Lords Sitting of 2 December 1982

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Hereford): The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

Telephone Services
Lord Belhaven and Stenton: 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, under their forthcoming legislation on telecommunications, any individual who at present has access to telephone services will be deprived of them.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, no individual who at present has access to telephone services will be deprived of them in the future. I can also confirm that anyone who is able to obtain a telephone at present will be able to obtain a telephone under the new arrangements.
Lord Belhaven and Stenton: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that Answer. Can he tell the House whether there is any truth in the allegations which have been made in certain quarters that rural kiosks will be removed because they do not pay the operators?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, there is no truth in that allegation at all. It would not, I think, be sensible for any particular distribution of kiosks to be laid down in any licence issued as a result of the Telecommunications Bill, but the licence will oblige British Telecom to continue to provide both the telephone kiosks and, of course, the 999 service, which makes much use of the telephone kiosks. It would be wrong of me to go into the Bill in detail now because it is already under discussion in another place, but Clause 3 of the Bill sets guidelines for my right honourable friend the Secretary of State in issuing licences. Moreover, in the functions relating to licences specific mention is made of these services and those to rural areas as needs to which both the director and my right honourable friend must have regard.
Lord Beswick: My Lords, is the question here not one as to whether any present subscriber will be physically deprived of a line but whether, under the new commercial policy required by this Bill, the said subscriber will in future be able to afford a telephone?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, there is nothing to indicate that rural services cost more to run other than in the initial arrangements for connecting the telephone. The charges remain the same for rural areas and, broadly speaking, for urban areas as well. There
1306
is nothing at all to suggest that it will be far too expensive for people living in rural areas to be connected.
Lord Orr-Ewing: My Lords, is it not true that there are two good reasons why there will be a tendency for charges to fall? To start with, there will be competition, and therefore the price is likely to fall; and, secondly, British Telecom are henceforward going to be able to borrow, and in any particular year they will not have to charge in order to raise the finance to invest in better telephone services. So on two scores there should be a reduction in charges rather than an increase. Is that not right?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for what he has said. He is absolutely right; and it is also true that technological advances, such as satellites, should mean that it will become more practical to provide services to more areas than in fact exist at present.
Lord Glenamara: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that most rural call-boxes are run at a considerable loss, and will he say whether there will be any subvention from public funds to British Telecom in order to keep these call-boxes in existence, similar to the payments made to British Rail to keep unremunerative lines open?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I do not believe that this would be an appropriate way to secure these services, and neither does the chairman of British Telecom. It will provide no incentive to improve efficiency or quality of service. I think it is also true that the 999 service and telephone kiosks are an integral part of the British Telecom services, and it is far better to recognise this by an obligation placed on British Telecom in its licence, supported as necessary by revenues obtained from other services. But this support will be made explicit to prevent hidden inefficiencies.
Lord Beswick: My Lords, on the question of competition as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, is the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, saying seriously that there is any possibility at all of a private company offering a competitive service to rural telephone subscribers?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, it will be competitive and, yes, there will be opportunities for commercial undertakings to compete with British Telecom when the Bill has been passed and the licences issued.
Lord Glenamara: My Lords, will the noble Lord say how competition will improve the rural call-box service? Does his reply to my supplementary question mean that the Government will be quite prepared to see large numbers of rural call-boxes go out of existence?
Lord Glenarthur: No, my Lords; there is no question of large numbers of call-boxes in rural areas being removed. Perhaps the noble Lord could repeat his first supplementary question.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that there is considerable fear that the new arrangement will in fact militate against those who are living in rural areas, and especially the more remote rural areas, of the three countries? Can he give us a clear assurance now, at the end of this exchange, that the rural areas are not going to be at a disadvantage by comparison with the urban areas? Is he also saying that profitability will not be a criterion in future?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has made it perfectly clear that these claims are entirely without foundation. As I said earlier, licences will be issued as a result of the Telecommunications Bill—and I think it would be wrong to go into the Bill in detail now—and British Telecom's licence will oblige it (and I emphasise those words) to provide these services throughout the United Kingdom, which includes remote and rural areas. It means that anyone who has access to a phone under the present arrangements will, as I said in my original Answer, continue to do so under the new arrangements. In their statement issued when the Bill was published, the British Telecom Board publicly accepted a continuing responsibility to provide services to both rural and outlying areas.
Lord Clifford of Chudleigh: My Lords, will the noble Lord do something to make more positive the replies he has given this afternoon, especially on the question of rural telephones? As president of the Devonshire Association of Parish Councils, I ask the noble Lord whether he is aware that parish councils all over the country, especially in my part of the world, are more than convinced that they are going to lose their rural telephones. Following on his statements this afternoon, can the noble Lord do something to put their minds at rest?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I really do not think I can be any more specific than I have been already. In any case, your Lordships will have plenty of opportunity to discuss this in further detail when the Bill comes before your Lordships.
Lord Walston: My Lords, will the noble Lord elucidate one point for me? He has told us that British Telecom have willingly undertaken the obligation in respect of rural telephone boxes and rural remote supplies, and he has also told us that there will be benefits from competition which will be of value to the consumer. How is it going to be possible for British Telecom to compete on an equal footing with other suppliers who are not under the obligations that British Telecom are under to provide expensive and unprofitable services?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I thought I had explained that in British Telecom's case the licence will oblige it to continue to provide those services. As I understand it, if anybody else undertakes to provide the services they, too, will be under the same obligations. But at the present time it is British Telecom who, under the new arrangements, will be obliged to maintain those services.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, can the noble Lord say—
Several noble Lords: Oh!
Lord Molloy: I wish noble Lords opposite would not wince before the lash comes. Can the noble Lord say what will be the qualification required of the entrepreneurs who will compete with the British element, and who will select them?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, that matter really is wide of the original Question and it will be discussed when the Bill comes before your Lordships.
Lord Derwent: My Lords, are we not now completely out of order? We are away from the Question and we are discussing the Bill.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I quite agree with my noble friend.

Motor-Car Duty: Spain and the UK
3.10 p.m.
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 what is the total amount of tax, expressed as a percentage of the value of a vehicle, imposed on the entry into this country of a car manufactured in Spain, and what is the total amount of tax calculated as above imposed by the Spanish authorities on the entry into Spain of a car manufactured in this country.
The Secretary of State for Trade (Lord Cockfield): My Lords, the duty on cars imported into the United Kingdom from Spain is 4·2 per cent. Spain imposes a duty of 36·7 per cent. on cars from Community countries including the United Kingdom. In both countries cars, once imported, are subject to the same taxes as domestic products or (in the case of Spain's home compensation tax) taxes claimed to be of equivalent effect to those on domestic production.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, in view of the very wide difference in the treatment of imports into each of the two countries from the other and the gross unfairness which those figures indicate to our own hard pressed motor manufacturing industry, is my noble friend able to tell me what he is going to do about it?
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend's analysis. The problem arises under a treaty signed in 1970 between the European Community and Spain, the benefit or burden of which we inherited when we joined the Community in 1973. When Spain itself accedes to the Community, the duties will of course disappear. We are pressing strongly for a very short transitional period of three years but we do not think that matters ought to be

1309
allowed to rest there. We are therefore pressing very hard through the European Community for action to be taken ad interim; the matter was raised at the November Foreign Affairs Council and it will be raised again at the forthcoming council on 13th and 14th December.
Lord Shinwell: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord the Minister a question? I am glad to have the opportunity of asking him this question because he is perhaps the most able member of the Government. Perhaps he can clear away some of the misunderstandings. On which leg do the Government stand? Quite recently—I do not know whether this applies to him but it applies to the Government in general and to Members on the other side of the House—there was a manifestation of high euphoria because Spain had entered the Common Market. No sooner do they enter the Common Market—and they are welcomed with open arms—than we complain about them. On which leg do the Government stand? The Minister surely is capable of replying to that question.
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for the complimentary remarks that he made at the beginning of his supplementary question. The Government have two feet and they stand firmly on both of them. We believe that our membership of the European Community is of great value. Nevertheless, there are problems in the Community and we turn our attention to solving them.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, I believe I asked a question which specifically mentioned car imports from Spain. I asked this question two weeks ago. I asked whether this matter would be brought up at the GATT meeting in Geneva. Was it, my Lords?
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, there were general discussions on the question of unbalanced trade between different countries. There was a passage which appeared in the final communiqué referring to obtaining a better balance of trade. The question of Spain was not itself specifically discussed as the objective of the GATT ministerial conference was to deal with general problems rather than pick out specific problems relating to trade between particular countries.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, may I press the noble Lord a little further on the answers that he has already given? The noble Lord referred to the desirability of a short transitional period for Spain assuming the full responsibilities under her EEC membership. Will he say whether the Government envisage a progressive scaling down during the transitional period of this discrepancy in duty to which the noble Lord, Lord Boyd-Carpenter, refers?
Lord Cockfield: Yes, my Lords. What we are concerned with now are the negotiations between the Community and Spain for her accession. In those negotiations we are pressing for an early and substantial reduction in the disparity between the two levels of duty.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that forgings for the automotive industry enter Spain bearing an import duty of 34 per cent? By contrast, for the United Kingdom and the EEC there is an import duty of only 2·9 per cent. Accepting what the noble Lord the Minister has said regarding Spain entering the EEC, will he give some advice to those industries in the West Midlands that are in the forging industry regarding how they can overcome the unemployment situation that is facing them in the interim period? Though they have competent management and a skilled and hard-working workforce, they cannot compete when they have this gross imbalance of import duties.
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, what the noble Baroness says is another example of the general problem that I mentioned at the beginning; namely, that the treaty between Spain and the European Community is a very unbalanced one. That is a situation that we are trying to deal with both before accession and most certainly after accession.
Lord Shinwell: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware of the dissatisfaction that has been expressed on this side of the House? That means dissatisfaction with our association with the Common Market. Will he take note that at the next election this is the issue on which the Tories will lose?
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, the membership of this country of the European Community is of very great value to us. Some 43 per cent. of our total exports now go to the European Community. Many millions of jobs depend on our membership. There are undoubtedly in some areas very considerable problems. But we have more chance of getting these problems—particularly the one relating to Spain—solved through the Community mechanism than we would be able to on our own.
Lord Leatherland: My Lords, does the Minister agree that one way of solving these difficulties with Spain would be to place an embargo upon the importation of sherry from that country?
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, we have no power, either under the terms of the European Community rules or under the rules of GATT, to impose such an embargo.

Consumer Councils
3.18 p.m.
Baroness Burton of Coventry: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are now in a position to announce the date on which they intend to publish proposals dealing with the reform of the Consumer Councils of the nationalised industries taking into account comments invited from organisations and individuals; and if not how much longer publication will be delayed; and whether such publication will be accompanied by a Statement to Parliament.
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, we hope to make an announcement and to publish detailed proposals before the Christmas Recess.
Baroness Burton of Coventry: My Lords, the Minister has not answered the last part of my Question, but perhaps I may return to that in a second. May I ask him first whether he does not think that I have been very patient in waiting since 22nd July to ask this Question? Does he recall that on that date he gave me exactly the same answer—at least that he hoped to publish the proposals as soon as possible after the Recess? Can he say whether there will be a Statement in Parliament when these proposals are actually made public?
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, I pay tribute to the great patience of the noble Baroness in this matter. The reply that I gave in July and the reply that I now give are entirely consistent with one another. In July I said that the proposals would be published after the Recess, and they are now being published before the next Recess. So far as the Statement is concerned, that is a matter to be settled through the usual channels.
Baroness Burton of Coventry: My Lords, while giving full credit to the Minister for consistency, as I am sure we shall, may I ask him this: as it seems doubtful that we are to get a Statement in Parliament, can he use his influence through the usual channels to ensure that there is a debate on these matters, which are of great concern both to the nationalised industries and to consumers everywhere?
Lord Cockfield: My Lords, I think the right thing would be to await the publication of the Government's document and then to decide what we would like to do in the light of that. But the question either of Statements or of debates in your Lordships' House is one for the usual channels and it is not a matter, I fear, on which I can express any opinion.

Technical Education and Training
3.21 p.m.
Baroness David: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what consultation there was before they announced their new initiative on technical education and training on 12th November 1982.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Young): My Lords, the Prime Minister announced the initiative after close consultation between the Secretaries of State for Education and Science and Employment and the chairman of the Manpower Services Commission.
Baroness David: My Lords, while thanking the noble Baroness for that Answer, does she, particularly as an ex-Minister of State for Education, think it was satisfactory that the local authority associations, which provide the education, were not consulted
1312
beforehand at all? As Mr. Lawton, chairman of the ACC Education Committee, said that the MSC involved fundamental constitutional questions which suggested that the Government were prepared to make changes in the 1944 Act, can the Minister say if such changes to the Act are proposed in order to make it possible for 14-year-olds to leave school and follow courses in FE colleges, or are they relying on the Employment Act 1973, Sections 2(1) and 13(1)? Is she aware that there are very grave doubts and anxieties about children being allowed to leave school at the age of 14?
Baroness Young: My Lords, there is to be no change in the 1944 Act. The children in fact will remain in school, though they will take courses possibly in colleges of further education, and the powers used will be those of Section 2(1) and Section 13(1) of the Employment and Training Act 1973. The Government felt it was important to go ahead with the scheme in 1983 and I am glad to confirm that the Secretary of State for Education and Science, the Secretary of State for Wales and the chairman of the Manpower Services Commission have met representatives of the local education authorities.
Lord Byers: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Baroness would accept that this initiative on vocational and technical training is widely welcomed in many parts of this country?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I am very glad to have that response from the noble Lord, Lord Byers. It was, of course, a point that was raised in a recent debate in your Lordships' House.
Baroness David: My Lords, as Mr. David Young of the Manpower Services Commission has said, in an article that he wrote in The Times Educational Supplement, that students in these schemes would probably be preparing for qualifications given by the City and Guilds, the Business Education Council, the Technical Education Council and the Royal Society of I Arts, and as courses for such qualifications are currently being given in FE colleges, can the Minister explain to me how this is going to be such a new initiative and how it will be different, except for the funding coming from the MSC instead of the DES and the local authorities?
Baroness Young: My Lords, as the noble Baroness is aware, the proposal is for 10 pilot schemes. These are to be set up in consultation with local education authorities, the details of which have still to be worked out. I confirm what the noble Baroness said, that it is intended that they will lead to specific qualifications such as the craft and technician awards of the CGLI and the general and national certificates and diplomas of the Business and Technical Education Councils.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, if I may ask a supplementary question while in no way dissenting from what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Byers, will the Government undertake to do everything in their power to see that the MSC does not embark on a collision course with the local education authorities, as collaboration is of the essence in this field?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I am glad to confirm that a national steering group is being set up, on which educational interests will be well represented, and this organisation will agree guidelines and criteria for submission of bids on this scheme. The chairman and director of the Manpower Services Commission, in consultation with the DES, will be having further discussions with the various parties concerned.
Lord Byers: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Baroness would consider—because there is no need for a collision course at all—making it clear to the people of this country that the principles which were learned through the experience of ORT, the Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training, of which Mr. David Young is the chairman, are going to be applied to this scheme and it has had tremendous success in other parts of the world. I do not think we ought to prejudge what could be achieved through this opportunity and option for children to go into the vocational stream at the age of 14, instead of into the academic stream.
Baroness Young: My Lords, I am very glad to hear what the noble Lord has said. We believe that this is an important new initiative, and the response of the local education authorities has been encouraging. Some 16 authorities have already expressed interest in it, so in fact it looks as though the scheme will be oversubscribed.

Law of the Sea Convention
Lord Denham: My Lords, at a convenient moment after 3.30 this afternoon my noble friend Lord Belstead will, with the leave of this House, repeat a Statement that is to be made in another place on the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention.

Representation of the People Bill [H.L.]
3.26 p.m.
The Lord Chancellor (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone): My Lords, I rise to move that this Bill be now read a second time. It is a strict consolidation Bill, bringing together in one Act much of the existing law on elections and electoral procedure. This is the second consolidation of the electoral legislation. The arrangement of the present Bill broadly follows that of the first consolidation, the Representation of the People Act 1949. Its contents fall under four main heads: the franchise and registration of electors; the conduct of elections; election campaigns; and legal proceedings following elections. The Bill applies to all parliamentary and local government elections in the United Kingdom, except that the local government provisions do not apply to Northern Ireland. The Bill also provides for the repeal of certain obsolete provisions in the existing legislation.
If your Lordships give this Bill a Second Reading it will be referred to the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills, in the ususal way. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
Lord Renton: My Lords, I wonder if I might take a very brief moment to suggest that the Government deserve praise for this important and massive piece of consolidation, not because it occupies 216 pages but because it brings into one statute so many provisions now spread about the statute book, and these provisions govern the necessary working of our parliamentary democracy. Voters who really care should be grateful for this, including those who speak Welsh.
Lord Elwyn-Jones: My Lords, I should like to confirm the view we take of the value of this consolidation. I confess that the additional boon of a reference to the use of the Welsh language makes it even more acceptable.
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I am deeply grateful both to my noble friend and to the noble and learned Lord. I am, as I hope the House will recognise, very keen on promoting consolidation. I have even more ambitious projects in my sights, but they sometimes find unexpected difficulties on the way.
On Question, Bill read a second time, and referred to the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills.

Mobile Homes Bill [H.L.]
3.29 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment (Lord Bellwin): MyLords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Bellwin.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The LORD ABERDARE in the Chair.]
Clause 1 [Duty to offer agreements]:
Lord Bishopston Lord Bishopston moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 1, line 13, at end insert ("; or
(d) permits a person to station a mobile home on land forming part of that site and to occupy that mobile home as his only or main residence,").
The noble Lord said: I beg to move Amendment No. 1, with which I think we might take No. 2. This measure is widely welcomed in many ways, because, as we said on Second Reading, it seeks to deal with some of the anomalies which have existed for a long time. I said then that the Government were to be commended on the degree of consultation which has taken place; and I know that they have had many helpful representations from the National Consumer Council, from Shelter and from many other authorities.
I am sure that the Committee, while supporting the Bill, is anxious that we should close as many loopholes as possible and that, at the same time—as the Minister hoped—we should be fair to both the site owner who provides the service, and also the resident who takes advantage of the service offered. Legislation is long overdue to tackle the problems not dealt with by the

1315
Mobile Homes Act 1975, or to close some of the loopholes. I think that the Committee will be anxious to be constructive on these matters, and I anticipate, from some of the comments made by the Minister on Second Reading, that he has an open mind on a number of issues. But, if he is not able to help us today, then he may, perhaps, consider points at a later stage.
We think that the measure is ineffective in some areas which are vital, not only to the interests of the resident, but to common justice. In his introduction on Second Reading, the Minister stressed the aim to be fair to all parties and such an aim is very commendable. But, of course, what is in this Bill is what really matters—not what we say in your Lordships' House. Although dealing with some anomalies, the Bill has loopholes and the amendments to which I am now speaking provide opportunities to deal with them.
At the outset, I would say again that greater progress might have been made if the Minister had not indicated on Second Reading that he was not prepared to extend some of the provisions on security of tenure which are in the Rent Act 1977 and the Housing Act 1980. There is a very strong point to be made that these homes, which are not mobile and are virtually the same as any other form of accommodation, ought to have some of the safeguards which are to be found in those two Acts of Parliament. It may be that we can improve the Bill to give some security, which would have been provided in a blanket way had those two Acts been operative in this sphere, because we ought to try to strengthen the provisions so as to give the security accorded to others.
These sites have a resident and an owner. The resident has no interest in the land, or, at least, not in the same way as the site owner, and he certainly has no security. The site owner is obliged to offer an agreement to a person who, under Clause 1(1)(a), has an unrestricted right to station a mobile home, and under Clause 1(6), that is a person who is not precluded from occupying a mobile home as his main or only residence. So the Bill can be evaded if the site agreement contains a restriction or a prohibition against residence. In such a case, a site owner is not required to offer an agreement.
There is a similar means of evasion in the Rent Act 1977, where Section 9 states that a tenancy is not protected if the purpose is to confer a right to occupy a dwelling for a holiday. So, if residents agree to this kind of provision, they can lose the protection of the measure. Surely, the consent to station a mobile home should establish a right of residence, and we believe that this is a loophole which should be plugged. I also believe that the Committee may well support this amendment in order to achieve what I think is essential in the interests not only of the resident but also of the site owner, because, if we can clarify the position so that the meaning of the legislation is quite clear, it will be in the interests of both. I beg to move.
Lord Avebury: I wonder whether, when the Minister comes to reply to this amendment, he will say a word about the problem of the mixed site, where it is possible for a person to be granted a right to station a mobile home as his principal dwelling, but where, equally, there are other parts of the site where only
1316
holiday use is permitted. It may well be that, in some circumstances, the site operator will seek to transfer mobile homes from one part of the site to another. So it is not always clear, on a site of this kind, whether or not a person entering into occupation of a pitch has an unrestricted site. It may be clear from the location of the pitch within the site, if the person has the sense to go and look at the site licence and realises that he is on part of it which is licensed only for holiday use. But that might not always be clear to the person coming on to the site, and it is something which we should take care of in the drafting of the legislation.
It seems to me that the amendment which we are now considering looks after that eventuality, because, if the contract between the owner and the occupier is plainly one which grants a licence to station a mobile home on the site as the resident's only or principal residence, then it will not be good enough for the site operator to say later on that, in fact, the mobile home was stationed on a part of the site which was licensed only for restricted use. This is one of the problems of mobile home living, which, although it affects only a very small number of sites, and an even smaller number of inhabitants, we should take care of at this stage and not leave to chance later on.
Lord Bellwin: On the last point that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, made, I should have thought that if a person going on to a site has an opportunity, which I would expect him to exercise, to see which part of the site he wishes to occupy, and considers that the area offered to him is not acceptable, it is, presumably, up to him to say, "I don't want to be there." In that way, he should know of all the restrictions and limitations on that part of the site. But I will certainly take note of what the noble Lord said and, if there is uncertainty which could disadvantage the occupier, as he would become, then we shall want to look into that.
So far as the similarity with the Rent Act 1977 is concerned, there were advantages which came forth from that Act, as, indeed, many believe there were from the other Rent Act. But only those who are unwilling to consider the whole subject of the Rent Acts would say that there were not disadvantages which also came forth from the Rent Acts. The major disadvantage has been that they tended very much to dry up the availability of accommodation. What we do not want is to have the same effect on the availability of sites. That is why, as the noble Lord, Lord Bishopston, rightly said, we have been at great pains to try to get a balance, so as to do justice and do the right thing by both sides.
If it should turn out, at the end of the day, that there is an imbalance here or there, then I suppose that that is part of life. But, so far as the Government are concerned, the object is to get the balance right and, certainly, if these amendments, or any others that noble Lords bring forth, will help us to do it better or to clarify, then we shall want to know of them.
To turn specifically to Amendments Nos. 1 and 2, the intention of the wording is to prevent a site owner from evading the obligation to offer statutory agreements to mobile home residents by pretending that his residents are in fact occupying their homes for holiday purposes rather than as residences. We do not believe that the amendments would have a

1317
significantly different effect from the present wording of the Bill. We also do not believe that the Bill needs strengthening at this point.
At present the Bill requires site owners to offer agreements to occupiers to whom they have granted an "unrestricted right" to station their mobile home. "Unrestricted right" is defined in Clause 1(6) as a right which does not preclude the use of a mobile home as an only or main residence. So a site owner who wishes to evade this duty must give people who come onto his site as residents a contract which specifically excludes their using their home as a residence. A site owner who wished to pursue this course would not be prevented from doing so by the first of these amendments, which replaces the concept of granting a right by one of "permitting" the occupation of the mobile home as an only or main residence. If a site owner really does want to evade his duty under the Bill, he would presumably "permit" the occupation of the mobile home for holiday use only. The second of these amendments, on the other hand, would allow someone who is resident on a mobile home site at commencement to claim an agreement under the Bill, even if he had never been given permission by the site owner to live in the mobile home which was always intended to be used as a holiday home.
We do not, as I have said, believe that the Bill needs strengthening here. In the first place, we do not believe that site owners will be desperate to avoid agreements under the Bill. It is said that landlords attempt to evade the Rent Acts by granting sham holiday lets. But this Bill will not place anything like the same burdens on site owners that the Rent Acts place on landlords. Secondly, most residential mobile homes are on sites for which the planning permission stipulates residential use, either for the site as a whole or for the relevant part of the site. To evade the Bill in the way envisaged a site owner would presumably need to give the appearance of breaching his own planning permission. Finally, we do not see any reason why a resident should not be able to claim that he is entitled to the offer of an agreement and press his claim in court, if he has accepted a "restricted" right which is a sham.
This is the first of a number of amendments in which we shall be trying to achieve a balance between the rights of the two sides. In this case I hope that the noble Lord will feel able not to press his amendment.
Lord Avebury: Before the noble Lord, Lord Bishop-ston, deals with that helpful reply of the Minister, I should like to pursue one point which arose as the Minister spoke; namely, whether it is correct to say, as he does, that the occupier will be deemed to have an unrestricted right if the licence provides for nothing but residential use, unless the contract which the owner offers to the occupier expressly limits the occupation to holiday use; therefore it is not necessary to have such a provision in the Bill because most of the sites are licensed for residential use only and a person coming onto a site would automatically have the unrestricted right which is mentioned in Clause 1(1)(a). This reinforces the point which I made: that in the case of the mixed site scheme there is a danger which we must guard against.
As I understand it, the position is not quite as the noble Lord the Minister mentioned. There can be sites where the licence grants the owner permission to use a
1318
certain proportion of the pitches for holiday use and the remainder for residential use and it is not specified, either in the planning permission or in the site licence, which parts of the area are to be used for which. Therefore, with respect to the noble Lord, he is not quite right in saying that when a person enters onto a site he has only to refer to the site licence, which ought to be put up in a prominent place where everybody can see it but which generally is not. Assuming that he could do so, either in the offices of the local authority or somewhere on the site, he immediately determines, by comparing the location of the pitch which has been offered to him with the map, whether it is in a part of the site where holiday use only is permitted or where full residential use is permitted. If, however, the licence is expressed solely in terms of the numbers of mobile homes of each kind which may be stationed on the site he cannot be certain, and in the absence of any specific provision in the agreement there may be some doubt about it. Therefore I should be grateful if the noble Lord would have another look at this matter. I believe this to be necessary in the light of the answer he has given.
Lord Bellwin: The noble Lord has raised an interesting point. I am not sure which would be the best way to deal with it, or to what extent it is possible for somebody coming onto a site to ascertain beforehand exactly what would be the effect of his being on a specific part of the site. Whether or not, for example, the 1975 Act is sufficiently clear on that point, I do not know. I should certainly want to look into it. I am sure the noble Lord will appreciate that I cannot accept the amendment but, as with everything else we shall speak about during the rest of the Committee stage, we shall want to look carefully at everything that is said.
Lord Bishopston: The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has already covered some of the points which I had to raise. In view of the possibility that the Minister may have another look at this matter, I shall, with the leave of the Committee, withdraw the amendment and will not proceed with Amendment No. 2.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendment No. 2 not moved.]
3.47 p.m.
Lord Bellwin Lord Bellwin moved Amendment No. 3:
Page 2, line 6, leave out ("this section") and insert ("subsection (1) or (2) above")
The noble Lord said: In moving Amendment No. 3, I propose to speak to Amendments Nos. 5, 6 and 9. Amendment No. 3 to Clause 1 is a paving amendment for Amendments Nos. 5, 6 and 9 to Clause 2 of the Bill. These are drafting amendments intended to clarify the circumstances in which a mobile home occupier can go to court to require the making of an agreement under the Bill.
Clause 1 of the Bill requires a site owner to offer to all the residential occupiers on his site an agreement under the Bill and a notice which we will prescribe by regulations. If a site owner fails to offer an agreement as required by the Bill, Clause 2 will enable an occupier to apply to the court, or to an arbitrator, for an order requiring an agreement to be made. The

1319
present wording of Clause 2 does not, however, specifically provide for an occupier to apply to the court if a statutory agreement is offered but the prescribed notice is not given. It is possible that a court would hold that an agreement had not been validly offered if the prescribed notice had not been given. But the absence of a specific reference to the prescribed notice in Clause 2 might leave the matter open to doubt.
The purpose of these amendments is to remove the scope for doubt. They establish a clear sanction against site owners who fail to fulfil both requirements of Clause 1. An occupier can ask the court to require the making of an agreement, unless the site owner both offers a statutory agreement and supplies the prescribed notice. Thus, for example, an occupier who is offered an agreement without a prescribed notice and fails to accept the agreement (perhaps because he is not sure about the merits of doing so) will be able to go to court later if he subsequently decides he wants an agreement. There is no time limit on the occupier's right to go to court in these circumstances. These are, as I have said, drafting amendments to clarify the provisions of the Bill, and I hope that your Lordships will accept them.
Lord Bishopston: I thank the Minister for moving Amendment No. 3 and for speaking to Amendments Nos. 5, 6 and 9. As he said, some of them are drafting amendments. I anticipate that the amendments go some way towards meeting some of the points of clarification. But later we shall be having a debate on subsequent amendments standing in my name and in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, which are wider than the points made by the Minister on this occasion.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal Baroness Fisher of Rednal moved Amendment No. 4:
Page 2, line 11, at beginning insert ("is in simple terms and is in such form and")
The noble Baroness said: We on this side of the Committee welcome the obligation that is written into the Bill to provide written notice. We accept that it should be in the prescribed form. What we ask for in our amendment is that the notice should be written in simple terms; simple enough for residents to be aware of the rights they have under the Act and the significance of the draft agreement. We suggest that it should draw attention to the time limit imposed by the Act and recommend that, if the resident is in doubt, he should take further advice. We are asking the noble Lord the Minister to consider our amendment because the people who are involved in mobile homes and the owners of sites are few in number and they really should not need continually to have recourse to the courts to get their problems solved. We feel quite strongly that if the notice is in a simple form then both sides—the mobile home owner and the site owner—will be able to understand the terms, and have them clearly understood between them, when the agreement is being drawn up.
We are asking that there should be no legal jargon. I do hope that I shall not upset any noble Lords in this House by using the term "legal jargon", but it is something for the legal profession and we are talking about an agreement between what one might call ordinary men in the street. We are sure that there must exist in the department someone who could interpret and personalise that kind of information. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, may remember that the words "simple terms", are quite specifically written into the Housing Act 1980 in connection with secure tenancies. When that Act was being debated, I believe all sides of the House felt that it was important for people in those kind of tenancies to understand the Act. Section 41 of the Housing Act 1980 is quite specific and says that every body shall,
"publish information about its secure tenancies in such form as it considers best suited to explain in simple terms and so far as it considers appropriate"—
and then it goes on to refer to the various parts of the Act. So we are not asking for anything new. We are asking that the same provision as exists for secure tenancies in the 1980 Act should be available for tenancies in respect of people who, although they own their mobile homes, are only tenants of the land on which those homes stand. I want to repeat my point that the numbers involved are not large, and I feel that I am not underestimating the type of people who live in mobile homes or who own sites. They do not proclaim themselves to be clever people. They are just ordinary people who have chosen this way of living.
Perhaps I may remind the noble Lord the Minister that in the Second Reading debate he said quite specifically that people should be aware of their rights, and for that reason:
"we will prescribe the notice to be given to residents in the agreement".
He is quoted as saying that in col. 671 of the Official Report for 18th November. One applauds the noble Lord—people should be aware of their rights. We on this side of the Committee feel that they can only be aware of their rights if those rights are written out in simple terms. One of the difficulties of Parliament generally is that its deliberations can only command respect if those people who are affected by legislation know the results of Parliament's deliberations and how they are affected by them. Our amendment shows that if hardship (if it is suffered by the owners) or loss (on the part of the site owners) is caused because of lack of information, because matters are not clearly spelt out or because that advice breaks down, then we feel that that is a breakdown of parliamentary democracy.
People should be able readily to understand such matters, particularly in instances such as this one, and to know that their rights are safeguarded. While I appreciate that it is written into various parts of the Act that there can be recourse to the courts, we have to understand what mobile homes are all about. The less recourse to the courts residents and site owners have to take, the more harmonious will be the way in which people live on those sites. It is for that reason—for the sake of harmonious living between the residents of mobile homes and site owners—that I ask the noble Lord the Minister to consider seriously what is a very simple amendment to what is perhaps a complicated Bill. I beg to move.
3.56 p.m.
Lord Bellwin: The noble Baroness, Lady Fisher of Rednal, put her points in very simple terms, and may I begin by assuring the noble Baroness that she is not very likely to say anything which will upset this noble Lord? Would that I could be so certain that I shall not say anything which will upset the noble Baroness. The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that the prescribed notice which site owners will be required to give occupiers when they offer them an agreement will be, as the noble Baroness has said; in "simple terms". I do not believe that it is necessary to impose this requirement, and let me say why. It will not be for the site owners to decide the wording of the notice—that is the first point. Site owners will not be the ones to decide the wording. The Secretary of State will have the power to prescribe the wording by regulations, and he will be using that power.
The noble Baroness made an analogy between this amendment and Section 41 of the Housing Act 1980, which does require local authorities to provide information to their tenants in "simple terms"; but it is not a close analogy. I remember this section very well indeed because I talked about it much at the time, and I am glad that the noble Baroness feels that it has been effective. I hope she will also come to agree in time that what we are proposing now will be equally effective. I believe that the noble Baroness will be happy if it does turn out to be so. I say that this amendment is not a close analogy because, in the case of Section 41 of the Housing Act 1980, it is local authorities—in that case, interested parties if you like—who decide the wording of the information they provide to their tenants. Under this Bill, it will be the Secretary of State who decides.
Perhaps a better analogy would be with the shorthold notice which landlords require to give tenants before the start of a shorthold tenancy. The wording of that notice is prescribed by regulations made by the Secretary of State under Section 52 of the Housing Act 1980. There is no requirement in the Act for that notice to be in "simple terms" and I do not believe that the language of that notice could be described as technical and still less as gobbledygook—although the noble Baroness has not described it as such today.
I said in my Second Reading speech that it was our intention that the prescribed notice should advise occupiers to take legal advice and to read the Government booklet that we will produce following the Bill. It will also emphasise to occupiers the importance of taking action within the time limit the Bill imposes. I can assure your Lordships that it will be in terms as simple as possible. I do not want to make a great deal of this but I heed carefully what the noble Baroness has said on this subject and recognise her concern. I certainly take her point about the need to obviate recourse to the courts; my goodness!—that is the last thing we want to see happening. If we got it right on this point—and I think the record will show that we did—in the 1980 Act, I think we also have it right here. It will not be left to either party to decide the wording; it will be up to the independent Secretary of State, who has no axe to grind. There will be plenty of opportunity to discuss how simple is simple, whether it is really simple. We know what the objective is. I
1322
would ask the noble Baroness to have confidence in our concern on this point, which is the same as hers.
Lord Bishopston: I feel sorry that the Minister has not been a little more forthcoming, I do not know whether he was the Minister at the time, but the Housing Act 1980, which was passed by this Government of course, said this in Section 41:
"Every body which lets dwelling-houses under secure tenancies shall, within two years of the commencement of this chapter and thereafter from time to time, publish information about its secure tenancies in such form as it considers best suited to explaining in simple terms and so far as it considers appropriate the effect of'—
and it goes on to refer to the express terms of its secure tenancies, the provisions of the Act and so forth. I see no reason why the same kind of requirement should not be put in this legislation. The Minister has said, in effect, that he agrees with the terms of the amendment. I think I mentioned at Second Reading the point which must be borne in mind, the importance of the fact that whereas with other forms of accommodation very much like mobile homes—which, as we keep saying, are not really mobile anyway—one often has title and deeds and so on and one would employ a solicitor to go into these things, this does not happen in the case of mobile homes. People are left entirely on their own to sort out the legal safeguards. After all, the amount of investment of residents could be comparable with that invested by people in other forms of accommodation. So there is a very real need that people should be informed.
The other point is the fact that 25 per cent. of the people living in mobile homes are elderly people. They may be a little confused about the terms of any agreement. Although I welcome the Minister's assurance that he will do what he can to make sure that all this information is available, it is very important that it goes to the right people. Everyone has a duty in this connection—the site owner, and of course the Secretary of State—to make sure that the agreement is in simple terms, can be understood and can be complied with. Otherwise the whole point of the legislation is lost. Perhaps I can ask the Minister if he would look at this point again. It ties up with the views he has expressed already.
Lord Bellwin: There is no difference at all between us in what we are seeking to do. It is only a question on whether or not there is a necessity to have written into the Bill the wording suggested in the amendment. I would only repeat that I am absolutely satisfied that there will not be a problem, for the very specific reason that it will be an independent Secretary of State, with no axe to grind, who will prescribe the wording. Whether that is in simple terms or not will be for everyone to judge at the time, but it is intended that it should be in very simple terms. I just do not think it is necessary to write it into the Bill.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: In thanking the noble Lord for his reply, I would say that all we are hoping to do—and I think the noble Lord would agree with us on this—is to make this Mobile Homes legislation perhaps the best Act. This is two bites of the cherry on what is a comparatively small problem regarding housing. In view of what the noble Lord has said, we accept his undertaking that he will ensure that it is in

1323
the kind of form that we hope for and the Secretary of State will personalise it and make it simple. If we feel that that is not so, we shall come back to it at a later stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Earl of Swinton: I beg to move that the House do now resume in order to discuss the Statement.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House resumed.

Law of the Sea Convention
4.5 p.m.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Belstead): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. The Statement is as follows:
"The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea will be opened for signature in Jamaica on 10th December, and will remain open for signature for two years thereafter. The convention deals with many aspects of the law of the sea. Some provisions are a restatement or codification of existing international law; some provisions seek to make new law. Parts of the convention, for example, those relating to navigation, the continental shelf and pollution, are helpful, but the provisions relating to deep seabed mining including the transfer of technology are not acceptable. They are based on undesirable regulatory principles and could constitute unsatisfactory precedents. A number of our friends and allies share our misgivings on these points. We need to obtain satisfactory improvements in the deep sea mining régime, and will therefore explore the prospects with interested states. As the convention is open for signature for 2 years there is ample time for revision before taking a final decision. It is our wish that there should be generally agreed provisions for regulating marine matters, and we wish to continue to work with the international community to achieve this.
"I should emphasise to the House that we could not participate in a seabed régime on the present terms, and for that reason we could not ratify the convention unless the provisions for the deep sea mining régime become satisfactory.
"A copy of the convention and relevant resolutions of the conference have been placed in the Library of the House".
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord for repeating the Statement. It does not really say a great deal that is new, and it is, I think, disappointing that we are still withholding our signature from this convention. Is it not very much in our own interests as a maritime nation to sign, but is there any substantial reason, apart from United States pressure, why we should not subscribe to a package
1324
which has been negotiated with great difficulty over a period of eight years?
The Statement refers to deep seabed mining. Would the noble Lord not agree that the present United States Administration, differently from the last, are giving in to pressure from private deep sea mining consortia which are working to extract cobalt, nickle, copper, manganese and other minerals from the ocean floor, whereas the convention provides that sites—and I think it is one for one—should be mined for the benefit of the poorer countries of the world? Is not that the real core of the objection of the United States, and therefore the core of our objection? Would there not be considerable advantages in relation to such things as territorial limits, freedom of navigation, the right of innocent passage—and I think 116 international straits would be involved in passage of this kind—fisheries, the exploitation of oil and other minerals on the continental shelf and so on? Does he really think that after eight years we can now hope to secure agreement on what is a fundamental point in a period of a further two years?
On the question of possible revision, how does the Minister think that this can be negotiated? What further arrangements have Her Majesty's Government made to discuss the revision to the deep seabed provisions with those who are prepared to sign the convention and with those who are not? Finally, if we do attach importance to the rule of international law, should we not sign this convention forthwith?
4.10 p.m.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, while thanking the Minister for repeating the Statement, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos, that it is very disturbing. I thought that we would all back the simple principle that because deep seabed mining is an area of such advanced technology it is only open to the industrialised nations and that an international seabed authority should distribute the benefits among the poor countries, instead of the present position where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I hope that the Government are not departing from that principle. The Statement is grossly inadequate. I hope that the Government will tell us why they are so proceeding. I sincerely hope that they will tell us that they are not acting out of the purely selfish reasons which, it appears, the international mining groups are pressuring the United States to adopt.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos and Lord Mackie of Benshie, for their comments. Clearly, both noble Lords are concerned on behalf of their parties about what is an important Statement and I understand their reservations.
I agree with both noble Lords about the advantages of the convention. Clearly the provisions on the continental shelf and freedom of navigation, to select only two of the provisions, are very desirable. There are other very desirable provisions. It gives no pleasure to Her Majesty's Government to be compelled to make this Statement today, but we feel that for the time being it is not possible to sign the convention as the deep sea mining provisions stand.
That leads me to answer the first question put by the noble Lord. Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: why are we not

1325
signing? The reasons are that we have never hidden from the conference, which has been discussing the convention, that parts of the deep sea mining régime are based on undesirable principles. We feel we must work for changes which will improve the balance in favour of the development of seabed resources and produce a realistic and workable convention which does not deter investment and does not set undesirable pressures now.
As regards investment, this leads to the second question which both noble Lords asked—have the Government been under some form of pressure from mining interests, which alone have led the Government to reach the conclusions which, for the moment, are set out in the Statement? The answer is quite clearly, no. There are two aspects of the convention which lead to great apprehension on the part of Her Majesty's Government. There are the provisions in the convention about the transfer of technology which, I understand, will be mandatory. The international seabed authority will be able to require the transfer of technology and there will be no argument about that in the future if the convention is agreed as it stands. There is also the difficulty about the opportunities for licences in the future. It is only fair that the mining interests throughout the world should at least have some certainty as to what their chances will be to get licences in future. This is by no means certain.
There is also a matter which I raised in answer to a Question by the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, on the 10th November. There is provision under the convention for what is called a review conference, which apparently means that after a period of years a conference can be held to unscramble the whole convention. We do not believe that these provisions give the certainty which is required in order to bring the necessary investment into deep sea mining.
The noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, asked: how can improvements be negotiated? First of all, the conference in Jamaica will have a signing of the Final Act. I do not in any way wish to conceal from the House that it would be the intention of Her Majesty's Government to sign the Final Act. We will, therefore, be entitled to participate as observers in the preparatory commission which will then be set up.
The convention needs ratification by some 60 member states, and this will take a period of time. It is during that time that we hope it will be possible, as the Statement said, to explore the prospects with interested states for improvements in the convention which will, of course, have to be done by an amending protocol.
4.17 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Croy: My Lords, I am sure that the House will be grateful to my noble friend for repeating the Statement made in another place, because the convention is to be opened for signature in four days' time. While I accept that the deep sea mining part of the convention is unsatisfactory, is my noble friend aware that there are at least two powerful reasons why British interests would benefit from other parts of the convention?
First, as a trading nation our shipping would benefit from the parts of the convention on navigation rights throughout the world. Secondly, our extensive
1326
coastline would benefit from the strength and protection from pollution and the increased area of jurisdiction for enforcement measures. Is it not the position that if the United Kingdom were to sign the convention at an early stage during this two-year period we would then be in a position to negotiate further amendments which would be beneficial for Britain? Is my noble friend aware that the prospects of a serious start to deep sea mining have now receded, for economic and other reasons, and that land based supplies are likely to be the sources of these metals for much longer than had been thought a few years ago?
Several noble Lords: My Lords—
The Earl of Avon: My Lords, I think we normally allow the Minister to reply.
Lord Belstead: If it is for the convenience of the House, my Lords, I shall reply to one question at a time.
My noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy referred to the rights of navigation. Yes, as I said on behalf of the Government, there are aspects of the convention, not least the rights of navigation, which are of very important interest to the Government and to the nation. This underlines the regret that the Government have in making the Statement today.
As regards the extent of the territorial sea, we are considering this issue in the light of the results of the United Nations Law of the Sea Conference. There are some advantages, but there are also some possible disadvantages which will need to be carefully examined. My advice is that an extension of the United Kingdom territorial sea from three to 12 nautical miles will depend upon international practice and is not tied irrevocably to the wording of the convention. Therefore, we can consider freely whether it is right that the United Kingdom should do it.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, while I am in general agreement with the thrust of the questioning from the Labour Opposition and from the Liberal Party, obviously the situation is extremely complex and cloudy and should be probed in a fuller debate in future. But for the moment may I ask the noble Lord one or two questions. We know that we are looking at an action by President Reagan when he kicked over the traces of eight years of international negotiation, and we are following him in that posture. What is the position of other countries like ourselves? How many other countries are staying out alongside the United States?
The Government seem to believe that it is safe to sign the Final Act without signing the treaty and to hope to be able to amend the treaty during the signature period after, presumably, some other countries have already signed it. Is that really practical diplomacy? It sounds a rather dubious procedure when one first hears of it. It looks like throwing away the first chance that the world has ever had of exploiting part of the natural wealth of the earth for the benefit of all mankind. It seems as though it will, to a greater or lesser extent—a matter which we must also probe—prevent our benefiting from all the good things in it which the Minister has so rightly listed, and all because it is "unacceptable" to transfer technology to the poorer nations.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, the noble Lord has asked me about the position of other countries. France has said that it will sign the convention in Jamaica, but it will seek changes in the deep seabed régime, and I understand that the Netherlands will do likewise. I understand that Turkey, Venezuela, Argentina and Israel will not sign and, of course, the United States will not sign. On the other hand, some Community countries—namely, Denmark, Ireland and Greece—have said that they will sign, as have Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There are other Community countries which are still considering their position; they include the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium and Italy, all of which share our misgivings about the seabed provisions.
4.23 p.m.
Lord Shinwell: My Lords, I should like to ask the noble Lord, is there any substantial reason to be dissatisfied? Although I appreciate the sentiments expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, who has always been intensely interested in the subject, I have some knowledge of the subject myself. I suppose I am the only Member of your Lordships' House who is an honorary life member of the National Union of Seamen, which means that I am not required to pay any subscriptions. This subject has been before us for the last 50 or 60 years. There are many complications.
Will the noble Lord and other Members of your Lordships' House take note that we cannot solve with Denmark the problem that now confronts us as regards fishing rights in the European sphere? If we cannot solve a simple problem of that kind, how is it possible to solve the problem of navigation rights, pollution difficulties and a whole series of cognate problems? We have two years during which we can use the offices of those connected with the conference to revise our views or consider new views on the subject. But it may be wiser for us to exercise some caution in the matter and not to agree on some definite project, only to discover that we are creating new problems.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, I think that it is fair for me to repeat what I said a little while ago in your Lordships' House. We tried at the last meeting of the conference in September to be the catalyst, to get agreement between those who disagreed fundamentally on the deep sea mining provisions. The two major points were the question of the transfer of technology and also the certainty, or better certainty, for the awarding of licences under the convention. We did not succeed in doing so and that is why today we are saying that we wish to see whether it is possible to explore the prospects with interested states for gaining a greater area of agreement before we come to sign the convention.
Lord Balogh: My Lords, would the Minister consider that his denial of mining company interests influenced the Government's attitude to the problem? We have only one example, and that is the sea oil,
1328
when all the problems of the seabed came up. That story is really not in any way reconcilable with the Minister's Statement.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, is overlooking the fact that the international seabed authority—which, when the conference on the convention began its deliberations, was going to have been not very far off self-supporting—will now cost huge sums of money in order to support. Any Government must take that into account in order to try to decide whether it is in the national interest to decide on a convention which contains deep sea mining provisions at the moment. For the reasons which I sought to deploy in your Lordships' House on more than one occasion, and again today, we have some very grave reservations about this, and I underline them in answer to the noble Lord's question because the Government would have to take into account the huge sums of money which will be necessary in order to finance the provisions of the convention. I do not think that that answer adds up to the fact that there has been unwarrantable pressure brought to bear by mining interests.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, is the noble Lord the Minister aware that this is literally a matter of life and death for millions of people in the developing countries? Is it the case that the British Government are opposed to the transfer of technology to the poorer countries? Will the noble Lord tell the House whether it is the case that, during this two years, the consortia of mining companies that are already prepared for the mining of minerals on the seabed may very well start their operations, if they have not been started already? Is there any precaution against that happening, despite the fact that the convention has not been signed by this Government?
Lord Belstead: My Lords, as regards the noble Lord's first question, I hoped that I had made it clear that the question of technology really needs to take into account the fact that very substantial sums of money will be needed in order to finance the provisions of this convention. It is no good talking about the transfer of technology as though this is something which is happening in a vacuum; it is necessary under the convention to finance it, and on any objective view at the moment there is not a fair provision under the convention for the transfer of technology.
So far as the noble Lord's second question is concerned, of course this sort of mining simply is not happening at the moment. There is exploration going on but there is no mining of this kind. Indeed, the convention will not be ratified for probably—I do not know—a year and a half, two years or maybe longer, while the 60 signatory states which decide to ratify it in fact get the permission of their legislators to do so. Meanwhile, so far as far as Britain is concerned, last year we passed legislation through both Houses of Parliament which make it clear that for this sort of mining we are not granting licences in Britain until 1988.

Mobile Homes Bill [H.L.]
4.28 p.m.
House again in Committee.
Clause 1, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 2 [Provisions for securing the making of agreements]:
Lord Bellwin Lord Bellwin moved Amendment No. 5:
Page 2, line 24, after ("1") insert ("(1) or (2)").
The noble Lord said: I have already spoken to this amendment and I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Lord Bellwin Lord Bellwin moved Amendment No. 6:
Page 2, line 25, leave out from ("Act") to end of line 27.
The noble Lord said: I have already spoken to this amendment. I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Lord Avebury Lord Avebury moved Amendment No. 7:
Page 2, line 31, at end insert—
("( ) For so long, after the expiry of the required period, as the owner fails to offer the occupier an agreement under this Act or fails to supply a written notice in accordance with the requirements of section 1(4) above, the owner shall only be entitled to enforce any obligation on the part of the occupier in accordance with an order of the court.")
The noble Lord said: We come now to the first of the amendments on Clause 2, which is sidelined:
"Provisions for securing the making of agreements".
This is an extremely important part of the Bill because, as your Lordships will be aware, the main defect of the 1975 Act was that people did not enter into the agreements which were there provided for, to the extent that only something like a quarter of the people who live in mobile homes are covered by those agreements now. We are now trying to make it possible for about 100 per cent. of the people to take advantage of the provisions of the Bill.
The trouble is that there were no effective sanctions that were to be levied against the site operator who did not enter into an agreement. We are trying to remedy that in the Bill by saying that only the occupier has the right to go to court if the agreement is not offered by the site operator within a given space of time. It is the duty of the site operator to offer such an agreement to a person who is the holder of an unrestricted right to station a mobile home on a protected site; but if he does not do that, as we said at Second Reading the onus is on the occupier to take action through the court to enforce his rights. The problem which we highlighted then and to which we should like to return now, is that the occupier may be completely unaware of his rights or may be fearful of enforcing them because of the consequences that may flow from so doing in the form of retaliation by the site operator. In the meanwhile, so far as I can see, the site operator has the power to alter the terms of the existing occupation of the pitch, assuming that the occupier had an agreement under the old Act, prior to the coming into force of the Bill, or perhaps that his agreement had expired.
The amendment that we now propose would enable the occupier to resist any changes that the owner might seek to enforce in the period until the agreement is offered, and would, therefore, prevent the owner from trying to twist the occupier's arm—for example, by raising the charges or imposing any additional conditions in order to soften up the occupier before offering an agreement, as he may well seek to do. This gives the owner some incentive to offer an agreement and our hope is that, as a result, the objectives which we all share will be achieved and that a very high proportion of occupiers will be covered by the Bill. I beg to move.
Baroness Trumpington: First, may I apologise to the Committee and to my noble friend the Minister because, owing to a longstanding engagement, I literally have to fly from this place as soon as I have sat down. However, I should like to support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for a few very simple but important reasons.
If the Government are willing to accept this amendment, the result would be to reduce the number of court cases. Many of the occupiers, who, as the Bill stands, would have to go to court in order to obtain an agreement, would be obliged to ask for legal aid. As we all know, legal aid is costing the country a great deal of money. Therefore, by reversing the process whereby the owner and not the occupier is the party who has to go to court, there will undoubtedly be a reduction in cases and an actual saving of money from public funds.
Secondly, I really think that three months is too short, and six months is to me a far more acceptable period. A third point I wish to make is to point out that the Government supported the principles contained in this amendment in the Consumer Credit Act 1974. I am well aware that as yet this particular clause has not been implemented. Nevertheless, the intention of the Government of the day was clear, and I am presuming that that intention still holds good.
We are dealing with a minority of bad owners as, indeed, with a minority of bad occupiers. As I said at the Bill's Second Reading, we all greatly welcome and applaud the Government for bringing forward this legislation. I was happy to hear what my noble friend the Minister said earlier this afternoon, because it would be dreadful if it was thought that, by introducing amendments, we were implying that owners of mobile home sites are big bad wolves waiting to fleece the mostly elderly lambs, to coin a phrase, who occupy their land. The vast majority of those who live in mobile homes are very happy. All I and others who take an interest in the Bill hope to do is to see that every eventuality is anticipated and that both parties are fully protected.
Lord Bellwin: Let me say at once that I very much appreciate what my noble friend Lady Trumpington has said. Of course, it is a fact that, throughout the rest of our deliberations on all stages of the Bill, we shall continue with the same philosophy in trying to get a Bill which is a big advance on what was in the 1975 Act but which, again, has to hold a balance, for the reasons that I have stated and which I shall not repeat now.

1331
The purpose of this amendment is to impose what is really a very severe penalty on a site owner who fails to offer an agreement under the Bill within the required period or who fails to provide the prescribed notice at the same time. The intention is that a site owner who fails to comply with either of these requirements should only be able to enforce any obligation on the occupier following an order from the court. Thus, the site owner would only be able to recover pitch fees from an occupier to whom he had failed to offer an agreement, or give a notice, if he first went to court. In practice, the amendment would only mean that if an occupier did not discover that he had been entitled to the offer of an agreement until some time after the period within which the offer should have been made, he would then be entitled to go to court to claim his agreement and also to reclaim the fees he had paid.
If this amendment were to work in the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, would like, it would, as I have said, impose a severe penalty on site owners who failed to offer an agreement—a more severe penalty, in fact, than even the Rent Acts impose on landlords who misbehave. I repeat, this is a Bill that seeks to strike a reasonable balance between owners and occupiers. The Bill already contains protection for an occupier to whom an agreement is not offered within the required period. The occupier can apply to court or to an arbitrator to require the making of an agreement on terms that the court, or arbitrator, consider just and equitable. There is no time limit on the occupier's ability to apply to the court in this way. And, following the amendments which I introduced earlier today, the occupier can also go to court to require the making of an agreement, if the agreement which was offered to him was not accompanied by a prescribed notice.
The sanction which the Bill already imposes on a site owner is not insignificant. An occupier must go to court to claim his agreement, but in that case the court will decide the terms of the agreement. I suspect that in practice just as many occupiers would need to go to court even if the noble Lord's amendment were adopted. It would be, as I have said, a very stringent measure for this Bill. Let me repeat the point that I made in our discussion of the noble Lord's first amendment to Clause 1. We do not believe that site owners will make desperate attempts to avoid offering agreements. We are not here dealing with the Rent Acts and the consequences of offering an agreement will not be those of taking on a Rent Act tenancy. I think we must get away from ideas of Rent Act-type evasions. Within the terms of the Bill as a whole, the sanction which noble Lords are proposing to impose on site owners through this amendment, is unusually severe and, I believe, unnecessary.
I heard what my noble friend Lady Trumpington said about the precedent set by Section 65 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. But as she herself said, first, as yet we do not know how this will work in practice and, secondly, Section 65 is concerned with improperly executed credit agreements for the purchase of a washing machine, a television set or anything else. I hope that my noble friend Lady Trumpington will forgive me if I suggest that the Bill is concerned with rather different matters; with the
1332
basis on which a mobile home occupier occupies his home. The Bill already provides a sanction of its own on site owners who do not offer agreements when they should. It enables an occupier to go to court at any time to claim his agreement.
If anyone is to say to me, yes. but what we are seeking to do is to avoid the necessity for people having to go to court, then of course I accept that entirely. But it is also fair to say in that context that we are here talking in the main not just of mobile homes of the kind that are holiday type, perhaps a modest structure, or something of that kind; a great number of these homes, surely the vast majority, are not insubstantial. That is why they appeal as they do to those who occupy them. If I were to occupy a home worth many i thousands of pounds I would not be averse to taking legal advice if I had to, with the costs that that may entail, and even to going to court to make sure that my rights were properly considered, but I do not think that that is going to come about. For the reasons I have given, I believe the Bill has sanctions in it. It covers the concerns, the properly expressed concerns, on both sides of the Committee, and I would ask your Lordships in these circumstances to let the matter rest at that.
4.42 p.m.
Lord Bishopston: My noble friends and I are rather disappointed at the Minister's reply. As the noble , Lord, Lord Avebury, said, this is an important I amendment on this part of the Bill in Clause 2. We believe that the requirements of the measure are not strong enough by any means, especially when you have regard to the problems facing the occupier. We believe that the Act should provide that the site agreement should be unenforceable for as long as no statutory agreement has been offered. If there is any aspect which should be determined then we believe that the court should do that.
The noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, mentioned the Consumer Credit Act. We believe that this sets a kind of precedent for this measure. If the Minister cannot be more forthcoming on this, a point which is important to residents and is not unjust to the site operators, I must ask my noble friends to join me in the lobbies.
Lord Avebury: I would ask the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, to have a look back at the proceedings on the Mobile Homes Act 1975, to see how many of us warned then that site operators were not going to enter into the agreements that were hoped for then, and that more teeth were required in the Bill—which we did not get—to make sure that this happened. I had a sense of déjà vu as the Minister replied to this amendment. We know that only a quarter of the people living in mobile homes are covered and we are trying to increase that as a common objective, and yet the first time that this matter comes before your Lordships' Committee—and there is an agreement on all sides that the Bill is not sufficiently tough as it stands—the noble Lord turns us down. This is very disappointing, particularly when he agrees with the arguments that we put.
The noble Lord the Minister says, "We want to avoid cluttering up the courts unnecessarily". That is precisely what we are trying to do. We are trying to say

1333
that if you provide what the noble Lord calls a "very severe penalty" on an owner who fails to offer an agreement, then it is more likely that he will be disposed to offer an agreement and render it unnecessary for the occupier to go to the court. If the noble Lord will look at the amendment he will see that what it says is that one is liable to this severe penalty, as the Minister calls it, only for so long as he fails to offer the occupier an agreement. Therefore, he can easily escape from the severe penalty when he tries to enforce an obligation which the occupier has, and the occupier tells him that he will not comply with it as long as the owner has failed to offer an agreement. He then has the alternative of instantly offering the agreement and thereby securing the objectives that we on all sides have tried to persuade the Minister are desirable. As this is fundamental to the purposes of the Bill, and it is the first time we come to a point of this kind, we really must test the feeling of the Committee to see whether we cannot have a better mood for the later discussions.
Lord Bellwin: By all means let us test the feeling of the Committee on the matter, but to put the record right I think I should say that it is not the case that the amendment would remove the need to go to court. It would only do so if the site owner obeyed the obligation it imposes. Today we are talking about site owners who do not obey the obligation in the Bill to offer an agreement in the Bill. If he does not obey one obligation, why should he obey another? There will always be circumstances in which people have to go to court to enforce their rights. However, the decision lies with your Lordships.
Lord Avebury: I do not wish to prolong this matter. What happens is, first of all, he does not offer the agreement. Then he finds that some of the terms of occupation are unenforceable. He cannot collect the rents, to put it bluntly. Then he has another opportunity of rectifying the matter by offering the agreement at that point. There are two stages at which he can avoid being brought before the court. One is when he has the three months that is given to him under the existing wording of the Bill to offer the agreement, and then later after the three months have expired, again when the occupier fails to comply with any of the terms of his occupation, he has another chance because of the wording of this amendment. I think that we have taken every possible step to encourage the owner and to give him the incentive to offer the agreement over and above what the Bill at present provides. We believe that that is necessary, and we believe that your Lordships will agree with us.
4.47 p.m.
On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 7) shall be agreed to?
Their Lordships divided: Contents, 59; Not-Contents, 91.

DIVISION NO. 1

CONTENTS

Airedale, L.

Aylestone, L.

Ardwick, L.

Balogh, L.

Avebury, L. [Teller]

Banks, L.

1334

Beswick, L.

Lloyd of Hampstead, L.

Bishopston, L.

Lloyd of Kilgerran, L.

Boston of Faversham, L.

Lockwood, B.

Briginshaw, L.

Longford, L.

Byers, L.

McCarthy, L.

Caradon, L.

McGregor of Durris, L.

Cledwyn of Penrhos, L.

David, B.

Masham of Ilton, B.

Denington, B.

Mayhew, L.

Diamond, L.

Oram, L.

Elwyn-Jones, L.

Peart, L.

Ewart-Biggs, B.

Phillips, B.

Fisher of Rednal, B.

Ponsonby of Shulbrede, L.[Teller]

Gaitskell, B.

Gormley, L.

Rea, L.

Gregson, L.

Rochester, L.

Hall, V.

Sainsbury, L.

Hampton, L.

Seear, B.

Hanworth, V.

Shinwell, L.

Harris of Greenwich, L.

Stedman, B.

Houghton of Sowerby, L.

Stewart of Alvechurch, B.

Howie of Troon, L.

Stewart of Fulham, L.

Jacobson, L.

Stone, L.

Jacques, L.

Strauss, L.

John-Mackie, L.

Wallace of Coslany, L.

Leatherland, L.

Wigoder, L.

Llewelyn-Davies of

Wilson of Langside, L.

Hastoe, B.

Wootton of Abinger, B.

NOT-CONTENTS

Abinger, L.

Mancroft, L.

Ailesbury, M.

Mar, C.

Alexander of Tunis, E.

Marley, L.

Ampthill, L.

Marshall of Leeds, L.

Auckland, L.

Merrivale, L.

Avon, L.

Mills, V.

Balfour of Inchrye, L.

Mottistone, L.

Bellwin, L.

Murton of Lindisfarne, L.

Belstead, L.

Nathan, L.

Bessborough, E.

Norfolk, D.

Boardman, L.

Nugent of Guildford, L.

Campbell of Croy, L.

Orkney, E.

Cathcart, E.

Pennock, L.

Coleraine, L.

Platt of Writtle, B.

Craigavon, V.

Plummer of St. Marylebone, L.

Cullen of Ashbourne, L.

De L'Isle, V.

Portland, D.

Denham, L. [Teller]

Rankeillour, L.

Derwent, L.

Reigate, L.

Ellenborough, L.

Romney, E.

Elliot of Harwood, B.

Rugby, L.

Elton, L.

St. Aldwyn, E.

Fortescue, E.

St. Davids, V.

Fraser of Kilmorack, L.

Saint Oswald, L.

Garner, L.

Saltoun, Ly.

Glenarthur, L.

Savile, L.

Grantchester, L.

Shannon, E.

Greenway, L.

Somers, L.

Hailsham of Saint Marylebone, L.

Spens, L.

Strathcarron, L.

Hampden, V.

Strathcona and Mount Royal, L.

Harmar-Nicholls, L.

Henley, L.

Strathspey, L.

Hives, L.

Swansea, L.

Hunt of Fawley, L.

Swinfen, L.

Hylton-Foster, B.

Swinton, E. [Teller]

Ilchester, E.

Terrington, L.

Kemsley, V.

Teviot, L.

Killearn, L.

Thorneycroft, L.

Lane-Fox, B.

Trefgarne, L.

Lawrence, L.

Trenchard, V.

Long, V.

Vaizey, L.

Lucas of Chilworth, L.

Vaux of Harrowden, L.

Lyell, L.

Vickers, B.

McAlpine of Moffat, L.

Vivian, L.

McFadzean, L.

Ward of Witley, V.

Malmsbury, E.

Young, B.

Resolved in the negative, and amendment disagreed to accordingly.
4.55 p.m.
Lord Bishopston Lord Bishopston moved Amendment No. 8:
Page 2, line 32, leave out subsections (3) and (4) and insert—
("(3) Where the owner has offered the occupier an agreement under this Act within the required period—

(a) if the terms of the agreement so offered are unacceptable to the occupier, the occupier may, within six months of the offer, apply to the court for an order requiring the making of such an agreement;

(b) if the occupier already occupies the mobile home as his only or main residence, he may accept the offer at any time;

(c) where paragraphs (a) or (b) above do not apply, the offer shall be treated as withdrawn six months after the date on which it was made.")

The noble Lord said: This has some aspects in common with the previous amendment, but it is somewhat different and is still very important. I refer the Committee to the terms of the amendment, which says that, where the owner offers the occupier an agreement under the Bill within the required period, then,
"if the terms of the agreement so offered are unacceptable to the occupier, the occupier may, within six months of the offer, apply to the court for an order requiring the making of such an agreement".
It goes on:
"if the occupier already occupies the mobile home as his only or main residence, he may accept the offer at any time",
and, where those two conditions,
"do not apply, the offer shall be treated as withdrawn six months after the date on which it was made".
Again, we are getting to the core of the Bill, because it depends on the kind of agreement which is made. As the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said when speaking to the previous amendment, there are problems where an agreement has not been made or where the terms are in doubt. The amendment seeks to protect the resident who is offered an agreement, but it has not been accepted or challenged—an in-between situation of uncertainty—and I believe that in this respect the Bill is on the side of the site owner. A resident may, through ignorance or ill health—such as may be the case with an elderly person, and earlier I mentioned that a large percentage of mobile home residents are elderly—be placed at a disadvantage. Of course, it also applies to younger people who start off in a mobile home—possibly because they can get no other form of accommodation—and, when the family comes, maybe they have the problems associated with moving out. There is, therefore, need for the agreement to be watertight on the rights of all mobile home residents, and we believe the clause as framed provides little or no protection.
The Bill is not clear on the other circumstances of Clause 2(4), and we think the time limit here is too short. The noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, referred to the period of three months. Where negotiations must take place or agreement has to be sought, there may be areas of disagreement and, by the time a resident has decided what terms would be just and negotiations have taken place, with perhaps an appeal to the court, that period will have gone by. We therefore suggest a longer period. I will not say more at this stage because the matter was dealt with in the debate on the previous amendment, although as I said, we regard this as an important amendment, too.
I hope that, if the Minister cannot be with us on this occasion either, he will, in the light of the representations made to him by many organisations concerned with the interests of those who live on mobile home sites—I refer, of course, to site owners as well as residents—agree to look at this aspect again to see whether something more can be done to put the balance a little more fairly in the direction of the residents. I beg to move.
Lord Bellwin: I do not want to make a great deal of this point, but I think that the period suggested in the amendment is too long, and I cannot accept it as it is. But in fairness I would say that it is an arguable point that the noble Lord makes, and it brings us back to the question of degree and balance. The site owner must be entitled to some degree of certainty, and I feel that the amendment would remove that from him in regard to a major group of occupiers, and would make it very difficult for him to plan the running of the site effectively.
I also believe that six months is a little too long a period to expect owners to wait, especially in cases where an agreement is offered to a prospective occupier who may change his mind about going on to the site but who might not actually bother to refuse the agreement. The Bill allows three months, and we should remember that the occupier will not only be offered a copy of the agreement, but will also receive a prescribed notice that advises him to read the government booklet and to take legal advice. The question is: is three months really that short a period of time in the circumstances? On balance, I do not believe that it is too short a period, and that is why I do not want to accept the amendment. But, as I have said, and as I concede, it is an arguable point, and others may well have a different view of it.
Lord Bishopston: I am sorry about the Minister's attitude to the period of three months. The amendment has other merits that I have mentioned. I made the point previously, but I am afraid that I have to remind the Committee of various points which apply in a number of circumstances, and so I would say that when a person buys a house or bungalow it is necessary to have the help of a solicitor—at least in most cases—and so to some extent the person's problems are taken care of. But in the kind of cases that we are considering, people do not normally receive legal advice and so they may have to use other means in order to obtain information about their rights and responsibilities.
I suspect that the Minister may feel a little uneasy about the period of three months as being perhaps too short or too long, but he might not be happy to accept a period of six months. I do not want to bargain with him, but I wonder whether he would be prepared to look at the matter again and see whether this particular aspect could be considered, too, and then we might come back to it at a later stage. But as I have said, this is not the only part of the amendment. It is a vital part, but it is not the whole amendment. I wonder whether the Minister will respond.
Lord Bellwin: I do not think that there is much that I can add to what I have said previously. One is not saying that 10 out of 10 is right. It is not at all that kind

1337
of situation. It is a judgment made in an attempt to strike a balance, and I cannot go further than I have gone. I do not want to accept the amendment. Of course I shall discuss it with colleagues, but I certainly do not want to accept it today. I think that on balance a period of three months is right. I had to smile at the noble Lord when he was referring to the length of the period, and it almost seemed to be a case of, "Do I hear four?", but we did not quite get to that. On this side of the Committee we should like to leave the period as it now is, certainly for the time being at any rate.
Lord Bishopston: I shall place more trust in the Minister than some might say would be justified. I hope that he will look at this point again, together with the other aspects of the amendment. I do not want to press it at this stage, but we might return to it later. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Bellwin Lord Bellwin moved Amendment No. 9:
Page 2, line 44, at end insert—
("(6) In this section "the required period" means the period within which the owner is required to offer the occupier an agreement under this Act; and for the purposes of this section an offer which does not comply with the requirements of section 1 (4) above shall be disregarded.")
The noble Lord said: I have already spoken to this amendment. I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
5.5 p.m.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal Baroness Fisher of Rednal moved Amendment No. 10:
Page 2, line 44, at end insert—
("(6) The Rent Officer shall, on the application of the owner or the occupier, specify the extent to which he considers to be reasonable sums payable by the occupier in pursuance of an agreement under this Act and the occupier shall not be liable to pay more than the sums so specified.
(7) In determining for the purposes of subsection (6) above what sum is or would be reasonable—

(a) regard shall be had to all the circumstances (other than personal circumstances) and in particular to:—

(i) the character and locality of the protected site;

(ii) the place within the protected site where the mobile home is, or is to be, stationed;

(iii) the services available to the occupier on the protected site; and

(iv) rates payable by the owner in respect of the protected site; and

(b) there shall be disregarded—

(i) the condition of the mobile home;

(ii) the fact that the agreement was offered or made under this Act.")

The noble Baroness said: One of the most important concerns in regard to each mobile home resident is to ensure not only that he has security of tenure, but that he is not faced with excessive charges. I am aware that the Secretary of State has already issued a document regarding premiums, assignments, and percentages, and so I do not want to enter into that field. But one point concerns me in particular, and I should like the noble Lord the Minister to make the position quite clear. Where there is an agreement and it is necessary to go to court because of a dispute over charges, can the court pronounce on the reasonableness of the charges? I ask that question because in the main the mobile home resident will go to court in order to challenge the reasonableness of the charges. I am
1338
concerned because as I read the Bill it does not seem to me that the court has such a responsibility.
Nowadays, with rates, water charges, land rentals, and all the rest going up, the mobile home owner must, to a certain extent, accept a rent review mechanism in the agreement. What we are concerned to ensure is that the rent review mechanism will be fair not only to the mobile home resident, but also to the site owner. It is for that reason that on this side of the Committee we believe that the rent officer should be involved. He is well versed in the rent review mechanism and is perhaps looked upon by both the tenant and the landlord as being "fairly fair". Obviously the tenant normally thinks that the rent officer is unfair and the landlord also thinks that he is unfair, but I believe that by and large they must accept that the rent officer acts in a "fairly fair" way.
I have in mind the question of excessive charges, and especially that of rent review, but we must also consider the service charges, and as I read the Bill there does not seem to be any opportunity for the mobile home resident to challenge the owner regarding the costs of providing services. There does not seem to be any obligation on the part of the site owner to supply information on how he bases his service charges.
Perhaps one of the reasons why the Bill is before us is that the mobile homes problem was raised quite extensively in the media, including in the press and on television. One problem that was brought out quite specifically both in the press and on television related to the consternation felt over rapidly increasing site rents as well as the suddenness of one-off payments, which led to hardship for many residents. Therefore we feel that there should be provision for the charges to be overseen, and we want to emphasise that this should be available much more easily than by having to go to court. We consider that the rent officer is well placed to carry out such functions. We do not think that it would be at all difficult to assign this additional function to him.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, I would agree that there are some very good site owners; and, of course, if they were all in that group then we would not need to have this legislation before us today. Our amendment, we feel, should not cause any concern at all to the good, considerate, fair site owner, who we on this side of the Committee recognise quite clearly, as does the noble Lord, is somebody who has a right to earn a reasonable return on his capital investment. But we are discussing this Bill today because not all site owners are in that category; there are some much more greedy than others. In fact, mobile home owners have said that there are some quite avaricious ones.
Balancing the two sides, we recognise that the residents themselves need protection from the inconsiderate site owner; and the resident, too, should be able to look after his capital investment. That, too, should be adequately protected, and a reasonable measure of security should be given to him. We are trying to be fair to both sides, and, therefore, the principle embodied in this amendment is, we feel, worthy of the support of the noble Lord; because there can be no doubt that the responsible, conscientious site owner will be able to draw upon the skill of the rent officers, and will be able to rely on them to be fair to

1339
the residents. In fact, those in the category of what we call good site owners should have no problems at all in being able to consult and work with the rent officer in drawing up a scheme. What we feel is important is for the residents to be protected from the less scrupulous site owners.
I think the noble Lord spoke about harassment. This was another point that was brought out by the television programme and by other parts of the media—that there are people who are harassed. The last thing we want to happen is that people should quite suddenly lose their homes, there and then, because of the harassment they suffer. If I may quote from one letter, it says:
"I feel that the site owners take unfair advantage of the often legally-ignorant mobile home owners who fear that to approach a solicitor may result in facing legal bills that they can ill afford. There is also"—
and this is, I think, important—
"the element of fear, of reprisal from the site owner, who can make life difficult for people on his site who are known to have complained".
It is for that reason, perhaps, that we need, as our amendment quite clearly states, the experience of somebody who is conversant not only with rent reviews but also with harassment.
The noble Lord might challenge the experience of the rent officer and say that he would not be capable of doing this job. I remember that when the Rent Act came into operation rent officers had to be trained to do the job—a very difficult job, as I can remember. I was a member of the local authority in Birmingham at the time, and the people in my ward were perhaps in the category of those being harassed by landlords because of the Rent Act. But the rent officers have gained in knowledge since the Rent Act came into operation, and the very unusual cases that they would have to deal with in the category of mobile homes are, we feel, matters that their expertise and their acknowledged skill should enable them to deal with quite easily for the benefit of both the site owner and the mobile home owner.
The Minister might perhaps feel that our amendment is a little untidy. I am not concerned that he thinks it untidy, because he can tidy it up. What is important is the principle behind it, and it is for that reason that we would ask the noble Lord to consider it quite seriously. I say with all humility that when a crisis occurs to an individual, and when it has to do with his own home—whether those concerned have bought it or let it, or whatever is the situation—it is of immense importance to him and sometimes he does not know how to cope effectively. The chances are that, under stress, such an individual will do the wrong thing.
I think it is important for us in this Committee to be realistic and to recognise that those who cannot afford the services of a solicitor and who, because of that, have to cope alone when they are going through these periods of stress, are placed in a worse position than the person who is able to pay for somebody else to worry for him. It is for that reason that I would ask the noble Lord to consider our amendment. Its purpose is really to give to the rent officer the power to deal with the charges, and with the criteria; and we feel that in this way it can be done much more easily, much more
1340
effectively and much more fairly to both the owner of the site and the resident than it could be by any court or judge when what is being considered is the reasonableness of the charges that are involved. I beg to move.
5.16 p.m.
Lord Bellwin: I am sure it is not necessary to remind the noble Baroness that it was I who during Second Reading referred to the point of harassment. Indeed. I mentioned, if I remember, the Daily Star, which had brought certain cases to the forefront, and I paid tribute to the influence that they and others had had in (if you like) helping to bring out the need for something much better than the 1975 Act. So, again, there is no difference between us on that. However, I keep having to come back all the time, as I do, to the fact that although in this Bill we are trying to bring forward a measure which will be much more effective than the 1975 Act—and I think everyone accepts that—nevertheless at no stage shall we be able to get away from the need to protect the interests of all concerned. The noble Baroness does not quarrel with me on this. Indeed. I am sure she herself spoke about it. But it brings us back all the time, because this amendment would involve the rent officer service in fixing the level of pitch fees payable by occupiers through agreements under the Bill. It also offers criteria which rent officers could use in so doing.
There is one point I should make before I deal with the substance of the amendment. There is no time limit within which an occupier can apply to the rent officer. The Bill provides that any challenge to the terms of an agreement must be made within the first three months. The effect of this amendment would be to allow challenge to one of the terms, the pitch fee, at any time. Even if I accepted that it would be a good idea to involve the rent officer service in mobile homes matters, I would wish to resist that aspect of the amendment. But I think that is secondary because, as the noble Baroness rightly said, one can always make adjustments if one accepts a principle, and the final wording of an amendment, certainly at Committee stage, does not have to be the last word on it.
I prefer to base the case against doing this—in fact, I do so—on the whole matter of the rent officer service in relation to this particular situation. The fact is that the task of rent officers is to fix rents within the criteria laid down by the Rent Acts. No doubt they do a very good job there. As the noble Baroness said, they do not please everyone; but I think there is general acceptance that they have skills and knowledge which enable them to hold a reasonable balance, at least one which makes a very hard situation tolerable. I gladly pay tribute to them—and I know quite a lot about the way in which they work.
But deciding the rent for a tenanted house or flat within Rent Act criteria is a very different matter from fixing the level of a pitch fee which the owner-occupier of a mobile home must pay the owner of the site on which his mobile home is stationed. This amendment would mean involving rent officers in a new and quite distinct field. The Bill allows occupiers and site owners to agree between them on an arbitrator—the noble Baroness did not mention the arbitrator—to resolve their disputes. The choice is a free one. If they cannot

1341
agree, they can then go to court. I frankly believe that that must be a better approach than bringing in the rent officer service. The noble Baroness will recognise the implications of bringing the rent officer service into this field. She knows a great deal about this aspect, as I know from our debates over the past three and a half years on other Bills. It would not be desirable to bring them in. All kinds of complications would arise for them.
To answer some points that the noble Baroness made, she spoke about a rent review mechanism. There is no rent review mechanism in the Bill as it is. She wondered whether the courts can judge the reasonableness of a charge. If they have do so, the answer is, yes. I hope, as she does, that first of all the matter can be agreed between the parties; secondly, if it cannot be agreed between them then at least they should ideally go to arbitration. They can decide upon that. That does not have to involve costly processes at all. It is only at the end of the day that, if necessary, they can go to the court if they so wish, and then the court will decide, provided that the challenge is made within the time limit laid down.
I am sorry not to be able to meet the noble Baroness who argues her case so eloquently on this issue and clearly believes that the rent officer service has a part to play here. I do not think that it has. It would be an awful mistake to bring that great mechanism into play on what we are trying to do in this Bill. I hope that in those circumstances, on reflection, the noble Baroness will be able to accept that answer.
Lord Jacques: I should like to plead with the Minister to give consideration to this amendment because of its significance. It has great psychological significance. If we are going to help the kind of people that we have in mind, there are one or two principles that have to be observed. First of all, if we want them to go somewhere for help they should go to the place that they are accustomed to visiting, to the town hall rather than the court. They should not be involved in something which they feel will immediately involve them in some big expense, such as going to a solicitor. The hearing procedure should be informal rather than formal. I suggest that on all these grounds the rent officer is more likely to do the job better than the court.
I am not smitten with the idea of arbitration. All kinds of things can happen when you provide for an arbitrator. The site owner could arrange for his agent to be the arbitrator or he could name a friend. The poor old occupier who is looking for a site regards that as a mere detail, but when it comes to the test it is of vital importance. When it is the rent officer, that is different; that is specific.
My final plea is this. We have introduced the rent officer into housing legislation. That has been a great success. I believe that, by and large, rent officers have given very fair and reasonable decisions. They have not satisfied everybody; that is impossible, but I think that they have done a first-class job. I believe that it will be no great step to apply this service also to mobile homes. I believe that for psychological reasons it is one of the most important amendments that could be made.
Lord Bellwin: I do not like to disagree with the noble Lord because we so often seem to see eye to eye on matters that we discuss. But I shall have to say—and I said this on Second Reading—that we do not want to bring in a Rent Act type Bill. What the noble Lord said about the Rent Acts is right. There is confidence in the rent officers based upon, in general, the fairness which they have shown and their skill. I paid tribute to that a moment ago and I do so again. But the fact is that for all the good things that they do—and they do many—they also have a connotation of bad things in housing, certainly since the 1977 Act. That introduced a new range of security of tenure, and when I was on the Francis Committee we always said that would have the effect of drying up the availability of great numbers of dwellings or parts of dwellings that are needed for renting.
If we were to contemplate a Rent Act type régime within this Bill then the fear would be, without question, that the availability of sites too would also decrease very much indeed. Just as it is true that there are certain concerns by the tenants who turn to the rent officer for protection in terms of giving a fair judgment on what rents should be, so conversely there is the fear of landlords, or even prospective landlords, who are contemplating making their accommodation available. In this particular Bill above all we are trying to bring forward a moderation—and we are all saying it and I am saying it again now—trying to get a balance between the interests of both sides to be fair. I believe that to bring in what is proposed really would have an adverse effect.
As to the point the noble Lord made about arbitration, the arbitrator does not have to be appointed by the site owner. The occupier must have equal say in who should be the arbitrator. If he does not agree, then there is not an arbitrator. The arbitrator has to be someone mutually acceptable. If not, there is no arbitration. Then you come on to the point of the court. The point that the noble Lord makes about going to court is the most important part of what he was saying, if I may say so. People do not want to go to court. People dislike this; they fear the costs; they fear it might involve them in all kinds of traumas. So they do not want it, and I understand it.
I do not believe that at the end of the day, in drawing a balance on what we should do. we ought to go into a Rent Act régime. The noble Lord asked whether I would at least consider it. I always like to read and think about whatever is said at various stages of the Bills that I deal with. Of course, I shall do that on this occasion and with this amendment. But I do not want to be less than frank about it. My own view is that I fear that, well intentioned though it may be, to introduce any Rent Act aspects will have an adverse effect on what all of us want to see.
5.28 p.m.
Lord Bishopston: I can well appreciate the points made by the Minister. He talks about the danger of accommodation drying up. This is any form of accommodation, including mobile homes, which are used by a not insignificant number of people. A problem to a tenant or owner of a house is a 100 per cent. problem to him and we should take that into account. If we do not have the Housing Act 1980 and the Rent Act 1977 safeguarding these people, as I and

1343
many of my noble friends contend—we accept that the Minister says that we do not want that régime—the fact is that we shall not have a régime which will be tied to the Rent Act and the Housing Act. It will be tied to this Bill, the Mobile Homes Bill. The rent officer, as we envisage it, will have to act in keeping with the provisions of this particular measure.
The rent officer has a very important role. The Minister has indicated his respect for rent officers and the work that they do. Unlike the courts, which deal with a number of issues, the rent officer is specialised in his approach. He is greatly experienced; he knows the problems; he can bring a certain degree of uniformity to his judgments, and so on. I am sure that his rulings and advice would be acceptable to both sides.
We believe that the rent officer is particularly suited to this kind of situation, and I hope the Minister will be able to look at this matter again. I stress that this is not bringing into focus the whole of the régime of the various Acts we have mentioned and which he has rejected. I am sure that he wants in fairness to make sure that the security and all other aspects which are accorded to the tenants and to the landlords and which are covered by these measures are extended so far as possible to those we are discussing. There are lesser provisions, if I may say so, in this Bill than there are in the provisions of the two Acts we have been discussing. Therefore, it will be a major measure to suit the particular circumstances, and we think that the rent officer is well experienced to do this with a degree of uniformity and fairness which will be fair to both sides.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: May I ask the noble Lord how he equates the skill of an arbitrator, who will be a one-off person, as against the skill and expertise of a rent officer? The arbitrator might be doing something in Devon, another in the North-West and another in the Midlands—completely isolated people. So far as I can see, there is no need for somebody with the qualifications of an arbitrator. How will they be able to do the jobs which the noble Lord felt that the rent officer could not do? I find that quite unacceptable. With regard to the principle that some people have chosen to live in mobile homes, that is their choice, in the same way that other people choose to live in a bungalow by the sea, or wherever. I think it is important to recognise that, having chosen, they have a right to protection in the same way as the tenant of a council house, the tenant of a private landlord or of a flat. Because they are a very small group of people and have chosen a different kind of housing, I am afraid that the more we discuss the Bill, the more we shall find ourselves in the same difficulty as on the previous Bill on the same issues. I would therefore sincerely ask the Minister to be much more generous than he is being at the present time. We have accepted that there is a need for the site owner to be dealt with equally fairly. For that reason, we will press this issue to a Divison unless we get a much clearer understanding from the noble Lord that the tenants of mobile homes will get equality with the site owner.
Lord Bellwin: May I say again, just to set the record straight, that I really do not need any "pushing" or any lessons on the need for the Bill. May I remind the
1344
noble Baroness that it is the Government who are bringing forward this Bill. If she feels so passionately about it—and I commend her for that—I should have thought that she might have prevailed upon her own colleagues in 1975 to have brought forward a different kind of Bill, which might have put it another way. I respectfully suggest that she did not do so, or perhaps was not able to do so—she may not have been involved in those days—
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: I was not.
Lord Bellwin: Then that absolutely explains it. Had she been, I have no doubt that she would have made the point she has made today; and so I will not press that point further. Even so, the principle remains fair. This Government are bringing in this Bill trying to do precisely what she wants us to do—to protect the interests of people who choose to live in this particular way. Many of them are very nice homes—indeed, why not?—and that is why we are bringing forward the Bill. They are entitled to protection, but in the bringing forward of the Bill we are anxious to look after the interests of others, too, who have an interest in providing the facilities and the sites where this accommodation is placed. So we seem to be repeating the same thing again. I cannot go as far as the noble Baroness would wish me to go. I really feel that it would be a mistake to bring a Rent Act régime into this Bill. I think it really would be contrary to what we are trying to do, despite the good intentions that I know are behind this amendment on the other side. So I cannot help on this occasion.
Lord Bishopston: I think we are still hopeful that the Minister will look at this again. We feel very strongly about it and are inclined to press the matter, but it is one which needs to be given more care and attention. The Minister will know that his own department, as have noble Lords, has had piles of correspondence on the matter. There have been many letters sent and the Press have had campaigns about the various injustices suffered by residents on mobile home sites.
It may be that it would be a good thing to come back to this on Report, if the Minister will look at it again. I am sure he has had many representations from many organisations on this matter. This is one of the key points as to what mechanism is to be used: whether it is the courts or the rent officer. As I said earlier, the rent officer does not have to pick up these Acts when he is dealing with mobile home matters: they are completely on one side. He will be looking at a modest Bill, and we want to be sure that the enforcement of its limited provisions will do justice and do the job which I am sure the Government and others in this House wish to be accommodated. On the basis of my charitable attitude to the Minister on this, and in the hope that he will look at it again, because it is terribly important, I will seek the leave of the Committee to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Earl of Swinton: I beg to move that the House do now resume.
Moved accordingly and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House resumed.

ECC 19th Report: Voluntary Part-Time Work
5.38 p.m.
Lord Seebohm Lord Seebohm rose to move, That this House takes note of the Report of the European Communities Committee on Voluntary Part-time Work (19th Report, 1981–82, H.L. 216).
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Motion is, that this House takes note of the European Communities Committee on Voluntary Part-time Work—that is, the 19th Report of 1981–82. Sub-Committee C of the Select Committee on the European Communities received oral or written evidence from a number of organisations and individuals, including the European Commission, the Department of Employment, the CBI, the TUC, a clearing bank, the Equal Opportunities Commission, the National Federation of Self-Employed and Small Businesses, the Institute of Directors, Professor Hepple, Mr. Ben Patterson, MEP and several others. We are most grateful for the help we got from all these people, who had obviously done a great deal of research and hard work to help us in our deliberations. We were also helped throughout by Dr. Colin Leicester, whose specialised knowledge was invaluable to us.
Briefly, the directive is intended to ensure that regular part-time workers enjoy proportionately the same terms of employment as full-time workers in comparable employment; that is to say, similar hourly rates, holiday entitlements, sick benefits, pension rights and so forth. I am quite sure that the general public do not understand the real implications of part-time work in this country. I am sure that went for the committee at the beginning of our deliberations. We changed our views quite considerably as we went along.
I think I should perhaps therefore state some facts—not too many figures—to show what we are really talking about. As far back as 1951 part-time work was not unknown, but the ratio was about one part-time worker to 23 full-time workers. They increased in number fairly rapidly over the years and in 1981 it was no less than one part-time worker to four full-time workers; in other words, one-fifth of the labour force are now part-time workers.
It will be seen, therefore, that we are dealing with a very significant part of the workforce, which should be treated as something very serious and highly respectable. People say "only part-time workers", but that attitude should no longer be adopted. We find that these people are among the older population, and also among the very young. I suppose everybody knows that most part-time workers are women, of whom there are 3·6 million, while 700,000 are men. Both are growing in numbers. There were 4·3 million in 1981 and the number is growing, though more slowly. There is also a strong tendency for men to go in for more part-time work—again, for demographic reasons and when families change—which will, I think, be dealt with later by the noble Lord, Lord McGregor. Therefore, we are dealing with something which is a very stable part of the workforce, whose very size demands that it is protected against anomalies and discrimination.
The United Kingdom is by far the largest employer
1346
of part-time workers, both in numbers and—with the exception of Denmark—proportionately. It is therefore significant that at the meeting of the Council of Ministers the United Kingdom stated that it finds the directive unacceptable. It was alone in taking a line of outright opposition. It is understood that France supports the directive strongly; Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg accept the directive as it stands and Germany and Ireland have reservations, but have indicated that they may give agreement after modification.
The Employment Protection Act 1978 fails to protect about 750,000 part-time workers, as the threshold for cover is set at 16 hours per week, or 8 hours if the worker has had regular employment for five years. This is equivalent to two days or one day per week respectively. The national insurance arrangements cover only those who earn £32·50 per week or more. These thresholds are arbitrary and have no clear rationale. The main objection by the United Kingdom Government appears, according to a letter from the Secretary of State for Employment to the committee, to be that there is no clear evidence that part-time workers are being unjustly treated; that there are sound economic or commercial reasons for applying different terms of employment from full-time workers and that this is a fact that is acceptable to part-time workers. He went on to point out that the implementation of the directive would reduce flexibility, increase employers' costs and decrease industry's efficiency, thereby decreasing the number of vacancies and increasing unemployment. These are very serious allegations and I think that I shall have to answer them seriatim, so far as I can.
First, as to evidence of injustice, the committee took evidence from the Equal Opportunities Commission, and we were convinced that there are certainly abuses and discrimination in the case of part-time workers. A small exampre is the wages councils, and in agriculture, for no particular reason, part-time workers are automatically granted wages which are 5 per cent. less than those of full-time workers on an hourly basis. We were satisfied, at the end, that there is a lot of injustice and discrimination, though the amount is not possible to assess.
Apart from the effect of increased costs, I doubt whether there would be any appreciable reduction in flexibility. Part-time work is essentially flexible. There are agreements which suit both employer and employee. I have a rather nasty feeling that the flexibility which the Secretary of State may have been talking about is, in fact, the flexibility where there is discrimination and some injustice. But I would remind the House that there is a pool of flexible labour, which is the temporary workers, casual workers, seasonal workers and so on, with which this directive does not at all concern itself.
There will be some increase in costs, which we do not at all deny. But I do not suppose that there has ever been any improvement in terms of employment which has not, in the short-term, meant some increased costs; I cannot think of any. But there is no doubt whatever that, over the years, improved terms of employment have increased efficiency, and probably productivity, to a considerable extent. So it has to be proved that the increase in costs will be considerable, if it is to be opposed on those grounds. The main

1347
component of rising costs is, I suppose, the benefits package; namely, access for part-time workers to existing sick pay and pension schemes, holidays, et cetera.
In the case of large employers, such as multiple stores, banks and the health service, our evidence was that the increase would be minimal. Barclays Bank thought that it might be 1 per cent., if they implemented the directive as it stands. The health service thought that it would be about the same figure. Sainsbury's evidence was of slightly higher costs. They thought that a change might increase their overall bill by 3 per cent., but nearly 60 per cent. of their employees are part-time and the main increase in costs in their case would be due to the pension scheme. These figures show that, for large employers, the increasing costs are minimal. The costs for small employers would be rather more, if they had to pay the national insurance charge which is on a poll tax basis and is a regressive tax. For people who work a few hours a week, it could be serious.
We should like to draw the attention of the House to the fact that the national insurance charge is the same, whether you are employed for 8 hours or for 40 hours. Therefore, it is a very bad, regressive tax. If only it could be made progressive and proportionate to earnings, rather than simply a poll tax, it would make a very big difference to the employment of part-time workers. I am sure that there must be a feasible solution to this. It is something which is a serious block to the progress of part-time work.
We have considerable objections to many of the articles, although the committee is in no doubt that the general objectives are sound. Also, we do not believe that a code of practice alone would be sufficient to put matters right; there must be some form of directive. Part-time work is becoming more and more acceptable to a wider range of workers, notably among men, and employees are becoming more inclined to expand the range of part-time work in their own firms. This is highly significant among the older workers, who are willing to move towards work sharing, but will hardly be encouraged to do so if their terms of employment are clearly worse than when they were working full-time.
Evidence produced to the committee shows that there are clear cases where the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act have been shown to be relatively powerless. About 13 per cent. of part-time jobs are at lower rates than full-time rates. The committee have concluded, therefore, that there are anomalies in the treatment of part-timers; that employment protection is arbitrary and fails to offer adequate remedy; that there is some discrimination, against which there is only limited protection under existing legislation; that the increased costs could be considerably mitigated by altering the regressive nature of the national insurance charge arrangements; that, since one in five employed in the United Kingdom are part-timers, the conditions of their employment need to be reviewed; that, as the United Kingdom employs 41 per cent. of all part-timers in the EEC, considerable weight will be given to its views and that, while representations should be made to amend the articles, the directive should not be opposed outright.
We visited Strasbourg a few weeks ago, and universally our report was given considerable praise. They felt that we had made a very good contribution to the discussion on the directive. In addition to that, on 4th October the Secretary of State gave an address in The Hague and he said—this was after our report came out—
"I am confident that we could make similar progress in extending the scope for part-time work. You may be interested to know that I have recently announced proposals in the United Kingdom for a scheme providing incentives to employers to create part-time jobs. This scheme has been notified to the European Commission and we are currently discussing it with them. It is experimental, but we hope that it will offer market-based jobs to more people and will offer more scope to those who wish to arrange their working lives in different ways".
I do not see how we can have it. both ways. If we wish to persuade more people to become part-timers, we are unlikely to do so if we say to them that they will have five or 10 per cent. less pay, that they cannot be in sickness benefit schemes, that they have no holiday entitlement, that they cannot use the canteen—and so on. This makes absolute nonsense of the whole argument. Part-timers have got to be accepted as a perfectly respectable, ordinary part of the workforce and of our way of life. Therefore, I beg to move.
5.50 p.m.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, on this very thorough and interesting report and to thank him and his committee members for all the meticulous work and patience they have put into their deliberations and recommendations.
The European Communities Commission's proposal for a directive on part-time work is currently under discussion by the European Community member states in the working group which serves the Council of Ministers, and has been since its publication at the beginning of the year. There is as yet little sign of the member states reaching agreement on a mutually satisfactory text.
The committee, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, are broadly in favour of the directive. They conclude in their report that:
"There are anomalies in the treatment of part-time workers compared with full-time workers which need to be rectified and may not be removed on a voluntary or collective basis".
Their support for the present text is not, however, unqualified.
"What is more open to doubt",
they say,
"is whether the present draft directive provides a workable balance between the needs of the employed and the present economic situation".
They put forward their suggestions for necessary amendments to the text of the directive, article by article.
I am grateful to the committee for their statement that the proposed directive may not,
"provide a workable balance between the needs of the employed and the present economic situation",
because this precisely sums up the Government's view. We also believe that it is desirable that part-time workers should be protected against unjustified inferior treatment, although we are considerably more sceptical than is the committee about the extent to

1349
which such unjustified inequalities do in fact exist. All part-time workers who work the equivalent of two days or more a week, and many who work only one, enjoy equal protection with full-timers under existing employment protection legislation. The concept that the objective of protecting the employed must, however, be balanced against the needs of the economy and the need not to increase the numbers of the unemployed is absolutely crucial to the Government's position on this instrument. Our view is that the directive tips the balance far too far towards protection of the employed and that its cost may well be the jobs of those whom it seeks to protect.
Ironically enough, this directive forms part of the European Communities Commission's programme of measures on work sharing, the purpose of which is to increase employment in the Community. It therefore has a dual purpose: to improve the conditions under which part-time work is carried out and to increase opportunities for part-time work. The Commission regard these two objectives as perfectly compatible. Their argument is that if employers are made to treat part-time employees as well as they treat full-time employees, part-time work will be more attractive and more employees will wish to work part-time. This, they believe, will lead to a fairer distribution of available work across the working population.
The perhaps more pragmatic view of the Government is, as I have indicated, that the effect of the directive would be likely to be exactly the opposite of that envisaged by the European Communities Commission. In the Government's view, the directive, if implemented, would reduce opportunities for part-time work, at least in the United Kingdom. Its immediate effect would be a reduction in the number of part-time vacancies available, because it would diminish the attractiveness to employers of part-time employees. In the longer term it might lead to an overall reduction in employment since it would interfere with the flexibility of a sector of the labour market which currently operates very efficiently, to the benefit of the economy as a whole.
What grounds do the Government have for the belief they hold that the immediate effect of the directive would be to force employers to reduce the size of their part-time work forces? It has been argued—indeed, it is even suggested in paragraph 21 of the committee's report—that the demand for part-time workers in the economy is pretty much fixed. It is suggested that the demand is determined by operational factors, such as peaks and troughs of activity in the retail trade, and that part-timers are such a cost-effective way of meeting these needs that the sort of regulation envisaged could not possibly outweigh the benefits which employing them confers.
There is absolutely no evidence for this view. Indeed, we know very little about the flexibility or inflexibility of employers' demands for part-time workers. What we do know, however, is that the form of regulation proposed would increase the cost of part-timers and reduce their usefulness as a flexible form of labour. We have consulted employers on this point and received a unanimous response to this effect. More important, we know that the mere fact that regulation has been introduced would be likely to become an important factor in employers' recruitment decisions,
1350
particularly the recruitment decisions of smaller employers. We know this from bitter experience with other employment protection provisions. The right to complain of unfair dismissal is a case in point. If the existence of legislation can deter an employer from expanding his business because he is afraid to recruit, then it can certainly induce him to rearrange his work schedules in such a way as to avoid employing part-timers.
It is the Government's view that the matters covered in the directive—that is, the pay and conditions of part-time workers—are much better left to collective and individual agreement and the self-adjusting mechanisms of the market, than regulated by legislation. The United Kingdom has the largest number of part-time workers in the Community and the second largest proportion in the workforce. This indicates that this sector of the labour market is operating very well, to the benefit of both employers and employees.
The Government's view, then, is that the implementation of the directive in its present form would run a very heavy risk of discouraging employers from using part-timers, to the detriment of employers, employees and industry. Earlier I mentioned balance. This is the word used in the report. Is this argument outweighed by considerations of social justice? Are part-timers exploited and discriminated against to such an extent as to warrant measures of the type envisaged to protect them? The committee in their report conclude that such measures are warranted because differences of treatment and inequalities exist between part-time and full-time workers.
In the Government's view it is of paramount importance to distinguish between unjust inequalities of treatment resulting from prejudice—in other words, discrimination—and inequalities of treatment which result from legitimate commercial considerations. Thus, it constitutes unfair discrimination, for example, to refuse to employ a woman as a van driver because she is a woman but it is not unfair to choose a man in preference to her because he is a better driver. In the view of the Government it has not been proved that the difference in treatment between part-timers and full-timers which has been observed is the result of unfair discrimination and that a new legal right needs to be created. The differences appear to us to be the result of legitimate economic or commercial considerations. I am not sure, and the Government are not sure, that the committee have fully addressed themselves to this important distinction in their report, although they are clearly aware of its implications in the sphere of the proportionality of remuneration.
I think we would all agree that it would be unfair if employees treated part-timers differently in respect of their physical working conditions or refused them access to social facilities. I really cannot believe, however, that such unfair practices exist. But what about access to training and promotion? This is surely just the sort of area in which differences of treatment may exist for perfectly legitimate reasons. As currently drafted, the directive would not permit employers to treat part-timers differently for sound management and commercial reasons. They would have to promote two part-time workers to fill one full-time supervisor

1351
post and incur the double training cost involved. The Government might succeed in getting the directive amended so that differences in treatment would be permissible where there was a legitimate, objective reason for inequality, but employers would still have to go to the tribunal to argue that reason.
Let me now consider pay, briefly. The committee state in their report that the evidence supports the view that there are differences in hourly rates between part-time and full-time employees. The Goverment would agree that there are differences, but there is no evidence to prove that part-timers and full-timers generally recieve different rates of pay for the same job. It shows that part-timers are usually in lower grade jobs and that is why they are lower paid.
To sum up, the Government's position on the proposed directive is as follows. We believe that part-time employees should not have to suffer unjustified inequalities of treatment in relation to full-time employees. But this objective must be set against the needs of the economy and the need not to deprive those same employees of their jobs. We consider it very likely that the measures proposed would have a significant effect in reducing the number of part-time vacancies available. We do not consider that the need for the proposed measures has been shown to be sufficiently great to outweigh those opposing considerations; we do not consider that a binding instrument is appropriate in this area.
6.1 p.m.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, I must first apologise to your Lordships because, owing to an engagement entered into long before I knew about this debate, I shall not be able to attend very much longer after I have spoken. I would also like to thank very much the Labour Front Bench in general and the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, in particular for arranging for the same reason, for my personal convenience, to reverse the normal procedure whereby he would have spoken after the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur.
Having thanked the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, I must say that I found his exposition of the Government's point of view extraordinarily difficult to follow. I followed it but I could not follow the logic behind it. What he seemed to be saying on the one hand was that there really was no injustice; that part-timers were treated perfectly properly; and that there were very few part-time workers who were being "done down". In the very next breath, the noble Lord said that it would cost a phenomenal amount to redress the difference between part-time and full-time workers; that industry would not be able to afford this; and that the economic effects of these adjustments would be so damaging that a considerable number of people would lose their jobs. The Government cannot have it both ways. Either there is considerable inequality which will cost a great deal to redress or there is not considerable inequality, in which case any remaining inequalities will cost very little to redress. I regret that I shall not be present to hear the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, when he explains the logic of his statement, but I will, of course, read it with very great interest in Hansard tomorrow.
I accept that it may be that this directive is yet another example of the passion which the Commis-
1352
sion seems to have for going into a degree of detail for which a directive is not an appropriate instrument. As I understand it and have always understood it to be, a directive is meant to indicate the objective to be attained on a particular principle in a particular area of policy, and that the members of the community are allowed to adjust their existing legislation in such a way as to achieve that objective. But I have always understood that the directive is not supposed to lay down in very great detail how that objective is to be achieved.
It seems to me that in recent years—and this point has been raised before in your Lordships' House—there has been a marked tendency for the Commission to put into directives a degree of detail which tends not to be compatible with what a directive is supposed to be. To that extent I agree that there are details in this directive which it would be desirable to have adjusted, and surely the Government of this country. which—as the noble Lords, Lord Seebohm and Lord Glenarthur, have already pointed out—has a very high number of part-time workers and a very high percentage of them in relation to all other members of the EEC except Denmark, are in a very strong position to argue for the kind of directive and details, if we must have details in a directive, which are appropriate based on our considerable knowledge of part-time employment and the problems and issues which it raises.
That, I fear, is as far as I can possibly go in agreeing with the point of view put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur. It seems to me that there are two overwhelmingly strong reasons why we must urge the Government to reconsider the approach they are basically taking towards this directive. The first has to do with the position of women in the labour market. The noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, will speak with greater authority and in much greater detail than I can on this aspect of the directive, but to me there can be no doubt that, in the past and at the present time, a great many women have been extremely anxious to obtain work on a part-time basis—for domestic reasons, and because of the great inadequacy of the child care provisions in this country, which have made it impossible in practice for a very large number of women to take employment unless that employment is part-time. Whether they should be in part-time employment or not and whether other steps should be taken to make it easier for them to take full-time rather than part-time work is another issue, and one that we are not discussing this evening. In any event, it has undoubtedly been the wish of a very great number of women to obtain part-time employment.
The fact remains that, for a great many women, part-time employment has been a snare because these jobs have been seen as jobs exclusively for women and as jobs at a very low level. They are almost "ghetto" jobs in that they are jobs from which a woman has very little chance of advancing and which offer very low levels of pay. A great many women have settled for jobs of that kind. Had the position been different, they would have certainly advanced much further into the labour market and made a contribution to the economy far more in keeping with their capacities than they have been able to do. Women have to a large extent been trapped in these jobs.
There is no doubt also that part-time workers are relatively difficult to organise from the point of view of

1353
the trade unions and, as a result, they have to some extent been exploited. If one is serious about one's desire to give women appropriate opportunities—opportunities compatible with their capacities—then one must adjust the position of part-time work so that it is not seen as being exclusively work which women take; and that is the view taken of it at the present time, although I know there has been an increase in the number of men in part-time work. Overwhelmingly, it is women who still go in for these jobs. They are jobs which are regarded as being very low-grade, dead-end jobs with very little opportunity for getting out of them. It is urgently necessary from the point of view of women in the labour market that the nature of part-time work in this country should be altered. If there were no directive, there would be a very strong argument for saying that we want to see some of the differences of conditions between part-time workers and full-time workers reduced, if not totally abolished.
The second reason why the Government should reconsider their approach is that surely we want to encourage people to take part-time work—men as well as women. When we have been debating questions of unemployment, as we have done on a number of occasions over the past months, we have all agreed that the hope that all men as well as all women are going to obtain full-time jobs is a will-o'-the-wisp for many years to come. It is highly desirable that men should be encouraged to share jobs. The Government have been sufficiently converted to this point of view that they are encouraging the splitting of jobs in older age groups. But it ought not to be only among the older age groups that it is made acceptable for men and women who wish so to do—and of course it will always have to be voluntary—to enter into job-sharing arrangements.
As the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, has said, if those part-time jobs do not have the same benefits proportionately—one is only saying they should be proportionate—as are carried by the full-time jobs, what hope is there that all except a very few men are going to volunteer for jobs of that kind? In particular, there is the question of training, so that as new opportunities develop' people will be able to take advantage of them. Above all, there is the question of pensions. If there is one thing that is going to stop the development of job sharing it is the effect the job sharing has on pensions. As long as part-time work does not carry appropriate pension rights—it is difficult enough if it only carries proportionate pension rights—there is no hope whatever that more than a handful of men in their middle years are going to consider job sharing, because they simply cannot do it.
So for these two reasons, the opportunity that this directive gives us to change the nature of part-time work being carried out by women, often to their long-term detriment; and the even stronger reason perhaps at the present time, to make part-time job sharing a reality for both men and women in all age groups, with appropriately good conditions, as a Continuing contribution to reducing the total number of unemployed, I do very much hope that the Government will take a root and branch look at their present opposition to this directive and see in what ways they can meet its intentions.
6.12 p.m.
Lord McCarthy: My Lords, I want to do two things this evening. I want, first of all, very much to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, and his committee on an excellent report, with which I think we on this side broadly agree. I will say a little about that in a moment. Secondly, I want to explore what I take to be the main objections raised by the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, which are, as we would have expected, the usual alliance of views of the Secretary of State for Employment and a representative group of small businessmen, the Institute of Directors and the rest of the circle of people who go round and round the mulberry tree in Lord North Street.
But before I do that I would like to congratulate the committee. Here I think the Minister was very selective in his quotations. As I understand them, they are saying two things: first, there is no case for the present Government's position, there is no case for outright opposition to this directive. That did not come out in the Minister's speech. Secondly, there may be a case—and here I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, said a lot of things with which I would also agree—for some amendment, for some change in the draft of the directive as it exists at the moment; in particular, for some change perhaps in the kind of conditions which appear to be imposed for pension schemes, both occupational voluntary pension schemes and statutory pension schemes. That seems to me to be the general position of the committee. I would go along with that.
The only point at which I would disagree with the committee—I am not sure I have got them right, but I think I have—is that in paragraph 16 they seem to be saying that they would be in favour of a general lowering of the exception limit, so that it would not be absolute and there would be some people in some circumstances who would be, as it were, outside the net. I think that might be all right in the particular case of occupational pension schemes and statutory pensions and national insurance contributions, but I would not want to say that there need to be any exceptions of any kind in respect of, for example, employment protection legislation; I see no justification for that at all.
Therefore, one comes to explore what one takes to be the main objections raised by the Government. As I have listed them and understood them, they are six. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, said, there is no discrimination really worth talking about, and that which there is is not very significant. Secondly, if there is any significant discrimination, then workers are not complaining about it; they seem to be perfectly happy with it. Thirdly, in any case, even if they were complaining about it and it did exist, there must be some justification for discrimination, for less than equal treatment, because it costs more to administer the employment of part-time workers. Fourthly, even if that is a little implausible to justify the degree of discrimination which is there, and which is there in the report, you cannot do much about it because it is quite objective; it is related to the relative market values of part-time and full-time workers. Fifthly, even if this is a bit far-fetched, it so happens that if you eliminate it by law you just reduce the number of part-time workers, because, although there is not much of it, it

1355
is so expensive that it will put part-time workers out of a job.
There I think I bow to what I would call the Seear's paradox, or if I can mix my metaphors, the upper and nether millstones of the noble Baroness's argument. I look forward to seeing how the noble Lord the Minister gets out of it when he comes to speak. So, they say, "If we do anything about this we would be reducing employment". Finally, if all else fails, the Government say you cannot do any of this because the Commission, in suggesting this kind of thing, has exceeded its mandate; the original resolution was to facilitate employment of part-time people and it has gone far beyond that. These seem to me to be the six arguments of the Government.
First, the Government say that there is no discrimination worth talking about. The Secretary of State in his letter to the committee, at page 131 of the report, said:
"There is no clear evidence that part-time workers are being unjustly treated."
This kind of approach was repeated by the noble Lord this evening. The trouble is that such statements are exposed by the evidence of this report, most notably by the evidence put in by Professor Hepple, by the Equal Opportunities Commission, by the evidence of the Low Pay Unit, and indeed by research, actually sponsored by the Department of Employment itself, admittedly by the previous Government, encased in the Robertson and Briggs Department of Employment Gazette article of July 1979.
If you put all this evidence together it shows quite significant discrimination; for example, that part-time women get up to 10 per cent. an hour less than full-time women. It is very difficult to believe that all that is due to job classification, as the Minister suggests. It suggests that, so far as the benefits package is concerned, this is usually inferior for part-time workers as against full-time workers; most of them get no sick pay, no holidays or pensions, or significantly less than those of full-time workers. It suggests that they are the first to be declared redundant irrespective of how long they happen to be employed. We do not need research for this because the Government admit it. There is a whole range of statutory rights, employment protection rights, redundancy payments and so on, where part-time workers below an arbitrary threshold which has never been defended, are excluded from all legal rights.
So it seems to me that the mere publication of this report destroys the first leg of the Government's argument, that there is no discrimination worth talking about. So they must rely upon the second of their five or six defences, that nobody is complaining. Once again the Secretary of State in his letter to the committee said that such differences as exist are,
"a fact which part-time workers are ready to accept as a consequence of the nature of their work. In our view, arrangements between part-time workers and their employers are best left for voluntary agreement either individually or through collective bargaining."
My Lords, it is tempting to say, how does he know? It is tempting to ask, do they have an alternative?
The fact is, as the noble Baroness said, that we are dealing for the most part here with ghetto areas of the labour force, with groups who are extremely difficult
1356
to organise, to unionise, and which need statutory protection. If the argument that the people who suffer these things are not complaining were to be generally accepted, we would never have abolished slavery, we would never have established the trade laws for sweated industries, which the Government are about to abolish, and we would never have taken children from the mines. Of course, just because people are not complaining it does not mean they are not suffering. That is no kind of argument at all when one is dealing with these areas of the labour force.
We come to the third argument, the third defence, that it costs more to administer part-timers and, therefore, one cannot expect to have parity. Once more I refer to the Secretary of State's letter which he sent to the committee. This is presumably what is behind the Secretary of State's somewhat delphic references to "sound economic and commercial reasons." That, presumably, is what he means. There are several answers. First, how does it come about that these sound economic and commercial reasons precisely mirror the size of the gap? How do they precisely establish the fact that, for example, in general terms one sees a 10 per cent. wage difference between part-time and full-time women workers? How do these administrative extra costs justify the absence of sick pay? How could they possibly justify the total exclusion from all forms of statutory unemployment and sickness benefit anyone who earns less than £32·50 a week?
There are two points to make about the relative costs of employing part-time rather than full-time workers. The first is—once again one must take up the drift of the Minister's argument—that there is now a considerable body of research, much of it listed in this excellent report, by people such as Robinson, Robertson and Briggs, Hakin, Morley and Sawbridge, and so on, which totally takes away any mystery about why British employers are employing more and more part-time workers. It is a consequence of changes in the structure of British industry and of a move away from manual work in the heavy industries towards distribution and commerce, and so on. It is a function of the fact that in those industries there are substantial technological and organisational advantages to employers in a move toward part-time labour; that part-time labour provides for flexible extended hours coverage; that part-time labour results in lower rates in absence and turnover, especially in dull, routine jobs, and that part-time labour appears to produce higher rates of productivity over a wide area. Indeed, research from other countries—for example, Denmark and the Netherlands—indicates that these advantages to employers survive when rates of pay and benefits are equalised. There is no mystery about this and the general drift of the body of research is against the Minister.
The second point to make is that where we can get details—and often we cannot, particularly from objectors to the general drift of the directive—of the costs of removing discrimination, as the noble Baroness said and as the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, said, they turn out to be trifling. For example, on page xv of the report we are told:
"The biggest single employer of part-time workers is probably the Public Sector … preliminary estimates from the Management and Personnel Office indicate that they would add less than 1 per cent. to the pension bill and that overall 'the cost' "—

1357
that is, the overall cost of carrying out the directive—
" 'would probably be minimal.' "
Again, if we take the representatives of Sainsbury and Barclays Bank who gave evidence to the committee, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, their evidence is that the overall cost would be trifling, which is not to say that it would not be significant for the individuals concerned.
One must admit that all this contrasts sharply with the much more alarmist suggestions of the Institute of Directors, the National Federation of Self-Employed and Small Businesses, the Mail Order Traders Association or the Secretary of State himself. In that letter he said,
"Our consultations have confirmed that the effect of the directive would be to increase employers' costs and decrease industry's efficiency"—
a magnificent non-sequitur—
"thus resulting in a reduction in the number of part-time vacancies available and an increase in unemployment".
There are several things one could say about that. The first obvious point is that it just shows who the present Secretary of State consults. We know he does not consult the TUC. Apparently he does not consult Sainsbury. Apparently he does not open the letters he gets from Barclays Bank; and apparently he does not ask his own Management and Personnel Office in the Treasury, which says, and it is the biggest single employer, that the overall cost is trifling. So who does he consult? Consultation like this is a bit like the practice we are told used to occur in the last days of Hitler in the bunker. Hitler would get up every morning and send out for good news. He would say to the generals, "And don't come back until you get some." That is the sort of consultation that the Secretary of State wants—consultation with the Institute of Directors and the National Federation of Self-Employed and Small Businesses and the Mail Order Traders Association who agree with him but, unfortunately, have absolutely no figures to support what they say.
Secondly, it just shows the level of economic analysis which is a great fall away from the good days of the Department of Employment when I used to know it. This is worth a word or two. Every first year economic student knows that even if labour costs rise, and even if they rise significantly, it does not follow automatically that one has an employment effect. It depends on the extent of the cost increase, on whether labour costs are a high proportion of total costs, which they often are not in this area; it depends on whether they can be offset or whether they feed into prices; it depends on whether prices rise and that affects product demand, and on whether the fall in demand is transmitted to labour demand. But most important of all, it depends on whether the employer decides to have the increase in cost measured in terms of an employment effect or in terms of a wage effect.
If the Secretary of State came to us and said, "The trouble with this is that it will not benefit these poor God-forsaken women, because all that will happen is that if, by statute, you impose an additional cost on the employer all he will do is not give them a wage increase next year, both men and women". In other words, there will be a price-wage effect rather than an employment effect. That would be implausible, but his
1358
economic logic would at least be defensible. But no, he does not tell us about the extent of the cost increases or the amount of the offset. He just assumes automatically that this will be an employment effect. I suggest that any first year economic student who handed in an essay of that kind would be asked what he had read. Therefore, on these grounds we cannot defend the Government's defence number four, that discrimination is limited to the difference in market values—there is no evidence that it is—or defence number five, that to eliminate by law would necessarily undermine employment.
We come to the final, the sixth, justification; the sixth veil which surrounds the Secretary of State or the Minister, that even if all this is so we cannot do it because the Commission has exceeded its mandate. Indeed, somewhere buried away in this report—I apologise to the House because I cannot find it—some chap who came along to the committee actually said that it was against the Treaty of Rome. I think that is good. This little thing is against the Treaty of Rome or, in the words of the Secretary of State, such proposals would be contrary to the declared aims of the Council's resolution. That is the ultimate disingenuousness. It is only true if one accepts the Government's own unlikely scenario; that there is an iron link between marginal increases in labour costs and the rate of unemployment; that there is no possibility of a price-wage effect or of the cost being absorbed; that this wipes out all the advantages and, therefore, one cannot protect any worker or any group of workers—this is the logic—however much they may be, as the noble Baroness said, ghetto workers, working in a ghetto. This is put forward as laissez faire economics.
That type of argument was rejected by Marshall. Even Marshall was in favour of protecting workers in ghetto situations. These people go back to before Marshall. That is the approach which has led to the Young Workers' Scheme, when millions of pounds of public money has been showered down without evidence of one extra job. That is the logic behind attempts to drive down the training rate of the Youth Training Scheme; that is the logic behind the threat to abolish wages councils and the fair wage resolutions depite our obligations to the ILO; and that, of course, is the philosophy which underlies much of the determination of the present Secretary of State to press on with the grandson of the 1980 Employment Act. Those of us who do not live in the dark ages and who do not subscribe to this broken doctrine, have no reason to agree with the Government.
6.31 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, I rise to speak in this debate with very considerable diffidence when I look at the expertise of the other Members of your Lordships' House who have put down their names to contribute, because I can certainly claim no expert knowledge. However, as a member of Sub-Committee 'C, I found the subject a fascinating one and I should like to pay my tribute to the way in which my noble friend Lord Seebohm guided us through our deliberations of what is really a rather complicated matter, and to the way in which he has so succinctly put the main considerations affecting this draft directive in his speech this evening.

1359
I am afraid that I find it difficult to speak with quite the same enthusiasm about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, however, elegant its phraseology. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, I was rather puzzled at reconciling two of the main elements of that speech: one, that there is nothing really wrong at the moment at all and there is no evidence of abuse but, secondly, that it would ruin industry to correct the abuses which do not seem to exist. I wait with some interest for the end of the debate to hear the Government's explanation of how these two are reconciled.
I must say that I personally began with some prejudice against the directive. I cannot help thinking sometimes that in this country there are rather too many restrictions already on the use of labour, and at the start I wondered whether this was another effort by the Brussels bureaucrats, with their passion for harmonisation, to go in for even more restrictions when there was no real need. But the more evidence we heard—and I began to doubt a little in the earlier speech whether the noble Lord's advisors had really read the evidence—the more I became persuaded that there was a real issue here and that the Commission proposal had rather more to it than I had originally appreciated.
The figures which the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, quoted at the beginning of this debate show how important—and increasingly important—part-time work is in this country; and the question of how this very considerable section of the community is to be treated raises issues which simply cannot be swept under the carpet.
Some of the difficulties in going down the path signposted by the draft directive speak for themselves. Everyone would agree that it must be right to look very carefully, and to look more than once, at anything which might increase the costs of employers at the present time and possibly—although I take Lord McCarthy's point—as a result put existing jobs at risk. Looking at the draft directive itself, I am sure that there would be general agreement that not all the articles would do as they stand.
It was of some interest, though, as regards the visit to Strasbourg to which the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, has already referred, that we met representatives of the Commission who made it clear that they had already taken aboard some of the criticisms made of the draft in the report that we are discussing this evening, and seemed prepared to accept the validity of at any rate some of them. I am well aware that other countries have also been filing in observations and suggested changes, and that not all the suggested alterations may in the end turn out to be of advantage from our point of view. It is no good denying that there are, indeed, formidable problems in accepting what the draft directive proposes, either in its present form or in the form in which it might later take shape. But there are very important considerations pointing the other way.
A good deal of the evidence we received suggests that the extra expense involved, and the risks of actually curtailing employment, may not be as great as is sometimes suggested—for example, in the propaganda we have all had from the CBI. It is fairly clear that many of the large firms are already well within the intentions of the directive, and that the
1360
extra cost of implementing the main provisions of the directive would not be all that great. It is also not to be overlooked, as has been pointed out, that the directive is concerned only with those employed under a rather formal agreement, and is not aimed at the casual worker, the seasonal worker or the self-employed.
Quite often, too, the simple fact is that there is a genuine need for a part-timer to do a particular job and that it just does not make economic sense, or any other type of sense, to employ someone full-time to do a part-time job or to do away with a job which needs to be done. Certainly the prospects of getting a wider use of job sharing would be enhanced if conditions of service for the part-timer were improved. I am sorry that the noble Lord did not comment on this very important point which the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm made, but I expect that he will do so when he comes to reply to the debate.
It is no good blinking the fact, though, that there is a problem in relation to some of the small firms on whose prospects the economy is greatly dependent. One particular aspect of the problem relates to Article 3 of the directive which has been mentioned and which deals with social security benefits. With us, the threshold for national insurance is calculated on the basis of pay, not hours (unlike the entitlement to redundancy pay) and the threshold, at £32·50 a week, as it soon will be, is pretty high. Article 3 is drafted in such terms that our arrangements would be acceptable under the directive as I understand it, but the fact remains that the figure at which the threshold is fixed, and the consideration that if you step over the threshold you are then in the national insurance scheme 100 per cent., results in a considerable distortion of the part-time labour force.
Hours and rates of pay may well be adjusted to make sure that the employee is paid below the national insurance figure so that there is no national insurance contribution to pay, but no national insurance benefits to be received either, apart I suppose from industrial injuries benefit. It was for that kind of reason that the report urges the DHSS to undertake a review of the present scheme at the bottom end and to consider whether there is perhaps some prospect of altering it so that those near or below the threshold pay a reduced amount and become entitled proportionately to reduced benefits. We realised well enough that this could mean extra administrative costs and the further complication of a scheme which is not at present characterised by undue simplicity, and we were not so foolish as to think that a solution could be worked out overnight. But the present position is not satisfactory, and there are many people involved. As the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, has already pointed out, entitlement to pension will be absolutely crucial if the job-sharing scheme is to develop.
Then there is the problem about occupational pensions. Article 3 of the draft directive should anyway be amended to make it clear that there is no obligation to provide even better treatment for the part-timer than for the full-timer. I gather that there is some pressure from other countries that the provision about occupational pensions ought to be cut out of the draft altogether. But if it is kept, and if it is altered to make provision simply that the part-timer should be entitled, in proportion, to the same rights as the full-time employee, it would mean that there would be new

1361
burdens on employers, whether or not the scheme was contributory. If it was contributory, then the employees would have to pay more, and certainly many would be reluctant to do so.
This problem clearly would not arise in the very many small firms which do not have their own occupational schemes. Where it would arise it is anyway for consideration whether this is not a price which should properly be paid for improving the lot of the part-time worker in a particularly important respect. In my mind there is not very much doubt that some improvement is necessary as a further instalment on our long history of labour legislation.
The noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, argued that the directive would militate against the flexibility which currently holds the field. But flexibility to do what? To continue to employ on a considerable scale—hundreds of thousands of people—people who fall outside the law protecting employment? To get by with giving a lower rate of pay? To bypass the legislation about sex discrimination and equal pay? To avoid giving proportionate access to sick pay, holidays and the use of social amenities? To ensure that there is no entitlement to national insurance benefits?
Other countries, we know, have doubts about some of the provisions in the directive and want to see changes, but, as I understand it, we are the only country which so far has taken a root and branch objection to the whole directive. I wonder whether it is right that this is a proposal on which we should remain the odd man out, and I hope that the Government will think again about their stance. I believe that they should.
6.44 p.m.
Lord Boardman: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, has raised some interesting points on the various articles, but as, like my noble friend, I am opposed to the directive as a whole, I am sure he will forgive me if I do not follow him on those points. I am a director of companies which employ a large number of part-time workers and to that extent, of course, I declare an interest. But I am expressing an entirely personal view in the points that I raise and they are not necessarily those of the companies to which I have referred.
The purpose of the directive is to assimilate the rights of part-time workers with those of full-time workers. It is well intentioned, but, like my noble friend on the Front Bench, I believe that it will cause most damage to those whom it is intended to benefit. We in this country are particularly vulnerable. As has been pointed out, we have the highest proportion of part-timers within the Community, with the exception of Denmark. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, on the work that his committee put in and I found the report very readable, although, as your Lordships will hear, I am unable to agree with its conclusions. The conclusion reached by the committee was that there was a need for legislation. I do not agree and I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Glenarthur and the Government do not agree, either.
The opinions expressed divide into two groups. First, there are those in favour of the directive who, with great respect to your Lordships, largely appear to
1362
be from the academic school. There are those—and this appears from the evidence—opposed to the directive who, in the main, are the employers. Indeed, my noble friend said that the Government had widely consulted employers and that they were unanimously opposed to the directive. I find almost surprising and somewhat disappointing the arrogance—and I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me but I use the term "arrogance" in no personal sense—with which the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, and some others from the academic world think that they know so much more about the problems facing industry and commerce than those who spend their lifetime engaged in it. It is a somewhat recurring theme. I found it disappointing that in the report so little weight appeared to be given to the arguments of those who were opposed to the directive.
First, we had the evidence of the CBI. Having listened to the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, refer to the evidence of those opposed, saying that they were small groups going round and round the mulberry tree of Lord North Street, I hardly think that that would be a description that he would wish to apply to the CBI, which represents such a large part of British industry and commerce. At page 32 they say:
"this proposal could undermine the competitiveness of some enterprises and would, therefore, reduce the ability and willingness of enterprises to provide more opportunities for part-time employment. The proposal has no apparent relevance to its original aim of reducing unemployment in the Community"—
and so on.
Then we come to the National Federation of Self-Employed and Small Businesses Limited. I quote from their evidence at page 41:
"There is little point in making part-time work more attractive to employees if, by doing so, it is made less attractive to employers".
How right they are. The noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, referred to the evidence given by Barclays Bank and to the additional costs which they stated they would incur, as being minimal. As is shown in their evidence on page 51, it is an increase of 1 per cent. on their salary bill or some £4 million. I do not consider that to be minimal, even with a very large company, particularly when their evidence goes on to say, as it does:
"I do not think that it would lead us to employ more or fewer".
In fact, it would have no impact at all upon the level of employment of the part-time worker.
Then there was the evidence of GEC Telecommunications Limited, and I quote from page 113:
"We believe the Directive interferes unnecessarily with things which are currently easily settled between employers and employees and that it is likely to create more problems than it will solve".
I turn to the Retail Consortium; very large employers of part-time workers—or their members are. From page 143, the directive,
"may well have the effect of making part-time employment uneconomic, increasing the costs of retail enterprises, and jeopardising the full-time jobs of workers in those enterprises where flexibility is required in order to maintain a competitive service—a flexibility which necessitates the employment of a certain proportion of part-time staff."
The Institute of Directors, on page 158;
"The Institute of Directors is in no doubt that the proposed Directive should be utterly opposed by the UK Government."
It goes on to give the reasons.

1363
The noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, quoted Sainsbury's, and implied that Sainsbury's saw benefits in the directive. What he omitted to say was that in their evidence—and I think this comes on page 38 of the report—they said that it could cost another 3·3 per cent. on the total labour costs full-time and part-time. I do not believe that those can be looked upon as being insignificant costs; they would have to be passed on to the ultimate customer, unless there are some real benefits to be gained from incurring them.
Every employer, and employer organisation, that gave evidence was either strongly against the directive or, at the best, said that it would produce no benefit to unemployment. We cannot fly in the face of such advice. These are the people giving evidence, or members of the association that put in evidence, who provide the jobs. I do not believe that their advice should be disregarded in favour of advice from academics or university professors, however distinguished they may be, but who have less practical experience of working in operations which involve a large number of part-time workers.
Your Lordships will probably recall the Employment Protection Act 1975.I believe that many of your Lordships will agree that that Act cost far more jobs than any other single measure in recent years. It was amended in 1980. The directive would reverse the benefit that came from the amendments made in 1980. The directive could have a savage impact upon the small firms. I will not attempt to go over the evidence included in the report to show what weight of support there is for the argument that the small firms would suffer substantially from this.
The directive would add significantly to bureaucracy. It would add to the administrative costs of companies. The only benefit for employment would be the additional bureaucrats involved. I was told today of a large company which, in one department alone, has 70 separate forms of contract for part-time workers. They said how impossible it would be to try to introduce proportionality, or profit sharing, for each of those contracts which covered such an enormous range of different operations. You may suggest, for example, that a part-time worker may have to be paid more than a whole-time worker if travelling costs, late-night working and such, absorb a greater proportion of the take-home pay. There are countless permutations. In one department there are 70 different special conditions which apply to people in that department.
I shall not repeat the arguments which have been put forward in the report, or which have been so well put forward by my noble friend. I believe that we should tell the Commission to concentrate on areas which will increase employment and stop interfering in relations between employers and part-time workers which are very satisfactory, and the terms of which have been satisfactorily settled between the parties direct.
There is a final point prompted by Lord McCarthy's reference to the constitutional issue, or to the powers under the Treaty of Rome. It is made—I think well made—in the Institute of Directors' submission in paragraph 14. Their objection to the directive being brought in under, I think, Articles 100 and 117, is
1364
correct. I shall not pursue that, because my objection to the directive is on its merits or, perhaps I should say, on its lack of merits.
Lord McCarthy: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I say this. The noble Lord has referred to my reference to Sainsbury's. Would he agree with me that if you read the report carefully, what the representative of Sainsbury's was saying—and this is on page 38—is that his assumptions of 3·3 per cent. were of the worst kind; that is to say, nocontracting-out of his own pension scheme and no statutory scheme?—both assumptions which are in fact quite false.
Lord Boardman: My Lords, of course I agree with that. I said "could". I accept fully what the noble Lord says that as the directive is at the moment on the most adverse interpretation it could add 3·3 per cent. to the total. I fully accept that.
6.57 p.m.
Lord McGregor of Durris: My Lords, it is apparent that we are debating a difficult issue. Whatever the demerits of your sub-committee's reports may be, obscurity is not among them. I should like to join with the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, in expressing my thanks, and I am sure those of other committee members, to the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, the committee's chairman, for the skill and ability with which he guided our discussions. I found the speech of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, narrow, disappointing and depressing. He referred to what he called the pragmatic view of the Government that nothing is wrong, and also stated that little is known about part-time workers. Yet he did not hesitate to make confident and highly speculative assertions about the effect of implementing proportionality between full-and part-time workers upon the willingness of employers to employ part-time workers.
However, I do not wish to discuss the details and present day problems. To the regret of the noble Lord, Lord Boardman, I am an academic person and I intend to inflict an academic commentary, mercifully short, upon your Lordships. I wish to stand back from the immediate issue and provide a perspective from which I think one can make a commentary upon the Government's view of the report. I start with a silent demographic revolution which has taken place during the last 50 years. There have been changes in the sex ratio. The surplus of unmarriageable women has disappeared. There are now more men in the marriageable age groups than there are women. We have more marriage. We have a high propensity to marry. We have younger marriage. All this, associated with the continuing habit of mild reproduction which has become firmly established, has had the result that extremes of family size have been eliminated. Very importantly, we have been engaged in the process that the Registrar-General calls compressing our fertility, by which he means that nowadays the very large majority of babies are born in the very early years of their parents' marriage. And there has been a considerable increase in the duration of marriage, with one major result: in the past, women, if they were lucky, got a husband, he fathered upon them the maximum number of children they were physiologically capable

1365
of bearing, and they reared them and died. Nowadays, the average mother has 20 to 25 years of active adult life after her youngest child has reached school-leaving age.
Those demographic changes have resulted in fundamental changes in women's entry into the labour market and in their occupational experience. First, there is the myth that women came into the labour market only as a result of the two world wars. In fact, women have constituted 30 per cent, of the country's labour force for the last 130 years, a proportion which has now risen to more than 40 per cent. In other words, more than 40 per cent. of our labour force is made up of women.
On the eve of Hitler's war, only 10 per cent. of women in the labour force were married. The remainder were out at work between leaving school, younger than they do today, and getting married, later than they do today, and when they got married they withdrew from work altogeher. Today, almost two-thirds of women workers are married, and the pattern of women's work is that a high proportion of women are at work in their late teens; the proportion falls steadily during the process of family building; in their 20s and early 30s, it then rises again as the children go to school and become reared, with a situation in which two-thirds of women aged 42 or more are back at work, and there they continue, their numbers dropping slowly until the age of retirement.
It is against that background that we have to see the huge increase in part-time work in the last 30 years, to which the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, referred in the opening part of his speech. The number of women part-time workers—83 per cent. of all part-time workers are women—has increased four fold since 1951, and it stands now at some 3½ million. Although there are only 700,000 male part-time workers today, their number has grown sixfold in the last 30 years, and the committee were told that as many men as women were now prepared to take part-time work.
I set out those figures in order to make the same point, from a slightly different angle, that was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Seear. What we are here looking at is a core development in the so-called emancipation of women. For the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, changes in the industrial structure and in the demand for labour have resulted in an increased need for part-time workers. This increased need has coincided with demographic and social developments which have brought women, as part-time workers, in large numbers because part-time work enables them to adapt the process of family building to the needs frequently of their families for a supplementary income during the period when children are at their most expensive.
Therefore, just at the point of time when Victorian emancipation—that is, the achievement of formal legal equality—was coming to an end, in the 1950s, very large numbers of women were going on to the labour market in their mid to late 30s, and they were going to stay there, on a part-time or full-time basis, for 20 years or more. There they were in a society which promised them equality, which said they were equal, but which gave them a grim taste of the inequality of the labour market, in which two-thirds of all women were doing unskilled work for rates of pay running at two-thirds of those of the lowest paid men.
1366
That seems to me to be the situation against which we must view our discussion of part-time work. Somehow or other we must find a social capacity to draw out the consequences of the new relationship between motherhood and work which became widely visible in the 1960s. Our failure so far to do that is why the movement for emancipation has resulted not in satisfaction but in a demand for liberation.
There are, therefore, reasons enough for the importance which your committee attached to the problem of part-time work. What I think has emerged from the debate that is relevant to what I have been saying is that there is not one cost of dealing with part-time work; there is, of course, a cost to the employer of increasing the real costs of employing part-time workers by treating them proportionally with full-time workers. But the other cost is the social cost of women workers. It is the social cost of providing half of the population, who have a very much harder life than men, with an adequate and dignified means of discharging their dual role as mothers and workers.
The committee's report undoubtedly demonstrates that there is inequality, and there is certainly, from the evidence which the committee received, a strong feeling among part-time workers and the bodies which represent them that they are being treated in accordance with a double standard of occupational morality. That, I think, is the fundamental case—albeit perhaps an academic one—for justifying the acceptance, not necessarily of the directive in the terms in which it is issued from the Commission, but of its basic principle.
7.10 p.m.
Lord Spens: My Lords, I must apologise to the House and to my noble friend Lord Seebohm for not being in the Chamber at the very beginning of his speech. I wonder whether he dealt with what I consider to be the most misleading title of this debate. When I looked at it yesterday morning I thought that it related to meals-on-wheels, social services visits, and that kind of thing. It was only after a fortuitous meeting that I discovered otherwise. As I was walking along the Embankment yesterday morning coming to the House I met a member of the staff of the Institute of Directors, and he drew my attention to what in fact the directive is really about, which is how to deal with all part-time workers in paid employment. I am quite certain that quite a number of other Members of your Lordships' House were under a similar misunderstanding. I know at least one noble Lord on the Benches opposite, with whom I talked today, who had not realised the implications of the debate, and I am quite certain that he would have taken part in it had he known them. So I complain that the debate's title, relating to voluntary part-time workers, has been extraordinarily misleading to us; in particular to those of us on the Cross-Benches who do not have the staff to support our researches.
Having said that, I want to say that I am not an academic and am rather astounded at the way that the academics whom we have heard so far seem to have neglected what I think is the most important, the greatest, priority that we must look at today, which is the huge figure of unemployment in the country. With great respect to the noble Lord, Lord McGregor of

1367
Durris, I would say, yes, in a good world where there is plenty of employment I would entirely agree with what he had said. But when we are trying to reduce the enormous figure of 3½ million unemployed, or whatever it is—it might be less today, under the new counting system—even to think of entering into, or supporting, a directive such as this is, to my mind, quite astonishing. Therefore, I say that I support entirely the speech of my noble kinsman on the Front Bench and the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Boardman. They have looked at the problem with realism—which is very different from the academic point of view.
By listening to the noble Lord, Lord McGregor of Durris, I was very tempted to follow the theme that I have pursued more than once in your Lordships' House about married women and about how better it would be if we could persuade them not to stay in full-time employment. But I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, that I do not propose to follow that theme this evening. No, my Lords, my theme is that of the problem of small businesses. The report itself states, in the introduction, at the top of page xii:
"The evidence received suggests that a high percentage of part-time employees work in small firms. It also appears that small firms have an above average proportion of part-time employees".
I emphasise small firms—not Barclays, not Sainsbury's, not the public services—which at the moment offer the only hope of quickly providing more jobs; unless the Government can be persuaded to follow some of the recommendations of the Select Committee on long-term remedies for unemployment. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, that one of his recommendations could be implemented very easily and fairly cheaply so as now to bring about a certain reduction in unemployment.
But apart from that, it is only the small firms that will produce the extra jobs, and if they are to do that, they must not be encumbered with the disincentives that appear in the scheme that we are considering. Small firms cannot be expected to apply the Employment Protection Acts of the last decade in the way that large firms can apply them, in particular with regard to redundancy payments, maternity pay, and so forth. If they are expected to do that—-and the draft directive would seem to imply that they should be compelled to do it—not only will they fail to expand, but very likely they will even lay off some of their present employees; and that is something that we must avoid at all costs.
The decade of the 1970s was the decade of employment protection, and I do not think that it is fortuitous—I believe that here I am following the noble Lord, Lord Boardman—when I say that that decade has shown an enormous increase in unemployment. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Boardman, that the Employment Protection Acts of 1975 and 1978 are very much to blame for that. Luckily, in their Employment Act 1980 the present Government reduced the effect that the earlier Acts had on very small businesses—businesses with fewer than 20 employees. Personally, I should like to see the maximum limit raised to nearer 50 employees. But it would seem that if implemented, the draft directive would compel the Government to do away with that small relief, which I do not think can be contemplated with relish by any small employer.
1368
So I feel that the Government are quite right to state their objections to the directive. Let them amend the directive so that it affects the Barclays and the Sainsburys of this world. That is all right; they can cope. And as the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, said, there could even be amendments to help the worksharing which is now being developed. But I hope the Government will stand firm in not allowing such a directive to be applied to the small firms in our country.
7.20 p.m.
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, I should like to welcome the report and to thank the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, and the members of his committee for the very detailed way in which they approached their task. I agree with their broad conclusions, and I also agree with some of their recommendations on the tightening up on some of the draft articles in the directive. I have a reservation. I would go even further than they do when they enter doubts that this particular draft directive may not provide a workable balance for us in this country. I would suggest that it does provide a workable balance.
When I read the report and the evidence that had been submitted, I wondered on occasions whether there was not some confusion about the purpose of such a directive and the purpose of some of the articles included in the draft. I must also confess that, listening to the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, I had to wonder whether or not there was not some confusion in his mind about the purpose of the directive. He talked about regulations. A draft directive or a directive does not impose regulations. As the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, said, a directive is intended to set out a general purpose and general principles, and then it is left to individual countries to adapt those principles to their own institutions and statutory provisions. As I read the draft directive, I thought it had taken aboard this approach with some sensitivity.
As I looked at the evidence, too, on a number of occasions I wondered whether there was some misunderstanding about the growth behind part-time employment during the past two decades. There have been two parallel and complementary developments taking place simultaneously. In the first place, as the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, said, there has been a change in the structure of industry. In the manufacturing sector there has been the introduction of new methods and new machinery, and of new techniques, which have required a growth in the shift system. In the service sector there has in itself been a tremendous growth, but there has also been a growth in jobs requiring less than a normal full day's work. In other words, this growth and this change in industry has produced its own specification, and that is a specification for part-time work.
Economic reasons, and all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Spens, has been referring to, may bring about a decrease in the demand for labour, both full-time and part-time. But I think it is a fact that improving conditions of part-time workers will not in itself necessarily reduce demand for part-time workers. I think it was the noble lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, who said that it would really be a very expensive exchange if we were to replace a person who

1369
was doing a part-time job with a person who was available full-time.
The second development that there has been, as the noble Lord, Lord McGregor of Durris, has said, is the emergence of a hidden resource; in other words, married women seeking to return to the labour market. It we look at some of the factors surrounding this return of married women to the labour market, we find a number of pointers. Currently, almost by definition, part-time work means married women workers. The report says—and some noble Lords have referred to this fact—that 84 per cent. of part-time workers are women. If we look at those workers between the ages of 16 and 59, or 16 and 64, whose main employment is part-time, then we find that of this group 95 per cent. are women. This is 95 per cent. of part-time workers whose main work is part-time; not those who are doing peripheral work, perhaps an extra job in the evening. The statistics show that these women are most frequently working between 17 and 24 hours per week.
The second factor is the demographic factor: that part-time employment for women is the time when they have had their children and they are seeking to return to the labour market. Of all the women working part-time at the present time, all but 7 per cent. have had at least one break in their employment pattern for child-rearing. Therefore, we can say that part-time work is related to family formation. If we look at the statistics, we find that 47 per cent. of part-time workers are women with children between 5 and 9 years old. If we look at the number of married women with no dependent children, we find that 42 per cent. of them are working full-time. Therefore, there is this pattern emerging of married women using part-time employment as an intermediary in their full-time employment pattern—full-time before having their children, then part-time and then full-time again. This is particularly so of the current generation of young mothers.
I would suggest that there is a need—a social need and a very real need—to protect the employment of these women, and to help them build up their pension rights. In this House we are fully aware of the difficulties in relation to marriage breakdown these days. It is a fact that the lifestyles of most families are now based on two incomes. This means two incomes in times of employment and two incomes in times of retirement. Therefore, it is important to ensure that this period of part-time employment for married women is an integral part of their employment pattern, and that it does not prejudice their opportunities for protection in their own right and their opportunities for earning a pension in their own right.
The third factor is, as the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, have said, that part-time work is associated with low pay. One of the objectives of the directive—and the directive is part of a package that is coming out of Europe—is to encourage other groups to come into the category of part-time employment. Other groups will be encouraged into this category only if the provisions are right. Therefore, I suggest that the development of part-time work underlines two needs: the first is to open up more opportunities for part-time work in
1370
more highly skilled areas. Many of the women who are working part-time are now having to work at a level below their skills and training because part-time employment is not available in the high levels. I hope that in looking at job sharing schemes we can concentrate on this aspect of providing part-time employment in other areas and in other levels of jobs.
The second need is to recognise the significance of part-time employment in the labour force. When we are talking about 20 per cent. of the labour force who are in part-time employment, we are not talking about an insignificant sector. The Employment Protection Act to some extent helped to recognise this significance. The draft directive would take us further. The draft directive that we are considering is not something which is going to apply to this country only; it is of course something that would apply to the whole of the Community.
Those who gave evidence and said that there was no indication of discrimination against part-time employees—and I include the Minister in this category because he said it, too—I suggest are ignoring the facts of the situation: the statistical evidence that is available and the case law under the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act. On two important aspects they have shown that there is unlawful discrimination against part-time workers. I regret very much that the Government have taken the attitude that they have towards this directive. I suggest to them that by changing the method of collecting and collating statistics we are not going to change the facts. The facts of the situation are that there is still this reserve of labour, these married women who, even if they are not included in the unemployment statistics, are still there.
The noble Lord, Lord Spens, said that the most important job was to solve the unemployment problem. These married women, the part-time workers, are part of that unemployment problem. If we pretend that they are not there, we are hiding our heads in the sand. Incidentally, we are, of course, adding to the cost of family income supplement and supplementary benefits because where these women cannot get employment the families might have to resort to these benefits.
The Government have recently introduced a job splitting scheme. That would have been an excellent opportunity for us to take on board the principles in the draft directive. I very much regret that the job splitting scheme has made no concessions at all to the status of part-time employment. It has not in any way tried to enhance the status of part-time employment. Indeed, it could prejudice the protection of those people under the Employment Protection Act if they move into job splitting schemes. It certainly could complicate pension arrangements. As the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, said, we are not going to encourage men into part-time employment or into job splitting schemes unless their pension arrangements are safeguarded. Of course, the new job splitting schemes totally exclude those married women who have been shown to be in the greatest need of part-time employment.
I suggest that instead of taking advantage of an opportunity to recognise the principles in the draft directive and link them with the job splitting proposals, we seem to have gone in the opposite

1371
direction. For all these reasons, I hope that the Government will look very seriously at the report from the Select Committee and see whether they can add their weight to the introduction of such a directive in Europe.
7.36 p.m.
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, I want to deal with only one aspect of the subject under discussion tonight. It is the importance of providing greater opportunities for part-time work for qualified married women. I stress the word "qualified". I raised this matter in a Wednesday debate about 10 years ago, and fortunately I was able to combine the Motion with one proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, who was then a senior Minister. After the debate he very greatly improved the conditions for married women working in the Civil Service. Although I had the full support of noble Baronesses in the House, I never subsequently managed to get any real interest from the industrial Peers and to make some impact in their field. Later, with unemployment rising, the climate was much less propitious, and I am afraid that I did not continue the campaign.
Apart from a few women who put a career beyond any other considerations, most will I think agree that if they start a family there is a period when they cannot and should not work at all; then there is a time when they could work part-time, followed, if they so wish, by a return to a full-time career. If we do not accept this, we are losing a high proportion of those who have been given expensive training at university—and I include some of our most able citizens. The same of course applies to other skilled persons.
However, there is much more to this matter. Many women are better wives and mothers if they have work and interests outside the home and can use their abilities. There have been too many changes in their absence from work to make it easy to return unless they can get part-time work quickly as soon as they can work at all. There is, however, another aspect to the usefulness of part-time working. With motivation, almost as much can be achieved in four hours as it can in eight. It used to be said that part-time teaching or nursing was impossible; but later it was accepted. Part-time research was unthinkable. If this is true, most university professors and lecturers are ineffective researchers. One can easily go on with the list. For example, what about a really able part-time secretary working in the morning and one less able working in the afternoon? Then the chances of having no secretary at one time are very much reduced.
I know that the noble Lord, Lord Spens, thinks that with unemployment as it is, a woman's place is in the home; but let us look for a moment at the statistics. There are now over 4 million part-time workers in Britain, 83 per cent. of whom are women; and the general trend is increasing. I am sure we cannot possibly discriminate against this. In fact, by accepting at least some of the EEC recommendations and improving conditions for part-time work, it could well be that more full-time workers would decide in favour of part-time work; and this of course would help the unemployment situation. Moreover, if it costs the Government in all something like £5,000 a year when
1372
a person is unemployed, they could in some areas gain the benefit of improved service and still have something in hand by introducing a quota of part-time workers. Teachers are a case in point, because smaller classes are desirable and there would be little or no added infrastructure such as larger buildings or the purchase of materials involved. That would seem to be one answer to getting more people working usefully at no cost to the Exchequer.
7.41 p.m.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, with the leave of the House, perhaps I may answer some of the questions which have been raised in the debate, which I think has been a very interesting one. Many very sound remarks have been made, although I am afraid I cannot promise that the Government will necessarily change their minds in the light of what has been said. However, I am quite certain that my right honourable friend will take note of all the points that have been raised.
The noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, referred to other member states and their attitudes to the directive, and it might be helpful if I tell him that I think perhaps he was slightly out of date in that at least three or four other countries share the United Kingdom's reservations about the proposals: they are, Germany, Denmark, Holland and, to some extent, Ireland. The noble Lord also talked, as did others, about the job-splitting scheme. I will talk a little more about that later; but of course that scheme is aimed at encouraging more part-time work and is fully consistent with the Government's policy.
The Government are against the directive because they believe it will reduce the opportunities for part-time work. It is as simple as that, and I think the Government have been supported in a very helpful way by my noble friend Lord Boardman and by the noble Lord, Lord Spens, in this regard. The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, and the noble Lord, Lord Allen, indicated that there was some inconsistency in what I have said. There is, my Lords, little evidence of unjust equal treatment of part-timers. The directive seeks to give proportionate treatment in all circumstances, regardless of commercial and economic considerations. The Government believe that this will lead, again, to less part-time work being made available.
The noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, in his usual eloquent way, tackled the Government on the six "legs" by which he claimed we did not agree with the directive. So far as discrimination is concerned, the Government do not claim that there is no unjust discrimination but they feel that the effect of the directive would be to tip the balance too far in favour of employee protection, to the detriment of part-time work.
There have been many arguments advocated this evening about the need for further protection of part-time workers. In respect of the unemployment situation, the Government believe that part-time workers should have broadly the same rights to protection as other workers. However, we also believe that before acquiring rights, employees need to show a reasonable level of commitment, and there is therefore a minimum hours qualification. One form of protection that part-time workers could avail themselves of

1373
is membership of a trade union, and at the present time only one in four or five part-time workers belong to trade unions. That is perhaps a question more for others than for me but, so far as I am aware, there is no bar to part-timers joining a union and I assume that their opportunities in the union are no less than those of full-timers. Protection through membership of a trade union is therefore a matter for personal choice and there is no role for the Government in it.
So far as the cost to employers is concerned, which was another of the points raised by the noble Lord, the Government most certainly did consult with the TUC and have seen evidence from individual employers. It is apparent that the directive would impose the greatest cuts on small employers, as was well demonstrated in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Spens. As the noble Lord said, it is in the area of small businesses that the greatest potential in the economy exists.
The noble Lord, Lord Allen, referred to the "insurance trap", which is referred to on page 125 of the report. What I should like to do is to draw the attention of my right honourable friend in the Department of Health and Social Security to the points that he made. So far as occupational schemes are concerned, perhaps I might say that the draft directive, as laid before Parliament, would give part-timers greater rights to access to occupational pension schemes than full-time workers. It would oblige employers to admit part-timers to their schemes even in circumstances where full-time workers are excluded, irrespective of their age, health, length of service and so on. This is unacceptable in principle. The aim, we believe, must surely be to give equal, but not better, rights.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, I am sorry: I did not wish to interrupt the noble Lord, but that was precisely the point I made. I said that the draft as at present drawn was unacceptable and that it ought to be amended to ensure that part-time people were given the same right proportionately, but no better right.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for what he has said and for agreeing with that particular part of what I have said. The Department of Health and Social Security have considered also the feasibility of having no threshold for the national insurance scheme, with a sliding scale of contributions based on earnings and hours worked, which was another point which was raised. My right honourable friend would be against such a proposal on the grounds of both principle and practicality in this case.
On the question of principle, the Department of Health and Social Security have a lower earnings limit which is set at the same level as the basic retirement pension so as to ensure that those with minimal earnings do not have to pay contributions. If there was a liability to pay contributions on any earnings, very small sums would become due. That would mean that the Department of Health and Social Security would have to introduce some system of pro rata benefits—those paying a small contribution receive a flat rate benefit at a higher level than their normal weekly pay and at a disproportionate amount to the
1374
contributions they have paid. This system, without expanding on it at any great length, would lead to a number of practical difficulties.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, and others, talked about, in particular, women. Women do have considerable protection already in their work both under the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts and also—and the noble Baroness referred to this—in the maternity provisions of the Employment Protection Act. These provisions go a long way to putting women in employment on the same basis as men. As your Lordships will know, the Equal Pay Act is shortly to be amended. Part-timers have, and will have, exactly the same rights under the Equal Pay Act as full-timers. They can claim equal pay with a part-time or full-time named comparator of the opposite sex, before an industrial tribunal. Therefore, in principle, there is no reason why women should be unjustly discriminated against when working part-time. Indeed, part-time work, with its intrinsic flexibility, often suits women with their family responsibilities, to which, of course, the noble Baroness referred.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, also asked specifically about the regulations and what they impose upon the Government. An EEC directive has to be implemented exactly in domestic legislation, except where discretion is specifically given to member states to adapt individual provisions to their own legislation. Perhaps I may draw her attention to Article 10, which specifically states that,
"Member States shall implement the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this directive not later than 1st January, 1984, and shall notify them to the Commission without delay",
and,
"Member States shall communicate to the Commission the texts of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions which they adopt in the field covered by the directive"—
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, if I may say so, I was drawing a distinction between a regulation and a directive—a regulation which applies throughout the Community and a directive which leaves it up to the individual Governments to introduce their own domestic legislation, in order to comply with the principles in the directive. I do not think that that conflicts with what the noble Lord has just read out.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness. As I understand it, regulations would be needed and they would follow on from the directive. We could not be very wide of the mark in the way in which we implemented the directive in our own legislation.
The noble Baroness also referred to the job splitting scheme. As she will know, the Government have decided to introduce the scheme. It is an important new scheme to increase job opportunities for the unemployed by offering them part-time jobs. There is no restriction on age, as the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, suggested. As well as reducing unemployment, the scheme should offer participants valuable work experience and training. It should also ensure a better use of public money through the payment of grants to cover the cost to employers, rather than payments to the unemployed.

1375
Concern has been expressed about setting a minimum of 30 hours to be worked in a fortnight. It is not correct that employers are being encouraged to avoid employing those who would qualify for rights under the employment protection legislation. The 30 hours is a minimum only and, in any case, all participants will have their attention drawn to a leaflet setting out the potential effects of their legislative rights. The noble Baroness also asked about the scheme confining benefits in respect of sex discrimination. There is only one reason for restricting the scheme to benefit recipients; that is, the need to make the scheme self-financing. There is no sex discrimination. Women who are eligible will be as welcome as men.
I hope that that covers many of the points that have been raised. No doubt there are many that I have not answered, but I do not wish to detain the House for much longer. The noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, talked about the need to create jobs and this is, of course, paramount. So far as possible, we are all determined to reduce the level of unemployment. But it is industry which is in a very good position to judge exactly what the effects of this directive are likely to be.
I do not think I shall weary the House by producing any more quotations from letters or evidence that have been submitted to this committee or to the Department of Employment, but the Confederation of British Industry, the CBI Small Firms Council, the Association of Independent Businesses and others clearly indicate that the directive would not encourage employers to employ part-time workers, because of additional costs and so on. My noble friend Lord Boardman made the point much more cogently than I can.
I have no hesitation in saying that of course my right honourable friend will take note of what has been said tonight in what has been a very good debate. However, I am afraid I cannot promise that he is likely to change his mind, or that the Government will be able to accept the directive, any more than I have been able to indicate that they have been able to accept it so far.
Lord McCarthy: My Lords, the noble Lord made an extremely important statement on behalf of the Government, and I want to make absolutely certain that I have got it right. As I understand it, he said that there was some unjust discrimination, whereas the Secretary of State for Employment, in his letter to the committee, stated on page 131:
"There is no clear evidence that part-time workers are being unjustly treated".
Is it now being said that the Secretary of State is wrong, has changed his mind, and that part-time workers are being unjustly treated? If they are, would it not be sensible for the Government to do what this report suggests; namely, to go for detailed amendments and not for the thing which sets us out from every other country in Western Europe—total opposition?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, there is, no doubt, a small measure of discrimination, yes. I do not think my right honourable friend would deny that for a moment. But I am certain that when he has read what
1376
the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, has said, he will bear in mind his views and the views of other Members of your Lordships' House.
7.58 p.m.
Lord Seebohm: My Lords, we have had a very interesting debate indeed, and it would be quite improper for me to start another speech at this time of night, although I could blow a number of holes in a number of things said by the noble Lord the Minister. I hope that he will read the Official Report carefully tomorrow; in particular, the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale. The noble Lord completely misinterpreted at least two things that he said, which I shall not go into now, on the pension and insurance side, both of which I think he got wrong.
I was rather surprised that the word "threshold" was practically never mentioned by anybody. We state in our report that we hope that the directive, when it comes forward, will leave the various member countries free to set their own threshold. This could, probably—it depends on where it is fixed—help to solve a lot of the problems which were referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Spens.
The other point I want to make is that I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Boardman, helps his case by sneering at academics. I saw the noble Lord, Lord Killearn, here during most of the debate. He was on my committee and he will, no doubt, be as pleased as I am to be called an academic, but I do not think we have that intelligence. We have only one academic here today who was on our committee, and I thought that the contribution made by the noble Lord, Lord McGregor, was very splendid indeed. His background to the report gave us very strong support.
I shall end by simply asking two questions—apart from thanking everybody who joined in the debate. Why should 4· 3 million people be so disadvantaged, in comparison with the rest of the workforce, just because they cannot work full-time? Surely what we are proposing is an inevitable progress for a new, logical—and I repeat, "logical"—and efficient employment system.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Zimbabwe: Harassment
8 p.m.
Lord Paget of Northampton Lord Paget of Northampton rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement about the harassment of the Zimbabwean opposition and public service in Zimbabwe.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to ask the Unstarred Question which appears in my name on the Order Paper. I feel it is time that we looked at what is happening in Zimbabwe. This state is very largely the creation of the present Government. When they came to power, Bishop Muzorewa was heading a multiracial government. This government had been endorsed by an election which I personally attended and which internationally was largely regarded as fair. The Government could have accepted the Muzorewa government. Instead of that, they rejected it and insisted at Lancaster House on a new constitution and

1377
new elections. I do not think that the Government can really escape responsibility for that constitution. It required the assistance of British citizens, service personnel, civil servants and administrators to make it work. Those men are in Zimbabwe only because our Government gave them assurances and advised them to be there.
The constitution provided for a public service which should be non-political and non-racial and for armed services which should work under the kind of rules to which civilised society has become accustomed. We advised senior officers of our armed forces, including the Royal Air Force, to accept service in Zimbabwe under the new constitution and also—this is most important—to accept Zimbabwean citizenship.
It is very natural and understandable that Zimbabwe should wish to have its own citizens commanding its own forces. That is perfectly right and proper. But were those officers warned before they accepted Zimbabwean citizenship that this would involve the abdication by Her Majesty's Government of all control over their interests and of all consular services? This has become a formidable consideration.
Senior officers from the Royal Air Force joined the Zimbabwean Air Force, took control of it and commanded it. By custom, in a service of that kind, the discipline within the service is a matter for the service. Certainly senior officers can be negligent, can do wrong. Many senior officers in our Navy have been court-martialled for hazarding their ships. I have no doubt— I was not in the Royal Air Force; I was in the Navy—that the same thing has happened in the Royal Air Force. But that, if it be justice, is trial by the service. When one moves over and finds that instead of the service looking to its own discipline, a political force, the CIO, moves in—not even the civil police—and arrests those officers, one begins to have one's suspicions.
On 24th August last a considerable part of the Air Force was sabotaged on the ground at the Thornhill base. Somebody—we do not know who—cut a gate through the surrounding barbed wire, got in and destroyed a large number of aeroplanes. It may have been the South Africans. I believe this was suggested by the government. That is unlikely. One cannot really see its objective. If they wanted to take out the Air Force they had an overwhelming superiority with which to do so. It may have been the Matabele who have been in rebellion against the Mugabe Government. But that does not stand up. It seems to me to be far more likely to have been the Communists, because at that point the Air Force was the only organised instrument of force which was not under Marxist control. Whatever it may be, those aeroplanes were destroyed.
As one would expect, the Air Force ordered a court of inquiry under Air Commodore Pile, of which Group Captain Briscoe was a member. Before that inquiry could report, Air Commodore Pile and Group Captain Briscoe were arrested, as was Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Slatter—not, your Lordships will observe, by the services, not by the civil police, but by the new political police who have no legal existence under the constitution.
Another curious thing to observe is that where an Air Force is attacked on the ground one would expect
1378
the people responsible to be the people responsible for guarding the ground: the guards, the Air Defence Regiment. None of them were arrested. No action was taken against any of them. It has merely been taken against senior white officers of the Air Force. The charge against them, of conspiring to destroy their own means of livelihood and their own jobs, seems almost too improbable to be taken seriously in any circumstances. This is politics. It is nothing to do with justice.
These officers were denied access to their lawyers. Somebody instructed a very distinguished firm, Gardner and Hartmann. At a press conference they said that they had been denied access and that their clients had been tortured—as, indeed, they had been and as is now acknowledged. They had been tortured by the application within their bodies of electrodes and they were in a pretty bad case.
What happened? The lawyers were arrested. On 25th September our Secretary of State for Defence went to Zimbabwe. We are told that he inquired about the detainees, these people who had been so very shockingly arrested, but that he got no satisfaction on that score. On the other hand, Mr. Mugabe requested an increase in our mission to train and provide them with an army and air force. This request was granted.
I do not know whether the people who asked to take part were warned of the kind of support they would be likely to get but it does seem incredible. What will happen? I presume that these officers will eventually be brought to trial and we shall probably be faced with "confessions"; "confessions" that they conspired to destroy their own airplanes. Confessions of that sort prove absolutely nothing except the efficiency of the tortures.
I will leave that subject and turn now to the other conditions of this constitution, of which we were really the authors and are responsible; the idea of the rule of law. The rule of law constitutes a police force responsible to the law and responsible to the constitution. Since then we have had a Minister for Home Affairs whose name I will not attempt other than to say that he is generally known as Dr. Ushe. Dr. Ushe has said very loudly and politely that he does not like white men. He has first created the CIO with its agents, which is a sort of Gestapo of the place—the political police force. Within that there is what may be described as the new SS, the Zipolis, with 300 specially selected men responsible to Dr. Ushe, in his own words,
"to deal with whites who have not fully accepted black rule".
We have an example of the operation of this police force. Mrs. Grace Cauvin had a son who, perhaps, did not fully accept black rule. She is the matron of the Queen Elizabeth Home for Children in Bulawayo. The Zipolis called to inquire about Mrs. Cauvin's son. Those who found Mrs. Cauvin some time later found that both of her hands and both of her feet were heavily bandaged to cover extensive cigarette burns apparently inflicted while she was under interrogation. They found that her face and much of her body was badly bruised and her eyes and mouth swollen. This is the matron of a children's home who happened to have a son which this body of new police wished to interrogate. Is this the kind of rule of law which we expected when we introduced this constitution?
The third point I would like to mention, which was very much in our minds when we introduced this constitution, concerns the legality of the Opposition. There should be an Opposition Party and that Opposition Party should have the right to criticise and the right to contest. When the elections came, the leader of the largest Opposition Party was Mr. Ian Smith. As provided by the constitution and as expected, this was a white interest. Did we expect him, his party and the Opposition to be treated with the kind of courtesies which my party in Opposition here expect and receive from the Government? I do not think we set a very good example.
Right from the start, when Prince Charles went to the celebration of independence, neither Mr. Smith nor any members of his party—the main parliamentary Opposition party elected to Parliament according to the constitution we created—were invited. According to the Daily Telegraph of two days ago, neither Mr. Smith nor any member of the official parliamentary Opposition party have ever received an invitation to anything at the High Commission. I would ask the noble Lord the Minister to reply to this question specifically: We have many ambassadors and a good number of high commissioners, yet is there a single high commissioner, other than this one, who has never invited the leaders of the Opposition in the country to which he was accredited to any high commission party? I do not suppose so, but if there is, he should be sacked.
Now I want to turn to how some members of this Opposition have been treated. First I will refer to Mr. Wally Stuttaford. Mr. Stuttaford was a Member of Parliament. He came from Bulawayo and he was interested in the Matabele; they were his constitutents. He was charged—I do not know how—with conspiring with Matabele politicians in order to upset the Government by violence. He was arrested. He is a man of 63. He was tortured. Biro pens were put into his hand until his knuckles were crushed. He was forced to jog until he became exhausted. Handcuffs were twisted on his wrists until they were cut and crushed. The back of his hands have now lost all feeling as a result of that torture. But he was a very brave man—I am sure a great deal braver than I am.
He resisted, but there were certain black witnesses. First there was Monwadisa Malumisa, who had been a Minister in the Bishop's Government. He made a statement incriminating Mr. Stuttaford. So did two brothers named Manhlela, both prominent Matabele politicians. When, after 10 months of detention, the matter was brought to trial, these three black witnesses who had been released from all charges some 10 weeks before the trial went into the witness box and there totally repudiated the statements which they had made incriminating Mr. Stuttaford. They said that they had made the statement under torture because the Home Office, that is the doctor, wanted to get Stuttaford. With this happening to their witnesses, naturally the case was thrown out; Mr. Stuttaford was acquitted.
Immediately afterwards he was re-arrested. What was said to Mr. Stuttaford was this, "Don't you imagine you can be protected up there. We are the bosses here and we rule this country". Every newspaper was on to this; I do not know this, but I
1380
think Mr. Mugabe, greatly to his credit, intervened, and that night Mr. Stuttaford was duly released. But the unfortunate witnesses are arrested and are still in prison. As to the principal charge with which they have been jointly charged with Stuttaford they have been released. The charge for which they are in prison now is telling the truth. I do not feel that we should stand for that. I do think that of all things I am raising tonight possibly those three witnesses may be the most important, and I would like to see some of the various organisations which go to the assistance of the wrongly imprisoned pay a bit of attention to this one.
The next man I would like to refer to is Mr. Walker, another Member of Parliament, a member of the Opposition, a man who had held Cabinet office in both Mr. Smith's Government and in Bishop Muzorewa's Government. He had been a Minister of Mines. When Mr. Stuttaford was arrested warrants had been issued at the same time for the arrest of Mr. Walker, who happened at that time to be on holiday in South Africa with his family. He heard of Mr. Stuttaford's arrest and he heard that he had been tortured. And with the kind of courage that I certainly do not know, that I could not meet or live up to, he came back to Rhodesia to face it. He came back, slipped into the Parliament and appeared in the Parliament on the Thursday, and when he was seen there he was cheered, not only by the white Members, which was a fairly remarkable demonstration. At that meeting he made a formidable speech attacking the Rhodesian Government over their attempt to seize the mines; he had been a Minister of Mines. He pointed out that this was in order to provide the North Koreans with those metals according to a bargain way below the world prices. This was the conspiracy which he denounced in Parliament. He was referred to in the press as "the hunted M.P." And after that meeting and that speech he disappeared. In point of fact, he had gone into his constituency, he had gone into the country. Then, to the astonishment of everybody, on the next Tuesday suddenly there he was in Parliament again. The report came that the CIO had got the place surrounded, they had their men on every back door; they had them everywhere except the front door. He walked out of the front door, straight down the steps into a car, and disappeared. He is now in England and I was with him this morning. That is a very brave man. But you cannot really conduct an opposition on those kind of terms.
Now I come back to the latest, smallest but widest, where the Leader of the Opposition, and if you like to call it so, the Shadow Cabinet, and its inner Committee, are at an art show, a show by an artist of his works, and are arrested again by this CIO on the ground that they are holding an illegal meeting. This is in flagrant breach of the constitution which provides for the right of meetings. It is some hours before they are released. Can one really conduct a civilised Opposition, a civilised Parliamentary system when this sort of thing happens.
Are we not, in a very broad moral sense, the guarantors of that constitution? At least we are its paymasters, and to a large degree its paymasters. In the days of illegal rule, when they were subject to sanctions, the Rhodesian economy had the strongest currency in Africa, and at one point I think the second

1381
largest capital expansion in the world. But since then that has not happened. Their economy is in an appalling mess and it exists on aid. It keeps going on aid and we provide a good deal of that aid. Certainly if we said, no, I have little doubt that the Americans, who I think are an even bigger contributor, would act with us. Before we go on financing and maintaining this form of Government ought we not to be a little firmer in seeing that the constitution is observed just a little sometimes, or even occasionally? At present they are passing over to a form of one-Party oppression, in which the Opposition are harassed and a racialist policy is being applied to terrorise one section of the population. Surely the Government cannot just sit back and say nothing.
8.29 p.m.
The Marquess of Salisbury: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Paget, for raising this rather depressing matter, and I would like to congratulate him on the way he has presented his case. It is indeed a formidable one and one that deserves the widest possible publicity. He has covered most of the aspects of the subject matter and I do not want to go over the same ground again, but there are one or two points which he made that I would like to emphasise, and one or two further questions I would like to ask. First, may I ask something about the formulation of the constitution? I hope that, just for information, the Minister will be able to tell me what the position is. The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, when he opened the Lancaster House conference, said
"The United Kingdom intends to take direct responsibility for the Independence Constitution".
So far as I have been able to discover, there is no mention on our statute book of any constitution. There is, however, Command Paper 7802 of January 1980. Is that the constitution as agreed? Is it regarded as binding? If not, I do not follow what the position is and what Lord Carrington's guarantee can mean in legal terms. I ask for some enlightenment on that point.
The noble Lord, Lord Paget of Northampton, mentioned the election that took place after Lancaster House. From such information as I can gather it appears that there were matters that took place during that period which would not be acceptable in a normal democratic country. There were accusations of intimidation, of altering the roll and other things of that sort. I am driven to the conclusion that when protests were made, as indeed they were, our representatives there did nothing about them because they were anxious to get out of what was then Rhodesia as quickly as possible without running into further trouble. However, they reported the election to be fair, although I question whether in fact it was as fair as the election held some months earlier. That election was pronounced fair by a number of noble Lords, such as the noble Viscount, Lord Boyd of Merton, the noble Lord, Lord Paget of Northampton, himself, the noble Earl, Lord Crawford and Balcarres, and others. However that may be, it seems to me that this election was the beginning of the rot that set in and of the conditions which have arisen that the noble Lord, Lord Paget, described so cogently.
1382
After that, Zimbabwe was completely independent. Mr. Mugabe is on record as having said that he accepted the arrangements at Lancaster House. He did so in his address to the nation on 4th March 1980. In that address he also stated:
"Only a government that subjects itself to the Rule of Law has any moral right to demand of its citizens obedience to the Rule of Law".
Surely we must ask ourselves, in view of what the noble Lord, Lord Paget, said, whether he has stuck to that statement or not.
I draw attention to some of the provisions in the Command Paper dealing with the rule of law, the rights of individuals, the personal freedom of individuals and the freedom of the press. They all seem to have a bearing—at least, to me they do—on the matters to which the noble Lord, Lord Paget of Northampton, has drawn attention. First, in the preamble to the constitution it is stated that there shall be no oppression by a majority of a minority. I wonder whether your Lordships will consider that this treatment is being accorded to the Matabele by the present Zimbabwean Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Paget of Northampton, dealt with most of the points in dealing with the cases of arrest, but again I wonder whether either the CIO or Zimpol are subject to the commissioner of police as laid down in the Command Paper. If not, clearly they have no right to exist under the constitution as it is set up. I emphasise this because it is one of the most important points that the noble Lord made in his speech. However, he has pointed out the effects of this unconstitutional force more than adequately and I shall not say any more about it.
The noble Lord also referred to torture. This, again, is expressly forbidden in the Command Paper. The noble Lord said enough to show exactly what is happening in that country. I support him entirely in asking what Her Majesty's Government intend to do about it? Do they accept that that is a reasonable way to behave? Surely they have a responsibility in view of the part they played in drawing up the constitution.
The protection of the individual is clearly covered in the Command Paper. First, there has to be freedom of expression. I do not know how much there is, but it seems to be very truncated. For instance, the television and broadcasting systems are not only controlled by the Government but are heavily censored. I am told that they pour out a constant flow of Government propaganda, communist propaganda and vitriolic anti-white sentiments. Again, that is against what was laid down in the Command Paper—that there should be no differentiation on grounds of race. The only paper is the Herald which is controlled and censored. I am advised that foreign correspondents resident in Zimbabwe take their line from the Herald because they do not feel it is safe to say anything not mentioned in it.
The second protection written into the Command Paper is a Bill of Rights. I believe it exists, but it seems to be conspicuous by its lack of application. The third protection is the appointment of an ombudsman. He is supposed to protect individuals, as in this country, especially against incursions on their rights by civil servants. The sole exception, I believe I am right in saying, is in matters connected with defence. In fact,

1383
the exception has been extended to cover the activities of a number of other Government departments. It would seem, therefore, that the function of the ombudsman has been entirely negatived.
We may ask ourselves; on what grounds have these sections of the constitution been abrogated? I believe the reason given is that there is a state of emergency. We should seriously ask ourselves whether there is a genuine emergency or whether this is not a case of finding an excuse for setting up a tyranny. To me it looks like the beginning of a Uganda-type situation. We must remember one thing: that mosts of the whites in a serious emergency would probably be able to leave the country even although they were destitute, but most of the Africans would not be in a position to do so. They would have to stay and suffer under the rigours of the régime. Many whites have already left. Others are leaving, having found the present situation to be intolerable. Do Her Majesty's Government regard themselves as having a responsibility for those unfortunate people? Many of them will be destitute, as I said. Will Her Majesty's Government consider giving some form of compensation as was done in the case of Kenya? I concur with the noble Lord, Lord Paget of Northampton, in saying that there is an obligation when the present situation is largely of Her Majesty's Government's making.
I should also like to ask whether the noble Lord in his reply could say something about dual citizenship, which is expressly included in the Command Paper. I believe that it is unusual because, for obvious reasons affecting nationality problems, it has usually been excluded from other constitutions on the granting of independence. I can only presume that it was included to afford some protection for citizens who previously had some connection with this country.
I understand that recently an Act has been passed in the Zimbabwe Parliament giving the Government there power to make changes in the status of citizens with dual nationality. I wonder whether Her Majesty's Government have been consulted about this, because presumably it affects the citizenship of people for whom we have a certain responsibility. Is anything being done about it? Will Her Majesty's Government consider giving full United Kingdom citizenship to those inhabitants of Zimbabwe who are of British descent on either side? I should like to remind your Lordships that that was suggested for the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands during the passage of the Nationality Bill and it was rejected. However, I note that on Monday the Government changed their mind in that case and are now offering them citizenship. Clearly the two situations are not entirely comparable, but in both cases one would be looking, by the granting of citizenship, to giving protection. I should have thought that there was just as compelling a reason in the case of the people in Zimbabwe as there was for the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands.
I should like to ask for a little more information on the question of the hand-outs given by Her Majesty's Government—a matter which has already been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Paget. How much have we given so far? Is there more in the pipeline? Are we promising more? I support the noble Lord entirely in saying that strings should be attached to it. It is
1384
taxpayers' money which is being paid out to support a tyranny, and surely that is an intolerable situation. I urge that as regards any further grants of money Her Majesty's Government take steps to see how the money is spent and to control it if necessary. That is perhaps the most effective weapon we have in making our feelings clear to the Government of Zimbabwe.
Finally, in view of the rapidly deteriorating situation, I suggest that the time has come for Her Majesty's Government to take some action. At present they give the impression that they do not care what is happening to the people of Zimbabwe; they only have a desire not to get involved again. They might just care to remember that it is not only the condition of the people of Zimbabwe that is at stake; there is their own reputation, and that of the people of this country.
8.45 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, I apologise for not having put my name down to speak on this Unstarred Question, but I had no idea as to whether I would be able to get back for the uncertain time at which it might begin. The noble Lord, Lord Paget, who asked the Unstarred Question, has always puzzled me. In my observations of him when he was in another place, and since I became a Member of your Lordships' House, I have known him as a man of great kindness and compassion, at least so far as the social affairs of this country are concerned. Yet for many years now he seems to have been obsessed by skin colour and I cannot understand why. It is unfortunate that this is an Unstarred Question and therefore the noble Lord does not have the opportunity to answer my question, but perhaps the occasion will arise in the future.
Why is it that the question of the alleged ill-treatment of these white airforce officers in Zimbabwe and white politicians in Zimbabwe, so agitates the noble Lord's mind when it is a matter of less than three years ago that black Zimbabweans were being treated, and had been treated for many, many years, in at least as cruel a way as he has described the alleged ill-treatment of the white members of the Opposition today? I do not know the answer to that question; I would be fascinated to discover it.
As I said during an intervention on a Question put, I think, by the noble Lord, Lord Gridley, last week, I believe that all Members of this House and, indeed, the population of this country as a whole, condemn any form of torture as inhumanity, irrespective of the skin colour of the victim, and I certainly do so. Whether the allegations that the noble Lord, Lord Paget, makes are true or untrue, accurate or inaccurate, I do not know; nor do I believe that anyone will know until the trial is held. They may very well be true; it would not surprise me. Anybody who has visited what was Rhodesia during the war there, who has had experience of life over the past 20 or 30 years in that part of the continent of Africa, would not be surprised if cruelty persists, because cruelty has been one of the basic elements of life for many, many years, and it is only over the last two and a half years that the responsible authorities have been black rather than white.
I also ask myself: Why does the noble Lord pay such attention to the alleged cruelties in Zimbabwe? And why does he, and the noble Marquess who has just

1385
spoken, concentrate on what is happening in Zimbabwe when I at least, in a long experience of attending both this House and the other place, have never heard either of them mention the kind of things that have been happening in South Africa? I say to the noble Lord who is to answer for the Government that it would appear to me that the British Government have no direct responsibility for what is happening in Zimbabwe once Zimbabwe became independent.
But if it is suggested, as the noble Lord, Lord Paget, suggested, that we have some responsibility because we participated in the drawing up of that constitution, then I ask: did we not participate in the drawing up of the constitution of South Africa? Was the constitution of South Africa not an Act of this Parliament? Why is it then that these allegations come—and if they are correct I condemn them as absolutely as the noble Lord and the noble Marquess who have spoken—when they are perpetrated against white people, but not against black people? Why is it that Zimbabwe is picked out, and not South Africa? Why is the provision of overseas aid by the British Government to Zimbabwe picked out, but not the provision of overseas aid, say, to Chile, Turkey or Pakistan?—where surely noble Lords will agree not only is there no opposition, but there is no civilian government; not only is there proven torture and cruelty, but there has been constant British economic assistance over many years. Why Zimbabwe?
All I would say from my own experience of this part of the world—that is, the whole of the southern part of Africa—is that I find it quite amazing that after the cruelties, the tortures and the oppression that have been characteristic of this area for so many years, since these countries, including Zimbabwe, became independent there has been so little racial discrimination, so few attempts at paying back, at taking revenge, for what has happened in the past.
Remember that Robert Mugabe, the Prime Minister, was detained for 10 years. Remember that Joshua Nkomo was detained for 10 years. Remember that Joshua Nkomo's house in Lusaka, which is very near where I have been living for the past two years, was destroyed by Rhodesian forces. Yet it is only a few weeks ago that I was playing cricket in Lusaka against a cricket team from Zimbabwe that consisted of black, brown and white players. Remember that Robert Mugabe has two Europeans in his Cabinet; that it is not all the whites in Zimbabwe who feel oppressed or who feel in danger. Certainly there are some, and I grant you that there is a very disturbed situation in Zimbabwe, and some of us have been predicting that that was the inevitable consequence of the illegal régime of Ian Smith and, going back even further, of the Central African Federation. Certainly there is a desperately dangerous and complex conflict between at least the majority of the Matabele tribe and the majority of the Shona. Certainly there are great problems for the Government of Robert Mugabe to overcome. He has had only two and a half years as Prime Minister.
I would suggest to the noble Lord who represents the Government here that the pleas to make public denouncements of this Government are destructive, if not in their purpose certainly in their effect. I hope that the noble Lord will be able to help us, or, if he is not able to tell us—which might be indiscreet—I hope that
1386
the British Government's representative in Harare is giving quiet advice. I hope that he will maintain the economic aid from this country which we owe to a country that was our colony and which we abandoned to an illegal Government. I hope, and I would believe from what I know of the British Diplomatic Service, that our representative in Harare is talking quietly and constructively with the Prime Minister of that country. I know that there are many white men, women and children in Zimbabwe who are anxious that the experiment will succeed, who know the terrible problems with which this Government were left, but who recognise that there is, at least among the vast majority of Africans living in that country—not all, I will give you that—a desire to make this an equally non-racial society as that in their neighbour, Zambia.
8.56 p.m.
Lord Stewart of Fulham: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Paget and the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, have described to us a number of the acts of cruelty and tyranny occurring in Zimbabwe, because although neither I nor, I think, anyone here is in a position to state exactly how much of these accounts we believe, I do not think there can be any doubt that there have been serious acts of cruelty and tyranny and that in many cases the victims of them have been white people and people for whom this Government have morally, if not legally, a responsibility. We shall, therefore, want to hear from the Government, so far as it is prudent for them to tell us, what steps they are taking to help these unfortunate people.
In addition to those two speeches, we have had one from my noble friend Lord Hatch, who has invited us to put the matter in a wider perspective of Zimbabwean and African history. It seems to me that we must do that, because the present Zimbabwean Government is inescapably and unavoidably the child of violence. First, there was the violence inflicted on the British colony of Southern Rhodesia by the illegal usurpation of power by Mr. Ian Smith; there was the violence by which Smith's Government was brought to an end. I think that we ought not to talk as if Her Majesty's Government at Lancaster House were in a position to frame an ideal constitution and plant it on the people of Zimbabwe. What was to happen there was to reflect the power structure in Zimbabwe. There is no getting away from that. I think it is inevitable, therefore, that Mr. Mugabe and his party should emerge as the rulers of Rhodesia.
In this country we can look back on a long history of legal development of government and of human rights. The history of the Government of Zimbabwe is, as I say, that of a child of violence and of conflict. In addition to that, there were the personal rivalries between Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Nkomo and the tribal differences which they personified. In addition, there was the inevitable suspicion of white people in Zimbabwe and the constant wondering by black rulers of Zimbabwe whether they could rely on the loyalty of white people. In many cases, of course, they could rely on the loyalty of white people. In many cases, of course, they could, but I think that this was one of the things poisoning the general atmosphere.
So these factors—the history of violence, the tribal conflicts and the suspicion between black and white—gave a situation in which any Government

1387
would have been bound to go through great difficulties and in which injustices would occur. We have, of course, noticed as this year has gone on growing disorders, connected partly with the activity of ZAPU guerrillas, illustrated by the attack on Mr. Mugabe's house, and, as several commentators have been quick to point out, by the increased use by the Zimbabwean Government of methods whose legality closely resembles the legality of Ian Smith's Government.
Indeed, it is noticeable that commentators who are neither black nor British have been inclined to point out that what some British people and other white people in Zimbabwe are suffering now can be set against, and compared with, what many black people suffered from Smith's régime. This was a point developed by my noble friend Lord Hatch. We are told that the Zimbabwean Government will be unwilling to listen to complaints which come from people who did not, at the proper time, complain about the violence and illegality and cruelty of Ian Smith's Government.
This is understandable, but I do not think that we can let the matter rest there, because some of the complaints against the Zimbabwean Government come from somebody who commands universal respect. I refer to Mr. Garfield Todd. It is he who has said that there is a fear affecting everybody now in Zimbabwe, of whatever race or colour to which they belong. This is something to which the Zimbabwean Government ought to pay attention. It is not enough, although it is very natural, for them to turn round and say, "If some white people have suffered injustices this is no more than many black people suffered at the hands of Ian Smith".
It is going to be a very bleak prospect for mankind if black men are going to try to assert their belief in racial equality by showing that if they are put to it they can be just as cruel and unjust as any white man. We must earnestly hope that that doctrine is not going to take hold, because we have seen this in other African countries, and indeed not in African countries alone. A wrong is committed on one side, a counter wrong is committed in revenge for it, and you go on in an apparently unbreakable chain of wrong and conflict. It is that that Zimbabwe now has to guard against. It is she who is required by the necessities of history to show generosity; to say that, whatever was done in the past, "it is our business to try to create an example of a free and civilised government".
I would not, therefore, urge that Her Majesty's Government should approach Zimbabwe with threats of cutting off aid, but should, by whatever means are appropriate, point out that really it is not a question of what Zimbabwe owes to us or to white men over this matter, it is what Zimbabwe owes to herself. Is she going to take the opportunity of creating an example of a civilised country that can forget wrong, that can assert the rule of law, that can, as it were, turn away the evil pages of Zimbabwe's history and embark on a new chapter? It is that, we hope, she will do. It is that that Her Majesty's Government, by whatever means may be appropriate for it, must endeavour to encourage her to do.
9.3 p.m.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity to respond on behalf of the Government
1388
to Lord Paget's Question on Zimbabwe. First of all, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, for the speech that he has just made, which I thought was wise advice and set in context the matters of concern mentioned in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Paget.
I say that because the first point I feel I have to make is that we are discussing a sovereign independent state. That does not mean that the Government are not concerned with the various points which the noble Lord, Lord Paget, raised, but if I may reply to the noble Marquess. Lord Salisbury, the Command Paper that my noble friend mentioned was a discussion document which pre-dated the statutory instrument that sets out the definitive Zimbabwe constitution, and since independence Mr Mugabe's government has adhered to the constitution. The constitution is in fact set out in the Zimbabwe Constitution Order of 1979. That was Statutory Instrument No. 1,600. Britain relinquished all legal responsibility for Zimbabwe at independence, and Britain is not a legal guarantor of the constitution.
Having said that, may I revert to what I was saying a moment or two ago. Of course, Zimbabwe is a country with which we in Britain have special ties; and since independence we have given it substantial material and moral support. Nevertheless, most of the matters which have been referred to this evening are internal affairs and the responsibility of the Government of Zimbabwe. The noble Lord, Lord Paget, expressed concern about certain particular developments in Zimbabwe, and also referred to the British Government's part in bringing the new constitution into being. I repeat, I share on behalf of the Government some of the noble Lord's expressed concern, but we must see developments in Zimbabwe in a true perspective.
By that I am thinking first of all that when Prime Minister Mugabe's Government came into office early in 1980 it was confronted with formidable political, social and economic problems. From the outset Mr. Mugabe made clear that the time had come for reconciliation: past differences should be forgotten so that all Zimbabweans, no matter what their former allegiance, could work together for the benefit of the country as a whole. That was not pure words. Mr. Mugabe demonstrated his own commitment to this policy by appointing white ministers as well as bringing members of Mr. Nkomo's ZAPU party into the Government.
It is the case that all has not gone smoothly. Mr. Nkomo lost his place in the Government in February, and two Republican Front members of the House of Assembly had serious charges brought against them. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Paget, that in the case of Mr. Stuttaford, who remained in the country to stand trial, the charges were subsequently withdrawn and he was released. I would say in passing that I feel anxious on behalf of the Government about the brief detention and now the impounding of the passport of Mr. Smith. However, if the noble Lord, Lord Paget, will allow me to say so, it is not the case that Mr. Smith has never been invited to see the British High Commissioner. Mr. Smith has been received by the High Commissioner and has been invited to High Commission functions. Despite the things that have not gone right, the Government of Prime Minister Mr.

1389
Mugabe still contains members of ZAPU and representatives of the white community, as has been said in the debate tonight.
A particular example of reconciliation—and one for which we can claim some credit—was the amalgamation of the rival armed groups into a united national army. The contribution made by the British military advisory and training team is a matter in which Britain can take pride. Again, there have been problems—desertions and disorder on the part of some soldiers and the arrest of two senior officers in connection with the discovery of caches of arms—yet the amalgamated army has held together, and members of Mr. Nkomo's ex-ZIPRA forces and white people remain among the senior ranks.
Some predicted that independence would be followed by a violent backlash against the white community and a mass exodus of white people. The facts have proved otherwise. White emigration has been running at around 1,500 a month—high, but far from an exodus. Indeed, the vast majority, some three-quarters of the estimated white population at independence, have so far chosen to stay. There is also quite a large number of new expatriates who have been encouraged to take themselves and their skills to Zimbabwe. I do not have the precise figures, but I understand that immigration from all sources has been running at about 600 a month, of whom, it is thought, the greater part have been white people.
My noble friend Lord Salisbury asked about compensation for people who leave Zimbabwe. There is no special financial provision for that. It would have been entirely inconsistent with the spirit of the Lancaster House agreement, which was to create conditions in Zimbabwe in which all Zimbabweans, of whatever race, would be encouraged to stay. But of course any Britsh citizen with a right of abode in this country is entitled to the normal security and other benefits to which all citizens of the country are entitled.
It is fair to refer to the economic growth in the country after independence. In the first two years of independence, an average rate of growth of some 10 per cent. was achieved, though of course there are now the problems of the world economic recession and the growth rate is now more modest. The Zimbabwean Government have retained the mixed economy inherited at independence. The recently-published Guidelines for Foreign Investors reaffirms belief in a "strong and viable private sector", as does the new Development Plan published this week. Where majority shareholdings have been taken in enterprises, that has been done on a fair price basis. The same principle is applied to land acquired for resettlement purposes. I feel bound to say—and I feel this is in line with the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Stewart—that it could hardly have been expected that the grave problems which Zimbabwe inherited from its turbulent past would disappear overnight. Tensions still exist, some of them serious, but there are many on all sides who are determined to work together in order to make the new country a success. I am sure that all noble Lords, even though we have had dfferent expressions of view in the debate would agree that this path of co-operation and reconciliation is the only one which gives hope for the future.
Now a few words about particular issues which I
1390
know have given rise to concern. One—this has not been mentioned in the debate—is the prospect of a one-party system. Whatever views we might have about this system of government, it is entirely for the Zimbabweans to decide whether they prefer a multiparty system, as they have at present, or a one-party system.
Mr. Mugabe has repeatedly said that he has no intention of making any changes in the constitution in an unconstitutional way, and of course the constitution agreed at Lancaster House provides the means to change the political system, if the people of Zimbabwe so wish.
Another issue is the policy of Africanisation in the public service. Although the noble Lord, Lord Paget, talked about the public sevice at some length, he did not, in particular, touch on this point. Nonetheless, I would take this opportunity to say that this is an understandable policy, which has been pursued, as your Lordships know, by other newly-independent governments. Mr. Mugabe has, however, recognised the importance of maintaining a balance, and numerous white officials continue to hold high office. The Zimbabwean Government have also reassured public servants that the Government intend to honour their pensions obligations under the constitution.
We naturally take very seriously reports of brutality by the armed forces and police in any country. Such allegations have been made regarding the treatment of a number of both whites and blacks in Zimbabwe; most recently regarding the ill-treatment of the detained Zimbabwe Air Force personnel, about whom the noble Lord, Lord Paget, spoke for a considerable proportion of his speech. I would add that we are always concerned about failure to observe or uphold human rights, especially as we made provision for this in the constitution. But if I may say so, it is misleading to suggest, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Paget, suggested, that we have merely inquired about the welfare of those detained. The fact is that we voiced our concern about these allegations at the highest level when my honourable friend the Minister of State for Defence visited Zimbabwe, and we urged that all detainees, whatever their nationality, should be brought to trial as soon as possible. It should also be said that the law courts in Zimbabwe maintain an impressive degree of integrity, and there is every reason to believe that people receive a fair trial there.
I should like to answer a few of the remaining questions which were asked me. The noble Lord, Lord Paget, referred to people becoming Zimbabwe citizens and, as he very fairly said, doing so naturally if they were going into the public service, but being encouraged by the British Government to do so. It is true that we welcome people taking up employment in the public service in Zimbabwe, though many of them in fact have retained British citizenship, and I am happy to say that many of them remain in senior positions.
So far as this particular point is concerned, perhaps I may reply to my noble friend Lord Salisbury, who expressed concern about what he had heard regarding moves on the status of dual nationality in Zimbabwe. My information is that the Zimbabwe Government have introduced a Bill which would enable the abolition of the right to dual nationality as provided for in the constitution. However, this provision may be amended by a two-thirds affirmative vote from the

1391
Senate and an affirmative vote by 70 members of the House of Assembly.
If I may say so, I do not think that it helps to underestimate the formidable difficulties facing Zimbabwe, and I think this very much the message which came over to the end of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham. But nor does it help to exaggerate them, or to ignore the real achievements in less than three years of independence. When we think of the bitter past, the degree of reconciliation has been remarkable. Today, former enemies are working together as colleagues in the Government, in the Army, in the senior ranks of the Civil Service, and the white community continues to play an important role in the country. Private industry and agriculture are encouraged. Private investment is welcomed, and there is a growing market for British exports. Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the leading countries in the continent of Africa and it has made clear the value that it attaches to its relations with the West.
I repeat that we should not, and we do not, hesitate to voice our concern over certain recent developments in Zimbabwe. But we should also acknowledge freely the real progress achieved by people from all political parties and all tribal and racial backgrounds in the creation and development of their new country.

British Railways (Liverpool Street Station) Bill
Brought from the Commons, read a first time, and referred to the Examiners.
House adjourned at nineteen minutes past nine o'clock.