Lords Sitting of 23 June 1982

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

Youth Adventure Scheme
Baroness Sharpies: 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 the response to the Youth Adventure Scheme has been encouraging.
The Earl of Avon: Yes, my Lords. Courses have now begun at all five locations, and every place on every course is now allocated. The courses are going very well, and many of the young people have commented on how enjoyable and rewarding they have found the training.
Baroness Sharpies: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. This is an extremely new experiment. I understand that it is to end in October of this year, and can my noble friend say whether it is possible that next year there will be a continuing process? Can he also say how many of the applicants who have applied have failed on medical grounds?—because I understand that it is quite a hard exercise over the two weeks.
The Earl of Avon: My Lords, as regards next year, the scheme was set up this year because there was spare capacity in the training organisation, which may or may not occur to the same extent next year. The decision on whether to repeat the scheme will be taken in the light of such capacity as is available, and other relevant factors, including its success. So far as the medical situation is concerned, I understand that the young people are given a fairly full Army medical before they go on the course. I have no statistics on the failure rate; I do not believe that they are kept. Some of the boys on the course go back early because they are not fit enough.
Lord Kilmany: My Lords, arising from that reply, would it be true to assume that by and large the girls are proving themselves tougher than the boys?
The Earl of Avon: My Lords, I have no statistics on that, but I am sure that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister will bear in mind the noble Lord's remarks.
Baroness Macleod of Borve: My Lords, can my noble friend tell the House how many young people are actually taking part at this time?
The Earl of Avon: My Lords, I understand that the full numbers for the courses will be about 5,000
Lord Elwyn-Jones: My Lords, are Army medicals more thorough-going than they used to be in the days when, "You're warm, you're in"?
The Earl of Avon: My Lords, at the moment I think that they probably are.

The Closed Shop: Publication of Report
2.39 p.m.
Lord Underhill: 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, as stated in the Observer of 16th May 1982, the report of the work on the closed shop commissioned by the Department of Employment, referred to in the Written Answer in the Official Report of 20th May (col. 871) has been in the department since December 1981, and whether it will be published before the last stage of the Employment Bill.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Earl Ferrers): My Lords, a draft report from Professor Gennard was received by the Department of Employment in February of this year. In Professor Gennard's view his report is not yet complete, nor is it in a publishable form. When it is completed, it will be published by Professor Gennard and his fellow authors.
Lord Underhill: My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for that reply. Can he give some assurance that the report might be available before discussion of the Employment Bill is concluded? Is it not a fact that the work was commissioned by the Department of Employment, at some cost to the taxpayer, and therefore is it not of vital importance to have the information in the report available for the discussions on the Employment Bill?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, I cannot give the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, the undertaking which he requires because it entirely depends on when Professor Gennard completes his report. The noble Lord, Lord Underhill, would be the first to agree that it would be inappropriate for an incomplete report to be published.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the Question and. Answer give the impression that parliamentary Questions are being asked as a result of a leak? Are leaks to newspapers on an unpublished, uncompleted report to form the basis of Question and Answer in either House of Parliament?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, I understand that the Question resulted from an article which appeared. From where the author of the article received his information, it is not for me to say; nor do I know.
Lord Underhill: My Lords, is the noble Earl also aware that, in addition to this noble Lord raising the

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matter as a result of a press report, it was raised also as a result of a Written Answer given by the noble Earl in the Official Report on, I think, 20th May?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, I do not think that there is any disparity or difference between the Answer that I then gave and the Answer that I have now given.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the Question is quite specific? It states:
… as stated in the Observer of 16th May ".
The parliamentary Answer was brought in purely as ancillary to the statement which was put out in the press, obviously without any official connivance and without the report being properly approved or completed.
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, of course I always try to be as helpful as I can to the House, and if the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, asks a perfectly reasonable Question, he receives what I hope he will think is a perfectly reasonable Answer.

The Falkland Islands
2.42 p.m.
The Earl of Dudley: 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 have any plans to consult other Commonwealth Governments with a view to securing their participation in the defence of the Falkland Islands and in discussions with the islanders about their future.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, we have much appreciated the strong support given by the overwhelming majority of Commonwealth Governments and the Secretary-General throughout the Falklands crisis. Mr. Ramphal has offered help in any way possible, and we remain in close touch with him. However the important responsibility for defence and for the restoration of normal conditions must be primarily our own, though we shall naturally be very willing to consider any further offers of support from our Commonwealth partners.
The Earl of Dudley: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that informative reply. I should like further to ask him whether, in the absence of United States' participation, Her Majesty's Government would regard as acceptable involvement by Commonwealth countries in the defence and future administration of the Falkland Islands, perhaps by some form of Commonwealth trusteeship'?
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, we are certainly willing for other friendly Governments to be associated in some way with the security arrangements for the Falkland Islands. If my noble friend has some particular arrangement in mind, we shall of course be
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ready to give it due consideration. However, we shall naturally need to consult the wishes of the Falkland islanders for their own future.

NHS Pay Negotiations
Lord Molloy Lord Molloy had given Notice of his intention to ask Her Majesty's Government what progress has been made in the dispute over National Health Service nurses' pay.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I understand that a Statement on this matter is to be repeated in this House later today. In the circumstances, and with the leave of the House, I do not propose to ask my Question.

Business
Lord Denham: My Lords, at a convenient moment after 3.30 this afternoon my noble friend Lord Trefgarne will, with the leave of the House, repeat a Statement to be made in another place on the pay negotiations in the National Health Service.
I should like, in the normal way and with the leave of the House, to say a brief word about the timing of the two Short Debates this afternoon. Following the accepted principle that the mover should be entitled to approximately 15 minutes and that the Minister should rise to reply no later than 20 minutes before the scheduled end of each debate, may I suggest that other speakers should endeavour to limit their speeches to about 10 or 101 minutes in the case of the debate in the name of my noble friend Lord Vaizey and to about 12 minutes in the case of the debate in the name of my noble friend Lord Mottistone. If noble Lords speak for any longer they run the serious risk of depriving later speakers of their full opportunity.

Housing Policy
2.45 p.m.
Lord Vaizey Lord Vaizey rose to call attention to the problems of housing with particular reference to the difficulties created by current legislation affecting the relationship of landlord and tenant, and to the importance of helping people to acquire ownership of their homes, including houses at present in the ownership of local authorities; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg leave to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. My noble friend has taken the words out of my mouth: I was going to say that it was 10½ minutes by my calculations. I particularly look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, this afternoon and also to the speeches of my noble friend Lord Bellwin. the Minister, and Lady Birk, the Opposition spokesman.
May I begin by saying that, so far as I can discover, the British are among the best housed people in Europe, which is a rather surprising statistic. Most of the housing stock is in fairly good "nick"; about 4 per cent. of it is seriously substandard; and about

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20 per cent., including the 4 per cent., is below standard. Or, to put it in another and perhaps more optimistic way, about 80 per cent., or about four-fifths of the housing stock, is above standard. Opinion polls show a surprisingly large proportion of the population pleased with their homes: 37 per cent. are recorded as being very satisfied, 45 per cent. as satisfied, only 6 per cent. are dissatisfied, and 2.7 per cent. very dissatisfied. There is, of course, much room for improvement, but one does not need, I would submit, to be too gloomy in the light of these figures, both about the facts and about people's opinions of the facts.
Much of the satisfaction that people express with housing obviously arises from the facts of home ownership. My Lords, 55 per cent. of the people who have housing tenure now own their own houses; and all parties in this House agree that the proportion should rise above 55 per cent. A house represents for most people, apart from their pension rights, their biggest single capital asset; and the British people have £300 billion invested in their houses, which they own themselves. The mortgage debt is only £50 billion, so they have a net holding of £250 billion. Tim Congdon, who works for Messels, the stockbrokers, has shown how the typical person enters the housing market at or about the time of marriage, trades up and then, after a period, begins to trade down, and in this way realises his or her capital. The savings that the couple make through housing are a principal source of consumption finance in later life.
This method of saving, through housing, is helped by the exemption up to £25,000 of mortgage interest from tax, and by other devices. Of course, the real value of owner-occupied houses varies with the state of the market. At the present time, the average house is worth about three times personal income; but it has reached, quite frequently in the past, four times personal income, and it will probably rise in the next few years. So if people want a tip from Messels, it is probably a good idea at the moment to get into the housing market because the prices are likely to rise over the near future.
In the light of these facts, I want to present the following argument. It is that so far as possible public policy should be directed towards encouraging people to own their own houses; to enable them to do what they want to do—namely, to become homeowners. The advantage of this is, above all, that it gives them a capital asset and all the freedom that possession of a capital asset gives them. It enables them to choose in a very fundamental way the way they want to live. In this, I differ from the argument which has just been provided by the notable housing charity Shelter. They argue that mortgage interest tax relief should be phased out, and, although I see the strength of the argument that all subsidies in this field should be brought to an end wherever possible, in this particular case I disagree with them.
I support the case for home-ownership, because it is the commonest form of housing tenure and it is the common aim of all parties, and of most families, to wish to own their own homes. But there are two categories of housing tenure which are not benefiting from home-ownership. First, there are council tenants.
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There are 6½ million council tenants. Some 30 per cent. of the number of dwellings are in the council sector. On this matter the policy of the people on this side of the House is clear. It is to dispose of the greater part of the council estates by selling the houses to the tenants. As Mr. Heath's research assistants argued in an interesting article in The Times, this is desirable both on the grounds that it gives assets to people and because it gives them a vested interest in improving and running their own houses and blocks of flats. The incidence of vandalism on some council estates is relatively high not because of the type of people but because stopping vandalism is the task of the council and not of the tenants. The cost of the maintenance and administration by the council is bound to be high and almost bound in many cases to be inefficient.
The question arises—this is one of the things that I should like to put to my noble friend—as to whether or not the rate of disposals of council property is fast enough. Although already 300,000 houses have been disposed of so far and another half million are being processed, one wonders whether this rate could be accelerated. I believe, as, I think, do many of my noble friends, that the time is coming when all council tenants in ordinary council property—not those with sheltered housing—will have their weekly rent turned into a weekly mortgage, as was suggested by Mr. Heath's assistants in The Times. I, myself, hope that we may see between 2 million and 3 million disposals of council property over the next four years. That would dissolve the council estate fiefdoms and the inevitable petty bureaucrat superstructures that seem to go with them.
For the last part of my speech, I want to refer to the one remaining form of tenure, having already spoken about home ownership and council tenants: the ever-diminishing band of private landlords. Not everybody wants or needs to own their own place—people in highly mobile jobs do not want to, Peers and MPs do not necessarily want to own their own London flats if they live in the country. If the housing market worked properly much of the housing shortage would, I submit, end; but almost 70 years of rent control has meant that this rental market has been divided into two; the expensive and often furnished end and the crumbling working-class end. It proves that if you want to make a market inefficient, it does become inefficient.
The Government have tried to remedy this situation by the 1980 Housing Act. In that Act, the Government ended the system of controlled tenancies under which rent was pegged at 1956 levels. These tenancies have now been brought into the fair rent system. The Government reduced the period between the fair rent reviews from three years to two years in order to give more protection against inflation. The Housing Act extended the rights of temporarily absent owner-occupiers, servicemen and the owners of retirement homes to regain possession of their homes from tenants by the procedure of assured tenancies.
The snag with the 1980 Act is that it is widely thought—I do not know whether it is thought rightly or wrongly—that if the Labour Party came back into office they would inevitably tighten up rent controls again. I would submit that a great responsibility

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therefore falls upon the Alliance—and I am pleased to see that no fewer than three SDP Members are to take part in this debate this afternoon—which is, after all, the alternative Opposition and (who knows?) may become the Official Opposition after the next election. One hopes-1 shall listen with interest to what the noble Lord, Lord Roberthall, has to say—that they will adopt a sensible policy towards the rented sector. That would help the benefits of the 1980 Act to be fully felt.
The 1980 Act is good as far as it goes but perhaps the time is coming when we need to ask a much more radical question, a question that, in a different context, my noble friend Lady Trumpington asked in the context of the Shops Act: Do we need these Acts at all? Admittedly, they give a great deal of work to the lawyers—never a group under-protected by either House of Parliament. But lawyers will always find work to do while there is legislation. Admittedly, the Rent Acts diminished the supply of rented housing, since, if you keep prices down, the supply dwindles. They make landlords bad landlords because they think that they cannot get a proper return on their capital and therefore they want to get rid of the tenants that they have. That produces—and the evidence is overwhelming—dissatisfied tenants.
The question of repealing the Rent Acts is now, I suggest, becoming practical politics. In Germany, for instance, since the end of the last war, over 2 million privately rented houses and flats have been constructed without any of the paraphernalia of the Rent Acts. Of course, people will inquire: What about the poor and the disadvantaged? Housing subsidies have little to do with the elimination of poverty. Housing subsidies are distributed, like rain, randomly on the just and the unjust, on those who badly need subsidy and on those who do not. The proper remedy for poverty is an efficiently working system of social security and assistance, above all, of cash allowances in which payment of housing costs is one important part, but only a part, and in which people are given cash to spend as they please. And a capital asset which comes from home ownership that can be mortgaged is itself a protection against indigence in later life.
In short, home ownership has become a fundamental asset of the modern British way of living. In my submission, the number of home owners should be increased, and the sale of council houses is already beginning to increase the number. But an efficient housing market needs a free rented market sector and I regard that as of great importance. The question of the alleviation of poverty must he sharply distinguished from housing policy. The way to help the poor is to give them more cash. The way to improve housing is to free the housing market. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
2.59 p.m.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for raising this very important question in this short debate today. I think he did play us all around a bit in some aspects of what he said, but he touched on some important points. How we must look at this is in the context of the major housing crisis in which we find ourselves
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today. There is no time in this short debate for sheets of housing statistics, which are another way of expressing numerically the human misery, family breakdown and basic deprivation due to a bad housing system. To give some indication of the gravity of the problem, I merely mention that the combined public and private housing starts last year were 153,000 compared with 265,000 in 1978—that is, 100,000 fewer; and I would not even say that at that earlier date the number was high enough. If we also look at the state of improvements to existing houses, these are an extremely important factor both in providing homes and in catching dilapidated property before it falls into dismal decay and is really fit only for demolition. The number of properties that were improved with the aid of grants last year was 20 per cent. down on the previous year, and as a society we really cannot afford this.
But the Government's own White Paper shows a dramatic planned reduction in public expenditure on housing, and this, as we well know, is reflected in the reduced allocations to local authorities. We now have homelessness higher than ever recorded, and this is according to the official figures. I am not talking about those very often in excess where the housing waiting lists are very difficult to fathom. We have a situation where people are put into bed and breakfast accommodation. It is almost an Alice-in-Wonderland situation. It is highly expensive; it is socially wrong; and it is completely unsuitable for families. Yet these are the lengths to which many local authorities have to go.
The effect of the Government's financial and monetary policy has been the biggest-ever slump in the construction industry. Due to the high unemployment that we unfortunately now suffer in this country, nearly one in eight of the 3 million unemployed are in the building industry.
When the present Government were elected three years ago, they placed great emphasis on reviving the private sector, and the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, referred to this. Unfortunately that has not worked out. To hold or reverse the decline in rented property, shorthold and assured tenancies were introduced in the 1980 Housing Act. The noble Lord said that Act was good as far as it went. 1 would say it was bad as far as it went, and it went too far. But what happened to these new introductions which were to deal with the decline in the rented sector? We have seen up to now only four assured tenancies and 5,128 shortholds in England. Of those, only 377 were in London, and the private rental market has been declining at the rate of 60,000 a year nationally and of something like 16,000 a year in London. Of course it has been declining, as I think we are all aware, almost since the beginning of this century. It had declined before the more recent Rent Acts and it has gone on declining through shortholds, and I fear it will go on declining.
The Minister will no doubt say when he comes to reply that the landlords are not taking up shortholds because the last Labour Government said they would repeal them. During the passage of that Act, I remember making it quite clear myself from these Benches that we would not repeal shortholds if the basic safeguards we were asking for were incor-

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porated. In fact when we voted on these amendments we got support from all sides of the House, but unfortunately the safeguards were not included and so shortholds became unacceptable.
However, it is quite untrue to place all the blame on a future promise—or threat, however one likes to look at it—to repeal this provision, because, if landlords found it would serve them for the moment—and they are shortholds, after all, and not longholdsthey would enter into them and use them. It is also interesting that everyone who was consulted, including the landlord bodies, were not very impressed by the Government's view about it. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, has said, I would argue that the decline of the private rented market is not due to security of the tenant but to economic factors. As a distinguished economist himself, I am sure he is well aware of this.
The return a landlord can receive from the average letting is quite incompatible with the investment which has to be put into property for renting. He does much better by selling the property and investing elsewhere. Why does he do better in this way? Because the bulk of those who rent cannot afford an economic rent. Here we are not talking about the comparatively small amount of expensive property for letting—incidentally, the service charges involved in these have now resulted in more and more people selling the flats they had rented and also getting out of the rented market themselves as tenants—and not as controlled tenants either. Whereas generous subsidies are available through mortgage tax relief to people buying and there are also subsidies for council housing, though the level of those subsidies has been halved between 1979–80 and 1981–82, there are no general subsidies available to private landlords. So, unless the charge is in excess of the means of most tenants and also in excess of what is necessary to service a mortgage, it just is not "on" for the landlord or the tenant.
If I may say so, it is all very well for the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, to say he is quite against subsidies and wants to see a revival of a flourishing private rented market, but he does not really explain how that is to be brought about when one is faced with the historic fact of the decline of the market and the economic facts of what the Government are doing at the present time. There are problems with legislation, as the noble Lord has mentioned in his Motion, but the problems are the loopholes in the Rent Acts which have been exploited by unscrupulous landlords.
During the passage of the Housing Act, we moved amendments on this very difficult problem, and the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, who was the Minister in charge of the Bill at the time, did say in reply to an amendment that I moved in order to try to get rid of the loopholes:
" As regards the loopholes in the Rent Acts—and noble Lords opposite know more about them than I do—we accept that there are, of course, problems. What I have said in answer to the amendment is that I just do not believe that this is the way to deal with the problems, for the reasons that I have given. That does not mean to say that I do not think that there should be attempts to find solutions to them."—(Official Report, 22/7/80; col. 231.)
Further on, he said this at col. 232:
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" I would only say—and I am not sure what other amendments there may be as regards filling the loopholes in the Rent Acts—that this is an area on which at present, within the Bill, we cannot go any further. Time does not allow it. But no one is turning away from the problems. It will be for another time—not necessarily a long time in the future—when we have got through what we are doing at present when we shall probably want to sit down and talk about the matter."
Up to now—and this is June 1982—none of us has sat down and talked about the matter, and these loopholes still go on and cause a great deal of hardship to many people, including students and others.
When we turn to home ownership, the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, said that there was a public policy to encourage people to own their own property. I entirely agree and, with the Labour Party, I believe that home ownership should be encouraged. But we do not believe it is right for councils to give ownership advantage to people at the expense of the poor, the homeless and the badly housed. I would remind your Lordships that the House of Commons Environment Committee in its second report clearly demonstrated the effect of compulsory council house sales, which had seriously reduced the number of lettings becoming available for those who have no option but to rent.
That is what we are concerned about. It is not dogma about owning houses; it is a question of the plight of those people who have no option but to rent. What they did in this Act about sales of council houses meant that the Government were once again destroying local autonomy in housing, as, unfortunately, they have done in so many other local authority areas. We saw this in the Local Government Finance (No. 2) Bill, which we have just finished.
Finally, what is needed is very much more public expenditure going into housing, which will not only give homes—and very badly needed homes—to more people, but will also revive the building industry and thus enable many of those who are now unemployed to obtain work.
3.11 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Norwich: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, is not speaking, it falls to me to say a word or two. But, first, I and my fellow Prelates must declare a personal and private interest in this matter, because, when one becomes a bishop, after 10 years one man's bishop's palace becomes another man's tied cottage, when one moves towards retirement. So we have an interest in this whole matter, because we belong to that band of clergy of the Church of England who live in tied cottages. In the Church today, we are working very hard to find ways and means of helping our clergy, at the end of long and honourable years' ministry, to find modest accommodation for themselves. Therefore, this subject is one in which we have a personal interest.
The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, reminded us that a house is the biggest single capital asset of any married couple and, therefore, this is a matter of major importance to the Church as well as to the state. I would plead for flexibility in this matter from successive Governments. I think of my own family and two of our daughters. One is married to a curate and she lives on the 14th floor of a block of corporation flats in a great northern city. I shall not mention the

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city, because, as the rats keep coming up the refuse chute from the 7th to the 8th floor, and they are on the 14th floor, there are anxieties about the future and, in a sense, helplessness, which people in accommodation of that kind feel. That can be dramatically pictured in many different ways by people who would love to find a way of having a little more control over the roof above their heads.
With flexibility, I hope that Governments, with their power and position, can allow young people to be exciting in their opportunities of housing. Another daughter and her husband, with another couple who are good at building, bought an old derelict manor house in Suffolk. For two and a half years they lived in a derelict bus in the grounds of the derelict manor, but they have now got out of the derelict bus and into the no longer derelict manor. So they are there in a glorious house which they have virtually built themselves. I ask for flexibility and for encouragement to young couples to show initiative in forms of housing.
Having heard the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, who are well able to face each other across the Table, I shall not enter into anything concerning party politics, seeking, as always, to speak in the national interest. I say that, because your Lordships may not have noticed that we have had a certain little local difficulty in Norwich, in relation to the sale of council houses. As my brother the right reverend Prelate from Southwark knows all about corporation and council houses, I am leaving the general issue of council houses in his safe hands, rather than in my own.
I would say only that, in talking to one of my own Christian ordinands, who is moving towards non-stipendiary ministry and who works in local housing, he made this point. He said that it gives a feeling of responsibility and a much easier means of family continuity in the family home if it can be owned and occupied, and this is more desirable than rented property. One cannot emphasise too strongly the importance of belonging—and that in country districts, as well as in town districts.
I notice that the selling of council houses is above party politics, because since 1952 it has been possible; it is simply that the 1980 Housing Act—whatever view we have of that Act, and I leave it to others to say what view they have—makes it possible to buy more. We have noticed an interesting point from the point of view of the Church. I do not believe that we should consider that if you are a Christian family, you therefore become a more prosperous family in this world's goods. But it is true to state that, statistically, fewer of our Church families are in prison as a result of grievous bodily harm cases, of extreme company fraud cases or of other things which break up home life. Therefore, statistically, our Church families seem a little better off.
I say that only because I believe that flexibility through the Housing Act 1980 is a good thing, as a measure of council houses bought on council estates saves those who have purchased, by thrift and hard work, or by being better paid, from having a tendency or a temptation to move out into what are, perhaps, more salubrious areas. In fact, they like to stay where they belong and near their local church. There-
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fore, where there is a sale of tenancies on council estates you get more of a mix, which is socially helpful in that situation.
I want to say one word, coming from the open countryside and the wide skies of Norfolk, about rural housing which can so easily be forgotten. The country's rural population is on the increase and a rise of 9½ per cent. has been recorded in the census between 1971 and 1979. At the same time, there is an alarming drop in rural building, whether private or council. Therefore, I put in a plea to Government to take particular care over the matter of rural housing today. In some areas, key villages tend to be designated, where everything is going for those villages—the school, the pub, the shop and the Church. This is a good idea in one way, but it can cause distress in the smaller villages. I believe that if Government could find their way to increase the allocation of money to council house building in rural areas, this would lead to a better quality of life there.
It is true that many of our agricultural workers live in tied cottages and that, under the legislation, they are able to stay in those cottages until other people need to follow them, and then there are ways in which provision is made for them. But I simply ask that we should not forget the need for tural housing, because the centres of cities and of urban areas can sometimes win the ear of Government, local government or pressure groups more easily than those who are less organised, who are more scattered and who live in the areas of rural Herefordshire or Norfolk, as the case may be. I ask that they be considered. I now gladly give way to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, which we are looking forward to hearing.
3.20 p.m.
Lord Coleraine: My Lords, my interest in the subject matter of this debate is that I have a legal practice and that I am very much aware at second hand of the many frustrations felt by private landlords and private tenants in flats and converted houses in the inner areas of London.
I must apologise to my noble friend that I was not here for the start of his speech this afternoon, owing to traffic jams and the various problems which they cause. But I was here to hear what he said about the private sector. Although I shall not entirely agree with all he says, I do concur when he says that the ultimate beneficiaries of so much of this legislation are the lawyers. From the trend of my speech, your Lordships will see that I also believe that the Rent Act legislation results in a great deal of wasted expenditure on builders, managing agents, accountants and all kinds of other people who get involved in between the landlord and the tenant.
I hope that I am not being in the least controversial when I say that in my opinion the complex structure of statute which has arisen in this century has not, on balance, proved man enough to meet the varied needs of landlords and tenants, and that again and again measures intended to alleviate problems have persistently tended to create new ones. In my intervention from these Benches this afternoon I shall try to touch on some of the symptoms of the bad effects of too much legislation by reference to the tendency of legislation which interferes with market forces

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and frustrates human initiatives to be ultimately counter-productive, rather than by reference to any innate intractability of the landlord-tenant problem in an aggressive, disturbed society—which is also a factor.
I want to speak mainly about some unfortunate side effects of the Rent Acts and similar legislation. I would identify two main limbs of Rent Act legislation. The first is the control of rents at levels below the levels which would be reached in an unfettered market. The second is security of tenure which restricts the freedom of a landlord to recover possession of his property at the date agreed with his tenant in the tenancy document or lease.
In each case the freedom of a party to contract to bind himself to honour obligations is interfered with. We know that this is a factor in much of our law. I would suggest that whereas the rent control itself is in principle thoroughly undesirable, being simply a subsidy for some citizens, provided in a rather random fashion by other citizens, security of tenure is of a different nature altogether. I am sorry that time does not permit me to develop my argument. However, my opinion is that the justification for security of tenure as a general principle—although I fully support shorthold tenure—is that the power which can be wielded by a landlord, by the threat of depriving a tenant of his home, is so great as to make this a proper field for Government concern: the protection of the weak against the strong.
The particular consequence of years of rent control which concerns me today is, on the one hand, the drying up of the stock of private housing to let and, on the other side of the coin, the extent to which flats which were formerly let on tenancies and short leases, whether in mansion blocks or converted houses, have been, and are still being, sold on long leases at low rents, so as to escape the main provisions of the Rent Acts altogether. This generally means: sold at the highest achievable premium and for the lowest rent.
I refer to the low rents often paid under long leases, because a rent of £25 a year over the term of a 99-year lease may seem a good bargain to a flat purchaser. But it may seem less good value in five or 10 years' time when the last lease in the mansion block concerned has been sold, the landlord is a £100 company, perhaps incorporated abroad, and there is no rent to be paid worth withholding against the landlord's complete lack of interest in managing the building or carrying out repairs. Or perhaps the landlord will be prepared to do some repair work, but only if the estimate which its associated managing agent has obtained from its good friend the builder is accepted and paid for in advance. Or, in another case, it may be that the landlord's interest in a block has passed, during the late 1960s or the early 1970s, through the hands of property speculators who have each sold a few flats as and when a statutory tenant died, or a short lease came to an end and the tenant decided to take some compensation and go. Later in the 1970s a landlord may have been liquidated, and there may have been more changes of landlord since then, with no consistent management over the period—and perhaps the provisions for repairs in one lease differing from those in
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other leases and the building having become by now near enough unmanageable.
It is common where blocks of flats are sold on long leases for the landlord to retain responsibility for repairs and management of the block, at least until the block has been sold—and possibly indefinitely thereafter—the leases providing for the sharing of expenses among the lessees. My experience is that in just too many cases this system has really broken down and has no chance of working. One has only to consider the case of a mansion block half sold on long leases and half let to statutory tenants or protected tenants. What landlord will willingly keep the block in repair when he can effectively only recover his full costs of doing so from the long lessees? For a number of reasons, including high fuel costs and wages, the cost of providing services has escalated over the past decade and the standard of services provided has deteriorated.
Parliament, it is true, has legislated in the field of repairs and management in the light of the problems I have outlined above and of abuses on the part of some landlords who found their service charge accounts a new source of profit. In 1972, lessees acquired the right to receive a summary of expenditure certified by the landlord's accountant. The Housing Act 1974 gave the right, in a somewhat unsatisfactory manner, for lessees to challenge the charges for shoddy or overpriced work. This has been replaced by Schedule 19 to the Housing Act 1980. But there are two big problems. First, there is the need for lessees to have some effective way of compelling their landlords to carry out the repairs for which they are liable and, secondly—I put them very much in that order of importance—the need to ensure that the repairs, when carried out, are properly charged for and that all due and necessary accounting practices are followed. Most recent legislation has concentrated on tackling the accountability problem, including the extensive provisions of the 19th Schedule to the Housing Act 1980. The effect of this, in some cases, is to make landlords less prepared to carry out repairs than before, when they come to consider the paper work to be done before repairs can be carried out: the estimates to be obtained, the timetables to be observed, the notices to be given, the observations to be called for and considered—and so on.
Lessees cannot step in and carry out repairs for which their landlord is responsible. The remedy of specific performance is expensive and slow and often amounts only to an order to a stone to give forth blood. The local environmental health officer's services are often available. And if the landlord does ultimately carry out the repairs, it is seldom an easy matter for the lessees to prove that the repairs which cost £8,000 when carried out would have cost £1,000 a year or two earlier, before the rot had spread, and that only the landlord's unreasonable delay inflated the ultimate cost of what was done.
The law as to service charges and the enforcement of landlords' repairing covenants is, in my opinion, a very ripe field for further consideration to lead to law reform. I should like to make one suggestion: that consideration should be given to the provision of a means, perhaps by legislation, of providing for the court appointment of a receiver, by which lessees are

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themselves enabled to carry out repairs and provide services where landlords have failed to do so.
The Rent Acts have greatly contributed to the breaking up and selling on long leases of flats which in the past would have been available to rent on short leases or periodic tenancies. But it is true that other factors have contributed to what is now the fashion of owning your own long lease of your flat as the preferred alternative to being just a tenant. Benevolent Government, apparently setting out to create a dwellinghouse-owning rather then a property-owning democracy, have performed fiscal contortions and distortions: Gains tax relief on principal dwelling-houses and mortgage interest relief on qualifying expenditure on principal dwelling-houses are two reliefs which manipulate people, in my opinion. It may be an heretical comment to make, but I would say that a man with £20,000 in his pocket living in a rented house may be in a position to be a great deal more use to himself, to his family and to all of us than the same man with the same £20,000 tied up in bricks and mortar. However, we have to live with the fashion for long leases, and the only other point I would make on the subject is, that we should consider the case for long lessees to be given powers by statute to buy out their landlord's interest in appropriate cases where the repairing and service provisions and the like provisions of their leases have manifestly broken down.
Going back to the distortions imposed by the Rent Acts, which lie behind so many of the problems and abuses that we see, I would like to make the point that, disregarding the political fringes, it has seemed to me that in recent years there has been a greater readiness to recognise defects in a system by all parties and a greater preparedness to abandon strictly adversarial attitudes and postures. In landlord and tenant legislations, as much as in any other field of controversy, more damage is done by parties legislating their own particular hard lines when they achieve power than can be imagined. I believe there is tendency to recognise this fact now more than there was before; I do hope so. I conclude by hoping that the problems of landlord and tenant in the Rent Act field can be tackled consensually—in particular by acceptance of the fact that market rents throughout the housing sphere are a desirable end for which to work—but that in what is not the best of all possible worlds, security of tenure must as a general rule be respected by Governments for the foreseeable future.
3.32 p.m.
Lord Robbins: My Lords, it always is a great pleasure to follow a maiden speech. On this occasion, it is a peculiar pleasure for me to follow this speech because I served under the noble Lord's father during the apex of his fame at the time of the Second World War. In that capacity, I grew to respect and to love him. Our friendship persisted until his recent death. I would infer from the quality of the speech which the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, has just delivered that something of the forcefulness, something of the technical insight and something of the acute moral discrimination has penetrated to his son. I assure the noble Lord that we look forward to hearing him many times in future in this House.
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I want to thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for drawing our attention to the whole sphere of issues which his Motion implies. I agree wholeheartedly with the positive part of the noble Lord's speech and his eulogy of the social benefits of house ownership. I propose to concentrate, however, on the latter part of the noble Lord's speech—not by way of disagreement but by way of providing a very simple historical and theoretical analysis of rents and rents regulation.
Rent control and regulation have been tried at different times and in different places this century. Broadly speaking, I would say that there is more agreement among members of my profession of different schools of thought than on a good many other issues. No less personalities than Professor Myrdal and Professor Hayek think poorly of the results of attempts at rent control and rent regulation. At the same time, one must realise that this is a subject which arouses deep emotions one way or another amongst the general public. The electorate is very sensitive on matters of this kind and I therefore hold that it is incumbent upon us who are not dependent upon the electorate to be quite candid about the truth of these matters as we see them.
Rent control is essentially the fixing of maximum rents below the level which would prevail in a free market. Thus it affords an incentive to an excess of demand and a disincentive to spontaneous response of supply. This has occurred whenever and wherever it has been introduced. The excessive demand shows itself pretty quickly. The disincentive to supply takes longer to become acute; after all, the stock of houses is there and although some owners may at once be disinclined to offer the services of their property, the effects on maintenance—not to be under-estimatedand the effects on new additions to the stock are bound to show themselves in the long term.
Crude rent control as it prevailed in this country from 1915 until 1965 resulted in the most astonishing anomalies. According to the date of the original contract, rents might differ in the same street. As my colleague Professor Paish pointed out in a famous article, there was no inherent guarantee in that system that the poorest tenant would own the cheapest house or that the poorest landlord would own the dearest one. But, for some time at any rate, the introduction of the regulation of fair rents introduced in 1965 did little to rectify the general tendency to shortage.
The criteria of fairness were defined as a reference to what the market rent would be if supply and demand in an area were roughly in balance. So you would have the paradox that regulation would be superfluous if that condition prevailed, while, if it did not, the one means of getting rid of the imbalance—namely, a higher rent, with the effect of choking off demand and increasing supply—would be absent. The normal tendencies to shortage would persist.
I am quite willing to agree that some attempt was made to remedy these tendencies in the 1980 Act, but I agree with Lord Vaizey that the question will still arise whether the whole body of statute law relating to the rent contract will need reconsideration, and eventually, according to my hope, be swept away. A housing shortage of the kind induced by control or regulation has as its main effect discrimination between those who have and those who have not the occupancy

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of houses. Those who have have a bonus which they would not enjoy were the price determined by the market. Those who have not have a negative bonus, in the sense that there are fewer houses to let than otherwise would be the case. The trouble does not stop here. The inhabitants of controlled or regulated houses, being assured of their tenancy, have a disincentive to move from the house inhabited to the areas where there is no such guarantee. And in a period of rapid economic change, such as ours has been in the greater part of my lifetime, the operation of this uncertainty has a restrictive effect on mobility, which surely is the reverse of what the contemporary situation demands.

NHS Pay Negotiations
3.43 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Lord Trefgarne): My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I will now intervene to repeat a Statement being made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Social Services in another place. The Statement is as follows:
" On 10th June I told the House that the Government were considering the points made by the Royal College of Nursing following the ballot on the pay offer of 6·4 per cent. I reported also the initiative I had taken in asking Mr. Lowry to undertake consultations with the health service unions affiliated to the TUC to establish if there was any common ground between us. My objective has been to secure agreement so that negotiations can be resumed in the respective Whitley Councils.
" Following careful consideration of the position and after consultation with some of the chairmen of the Management Sides of the Whitley Councils I entered discussions with the representatives of the health service unions and professional bodies. I was able to tell them that the Government had decided that a further £90 million would be available for Great Britain in negotiating a new pay offer—partly from the Government and partly from the existing health service budget. Together with the additional resources made available in March this year this would increase the average pay of nurses and midwives and the professions supplementary to medicine by Vs per cent., ambulancemen and hospital pharmacists by 61 per cent. and other groups of staff by 6 per cent. The increases for particular grades would be for negotiation within the Whitley Councils. These improved offers both maintain the special position of nurses and other staff providing direct patient care and bring offers to all groups of staff on a par with other recent awards in the public sector.
" My honourable friend the Minister for Health and I have been in discussions over the last two days with the Royal College of Nursing and the Health service unions affiliated to the TUC. I am glad to report to the House that the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives, the Health Visitors
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Association and the Association of Nurse Administrators have agreed to recommend to their responsible bodies that their negotiators be authorised to return to the negotiating table. I hope their Whitley Council will resume discussions very shortly.
" Regrettably the representatives of the health service unions rejected the improved offers out of hand and were unwilling to resume any negotiations. They intend to report this back to the full TUC health services committee with the proposal that industrial action should continue.
" Mr. Speaker, the Government have moved substantially to improve the offers to the health service. The average increases in pay offered for health service staff range between 6 per cent. and 7.5 per cent. This compares with 5.9 per cent. for civil servants, 6.0 per cent. for teachers and 6-1 per cent for the armed services.
" I do not believe that the health service unions are justified in rejecting this offer and I deplore their decision to continue a campaign of industrial action which can only harm patient care. I hope that they, and in particular their members, will reconsider the position very carefully and I urge them to return to negotiations in the Whitley Councils."
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Lord Wallace of Coslany: My Lords, may I thank the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, for repeating the Statement, which he has done so clearly, to indicate to the House the Government's position. The Government's move to increase their offer is an indication of the justice of the health workers' claim. They are indeed among the lowest paid workers in the country, performing a vital service to the community. The National Health Service means teamwork, and ancillary workers are an essential part of that team. It is regrettable that strike action has again to be taken, but morale is low in the health service. The workers feel that they are being made to bear the brunt of the Government's pay policy. When one is on low pay, increases to better paid sections of public services only irritate.
So far as nurses pay is concerned, has agreement to accept been given not only by the Royal College but by other unions covering nurses? I rather gather from the Statement that the nurses affiliated to TUC unions have not yet accepted. It must be borne in mind that nurses and other health workers face increases in their accommodation charges, as the Secretary of State has recently instructed health authorities to increase rents in line with the £2.50 guideline increase in council rents. In addition, there are increases in cost of meals taken on duty.
It might help the House to relate percentages to actual facts. We should bear in mind that the revised offer really means an increase for nurses of £1.18 per week, on average, and for ancillary workers £1.34. There has been a regrettable situation in the negotiations in the last two days, which is not on the best lines of establishing good relations. On Monday, the department offered nurses 7 per cent. and ancillary workers 5.5 per cent. On Tuesday, 22nd June, the Secretary of State agreed to meet the TUC Health Services Committee at 12 noon. He then delayed the

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meeting until 2.30 p.m. He then delayed it again.
Meanwhile, at 3.50 p.m. the Royal College of Nursing held a press conference at which it announced that the Secretary of State had offered nurses 7.5 per cent. and the ancillary workers 6 per cent; and 20 minutes later the Secretary of State came to tell the TUC Health Committee the same news. That is not the way to establish good relations with the TUC Health Committee and, as one very much involved voluntarily over the years with the health service, I very much regret the continuing dispute and the industrial action.
As it is continuing, regrettably so, will the Government refer the matter to ACAS? Will they consider arbitration? At present—this is not new—industrial relations in the National Health Service are in a poor state, which is acting against the public and the patients' interests. It is all very well for some people to say that people in the public services, especially in the NHS, should not strike. That is no solution. The situation will not improve until the Government supplement collective bargaining with proper arbitration to ensure a fair rate for the job. And will the Government cease taking advantage of the specalised position of health workers, and, first, set up an inquiry into the whole position, and, secondly, establish adequate and fair negotiating machinery?
3.52 p.m.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, we on these Benches would also like to thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made in another place. We, too, must of course deplore the initiation of strike action and its continuation on the part of the health service workers. We recognise the difficulty in which the Government find themselves, in that they have an incomes policy for the public sector but no incomes policy throughout the country as a whole. I know that the noble Lord will tell me the Government have not an incomes policy for the public sector—but a rose by any other name, and this looks more like an incomes policy than most incomes policies that we have had in the past.
The Government have been singularly unfortunate in their handling of negotiations in the public sector, both last year and this year. If they mean business by negotiation, if they really want the Whitley machinery to work—and I believe they probably do want it to work, and we on these Benches certainly want it to work—I would suggest that there really must be adequate scope for genuine negotiation; but to be told that there is a fixed amount, as the National Health Service workers were told in the first place, and then in face of resistance to give a bit, the £90 million with which the Government have came back, is no way to continue negotiations. Either the Government have to recognise that there must be sufficient flexibility in their offer to enable negotiations really to take place or they must accept that it is a hidden diktat which the health service workers are unlikely to accept. The Government need to consider their whole practice of negotiations in relation to the public sector.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Coslany, was not able more
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warmly to welcome the Statement. The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, was perhaps not quite as anxious as the noble Lord, but I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Coslany, that arbitration is really no solution to this problem. Arbitration is not an extension of free collective bargaining, because arbitration will result in imposing upon one side or another a settlement which they do not wish to accept and would not have accepted in the first instance.
It is for the Government to decide how much money is available and for the Whitley Councils to conduct detailed negotiations and make the detailed offers to the individual and varying grades in their varying councils and within different skills, and that is what we have done. We made a certain sum of money available, additional Government money, and as I have warned your Lordships on many occasions we have had to make a further inroad into this other fund available to the health service from within its existing budget. As I said, I believe in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Molloy, a week or so ago, there was no possibility of a significant new offer without some erosion of the health service's existing budget; and I fear that that is what has had to happen.
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, does the noble Lord recall that in 1974 the party now in Opposition had got itself into exactly the same mess as the present Government, then in Opposition, have got themselves into now? Does he remember that, being then Chairman of the Doctors' and Dentists' Review Body I was asked to Chair the equivalent of a review body for the nurses, midwives and paramedical professions and that for a period of about six months my two review bodies had linked, through me, the entire structure of the National Health Service, upper echelon and salaries, under their control and we brought a rational structure of differentials into being, and that this rational structure gave universal satisfaction to everybody concerned? Does the noble Lord also recall that when I laid down my task I warned the then Minister at the Elephant and Castle—it was Mrs. Castle—that the system would simply slip back into the mess from which my colleagues and I had rescued it so long as there was no continuing review body? I wanted to see the Whitley Council schemes dissolved for the purposes of the nurses, midwives and paramedical professions and a standing review body set up instead.
The unrealistic factor in the present system of going about it is that the hands are the voice of Esau but the voice is the voice of Jacob. Behind it all always is not the employer, the National Health Service, but the Treasury. It is the Treasury who cooks up what is to be given away, not the employers. The whole of this negotiating machinery is largely bogus as it stands at the moment. That is why there is this slippage.
Why did the particular scheme of differentials which my committee and myself agreed upon give satisfaction? It was because we took an enormous amount of trouble to try to ascertain the right point at which to level peg the centre of gravity of the nursing professions, and we chose the station sergeant in the police force.
Baroness Young: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Earl, but after a Statement it is proper to ask a question rather than make a speech. If the noble Earl could put his point in the form of a question then others would have an opportunity to raise questions on the Statement.
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, my question to the Government spokesman was: does he remember that? I then asked what it was. However, if I have not the ear of the House or the Front Bench and they want me to wind up quickly, I will certainly do so. The secret of it was to level peg one thing with another. Does the noble Lord remember that that was what I did?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, the noble Earl had a distinguished role to play in these affairs in years past, but whatever negotiating machinery is devised somebody has to find the money to meet these wage settlements. If we were to give teeth to the Whitley Councils and, for example, were to give them a total say over how much money they have to dispose of, that would be, in effect, an open-ended commitment; and the Government cannot enter into an open-ended commitment. We have a clear and binding duty to control public expenditure one way or another, and to give, particularly, health service pay negotiators an open-ended ability to conduct their negotiations would be a wholly unacceptable imposition on the public purse.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, if the Government wish to remove inconsistencies and a sense of injustice on this question of arbitration in the public sector, why is it that arbitration under pressure was conceded to the Civil Service? Why is it that arbitration under pressure was conceded to the teachers? Now the noble Lord is saying that the Government must decide on the pay of the health service workers. Why cannot arbitration given to one section of the public sector be applied to others, and what alternative is there for resolving differences between the Government's workers and the Government themselves if arbitration is not available?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, the distinction between the award to the teachers and the civil servants on the one hand, and to the health service workers on the other hand, is that in the first two cases the awards were contained within existing cash limits of around 4 per cent. It has not been possible to do that with regard to the health service award. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the health service altogether employs something like a million people. Your Lordships will appreciate, therefore, that a very tiny percentage increase can mean a very substantial sum altogether in public expenditure.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that what irritates and annoys the TUC negotiators is that their highest level is the lowest level in public service? The Government are not fair at all. It is absolutely unfair for the police, for the armed services and, for example, the firemen, to have a certain high level, while, when the nurses want to negotiate on that basis, the Government forbid it. Is the noble Lord further aware that the activities yesterday of the
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Secretary of State, who, having made a firm appointment and called the TUC leaders to meet him, kept them waiting for four hours while he did a secret deal with the Royal College of Nursing, will mean that student nurses—the most hard-pressed of all—will get an extra 69p a week? Is the noble Lord aware that the Secretary of State may have succeeded in splitting the solidarity of Britain's health service workers, but the annoyance and the bitterness is so great that it may well turn into a pyrrhic victory for the Secretary of State?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, it is, of course, the case that the health service unions are already taking industrial action, and have been for some considerable time, while the nurses are not doing so, have not done so, and, so far as we know, will not do so. It is, thus, hardly surprising that, if there is any difficulty, my right honourable friend is anxious about the health service unions who have already taken industrial action. Indeed, as I said in answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, the other day, even emergency cover has in some places been withdrawn. However, it is the intention of my right honourable friend to get a settlement in this matter and that is why he has made the additional funds available to which I have referred today.
Lord Rochester: My Lords, have the Government considered the possibility of permitting disputes in the health service such as this to be submitted to some form of independent arbitration because, as he rightly says, the Government in the last resort are the pay master, the Government, as it were, being permitted to refrain from accepting the outcome of the independent arbitration subject to an affirmative resolution by both Houses of Parliament?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I do not think that the Government can abandon responsibility for determining the sums of money available for these matters. We have long said that it is necessary to contain the growth in public expenditure and we have, therefore, to contain the growth in funds available to the health service. That is why my right honourable friend has to set the total sums available to the Whitley Councils for the negotiations in respect of their different grades. Within those total sums, it is, of course, open to the Whitley Councils to allocate the money as best they can and as they think fit after discussion between the management and staff sides.

Housing Policy
Debate resumed.
4.4 p.m.
Lord Roberthall: My Lords, perhaps we can now return to another, much longer-term problem. The House is indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for being given the opportunity to discuss this important matter. Let me begin by adding my congratulations to those of the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, to the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, He will hardly believe me when I say that I hung on every word that he said. I am afraid that this may sound very fulsome, but the

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fact is that, for the reasons he gave, I was forced a few years ago to become the owner of a very long lease and I suffered all the disadvantages which he has so eloquently and with so much experience explained to us. On a slightly personal note—but I am sure that the noble Lord will be interested—I was so much irritated by the situation that I found the ground landlord and managed to buy the ground lease from him, because a lease is worth very little indeed to the ground landlord, whereas tenants are personally interested in such matters. I managed to persuade the other tenants to form a tenants' association and since then we have overcome all of our troubles.
I return to the wider issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey. I do not want to say very much on the question of the sale of council houses. My own view is that, subject to a small limit which the council ought to sell and to another small limit which the council must retain because of its obligations in certain cases to find accomodation, this is a matter that might be left to the local authority; that is, the decision about which way its policy should go. If the constituents want a great many sales, then they can have them. However, that is just a passing comment.
I want to speak mainly about the question of the Rent Acts. As my noble friend Lord Robbins has already informed the House, this is a question about which a very large number of economists—who, especially at the moment, are disagreeing like mad on many matters— are very much agreed. The Rent Acts are a real anomaly. There is nothing in the whole economic system which corresponds in the least to the market for rented houses. It was orignally introduced in the First World War. In a war everyone has to make sacrifices, and often the best way to do that is by rationing. It is very difficult to ration houses except where they are to be used as billets. The Government felt that they had to do something about it; the owners were in a monopoly situation and they were prevented from exploiting the monopoly. That was the foundation which left this extraordinary legacy from which we are now suffering. They did not get rid of them in the inter-war period—I suppose that they could have been introduced again for the same reasons. However, it is now approximately 37 years since the end of the last war and the matter has become increasingly complex.
In trying to prepare myself for this debate, I went to the Westminster Council Housing Department and obtained some of the literature that they provide. I was absolutely appalled at the large amount of it. There was a large table which was simply covered with pamphlets. I had intended to take one of each, but I felt that I could not face doing so and, therefore, I took only about seven. They are admirable pamphlets. They are very well drafted and, as your Lordships will hardly be surprised to know—I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, will not be surprised—a great many of them conclude by saying that the position is not altogether clear and that it is hoped, therefore, that people in doubt will get legal advice and that they will probably be able to get legal aid to assist them.
To summerise what has been said so much better by the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, the present Rent Acts
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aggravate the situation. They diminish the supply and they frustrate the demand. The result is completely unclear. The community is divided into those who have what used to be called, until a short time ago, a protected tenancy, and those who want rented accommodation and who find it extremely difficult to obtain. In some towns where there is not a bad housing situation—for example, in the university towns—people go out of their way to let rooms to non-residents because non-residents cannot get protection under the Act; they are rather nervous anyway and they do not like to go round and get an assessment for a fair rent. So the people who are there because they have had to change their jobs and would like rented accommodation are frustrated.
The result is that the situation is now very complex indeed. I do not think that it would be possible to get rid of the Acts and the present situation in one blow. I think that it will have to be phased out very carefully, with particular attention being paid to the question of security, which I notice the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, mentioned.
But more important than the care with which the situation is phased out, is that I do not believe it would be acceptable to a great majority of the community if the Rent Acts were dropped at a time when there is still a very severe housing shortage. I think that the Government can take a certain amount of credit for the Housing Act 1980 in this respect. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, rather than the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, on this. The Government moved in the right direction by easing the position for people who wanted to let rooms in housing which they occupy and by the shorthold tenancy. But although the Government have moved in one direction with which I would agree, they have moved much further back in an opposite direction, because they have cut the allocation for house building by between 40 and 50 per cent. since 1979. If we are to have a satisfactory end to the Rent Acts, it is essential that the supply of houses should be increased. We are going back on the whole housing situation because of the severe restrictions on new council house building.
At the same time, the problem of the deterioration of existing stock is getting worse. So the value of a protected tenancy will become greater again and the difficulty of finding rented accommodation will also become greater. From this point of view, the programme of the SDP and the Alliance should certainly commend itself much more than that of the Government, because in its first modest stimulus to the economy —-and to start with it has to be a modest one it intends to do a substantial amount in the construction trades and will pay particular attention to the question of rehabilitation and modernisation of the large existing stock. I hope that it will also do something about councils owning a great many houses and doing nothing about them—not modernising them or letting people live in them in districts where there is a bad housing shortage and thus giving an invitation to squatters. No one likes to do anything about squatters in that situation. It is altogether a most unfortunate affair.
To sum up, in the long term we ought to have a plan for phasing out the Rent Acts, and in the immediate future we should pay much more attention to improving and modernising the stock of houses.
4.14 p.m.
Lord Northfield: My Lords, as one who is involved actually in selling off Government-owned houses, I want to say a few words and to give the House some of the facts and figures and the opportunities that this creates for tenants. I would introduce what I have to say in this way. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, hinted at the revolution which is happening under our feet. The average salary and wage-earner has only two ways of getting Government help in accumulating capital. The first is that he pays into a pension fund, if he is one of those exempt from the state scheme, or into life insurance. Those two kinds of ownership are now transforming our ownership of capital assets in society—a revolution of which, in my view, we are taking no heed. For example, we do not realise that pension funds buy four-fifths of Government stock, and that the Post Office pension fund has £½ million a day coming in and is almost finding it hard to know where to invest. A similar revolution is happening through sales of houses and the Government subsidy that goes to them in tax relief. This is spreading home ownership and capital, and I very much welcome it. Just as over half the ownership of shares quoted on the Stock Exchange is in the hands of pension funds and life insurance companies, so more than half of our housing stock is now in individual ownership.
I want to talk about my experience of this in Telford. People perhaps do not realise that Telford New Town is a huge undertaking. We are building there a city the acreage of Coventry. This is no pocket handkerchief size operation. When it comes to this issue of selling houses, we are lucky in that we have plenty of public sector houses. I am, luckily, excused the party warfare over the issue of when it is right to sell. Indeed, I may say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that we are not selling old persons' bungalows because they are in short supply, and we have taken what I think is a proper decision to hold those back and simply to sell the houses. I am sure that she will approve of that, just as the noble Lord on the Front Bench opposite will approve of it.
What, then, is our experience? We have 11,000 houses and we have already sold 1,000. We are selling at the rate of two a day, completing two every day. I might say to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who raised this issue, that that is a technical reason why we cannot go much faster, and I should like to explain it to him another time. I think that perhaps the basic system is not understood in the House. Tenants receive a 30 per cent. deduction from the valuation if they wish to buy. That deduction can rise to 50 per cent. if they have been tenants for a very long time. But there is a floor price—the original cost of the house in the first place—below which they cannot go in buying their house.
What does this mean? The opportunities for tenants are really quite extraordinary. On our earlier estates, built 10 or more years ago, the average selling price, with a 30 per cent. discount, is between £5,900 and £6,500. Many, of course, have more than a 30 per cent. discount. Of course, some houses are selling at more than £6,500—say, at £7,500. Let us look at the advantage of this to tenants today on those earlier estates. If we take their mortgage payment on these figures—and, as I say, they are buying
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at £5,000, £6,000 or £7,000—less the tax relief that they receive (the 30 per cent. tax relief that I started talking about; the subsidy to home ownership that we give through the taxation system) on these earlier estates it is incredible that their mortgage payments are no more than between £45 to £60 a month. But, if they stayed in the public sector, the rents of those houses would be now between £60 to £70 a month. That is by any measure quite a bargain in present-day society. With rents due to be increased a good deal further in July, the disparity on these earlier estates between what it costs to go on renting and what it costs to move over to home ownership will become even greater. The bargain will look even better.
On later estates, built within the last 10 years, of course, the houses are much higher in price. We now have houses built at considerably greater cost, double and treble the cost compared to those earlier figures. But I have done some calculations on our average houses and, again, the comparison bears out. If some of our later tenants, buying more expensive houses from us, take out a 100 per cent. mortgage, their mortgage payments are now between £100 and £110 a month. But if they kept on renting, their rent would be something over £80 a month, and it will go up even more with the recently announced rent increases due to Government withdrawal of subsidy. So even on the later houses the bargain is worth having. For something like the same price as the rent, you get into home ownership. I believe in this passionately and am pressing it as hard as I can, because we are lucky to have a surplus of houses and can introduce people to this form of ownership.
What effect is all this having? On our earlier estates, where we had got to a point where it was difficult to let some of the houses, the transformation is quite extraordinary. On our first estate, which was beginning to become a bit run down, we have already, on what one might call the worst houses in some respects—they are all absolutely first-class houses inside, but they had as an estate become slightly frowned upon—sold one-third and we shall soon be up to selling half of them.
Now people spend their weekends painting, clearing the garden, putting up fences and all the rest of it, and you see the bright smiles on their faces. You have to put up with the fact that they go to immense lengths to express their own personality on some of the outside decorations. But why not? It is a free country, and I am delighted to see it. I put up with the plastic stone and the gnomes, and all the other things, because it is a price worth paying to introduce people to this form of capital accumulation.
I come to one other point before I wind up. We also are now starting in my town the system of equity sharing. I should like again to tell Members of this Chamber our experience. Equity sharing is new in Britain to some extent. It works by our selling half the equity, or the builder in this case selling half the equity of the house. We, the new town development corporation, buy the other half, and we rent the other half of the house to the purchaser. He is buying half his house and renting half his house, and he can trade up. He can begin to buy another 10 per cent., or 20 per cent., until he finally owns 100 per cent. of his equity.

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This is a system which my new town is pressing hard. We finally agreed, on behalf of the new towns, the system of legal agreement which the building societies would accept in order to advance mortgages on the 50 per cent. that the purchaser is buying. This is helping developers to sell their houses. We have 79 applications already. If I may say one thing to the noble Lord without breaking the Addison Rules, if we need some more money to press on with equity sharing, I hope the noble Lord will be helping me along, because we have to buy half the houses to get the system going.
To take the small starter homes which today are selling in my town at about £18,000, if a man buys one with a 100 per cent. mortgage from the builder, in this case his mortgage payments a month are about £150. But if he does it on this new system of buying half of it and renting half, his rent and the mortgage together—half on mortgage, half rent—is about £100, or £102, something like that. So for a tenner a week he is getting his foot into home ownership and he can gradually build on his 50 per cent. up to 100 per cent. It is a price worth paying and it is a marvellous way to get people accustomed to the idea of owning their own homes.
What do we learn from all this? I see I have only one or two minutes left. It has one disadvantage which I must not disguise. If you sell too many in the circumstances and have too many empty ones on the market, it can reduce the general price and value of these houses. As a result, some people who perhaps have bought their houses and who have moved to a job in another town have difficulty in selling, because the price is not holding up due to flooding of the market. We must not go too fast. We must be left to judge carefully about the pace at which we go, otherwise we begin to have a bad effect on the mobility of labour, and a bad name with the people we got into buying houses in this way in the first place.
The good effects outweigh those bad effects. First, we are getting a proper social balance in the town, a marvellous difference on particular estates, and in the pride that people take. Secondly, we are getting, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and other noble Lords have said, the great advantage of the spread of capital ownership. It helps the saving habit because people can see the bricks and mortar, the asset into which their personal saving is going, and so the whole habit of saving is reinforced and is a good one.
Thirdly, we get the pride in ownership. This shows as you go around, and not only in what you see. I remember when the Minister of State, Mr. Stanley, came we called on one of our tenants who was buying. Mr. Stanley actually helped the tenants to start painting the stairs. They were there with the paint pot. I swear I had not arranged all this, but the point was that the Minister came along and took a hand in helping to paint the stairs. This sort of thing is going on all round now, and how wonderful it is to see.
I come to my final point, and I must not overstretch my welcome. It is important for one final matter that has not been touched on in this debate. People today want identity. This was drilled into me by Eric Lyons, who recently died. He was one
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of the best of the 20th century architects. He said to me that architecture is about sense of place. What people are doing more than anything in buying their own houses, apart from saving, pride, and all that, is that they are searching for identity in an anonymous society. They can express themselves in this house which they own, which they can arrange as they want. The biggest battle today is to give people that chance of expressing themselves and seeking particular identity in this anonymous society that is so full of estates, bus queues, and all the rest of it.
This is a battle which I have to take on with the developers in my own town. I have fought them over the years—friendly fighting; we do not fall out because I want them to build more and more in my new town—and I try to tell them all the time that they must create housing with identity. Let us stop the serried ranks, and the estates without character. I have proved in my town anyway that (a) if we can let people buy their own houses, and (b) encourage developers to build houses with particular identities, the sales improve, and even the developers come back to me and thank me for pushing them further up the market than they ever really intended to go. Those are just a few words of experience in a short time about one new town. I am sure it can be mirrored all over the country, but I must say that I have immense fun in doing it and I am very satisfied at the social effects that the experiment is having.
4.27 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Southwark: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, for his knowledgeable and helpful maiden speech. I began by thinking that I would share some sympathy with him because I made a maiden speech on this same subject of housing almost exactly two years ago, but I quickly realised that there was no need for sympathy but only for admiration. He knows a great deal more about the relationships of private landlords and tenants than the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich says I know about council housing. I wish I did know a lot about it, although I suspect that if I knew a lot about the finance involved I should be rather a boring person at times. It is a winsome characteristic of his, if I may just say this, to pay his friends generous compliments which often have rather little relationship to reality.
I have recently returned from my first visit to New York. I suppose I am a good deal later in going there than most Members of this House. I was driven in a taxi from Kennedy Airport to the Upper West Side, which meant that we went through parts of the Bronx and Harlem. The shock of seeing so much urban devastation is still with me. I saw street after street with decaying tenement blocks, many of them half burnt out; boarded up shops; pot-holed roads, and so on. All this is in a major city in the nation which many of us regard as probably the most wealthy in the world. Having gone through that experience, I suppose it was slightly less of a shock to then travel, as I did quite frequently, on the subway, sometimes coming back in the evening, and finding myself looking at armed policemen on the platforms and sometimes travelling in the very coach in which I was riding.

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I start with that brief personal experience, which I realise is striking a rather different note from any that we have heard so far this afternoon, because it underlines what happens when a nation, or a city, seems at least unwilling to pay the cost of adequate housing for all its people—something which is surely fundamental to a good society. Like a predecessor of mine, Bishop Garbett, later Archbishop of York, I believe it is a matter of deep Christian concern to try to ensure that everyone who truly needs it has access to suitable housing. This is a subject on which it is right from that point of view, to have some moral passion, if you like, and I am sure that is shared by noble Lords in all parts of the House; it is not—I hope it is not—a party matter in any way.
As has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and others, in this century we have seen a massive switch from rented accommodation, which was roughly 90 per cent. of all housing in 1914, to owned accommodation, which is now between 55 and 60 per cent. I am as clear as anyone in believing that there have been many very good effects of that shift, and the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, made that clear in his lively way, looking at Telford in particular. But there are some cautionary notes that must be struck about how far the balance should go, and there have been hints about that this afternoon. The point has not been spelt out as clearly as it needs to be, however, and I shall suggest some points in relation to it.
First, there remains massive need which is never likely to be met by ownership. I use the word "never" advisedly; it may diminish a little more, but I ask your Lordships to think about the substantial number of low paid people, single people, particularly the elderly, single parents and others. I believe that the resources which the state, local authorities, housing associations or perhaps housing co-operatives—there are many variants involved—can bring to bear are the only ones that are likely to meet, and continue to meet effectively, that sort of need, and I am sure nobody would deny that. However, I think we in a way fasten on to the problems that are connected with the private sector and the Rent Acts and all we have heard about this afternoon to the point where we forget that there are other ways of meeting those needs.
I often question to myself whether we need grieve too much about the rapid shrinkage of the private sector, since I question whether housing is a sphere in which we should be thinking about what has been called today "a proper return on capital". In an age of high interest rates, people will be looking for a return which seems to me to be inapposite in relation to the housing need out of which so often it is being met. My first point, therefore, in this connection is this massive need which we must keep in our sights, and I am very conscious of that as I go around South London and look, in particular, at the inner city areas there.
Some control of council house sales is surely needed by local authorities for the very reasons that were given by the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, in relation to a new town which, if I understood him correctly, is exempt from some of those considerations. I argued about that two years ago in relation to rural areas and
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places like Northumberland; I think it is still also relevant in the big cities, for slightly different reasons, particularly where they have huge numbers of flats which nobody is likely ever to want to buy, and the balance is therefore altered.
Secondly, ownership does not solve all the problems, as we have heard this afternoon. There are many owners of property, elderly owners particularly, who are unable to look after their property. Bad maintenance or lack of maintenance and decay is not limited to over-pressed local authorities. Immobility is a very real problem; when you cannot sell your house, that can be just as difficult as being unable to acquire rented accommodation. There are problems of that kind and I believe that if we get the balance too far the other way, we may find that those problems become very acute indeed.
The third is a more general point: one which I find rather difficult to express, but I believe it to be very important. There is a sense in which what we are observing at the present time is an increasing polarisation of society, and there is a real danger that we shall begin to regard those who can live only in rented accommodation as somehow in a very low grade sub-group of their own. You can see something of the shift when you hear people talking about "welfare housing" and making the suggestion, which I have heard more than once, that owning is good and renting is bad, that everybody who makes an effort can own but that some people cannot be bothered; just as everybody who wants a job can get one, but some people do not try. I appreciate that I am exaggerating and making a parallel of it, but there is a slippage in that direction and we need to watch it carefully because there is no question of "better" or "worse" about it: there are appropriate categories of accommodation for different needs. In all this, we are not looking at a straight conflict between council housing and owner occupation. There are some in betweens, and they are very important; tenants co-operatives, housing association and so on may yet prove the way into the gap we are looking at this afternoon.
For all those reasons, I urge that local authorities and other bodies, especially those in hard-pressed inner areas, should have the opportunity to preserve a balance between houses for sale and houses for rent in order to prevent an excessive swing in either direction—we are certainly remedying the previous one—and that they should have the financial strength to preserve the existing housing stock in good condition (failure to do so is a most alarming feature at the present time) and should be able to do something to meet the considerable need which still exists in those areas in terms of people who are simply without housing at all. I am sure we all share the deep concern of the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, about seeing people properly housed in the way they want to be housed. I simply want to make sure that we keep our vision whole at this time.
Viscount Massereene and Ferrard: My Lords, I knew the area in New York about which the right reverend Prelate talked because I used to go to America a lot and—
Lord Vaizey: My Lords, I would remind my noble friend that this is a short debate and that, if he has not put his name down to speak, it is very unfair to those who have done so for him to intervene.
Viscount Massereene and Ferrard: I was simply going to point out that in that area a great number of the occupants wreck the houses—it is a violent area—but otherwise I agreed with the remainder of the right reverend Prelate's speech.
4.39 p.m.
Lord Harris of High Cross: My Lords, thanks to the remarkable self-discipline of earlier speakers, the pressure of time is not now so acute that I must refrain from pursuing the normal courtesies. Therefore, I wish first to thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for putting down the Motion and giving us an opportunity to review this important subject. I wish also to add my congratulations to the maiden speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine. I too had the great privilege over a period of 15 to 20 years of knowing his father very well. I recall his father as a Conservative with marked classical liberal leanings, which brought us into much agreement on contentious issues, and I have no doubt that his father would have been proud to hear the eloquent and thoughtful speech which we enjoyed this afternoon.
I am sure an apology is called for because I am the fourth, luckily the last, economist to address the House out of a list of no more than a dozen. I would want to add my voice to that of my noble friend Lord Robbins and say that I can think of no issue in political economy on which professional economists of widely differing tendencies are in more substantial agreement than on the unholy mess which successive Governments have made of the housing market. It is surely worth pondering that, despite the spending of mounting billions of pounds over half a century by Governments of both parties, housing has become a growing cause of human misery. I would go so far from the Cross-Benches as to argue that the so-called "housing shortage" is largely the creation of politicians in their destruction and demolition of the market for rented accommodation.
It becomes a little easier almost week by week to assert the economist's basic proposition that prices do affect supply and demand. As we see with the common agricultural policy, an artificially high price will increase supply and reduce demand and thereby create an embarrassing surplus of farm products. In precisely the same way rent control, by holding the price below the market level, will increase demand for accommodation, reduce the supply, and create the famous housing shortage. I am afraid that the real handicap which the occupants of the Labour Benches suffer is that this kind of logic is simultaneously irresistible and unacceptable.
Noble Lords have said that rent control was introduced in 1915 as an emergency wartime measure. As a self-confessed market economist I have no difficulty in defending that kind of intervention. My noble friend Lord Robbins has taught in his writings over many years that price control, and indeed rationing, are appropriate to a condition of siege, and for one simple reason. Whereas a rise in price can generally
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be relied upon in an open market to call forth an increased supply that helps to redress the shortage, no such corrective is possible in the abnormal circumstances of war.
The trouble was that instead of ending rent control with the end of the emergency that was its justification, successive Governments have, frankly, found it electorally profitable in the short run—which is the only run they know—to extend control and even to grant life tenancy into the second generation. As my noble friend Lord Robbins has said, the ill-effects of drying-up the supply were not immediately visible, simply because houses last a long time before they need replacing. But under rent control they just do not get replaced.
It is no wonder that politicians really thought that at last they had stumbled on a free lunch. They could indulge their favourite passion for doing good, or at least for feeling good, and at the same time serve their own electoral interest by collecting millions of grateful votes for keeping rents down. The cost was obligingly paid for by the landlords, who had conveniently little political weight. We have heard about the injustices between prosperous tenants and often poorer landlords, and also between favoured tenants in controlled property and their unlucky neighbours, forced on to lengthening queues for council houses or into uncontrolled houses at inflated rents.
The lesson of every country that has resorted to rent control has been that market forces are not so easily cheated. As the Francis Report conceded back in 1971, the combination of low rents and security of tenure ensured that no new family houses were built for letting. Even worse, by holding rents below the rising cost of maintenance and repair, especially in an age of inflation, political expediency has caused the decay and rapid decline in the number of houses under control. The statistics are remarkable. From a peak of 8½ million after the recent war, the number of private tenancies fell to 4½ million in 1960, and today is 2¾ million.
I followed the right reverend Prelate in his observations about the sorry and sad sight of decay in New York. New York is a classic case of the devastation created by rent control. It was indeed the universal phenomenon of devastation by rent control that produced a verdict from a Swedish professor, Assar Linbeck—of sufficiently good Social Democratic credentials to appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Robert-hall. In his book, The Political Economy of the New Left, he wrote as follows:
" In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing ".
It is a by-product of this destructive policy that has caused Governments to mount the treadmill of building houses to let at subsidised rents in a vain effort to make good the shortage contrived by their own past follies. Others have spoken of the ill-effects on the mobility of labour, and I would underline an observation by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey—that the effect of rent control has often been to force many people into the market for buying a home when they would much prefer the convenience and flexibility of renting in a free market.

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The pretext for all of this costly and damaging policy has always been that poor families cannot afford market rents. But this is no new discovery. Poor families cannot afford sufficient food or sufficient clothing. It has been increasingly accepted, over a very long period, that the appropriate solution to this social problem of poverty is to top up their incomes in some way, not to fake the price system, with all the consequent distortions of supply, demand, and consumer choice.
There is not much time to go into alternative policies. My preference would be that of the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey—along the lines of straightforward repeal. We should sweep away the damaging rent controls as well as the wasteful, indiscriminate subsidies. We should address ourselves to those in need by introducing some coherent system of personal and portable housing allowances that would not be tied to staying put in the same home. In my view we should also phase out mortgage relief in return for progressive cuts in the rates of income tax.
In the past the partial and piecemeal efforts of Conservative Governments to tackle these problems have been frustrated by what the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, acknowledged was the threat that the next Labour Government would repeal any sensible measure in this field. I hope that the noble Lords remaining on the dwindling Labour Benches will forgive me for speaking frankly, but the emotional muddle of the last Labour Cabinet was revealed by a chastened Joel Barnett in his remarkable recent memoir, Inside the Treasury, which I commend to present occupants of the Labour Front Bench. He wrote as follows:
" Talk of increasing council house rents and it was as if you were planning to snatch children from their mothers or put them to work down a mine."
I sympathise with Mr. Barnett, and know what it is to be made to feel that kind of guilt.
But I want to conclude on this more positive note. We should not allow that kind of mentality to obscure the merits of radical reform to remedy a housing problem that has been caused by an unholy mixture of misplaced benevolence, intellectual confusion and electoral opportunism.
4.50 p.m.
Lord Taylor of Gryfe: My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, on his maiden speech. Once again it has emerged in this House that we have a great fund of knowledge and expertise in the various subjects that are discussed. I hope we shall hear more from the noble Lord. I should like to apologise, too, to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey. I am sure he will understand that the difficulty of getting from an airport to this House is considerable these days. Indeed, it was much quicker to fiy from Scotland to London than it was to get from Victoria into the City today.
I have an abiding interest in the housing problem, and it derives from an early experience which I am sure was shared by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who I am glad to see in his place. Both of us were members of the Glasgow City Council, and Glasgow had the unfortunate and unenviable distinction of being at that time the worst-housed city in Europe. It was not
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uncommon in my constituency to find six, seven, and eight people sharing a single apartment dwelling. I can recall frequently visiting houses that were damp-infested and I could see babies in their prams whose faces were scarred by the bites of vermin and insects. That was the situation in the City of Glasgow.
I believe the majority of houses had no bathroom and one-third of the houses had outside toilets. It was in that environment that we tried to develop our rational housing policy. It was a city of dull grey tenements; a city in which the name "Gorbals" was synonymous with slums and squalor. So we took power, and we decided that this was the major social evil in the city. We sent in the bulldozers and knocked down the slums. We embarked on a housing programme of 6,000 houses a year, because we had a waiting list of 60,000 at that time. We created new housing estates. We were building the new Jerusalem, and so intent were we on this that we decided we would have no licensed premises in these new housing estates. That was a major disaster, for a very simple social reason, and that was that in the process of building houses we forgot about all the other aspects of human activity and community life.
We destroyed the city centres, because the city centres were largely made up of the old tenements, and we built the new cities outside of town. As a result of that policy, of the total number of houses in the City of Glasgow—300,000 houses in the entire city—185,000 houses are local authority houses. That means that there was a large vested interest in local authority politics in Glasgow and in other areas at that time. I read the interesting statistic the other day, when someone was surveying the Coatbridge and Airdrie prospects, that 80 per cent. of the people in Coatbridge live in local authority housing.
I think it is time, having seen that interesting experiment, to take stock of its advantages and its weaknesses. First, it has many advantages. We gave some people the opportunity of greater comfort and an ability to raise children in a happier social environment. We cut dramatically the rates of infantile mortality which were a consequence of neglect and slum living in the east end of Glasgow. We built new schools which were exciting and interesting, and which provided better opportunities for raising educational standards.
But, on the other side, it is important to review the weaknesses of our achievement. First, all the tenants were taken off the register of greatest need, and therefore we tended to create a one-class community. There was no diversity in that community at all; they all came from the same social strata. That in itself does not create the diversity which makes community life interesting and exciting. Secondly, we destroyed communities. These people had enjoyed a very intimate personal relationship, even in the Gorbals, and they now found themselves in a new environment, and we did not pay enough attention to creating community interests.
Thirdly, we created very large housing estates, many of them bigger than many cities in this country, and we controlled and directed these estates from a central bureaucratic control. There was little personal or tenant involvement. Of course, tenants' associations grew up, largely as complaints bureaux, largely to knock at the doors of the local councillors to get

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the water fixed or the damp-proofing attended to. Involvement in running that area was never given to the tenants. So, as I say, you almost alienated people in the new environment which you created.
Recently, in anticipation of a debate in this House, I had a look at the poverty problem in the City of Glasgow. I discovered that the poverty was no longer in the slum areas but that there was greater poverty out in the new housing estates because, first, people had to travel to their work, and travel is expensive. Secondly, many of them had taken on hire-purchase commitments for new carpets or for electrical devices which they had never formerly enjoyed, and unemployment was hitting these areas hard. So you had created new communities but you had not solved the poverty problem.
Finally, we had created a situation in which there was a lack of attention to amenity—sports and other recreation activities. If I may say so in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, the new towns have planned community living far better than the local authority housing estates, with their obsession to get so many houses built as the measure of their achievement. The local authorities had a new dilemma. First, they found that the housing revenue account was running into deficit, but in the light of the poverty situation in many of these areas they were reluctant to increase the rents to economic levels—and this was understandable. If I may say so, too, in a community or a city where 60 per cent. of the people lived in council houses the electors were reluctant to elect councillors who would take a realistic view of council house rents.
So, in the light of this interesting stocktaking in housing, I think we must look at new directions for housing. As so often is the case in the political debate, the Social Democratic Party tries to strike some kind of middle way between the doctrinaire views of the local authority enthusiast and the private enterprise enthusiast on the other side. As the right reverend Prelate has said, there are many possibilities for diversity in house-building and management. I was interested in the fact that he observed the squalor of Harlem, and was upset. If he had taken his taxi just a little further out of town he would have come across two large housing estates. One is called Rochdale, in memory of the Rochdale pioneers of Lancashire, because it is a co-operative housing development in which several thousand people are living together in co-operative housing. Then, further up the road there is Co-op City, once again a co-op housing development in which the people own their houses and run that enterprise as a co-operative development.
There are three forms of co-operative housing which might be pursued: management co-operatives in which people share the management; non-equity co-operatives in which they do not have an equity stake in the development, and co-partnership associations in which the people own the houses and work as co-partners in the community. There is a great variety of forms of management of community housing which ought to be explored and we ought to be looking at new directions. Similarly, I was delighted to hear in the debate so many references to the improvement of the existing stock of houses. That is so much
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encouraged now by the creation of housing associations. They are doing a tremendous job in rehabilitating desert areas such as those to be found in the City of Glasgow.
So, my Lords, the Social Democratic Party is committed to decentralisation in the running of housing estates. It believes in handing back power to the people. We want neighbourhood management staff to relate to district committees and made up of tenants. Within the housing budgets, although some councils will wish to build more council houses, there must be a much higher priority for rehabilitation and maintenance. In all housing policy, as emphasised by the right reverend Prelate, there must be care. We must not be so market orientated and so profit orientated that we forget to care for those people who are not able to enjoy home ownership and who are not able to pay an economic rent. People who are single-parent families, the aged and the sick must be cared for in any reasonable social housing policy. That is the view of our party and these Benches.
5.2 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment (Lord Bellwin): My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Vaizey for introducing this debate. I confess, listening to it, that looking over perhaps some part of a lifetime in this field of housing I find it so frustrating to know before I begin that the time I have available to me to talk on this massive subject is so short that I can only help a little by speaking a little quicker and perhaps hoping that your Lordships will bear with me if I take perhaps a little longer in presenting the Government's position than I think perhaps is permissible. I hope my noble friend Lord Vaizey will bear with me. That is what I would like to do. I will read very carefully all that has been said in the debate, because there have been some excellent speeches and I shall want to study very carefully and discuss their contents with my colleagues. May I add my own congratulations to my noble friend Lord Coleraine for a splendid speech. As the the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, said, it was certainly of a kind to make one want to listen to him much more—and this I look forward to doing in the future. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Gryfe, really got into the nuts and bolts of the whole field of housing. How dearly I would like to have a whole debate for some hours so that we could talk of that !— because, frankly, that really is what housing is about, about people, about the needs, about the economics, certainly; for if we ignore that we get nowhere. But at the end of the day it is also about what have we achieved, what were the mistakes, what was the slum clearance as opposed to the rebuild of the housing scene.
It is so vast a subject that my heart sinks slightly as I embark upon trying to respond to the comments made so far and at the same time to give some indication of how the Government feel about these matters. It has been the aim of this Government to make all parts of the housing market more responsive to the genuine needs of people and to break down the barriers between the different providers and users of housing. There are two key elements in this. The first is the clear, unequivocal acceptance of the fact that the

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great majority of people do want to own their own homes and that meeting this need must be our top priority.
In saying that, I am absolutely agreed that there are categories of people who do not want to do so. There are those who do not need to; and their position also is part of the whole debate. But we delude ourselves if we do not acknowledge that the majority want to own their own homes. All the main political parties talk about the importance of owner-occupation. Indeed, frankly, they have no option; for 90 per cent. of households whose head is under 45 years, according to the general housing survey, prefer to own their own homes. But the present Government have been working actively to make it possible for people to achieve this goal.
The second element is that we must make the best use of the limited resources of houses, land and money available. That means there must be a sensible balance, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Gryfe, has said, between rehabilitation and new build; and the resources of the public and private sectors must be used effectively together in a way which they have not always been so used in the past.
The Motion we are debating today rightly stresses the importance of home ownership. There is in the country, as every speaker has said, a deep-rooted desire for it. It is also close to the hearts of millions of council tenants as well as of other aspiring owners. Home ownership gives people a stronger stake in society; it encourages them, as the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, said, in what 1 thought was a splendid speech. We shall have to have him as a salesman on this side of the House—except that for council house selling, frankly, we do not need a salesman. The case is self made.
What else does ownership do? It encourages an attitude of self-reliance and independence. That is why this Government took office with a pledge to give many more low-income households—and this is the point—the chance to realise their dream of home ownership. But the cornerstone of that policy is the right to buy, and I should like to tell your Lordships the response there has been to this. Without going into a great deal of detail, I sum it up simply by saying that it is estimated that by the end of March 1983 over 400,000 council tenants in England will have bought their property under the present Administration.
Well, you can talk of the 6i million council tenants and I think, to answer the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark, who said that we should maintain a balance, that he is right. We should maintain a balance. But what is a balance? Is a balance 3 million? Is it 2 million? Is it 5 million? What is a balance? Everyone will have their own view as to that. But I would suggest that there is little fear for the right reverend Prelate that there will ever be so great an imbalance in the total number of sales as to prevent local authorities from providing rented accommodation for those who need it and indeed, for those who would want it.
The figure that I have mentioned is, I submit respectfully, a huge response and a vindication of the Government's policy. The noble Lord, Lord Northfield, was so right when he said that while some theorisea
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about the quality and the redistribution of wealth, the fact is that this, a Conservative Government, are doing something about it. They are doing, I submit, more than has ever been done before about further equalisation of wealth through this policy. And is it not ironical that this is a policy that really was fought so much by the party opposite!
There are wider benefits, too, to the industrial purchaser. For example, there is normally greater ease of mobility in the owner-occupied sector, although we are taking steps to improve it in the public sector. too. There are social advantages in mixing forms of tenure, rather than having whole areas of cities consisting of nothing but council housing. Again, the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, said; "Go round the council estates and see what is happening there! See what happens when the council homes have been purchased and are being looked after and the gardens looked after!" I remember when I first introduced myself to the selling of council houses in Leeds in 1968 that one of the fiercest opponents of it said; "Do you realise that the tenants will paint their houses in different colours?" I said that I sincerely hoped that they would. But I tell you that was done by very responsible politicians. They thought that would be dreadful. It is true they paint them different colours and do their gardens different ways—and thank goodness for it—because that really uplifts the whole of housing. If the right reverend Prelate is so rightly concerned that we should not have polariastion, I would ask: What is polarisation but massive council estates which clearly set up not individual tenants or owners but whole areas of polarisation? I will not say more about this subject. I think the case is made: it is game, set and match, if I may use that expression at this particular time.
1 should therefore now like to turn to other aspects of the Government's policy of promoting home ownership. Many local authorities own land which is unlikely to be developed for many years; yet builders and developers badly need land now so as to meet the demand for low-cost starter homes for many people who at present will appear on council waiting lists. The merits of forging a partnership between local authorities and developers to ensure that houses acceptable to all concerned are actually built may appear self-evident, but it does represent a radical change in the way of doing business both for authorities and builders. This Government have done more than any other to promote this new approach. We have been urging local authorities to recognise that a great many of the housing needs in their areas do not require the traditional solution of building homes for rent. Making land available to builders for starter homes is one direct form of help, and authorities can sell on terms which ensure that a low land price is fully reflected in the price of the homes. Again, there is scope here for a whole new debate so that we could speak at length on this topic. At this time, however, I would only say that we warmly welcome the efforts of the Housebuilders' Federation in telling local authorities of the help their members can offer. They are doing this now in a very active way and we are very pleased to see it.
Perhaps I should refer to one point made by my noble friend Lord Vaizey and assure him, in case

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there should be those who have any doubts, that the Government remain committed to the continuation of the principle of mortgage interest relief. The limit on relief, currently £25,000, is carefully reviewed every year. In the Budget we also reduced the cost of buying a house by increasing the threshold above which stamp duty is payable from £20,000 to £25,000. I welcome, also, the movement within the private building sector towards building the kind of accommodation they always said they would not build; namely, accommodation for the single person and similar types of accommodation. They are building that today and they are building in the inner cities. They will build more in the inner cities if local authorities would make more land available to them. In my opinion, that is a very great contribution towards the whole problem of housing stock.
The Government are very concerned about the adequate supply of land and therefore, among a lot of other measures, we have introduced registers of used and under-used land in public ownership. Three hundred and fifty-eight have now been published, covering some 9,600 sites totalling 87,000 acres. The experience of the first 35 registers—I think this is very interesting—published last year suggests that half of this land may be suitable for development. I am concerned that there are still a few local authorities whose planning policies place excessive restrictions on density and make it difficult to get low-cost home ownership schemes off the ground. I would urge them to look again at their planning policies in this respect.
Is it not good to know that activity is now picking up in the public sector as well as in the private sector? I am hoping that local authorities will now make use of these hundreds of millions of pounds of capital receipts now in their hands so that they can do with them what they claim they have been unable to do in the past. In other words, if they want to rehabilitate their homes, that is fine; if they want to build some more, that is up to them. They can increase their housing capital allocations so to do, and they now have the kind of manoeuvrability and flexibility which has not pertained for quite some time. I hope that they will make the most of that.
I am not going to rise to the bait by talking about the politics of the numbers of homes built. Circumstances have changed. The postwar shortfall in numbers of dwellings compared to the numbers of households has created a new situation, and we should be quite wrong to be diverted from the mainstream of this subject—certainly of today's debate—by going into that, but I hope time may be made available on another occasion so that we can do so.
The final theme I want to refer to is the private rented sector, about which so many of your Lordships have spoken today. My goodness!—those speeches will repay some careful reading. In a short and very sharp contribution, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, made a rather devastating speech. As to the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, my complaint is that he does not speak often enough, because his comments are always worthy of the greatest consideration, and I do assure him that they will get it.
What can one say about the situation which now prevails? I served on the Francis Committee, which studied the working of the Acts, and every Friday for
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15 months we sat down and talked about this. We took oral evidence and we visited and we looked into the working of those Acts. Among other things, what we said at the end of the day was: "If you give security of tenure to furnished tenancies, it will inevitably have a dramatic impact on the availability of accommodation to rent".
Nobody took the slightest notice. I sometimes wonder why the committee was appointed. What happened was exactly what we had said would happen, and I personally feel it is catastrophic that the number of homes available to rent in the private sector continues to decline as it does. With great respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, when she says that it is only a financial matter, she is wrong. The fact is that if I had spare room in my house to rent and I knew that by renting them I would be giving somebody complete security of tenure for who knows how many generations, I should need my head examining if I did so rent those rooms. That is the biggest deterrent of all, and we delude ourselves if we think otherwise. I am not going further into the private rented accommodation question, but one day we shall certainly have to come back to it. It is a problem which will go on. It will not go away, and we must come back to it.
My Lords, time is pressing, as we know, so I shall conclude by summing up quickly just some of the major initiatives the Government have taken in the last three years, which I hope will encourage my noble friend Lord Vaizey, who proposed this Motion. We have introduced, as I said, the right to buy. We have done more than any previous Government to encourage local authorities, made land available for starter homes. Then there are all the various other things. There are the low cost—I stress low cost—home ownership schemes, improvements and buildings for sale, homesteading and shared ownership. We have given local authorities powers to guarantee building society loans on the cheapest and most run-down dwellings. Surely we have to be concerned about the 100,000 or so council dwellings plus the more than that private sector houses that are lying empty today—just totally empty. What a massive waste of resources!
We have raised the exemption ceiling for stamp duty and increased the ceiling for local authority mortgage advances. It is now easier than at almost any other time for first-time buyers to enter the housing market, and more are now doing so. I have said what we are doing for the private rented sector by way of shorthold —at least, I have not said too much because of the time factor, but we could have a debate just about shorthold and shorthold tenancies. May I just say that I am still amazed that a leading spokesman in another place could say that he would rather see houses standing empty than being occupied under shorthold tenancies? How any politician of any party can ever justify a statement like that I shall never know: yet we have it there and they stand on it even today.
In the public sector, we have introduced a tenants' charter, giving tenants the right, among other things, to decorate, to improve, to take in lodgers and to sub-let, as well as the right of security of tenure and one succession and the right to information and consultation. It is a Conservative Government who have introduced all those rights for council tenants. Is that not ironical?

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To help tackle the serious problem of "difficult to let" council estates, we have launched the Priority Estates Project, which the noble Baroness, Lady Fisher, only last week commended so much to us. We have encouraged mobility; besides developing the first ever National Mobility Scheme, we have launched the Tenants' Exchange Scheme, providing a national computer-based information service for tenants who want to exchange their homes. We have launched the first major expansion in hostels provision for many years; and we have taken special measures to help, among others, servicemen, the elderly and the disabled.
I finish by saying that, after many years of personal involvement in the whole field that is housing, I am proud to be a member of a Government which has people like our Secretary of State, and my honourable friend the Minister for Housing, who are producing so many imaginative, innovative and progressive housing projects. I again thank my noble friend Lord Vaizey for giving me the opportunity to say so, and I again say that I shall read very carefully all that has been said in this most excellent debate.
5.21 p.m.
Lord Vaizey: My Lords, I should like to reply briefly to the debate. Your Lordships have been commendably brief. We have not reached the end of the allotted time, even although we have had a Statement made by my noble friend about the Royal College of Nursing. I should first like to thank my noble friend Lord Coleraine for what was truly a remarkably impressive and very helpful maiden speech. I should also like to thank my noble friend Lord Bellwin for his knowledge, his enthusiasm and his warmth. The affection in which he is held in the House is clear to everybody. He has made a very helpful contribution, as has everybody who has spoken.
I should just like, very briefly, to make three points, First, I think that almost everybody stressed the importance for human dignity, and for a sense of citizenship, of the ownership of equity and the pride of ownership—what the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, called the search for identity. It is something of tremendous importance that people speaking from every side of the House should have emphasised this as a central and commendable feature of much of our modern life.
Secondly, it takes some doing to get unity among four economists. When you have four economists speaking out, you usually have eight opinions. But we are against the Rent Acts. The only people who are for the Rent Acts, so far as I know, are not economists, and even those who ventured to say a word in favour of the Rent Acts said that they should be abolished, but abolished slowly—if I fully took on board the message which the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Gryfe, brought down from Glasgow, helped by British Caledonian and hindered by London Transport.
We had a brilliant exposition by the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, of the way in which the Rent Acts actually work. This is a rather central point, and I should like to take the third stream in the debate, which I might call the problem of the Church of England. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark is an extremely distinguished pastoral Bishop and a distinguished theologian. But one of
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the perplexities of those, like myself, who are loyal, dedicated sons of the Church of England, is how the Church of England has repealed the Book of Common Prayer and adopted collectivism as the new theology.
The devastation of the City of New York, through which the right reverend Prelate drove, is directly and unambiguously attributable, as the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, said, to rent control, which has been imposed by the City of New York, under the pressure of a series of incredibly corrupt city governments over many years. Similarly, the devastation of the inner part of the right reverend Prelate's diocese, Southwark, which I happen to know well, because I was born and brought up there—and there are very few streets in the inner part that I could not take him down—is entirely attributable to the actions of rent restriction and the local borough council, as was rightly said by one of your Lordships this afternoon. Apart from the bombing of the city, which the Luftwaffe did, you would find that most of the vacant spaces are entirely due to the late lamented London County Council—an excellent education authority, but a very misguided local planning authority.
In fact, I remember taking a friend of mine from Dublin through Belfast and saying "It looks awfully bad, doesn't it?" He was a rather eccentric Irishman, who always went up to Belfast every three months to go to the dentist, and he said, "It doesn't look as bad as what the planners have done to Greater London". That is true, and the devastation has been brought about by a combination of the Rent Acts and town and country planning. If the Church of England persistently believes that the only way of relieving the poverty of the poor is through collectivist measures, then I despair, because it is not true, and it is a very thin theological gruel to give to the starving millions. With that, my Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Denham: My Lords, it might be helpful if, with the leave of the House, I were to repeat shortly what I said earlier in the day. It has become the accepted practice in these short debates that the mover should be entitled to approximately 15 minutes and that the Minister should rise to reply no later than 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the debate. May I suggest that other speakers should limit their speeches on the Motion of my noble friend Lord Mottistone to about 12 minutes, because, if any noble Lord should speak longer, he may well be doing so at the expense of others later in the debate.

Civil Defence
5.27 p.m.
Lord Mottistonerose to call attention to the problems of civil defence and in particular to the duties in this respect of local authorities and to the value of encouraging the recruitment of volunteers to this and other related forms of public service; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, with regard to what my noble friend the Chief Whip has just said, I am

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delighted that he repeated his statement that we have 12 minutes per person, which is what I calculated, because in his earlier speech he gave only 1W., minutes to the previous lot, and as there are exactly the same number of speakers I could not quite understand the difference. However, we can take full advantage I did not say so at the time, for fear that he cut down. our timing. I welcome all the speakers who have kindly put down their names to speak, particularly the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletsoe, who will be giving us his maiden speech. I welcome him very much and greatly look forward to hearing what he has to tell us.
It is some time since a debate on this subject was held in your Lordships' House, and I can touch on only some aspects of what can be quite a wide subject. I hope that others of your Lordships who are taking part in the debate will be able to fill any gaps that I may leave. Though the Government have taken welcome initiatives—financially, in giving advice about civil defence and in raising a volunteer force-1 believe that it is necessary at the outset to examine, once again, the basic needs. Why do we need civil defence? I suggest that the fundamental reason is that we need to have an organised body of trained volunteers, led by a relatively small, full-time specialist team who are able at any time to support local authorities in the event of any natural or man-made disaster. Floods. extensive subsidence, major air crashes, major train accidents, major snowfalls, landslides and chemical disasters in sophistocated plants or in vehicles, are all features of modern life, and a great many of them are features of recent modern life. Secondly, I think there is a need for such a force of specialists and trained volunteers also to be available to back up the regular armed forces and their reserves in the event of any attack by an outside aggressor on these islands. I should have thought that this was absolutely obvious common sense.
I turn now to why, in the main, it should be a volunteer force. I suggest that there is a limit to the number of full-time local authority employees whom it is reasonable or economical to have available for unforseen major disasters. There is a similar limit to the size of fully trained armed services, and their reserves, available for back-up purposes. There is, on the other hand, a great number of men and women who are ready to come forward and assist this great country to surmount any major disaster which may strike it in peace or war. Good, well-established examples of such voluntary services are the many nursing organisations, the lifeboats, the volunteer fire brigades and bodies of that nature. But I suggest to your Lordships that they do not of themselves provide precisely what I am saying we need for unforeseen disasters.
With that background, it seems to me to be singularly shortsighted not to tap this great volunteer reserve and give it the necessary training to tackle the tasks which may occur at any time, and without warning, and to tackle them in an organised way. The broad mass of the people would surely not forgive either central or local government if an emergency arose and the thousands, maybe more, of able bodied people who are willing and able to do so had been given no chance to be prepared to help. Their effectiveness in doing so
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will of course be immeasurably increased if they are trained and organised in advance. As well as giving such people a chance to help if they are needed, the fact that the arrangements have been made at all will be yet another indication to any potential aggressor that we would resist attack, and will help—but only help—to deter him from doing so.
Your Lordships may have noted that so far I have made no mention of the relevance of civil defence to nuclear attack. That most unlikely form of attack is only one of the emergencies for which an organised civil defence force could be of assistance. I suggest to your Lordships that nuclear aggression is most unlikely, because those who are capable of implementing it are fully aware of the disastrous and long-term effect of such resultant explosions, and are also deterred by the possibility of retaliation. Furthermore, the main purpose of war for an aggressor—I would mention that according to my reckoning this country, under major war conditions, has not been an aggressor for over two centuries, so we do not know what it is like to be an aggressor and cannot therefore judge these things —is to impose his will on the community under attack. What is the point of totally destroying those whom you wish to subjugate? However, I have some sympathy for the Government of the day which wound up the civil defence force in the 1960s when the Soviet threat appeared to be only nuclear.
Since then, things—as they tend to do—have moved on. There have been, fortunately, few natural disasters and man-made chemical catastrophes. In those few cases, unsung ordinary people have sprung to the assistance of the authorities. In many cases there has been a hard core of people with experience of war, accustomed to organising behaviour for emergencies. But we are running out of these people. The other, and vitally important, new factor has been that in the past 20 years the Soviet Union have developed their so-called conventional forces to a size far in excess of that necessary for their stated aim of self-defence. If, as they are currently trying to do, they can persuade the countries of Western Europe to drop their nuclear guard, then, if the situation looks right, they will be able to threaten to impose their will by so-called conventional means. Thus, we need civil defence for peacetime emergencies. We also need it desperately both to deter and, if necessary, to help to tackle a conventional Soviet attack.
Much of what I have said is included in the Government pamphlet Civil Defence: Why We Need It, and in the excellent Home Office circulars to local authorities —ES1/81 and ES2/81. Thus I find it incomprehensible that so many local authorities do not realise the grave disservice which they are doing to their electors in failing to implement coherent plans for civil defence. They also mislead those electors into thinking that, somehow, an efficient civil defence force has some sort of link with a nuclear threat—which they, and anybody else who is sensible, does not like the thought of. In some cases they mislead their electors even further into thinking that the declaration of a nuclear-free zone provides any defence whatsoever against anything. It is absolute nonsense. Those local authorities would do their electors a much better service by preparing for all types of emergencies and by joining up with the various peace movements to ask the

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Russians when they are going to reduce their conventional arms to a level that is necessary solely for self defence.
I must also say that, good though their recent circulars are and welcome though the financial support which they offer is, the Government themselves seem to have been surprisingly backward—at least since the excellent speech of my honourable friend Mr. Mayhew in another place on 27th November 1981, at col. 1156—in giving positive impetus towards the implementation of their excellent intentions, especially concerning the ignorant and incomprehensibe behaviour of so many local authorities. I believe that the Government have also been backward in correcting the general public regarding the misleading nonsense about linking civil defence with nuclear warfare and establishing nuclear-free zones, to which I have already referred. I hope very much that my noble friend the Minister, to whom I have given notice of those two latter points, will be able to tell us of positive action to correct them, or about the contemplation of such action.
In conclusion, I commend to your Lordships the National Council for Civil Defence, of which I, together with the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, and my noble friend Lady Vickers, have the privilege of being vice-presidents—and of which my noble friend Lord Renton is the illustrous president. I commend it to your Lordships of all parties, and indeed it is sad that there are so few people on the Benches opposite who are joining in this debate. It is a body of parliamentarians and other members from many parts of the country, formed independently to help persuade people—the country at large—that civil defence is truly needed by the country for tackling the emergencies which I have described, and for deterring aggression. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.41 p.m.
Lord Elystan-Morgan: My Lords, the House is deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, for this opportunity to discuss matters which are of prime interest and of profound public concern. May I join with the noble Lord who opened the debate in saying how much I, too, look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletso.
I am sure that the House and the opening speaker will forgive me if I seek to confine my remarks to the question of civil defence in the context of an attack upon the civilian population. The field of civil defence holds vital issues involving some of the greatest considerations any community has had to face throughout history. Civil defence in its broadest aspects has the widest scope possible. It has a multiplicity of roles, ranging from one extreme of seeking to neutralise any physical threat to the public at large, to the other extreme of attempting to create some semblance of order out of cataclysmic chaos and of salvaging the very structure of Government from the mangled remains of a community. If I may, it is against that background that I ask the question: has civil defence in that respect any meaningful role in Britain today?
In so far as the capacity of civil defence to counter the horrendous effects of nuclear attack is concerned, then quite clearly such a capacity does not exist. There is overwhelming evidence on that score from
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every quarter. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, as the House is well aware, had an equivalent explosive force of some 12,500 tonnes of TNT. It achieved in an instant the deaths of 60,000 people, and some 60,000 more died within a few months, followed by the deaths of many, many thousands more over the years. A Government exercise carried out in 1980—Operation Square Leg—seeking to simulate in realistic terms a nuclear attack upon Britain, was based upon the probability that such an attack would involve Britain suffering 125 nuclear missiles, amounting in total to some 200 megatons—that is, the eqivalent of 13,000 Hiroshimas.
The Government are on record as having calculated that the number of deaths in an all-out attack on Britain would be in the order of 35 million. How the Government can calculate that the figure would be 35 million rather than 40 million, 45 million or 55 million is something which no doubt the Minister will wish to comment upon in due course. The late Lord Louis Mountbatten, in a speech at Strasbourg on 11th May 1979, spoke of a nuclear attack upon Britain in these terms:
" In the event of nuclear war, there will be no chances and there will be no survivors. All will be obliterated."
He went on to say:
" I am not asserting this without having deeply thought about the matter. When I was Chief of Defence Staff, I made my views known. I have heard arguments against this view, but I have never found them convincing."
The noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, chief scientific adviser to the Government for many years, made a speech in the United States of America in November 1979, when he put it this way:
" As our own White Paper on Defence put it as long ago as 1957, there was then no means of protecting the nation against the consequences of a nuclear war. There is none today, when the scale of attack may he 100 times greater than it was in the 1950s."
One could continue finding quotation upon quotation, all by people of distinction and experience in this field, and all pointing to an almost inevitable apocalyptic disaster in the event of a nuclear attack One thing, in my submission, is clear: the effect of a nuclear attack on Britain would be to leave these islands a smoking and radiation-contaminated ruin. There is no precedent even in the most terrifying chapters of human history to turn to for a realistic parallel Indeed, one would have to descend into Dante's Inferno.
Civil defence as a shield to protect the mass of the people of Britain against nuclear destruction is a physical impossibility and a myth. I am sure that this House will accept that to propagate such a myth would be to blur the sharp edges of reality and to delude the mass of our people. To do this would be an act of wicked irresponsibility on the part of any government. But sometimes those who take a particular stance in relation to civil defence say, "But you must never presume that the attack upon Britain will be a nuclear one." Let us think of that for a moment. Let us assume that a conventional weapons attack was made by a nuclear power. Why should that ever be so? Surely any such power, in deciding to attack Britain, would have to come to the conclusion that it had a fair chance of knocking out the

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British community completely and depriving it of its power of retaliation. If by using conventional rather than nuclear weapons it took any risk, it would be an imbecilic risk for such a country to take. It is almost as if one had argued in 1939 that the Germans would not use their vast armada of bombers to attack Britain but would send only a few antiquated Zeppelin airships instead. So far as the possibility of an attack from a non-nuclear country is concerned, that is a prospect too ludicrous to justify any examination.
Although the destruction that Britain would suffer from a nuclear attack would be truly massive, it must follow—must it not?—that no-one could possibly calculate within 1 million, 5 million or tens of millions just how many people would be killed and how many would have a chance of survival. It must follow that, in relation to nuclear attack, there must be a real case for civil defence. If civil defence was not able genuinely to deflect or neutralise the prospect of nuclear destruction, nevertheless it has a role if it offers the possibility of saving millions upon millions of lives. The question of saving millions of lives must be a real possibility so far as people who live on the edges of a nuclear blast are concerned. It is impossible to say in what circumstances there would be such a patchy or partial attack on the British community, but one can imagine a dozen different situations in which that would happen. The possibility of the saving from jeopardy of millions or tens of millions of lives must indeed be central to the very duties of a state. In fact, I would argue that there is no higher duty that a state has in the material world.
The question, however, that one must ask is whether civil defence as we know it at the moment in Britain is geared to such a role. The scale of the enterprise from a financial point of view is extremely modest. In 1980, the Government spent £27 million on civil defence. By 1983–84 that will have risen to a sum of the order of £45 million. That will be one-third of what was spent upon civil defence in 1968 when the Civil Defence Corps was stood down and placed upon a care and maintenance basis. The £45 million is a fraction of what Britain spends, for example, every year upon military bands. Certainly I do not attack military bands—on the contrary—but I think it gives us some idea of the priorities in this context.
Government publications in this field have not given any real clue at all as to Government commitments. The latest pamphlet, Civil Defence: Why We Need It, is confined to arguing the case for civil defence. There was an earlier publication in 1976, which was issued to the general public only in 1979–80, that exhorted people in the event of thermo-nuclear war to hide under tables, to white-wash windows, to horde tinned food and toothbrushes. Among these clouds of good advice there was no commitment by the Government for the most direct methods of defence. The Government, it seems, have no plans for seeing to it that a substantial proportion of the people of Britain are provided, either communally or privately, with deep shelters. If the Government say that the risk of nuclear war is negligible, then, of course, I accept that it would be folly to commit ourselves to the vast expenditure that such a project entails. But if the risk of nuclear war is negligible, why should Her Majesty's Government commit Britain to the expenditure of £8,000 million
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upon the Trident scheme? If the risk, however, is real, then there is a real duty upon the Government to protect their people.
There is a great deal that I would wish to say, but I am afraid that time has completely forestalled me. I end by asking that question. If the Government consider that there is this real risk, small but nevertheless real, by failing to provide the British people with a chance, which in the case of millions of people would give them a real prospect of survival, the Government inevitably must be abdicating one of their basic responsibilities.
5.53 p.m.
Lord Mayhew: My Lords, a number of points about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, puzzled me very greatly. He began by reminding us of the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in nuclear-free zones. This morning I received a document called The Londoner, a newspaper published at the ratepayers' expense, which informed me that London had been declared a nuclear-free zone by the GLC; put on a par, that is so far as its status goes, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki—they were in nuclear-free zones. It can be argued that if the Japanese had had nuclear weapons, the tragedies that overcame Hiroshima and Nagasaki might never have taken place.
Then the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, left us in some doubt as to whether he wished the Government to build deep shelters, or whether he wished the Government to do nothing. It is perfectly possible from the speech of the noble Lord to deduce either that he wishes the Government to do nothing or that he wishes them to build deep shelters.
Lord Elystan-Morgan: My Lords, if the noble Lord will allow me to intervene—and I am most grateful—certainly what I say is that if, according to the Government's own argument there is a real danger of nuclear war, and if they really want to protect millions of lives then shelters certainly should be built.
Lord Mayhew: The noble Lord, with great respect, is avoiding his moral duty to this House. He really must say whether he wishes the Government to do nothing or to build deep shelters.
Lord Elystan-Morgan: My Lords, unreservedly I do, unless it can be shown that the risk is a negligible one, and at the moment the risk is not a negligible one. I do not think I could be clearer than that.
Lord Mayhew: My Lords, now I am clear that the noble Lord wishes a very vast sum of money to be spent, millions of pounds, on providing this country with deep shelters. Where the money is coming from no doubt other Members of those Benches will explain.
Lord Elystan-Morgan: Trident.
Lord Mayhew: My Lords, I wish to suggest, on the contrary, that the Government are at fault for a different reason. I take very much the line of the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, who opened the debate, in this sense: I think it is lamentable that local authori-

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ties, including the GLC, are not co-operating in the civil defence venture of the Government. They argue, as indeed the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, has argued, that nuclear war is so destructive that it is futile to make any provision against it. They argue that in preparing for civil defence in some way brings nuclear war nearer, or even involves preparing for fighting a nuclear war. In my view, all these arguments are preposterous. But they are exploited quite effectively in order to dissuade local authorities from doing their duty in the field of civil defence.
My complaint with the Government is this: that their civil defence effort has been planned and presented not as a response to natural disasters or the possibility of conventional warfare, or even as a response to a single nuclear explosion, possibly accidental, possibly the dropping of a demonstration bomb. The Government's civil defence plans have been prepared and presented to the nation solely in terms of the nuclear holocaust to which the last speaker was referring. What nonsense this is!
Why are the Government taking this line? Do they really think that a nuclear holocaust is more likely than conventional war? It does not correspond with the views of the Secretary of State for Defence. Or do they think that conventional war will not also cause appalling destruction and terrible casualties? Or do they feel that the public will respond more readily if the case for civil defence is put in terms of a nuclear holocaust? If they think these things they are wrong on all these counts, and must carry considerable responsibility for the failure to mobilise the country; the failure to get the co-operation of local authorities throughout the country.
My own view is that while we have a deterrent the possibility of conventional war with the Soviet Union in Europe is very small indeed, and the possibility of nuclear war with Russia in Europe hardly exists at all. If we are to have skeleton civil defence plans, as I think we should, I think they should be geared more to conventional war than to nuclear war. And to the extent that they are geared to nuclear war they should be geared to a single nuclear explosion, possibly an accident, possibly a demonstration bomb, more than to a nuclear holocaust. In planning and preparing their scheme, the Government have done exactly the opposite and have given a great opportunity to extreme Left-Wing views to exploit the situation against the NATO defence policy which is supported so widely in this country. The Government have got their priorities wrong and have helped nobody except Left-Wing extremists and unilateralists.
I would also say, however, as the last point 1 wish to make, that no matter whether one is a unilateralist, a multilateralist or a pacifist, whatever one's political views, it does not affect the case for civil defence at all. The case for civil defence is a humanitarian case and that is all it is. It simply asserts that no matter what may have caused suffering it is everyone's obligation to try to limit it. That is all it says, and this applies in all circumstances in all countries, no matter how wicked or how stupid the Government may be; it is a humanitarian case and it gives me the greatest pain to see my old party rejecting the case for humanity in this very casuistic way, this very unconvincing
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manner. This argument of humanity also applies in neutral countries. If war comes in Europe, whether it is conventional or nuclear, it is unlikely to have been brought about by the governments of Sweden or Switzerland. Nor are they likely to be participants or to be deliberate targets in such a war; but these two countries are foremost in the protection they provide for their citizens in civil defence. If Britain followed their example, if we became neutral, if we became non-nuclear, we should have exactly the same obligation to defend our citizens, to provide civil defence. In my view, therefore, the present attitude of some local authorities in refusing to co-operate in civil defence is not only extremely illogical but essentially inhumane.
6.2 p.m.
Lord St. John of Bletso: My Lords, it is a great privilege for me to speak in your Lordships' House for the first time, and particularly in this important debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, for his kind introduction. I am conscious of the traditions of this House and of the vast experienc and depth of knowledge of all aspects of life represented here. Although I have spent most of my life in South Africa and thus to some degree have been remote from the public debates on defence matters which are of such immediate concern to the countries of the northern hemisphere, nevertheless I have no doubt of the importance of the subject we are debating.
Parallels are not easy to draw between one part of the world and another, but I am sure that all observers would agree that the most tragic aspect of the various guerrilla wars which have occurred, and are still occurring, in Southern Africa is the loss of life among innocent civilians caught between the fires of opposing parties. In Europe, too, it is perhaps easy to forget that in a major war the greatest burden in deaths, casualties and distress is inevitably likely to fall upon the civilian population; but although in considering the question of civil defence one's mind naturally turns to the possibility of a military attack on this country, none the less the severe social disruption which would inevitably be caused by such an attack could be brought about by other circumstances.
I refer particularly to natural disasters, or what may be called technological disasters, such as the power failure which gripped New York a few years ago—I believe in I977—which caused such disruptive consequences. Whatever causes these disruptions, the same kind of consequences are likely to follow; for example, breakdowns in communication, transport failures, the collapse of vital services like the supply of water and of electricity. Furthermore, the possibility of looting and other civil disorders such as occurred during the New York power failure which I have mentioned cannot be ruled out.
In considering the powers and functions of this country's civil defence authorities we should not forget to take into account these non-military factors. In the circumstances of serious social disruption the maintenance of law and order will of course remain the proper responsibility of the police force. It may also be necessary to call upon the armed forces to ensure that at least minimal vital services can be

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maintained; but I would suggest that there are many people in the community who would be keen and willing to offer any assistance they could to help those not in a position to help themselves.
I am not suggesting that what is needed is some form of vigilante force. The main burden for the maintenance of law and order should fall upon the police and existing authorities; but would there not be great value in encouraging volunteers to come forward for instruction, so that in the event of any form of disaster, on however localised a scale, there would be those in each locality aware of the actions they can take to help those in schools and hospitals, as well as the elderly? A call for such volunteers would not be intended to stir up a bellicose mentality among the population nor, I am sure, would it have that effect. It is surely a natural expression of a community's vitality that there are those in it who are prepared to do their bit to help others in distress.
It is only right, therefore, that great attention should be given to civil defence in this country, not because we anticipate a war, but because, should a war be forced upon us, or should a serious natural disaster occur, it is right that every effort should be made to ensure that the innocent and the weak do not suffer more than is absolutely unavoidable.
My Lords, you have listened to me with great indulgence. I hope that our debate today will help to stir the thinking of the authorities responsible for our civil defence in all its aspects, since the more thought we give to it now, the more future generations will thank us.
6.9 p.m.
Lord Renton: My Lords, I am sure that all your Lordships will wish to join with me in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletso, on his maiden speech, which was penetratingly thoughtful, fluent and convincing. Naturally, I welcome his support for civil defence and for the need to maintain vital services in case of all emergencies in peace and war, and the encouragement that he gave to the use of volunteers. He was good enough in his speech to refer to the experience and expertise in your Lordships' House, but we in turn should welcome the fact that his presence means that we have youth on our side. For that we are grateful and we hope that we shall often have him speaking in our debates when he is free to attend from his professional duties elsewhere. There, as he has explained to me, he will have to make his living and his life; but his presence with us is most welcome.
I would like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Mottistone on initiating this important debate and on the way in which he did so. He was surely right to point out that we need to prepare for the immense peacetime disasters which can hit us as well as the possibility of conventional or nuclear war. He too referred, so rightly, to the part which trained volunteers should be given a chance to play. I listened eagerly and anxiously to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. I believe I can at least say about it that it showed a degree of responsibility which we do not always get in these matters from members of his party, who so often in a deceptive kind of way try to tell people, especially the young people of this country,
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that there is only one kind of emergency, that that is an all-out civil war, that civil defence exists only for that, that it is a waste of time and therefore we do not want civil defence. That false simplification of the argument does no service to the people of this or any other country. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, avoided that argument.
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, will my noble friend give way? He said "civil war"; I think he meant "nuclear war".
Lord Renton: Yes, my Lords; I am sorry, I meant nuclear war. 1 am most grateful for that correction and interruption which is so typical of the type of diligent service which we in civil defence receive from my noble friend Lord Mottistone.
However, in analysing the risks which the Government and local authorities have to face, I feel bound to say that the noble Lord's picture was incomplete. Besides those risks that he mentioned, there is the additional risk, so rightly mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, that a nuclear accident might happen anywhere and the people, for example, in Scotland could suffer from a nuclear accident on the continent of Europe, by fallout drifting over. To say that civil defence would be a waste of time in such circumstances is again to deceive the people. That is one of the reasons why we need civil defence. I happened to mention another one at, I think, Question Time last week. We know now that several dictators, including, we believe, the Argentina junta, have or will soon have the nuclear bomb. We are told that Colonel Gaddafi has practically got it. I think that one of the possible risks, not a probable one, but one that should be borne in mind, is that a bomb-happy irresponsible dictator could drop a bomb somewhere and the fallout could drift over a continent.
I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Elystan Morgan, in saying that we do not have to face the prospect of a conventional war between the great powers. I trust that there will never be a war between the great powers. However, if there is a war, then a conventional war is much more likely and the real risk in such a war is that the losing side, in order to try to bring the conflict to a conclusion, might drop not 100 nuclear bombs, but one nuclear bomb. That is a serious possibility, and one of the risks against which we should provide and in respect of which we should be prepared to pay the premium which is a modest one.
Without being too rhetorical, I should like to echo the sentiment of Alfred Lord Tennyson and say that I wish that we could:
" Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace".
That is what we would all like. It is not only the wish of those in the peace movement—they do not have a monopoly of that desire. But we live in a dangerous world. We shall not get peace by unilateral disarmament, by declaring nuclear-free zones or by letting local authorities neglect the statutory duty imposed upon them by Parliament when there have been both Labour and Conservative Governments. It is a very meagre responsibility. It is merely a responsibility to plan for emergencies in peace and war. It is not onerous. At the lowest it is a mere paper exercise

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although it could—and in my opinion should—amount to much more than that and should include the training of local authority staffs, as mentioned by my noble friend. It could and should include the involvement and training of volunteers whether in existing organisations or not; it should include preparations for industrial civil defence on which I know at least one of my noble friends is to say something; and it should include adequate take-up of the warning systems. Luckily we have the Royal Observer Corps and their early warning system. Indeed, that is possibly one of the strongest parts of our civil defence organisation. But it means that it should be carried down to the local level, to parish and ward level.
It would be interesting to know what the Government include in the concept of emergency planning. As have said, it can be merely a paper exercise. The tragedy is that many local authorities are not even doing the minimum. This is disgraceful, for it means that not only are they failing to do what Parliament has required them to do but, as has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, it also means that they are failing in their humanitarian duty towards their own ratepayers. That failure seems to me, from what one can glean from the newspapers and one's knowledge of what goes on in local government in the country, to be largely due to ideological prejudice based partly on ignorance and partly on wilful deception. But it has the effect of weakening our country against the possibility of attack.
It is rather interesting to note in passing that the other day 11 young Russians tried to start a peace movement outside the Kremlin, and they were immediately arrested and put inside. The money which the peace movement is spending in this country would be much better spent in sending as many people as possible to Russia to protest there, where the real source of possible war exists.
Although it is obvious that there is no defence against a direct hit by a bomb, whether nuclear or conventional, those of us who are old enough can remember feeling very lucky at not being hit by a bomb or by a shell which might have taken us directly and which did take our friends. However, there is a good chance of survival for all those people who are on the perimeter or who are outside the perimeter. Protection against fallout can be given—scientists are agreed upon this, whatever Lord Mountbatten said—if advanced preparations have been made, but it is not so easy to improvise at the last minute. Fortunately, no nuclear bombs have been dropped anywhere since 1945 and it is unlikely, I trust, that any will be dropped. But vast numbers of high explosives and incendiary bombs have been used, some very effectively in the Falklands for example. Therefore, it is right that we should concentrate our minds mainly on the possibility of conventional attack.
We are entitled to ask the Government what they propose to do about the present unsatisfactory situation of local authorities failing in their responsibilities for emergency planning. If it is a question of money, it is surely worth changing the present financial arrangements whereby 75 per cent. of the cost of emergency planning is assumed to be included in the negotiations for the rate support grant, but it can be spent by local
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authorities on other things or not spent at all. I suggest that it might be very much better if we convert that element of the rate support grant into a specific grant, require local authorities to spend it on emergency planning and require them to spend the remaining 15 per cent. which would come from the rates.
In my opinion, and in the opinion of my friends on the National Council for Civil Defence, one of the problems of our present situation is that the Government lack the staff and the resources for monitoring the lack of performance by local authorities, for ensuring that the best standards are maintained, for advising local authorities on what needs to be done in the national interest and for co-ordination with public services and with the Armed Forces. Surely we need a director-general of civil defence with adequate powers and adequate staff.
Of course, we used to have very well-organised regional headquarters. My noble friend Lord Bathurst, who, with me, used to be responsible for civil defence in the Home Office under the Home Secretary, will remember that we used to have a very well-organised system of regional headquarters. They do not exist now; the underground places and equipment are still there but in mothballs. I should have thought that it would not be over-reacting if we had at least a skeleton staff dealing with that.
I have already exceeded my time. I must conclude by saying that it would make war less likely if we had better civil defence, because it would make our country less vulnerable both to conventional attack and nuclear fallout.
6.22 p.m.
Lord Clifford of Chudleigh: My Lords, first, I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord St. John of Bletso on his maiden speech. A propos his remark about experience, to which reference has just been made by the noble Lord, Lord Renton, both he and the noble Earl, Lord Bathurst, have experience on the political side. How do I know that?—because, when the noble Earl, Lord Bathurst, visited the Civil Defence Staff College, as it then was, at Sunningdale, I happened then to be a student there and, I suppose, because I had a handle to my name, I was dragged out from the multitude to have my lunch beside him.
We had a perfectly good system of civil defence—home defence—until the late 1960s when, in turn, both the Territorial Army was truncated and civil defence abolished. The Conservatives mentioned in their last manifesto that they would do something about it. We became rather anxious; things were going slowly. Some of your Lordships will remember that I initiated a debate on 5th March 1980 on the need for home civil defence. That was followed on 7th August 1980 by the Home Secretary's Statement, which was followed at the end of the year by the appointment of Sir Leslie Mayor as a co-ordinator of voluntary effort in civil defence. That was followed by the Home Office Circular ES2/81 in August 1981—note the date—a year after the previous Statement. There was a whole year's delay before the Home Office got around to giving the necessary instructions. ES1/1 was purely a civil defence review. The whole emphasis has rightly been on the responsibility of local authorities and the use of local volunteers.

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As several noble Lords know, I have an interest to declare here, in that we in Devon have raised what we call the Devon Emergency Volunteers. As of this date we have about 2,000 volunteers, and we had them long before the Government started doing anything. In fact, the noble Lord, Lord Renton, will remember that 1 asked him and the co-ordinator to visit us, as soon as possible after the appointment of Sir Leslie Mayor, to see what we had done. But the trouble is that, despite efforts on the part of individuals, on a national level co-operation has been fragmented and at times non-existent. We have had references to this already today, when noble Lords have mentioned that officials in various counties or at equivalent levels have said, "No, we shall not do anything to defend our people". Instead of everyone working together under an agreed plan, as used to be the case in the old civil defence organisation, we have various bodies that should be co-operating but are not.
They are not doing so because of jealousies between various organisations. I mention just three, with great respect to my noble friend—the WRVS, the Red Cross and the St. John Ambulance Brigade. We need a co-ordinator with sufficient powers to get the voluntary bodies to pull together for the proper good of the nation, not to indulge in internecine strife. I must say that I am extremely irritated, to say the least, at the behaviour of the army cadets in not giving full support to civil defence, which we feel they should. In my part of the world we have excellent relations with the air force cadets. Why must the army cadets hum and haw about what they can do. The Boy Scouts are of more help to us at the moment. It is not the fault of individuals; it is the fault of the blokes up top.
If there is a war—conventional or nuclear—assistance to the less fortunate has, for obvious reasons, to be local. My main criticism of the Home Office is that it seems to want no particular involvement in the production of national training material. Let us just look into that. I asked the noble Lord's predecessor one or two questions about that in his time. But I have an even greater criticism of our politicians as a whole, because they do not appreciate that civil defence is a part of home defence, which is a part of national defence. Santayana wrote to the effect that those who did not learn from history were condemned to repeat its mistakes. We need go no further back than the early 1930s.
Perhaps I might quote my own experience; there are several noble Lords present who will, of course, remember the same circumstances. When I first went up to Oxford I was a "I will not fight for King and country bloke; I am a Peace Pledge Union bloke ". Fortunately, on my first vacation I went to Germany and the idealism was naturally muted. What happened then? We had a Peace Pledge Union—it was rampant, with thousands of signatures. What did it do? Baldwin admitted afterwards that he dare not re-arm because he might lose the election. What happened was far more damaging to the country. It convinced Hitler, through Ribbentrop, that under no circumstances would we fight, and so were a contributory influence to the starting of the last war. I would like the CND to see whether the cap is not fitting at this moment. Are they not persuading the hawks in the
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Kremlin that we are a pushover?
I will tell you what the CND are doing now. We had a meeting of volunteers in my neck of the woods. The meeting was after the floods in Newton Abbot. We called the meeting to discuss how, when various emergencies came again, we could do more to help. What did our local CND do? They came to bust the meeting up: just as the Peace Pledge Union came and bust up the meeting when Duff Cooper was addressing the cadets of the senior division of the OTC at Oxford University in my last term there. History is repeating itself.
May I add one thing to that. Did your Lordships read—of course you did—Galtieri's interview with the Italian lady journalist?" Oh, no. We never believed that Britain would do anything. All the information we had was that they would not fight. They would not send anyone." History repeats itself. I would like to commend our politicians of all parties to read a bit more history. I would like to repeat the truism that civil defence is a part of national defence. It certainly is in the way that it can dissuade would-be aggressors.
What the Government have to do now is to make arrangements whereby the co-ordinator has more power to co-ordinate. I am far from satisfied that those vital elements that we had in the civil defence in the days when I was active in that line, are co-operating now as they should. What about the special constables? What about the WRVS? What about the army cadet corps? They all have a role to play in an emergency. They all had a role to play in the earlier emergency, but now they are of little or no help because they are so fragmented.
I should like to end by saying that this is supposed to be a Christian country. I was brought up to believe that three of the main Christian virtues were faith, hope and charity. Having an adequate civil defence fulfils each of these three things. Faith in one's own people, hope for the future, and charity to those who are in an unfortunate position.
6.34 p.m.
The Earl of Cork and Orrery: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow that great fighter for defence, the untiring patriot from Devon, my noble friend Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. It is an even greater pleasure to add my congratulations to those of my noble friend Lord Renton to the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletso, who has come among us for the first time and has given great pleasure in a most admirable speech. We indeed welcome him among us and hope to hear him often in the future.
Before I say anything else, I simply cannot resist the temptation, usurping the office of my noble friend the Minister here, to reply to a question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, of the Government. He asked: if the risk of nuclear war is negligible, why should the Government spend £8,000 million on Trident? I suggest turning the question round, when you would discover that if the Government spend £8,000 million on Trident, they therefore regard the risk of nuclear war as negligible.
However, what I chiefly wish to do is to make a rather uncivil attack upon a certain class of person.

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I will initiate this by quoting a piece of history from last October, when there took place a meeting in Manchester which was aimed at promoting a common approach towards the creation of so-called nuclear-free zones. These were local authorities to the number of 75 who took part in this meeting. Various resolutions were passed. A typical one came from Avon. It was worded in this way:
" The spending of public money for the purpose of civil defence in preparation for a nuclear attack is futile and gives people a false sense of security."
This is an equivocal statement, and it is possible to take it, to give the authority the benefit of the doubt, as saying that they were not in fact condemning civil defence entirely as useless because it was useless against nuclear attack.
However, we cannot do this in fact, because there exists a paper called Sanity, which is the magazine of the CND. Writing about that conference a gentleman called Dan Plesch wrote about the Avon performance:
" A hundred and twenty councils have rejected nuclear weapons and the civil defencecon'".
A little later on he writes;
" The stock of local civil defence handbooks has been put through the pulping machine. Work on the CD has been frozen."
I submit that there are two kinds of person who can write that: the stupid, and the dishonest. There is no other possibility, I believe.
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, will the noble Earl give way? It happens that I know Mr. Plesch personally, and I can assure the noble Earl that he is neither stupid nor dishonest.
The Earl of Cork and Orrery: My Lords, I do not know how the noble Lord is able to do that. I say that this kind of statement can be made only by a person who is either stupid or dishonest. I say that with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Putney. How can it be anything but stupid to say that civil defence is useless and must be abolished, simply because it is useless against a nuclear attack?
The point has been made by my noble friend Lord Renton and before him by the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, that nuclear explosions do not necessarily amount to the fearful number of 125 nuclear missiles postulated by the Government, according to the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, and resulting in some 35 million deaths. As my noble friend Lord Renton pointed out, you can have an accidental explosion. You can have a shortfall coming from who knows which side, which will land and explode possibly somewhere in the Western Approaches.
I will reveal to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins, that there are three results of a nuclear explosion. There is the blast, which kills; there is the radiation, which kills, and there is a whole flock or cloud of radioactive particles which is known as fallout. This travels on the wind. We have in England a prevailing wind coming from the South-West. The cloud of fallout initiating in the Western Approaches will travel with the wind up the Bristol Channel. It will arrive pretty soon at Bristol, which is in Avon. I suppose the defence put up against it there will consist of members
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of the county council waving placards saying, "No radiation here; this is a nuclear free zone ", while the millions of people who live in Bristol and around it die like ninepins and the cloud passes on to devastate the rest of the country.
This can happen. Does the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins, not know that this can happen? Does Mr. Plesch not know that this can happen? If he says that it cannot happen and that the only possibility is total destruction by blast, then that gentleman is deliberately misleading his readers. There can be no other interpretation of this. Furthermore, we have here public authorities deliberately linking, according to Mr. Plesch, civil defence with what he calls the "CD con". What is the con? Presumably it is the con that it is possible to survive an attack by means of civil defence. Of course it is, as I have pointed out; there are defences against fallout.
But civil defence is not about nuclear war. Indeed, why must we have nuclear war brought into it at all? Why need we have an enormous organisation called the CND, filled with people who are campaigning against civil defence as though it were civil defence against nuclear war? It is not. My noble friend Lord Mottistone, in initiating the debate, made perfectly plain that that is not the basic requirement of civil defence.
Civil defence is about chemical factory explosions, air crashes and floods, things the defence against which is to be forbidden by the people of the CND, including presumably the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Putney. Civil defence is about tanker spills of corrosive acids on motorways, explosions of any kind in peace or war, train crashes, landslides and excesses of snow. All of those are emergencies which the civil defence organisation and plans are designed to combat, none of which is to be allowed by those people. What sort of people are they? Civil defence is a humanitarian cause, and I echo the excellent words spoken by the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, and underlined heavily by my noble friend Lord Renton.
It is customary in debates for each succeeding speaker to congratulate the mover of the debate, a custom which, I confess, I have sometimes found tedious. I have not done so, preferring to keep my congratulations to the end and thereby, I hope, to give them somewhat greater emphasis. If this debate has the effect of stimulating the Government into further activity in the cause of civil defence, as my noble friends and as the noble Lords, Lord Elystan-Morgan and Lord Mayhew, have hoped it will, then indeed my noble friend Lord Mottistone will have performed a signal service for his country in attacking—or I hope I may support him by attacking—thoes strange people, those enemies of the country (because they are nothing less) who lurk and masquerade among the genuine and sincere, but none the less muddle-headed, patriots, altruists and pacifists of the CND.
6.43 p.m.
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, I am glad we have been given the chance this evening to return to the question of civil defence. It was about a year ago that we debated it at some length and it is time to do it again, and I am glad that my noble friend has given us this chance. I want to leave the more general questions

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of policy and comment briefly on organisation because, even if our policy is right, it is necessary that our organisation should be right too, and in this field it is all too easy to build an organisation which is a compromise between the interests of different groups—to which reference has been made an organisation which would probably fail when called upon to act quickly.
At the present time, I believe that the main responsibility rests with county councils and that the chief executive of the county council is the head man. It is interesting how different counties have achieved very different results to date. They have had a long time to do something; we should take note of that. There has been reference to the statutory minimum duties which county councils should carry out. They are described in the Act, I believe, in very general terms. I have spoken to different people closely connected with civil defence in the counties, and they all say that it is impossible to define exactly what the statutory minimum really is.
Lord Renton: My Lords, the precise terms—to the extent that they are precise, and they are not very much so—are in the civil defence regulations made under the Civil Defence Act 1948, which, it is true, is in very general terms.
Lord Inglewood: I thank my noble friend. At last, my Lords, 1 have found someone who thinks he knows what the statutory minimum is. When answering at Question Time not long ago, a Minister led me, and no doubt others, to believe that there were no clear defaulters among the county councils, although some had done more than others. I should like him to confirm this sometime, because there is a feeling in the country that some county councils have done virtually nothing.
Returning to the question of organisation, if a county has to put its emergency plans into operation, whether to meet a severe natural disaster or military action against this country, it must be able to act with clear authority, and its relations with the different services which are vital to it must also be clear. In those circumstances, there is no time for long consultation and seeking approval from higher authority. Somebody must be able to act, and act quickly. The co-operation of the various organisations may be promised during the training periods, but is such co-operation really enough? It is easy to see different views on priorities developing between the chief executive of the county council, the local military commander and the chief constable, the organisations of the latter two being absolutely vital to the county's plans.
It is obvious that they cannot all be put "under command"—to use the military phrase—of the county council. I speak under correction with the noble and gallent Earl to follow, and perhaps he could say whether it was the Duke of Wellington who distinguished between "under command" and "in support" and which formula he would have adopted here. We should address ourselves to this point, for it is all too easy under strain for any such organisation to fall apart. There are at present, I understand, a series of separate chains of command which really do not come together until we get to the regional commissioner, who might be a Minister of the Crown. Again, that
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is not the sort of organisation which will stand the strain of military-type pressure, or something like it, in a disaster situation.
There is another big question which has rarely been mentioned in these debates, and that is refugees. I am told that there will be no planned large-scale evacuation from the main centres of popluation, which is not the same, however, as ensuring that no large-scale evacuation happens as a result of private enterprise. There will be rural counties which could be flooded by refugees at short notice, and if that were to happen without sane organisation, it could be disastrous. I shall never forget seeing the Belgians in 1940 under the pressure exerted by the German Army drifting in tens of thousands in all directions, blocking the roads so that army vehicles had the greatest difficulty moving. The misery I saw was awful and I remember at the time thinking what a difference it would have made if they had had a larger number of trained volunteers dealing with the humanitarian and other problems. I should hate to see anything like that happen in this country.
I use the word "volunteers" because volunteers are the key to the whole debate. It was said earlier that we shall never see enough professionals. It is not possible and I do not think it would be right. What we want are intelligent, well-trained, well-led, enthusiastic volunteers, their enthusiasm stimulated by the professionals. In this country we have often had a genius which has made professionals and amateurs work well together in any number of fields. But we must remember too that professionals can be jealous of volunteers in certain spheres.
Finally, I hope that the Home Office will do all it can to give a lead to ensure that we see volunteers coming forward in big numbers, and to ensure that they stay in once they have joined, because they realise that they arc doing a good job and have their enthusiasm awakened. They must not he treated merely as so many numbers on a sheet of paper. Volunteers are the answer to our problem. and time is not on our side.
6.50 p.m.
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, I, too, should like to join in the congratulations which have been extended to the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, on introducing the debate. I also wish to congratulate the noble Lord who made his maiden speech. I am not sure whether he belongs to the St. John school or the "Sinjin" school, but whichever it is, I congratulate him and hope to hear more from him in future. I should also like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Elystan-Morgan, who spoke so trenchantly from the Front Bench. His speech did not receive the reception that it deserved—notably not from the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, who scarcely treated the matter seriously at all.
Noble Lords who have spoken in the debate will forgive me if I do not extend general congratulations to all of them. Frankly, I found some of their remarks unrealistic. I should like to say to the noble Earl, Lord Cork and Orrery, that I think he would agree that the noble Lords, Lord Brockway and Lord Soper—as was Lord Ritchie-Calder—are genuine and sincere people. I do not think that the noble Earl would address them, because he knows them, in the manner that he addressed a young man whom he does not know. I

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rather suspect that if he did know that young man, he would have used different words. I feel that this evening he did himself and this Chamber no good service.
The Earl of Cork and Orrery: My Lords, I referred to what I regard in my personal opinion as the genuine and sincere altruists and pacifists in the CND. They would unquestionably include the noble Lords to whom the noble Lord has referred—and indeed, why not himself, too?
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, we can perhaps leave the matter there.
It will be generally agreed that to house nuclear weapons on a small island is to make it a target. Soviet nuclear missiles have been targeted on Britain for many years, and the situation has been getting worse—getting worse every year, rather than better—because as more and more missles are housed here, consequently the number of missiles trained upon us increases proportionately. This must be the case, and if noble Lords pause to examine the situation, they will recognise that it is inevitably so.
Professor Michael Howard, of All Souls, scarcely a nuclear disarmer, even thinks that if we once actually get cruise missiles on our soil, we shall precipitate pre-emptive strikes by Soviet missiles. He said that in The Times. How he reconciles that with his other view, that we should nevertheless increase our vulnerability in this way, is his problem, rather than mine. But it is a problem. It is a problem for everyone—for everyone who believes that we should continue to prepare to take part in a nuclear war.
For those of us who are nuclear disarmers there is no difficulty. Having got rid of our own "nukes" and the American ones as well, we could simply do our best to provide as much protection as possible against the possibility of nuclear fallout drifting from a suicidal war taking place in some less enlightened part of the world, as the Swiss and the Swedes do. They have no nuclear weapons, and of course their substantial provision on civil defence is the corollary of that. If you do not have nuclear weapons, you can afford to spend money on civil defence because you are very unlikely to be the subject of a direct hit. But if you insist upon being a target, you increase your vulnerability, and far from nuclear weapons giving you any protection, they merely make it certain that the consequences of a nuclear war so far as you are concerned will be utterly disastrous.
That is the situation in which we find ourselves. If we had no nuclear weapons, we should no longer have to pretend to be able to succour a tolerable number of survivors from the holocaust of a direct nuclear strike. But, as we have nuclear weapons, the Government must do something. They cannot tell the people, "There is nothing we can do to save you", because it is part of their policy to have the weapon which creates the situation. So the Government must say something, and consequently they put out their documents, in which in one sentence there is an honest admission of reality, which they then run away from in the next sentence.
One reason for the great growth of CND has been
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the failure of the Government to sustain the pretence of survival in a sufficiently convincing way. I think that the nuclear warriors have been rather dull in failing to see that this pretence is a necessary part of the policy. The trouble is that the Government really do not believe it themselves, and if they want successfully to deceive the people, they must first deceive themselves. Some noble Lords on the Back-Benches may have succeeded in doing that, but the Government have not. I think that it is to the Government's credit that they have failed to convince themselves of the reality of reasonable, proper and worthwhile survival after a full-scale nuclear war. There are not enough dim-witted or wicked people in Government to sustain such a policy, and that is the truth of the matter. They are neither so daft as to believe in survival after a nuclear war, nor are they so Machiavellian as to try to pretend to the ordinary people of the country that what they know does not exist does in fact exist. That is the problem.
There may be a few at high level and one or two lower down, but that is not enough against the whole and growing body of world scientific opinion that nuclear war is not survivable. That opinion is held not only in this country; it is held all over the world. If noble Lords doubt it, I recommend them to read some of the latest American scientific literature, to read some of the literature which is now emerging from American medical opinion, and from our own medical opinion. All along the line the possibility of survival of a full-scale nuclear war is now reckoned to be practically nil.
This is dreadful, because for the first time mankind has within his power the ability to destroy his own species. That is the situation we are in, and it is totally unprecedented. It faces the human mind with a problem with which it has never before been faced. It is hardly surprising that sometimes noble Lords bring to this new problem traditional responses, emanating from their own background, which are not perhaps as relevant as they think they are.
I have played some part in exposing the unreality of civil defence as I see it. Back in the 'sixties I successfully moved a Motion in the old London County Council to abolish the Civil Defence Corps, on the grounds that the corps was being asked to perform an impossibility. At that time I suggested—and I am sorry that the suggestion was not followed up—substitution by a civil emergency force. This is precisely what one or two noble Lords have suggested—a force that would be there to deal with the kind of natural disasters which several noble Lords have mentioned. It would also be there to do anything which might conceivably be done in the event of a nuclear war. But it would not be a force which was geared, as the old civil defence force was geared, to the idea of trying to survive a nuclear war. Effectively to provide a defence against nuclear war was not possible then, and it is even less possible now.
When I became Member of Parliament I pursued the same argument with equal success, and in 1968 the Labour Government of the time accepted part of my argument nationally. But what they did not do was to accept the second part of my argument. They abolished the Civil Defence Corps, but they retained nuclear weapons. They abandoned the pretence of

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survival, but they continued to commit the nation to national nuclear suicide. The amazing thing is that ever since our people have tolerated the slow march to extinction and are only now beginning to say, "No" to national self-extermination.
The Government claim to believe that between 15 and 30 million people might survive a nuclear attack on these islands. Their main concern is the preservation of law and order among the survivors, and Home Office circulars to local authorities concentrate on this point, including the round-up of subversives before the actual strike. If some noble Lords had their way that would include every member of CND, for a start. Operation Square Leg, which is the operation which last year included civil defence—there is to be another one this year, which is to be called Hard Rock; I do not know what that means—seemed to include as subversive anyone opposed to nuclear war; but what the Home Office circulars have not done is to give any details of how the last hours of the majority might be eased. They go straight from strike to burial, and they say nothing about the period which must concern most people—what happens before you die. Are there any plans for suicide pills for the intolerably injured and sick? We do not know; and if we are committed by the Government to be the subject of nuclear death, we ought at least to know if there is to be any way of departing without terrible indignity.
Her Majesty's Opposition believes (and perhaps your Lordships will allow me a minute or two because I possibly am one of the few speaking in this sense)—and I quote from the official Labour Party document:
" For a densely populated country like Britain there can be no effective civil defence against a direct nuclear attack. The only effective civil defence is to ensure that Britain is not involved in a nuclear war, and to oppose all nuclear weapons and nuclear war preparations by Britain or any other country. We recommend local authorities to reject attempts to use so called civil defence to condition people to accept that a nuclear war is somehow survivable '."
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, if the noble Lord will allow me to interrupt him, when was that produced?
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, that is a Labour Party document entitled Advice Note—Civil Defence, Home Defence and Emergency Planning dated June 1981 and circulated to local authorities. The real question is not: can we survive a nuclear war? Everyone really knows that we cannot. The real question is: are we going to maintain the pretence of survival until the day of our extinction, or are we going to stand up for the human race and demand the universal abolition of nuclear weapons and their prohibition from these islands?
7.3 p.m.
Earl Bathurst: My Lords, I, too, want to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletsoe, on his excellent maiden speech, and to join with all the others who have congratulated him in hoping that we shall hear from him again many times when he is able to address us. Your Lordships will well remember —or some of your Lordships will well remember, others perhaps not quite so well—the nerves that take hold of one on making a maiden speech in your Lordships' House, and that is the first trouble to get
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over. The noble Lord could not have been more composed or more self-assured. The second problem is to say something which the expert noble Lords who have already spoken have not already said. In this case, my Lords, it is completely the reverse: it is our difficulty to find something to say which the noble Lord himself, in his maiden speech, has not already said. We must congratulate him on his expertise and his feeling for this important topic of civil defence.
My Lords, I join in this debate because as my noble friend Lord Renton has said (and I am rather embarrassed) I used to be his dogsbody in the Home Office, and I was given the task of looking after civil defence. The Home Office had never seen a Lord-in-Waiting, let alone a Member of your Lordships' House who was, I think, Under-Secretary of State. They did not quite know what to do, but my noble friend put me on to civil defence and I did indeed find these amazing places to which he has referred. You opened a trapdoor and there was a world which existed only in science fiction films. I hope that there is something of the organisation of those places remaining—and it is disturbing to hear what the noble Lord said.
I also went once to a place, luckily not far from my home, where there was a huge shed full of civil defence equipment, most of which comprised dosimeters; and I spent a complete afternoon with the technician in charge of that place, who was also an expert on brewing home-made wine. I learned a great deal about civil defence in the course of that afternoon, and luckily was able to make a report on what dosimeters were, which report I presented to my noble friend Lord Renton. I also sent a copy to our right honourable friend at the time, the late Lord Butler, together with a sample of home-made dandelion wine. I do not know what the result was, but it certainly was not referred to in the diaries of the late noble Lord, Lord Butler. But something did happen with regard to dosimeters, and I think the noble Lord was entirely responsible for that.
My noble friend the Minister who will be replying will, I hope, welcome in a moment what I am going to say, because no noble Lord has referred to an Answer which he gave not long ago to my noble friend Lord Renton. In that Answer he said that his right honourable friend and the Government are going to spend 60 per cent. more annually on civil defence, and this will bring it in 1983, I think the reply said, to £45 million. I suppose that is quite a lot of money—certainly a great deal more than had been spent. Whether it should be more, and very much more, I am afraid I do not know; but at least more is being spent, and I am quite certain that all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, will wish to thank and congratluate him for that.
In the same reply my noble friend said that the capacity of the Home Defence College, mentioned by my noble friend Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, is to be increased from 50 to 70, and that will mean that more experts can go there to learn what can be done in a nuclear attack. I am afraid I did not write to my noble friend to give him notice of this question, but I wonder whether he knows to what extent those places have been taken up.

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My Lords, there is some extra cash, but what else must it be spent on? There are the expert people mentioned by my noble friend Lord Inglewood; or equipment, communications. They must have advanced enormously since the days that my noble friend Lord Renton was talking about. There is also the organisation of civil defence set-up, and the people who are concerned with it. I believe —I always have done—that civil defence needs a new image. It is not quite right. Once upon a time there was an argument about it all, and the result was Home Defence ". Again, that was not quite right, because even then it was considered a type of what might now perhaps be called "Dad's Army". It did not seem to be quite right. But we called it "Home Defence College ", and we have it in pamphlets, "Home Defence"; so there is something there.
But whatever else it should be, I believe it should be a national organisation of some sort—and many of your Lordships have already said this. The word "emergency" would surely fire the public mind; and rescue"; and probably "defence" should be in there somewhere as well. I believe that it should be funded nationally, on the lines of the Territorial Army. Obviously, local councils will have to organise at council level—at least, I imagine so. But I do not believe it is right to allow rate support grant to be spent on such a national defence organisation.
My noble friend Lord Renton has suggested that it should qualify for a 100 per cent. rate support grant. It may be that that is so; but, in any case, I believe it should be national expenditure, because whatever else is going to happen in a nuclear war I am quite certain that where a nuclear weapon strikes it will not be the civil defence effort in that place that will come to the aid, it will be the civil defence effort of somewhere else—and, unfortunately, at the present time it would seem that those "somewhere elses" are the least civil defence-minded authorities.
I believe that a national status for civil defence would bring in that immense number of people who have already been mentioned by your Lordships. They would also deal with emergencies. My noble friend Lord Mottistone and all on this side of the House, and the noble Lord, Lord St. John, have suggested that they should be available and ready for national and local emergencies—and that is a very new view, I believe, in this House. Unfortunately, I could not be at the last debate. There is the National Council for Civil Defence. My noble friend Lord Renton is its president and all speakers, except for me, are members of that council. There are other experts in the field and they are conspicuous by their absence. I cannot see how any debate on civil defence in this House can be complete without the noble Lord, Lord Soper, making a brilliant speech on how morally incorrect was civil defence and without the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, giving a beautifully explicit, scientific reason why civil defence was no good at all —and he was, many noble Lords will remember, a member of an organisation called Pugwash. I could never work out exactly what that meant. It was some very scientific organisation. In any case, noble Lords will know that it is almost impossible to wash
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a pug anyhow, and even if you did, you should not do it; it is harmful. However, he used to put that view forward.
All I can say is that my noble friend Lord Elton has an easy ride tonight to answer in this debate. I am sure that he will be able to more than do justice to the points which the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Putney, nobly put forward in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Soper, and the noble Lord, Lord Kennet.
There is another organisation of which I had never heard previously. It is the Industrial Emergency Services Officers. They have a pamphlet which gives a review of their deliberations. Perpaps I can quote some of page 2 of that pamphlet to your Lordships because of the interest. Ordinary national and local disasters have entered into the debate. On the Flixborough disaster, there were 28 people killed, 105 injured, 200 homes rendered uninhabitable and some 5,000 people (about 100 coach loads) had to be removed. 1 am sure that some noble Lords will know something about that terrible disaster. I watched it humbly and in awe on the television. Mr. G. Jolliffe, the National Coal Board Yorkshire district reserve emergency stations manager would, I guess, know more about emergencies, disasters and accidents than anyone in the country. He reported to this organisation. I will quote:
" It was felt by many people that it was a job for the civil defence organisation."
Then he goes on and I do not think that this is him speaking, but it is all in the same report:
" It was also felt by many people that the civil defence organisation as it existed would have coped with the Flixborough situation with a degree of competence and its availability was sorely missed".
It was not there—that is what it means. Had it been there (and a man like Mr. Jolliffe said it should have been there) I believe that what everyone is saying is even more important. There was a terrible disaster in the early 1960s involving a Harrow tube train. I have it from first-hand evidence what a magnificent job an industrial civil defence unit did to save lives at that time.
I believe that if we could make a national corps, unit, or whatever, available for local and national disasters and defence, we will have thousands of men and women who are experts in their field coming to join, to sign up, to show where they are available, and ready for the real experts to guide them in times of any national or local emergency. Nobody can say that civil defence can take the place of the professional rescue and defence units. Nobody can say that. They will be very sorely stretched in times of emergency. Those who know something about radiation, who know how to turn off the gas and to fix electric light and power cables are the men and women who will be wanted at such a time. I believe, like my noble friend Lord Mottistone, the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletsoe, and all noble Lords who have taken part, that these people will come forward—which alas! they have not yet done with our present civil defence organisation.
7.16 p.m.
Earl Cathcart: My Lords, I should like to add my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Mottistone for giving us the opportunity this afternoon to discuss this

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subject, a subject which we have not debated for too long in my opinion, and a subject which all too often is swept under the carpet. To talk and discuss the possibility of an all-out attack on this country, perhaps even a nuclear attack, is highly unpalatable. But the unexpected often happens, as many of us have recently come to realise. As far as the defence of these islands is concerned we should be ready for any eventuality. In his speech my noble friend Lord Mottistone outlined clearly some of these eventualities. Civil defence is far too often put in doubt and disparaged by some people in this country, but we must not run away from our responsibilities and we must acknowledge the humanitarianism and non-aggressive qualities of civil defence.
Much of the opposition to any form of organised attempts to establish any form of effective civil defence is based, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Putney, pointed out, on the single scenario that an attack on these islands will be an all-out nuclear attack and that in such conditions there is no point in surviving, so why bother to organise any arrangements to mitigate the effects of that or of any other form of attack or attempt to organise any recovery? I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, over-emphasised the nuclear aspect in his speech and this was shown up by the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, in his speech.
An attack on this country might take many forms, ranging from extensive sabotage of essential public services right through to a nuclear demonstration strike or a series of nuclear strikes against essentially military and industrial targets. I must mention the highly unpalatable subject of chemical warfare. There arc certain nations who are not our allies, and not in NATO, who do not regard the use of chemical warfare as anything but conventional. There is no doubt that a civil defence organisation could mitigate to a great degree a chemical strike against this country.
Successive defence White Papers have stressed the high priority given to the defence of the United Kingdom, and civil defence is an essential and integral part of our military effort to satisfy this important priority. Yet civil defence is the Cinderella between the two sister departments of defence and home affairs. To expect our armed forces to conduct effective defence of the United Kingdom against hostile attack in whatever form it might occur, without proper arrangements to protect and sustain the civil population, is unthinkable. If this is not done (and my noble friend Lord Inglewood stressed this) it may actually impede the armed forces in their prime task. One can imagine the extent to which a large-scale, disorganised band of refugees moving in an uncontrolled way in this country in the event of any form of attack, would gravely disrupt the mobility of our armed forces attempting to defend the country and carry out their tasks.
Furthermore, in such a situation our conventional public services—the police, the ambulance service, the fire service and others—will have their hands full in performing their normal tasks, and they will be totally overwhelmed unless within each community there is some organisation within the civilian population to enable them to cope and to sustain themselves. There are so many tasks civilians can do to sustain themselves and to maintain administration within their own communities when communications perhaps have been
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destroyed or disrupted; yet these capabilities need organisation and preparation, and cannot be achieved at short notice when an emergency has actually occurred.
There is no doubt that the Home Office agrees with this. Indeed, it has acknowledged the need for civil defence as part of our defence posture; but I do not think it has approached the subject with a proper degree of urgency, and neither do I think it has imparted urgency in a satisfactory manner to local authorities. Certainly civil defence is best organised on a local scale based on county and local authorities; but, of course, local authorities are harassed, busy people in peacetime. If they are to organise a satisfactory civil defence they need considerable encouragement and guidance as well as financial support from central Government. I think central Government need to be far more forthcoming than they have been so far.
One of the main problems is the integration of a large number of independent peacetime organisations to satisfy the particular problems which each community might have to contend with in the event of an attack. That was referred to very clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. Civil defence planning does not consist solely of the provision of shelters. That, in my opinion, is a red herring which has led us off target in our discussion of this overall problem. It requires a degree and variety of skills throughout the civilian population, and the need for the organisation to he made effective also requires proper co-ordination and a proper chain of command. That was referred to by my noble friend Lord Inglewood. I very much doubt whether the phrase "under command" would find favour in a largely civilian organisation, but "in support" I think would. But there must be a chain of command, with clearly recognised links between the various levels of command so that they may understand how they are to support the overall plan which they may be required to put into effect.
I think there are so many skills within the framework of civil defence that almost any natural ability of individual civilians can be satisfied and their training could be interesting and worthwhile. A by-product of organising civil defence in peacetime with a wide range of civilian population trained in this great variety of duties, would of course be the provision of a better degree of protection against disasters of a non-warlike nature which can so easily occur. Therefore, I very strongly support the Motion put forward by my noble friend.
7.24 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Elton): My Lords, I should like first to thank and congratulate my noble friend Lord Mottistone not only on providing us with a most admirable debate but also for providing the occasion for the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletso, to launch his first voyage upon the waters of this House, upon which we wish to see him sail with equal success—and that will be considerable success—for many years ahead.
Those of your Lordships who lived in this country during the last world war—particularly whose who lived in London or Coventry or Liverpool, or any of the other cities that were subject to aerial attack—will know very well what a vital part civil defence played both in saving the lives of countless individuals and

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in securing the survival of our people as a whole. They will also clearly recall something of which it may perhaps be necessary to remind some of our younger fellow countrymen and women: that civil defence is an entirely peaceable activity designed solely to save lives and make those lives livable under extremely difficult conditions. It is conducted without weapons and without malice, and by many it is conducted without any reward save that of knowing that they have contributed to the unwarlike victory of life over death. It is not, as the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, so eloquently argued, something to which pacifists can object. Yet it does have its own part, I believe, in staving off the actual threat of war itself.
Your Lordships will know that the Government's Defensive Strategy rests upon the principle of deterrence. The price of aggression must be seen, by any aggressor, to be not worth the paying. The effectiveness of that principle depends upon its credibility. The aggressor must be convinced not only of our ability to respond in kind, but also of our readiness to do so. No one will treat as real an advertised response to an attack when our own demeanour shows that we do not believe in the possibility of the attack itself.
In modern war the civilian population itself becomes all too often the target, whether intended or not, of weapons of huge destructive power. London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Beirut—to winners and losers alike the lesson is inescapable, and it is inescapable whether or not nuclear weapons are used. No country can be said seriously to believe in the reality of that sort of threat which does not take steps to mitigate its effects—and a country that does not believe in the threat is a country that is most acutely exposed to the reality.
There are those who argue that this very slender link between the deterrent method of securing peace (which rests upon the possession of weapons of a power and number sufficient to deter those who possess such weapons themselves) and any coherent system of civil defence (which rests upon the pre-arranged organisation of unarmed non-combatant civilians to rescue, succour and protect their unarmed noncombatant civilian compatriots) itself renders it immoral. I cannot follow the logic of that, my Lords; I really cannot. I cannot see that it is wrong to render a hideous war marginally less likely by trying to protect those who take no part in it and are principally at risk. Indeed, were the calamity to befall us and were thousands of our men, women and children to perish for lack of simple precautions and elementary assistance, I think that the people who had actively opposed or prevented those simple provisions would be revealed as clearly and inescapably responsible for a large number of unnecessary deaths.
But even if you accept the lemming logic behind that position, the opponent of civil defence is himself still in an indefensible position, for a very simple reason which, on other platforms, he himself is constantly advancing. I am not pointing the finger at anybody, but I am looking at a generality of people. No one, my Lords, positively no one, can guarantee the future. Even a 100 per cent. pacifist, unilateralist government could not guarantee the peace and it really does puzzle and sadden me to hear good and earnest men saying in one breath that nuclear weapons must
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be dismantled as otherwise they will eventually be unleashed by mistake, and in the next that our wives and children and we ourselves must not be accorded any protection by central government or civil defence in the event of an attack or an accident. And the words of my noble friend Lord Renton have done much to show how the risk of nuclear war being precipitated almost or entirely by mistake is likely to grow in the years ahead. If those who argue against us cannot agree with us in wisdom, my Lords, at least let them do so in mercy.
The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, argued against the possibility of conventional attack and took as an analogy the fact that the Germans did not hesitate to use their aerial fleet to bombard this country in 1940. In those years they had a very large and potent bombing air force and we had not. I would not seek to argue that analogy, but I would argue an analogy in the same year: then the Germans had large stocks of poisonous gas and so did this Government and we equipped our civilian population with protection against it. The weapon was there, and neither side used it. I do not accept the argument that having the weapon creates the risk. I believe that the risk is created by unpreparedness, both to respond and to protect oneself from attack. That being so, it is, indeed, logical that our civil defence arrangements should be concerned with conventional, as well as with nuclear, warfare, particularly against air attacks against targets of military significance.
One of my noble friends referred to the example posed in the South Atlantic. He has used that example, and let me refer your Lordships to the terrible plight of the civilian population of large parts of the Lebanon. Much central government activity in civil defence is taken up with planning against this form of attack, and the same should be true of local authority planning. This planning is, of course, closely related to planning against peacetime emergencies and disasters as well. I am very glad that my noble friend Lord Bathurst referred to the Flixborough disaster as an illustration of the admirable way in which co-operation can come together effectively at short notice in local districts. I often think that the fire service is not given sufficient credit not only for its role on that occasion, but for its very considerable role in preparing against, and trying to avoid, civil disasters up and the down the country. So let us remember that emergency planning is something that must offer protection to the people of an area against any emergency which may occur, whether it is a flood, a bombing raid or, in the worst case, a nuclear attack.
I now turn to those simple preparations which this Government have so far put in hand. Very soon after coming into office, the Government decided to take a fresh look at the state of planning measures. The result of that review was announced by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary on 7th August 1980, and it was conveyed to local authorities by Home Office circular ES.1 of 1981. It marked substantial improvements, involving increasing annual expenditure progressively over a three-year period to exceed its former level, as my noble friend has generously reminded your Lordships, by 60 per cent. in real terms. Of course, we shall never please all of the people all of the time. Some think that we do too

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little civil defence planning; some too much.
The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, would have us have either a kitchen table or a mine shaft. In a most interesting postscript to his speech, elicited by the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, he put forward a policy which I find slightly at variance with the National Executive Committee's Advice Note No. 6, published in June, 1981, which has already been referred to twice in this debate, and to which I shall doubtless have recourse again.
May I at this point reassure my noble friend Lord Renton, when we are on the subject of grants to local authorities, that the 75 per cent. grant is a specific grant and is not available for expenditure on other purposes. The job of the Government in peacetime is to access the extent of the risk, and to weigh that against what the country can reasonably afford, having regard to all its other commitments—
Lord Renton: My Lords, would my noble friend allow me to intervene on a rather important point? Has he any means of ensuring that local authorities spend the specific grant and spend it within the compass of emergency planning?
Lord Elton: My Lords, I always proceed upon the thin ice of local government expenditure with great caution. I should like, if I may, to be more specific by writing to my noble friend, but it is a 75 per cent. grant on work undertaken. I think that my noble friend believes it is subsumed in the RSG. My understanding on the advice I have before me at the moment, is that it is a grant against a specific expenditure. If I am wrong, I shall have to inform your Lordships at a later stage. But, in any case, I will write to my noble friend —
Earl Bathurst: My Lords, may I interrupt my noble friend here, because so many of your Lordships think that the expenditure is a vital point? Is it not right that the 75 per cent. specific grant, if it is spent, is also considered as a part of over-expenditure? I do not believe that it is separate from county councils' budgets that are allowable for grants and expenditure. Am I not right that it is not over and above what they must budget for?
Lord Elton: My Lords, I should like to give a technical reply to my noble friend's technical question, and I think that 1 will just allow a little time for it to gestate, if I may so phrase it.
A primary requirement in the arrangements for the protection of a nation in modern war is effective provision for warning the civilian population of imminent air attack and, if—God forbid !—the enemy should use nuclear weapons, for monitoring the subsequent spread of radioactive fall-out. Your Lordships will know, as my noble friend Lord Cork and Orrery has very clearly explained, the different sorts of damage, and the fact that the Swiss are digging deep shelters suggests that they are preparing for direct attack as well as for fall-out. But the fall-out needs to be monitored, because it is invisible, and lethal.
Those two capabilities, in a small and crowded nation such as ours, could save literally millions of lives. They rest on a typically British framework: a partnership between central government, the emer-
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gency services and volunteers from the general public. More than 11,000 volunteers of the Royal Observer Corps—many of them young people—train regularly for their vital role, and in recognition of this receive the improved allowances which were introduced by this Government two years ago. The full-time staff of the organisation now have a new administrative headquarters at Oxford. There are over 9,000 power-operated sirens in urban areas and nearly 20,000 warning points in suburban and rural areas. The communication chain and the equipment are steadily being modernised. All in all, the United Kingdom warning and monitoring organisation is an extremely cost-effective casualty prevention measure, of which the nation should be justly proud; and it does not threaten a single life.
In the aftermath of a widespread nuclear attack upon the United Kingdom, government of the country from London or any other single location would be impracticable for a time. A system of regional, or decentralised, government has been planned against this eventuality, and we are rapidly completing the network of protected administrative headquarters—both regional and sub-regional headquarters—which the system requires. These headquarters need to be matched at county and district levels, and in Greater London at group and borough levels, by protected accommodation for those whose duty it would be to marshal resources and co-ordinate relief operations. There is no general need at these levels for purpose-built headquarters, and the established practice is to make central government grants available to local authorities for essential adaptations in suitable premises which are already at their disposal.
I have now to reassure my noble friend Lord Renton that the 75 per cent. grant is available only on approved estimates of agreed expenditure. I hope that that answers his question. Over £1 million has been approved for such schemes over the past 12 months, and more money is available. The full effectiveness of the headquarters would depend upon reliable communications, and we have undertaken to spend more than for several years past on improvements to the emergency communications network across the country, which my noble friend Lord Bathurst said was so eminently desirable and which could save many lives.
I think that the convention of the debate would allow me to go on until about two minutes to eight. I shall not take the whole of that time, but I shall trespass beyond 12 minutes. Headquarters and communications are only as good as the people who use them. For this reason, we arc pressing on with the designation of the staff of central government departments—for example, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Department of Health and Security, the Department of Energy and my own department, the Home Office—with civil defence responsibilities in war. Such designation will permit their training and exercising in peace time. Local authorities have, by and large, designated their war duty staffs, and they—together with the volunteer members of the scientific advisory service—receive training, both locally and nationally.
Here I would pay tribute to the excellent contributions which the Home Defence College at Easingwold,

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which my noble friend mentioned, makes to the nation's civil preparedness. We have built another 20 study bedrooms and thereby extended the tutorial accommodation at the college by 40 per cent. They opened only last month. They are being taken up, but I could not tell my noble friend to what level their use will eventually rise.
The emergency services, particularly the police, approach civil defence with great seriousness. Much is done. More remains to be done. The public, as my right honourable friend said in August 1980, have a right to know. Noble Lords will be aware of the extensive facilities which the Home Office has made available to the media in recent years. Radio and television teams have been welcome at sub-regional headquarters, at United Kingdom warning and monitoring organisation installations and, for a week at a time, at the Home Defence College itself. Ministers and officials have been interviewed freely. In addition, the Government put the war crisis booklet Protect and Survive on the bookstalls, together with two new booklets on domestic nuclear shelters for those who wish to know about such things.
My noble friend Lord Mottistone refers particularly in his Motion to the civil defence duties of the local authorities. They have an obligation under the Civil Defence Act 1948—I can confirm to my noble friend Lord Inglewood the words of my noble friend Lord Renton—to discharge certain civil defence functions. Many of these are detailed in the Civil Defence (Planning) Regulations 1974. It is here that my noble friend sees difficulty, because it is an unfortunate fact that some local authorities—guided in some cases, I believe, by the mistaken philosophies which I have already mentioned—are less than enthusiastic about carrying out these functions.
Some authorities have gone so far as to declare themselves nuclear-free zones. I find that to be a singularly meaningless term. It is rather like a bald man writing "rain-free zone" on the top of his head and expecting to remain dry throughout the summer—which of course he could not, unless he had a special arrangement with the Almighty. I suppose that the local authorities concerned may feel that they have some special and reliable arrangement with the Warsaw Pact countries, but if so it will be an arrangement that they will not only not drop a bomb on them but that they will not drop one anywhere upwind of them, in whatever direction the wind may be. That seems to me to be an admirable defence but one upon which we cannot rely.
This fallacy was devastatingly exposed, along with much else, by my noble friend Lord Cork and Orrery. I regret to say that it seems to have been undertaken with the guidance of the Labour Party National Executive in the document distributed by them last June, to which I have already referred. That seems to me to be the height of irresponsibility. I can say, none the less, to my noble friend Lord Inglewood, that all local authorities are complying at least with their minimum statutory obligations. In the event of default, of course, the Government do possess powers of enforcement under the Civil Defence (General) Regulations 1949 and the Civil Defence (Grant) Regulations 1953. However, where there is apparent
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failure or refusal by a local authority, the Government have, so far, preferred to proceed by encouragement and persuasion as well as by pointing to the very considerable financial assistance available by way of specific grants, to which I have already referred.
I turn now to the matter which lies at the heart of the debate, to which the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Bletso, first drew our attention—after my noble friend; namely, the role of the volunteer in civil defence. Perhaps we should see this against the background of the Home Office Circular ES.2 of 1981 which set out in some detail Government guidelines on the organisation of the community in war. In his Statement in another place on 7th August 1980, the Home Secretary made clear that the role of volunteers is vital to the success of civil defence planning as a whole, and in particular to effective planning for community involvement below district level. He went on to say that the Government are ready to make more money available to meet this need and that "the harnessing of volunteer effort will be an important feature of our plans".
Herein lies, in part, an answer to the criticism of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, whose arithmetic about the expenditure of the British Government on military bands has gone a little astray. No, we do not spend £45 million a year on military bands, which is what I think the noble Lord led the House to believe. I will let the noble Lord know in writing the exact figure, if he wishes, but its order of magnitude is half that, at most—and maybe even less.
The noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, wants there to be more standard training material throughout the country. We understand this wish and at present we are looking into the possibility. Your Lordships will know that this Government appointed Air Marshal Sir Leslie Mayor to co-ordinate volunteer effort in England and Wales. He was one of the two signatories at the foot of Circular ES.2 to which I referred earlier. Subsequently, Mr. F. G. Armstrong was appointed to fulfil a similar office of co-ordination in Scotland.
It would be misleading to say that local authorities have responded with uniform enthusiasm, even to the enrolment and training of volunteers. As in other areas of civil defence planning, progress has been variable and there are disappointments. Substantial progress has been made and continues to be made. The Government are firmly committed to a belief in the importance of voluntary effort in our society and a conviction that there are many people eager to help others and to lend a hand in performing some public duty without financial reward. Civil defence is an activity which has a strong humanitarian appeal.
It follows that we owe it to these prospective helpers, and to those who wish to be helped by them, to see that this reservoir of voluntary help is not only used but used in the most effective way. The Government will continue to mobilise this resource to the best of their ability. In the meantime, I should like to pay tribute to the valuable work of these dedicated men and women, whether as individual volunteers, or scientific advisers, or members of one of the organisations assisting civil defence, such as the Royal Observer Corps, the warning officers of the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation, the British

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Red Cross Society, the St. John Ambulance Association and Brigade, the Women's Royal Voluntary Service, Civil Aid and many local groups of volunteers.
No Government can afford to be complacent in all this. While, as I have said, encouragement and persuasion have been our watchwords, we shall not shrink from the consideration of other, more direct steps if the civil defence responsibilities properly placed by Parliament on local authorities many years ago are seen to be gravely neglected or deliberately flouted. Ours is a tolerant society but, as recent events elsewhere have amply demonstrated, the British people, in the fullness of time, brook no abuse of their sense of fair play. I am sure noble Lords will agree that it would be less than fair to people dependent upon the soundness of their planning if some local authorities were to pay little more than lip service to their statutory obligations and were seen to get away with it. Lip service might, or might not, amount in law to outright neglect or failure, but I am confident that the country as a whole looks to the Government to take positive steps to ensure that, however low the risk of war in Europe may be, the lives of people are not put at additional risk by irresponsible local authorities.
Many points must be unanswered in a speech which is already three minutes over the convention, but they will be taken into consideration at the Home Office by myself and more particularly by my honourable and learned friend and my right honourable friend. I think I have said enough to show that the Government's recognition of the profound importance to our people of effective civil defence is real. I believe that the great majority of noble Lords will agree with this view. I believe that the great majority of the people of this country will also agree with this view. I am sure that this debate will send to those public authorities who are sceptical about the value of civil defence a clear message that the country supports the lead which this Government are giving to improve the state of civil preparedness throughout the United Kingdom.
7.49 p.m.
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister very much for not going on as long as he threatened to do, for it gives me a little time in which to wind up. May I thank him for his reply. It contained excellent arguments against the nonsense that was coming from the Benches opposite—which I shall talk about in a minute—but it was terribly disappointing when it came to the "nitty gritty" of what real leadership is to be given by the Government, first in persuading people that they are mistaken in not going on with developing their civil defence and, secondly, in not undertaking to provide some sort of an argument against the misleading nonsense which is being put forward to the general public of the kind which the noble Lords opposite advanced earlier this evening.
Really, the Government should give something more positive. I was terribly disappointed that the point made by my noble friend Lord Renton, that there should be leadership in the form of a director-general with commitments and powers, was not taken up at all. That was a positive and useful suggestion as to how the Government could use someone to give the right
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leadership. There was a gap in respect of what was said by my noble friend; the sentiment is splendid but the action was non-existent.
It is my turn, at last, to add my congratulations to our maiden speaker. We would genuinely like to hear him again, when he can find the time. His maiden speech was remarkably well balanced; it was splendidly delivered and yet it lasted for only five minutes and told us all we needed to know. It was an example to the rest of us. I expect that I might even be able to emulate it, although I have a little more to say.
I was terribly disappointed also by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, speaking from the Opposition Front Bench from a position of authority in this Chamber. He was "rabbiting on" about "nuclear". It was so disappointing and so unimaginative. I am almost ashamed of the Opposition if that is all they think. It was so disappointing that there was nothing positive there at all. Luckily, I do not need to go on about it because the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, in a splendid speech tore it to pieces within seconds. But perhaps we will not have them as the main Opposition much longer, so that will be all right.
On the other hand, in respect of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Putney, I came to the conclusion, after having thought for a long time that he was in the pay of the enemy, that he is really tragically and naively misguided. It is fascinating that anyone who is obviously so intelligent should be so misguided and naive. In that respect I will give him anything he likes to say but, by heaven! his arguments were tortuous. I am going to have fun reading them. It may be that another time I will be able more actively to untangle his knots, to help him see the truth. We shall see.
I cannot finish this speech without reminding your Lordships that my noble friend Lord Renton, in his position as president of the National Council for Civil Defence, has been tireless and energetically valiant in helping that organisation to get off the ground. I cannot tell him how grateful and thankful I am, and all the other members of that organisation are, for providing such splendid leadership. If only the Government would provide the same sort of leadership in controlling, encouraging and developing local authorities, and in putting some sense into them, then we would be getting somewhere. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Multiple Sclerosis: Partial Disability Benefits
7.53 p.m.
Baroness Lane-Fox Baroness Lane-Fox rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have considered the report of the Multiple Sclerosis Society on Benefits for Partial Disability, and if so whether they are prepared to institute within social security a system of partial incapacity for work.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, generally when one submits a scheme to improve the lot of disabled people it involves passing around the begging bowl. The scheme explained in the report mentioned in my

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Question is very different since it contains elements which could be a saving to the economy. Prepared for the Multiple Sclerosis Society by the Economist Intelligence Unit to look at the cost implications of partially incapacitated provisions, the report suggests that its recommendations could save the social security budget several million pounds per annum. Most important of all is that its recommendations are not just economic but are also humane.
Let me stress to your Lordships that, partly because of the progress of medical science, many people now could live a long life span. While incapable of full-time employment, they are able and eager to work part-time. There are for example, young stroke victims, those with various mental handicaps, people with multiple sclerosis and other afflictions of the central nervous system, the bronchitics, old polios, some sclerosis people, the congenitally handicapped, heart cases and others that I have not mentioned—all of whom should have the chance to work if they can. They should be encouraged to accept the best career opportunity available to them.
Your Lordships may think that I sound bossy, if not a slave-driver, but to justify my stance let me declare what a thrilling moment it was for me when, at the age of 21, I got my first paid job at 30 shillings a week. From that time I realised that not only was this a release from the fetters of disablement (for it offered a chance to participate more fully in life) but that it also reduced the sense of being such a burden on the family. It became quite obvious to me that in work lay the best way for any disabled person to live an interesting, useful and fulfilled life.
What later seemed incomprehensible was that my right to draw invalidity pension would be jeopardised if I earned more than a certain set limit. At first that limit was only £4.50 per week. My noble friend Lord Crawshaw spoke scathingly of the demoralising effects of this in a witty and excellent speech during a debate on the Social Security Benefits Bill in February 1975. The case against the rule has been made repeatedly by the Disablement Income Group and other groups. Indeed, the limit has been raised several times in recent years. Admittedly, during my last two years as an employee, to avoid the hassle of having to notify the social security office every time my earnings were boosted unexpectedly—perhaps by writing an article or by the odd broadcast—I even sacrificed my untaxed invalidity pension in return for the taxable retirement pension. Now, in November this year, this earning limit is to be raised to £20—the steepest rise yet made and, as such, very welcome.
Nevertheless, the situation remains that there are those who cannot do a full week's work yet cannot afford to live on part-time pay. In order to hang on to their invalidity pension they have to give up their healthy urge to work. This is ludicrous. I need not remind your Lordships of the therapy provided by work; the earnings rule applied in these cases itself is called the "therapeutic earnings rule". It was called "therapeutic" as the intention was that it should be reward for work prescribed by a doctor, although in effect I am told that at the moment therapeutic earnings are not automatically payable. What can be said is that the name of this earnings rule, for those of us
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desperately trying to become self-supporting, far from being "therapeutic" is likely to threaten the onset of hypertension and high blood pressure. In the more kindly climate in which disabled people find themselves at present, such harsh rulings seem strangely out of tune.
From a number of figures and statistics quoted in the report it would appear that about 100,000 people fall within the provisions of these schemes. The numbers are not great. From researches made into the subjects by expert market researchers Nicole Davoud, Judith Buckle and Melvyn Kettle, and economist Jean Shrimpton, it appears that the large percentage of those who wish to become working disabled—provided there was no financial disincentive against doing so—could now be given the go-ahead to make the very most of their working abilities if the last of the schemes recommended in the report is adopted.
It seems more than coincidence that this report has been published now. The Chancellor has spoken fairly recently of a desire to do everything possible to assist the working disabled. There is now a new emphasis on job sharing and on part-time work. There is new technology and new working practices which are on the side of disabled people—both in helping to simplify our lives and in offering us jobs within our capacity.
Let me make it clear that I do not aspire to being any sort of trained economist or accountant. But I have been led through this report by the experts and am impressed that the people about whom we are talking are those who tire more easily than normal, through muscular and other conditions and malfunctions, so that they cannot sustain continuous effort for a full working week; or those who vary with their good and their bad days et cetera. Up to date, this provision through invalidity pension has been based not on sickness or disability as such but on their resulting inability to work.
The report gives these three options for correcting the present hardships, but of those it favours a system of a partial incapacity benefit on the basis of modification to invalidity benefit. Such a two-tier benefit already exists as attendance allowance, payable as it is at a high or a low rate. Such a partial incapacity benefit would remove the obstacle of the earnings rule to those it discouraged from making the most of their working talents. It is very encouraging that the Minister for Social Security and the Disabled, Mr. Hugh Rossi, said last week in another place:
" We recognise the force of the DIG argument for a partial incapacity allowance ".
Extensive calls are made on the DHSS for benefits to meet the extra expenses of disability, but it seems not very likely that all these can be met just yet. The scheme I am mentioning, if adopted, could prove to be quickly possible to implement. It would be assessed on an economic as well as on a medical basis, giving a realistic impression of the effect of disablement on a working life. It is thought by the authors that by using the assessment of this relatively small section of the total population of people with disabilities there could evolve a mechanism for assessing disability more realistically, which has so far been sadly lacking, helping towards the wider benefit scheme long sought by pressure groups. It should be said that such a partial benefit would not presumably amount to more

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than two-thirds of that for total disability, and for those enabled to work it might be a good deal less than this once their earnings are established.
In my humble view, this main proposal in the report deserves to be quickly incorporated within social security. I repeat that it is both economic and humane, and with due respect I commend it to my noble friend the Minister, hoping that he may find it possible to give a favourable reply.
8.3 p.m.
Lord Wallace of Coslany: My Lords, may I first congratulate the noble Baroness on the clear and very positive way she has put her case. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, has raised an important and human issue which is deserving of a wider ranging debate. The report itself I found to be well prepared and comprehensively presented. The prospect of employment, mainly part-time, for those suffering from partial incapacity has a beneficial effect to the individual. It gives a degree of independence and widens life's horizon for those so affected. I agree with the very obvious conclusion of the report that earnings from part-time work do not provide a living wage. The effect to the individual, however, with a degree of independence and feeling of use to the community, cannot be ignored.
I would like to quote from Section 9.2 of the report, part of which was referred to by the noble Baroness. The Chancellor, in his Budget speech, spoke of a desire to do all possible to assist the working disabled. The report goes on to say:
" New technology and new working practices are on the side of the partially disabled. Work sharing and part-time working are increasing, making this a particularly timely point at which to give further consideration to the potential, at present wasted, of this group of people who have significant disability but who none the less could be among the working disabled if they were permitted to do so."
I would not disagree with this, but to assume, as the report does, that 100,000 people would be affected and involved in employment, mainly part-time, is, I fear, a degree optimistic in view of the critical unemployment figure of over 3 million at the present time. Of course, we are not necessarily talking only about the present time but also about the future. But I am bound to put that point.
In any case, opportunities for part-time working vary considerably from area to area, and this, of course, must be taken into account. For instance, if one lives, as I do, in a residential suburban area, there is not the same opportunity as in other areas. However, even taking a somewhat pessimistic view, the case remains that the present limitation to certain cases allowed "therapeutic" earnings, subject to limited level of earnings, should be widened; in other words, to extend the opportunity not only to those suffering from multiple sclerosis but others with permanent disabilities and many other conditions reducing full or part-time employment potential. The report points out the problem of providing suitable legislation, and would appear to come down in favour of a partial incapacity benefit on the basis of modifications to invalidity benefit. But, of course, with this and other ideas some system of tapering is involved, with the added complication of the danger of bureaucratic administration.
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Here I would give the House an instance of what I mean. This comes from the Guardian diary of yesterday. This is the reply sent by the DHSS office at Richmond-on-Thames to a mentally ill 19 year old living on invalidity benefit who managed to get a job for two days washing dishes at Olympia and wrote to the DHSS asking them to reduce his benefit accordingly. The reply is:
" The claimant is disqualified for receiving non-contributory invalidity benefit for 17.5.82 because he failed without good cause to observe the rule that he should do no work other than work which he had good cause for doing and from which his earnings were ordinarily not more than £16.50 a week. S.S. (Unemployment, Sickness and Invalidity Benefit) Regulations, reg. 12(I)(a)(iii).
As a result an overpayment of non-contributory invalidity benefit has been made amounting to £2.95 as detailed below. Repayment of this sum is required because it has not been shown that the claimant has throughout used due care and diligence in the obtaining and receipt of benefit to avoid overpayment."
Yet this poor individual had previously written and asked them to adjust his benefit.
My Lords, a partial incapacity benefit could work, but in view of what I have indicated, it has to be administered with sensitivity, because you are dealing with people not fully able to deal with their own affairs. The report hints at financial savings and at one point mentions a figure of £5 million. I would say that financial savings are not unimportant, but certainly should not be the prime factor leading to possible change. The main issue is that we can do our utmost to ensure that the disabled and partially disabled shall be helped and encouraged to play as much a part as possible in the life of the community by productive work and effort and in so doing enhance their own dignity, self-reliance and independence. My Lords, this, I believe is the main objective behind the report, and may I say that it is one that has my wholehearted support.
8.10 p.m.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, I would like to begin by making an apology to the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for the fact that it is I and not my noble friend Lord Banks who is intervening in this short debate. He would have done it a great deal better than I, but he has asked to be associated with what I am going to say. He is absent simply owing to a longstanding engagement.
This document raises two important questions. The first is the question to which it specifically addresses itself, the other is the whole matter of the limitation on earnings in relation to social security benefits. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Coslany, mentioned the Guardian yesterday, but there is an article in the Guardian today which trenchantly points out that the interaction of tax and social security in Great Britain is an incoherent mess.
First, to the substance of the Unstarred Question. The present arrangements limit disabled part-time earners to £16.50 per week—I believe the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, said that it was to rise to £20 in November—after which they forfeit entitlement to invalidity benefit. These permissible earnings are entitled "therapeutic earnings", a term which I myself feel is rather unfortunate if not offensive. The

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report proposes a new category for which it suggests the name "concessionary earnings" and I believe that this would be a great improvement. I understand that on medical grounds these new concessionary earnings would be particularly appropriate in the case of multiple sclerosis which not infrequently afflicts people in their twenties and thirties who would otherwise have the expectation of almost a whole working life ahead. I am also led to understand that the condition is remissible in the sense of receding for periods, during which an increase in the sufferer's working capacity may well take place.
On page 30 the report tells us what I am sure we would all accept:
" Most younger disabled people and many of those in their middle years want to be as independent as possible. It is evident that this would encourage and help to create an atmosphere in which people are expected to contribute as far as possible to their own income, instead of feeling defeated by a system which concentrates on their incapacity."
That seems to me to be very well expressed.
A further point is that I am given to understand that we arc almost alone in the European Community in not having provision for partial incapacity outside our war and industrial pension schemes. All these things reinforce the desirability of enabling those who are able and anxious to take part-time work to do so. At present, the rule is that if a person can do some work, that person is not "incapable of work" so sickness and invalidity benefits cannot be payable. This is quite unduly rigid and indeed is an unrealistic approach to the real world of partial disablement. This report looks at ways of recognising and encouraging the residual capacity for work, which may be very considerable in some cases.
It is not only a question of creating the framework for a more interesting and satisfying life for the partially disabled, desirable though this is. There are also, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, has pointed out, and the report points out on page 29, potential savings to the economy:
" For those recipients who re-established adequate earnings there would be a gradual increase in tax and National Insurance contributions. Even in cases where recipients' earnings would not be at a sufficient level to extinguish or partly extinguish benefit, the addition to their purchasing power would mean greater contribution to indirect taxes. They would also be able to pay for services and purchases which would help to provide employment for others".
That is a very important consideration.
So we have not only a socially desirable end but one that looks as if it would be at the very least self-financing. The noble Baroness had slightly greater hopes for it, but at the very least it would be self-financing. The report sets out three options: modifications to the present law governing invalidity benefit; a scheme modelled on the present industrial disablement benefits; and an assessment of partial incapacity benefit on an economic as well as a medical basis—that is, taking account of loss of earnings. If I heard the noble Baroness aright, she expressed a preference for the third of these options. I am open to guidance and we must listen to the Government's point of view here. I look forward with great interest to what the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, is going to say.
I confess that I am marginally drawn to the first
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option; that is, modification of invalidity benefit involving a graduated withdrawal of the benefit on a tapering scale as earnings rise. We are warned on page 18 that tapers are more expensive to administer than a flat rate cut-off and that there is a danger of producing yet another technical "trap" unless the stepped withdrawal is properly designed. I do not believe, however, that that is beyond the wit of man. It is certainly not beyond the wit of the DHSS. The anticipated administrative costs are still very considerably less than in the other two options and the adaption of the existing benefit would probably be the speediest and most efficient way of achieving the desired object. Furthermore, it would not be out of step with the Government's approach to certain other benefits, such as unemployment benefit, on which they have raised the earnings disregard on bringing the benefits into tax.
Here I cannot refrain from widening the debate for a moment just to draw the logical conclusion from the various problems of designing tapers, avoiding traps and taxing benefits, that sooner of later we shall simply have to move towards a tax credit scheme on the lines which have long been promoted by the Liberals and are under very active consideration by my party. In fact, it was once a Conservative proposal, too, with which the noble Lord, Lord Cockfield, was not unconnected, so that it has very respectable credentials all round.
The total integration of the tax and benefit systems is the only way we will iron out the anomalies and difficulties to which I have referred. I should say here that I told the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, that I was going to mention this. She did not object, because it turns out that she, too, shares my belief that that is the way we shall have to go in the long run. I will not pursue it any further here and now, because the noble Baroness very properly has a specific object in view from which I do not wish to distract the Government's attention. It would be quite wrong if nothing was done now, because we are setting our sights on a beautiful new scheme which may still lie many years ahead. Limited improvements can and must be made and this is one of them. I therefore want to end by asking the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, when he comes to reply, to tell us in which way the Government themselves propose to give effect to the undertaking of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his budget speech to "do all possible to assist the working disabled".
8.18 p.m.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I must join other noble Lords who have thanked the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for introducing this short debate this evening, because it gives me the chance to welcome the report prepared by the Multiple Sclerosis Society on benefits for partial disability. The report has understandably generated much interest in the continuing debate on the need for provision for those who are unable to work full-time because of disability or chronic illness. It has also made some useful suggestions on how such help could be given.
As my noble friend has told your Lordships, the present system of benefit was not designed for people who, although ill or disabled, have some capacity to

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earn. Partial incapacity, also known as partial disability, is disability which leaves an individual with some capacity to earn. People in this position are not incapable of work in the traditional sense, and accordingly are generally barred from receipt of the normal incapacity benefit for which incapacity for work is a condition of entitlement.
The main contributory benefits in this area of social security—sickness and invalidity benefit—are payable only to those who are incapable of any work. The only exception to this is the so-called therapeutic earnings provision. This enables a person to be treated as incapable of work and to receive benefit if he is doing a job which may be regarded as of therapeutic value and for which his earnings are under a ceiling of £16.50 at present, and £20 from November. I will say more on that matter in a moment; it was raised by all the speakers this evening.
In addition to the difficulties which partially incapacitated people have in qualifying for incapacity benefits, they may also, of course, face considerable problems in attempting to support themselves by working. They may be restricted in the hours that they can work, the range of jobs they can do or the responsibilities that they can accept; or they may be able to work intermittently or in special conditions. Even when a disabled person's earnings are at a reasonable level, the demands of a job may well put an abnormal financial burden upon him in respect of travel, attendance or special clothing which will leave him significantly less well off than others.
If we turn to other parts of the social security system, a disabled part-time worker may, if his total income is low, be eligible for supplementary benefit which, of course, has some special rules for disabled people. If he has children and is in low-paid work for at least 30 hours a week-24 hours for a one-parent family— he may get family income supplement. There are preferences for disabled people in the rent and rate rebate schemes, and there is a range of means-tested benefits, such as free prescriptions and free school meals, for people with low incomes in general.
This does not, however, add up to a coherent system of help for disabled workers which would encourage them to make full use of whatever capacity for work they may have. It has been argued that there is thus some room for improvement in this as in other areas of social security, and the main question directed at me tonight is what our intentions are in respect of partial incapacity, Let me say straight away that I acknowledge the force of this case. If there is a disincentive to disabled people to obtain part-time work, then we clearly need to study ways around this. And we have confirmed that we are looking at the possibilities. Whether improvement can be achieved by amending the social security schemes or by other means is something that we shall need to consider very carefully.
However, as I am sure that your Lordships will recognise, this is a complex problem and there are no simple solutions. Indeed, the report recognises that there needs to be more work on the details of the approaches suggested in it. We are at present looking at these and other possibilities. The Social Security Advisory Committee are themselves considering this, and their advice, when it is available, will, I am certain, be of great assistance, But at the moment we are not
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able to say which is the best approach to adapt or when it would be possible to put it into effect.
The cost of any new provision for partial incapacity is certainly an important factor in considering the, relative merits of different possibilities, and also, of course, in determining when the Government could afford to introduce such a measure. The point has been made that there would be offsets against any cost, and this was one of the points made by my noble friend. Not only might some people take up work who would otherwise he totally reliant on benefit, but there would of course, also be increased tax revenue. That may well be so, but we need to do a lot more work on costs, taking into account such factors as the effect on people in full-time work who, because of disability, may find a combination of earnings and other financial support preferable to earnings alone. More work is needed before it is unequivocably clear that a worthwhile provision could he made at virtually no cost, as has been suggested. The report claims that the overwhelming majority of the potential client group for a partial incapacity benefit are already receiving one or more benefits, primarily invalidity benefits. As I say, we accept that some offsetting savings could be gained from taking such people off sole dependence on benefits. But it is necessary to look at the whole picture, and I think that your Lordships will appreciate that there might be costs as well as savings. We shall have to look at the whole equation.
There are other factors which need careful consideration also. One of these is the question of whom we should be trying to help. I think from what has been said that there is a consensus that provision on the lines we are discussing should be aimed at the disabled person capable of part-time work, and I imagine that in the definition of "disabled" your Lordships would wish to include those suffering from mental disability. But translating the concept of capability of part-time work into a legal framework will not be easy. Those of your Lordships with experience in social security will know the problem of drawing dividing lines so as to target provision at those for whom it is intended. I mention that difficulty not in any defeatist sense but to underline the complexity of the issues we are discussing.
The cost and scope of any scheme as well as its effectiveness will, of course, be determined by the nature of the scheme itself. That means that I cannot give figures this evening. What I can do, is suggest some of the ways in which it might be possible to take better account of partial incapacity.
The report itself suggests three approaches. The first is adjustment of the existing rules for social security benefits in order that people may work part-time without losing all their benefit. That is certainly worth looking at, since, on the face of it, it would result in a simple scheme. But I should perhaps alert your Lordships to the problem of drawing up rules so that the help goes only to those for whom it is intended. I am sure that no one would wish for the introduction of a scheme which, at the end of the day, provided benefit for people in part-time work even if they were in fact capable of doing full-time work.
The other two approaches suggested in the report relate to what I might describe as a full-blown, separate benefit for partial incapacity. The first option suggested is to use the criterion of loss of faculty. The

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second is to carry out both a medical and an occupational assessment of the individual. Both these approaches have much to be said for them. But I think —and the report recognises this—that both suffer from requiring a fairly high level of administrative effort.
There may be other ways in which to approach the problem of partial incapacity—for example, we should need to consider the possibility of support more directly related to employment. And in all our considerations we shall have to bear in mind the tax position of the people concerned. It would not be sensible to introduce a scheme in which the marginal tax on earnings was approaching 100 per cent., because, of course, of reduction of benefit, though, in saying that, I recognise what has been said about the high level of motivation of the people we are discussing. For many of them—and my noble friend referred to this when she talked about the very first job that she had—the status of having a job is at least as important as the earnings deriving from it.
As I have made clear, we have not reached any decisions on this matter. When we see what the Social Security Advisory Committee have to say, it may be that the picture will be clearer and the options available will be capable of analysis as to cost and numbers involved. But, even then, we shall have to look at the resources available and weigh up what priority to give such a provision compared with other objectives, including those in the social security field. But, nevertheless, the important point to take from this debate is that we have been persuaded that there is a problem and that we must look carefully at all possible solutions to it. We are now setting about that task.
Let me turn now to one or two points that have been made during the course of the debate. First, let me correct one matter raised by both my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, about the therapeutic earnings provision. The therapeutic earnings provision is not an earnings rule: it is a measure of the work that can be done by someone without being incompatible with incapacity for work. It is a guideline to the insurance officer who makes decisions about such incapacity. The noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, in fact, specifically questioned the terminology. I should explain that these earnings are permitted only if the work undertaken is approved by the claimant's doctor and is thus therapeutic. Perhaps the phrase "concessionary" would be better, but I fear that that would still be only a semantic difference for so long as we retain the present system of benefits for sick and disabled people. The important point is that the therapeutic earnings limit is just that; it applies only to work that the doctor certifies as being of therapeutic value. Thus, I was careful to say that it is not just a question of being only £16.50, or £20 later in the year when it is raised.
I think that the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, referred to some foreign schemes. It is true that other countries make provision for partial incapacity, and naturally my department has studied these. But I would just make the point that such schemes have to be set in context. There are invariably important differences in the general structure and administration of other systems of social security, health care and social services. This means that their arrangements
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cannot readily be translated into our own context, though there is perhaps always something to be learned from the way other people deal with problems similar to our own. As I say, their schemes will certainly be studied and, indeed, have been already.
The noble Baroness and, I think, both other noble Lords who spoke argued that provision can be made at nil cost. I referred to that a moment ago. I cannot dispute that, in terms of figures that we have been discussing tonight, that may appear to be so. But there could be a cost if people move from earnings to earnings plus other provision. What I think is needed is a long, cool study of these costs. Your Lordships may be interested to know that my officials have already met with the author of this report to discuss the point, and we are beginning to work towards a clarification of what is, frankly, a rather unclear or, if you like, muddy area. The statistics are not readily available at present and we are seeing what we can do to get a closer appreciation of the facts in the matter. But I must say that I am not wholly convinced at this stage that such a scheme could be introduced at nil cost or even at some saving, as has been suggested.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Coslany, referred to a specific issue which he had read about in the Guardian today or yesterday.
Lord Wallace of Coslany: My Lords, yesterday.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I, too, have seen the report of that matter and I and my colleagues have asked for some advice and information about that particular case. I must agree that it appears to be something that needs to be looked into.
I hope I have made clear that we are sympathetic to the arguments put to us in the debate tonight. I say that not simply because the Government's long-term aim is to rationalise and improve provision for disabled people. It is because what has been argued tonight strikes a chord with this Government's philosophy of creating the right environment to encourage people to work. To the extent that there is a disincentive to some disabled people who want to work, we cannot condone that. But correcting the situation may not be straightforward and may have a cost. Thus we must explore carefully the implications of the various possibilities and determine how and when to make changes.
I hope that the generally sympathetic approach that I have been able to enunciate in response to the Question of the noble Baroness tonight will convince your Lordships that we have this matter very seriously in hand, and I hope that before long we shall be able to take a further step forward.

Insurance Companies Bill [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee with amendments, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House; Bill to be printed as amended.
Industrial Development Bill [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee with amendments, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House; Bill to be printed as amended.
Aviation Security Bill [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee without amendment, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House.

Written Answers
MEDICAL TRAINING FOR OVERSEAS SERVICE
Lord Kennet Lord Kennet asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether medical and nursing people who are trained in this country and likely to serve in countries where the customs of female circumcision, excision and infibulation exist, receive any teaching on the subject, and if so what.
Lord Trefgarne: Doctors and nurses are trained in this country primarily to meet the needs of patients in this country where the practices referred to by the noble Lord are deprecated unless performed for purely medical reasons. For doctors and nurses going overseas who require training specifically related to these practices, it would have to be arranged specially.

THE FALKLAND ISLANDS: REQUISITIONED SHIPS
Lord Mottistone Lord Mottistone asked Her Majesty's Government:
What arrangements are being made to meet claims for loss or damage arising from hostile action against merchant ships requisitioned or chartered in support of the task force for the Falkland Islands.
The Secretary of State for Trade (Lord Cockfield): Claims will be met from the Marine and Aviation Insurance (War Risks) Fund which was established under Section 5 of the Marine and Aviation Insurance (War Risks) Act 1952. The balance of the fund is currently £5.25 million. Claims for the loss of the "Atlantic Conveyer" exceed that amount and Parliament's approval will be sought in a Supplementary Estimate to make good the deficit in the fund. In the meantime repayable advances of up to £4.5 million will be made from the Contingencies Fund so that settlement of these claims may be made in the next few days. The Department of Trade's cash limit will be increased by £2,800,000 from £160,750,000 to £163,550,000. This increase will be met from the Contingency Reserve and will not therefore add to total public expenditure.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter Lord Boyd-Carpenter asked Her Majesty's Government:
What compensation will be payable by it in respect of the requisitioning of ships for use in the South Atlantic.
Lord Cockfield: Compensation will be payable to shipowners as provided for under Section 4 of the Compensation (Defence) Act 1939 in respect of:

(1) the loss of use of the vessel during the period of requisition. This will be a bare boat charter rate which will include a profit element for the ship owner;

(2) expenses in connection with the running of the vessel in cases where it has been agreed that this service will be provided;

(3) the cost of making good any damage to the vessel;

(4) in a case of a total loss of the vessel, a sum equal to its value immediately before occurence of the damage causing its loss;

(5) expenses reasonably incurred for the purpose of complying with the Requisition Order.

In addition the Government are willing to enter into agreements with shipowners as envisaged in Section 15 of the 1939 Act which will provide for payments to be made in respect of:

(6) any profit which might reasonably have been expected to be earned by the ship during the period of requisition in so far as that profit is not covered by Section 4;

(7) payments in respect of the period of requisition due to third parties, arising from contractual obligations entered into prior to the requisition, directly connected with the operation of the ship, and not covered by Section 4;

(8) other expenses reasonably incurred during the the period of and attributable to the requisition;

(9) loss of profit for a period not exceeding six months after the period of requisition being profit which might, but for the requisition, have reasonably been expected to be earned by the ship;

(10) any other loss suffered by the claimant during a period of not more than six months after the period of requisition if that loss was reasonably foreseeable as a result of the requisition.

The provisions covered in (6)—(10) above are subject to the proviso that no account will be taken of any loss if the claimant has not taken all reasonable steps to avoid or minimise that loss. The period of six months in (9) and (10) above has been chosen as one in which any loss directly resulting from the requisition could be expected to arise. In exceptional circumstances and where loss which is clearly a result of the requisition arises after this perod of six months, the Government will give special consideration to the claim. The Lord Chancellor is taking steps to reconstitute the Shipping Claims Tribunal provided for under the 1939 Act which will be asked to determine disputes.
House adjourned at twenty-six minutes before nine o'clock.