Lords Sitting of 11 April 1984

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Southwell.

The Lord Bishop of Ripon
David Nigel de Lorentz, Lord Bishop of Ripon—Was (in the usual manner) introduced between the Lord Bishop of Rochester and the Lord Bishop of Carlisle.

Peking and Hong Kong: Ministerial Visit
2.43 p.m.
Lord Fanshawe of Richmond: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement on the forthcoming visit of the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to Peking and Hong Kong.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Young): My Lords, my right honourable friend will visit Peking at the invitation of the Chinese Foreign Minister from 15th to 18th April. He will have discussions with the Foreign Minister and other Chinese leaders on all aspects of Hong Kong's future, as well as on other bilateral and international issues.
The Foreign Secretary's visit to Hong Kong will provide him with an opportunity to get a first-hand view of the territory and to listen to a wide range of opinion there. He will have discussions with the Governor and unofficial members of the Executive Council and Legislative Council. He will also meet elected and appointed representatives of the Urban Council and district boards as well as members of numerous professional and interest groups.
Lord Fanshawe of Richmond: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that at the present time there is grave concern and anxiety in Hong Kong about the future, which was underlined by the recent statement made by Jardine, Matheson? Can my noble friend give an assurance that, when her right honourable friend the Secretary of State returns from Peking and Hong Kong, he will make a firm and detailed statement on the state of negotiations in Peking at the present time, including the method and arrangements which he intends should take place in order to ascertain the views of the people of Hong Kong when a final agreement is reached?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I can assure my noble friend that there is an agreed common aim of obtaining Hong Kong's stability and prosperity. The
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Government's aim, through discussion with the Chinese Government, is to agree arrangements for the future which will maintain Hong Kong's stability and prosperity and be acceptable to the British Parliament, the Government of China and the people of Hong Kong.
I take note of my noble friend's interest in my right honourable friend's visit to China and Hong Kong. I can assure him that we shall consider carefully how best to ensure that your Lordships are informed of the results of that visit.
Lord Brockway: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether the people of Hong Kong are to be given any opportunity to express their view regarding the agreement before it is put into operation?
Baroness Young: My Lords, there is a continuous process of consultation with the people of Hong Kong on all matters relating to the territory's future. The question of how this process can best be pursued is kept under review. A wide range of channels has evolved in Hong Kong through which people make their views known. We particularly value our regular discussions with the Governor and the unofficial members of the Executive Council, who are well placed to reflect the opinions of the Hong Kong people.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, is the noble Baroness aware that we shall continue to support the Government while they seek a fair and equitable solution to this matter? Is she further aware of the acute anxiety which exists in Hong Kong, and can she say whether some early indication will be given as to the progress of the negotiations? Furthermore, can she say whether the premature withdrawal of Jardine, Matheson has had a serious effect on commercial confidence or on the negotiations which are now taking place?
Baroness Young: My Lords, we greatly value what the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, has said in giving his support to the Government in these negotiations. We are of course aware of the feelings of the people of Hong Kong at this time. It is our view—and indeed by common agreement with the Chinese Government—that the contents of the talks at the present time remain confidential. But your Lordships will be aware that successive rounds of talks have been described by both sides as "useful and constructive", and we are entering the twelfth round of talks.
On the question of confidence in Hong Kong, the Governor of Hong Kong made clear in his speech to the Legislative Council on 5th October 1983 that the Hong Kong Government intend to continue to invest vigorously in the future of Hong Kong and its people and in the development of the territory, and indeed they are doing so.
Lord Grimond: My Lords, can the noble Baroness go a little further on the questions which have already been asked? Will she agree that it is hardly enough simply to take the opinion of a Governor as represent-ing the people of Hong Kong, however excellent he may be? In a democratic country surely there must be some obligation to devise some democratic means of

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taking the opinion of the ordinary people of Hong Kong? Can she give the House the assurance that that will be done, and done in the fairly near future?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I did not say in answer to a previous question that we only took the view of the Governor of Hong Kong, but I take the point of the noble Lord and we shall of course continue to keep in close touch with the views of the people of Hong Kong. However, it is too early to say exactly how Hong Kong opinion will be consulted on any specific arrangements for the future.
Lord Renton: My Lords, will my noble friend suggest to our right honourable friend the Secretary of State that he might well combine his diplomatic skill and great experience in our law tactfully to point out to the Chinese that our systems of justice are quite different, and that we in particular attach great importance to the independence of the judiciary?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I shall certainly draw to my right honourable friend's attention the point that my noble friend has just made.
Lord John-Mackie: My Lords, did Jardine, Matheson give the Government notice of what they were going to do? If they did, what steps did the Government take to dissuade them?
Baroness Young: My Lords, on that particular point the Government had no opportunity to influence the decision of Jardine, Matheson in any way. It was in fact a commercial decision on their part.
Lord Fanshawe of Richmond: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that her remarks and answers this afternoon will be widely welcomed in Hong Kong? Will she ensure that as soon as possible a detailed statement is made by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary in order to relieve the uncertainty which is causing concern and has done for some months now?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his remark. I certainly take note very carefully of all that he has said and I will confirm that we shall ensure how best your Lordships may be informed of the results of the visit of my right honourable friend.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, will the noble Baroness expand on the reply to my noble friend Lord Grimond? At what point would the Government propose to consult the people of Hong Kong: after they have made the agreement or before?
Baroness Young: My Lords, at present I cannot add anything further to what I have said on this matter. Negotiations are still continuing and we shall take an opportunity, as I have said, to consult opinion in Hong Kong. What is important and what I think is implied in the noble Lord's Question, and which is Government policy, is that any agreement at the end will be acceptable to the British Parliament, to the Government of China and to the people of Hong Kong.

Information Technology: New Jobs
2.52 p.m.
Baroness Vickers: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many jobs have been created in information technology as a result of the Government's "new blood" and information technology initiatives.
Baroness Young: My Lords, the Government's information technology initiative is being introduced over three years beginning with the academic year 1983–84. Only limited information is available about the number of new jobs being created. In the universities about 130 new academic posts are planned, of which 61 have been filled to date. In addition, 33 IT Fellows were appointed for 1983–84 with funds from the Science and Engineering Research Council, and over 100 additional fellowships will be available for the later years of the programme.
As yet, no figure is available for the number of jobs being created in the polytechnics and other colleges, but it is estimated that about 100 new academic posts have been created to date and that the total of academic posts will be more than double this. In both sectors, new jobs may also be created for technicians and other staff, but no estimate of the numbers involved is available.
The "new blood" scheme covers the whole range of academic subjects, but the allocation of posts for 1984–85 recently announced by the University Grants Committee included 13 posts in subjects related to information technology.
Baroness Vickers: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. Can she give me a breakdown between men and women in the "new blood" section and also in the information technology section? Will she try to get more students for these two courses?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I can say that there is a small and steady increase in the numbers of women taking courses in technology. Overall, in higher education, in science subjects 30 per cent. are women, 8 per cent. of university students in engineering are women, and 3 per cent. of those in polytechnics studying engineering are women. It is my hope that more women will go for places in the women-in-science and women-in-engineering courses which are being established.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Baroness has had an opportunity to look at the numerous pages of advertisements for jobs in journals such as Computing and Computer Weekly? If she has done so, has she noticed that the vast majority of employers are asking for several years' experience in the relevant skills? Therefore, what steps are the Government taking to ensure that the people coming out of the universities and polytechnics obtain the practical training in programming and other skills which is necessary for them to be able to apply for the sort of jobs that are widely advertised and where the skills are most needed?
Baroness Young: My Lords, in answer to the first part of the noble Lord's supplementary question, I am afraid that I have not studied the pages of jobs in Computing, but I think it is an important point that young people should be encouraged to take courses which lead to jobs that are available. Part of the function of both the new money which has gone into information technology and the "new blood" money is to see that there will be more qualified people to fill these jobs.
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Baroness would confirm that for the "new blood" posts there is an upper age limit of 35? In view of the fact that very few women were successful in achieving posts in the first batch of "new blood" appointments, would she consider approaching her right honourable friend to see whether the age limit of 35 could be varied in respect of women applicants, particularly in view of the fact that women tend to be behind men in their career progression? Secondly, in the light of the real and growing shortage of people for highly skilled information technology posts, would she approach her right honourable friend the Secretary of State to see whether he will consider the possibility of making available conversion courses under the heading of the information technology posts? I understand that a number of these are conversion courses, but I wonder whether her right honourable friend would consider the possibility of making a group of posts available for women in the light of the real shortage and of the fact that it is widely acknowledged—
Noble Lords: Speech!
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, I am sure the Minister agrees that it is widely acknowledged that it is from women—
Noble Lords: Speech!
Baroness Lockwood:—that the new sources must come in the future.
Baroness Young; My Lords, I can confirm that the age limit has been set at 35 since the purpose of this programme is to appoint young, able researchers who will introduce fresh ability and energy into these new fields of science and technology. I understand, however, that there is some room for flexibility in special circumstances, but only where there are no suitable applicants under the age limit. On the question of conversion courses, I will draw to the attention of my right honourable friend the point that the noble Baroness has made.
Lord Glenamara: My Lords, is the noble Baroness aware that in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the university and the polytechnic, which have about 8,000 students each, have reached an advanced stage in planning a technology centre? They did so on the understanding that Government funds would match any funds generated locally. Having reached the point where the thing can take off, they have been informed that no Government funds are forthcoming. Does the noble Baroness know anything about this, and, if she does,
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how does she reconcile it with the rather rosy picture she has painted in her replies?
Baroness Young: My Lords, the specific question that the noble Lord has asked is somewhat different from the Question on the Order Paper, which concerns the numbers of jobs that have been created. Appointments at universities, as the noble Lord will know, are a matter for the University Grants Committee.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, can the noble Baroness say whether, in any advance in the technological field, be it from the "new blood" scheme or from any other scheme or advancement, the Government are seized of the frightening dilemma that the introduction of new technology may sometimes be advancement for the few and unemployment for the many?
Baroness Young: My Lords, it is important for the whole country to realise that we must keep up with new technology, and the Government believe that a great many new jobs will be created provided that we are skilled and equipped to take advantage of the new technology.
Lord Sandys: My Lords, arising out of that reply, can my noble friend confirm that many new jobs are being created in enterprise zones, especially in Corby in Northamptonshire? Can she confirm that the Commodore Company of America recently announced that up to 1,000 jobs are being created there as a result of information technology initiatives?
Baroness Young: My Lords, my noble friend's question is rather wide of the original one on the Order Paper, but if he would care to put it down as a separate Question I would be glad to try to answer it.
Baroness David: My Lords, may I ask the Minister in how many universities there are "new blood" posts? In deciding to which universities the "new blood" posts go, is there any consideration given to whether they are in areas of high unemployment?
Baroness Young: My Lords, my understanding is that as far as the posts for the "new blood" initiative are concerned, it is for the University Grants Committee to determine what the distribution will be. I have a list which I think I could make available to the noble Baroness if she would care to see it.

Housing Benefit: Effect of Changes
3 p.m.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what effect changes to housing benefit introduced on 1st April will have on the incomes of pensioners and low income families.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Lord Glenarthur): My Lords, we estimate that about 4 million households, including 2½ million of the poorest pensioners, will be completely unaffected by the April changes. About 1.3 million pensioners will lose on average about 56p a week and about 460,000 families with dependent children, including some with incomes at or above the national average, will lose about 70p a week from the main change, in the tapers above the needs allowance.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, will the noble Lord the Minister confirm the figures that I have received in Written Answers, that the cuts in housing benefit announced last week will reduce the income of 1,300,000 pensioners and about 1 million other households, that 210,000 pensioners will lose more than £ 1 a week, that 90,000 pensioners will lose more than £ 1·50 a week and that 60,000 pensioners will lose more than £2 a week? Does the Minister accept the views of the National Association of Citizens' Advice Bureaux, who have said that the scheme is inequitable and unworkable and that they reach this conclusion after long and careful study of over 10,000 cases?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, the noble Lord gave me a lot of figures. As far as I can tell, those figures are founded on the figures that I gave him earlier. I talked about average losses and those are the ones which are really important. As far as the National Association of Citizens' Advice Bureaux are concerned to whom the noble Lord referred, I am aware that they have comments but I would not accept the remarks that they have made.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, so as to make sure that the new scheme is fully understood for what it actually is, will the noble Lord the Minister confirm that the purpose of the new scheme was not to give people greater help with housing costs but was to reduce public expenditure and to reduce the size of the Civil Service? Would he also confirm that while some people, as he has rightly said, will not be affected, others will lose money, and that the only group who actually gain from the new arrangements will be the blind?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, so far as the first part of the noble Lord's supplementary question is concerned, yes, the idea was to try to put two schemes into one—and that achieves both aims suggested by the noble Lord. The fact is that these changes have to be kept in perspective. It will still help over 7 million households. Some 2½ million of the poorest pensioners with incomes up to nearly £10 above the state retirement pensions will not be affected and over one-quarter of those affected by the taper and minimum losses will lose less than 25p a week.
Baroness Jeger: My Lords, can the noble Lord the Minister help the House by telling us what informa-tion he has about the difficulties experienced by local authorities in the changes that were brought about in April? Would it be possible for the Government not to bring in further changes in November until the report which we have been promised is made available?
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Secondly, the Minister referred to the losses in terms of pennies. Does he agree or disagree with the report of the Government's own Social Security Advisory Committee which said in paragraph 8:
"From the evidence we have received, for many people the loss of income will be very severe".
Can he not refer to those people and not to the average of the heavy losses?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, it is true that many local authorities for a variety of reasons experienced difficulties and delays in reassessing their 4 million existing cases and in taking on the 3 million supplementary benefit cases. Transitional regulations allowed benefits to continue under the old rules while problems were resolved. The department has set up a working group (as I think the noble Baroness knows) with the local authority association to review all the forms and pieces of paper that are involved.
On the question of deferring the November proposals, the fact that some changes are now deferred until November shows the Government's willingness to take account as far as possible of other views, including the representations made in the Social Services Advisory Committee report. But the November proposals are necessary in order to keep the social security programme within targets. My right honourable friend announced on 22nd April the appointment of the chairman of the review into housing benefits. This will look at structure, scope and simplicity and will concentrate on those most in need as well as improving administration.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, would the noble Lord the Minister not agree that, whatever analysis he places on the figures that have been given both by himself and by the noble Lord, Lord Stallard, they will be seen by the general public at large to be nothing but a squalid attack by the Government on some of the poorest people in our community?
Lord Glenarthur: No, my Lords, I entirely reject what the noble Lord suggests. As he knows full well, it is part of our overall economic strategy to reduce public expenditure. In that we are successful, and we have been extremely successful in reducing inflation. The social security budget cannot be immune from these efforts.
Lord Banks: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether it is correct that single pensioners with an income of more than £43.80 per week and married couples (again, pensioners) with an income of more than £64.25 a week have had their benefit reduced as a result of the changes. If that is so, are these not very low levels of income at which to impose cuts?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, in the space of a minute or two, I cannot look up the exact figures to which the noble Lord referred. He will be well aware of the complexity of the scheme, in any case. What I initially said was that of those who will lose, over half will lose 50p a week or less, and well over three-quarters, £1 or less. Those figures speak for themselves.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, will the noble Lord assure the House that local authorities will not be rate capped for any additional administrative costs they incur in administering this very complex scheme?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I think that that is another question.

Belize: Refugee Situation
3.6 p.m.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what measures they will take to persuade the Government of Belize to adhere to the 1951 Geneva Convention on the State of Refugees and, in accordance with the advice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to recognise the status of the several thousand Salvadorean and Guatemalan refugees now in Belize.
Baroness Young: My Lords, we would welcome Belize's adherence to the convention, but as Belize is an independent state this is entirely a matter for its own government.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, is not the traditional relationship between this country and Belize—the presence of British troops and the special relationship which endures—sufficient to entitle our Government to give them a bit of a nudge towards recognising the true status of these people, thereby allowing the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees to help them—which he cannot do at present?
Baroness Young: My Lords, we ourselves are party to the convention and would welcome the adherence of any other goverment to the convention. I should like to confirm that the Belize Government assists several thousand Salvadoreans in Belize and adopts a tolerant and benevolent attitude towards all genuine refugees. The Belize Government is concerned to help refugees integrate into Belizean society, and, as one example of that, we have the Valley of Peace farming settlement.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, does not the noble Baroness the Minister agree that the Question and Answer that we have had this afternoon in regard to Belize is a reminder to the House of the plight of many millions of refugees, through political causes, in the world today? Are Her Majesty's Government prepared to take the initiative to see that the powers are called together—the High Commissioner being largely helpless in regard to the heavy task that he has to perform—in order to see whether each of the great powers cannot make some contribution in regard to this problem, which is a blot on the civilised world?
Baroness Young: My Lords, Her Majesty's Government are very conscious of the numbers of refugees in the world and give financial assistance towards helping refugees—both those who are the subject of this Question in Central America and the refugees in other parts of the world.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, the noble Baroness said that there were several thousand refugees in Belize from El Salvador. She did not give the figures from Guatemala. I wonder whether she could say what information the Government have been given by the authorities in Belize about the numbers crossing the borders from Guatemala; what deductions they draw from those figures about the deterioration in the human rights situation in Guatemala and whether that confirms the report recently made by the American Watch Committee of a serious downgrading of the human rights situation in that country?
Baroness Young: My Lords, the current Belize Government estimate that the refugee population in Belize is between 2.500 and 3,000. In 1982, 2,000 Salvadoreans in Belize received assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I think it is important to distinguish between refugees and illegal immigrants who may be deported; it is a quite separate issue from that of refugees.
Baroness Vickers: My Lords, may I ask the noble Baroness the Minister whether or not, in view of the fact that Belize is really under-populated, there is a chance of getting these people some work while they are in that country?
Baroness Young: My Lords, as I have already indicated in answering an earlier question, we believe that the Belize Government have assisted their refugees, have adopted a benevolent attitude towards them and have tried to find some work for, at any rate, some of them.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, if the noble Baroness, Lady Young, has not got the figures for refugees in Belize from Guatemala now, I wonder might she give those figures to us on another occasion?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I do not have the figure of the precise numbers of Guatemalans as refugees in Belize. If it is possible to obtain these figures I will, of course, let the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, know.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, in spite of everything which the noble Baroness has said, can she give the House some hope that it is not impossible that Her Majesty's Government might, quite quietly behind the scenes, urge the government of Belize to get in line with the rest of the civilised world, recognise refugees as refugees, and thereby open the gates to proper United Nations assistance?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I hope in answering one of the earlier supplementary questions I have indicated that we should welcome the adherence of any other government to the convention.

Business
Viscount Long: My Lords, at a convenient moment after 3.30 this afternoon my noble friend Lady Young will, with the leave of the House, repeat in the form of a Statement the Answer which has been given in another place to a Private Notice Question on the Falklands hospital fire.

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My noble friend Lady Young will, again with the leave of the House, then repeat a Statement which is to be made in another place on the European Council Meeting on 9th—10th April.
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I should like in the normal way to say a brief word about the timing of the two short debates this afternoon standing in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, and my noble friend Lord Gainford.
It is normal, in the case of short debates, to suggest the maximum length of time for speeches. The principle which is adopted is that the mover shall 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. On that basis I should be grateful if other speakers in the debate of the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, would limit their speeches to a maximum of 12 minutes. I should say that the limit is calculated to allow for the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady Gaitskell, will be speaking after my noble friend Lady Cox, although her name does not appear on the list of speakers.
I am afraid that the application of the usual principles to the debate of my noble friend Lord Gainford would suggest that other speakers in that debate should limit—if that is the correct word—their speeches to a maximum of 38 minutes each! I should therefore suggest that they limit their speeches to no more than the 15 minutes customarily permitted to the mover of a short debate.

National Health Service: Managers
3.16 p.m.
Lord Hunter of Newington Lord Hunter of Newington rose to call attention to the need for managers in the National Health Service; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I rise to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. There must be few places in which there are the accumulated wisdom and experience of managers and management that one finds in your Lordships' House. I have hesitated to raise this matter of health service management, but the whole thing is becoming urgent and requires your Lordships' wisdom. In another place the Social Services Committee has reported and its evidence is available; and I understand that there will be a debate in another place at the beginning of May. To me, therefore, the opportunity is ripe for your Lordships to influence these matters while they are in a formative stage.
Many of your Lordships have experienced health service management at first-hand. Many started their voluntary social work on boards of management and boards of governors. Personally, I have happy memories of boards of management in the early days. Who led? It was sometimes the chairman, sometimes the finance officer, the administrator, or perhaps the senior administrator on the board. Up and down the country they varied enormously, but most operated in the way that best suited local needs. Boards of governors, from years of experience, had established a balance with administrators and doctors, and the governors held that balance.
Then came change. Following the reorganisation of the Department of Health to form the Department of Health and Social Security, plans were launched for the 1973 reorganisation of the National Health Service. Many things happened, but two vital changes were, first, that the boards of management disappeared, to be replaced by district management teams which were instructed to develop consensus management. The relationship between these district teams and the area health authorities was never happy. Now, the district authority is important, is vital, and the area authority has disappeared; there has been a further reorganisation.
In the 1982 reorganisation, many able adminis-trators left. Now, line management is proposed; but, more than that, radical changes are proposed through-out the National Health Service and also in the Department of Health. The Department of Health and Social Security, on the health side, has had to combine the functions common to any department of state: advising Ministers, formulating legislation and national policy, and combining this with the management of an enormous and highly complex service. Under the Griffiths proposals it is important to distinguish the two sides of the department's activities and imagine how they will continue. Clearly, the first of these functions will be undisturbed by the Griffiths proposals. It is important, however, that the second function is related directly to the establishment of the management board which is proposed. This has fundamental implications for the role, organisation, staffing and mode of operation of large parts of the department—a department which has borne its share of cuts in the general austerity; some 20 per cent. of staff.
If the challenge of clarifying the responsibilities and line of management of these departmental activities is not faced, then the consequences for the management board are serious. A shift of this kind was envisaged some years ago in the three chairmen's review, in 1976, entitled "Regional Chairmen's Enquiry into the Working of the Department of Health and Social Security in relation to Regional Health Authorities". Mr. Griffiths does not mention the cost or scale of the staff necessary to sustain the corporate function of the management board, though in evidence to the Select Committee, the Permanent Secretary. Sir Kenneth Stowe, said:
"I think we will work as we have to—within a manpower constraint. So, when the new system is working there will be no more people in the aggregate than there are now".
A further sorting out will have to be done by the Secretary of State in relation to regional chairmen, who are responsible to him and have right of access to him. The position of the director general will have to be clarified. From the evidence, his Civil Service ranking will be the same as that of a chief medical officer.
The concept of general management is central to Mr. Griffiths' proposals. In my view he restricts the idea unnecessarily by focusing on the general manager as an individual rather than on general management as a function of the organisation; that is, recognition of general management as the reponsibility of a group of individuals who are senior managers. After all, in the modern world, senior management is about the

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effective working of teams. It is not only important to avoid polarisation of an individual; it is also of vital importance to the introduction of any new management system. Moreover, this cannot be done overnight. For years there has been a chronic lack of investment in management recruitment and development in the service. The management inquiry team may have noted this. Where are these administrators to come from? They have to be, we are told, exceptional people.
Professional clinical autonomy is central to everything to do with the Health Service, and it is necessary to examine this in some detail. Enormous strides were made in the 1960s as a consequence of the "cogwheel" reports of the then Chief Medical Officer, Sir George Godber. These involved doctors in management and made them increasingly aware of the need for resource allocation and conservation. Since the reorganisation in 1973, so far as I can see, there has been little progress on this front although the clinical committees continue. So far as nurses are concerned, they believed that the Salmon Report gave them authority, status, and managerial functions which they did not hold before: now they feel more threatened, I think, than anyone else. I am glad that the noble Baroness. Lady Cox, will be speaking in this debate.
The Griffiths Report observed:
"We have been told that the NHS is different from business in management terms, not least because the NHS is not concerned with the profit motive and must be judged by wider social standards that cannot be measured."
I do not agree. Moreover, this is not the most remarkable feature of the National Health Service. There are two features of great importance, and there may be others. The first is the wide range of specialties that contribute to health care and the different values and priorities of these groups, which often operate in isolation. The second is the extent to which doctors are able to commit the resources of the organisation through the legitimate exercise of clinical freedom. They have a blank cheque in some respects. The profession is increasingly aware of this fact, and the awareness factor is growing. Every consultant is a managing director in his specialty, but he also works on the shop floor, and, by legitimate action, can make nonsense of planning. As Griffiths says, these consultants must be concerned with resource management. I agree.
Griffiths also recognises that management budgets must be made to meet the medical requirement and interest. This is a major task, and there is one big unknown factor which has recently become evident. That is the general practitioners' demand on hospital services. One general practitioner will make a demand of, say, £200,000-worth a year of services, while another will make demands for £1 million-worth a year of services. They seem to be consistent, because the million pound man continues to make that degree of demand. This seems to be a very important thing in the planning, and little information about National Health Service costs has hitherto been available. Yet this information is a necessary prerequisite for any form of budgeting. The information must be available; it must be fast, reliable and accurate. These require-
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ments can be met only if a computerised system is used. And how long will this take to set up? I do not think the organisation that is envisaged could possibly function without it.
The recommendations of the Griffiths Report imply a greater detail of clinical audit than has so far been accepted by the medical profession. I believe that many are now ready to co-operate on this but the matter may in the first instance have to be confined to the relevant clinical divisions: that is. carried out by peer review, as it has been in some units for many years. This could be arranged very quickly and easily while the other arrangements are being made and the information systems set up.
Management has been defined as including planning implementation and control. Control implies that the consultant manager has the power and authority to increase or to restrict resources, including staff facilities and services within the overall limits of his budget. The 1982 reorganisation has already created management tensions between unit management teams and "cogwheel" executives. The key area is between the clinical manager, or clinical management, and the general manager. This will have to be worked out and, with safeguards, should be possible. It surely must be possible. The medical profession has moved forward. If this recommendation of Griffiths is implemented in one form or another, then the whole exercise will have been worth while.
One weakness of the Griffiths report is that it appears to make the resolution of professional difference a matter for general managers. This has received substantial criticism in some quarters. Interpreted in one way, it does not make abundantly clear what I am sure was clear to Mr. Griffiths and his colleagues; that is, that the good manager has to gain the trust of those he works with, and he must have a fundamental understanding of the whole system. Such a person obviously must be of exceptional ability. The best professional manager I ever knew was the noble Lord, Lord Porritt. I suspect that he would hate being called "a professional manager", but in fact he ran 21 Army Group surgical services in a way that I feel any general manager in the new set-up would wish to aspire to, and with the same degree of quality.
I have already referred to some difficulties. The solution seems to be the use of management boards with clearly defined responsibilities, certainly as a first step. But the time is ripe to consider what are the basic requirements for the evolution of a new management system in the National Health Service. Mr. Griffiths, in his introductory statement to the Social Services Committee, had no doubt that everyone would benefit: patients, and staff. Sir Brian Bailey said this:
"Eighty-five per cent of decisions will still be consensus decisions."
The House of Commons Social Services Committee identified a number of important matters. Other noble Lords will be discussing this and I will make only a brief reference now to two key points. The committee asked: first, what is the future role of the consensus management team at district level and the future pattern of the medical advisory machinery? They are already in existence: what is to happen? Secondly, the committee recommended that general management function at unit level be postponed until the review of

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general management at higher level was completed. That is the opposite of the Griffiths recommendation.
The responses of the authorities consulted will provide further information in this regard, and we all look forward to the Minister's contribution to this debate. The Secretary of State showed a great deal of determination when he reviewed the Griffiths Report by accepting it resolutely—gaps and all—and immediately setting up the skeleton of the supervisory board. Sadly, the gaps in Griffiths give a glorious opportunity to those who for one reason or another want to defer or destroy it and to read into the report what they fear most. A system which involves clinical audit, I believe, must come, but the way in which it is introduced is vitally important.
There is one last question. Can we introduce this matter into the hospital situation and settle it separately from general practice? My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.30 p.m.
Baroness Robson of Kiddington: My Lords, I am sure that we are all very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, for giving us the opportunity of discussing the future management of the NHS. At the time of the Statement on the Griffiths Report on 25th October, many noble Lords in this House expressed their desire for a full debate on the issues involved and so far the Government have not seen fit to satisfy that desire. I am also very grateful to the noble Lord for setting out the historical background to our debate today.
The NHS, from its inception in 1948 to 1974, benefited from a fairly limited amount of interference from Government; but in the past 10 years, as has been said, it has had to contend with an almost unprecedented number of reorganisations of which this is the third. Even local government, whose future occupied this House till the late hours of Monday night, has not been subject to that number of reorganisations. On 25th October, my noble friend Lord Winstanley welcomed the Statement made by the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, in so far as it dealt with a devolution of powers from the centre to the grass roots, as well as the appointment of individuals with management abilities at certain levels— something which many of us in the health service had been advocating for many years.
Since that time, we have had the privilege of reading the Griffiths Report in depth and an increasing number of doubts have therefore arisen in our minds. We are more than ever concerned about the gaps in the report and the proposed speed of implementation across the board. I understand that when the Secretary of State makes a Statement in the other place shortly health authorities are to be told the timing of the implementation that he expects.
The other matter that concerns me—and it is borne out by what the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, has said—is the reservations expressed by doctors about the advantage of the Griffiths Report, because without their support Griffiths cannot be implemented. The delegation of authority at and below district level presents enormous problems, because of the existence, as has been said, of indepen-
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dent clinicians as well as a large number of other groups, most of whom are self-managing in professional matters, and have to be so. We would not want to change that. You would therefore have to draw a distinction between the responsibilities of these groups; between clinical freedom and professional accountability and managerial accountability. So whoever is appointed general manager at unit or district level, be it administrator, nurse, treasurer, or doctor, will come up against this problem.
One might perhaps believe that the appointment of a medical administrator would cause the least problem, but I have still to be convinced that one clinician is able to control the activities of his fellow clinicians any better than members of any of the other professions. So whoever is appointed will have formidable problems and, without meaningful information and data, he or she will fail to make the impact which we all hope will flow from a strengthening of the managerial role within the health service.
The health authorities have laboured under constant pressure to reduce their administrative costs for the past 10 years. They have done that, so the percentage of revenue devoted to administrative costs, which is really management costs, is now below 5 per cent.—by far the lowest management costs anywhere in the world. They have done this at the expense of losing some very good people through early retirement at both reorganisations. They are now asked to improve their management structure without increasing the overall cost—almost, I would have said, an impossible task.
I mentioned earlier that a manager needs meaningful information and data to perform his task; in other words, he needs the tools of his trade. We do not have that. We cannot give him that at the moment in the health service. In this connection, I can mention a personal experience. On behalf of a charity with which I am connected, we wanted certain information which one would have thought quite simple: what does it cost the NHS to perform a vasectomy operation? We approached the DHSS and various health authorities, but we were unable to get the answer. In the end, I appealed to one district health authority treasurer who was prepared to do a special exercise for us and, in the end, we obtained some kind of a price. But this was not an average cost throughout the health service, and it was no basis on which to make comparisons between one authority and another.
However, I am pleased because I understand that the Government hope to introduce the recommendations contained in the Körner Reports by 1987. These reports recommend the collection of management data by each health authority relating to different activities, based on both financial and clinical information, such data to be common to the whole health service. At the moment, those data are completely diverse between authorities. But if they were common to the whole health service they would be interchangeable, and one would then be able to compare like with like and have a proper basis for managing the service.
This will not be a cheap exercise, because it means setting up a whole new computer system for the service. It also, in my view, entails the setting up of

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individual budgets for each clinical department within a hospital and making clinicians responsible for the financial management of their departments. When this has been done, a commercial type manager for the NHS will at least have some of the tools he needs for his trade; that is. basic information.
Is it not therefore essential, if we are to introduce Griffiths, that the management board at the DHSS spend some time filling in the gaps in the report? And they are not mere gaps; when you start looking at it, it is almost like a sieve. It is important that they should do this job; that they should negotiate with the professions—and I mean all professions, not only the doctors—within the NHS, in order to get total commitment from them in favour of an improved management structure. This would happen before the health authorities were asked to implement what is at the moment purely an outline of a possible structure for the improvement of management in the service.
I saw in The Times of yesterday that the Department of Health are head-hunting for this superman who will be chairman of the management board. It appears that there is not an enormous number of people standing at the doors of the DHSS asking for the job. It will be an extremely difficult job for whoever takes it on; and unless the management board examine the Griffiths Report and recommend the right kind of structure for the authorities to be able to implement the report, it will not succeed.
There is another problem which worries me very much; what will be the true relationship between the Secretary of State, the supervisory board—which we all insist should include the chief nursing officer at the Department of Health and Social Security—the management board, the regional chairmen and the role of health authority members? Many questions remain to be answered.
3.40 p.m.
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, I, too, should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, upon introducing this debate so skilfully, and for making clear to us the outstanding points which we have to consider. As I said in an earlier speech on the subject, I am deeply concerned that unless these kind of problems are tackled, the National Health Service will, over the years, price itself out of existence. If we are to keep the NHS, which I am sure we all want to do, it is very important that this problem should be tackled.
I speak with diffidence because my only personal contact with the National Health Service has been as a patient. However, my daughter is a State Registered Nurse and my wife gives me a worm's eye view as a voluntary helper in the wards of a children's hospital. A worm's eye view can sometimes be useful. Outsiders can see where there are shortcomings, particularly the high cost of wastage, which others might not notice.
I have to apologise to your Lordships for the fact that pressure of other business during the past two or three weeks has not enabled me to discuss the Griffiths Report nearly so fully as I should have wished. Therefore I speak mainly as a manager and—dare I say it?—as a Fellow of the Institute of Personnel
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Management, and in particular from my experience as a director of the Distributive Industry Training Board, a non-profit making body which was established by Act of Parliament to provide a service to industry.
I have been involved with management in many other organisations and have observed that there are certain fundamental features of management which are common to all types of organisation. Accordingly, I welcome the Griffiths Report because it seeks to incorporate those essential features of management within the National Health Service system as it stands. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Robson of Kiddington, on the whole (though everything has imperfections) I see much more good in the Griffiths proposals than possible failures. However, I was delighted that as her speech progressed the noble Baroness seemed to be more enthusiastic for it than she had been at the beginning—though perhaps I misinterpreted what she said.
I see the Griffiths Report as a common-sense manager's identification of what is needed to adjust the organisation of the National Health Service so as to make it properly effective, and (I quote from paragraph 3 on page 11 of the report):
"to secure the best deal for patients and the community within the available resources; best value for the taxpayer; and the best motivation for staff".
I am not surprised at the quality of the report because for many years I have had the privilege of knowing one of the members of the inquiry team, Mr. Jim Blyth. I have the highest opinion of his quality as a practical senior manager.
I would give particular support to their ideas for establishing a National Health Service management board with an externally recruited chairman and an externally recruited personnel director. I give support also to the Griffiths understanding that changes need to be established from within the present system, thus involving minimum cost and avoiding, as far as possible, what could be interpreted as yet another radical organisational change, with the added benefit of minimum delay for it to become effective.
Above all, I believe that the proposals will provide a clearly identified leader with clear responsibilities at each level of management. Consensus management, as I understand it, can never produce properly effective results. This does not mean that the executive manager does not have to take his team along with him before decisions are made. It means that it is clearly seen by everybody—by all the staff and by all the other managers—that somebody is in charge. I suspect that that is not so clearly seen today.
If I may now tread on rather more delicate ground, I believe that one of the main difficulties for the National Health Service is that doctors naturally consider themselves to be the most important people in the system.
Baroness Gaitskell: Why not?
Lord Mottistone: The noble Baroness may say "Why not?" but doctors may not necessarily be good managers.
Viscount Massereene and Ferrard: Hear, hear!
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, they may, on the other hand, even if they have the potential to be good managers, consider management to be simple, something which any intelligent person can do, and that therefore they do not have to try very hard to become good managers. Industrial history is littered with examples of companies which have gone "bust" when they have been passed on to successors who have taken that kind of view, or who have naturally been bad managers. Unfortunately, the National Health Service as a whole, and its individual units and hospitals, are spared the discipline of going "bust", so if they are badly managed they just become inefficient and are unhappy places for staff and patients alike.
Therefore I strongly welcome the recommendations in paragraph 19 of Part II of the Griffiths Report, that doctors should receive management training during their initial training, and subsequently. The noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, said that this had happened, but I understood him to say that this has not been continued. Many people feel that management training is an insult to their qualities, but the fact is that there is a great deal to be learned by us all. Some leaders are born, but most of them have to work very hard in order to become good managers.
If anybody seeks to be better than the others—the noble Baroness, Lady Gaitskell, asked "Why not?" when I said that doctors think that they are better than the others—I believe that they must be good managers. Since I hold that view, it saddened me when I read the BMA's comment on the concept of an executive manager—not just one executive manager but executive managers in general who are the key to the success of this scheme. The BMA says that this concept has no place in the National Health Service. I may be slightly overdoing this, but I regard the BMA's comment on the Griffiths proposals as "damning with faint praise". Unless that attitude can radically be changed, there is no hope for these imaginative proposals and little chance of improved services for customers—that is, for patients.
Therefore I very much hope that the Government will tackle without delay the problem of the false concepts of doctors and that they will implement the Griffiths proposals as fully as possible and as soon as they can.
3.50 p.m.
Lord Taylor: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Hunter drew a rather gloomy picture of two GPs, one of whom sent work worth £250,000 to the hospitals every year and the other who sent in work worth £1 million a year to the hospitals. He said that it would be a good thing to investigate what was going on. I am not sure that it would, because one may very well discover that the GP who is doing the good job is the one sending in £1 million worth of work and that the other fellow is not really giving his patients the attention which they should have.
May I say how grateful I am to my noble friend Lord Hunter for raising this matter, for a reason which will appear in a moment. Some 45 years ago a group of young doctors, of which I was one, were considering how we ought to run our health services and what they ought to be like. We reached five conclusions. The first conclusion was that, whatever happened, it had to be
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a universal service simply because the risk of serious ill-health was universal and the cost of treating serious ill-health was likely to increase very greatly in the years ahead. I believe we were right on both those two points.
Secondly, we concluded that it was essential that it should be a high quality medical service, because a mediocre service would be worse than useless; it would set a low standard and would permeate the whole structure. We concluded also that the administration had to be designed to achieve those two ends. We were not politicians and were not concerned with politics in this matter, but we were sure that it had to be a regional service, for technical reasons—because if we were to provide the pool of seriously-ill patients within any particular specialty, that could not be achieved without a regional hospital service. Fourth, it had to be taken away from the municipal hospital authorities, because in municipal hospitals we had a hierarchy of medical care, with the only road to promotion being to give up clinical medicine and become an administrator. The standard of clinical care which we saw in municipal hospitals was such as to appal us.
Lastly, we concluded that we also had to ensure that the service in the future was divorced from the Civil Service—which is almost, if not quite, as soul-destroying as the municipal services. On looking around for a model, we reached the conclusion that by far the best model was the BBC. For this we worked and we struggled but we did not win.
In due course, Mr. Aneurin Bevan became Minister of Health and at the same time I happened to become a Member of Parliament. I found to my joy that we had allies inside the Ministry in the shape of, first, Sir John Hawton, who some of your Lordships may remember. He was a wonderful civil servant. He was a deputy secretary and then became the permanent secretary. The second was his lieutenant, Mr. Pater—another outstanding civil servant who has, incidentally, just written a very good history of the National Health Service. The third was Sir Wilson Jameson. He was chief medical officer from 1940 to 1950 and he was, I believe, the best chief medical officer I have ever known. He was a wonderful man. However, I must add that we are extremely fortunate in the new chief medical officer who has just been appointed. Dr. Aeheson.
Between us, we steered Mr. Bevan away from municipalisation of the hospital services and onto regionalisation, but we failed to get freedom from Civil Service control. We went for the next best thing, which was to get a maximum of autonomy for the regional hospital boards, so that they could act as largely independent corporations—each in charge of a very large area and of enormous capital and current expenditure. Since then, some people—particularly, I am afraid, in the Civil Service—have waged unremitting war on the regional hospital boards. Twice in my lifetime they have nearly succeeded in getting rid of them. I am pleased to say that they were frustrated.
In 1948, while still a Member of Parliament. I was appointed to the North-West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board. Almost the first direction we received from the Ministry of Health was that we should pay

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our senior administrative medical officer the sum of £2,500 per annum. This just enabled us to get hold of Dr. McAuley, who was the MOH for Middlesex and a very fine and good man. But our senior lay executive (the regional hospital board secretary) was to receive £1,200 a year—less than a Principal in the Civil Service—and yet he was to be handling a budget of £10 million or £12 million. I fought this as hard as 1 could, but I could not get Mr. Bevan to understand what I was on about.
From that moment, regional boards became more or less creatures of the Ministry of Health. Despite this—outside London particularly—they have managed surprisingly well, and I believe they have saved the day. Many of your Lordships have received splendid treatment, as I have, from the National Health Service. That is due to the quality of our doctors and nurses, and also to the quality of our regional boards, who have done a splendid job. Both Mr. Griffiths and the Secretary of State have spotted that the best men they have on the administrative side are the men who run the regional boards; that is to say, the chairmen. Many of them have been and still are very high earners in the professions (other than medicine) or in the private sector. Incidentally, they receive from the Ministry a rather strange payment of approximately £7,500 a year for their part-time duties. That figure is exactly the same as the sum received by the chairmen of district health authorities.
It is my hope and belief that Mr. Griffiths has recommended, and that the Secretary of State has accepted, what we tried to achieve 40 years ago. He has done it very ingeniously, without altering the law. In place of the governors of the BBC we have the Health Service Supervisory Board with the Secretary of State as chairman. On that board is the Minister of State for Health, the permanent secretary, the CMO, and two or three non-executive members, of which Mr. Griffiths is to be one.
In place of the executive board of the BBC, under the chairmanship of the person who has been referred to already in this debate as the "director general" (and, incidentally, the report of the social services committee in another place refers to him as the "director general", and I have no doubt that he will in fact become the "director general") there will be an executive board. We also have the information that the director general will be appointed from outside the Civil Service.
Now we come to the crunch. Everything depends on the quality of this single appointment; of this new chief executive or director general. Mr. Griffiths must, I suspect, have been quite appalled to learn that he was to have the status and pay of a second secretary. The permanent secretary in the DHSS receives £42,750 per annum. A second secretary receives £39,500 per annum. We are told that the National Health Service is the biggest business in Europe, and I believe that that is probably true. These jobs need a man of the calibre of Sir Michael Edwardes or Mr. Griffiths himself. Frankly, I think they would laugh at such a salary, and certainly I am not at all surprised to hear that the Government are having difficulty in head hunting at that level.
Fortunately for us, the Government have published
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a book called Public Bodies—1983. It is a Cabinet Office publication: management and personnel office. It gives the actual salaries paid to the higher personages whom the Government employ to manage their affairs. These are divided into two groups—the full-timers and the part-timers. Top of the full-timers is the chairman of British Telecom who gets £85,000 a year. The chairman of the Bank of England receives £83,549; the chairman of the National Coal Board receives only £59,000; the chairman of the Post Office receives £57,000; the chairman of British Nuclear Fuels receives £52,000, and the chairman of the Law Commission receives £42,500.
The part-timers are even more interesting. The chairmen of the water authorities get £35,000 a year, part-time. They are top of the list. The chairman of the UGC receives £35,000 a year part-time. The chairmen of the BBC and the IBA each receive £23,000 to £24,000 a year, part-time. The highest paid people in the DHSS, in this part-time business, are: the chairman of the Medical Practices Committee who gets £18,483; the chairman of the Distinction Awards Committee, who is the chap who dishes out the fortunes to us fellows, who receives £9,240 per annum; and the chairmen of regional health authorities and district health authorities, who each receive £7,590. We can by inference—that is, by working out from the Scottish hydro authorities—ascertain the relationship between part-time and whole-time pay. They have part-time chairmen and whole-time deputy chairmen. A part-time chairman gets £18,000 and a full-time deputy chairman gets £32,000. One can therefore work out what one might think would be the correct rates.
I beg the Minister to think again on this. I beg him not to appoint, or even short list, a director of personnel before his new director general has been appointed. It would be absolute folly to do that. The job of director general of the National Health Service is a tremendously tough one. He will have to deal with the doctors, nurses, the underpaid, trade unions and their officers, and in many cases those jobs are perhaps overstaffed. He will have to deal with regional boards, the district health authorities and regional health authorities. Above all, he will have to deal with the Minister, Parliament and parliamentary committees. It will be a killer of a job.
I reckon that a short-term contract of seven years is about right. That was the time I spent as a vice-chancellor and I found that it was quite long enough. Therefore, I recommend a seven-year appointment at the approximate rate of £75,000 to £100,000 a year, with a two-thirds pension at the end of it. I think he will be clapped out at the end of that time. It will be a very tough job but we shall have a very much better National Health Service with such a man. He will have to stand up to pressure from everyone. If he does that we will get something really worth while. But I must say one word of warning.
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, before the noble Lord proceeds, may I put one point. If this person is clapped out will he not have the best health service in the world at his disposal?
Lord Taylor: My Lords, when a person is clapped out by hard work his situation is a little difficult to cure other than by giving him a pension.

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My final point is this. Do not think that by making something efficient and working well one necessarily makes it cheaper. The truth is that we have a very cheap National Health Service compared with all the countries who try to do the same. It is very well run on the clinical side and on the nursing side, but the administration has not been good enough. It is not too difficult. I recommend that the noble Baroness, Lady Robson of Kiddington, should look at some good American hospitals. The George Washington Hospital, for example, is very efficiently administered by a doctor-administrator who has given up doctoring. It was at that hospital that the President was treated and it was that administrator who made the excellent broadcasts following the attempted assassination of the President.
I have great hopes, and it may well be that the Griffiths Report is a major step in the history of our health services. I hope very much that the Minister will have listened to and will follow the good advice that I have just given to him.

Falklands Hospital Fire
4.6 p.m.
Baroness Young: My Lords, with the leave of the House. I shall now repeat the Answer which has been given to a Private Notice Question in another place about the tragic fire at the King Edward Memorial Hospital, Port Stanley.
"As my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said in another place yesterday, the Government were shocked, and greatly saddened, to learn of the tragic fire at the King Edward Memorial Hospital early yesterday morning. She has sent a message to the Falkland Islands Government expressing our deepest sympathy at the loss of life and injury sustained in the fire. My right honourable and learned friend has also sent a message of sympathy to the Civil Commissioner, in which I and my right honourable friend the Minister for Overseas Development joined.
"The fire started in part of the old wing of the hospital, which was a wooden structure built in 1914. The cause has not yet been established. We are providing experts to assist in the inquiry announced by the Civil Commissioner, which will report to the Falkland Islands Government on the causes and other aspects of the disaster. A member of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Fire Services will fly to the islands next week. The timing of the arrival of the civilian fire-fighting equipment from the town and military equipment from the airport will also be fully investigated.
"The question of hospital services on the islands has been the subject of consideration on a number of occasions since late 1982. This has included a study of reports which referred to fire hazards and precautions in the hospital buildings. The extent to which the recommendations in these reports were carried out will of course be a priority issue for the inquiry.
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"Looking ahead, we stand ready to help the Falkland Islands Government in the urgent task of building a new hospital as soon as possible. A hospital architect will travel to the Falkland Islands within a few days. We shall provide the Falkland Islands Government with financial and other assistance in the construction of a new hospital.
"In the meantime, the temporary hospital set up in Port Stanley town hall includes the resources of an Army field surgical unit. The Ministry of Defence are also providing, via the airbridge, blood transfusion equipment and other reinforcement for the emergency stores that are already in place on the islands."
Lord Bishopston: My Lords, the House will thank the noble Baroness for repeating the response to the PNQ. We express our sympathy with the bereaved and, indeed, with the people of the Falkland Islands. The death of eight people in Port Stanley—which is a community of only 800 in number and is about the daily attendance of Members of both Houses of Parliament—is a tragedy which will cause deep sorrow both there and, indeed, among those who have a personal knowledge of the Falkland Islands. The concern we express, of course, would be expressed equally for any other community suffering such a tragedy.
As the 70 year-old hospital is used for civil purposes, with military co-operation, can the noble Baroness say what study of the hospital's needs has been taken and what has been planned with regard not only to health but to safety? Is this really a shortcoming of the Overseas Development Ministry's priorities?
Will the noble Baroness say what defence facilities are now available to augment the civilian services in Port Stanley? I think that she will know, as I do from having been there, that the town hall is really no safer a structure than the hospital was. I notice that in the latest copy of the Falkland Islands Focus, a digest compiled by the Falkland Islands Government's London Office, among the projects being currently discussed there is no mention of the hospital, but apparently that has been taken care of. Does the tragedy not emphasise what has often been stressed by Her Majesty's Opposition, that there is a danger of spending substantial sums on providing considerable resources for the defence role—a role which, I may say, we accept—while the civil population, whom the forces are there to defend, have access only to much more limited resources? Finally, will Her Majesty's Government review with the Falkland Islands Government the civil aspects and priorities as well as the defensive ones?
Lord Gladwyn: My Lords, on these Benches we too are obliged to the noble Baroness for repeating the Answer given to the Private Notice Question and would like to associate ourselves with the expressions of sympathy to the victims of this disaster, to their relations and to everybody else concerned on the islands. I am sure that there is very little point in trying to track down who, if anybody, was responsible for this unfortunate fire. I do not think that anything will be gained by doing so.

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What is important now is for the Government to decide what will take the place of the hospital that has been partially destroyed. For instance, is it the Government's intention that the new hospital should provide only for the needs of the population of the Falkland Islands, amounting to only 1,600 or 1,700 people, or for the needs of the entire garrison of 3,000 in addition? If it is their intention to maintain a garrison of 3,000 indefinitely (which I believe is now their intention), presumably the hospital will have to be much larger than if they contemplated the reduction or abolition of the garrison in the compara-tively near future?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I thank both the noble Lords, Lord Bishopston and Lord Gladwyn, for their sympathy which they have expressed over this tragic event. In reply to the noble Lord, Lord Bishopston, I think that all the questions of the study of the hospital and the internal arrangements will be the subject of the inquiry. It would be wise to wait until we had that inquiry before commenting further. I appreciate the point made by Lord Bishopston about the arrange-ments now being made for an emergency hospital in the town hall, as I myself have visited not only the hospital but also the town hall.
It is such a short time since the tragedy of the burning down of the hospital that I cannot add anything to what has been said in the Statement. We are glad that there is an Army field surgical unit in place and that there is provision for the blood transfusion equipment. I take the noble Lord's point. I assure him that we shall do what we can to see that the islanders are helped. On his last point about priorities and expenditure, of course the expenditure of £31 million development money has been discussed with the Falkland Islands Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, again, I was pleased to see. looked very much to the future. That is the important thing. As the Statement makes plain, a new hospital will be built. I think that it is too early at this stage to say any more than that.
Baroness Vickers: My Lords, having had the opportunity to see this hospital during my visit to the Falkland Islands, I should like to praise all those who have worked there together in the past, military and civil, in the care of the patients. Our one regret is that the old people were still there. It had been hoped that there would be an Abbeyfield organisation or something similar to which they could turn. Perhaps now that the hospital has had this unfortunate accident, we shall make progress there. May I also say that the trustees of the Falkland Islands Appeal have already sent a telex to the Civil Commissioner offering help in any way he desires? We hope that in the future another happy hospital will be built up. as this one has been in the past. It has done extremely good work and carried out major operations. More modern equipment will be very useful.
Baroness Young: My Lords, I am sure that the whole House would want to echo what my noble friend Lady Vickers has said about the work done by the doctors and nurses, both civil and military, in the hospital, and
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the work which has been done by both civil and military personnel in co-operative effort in the hospital itself. I take her point about the old people who were still in the hospital. I understand that it was a matter of discussion in the Falkland Islands Government about a purpose-built home being developed. I am very glad to hear what she said about the trustees of the Falkland Islands Appeal offering help. I am sure that this will be very welcome.

Council of Foreign Ministers
4.16 p.m.
Baroness Young: My Lords, with the leave of the House. I shall now repeat a Statement on the Foreign Affairs Council which is being made in another place by my right honourable and learned friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. The Statement is as follows:
"With permission, Mr. Speaker, I should like to make a Statement about the Foreign Affairs Council which I attended in Luxembourg on 9th and 10th April. I was accompanied by my right honourable friend the Minister for Trade.
"The Council had a brief discussion on follow-up to the European Council. It was agreed that further work on the text on control of Community expenditure, on which provisional agreement was reached at the European Council, should be remitted to the Council of Ministers (Finance). On budgetary imbalances, I made clear our determination to work for a satisfactory agreement. There was, however, no substantive discussion and no agreement was reached on this occasion. Until agreement is reached on an equitable solution, there can be no question of agreement on our part to any increase in the own resources ceiling.
"The President of the Commission made a statement on the financial situation in the Community in which he said that expenditure in the current financial year was expected to exceed the budget provision by about 2.5 billion ecu. The United Kingdom's position on this issue was made clear by my right honourable friend the Minister of Agriculture in the Agriculture Council on 31st March and by a formal entry in the minutes of that Council.
"The Council resolved the main outstanding difficulties on the proposed common commercial policy regulation. It was agreed that the regulation, along with a package of 15 measures providing common Community safety and technical standards for industrial products, should be formally adopted, subject, in our case, to a parliamentary scrutiny reserve on two of the directives.
"In company with other member states and the Commision, we strongly urged Ireland to withdraw its objection to the conclusion of a further five-year agreement on imports of New Zealand butter to the Community.
"There was a discussion in preparation for the forthcoming ministerial meeting on the Lomé Convention.

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"A successful joint meeting with Ministers from the member countries of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) was held on 9th April, following the establishment on 1st January 1984 of full free trade in industrial goods between the Community and the countries of EFTA.
"A co-operation Council with Egypt was held to consider progress and prospects in economic, technical and financial co-operation.
"At the ministerial conference with Spain agreement was reached on some aspects of external relations and on the issue of patents.
"Ministers of the Ten also agreed a statement on recent events in Chile. I am arranging for a copy of this to be placed in the Library of the House. We also discussed the export of certain chemicals to Iran/Iraq in the light of the United Nations Secretary General's report on the use of chemical weapons in the Iran/Iraq war."
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, we thank the noble Baroness for repeating the Statement and regret that the result of the talks was again negative on the crucial issue. The Statement says that there was "no substantive discussion" on the budgetary problem. I wonder whether the noble Baroness will be good enough to explain this. Why did the Ministers not move to a substantive discussion, because it does appear to add an even graver shadow over the talks? Can she confirm that the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary suggested that the Commission should be asked for a solution? What did the Foreign Secretary have in mind, if this is the case? Is it also true that Monsieur Gaston Thorn, the President, turned this suggestion down? What reason would he have for refusing to consider that? Furthermore, did the financial statement made by the President confirm the Government in their intention not to compromise further, or is there still a possibility of a compromise in order to achieve a settlement?
On the other points, can the noble Baroness say what Ireland's response was to the Government's plea on New Zealand butter? Can she say whether the agreement with EFTA has in fact started improving our position in relation to trade with the EFTA countries? Finally, the Statement is not absolutely clear as to the results of the discussion on the export of chemicals to Iran and Iraq. Was it decided to halt the export of these chemicals in view of the use which has been made of them in the present unfortunate conflict there?
Lord Kennet: My Lords, on the major question I think I have nothing to add to the questions asked by Lord Cledwyn, and we on these Benches tend to feel now that we have issued enough warnings and sounded the alarm signals so often about the present courses of Her Majesty's Government in this respect that the best we can do now is to fall silent and simply pray that they know what they are doing. Because it is, is it not, the case that once upon a time it was Germany and us and then a couple of doubters half-way between, against the rest in this matter; then the doubters vanished and then Germany vanished, and it
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is now this country alone and we have in effect reduced the Community to the low position it was in at the very worst of the crisis between President de Gaulle of France and all the other countries 20 years ago?
I have two further questions. On the Council meeting with Spain, what were the aspects of external relations which were discussed and what conclusions were reached? Further, on Lord Cledwyn's question about the export of chemicals to Iraq, did the Council of Ministers recognise together that they were facing the destruction of a 60-year history of agreement about chemical weapons? What do they propose to do about it? Is there a collective voice in Europe? Is there collective action in Europe on this matter?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I should like to thank both the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, and the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, for their reception of this Statement. Both noble Lords asked me about progress in these talks. In fact, a measure of agreement has been reached over the control of the Community expenditure framework, and on budget imbalances, and we have agreement to a lasting settlement which will ensure that we pay no more than our fair share. Negotiations are continuing and there is no lack of momentum on this matter.
The noble Lord. Lord Cledwyn, asked me a quite specific question about the Commission and I can confirm that my right honourable friend said that he believed that it would be helpful if the Commission could, at the appropriate moment, make a contribution which might break the deadlock. That was the only new proposal and it came from the United Kingdom. I hope that that will be an answer to the noble Lord's question.
The noble Lord asked me a question about the Community and EFTA. I can confirm that the development of economic and trade relations in the context of the free trade agreements between the Community and the member countries of EFTA were considered. The prospects for future co-operation were also considered. A joint declaration was issued at the conclusion of this successful meeting.
On the question of New Zealand butter, we have never seen any justification for denying New Zealand the full five-year agreement which was proposed by the Commission, and now that agreement has been reached on the reform of the milk regime there can be no reason to delay agreement further. Indeed, continued delay would be shabby treatment of a partner to whom the Community has clear commitments and we shall continue to press our partners for an early agreement.
The noble Lord, Lord Kennet, asked me a point about the Spanish accession. The particular outstanding questions which remain, both for Spain and for Portugal, include difficult areas of social affairs, agriculture, fisheries, institutions, own resources, and, for Spain, transitional arrangements for industrial tariffs. We hope that these dossiers will at least be substantively completed by the autumn.
Both noble Lords raised a point on the very serious matter of chemical exports to Iraq and Iran. I should like to confirm that the matter is under urgent study both here and within the Ten. The House will be

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informed as soon as firm decisions have been reached. On the use of chemical weapons, the United Kingdom Government wholeheartedly endorse the Security Council's condemnation of the use of chemical weapons in the conflict between Iran and Iraq, and we have repeatedly made it clear that we condemn the use of chemical weapons whenever they may occur.
Lord Gladwyn: Is it not becoming clear that the maintenance by Her Majesty's Government of what might, I suppose, be properly described as a Gaullist attitude towards our contribution to the budget is becoming increasingly untenable? I may be wrong but, as I understand it, the general formula governing the long-term contribution of members to the budget has now been more or less agreed, and the outstanding point, apparently, is the actual amount which separates our estimation of what we should pay from that of our nine colleagues. I believe this is only about £120 million. Why not therefore just call it a day and say we will accept a compromise whereby we go fifty-fifty and accept £60 million instead of £120 million, thus probably ending the controversy straight away?
Baroness Young: My Lords, as I indicated in my earlier answer to the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, we have made some headway in these meetings, in some directions. On this occasion we did not move forward but on the other hand we did not move backwards, and work is continuing to try to bridge the gap. We remain determined to reach a satisfactory solution.
The noble Lord asks if the gap was so small, why could we not get a compromise? The fact is that the notional base figure is of crucial importance because it provides the foundation for a system that will operate into the future. It is therefore very important that we should get it right. The gap between what we regard as an equitable figure and what our partners are offering is a more significant one so far as the United Kingdom is concerned than for the other nine member states who would contribute jointly to finance it.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, before the debate is resumed, I should inform your Lordships that the revised time for the end of the debate is 6.7 p.m.

National Health Service: Managers
4.29 p.m.
Debate resumed.
Baroness Faithfull: My Lords, as a retired Director of Social Services, it is perhaps inevitable that my special area of concern with regard to the need of management in the health service is to ask the Minister: what is managers' particular role under the Griffiths Report in connection with the setting up of joint projects as between health, social services and voluntary organisations in the community? If hospitals are to be run efficiently, giving services to those in need of treatment and medical care, then it must be the managers' concern to see that those in hospital who could and should be treated in the community have the facilities to receive such a service.
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I refer of course especially to the elderly who are able to live in the community with support, the mentally ill on the way to stabilising, and other patients who I understand at the moment in many cases have to take up hospital beds, but who could be cared for in the community were there community projects available.
It seems to me that, first, there must be in each area an overall strategy and. secondly, that that strategy must be worked out in each area and region to meet local needs, and must be solved locally. Thirdly, the primary care team and the social services and voluntary organisations must together be able to meet the needs, so that people do not languish in hospitals, taking up beds.
Is the Minister satisfied that managerially the joint planning teams throughout the country are able to give this service and are assessing the needs, without undue endless rounds of consultative committees, consultations, and final implementation? I know that this is a grey area in the sphere of management of the health service, but I would submit that it is an important area.
I realise that perhaps today we cannot discuss resources. However, as I understand the position, once a scheme has been approved by a joint financing committee of the health and social services, then ultimately, after it has been running for two or three years, the bill for its continuance, from the point of view of resources, must be provided for by either the health service or the social services. Should not this question be determined at the beginning of the project, rather than at the end of it? I ask that because I have been told that many projects which have been set up have closed due to the fact that neither organisation—the health service, nor the social services—was able to meet the bill in the end or carry on with the expenses. Surely from a management point of view that is a waste of time of personnel of both the health and social services, and it could be said to be poor management.
I should like for a moment to turn to the question of the type of person a manager should be. and here I wish to make special reference to my noble friend Lord Mottistone and the noble Lord, Lord Taylor. I should have thought that it is the type of person who counts, and not necessarily his background. It seems to me that there are many doctors who make splendid managers and equally there are many lay people who make splendid managers. What is important is the type of person and his qualities. Perhaps I may mention that a cousin of mine who was a doctor was the medical superintendent of the Neath Hospital, which dealt with all the accidents from the mines in Wales. The management team consisted of the doctor, the matron, and the secretary—that was all—and it gave service of a superb nature to that area. Therefore, I would beg that the best person be chosen, be he doctor or layman.
4.34 p.m.
Lord Perry of Walton: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, for giving us this opportunity to debate again the problems of running the National Health Service. The present Government have a remarkable record of diagnostic skills. Once again they have come to a

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correct conclusion—that there is something wrong with the National Health Service, it is not fit and healthy, it is, to say the least, a bit under the weather. But, once again, I am afraid the Government have failed to match their diagnostic skills with the wisest kind of treatment.
We on these Benches consider that the nub of the problem is the inevitability of a real reduction in front line staff and patient care. We believe that the Government are not facing up to that problem. Instead, they are rushing into a new management scheme in the wake of the Griffiths inquiry and, as has been said, this is the third major reorganisation of the service in 10 years, and is being introduced hastily and without proper consultation.
We are not against improvements in management, and the new proposals may indeed lead to improvement; nor are we wedded to the status quo. But we have serious doubts about the wisdom of imposing the new management structure nationwide, in a blanket fashion, and we should have preferred to see a preliminary pilot study in one region.
In any case, bad management, where it exists, is only a symptom, and the introduction of new managerial structures is only symptomatic treatment. What we need is a more radical cure. I should like to concentrate upon the relatively simple problem of the hospitals and how they are run.
On 10th March 1982 in your Lordships' House we debated the state of the National Health Service and I then said that I thought that what was wrong was a lack of leadership. The same is still true, and it lies at the root of the problem. The Griffiths recommendations recognise this, but the introduction of general managers is seen as the solution. Like the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, I never cease to be amazed—I suppose I have a simple mind—that intelligent people can believe that consensus management, as that term is understood in the National Health Service, can ever work. Yet in many of the papers that have been written about the Griffiths inquiry the concept is defended, often with passion.
Much is made of the multiprofessional nature of the National Health Service; much is made of the problem of having one kind of professional take decisions that affect the work of another kind. And so the idea that the spokesmen of every professional group must all agree before anything is ever done is given the semblance of credibility. But, my Lords, it is only a semblance. In reality it is a recipe for doing nothing. A decision to do nothing is every bit as important as a decision to do something, but the current system requires a consensus to do something and yet requires no consensus whatsoever to do nothing at all; for if only one voice is raised against a proposal it cannot be proceeded with. It is a ludicrous system.
Even the basis on which it is defended has only superficial merit. Let me illustrate what I am trying to say by making an analogy with the university world, for in many respects a large university is not unlike a hospital. A university and a hospital are there to provide services to students and patients respectively. They are both staffed multiprofessionally, and they depend on a large variety of craftsmen, technicians
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and tradesmen. Both expend vast sums of public money.
Like other vice-chancellors, I ran a large university. I am not a trained administrator, and I do not think that I am a particularly gifted manager. All that I can claim to have given to the Open University was leadership. To be a successful leader requires, I think, three things. First, it is vital to be able to command the respect and loyalty of the staff. Secondly, you must be able to formulate and enunciate the policies of your institution, borrowing ideas—where they are appropriate—from your colleagues, ensuring that they are acceptable to a majority of the staff before espousing them, but ensuring, too, that they are in the best interests of your institution. That is true consensus management. Thirdly, and just as important, you have to pick the right people to do the jobs that have to be done. You must, as I did, appoint a first-class administrator to administer, especially if you are not very good at it yourself.
I am sure that there are lots of able managers and administrators around; but being a good administrator is not of itself any guarantee of being able to provide leadership. Many such men, worthy and skilled as they are, are faceless bureaucrats, grey men with no charisma whatever. Making the books balance and answering all letters by return never fired the imagination of staff nor raised their morale in times of trouble. I am sure that the NHS has many good administrators and now the Government propose to give it more good managers. However, this will not necessarily do anything to provide the leadership that is so badly needed. There is one reason why it cannot do so.
If I can return to my university analogy, there are many experts in the university. Each professor was appointed because he was the most distinguished scholar that could be found in his field. The vice-chancellor, if he is lucky, may be as distinguished in one field of scholarship as the professor in that field, but he cannot be the equal of all the others in theirs. His administrative staff has usually been trained in the standard career of university administration and probably knows far more about it than he does. His staff includes laboratory technicians and gardeners, cleaners and caterers, hoteliers and drivers, surveyors and craftsmen. It is as varied a staff as that in any hospital. And, believe me, academic staff are every bit as much a bunch of prima donnas as hospital consultants. Yet in a university there is no doubt whatever where responsibility lies.
The vice-chancellor is the chief administrator and the chief academic officer of the institution, responsible for the health of the whole university to the governing body. He usually has, on the other hand, very few statutory powers. He is the antithesis of the harlot. She has the power without the responsibility. What he does have is enormous influence. He takes decisions every day, but he takes them because he knows that they will be acceptable by a majority. He is in fact a leader. He is also drawn almost always from the ranks of the university academic community. This is supremely important. Where that pattern has been broken the results have rarely been happy. High-powered academic staff readily give their loyalty only to someone who commands their intellectual respect.

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Those who lack scholarship have therefore a formidable obstacle to surmount. It is very creditable that a few people have, indeed, surmounted it.
In a hospital the only person who can command a similar loyalty and respect from all the staff is one drawn from the ranks of the senior consultants. I hope that I can allay the doubts of my noble friend Lady Robson about this. Of course, there are many consultants who would refuse the job of running a hospital. But there are also just as many professors who would refuse the job of running a university. However, there is never any difficulty in filling a vacancy. I do not believe that there would be any difficulty in the hospital service either. What is necessary is to make the job financially attractive. That means competing not only with consultants' salaries but with distinction awards as well.
As many groups have pointed out, it would be retrogressive to go back to the old system of the hospital superintendent. It is a tarnished image. Many superintendents were of a calibre quite insufficient to command any respect from the consultant staff. But to refuse to go back to that system should not be used as an argument against all systems of medical control. I argue that only medical men can provide the leadership that is required. Of course, it is true that other people can provide management, but leadership is very difficult for anyone who is not medical. Unless that is accepted and acted upon, we can have reorganisation after reorganisation without significantly affecting the situation. In the end, the whole of the National Health Service is about giving the patient the treatment he needs. That treatment is the responsibility of the doctor. It includes not only medical and surgical care but also the standard of nursing, the cleanliness of the wards and corridors, the quality of the food and the handling of trolleys and stretchers. It includes the operation of the whole hospital. Every employee is there to help the doctor provide the patient with the treatment required. Let us, for God's sake, recognise that fact and get some sense back into the system.
But what, you may say, of the control of cost? And the Government will certainly say it. Even we vice-chancellors have to live within our budgets. So, too, I believe, would the medical director of a hospital. He would also have the necessary charisma and power of leadership to get his senior consultant staff to back him up. When the available funds were not sufficient to provide for all the facets of patient care, he could make that fact public. He could show that it is a myth that public funds can provide a wholly comprehensive service at an open-ended commitment on cost.
Finally, let me add, as a footnote, that I believe that a similar change is needed at the very top of the National Health Service. The Griffiths inquiry recommends that there should be a National Health Service management board with a director general as head of the service. This is a role, I believe, that can only be filled adequately by a distinguished medical man given the public authority to lead the service. I shall not labour the point. Let me simply say that I believe that such a move could restore a little hope to a service that is sadly demoralised, a service that we all want to be proud of. It is one of the most successful
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social innovations of all time and it deserves the best that we can give it.
4.46 p.m.
Lord Rea: My Lords, I should like to apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Hunter, for not being able to be here at the beginning of the debate. I would have liked to be able to say that I was detained because of my duties with the mental health care planning team for Bloomsbury—but that actually meets on a different Wednesday. I was detained by other professional cares. I wish to make only a short statement.
The debate is timely in that National Health Service staff are worried because of the hiatus, now six months long, between the publication of the Griffiths recommendations and a definitive Government statement about their response. While we are reasonably happy that there will be no further drastic shake-up of the National Health Service (and Griffiths itself is mindful of that), we still remain uneasy. The British Medical Association has given a guarded welcome to Griffiths and the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Social Services has also some positive things to say. No-one maintains that the management of the National Health Service is ideal. But neither is it wholly bad. The system of consensus management, while slow and often tedious, does at least give everyone a chance to put their view; and decisions, when finally arrived at. are thus more acceptable.
The Griffiths recommendations are not precise, and our unease comes from the introduction of another group and a powerful group of appointed rather than elected administrators. Many others are concerned that the Minister, with Cabinet pressure on him to cut spending, may appoint managers whose main aim is to prune, with the welfare of patients low down on the list of priorities. Some of the appointees will come from outside the National Health Service, from commerce and industry, which suggests that they may be inclined to encourage private practice as a means of off-loading pressure on the National Health Service. We debated this in the last short debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Hunter. Many feel that this would be uneconomic in total cost to the nation and divisive and destructive of the National Health Service.
Having voiced these doubts, I must say that there are some true and positive points made in the Griffiths recommendations. Paragraph 2 on page 10 states:
"The NHS does not have the profit motive, but it is. of course, enormously concerned with control of expenditure. Surprisingly, however, it still lacks any real continuous evaluation of its performance against criteria"—
which were mentioned earlier.
"Rarely are precise management objectives set: there is little measurement of health output: clinical evaluation of particular practices is by no means common and economic evaluation of those practices extremely rare. Nor can the NHS display a ready assessment of the effectiveness with which it is meeting the needs and expectations of the people it serves. Businessmen have a keen sense of how well they are looking after their customers. Whether the NHS is meeting the needs of the patient, and the community, and can prove that it is doing so, is open to question".
I believe that many of the challenges contained in this statement could be met from within the present structure, and there are already research projects

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looking at some of these questions, funded by the department. But if Griffiths strengthens and raises the priority of this type of evaluative research, it will be on the right track.
On the private sector, the report also says something which is rather reassuring. It says:
"Management … should … be asking … and examining why, if functions can be performed more cheaply (outside the NHS) the NHS itself should not do so".
In drawing these short remarks to a conclusion, I was going to read some of the remarks which the British Medical Association made in its letter to the Minister in January. But in my haste to get here I am afraid that I have left the letter behind! However, the gist of the communication from the BMA is that, although it fully agrees that improvements in management are necessary, it is very concerned that, where clinical matters are involved, the new managers should not be empowered to overrule decisions taken on clinical grounds.
My noble friend Lord Pitt has just handed me a copy of the letter but, in fact, the passage that I wanted to read is not marked and I have a summary of it in my head. The basic feeling of the BMA about consensus management is that, although it is sometimes slow to make decisions, the best way of increasing the speed of its decision-making is to increase the powers of well-trusted managers who are already there, rather than to bring in new people from outside who are not so familiar with the local problems. That is all I have to say at the moment. As I promised, it was a short statement.
4.53 p.m.
Baroness Cox: My Lords, I must begin with an apology, because I deeply regret that I may be unable to stay for the latter part of this important debate for which we are so indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Hunter. At present I am absconding from an international conference which I must rejoin no later than six o'clock. I shall be very sorry if I have to miss the latter contributions, but I very much look forward to reading them in Hansard tomorrow.
I wish to offer a contribution from the perspective of the nursing and midwifery professions. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunter, for recognising the concern that they are currently feeling. I offer this contribution, not to plead for sectional interests, but because nurses and midwives comprise the largest occupational group in the National Health Service and it might, therefore, assist your Lordships' debate if their views are put. In so doing, I shall confine myself to recent developments in the form of the Griffiths Management Inquiry Report and the ensuing report from the Social Services Committee, because it is these which are of paramount concern at the moment.
In order to comment succinctly, I have endeavoured to subsume some of the main concerns under three headings: financial accountability, professional responsibility, and provision for education. The first is financial accountability. The first point which I wish to emphasise is that my colleagues in nursing and midwifery have consistently pledged their commitment to endeavours to promote efficiency and cost-effectiveness. As the Royal College of Nursing
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wrote in its evidence to the Social Services Committee:
"The Royal College of Nursing also welcomes the general emphasis in the inquiry on seeking to improve effectiveness and efficiency in the National Health Service. The College is always prepared to welcome recommendations which seek to achieve these ends, provided that they are commensurate with maintaining high standards of patient care and professional practice".
Moreover, there is general acceptance that there is room for improvements in management in the National Health Service. For example, Royal College of Nursing members "welcome" the:
"emphasis on more vigorous management in the National Health Service",
and:
"the need for more attention to be paid to crisper decision-making".
However, as is well known, many of the specific recommendations made in the Griffiths Report have aroused great dismay, largely because of their implications for my two remaining topics— professional responsibility and accountability, and provision for education. These issues have been considered by the Social Services Committee and most of its recommendations have been warmly welcomed by nurses and midwives.
I should like to turn briefly to professional responsibility. It is the concern of the nursing and midwifery professions that they should continue to have a formal role in decision-making at all levels in the National Health Service—not for reasons of self-interest, but because of the special contribution that they can make, based both on the numbers of staff which they represent and on their particular role in the provision of health care. On the first point, it is relevant to remember that there are approximately 500,000 nurses employed in the National Health Service—about 44 per cent. of the total workforce. They therefore account for a very high proportion of National Health Service funds. On the second point, it is nurses who, by the nature of their professional work, are in the closest day-to-day contact with patients and are, therefore, often in a particularly good position to act as their advocates.
Consequently, the nursing profession has welcomed the recommendations of the report of the Social Services Committee which would help to preserve the nursing influence in decision-making. I refer, first, to the recommendation that the chief nursing officer of the DHSS should be appointed a member of the Health Services Advisory Board. Her exclusion from this top-level decision-making body was perhaps the most disturbing example of the failure, throughout the Griffiths Report, to give serious consideration to the key role of nurses and midwives in determining health policy. I sincerely hope that your Lordships may see fit to support the recommendation of the Social Services Committee that the omission of the chief nursing officer from the advisory board should be remedied.
Concern has also been expressed over other proposed changes in the structure of management at other levels in the National Health Service. For example, in its evidence to the Social Services Committee, the Royal College of Nursing claimed:
"Royal College of Nursing members found many of the proposals relating to the management of the National Health Service at regional, district and unit level disturbing, and believe that more specific clarification would be needed as to their impact and intent".

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In particular, they are concerned about the rejection of the concept of consensus management and about the possible loss of professional autonomy and accountability. Although recognising that consensus management has not been without problems in some places, they argue that in many places it appears to have worked satisfactorily, and that the Griffiths inquiry gave no evidence to justify jettisoning it; and the proposal to introduce general managers at unit level has caused considerable consternation. As the report of the Social Services Committee argues:
"There is widespread agreement that the 1982 reorganisation has not even now been fully implemented at unit level. Some posts are still unfilled. The relationship between unit managers, clinical staff and nurse managers is still at a very early stage. To disturb them, and in a manner as yet unspecified, would be the height of folly".
The nursing and midwifery professions wholeheartedly endorse this view. Moreover, they argue that early indications of the management performance of units are very encouraging, and they consequently urge that a structure which, while still establishing itself, is showing great promise, should not be interfered with so soon.
I must repeat once again that my professional colleagues are not motivated by self-interest or professional self-aggrandisement. Their anxiety is caused by their sincere and, in my view, realistic belief that another major upheaval now in the National Health Service could have disastrous consequences for efficiency and for morale. Moreover, the changes proposed by the Griffiths inquiry are seen as in some respects structurally unsound. For example, the introduction of general managers at unit level would destroy the line of professional accountability between a director of nursing services and the district nursing officer.
This loss of direct professional accountability has serious professional implications and is something which the professions would oppose to the utmost. And the removal of responsibility for the nursing budget from those responsible for providing nursing services would impair rather than enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness. For example, in any general hospital a great deal of fine tuning is constantly taking place resulting from changing priorities and pressures on the nursing services. This fine tuning is an extremely complex process and requires nursing expertise to ensure that the available resources are used to maximum benefit. It would be anomalous and unsatisfactory if the person who has responsibility for the control of a budget lid does not have responsibility for the deployment of staff paid for by that budget.
It is on these grounds that the nursing and midwifery professions endorse the Social Services Committee report in their recommendations that:
"the Secretary of State clarify his intentions as regards the future of district functional management, including nurse management … and that the issue of general management at unit level be considered separately from general management at district and regional level."
This brings me finally and briefly to my third topic: provision for education. The omission of consideration of this subject from the Griffiths Report must be seen as serious. The nursing and midwifery services rely on 65 per cent. to 72 per cent. of a student's time being devoted to providing service, and they consequently make a crucial input to the delivery
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of patient care. Also, the salaries of the student and pupil nurses and of student midwives are part of the total district nursing budget, and there must be a facility for virement between units to take account of fluctuations stemming from their training programmes. This is yet another reason for retention of the control of the nursing budget by the district nursing officer—an argument which has been put very forcefully by the Association of Nurse Administrators in strong representations to the Secretary of State.
I conclude by summarising the main concerns felt by my nursing and midwifery colleagues. They are not opposed to endeavours to improve efficiency and to enhance cost-effectiveness in the National Health Service. They appreciate that resources are scarce and that efforts must be made to "sharpen" management so that resources are used to the best advantage. However, they believe that the maintenance of high standards of professional practice will not be facilitated by the proposed changes in professional accountability; rather, they believe that preservation of nursing's contribution to policy-making and decision-making at all levels is a prerequisite for efficient and effective use of resources. And they also urge that no precipitate changes are made within the National Health Service which will damage the morale of staff, which is already at an unprecedentedly low level due to repeated change, sustained uncertainty and understandable feelings of insecurity.
The National Health Service has the benefit of the dedication of thousands of able and altruistic men and women. Many of these, especially in the nursing and midwifery professions, are now anxious and demoralised. They have been cheered by the reassurances offered by the report of the Social Services Committee, which advocates caution, together with further debate and clarification of certain areas of confusion, before implementing any further major changes.
I hope, passionately, that the concerns and reservations expressed by these professions will be taken seriously so that they may be enabled to continue to try to provide nursing and midwifery care of the highest possible standard. I also hope that their members, who are generally held in such high esteem and affection by the public whom they serve, will not be subjected to unnecessary pressure and distress by precipitate implementation of policies which may not achieve the goal which they are intended to achieve—a goal which we all share: the efficient provision of the best possible health care for everyone.
5.6 p.m.
Baroness Gaitskell: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunter, for allowing me to speak today very shortly. My speech is going to have few facts and is going to be really a slight eulogy of the National Health Service hospital, the Royal Free, which I attend, and have attended several times over the last few years. I may say that it will be a eulogy about this hospital rather than a talk about what the noble Lord, Lord Hunter, was speaking about.
I have been ill over the last few months and have had one accident. How would one have dealt with that had there not been a National Health Service? We do not think of things like that. Who is going to look after us? I had two X-rays on an arm that I could not move at

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all for a little time. I found the situation completely inadequate, and my daughter took me to the hospital. I do not know what people do who have not got either cars or nice daughters who can help them on these occasions.
I do not understand all this talk about managers. What do people mean by managers in the National Health Service? I cannot see any use for them there—none at all. Let them stick to business, not to health. That is what we want. Maybe things can be improved, but what could they do? Bring their business knowledge to the hospitals? I do not believe a word of it. No one who has spoken has convinced me of any job for such managers. I do not know what we want them for. The good hospitals are doing extremely well, and surely, if they are not doing so well, they can be taught by all sorts of people to do better.
My experience of the hospital was wonderful; one day I could not move this arm at all and I could not walk, or do anything. On the next day, having been at the hospital and having had two X-rays, there it was, waggling away. That is the kind of thing we ordinary people want to have done, if we have to go to a doctor.
One thing that troubles me is that many women are shy about going to their own doctors at certain times. They have spoken to me about it, and they have told me that they are shy and cannot do it, whereas they will go to a hospital, where they are not shy, and they are attended to. Altogether it seems to me that we are barking up the wrong tree when we talk only of managers. There are several hospitals in this city which are first class. The people who go to them get service for nothing, and the people who will not go to them have to pay £15 for a five-minute interview. Really there is only one thing we can do: the National Health Service and the hospitals are absolutely first class, and if they need to be better, we can make them so.
5.10 p.m.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, I am naturally delighted that my noble friend Lady Gaitskell paid the warm tribute that she did to the National Health Service for restoring her to full health, enabling her to give a bit of passion to this debate. I am also grateful to see the noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, return because the noble Baronesses have distinguished themselves today.
I should, before saying that, have thanked the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, for enabling the noble Baronesses to do so and for the excellent speech which he made. I am sorry that Lady Cox has had to leave, but she left after making what I thought was an outstanding speech. I hope she reads Hansard tomorrow, because there was not one word in the speech which she made with which I would not totally associate myself. I cannot say that about any of the other speeches, except for that made by the noble Baroness, Lady Robson of Kiddington. I have a special affection for Lady Robson, as on these issues we do not touch on party issues. She was an excellent chairman of a regional health authority; we had the closest relationship.
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All those who have spoken did so with a great deal of experience. I am a little worried about Lord Taylor because he seems to think that a manager is clapped out after seven years. What about a Secretary of State who does not have a manager? What is his state after three years? I do not feel clapped out, and I tell him I am not clapped out. I do not know whether the Secretary of State will find his life easier if, with the responsibility that he has to Parliament for the running and provision of a health service, he has also to cope with a manager paid three times as much as he is paid. But we will leave that for the moment. Whatever we feel here, none of us—excluding my noble friend Lady Gaitskell—feels that we do not have to improve, if we can, the management of the National Health Service.
I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, has returned to her place. I have just been saying some lovely things about her, saying that everything she said I agreed with. Of course we want to improve management, but there are a lot of provisos involved: provided that we can achieve it without loss of effective inter-professional consultation; provided that it will improve patient care; provided that it will not undermine the consensus and agreement between the professions and provided that we can do it without extra cost.
Inevitably in this debate we have been concentrating our minds on the Griffiths report. I think I have read every bit of evidence submitted to the House of Commons Select Committee and I listened to a number of sessions in which there was oral cross-questioning of Ministers, Mr. Griffiths and the organisations themselves. I feel myself steeped in the Griffiths report, but I am not really very happy about it.
I was staggered by the fact that the Secretary of State did not publish the report as soon as he received it; he published it at the moment when he said: "And I accept it". I do not believe this is the way to go about things at all. He should have published it; as I feel about the Greenfield report, as I feel about the Binder Hamlyn report. You publish a report, allow people's views to be reflected and you then make up your mind. He may be going slower now than he was in his first bout of enthusiasm, but it is, I fear, a habit of Conservative Governments constantly to reorganise the National Health Service. We had the 1972 reorganisation under Sir Keith Joseph. I think it was a disaster, although some good things were done. I supported my predecessor, Barbara Castle, who decided that, even though she thought it was a pretty unfavourable mess of pottage—I shall now mix my metaphors—she did not intend to unscramble the egg. You cannot do that.
If there is a change and the health service is thrown into great disruption, the Secretary of State cannot say: "I don't like that. I am going to do another one", and reorganise it all over again. Management has to keep to its job and all those working in the health service have to see a reasonable future. I resisted all the pressure upon me, when I was Secretary of State, to put right what had been done by the previous Administration.
We had the 1982 reorganisation and, as has already been pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, it

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has not even been completed; posts are not yet filled and people are still settling in to the new posts. Now we are to be presented with another reorganisation. Quite frankly, it is too much for the National Health Service. I believe it would do great damage to do it now. There may be time and that time will come. But, if one considers the evidence, the Royal College of Nursing was extremely strong in its opposition. The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, made reference to Trevor Clay, who told the Select Committee in another place that:
"The response from RCN members was clear and angry from the outset".
Some of the reasons have been given by the noble Baroness.
The BMA also made it clear that they were opposed to the recommendations. All right, they have some commendations, as I have, about the critique which Griffiths made. Many wise things were said by Griffiths in his critique of the National Health Service, but not in his remedy for the weaknesses.
Some members of the National Association of Health Authorities took a variety of different views but, on the whole, they were extremely critical and the unions were also opposed in varying degrees of fury.
I believe that if the Secretary of State proceeds, even on the slightly slower timetable that he seems to envisage, the National Health Service will be thrown again into confusion and conflict by what will be a third reorganisation in ten years. The absurd thing is that each reorganisation seems to run contrary to its predecessor. The 1982 reorganisation was designed to undo the 1972 one and Patients First, which was published in 1980, was the basis of the reorganisation. It specifically rejected the idea of managers, of chief executives, as the Guillebaud report did back in 1956, and as Sir Keith Joseph had done in 1972. Each has considered whether this sort of business management should be brought into the National Health Service and each has turned it down.
Inevitably, Roy Griffiths and his team, in considering the National Health Service, looked at it from the point of view of a business structure. I do not believe one can compare the National Health Service with a business structure. Someone has mentioned the profit motive; that is a small part of it, because every section of the health service, indeed every organisation, has to be efficient, whether there is profit or whether there is not.
There is another factor. The law of the land requires that the Secretary of State himself—unless the law is to be changed, and he does not propose to change it—is responsible to Parliament for the provision of a health service. Thirdly, decisions in the National Health Service must be taken in the interests of millions of individual patients whose needs are best known by a variety of different professional people—trained doctors, nurses, professions supplementary to medicine, not management consultants or consumer surveys. The National Health Service cannot seriously be compared with a business enterprise.
There is a second fallacy; that is, that the National Health Service is badly managed. There seems to be a great assumption that it is badly managed. Nothing is perfect and we can find errors. I guess we would find
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errors if we did an analysis of the Sainsbury organisation, Marks and Spencer or any other commerical organisation. The NHS, as was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Robson, is administered on a very tight budget of now marginally less than 5 per cent. She and I know well that this is an operation that has been going on for several years; tightening, tightening, tightening the management proportion of the National Health Service. But I believe that for efficiency and value for money it is better than that provided in most countries in the world and in most enterprises in Britain—commercial enterprises or not commercial enterprises. The real trouble with the National Health Service is not its management; it is that it is under-financed—and I am not going to go any further on that because I think across the Floor of the House there will be agreement that we can try to improve management as much as we like, but if the funds are not there to sustain and develop the growth of the National Health Service, then we are going to be in a grave difficulty.
Looking at some of the evidence that was presented to the Select Committee in another place, the National Association of Health Authorities, who represent all the different health authorities in the country, said—and it is worthwhile quoting—in paragraph 15:
"It would have to be recognised that there would be major practical difficulties in introducing a chief executive system into the National Health Service."
They give three reasons:
"(a) It would require the understanding and co-operation of the major professions".
Well, it has not got the co-operation of the major professions: that is absolutely clear. Secondly:
"(b) There may be a serious shortage of suitable qualified and experienced officers, especially at unit level".
I think that to bring people in from outside would be a very risky operation to undertake. Thirdly, they say:
"(c) It would cause further disruption and seriously affect morale in a service which is still in the process of implementing the 1982 reorganisation".
That is their view, it is the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, it is the BMA's view and it is my view; but it is not the Government's view and I do not understand why.
Perhaps I may quote from paragraph 16, which says:
"Moreover, a chief executive system is largely untried. There will be no guarantee that it will work better than consensus management which in many places is working well".
I agree with that. I think that it is absolutely essential in decisions that are taken with a variety of different professions seeking to work together that, in the end, even if you may delay for two weeks in taking a decision, you get the decision right and you get the professions and all those who are having to operate this service doing it together and not arguing together. Many health authorities—and I am quoting from their evidence:
"… would be reluctant to make a radical change in their management arrangements unless the advantages of so doing have been clearly demonstrated in practice. As in any other organisation, the effectiveness of the arrangements for executive authority depend upon the personality and capabilities of the individuals concerned".
I think that that is absolutely right.
I was very interested in what was said by one of the

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members of the Select Committee—a Mrs. Edwina Currie, who is a Conservative Member of another place and who served on the Select Committee. She said:
"Nurses must understand budgets, administrators must grapple with clerical choice. Doctors should grasp the intricacies of industrial relations. The management team all have to seek to understand the problems that other members of the management team must operate".
She went on:
"Consensus management is a reflection of the ineradicable plurality of the National Health Service, not a cause of it. And, generally, it is working".
I want to say that I agree with her.
My Lords, before I end. I want to raise just one other issue which was raised in the Sunday Times the week before last and which certainly affects management. The Sunday Times pointed out—and I think that there has been no denial—that a civil servant from the DHSS, a Mr. John Rogers, whom I greatly admire, who was my deputy private secretary and a very able man. was seconded to a crucial position at the Merseyside Health Authority in Liverpool. According to a document, he had been given remarkably wide-ranging duties, acting as deputy to the region's chief administrator, also retaining important responsibilities to Ministers. Part of the job description said that he would have to visit each of the 10 districts, that he would have to
"explain departmental policies, answer queries, and assess performances of ministerial appointees".
I must say that if management is to include people checking on whether lay or professional members of health authorities are satisfactory in the eyes of the Minister, that is a very dangerous thing. I quote again from the job description document published in the Sunday Times saying that he will also be:
"Providing information about the region to other parts of the division"—
and that means divisions within the department—.
"in connection with national policies and strategies".
My Lords, I believe that there are grave dangers in the centre dominating the place where the job is done. This was the great mistake that was made in the establishment of the area health authorities. It took decision-making further up the line, away from the point at which patients are cared for. I believe that increasingly—and it may seem strange from a former Socialist Secretary of State to say so about a Conservative Secretary of State—in this field as well as in local government, we are seeing the Government seeking to intervene excessively and increasingly in the affairs which are best managed by people on the spot who know best. When Griffiths said in his report that this would give greater influence at a local level, I am afraid that I do not agree with that at all. I think that we are going to see, if this is carried out, a management structure that will go down from top to bottom, and I have great fears about that.
It is always dangerous to give advice to the Secretary of State because, if I give it, he will not take it. So what am I to do? It may be that the noble Lord the Minister will at least accept it. I am not saying that everything in the Griffiths report is wrong. All I am saying is that to introduce it now without much more consultation with all the professions may leave some gaps. The
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noble Baroness, Lady Robson, referred to some of the gaps. Perhaps they can be filled, through consultation, over the next two years. But I would put the implementation of the Griffiths recommendations on the back row for two or three years, not only to ease the National Health Service from having another disruption but to enable it, if we are going to make another change, actually to get it right.
5.28 p.m.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I join with others of your Lordships who have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, for choosing this important subject for debate today, and for succeeding in getting his name drawn out of the hat. I particularly welcome the opportunity that it has given all of us to hear the thoughtful, stimulating, sometimes even emotional comments, mostly based on direct experience of the National Health Service, which he and others have made on the many far-reaching issues raised by the report of Mr. Griffiths. This is the first time, apart from at the initial announcement, that the report has been discussed either on the Floor of your Lordships' House or in another place. Therefore, it will enable your Lordships to participate in the process of consultation. But I have to say that the Government are not yet in a position to respond to many of the detailed points which have been raised here and in other fora. No final decisions have been reached on how precisely to carry forward all the recommendations contained in the Griffiths Report. However, I am pleased to have the chance to make some more general observations about the Government's views on the report, and I shall do my best to clarify any of the more specific points that I can.
So far as the debate in another place is concerned, that is a matter for another place. I have no doubt that they will want to discuss the report which has been so frequently referred to. I should like to begin by placing the report in the wider context of the Government's general policy on the National Health Service. Throughout our term of office we have been concerned about improving the efficiency of the health service. We regard it as a major priority to ensure that the huge amount of money we spend on the service each year—currently £13 billion in England alone—reaches its target; and its target is the patients. To help to do this, we have set several initiatives in hand already. For example, the establishment of the annual accountability review process, the introduction of improved manpower control and planning systems which regional health authorities are now required to link with their service plans and available resources, the setting up of pilot projects for management budgets and improving audit procedures. Behind these individual initiatives has been the Government's overriding concern to see the management of the health service is geared to the interests of the patients and to the more efficient use of what must always, I fear, be limited resources.
It was against this background that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Social Services set up the management inquiry, under Roy Griffiths' leadership. The Government's purpose was to seek advice, from professional managers with experience in other large organisations, on our current

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initiatives to improve management and efficiency in the service, and on what more we, at the centre, and health authorities, should do to get the best value for money and the best possible service to patients. The inquiry team report has, in our view, provided us with valuable and constructive advice. We were encouraged that the inquiry team endorsed the management action we were taking already, and we welcome—as do the majority of those working in the health service—the aims and objectives which led the team to suggest a challenging future programme of management action—not, I should stress, to bring about another restructuring—as was suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Robson, and by the noble Lord, Lord Ennals—but to make the existing organisation work better in practice.
What we are doing is not changing the system but building on what we have done so far: the establishment of a general management function would add to the existing management arrangements. It is introducing something new into the National Health Service which, in our view, is not there at present. It is certainly not replacing existing arrangements.
Many of the team's recommendations call for continued action on the initiatives already under way, such as the further development of management budgets. And the importance of these aspects of the report's recommendations should not be overlooked, though, naturally, those in the health service have been concentrating their attention primarily on the establishment of a general management function and the greater involvement of clinicians in management which my right honourable friend asked about particularly in his consultation letter to health authority chairmen last November. And similarly, it is these two aspects which have been primarily engaging the interest of your Lordships today. I am particularly pleased about the emphasis that has been placed on the crucial role of clinicians.
As I said earlier, I am not in a position to give any detailed response on how the report's recommendations will be carried forward. What I can report is progress made so far. As your Lordships will know, my right honourable friend, having accepted the general thrust of the Griffiths Report—which I think was the point really made by the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, when he said he accepted the report willy-nilly—initiated a consultation process, beginning last November, with health authorities, professional bodies and others with an interest. The intention then was to issue guidance to health authorities early this year. We are still broadly on schedule to do this. However, since then, the Social Services Committee—which I mentioned just now—decided to make the Griffiths Report the subject of their first inquiry this Session, and my right honourable friend has indicated that he would like to have the opportunity to debate their report before reaching any final conclusions on guidance to be issued to health authorities. The Government hope to secure time for a debate in the course of the next month or so, the intention then being to issue guidance to health authorities without undue delay.
We are well aware of the points made by my noble friend Lady Cox that the National Health Service is
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geared up and waiting for guidance. I can assure her that we intend to keep to our intention to issue guidance as soon as possible in May.
One point I should like to make clear: the Government are firmly committed to establishing the general management function in the National Health Service on the lines recommended in the Griffiths Report. As your Lordships will be well aware, the inquiry team found that the general management function is not clearly defined at any level of the health service. They define this function as the responsibility, clearly vested in one person, for ensuring that the whole organisation runs smoothly and that things get done. I must say that here I share wholeheartedly the views expressed by my noble friend Lord Mottistone. What he said I think summarised so many of the thoughts which Griffiths and his team put forward: in other words, the establishment of the general management function is designed to meet the very point made by my noble friend Lady Faithfull; it should co-ordinate the drive to ensure that local and national policies and priorities are translated into effective action.
The inquiry team believed that only by establishing a personal and visible responsibility for the general management function could we achieve a guaranteed commitment throughout the health service to that constant search for improvement and concern for the experience of every individual patient which should be the universal hallmark of our National Health Service, of which we are justly proud. It is just this commitment to the needs of the individual patient which is at the heart of the care and community policies and to which the department is asking health authorities to give priority. That of course also lay behind much of the concern expressed by my noble friend Lady Faithfull. The inquiry team were not undervaluing in any way the importance of consensus management in the National Health Service.
Consensus works for a variety of reasons. It works either because everybody agrees that the decision is obvious, or more often—and I think this is probably true generally—it works because where a decision is particularly difficult one particular person in the group which is making these decisions stands out pre-eminently and leads the team which is making the consensus view. Teams are important; but at the end of the day nearly every successful enterprise is successful due to the taking of decisions by one person, however hard those decisions may be. Of course, people can still put their point of view before decisions are reached.
The fact is. as I have said, consensus on its own does not always lead to effective decision-making and management action; but perhaps, more importantly, as a management style it does not promote the kind of dynamic approach that we need in the health service to ensure that we get the best quality of care and value for money for patients. I share the views—
Lord Ennals: My Lords, may I ask the Minister one question? The noble Lord the Minister is arguing his case very effectively. I simply want to know why the view he now holds was not held and carried into practice at the time of the 1982 reorganisation.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, will agree that everything in life develops, and the National Health Service cannot be immune from that. The fact remains that what we hope to do with Griffiths is to try to improve what was started in 1982, and that is the purpose of the Griffiths report.
What I was going on to say was that I entirely share the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Perry of Walton, when he said leadership was a prerequisite in matters of successful management. I am quite sure that my noble friend Lord Mottistone would agree with that. We share the view of the inquiry team that the lack of clearly defined general management function is a weakness in present management arrangements, and it is this which had led us to believe—as my right honourable friend said in his November consultation letter—that we will begin to achieve the improvements we need and want in health service management by implementing the inquiry report's recommendations to identify a general manager at each level, as we have heard this afternoon: unit, district and region. He or she might come from any discipline, and should simply be the best person for the job. But the team hoped that, at unit level in particular, clinicians might be attracted to taking on this responsibility.
That, I hope, will please my noble friend Lady Faithfull. I am grateful to her for making the point so effectively and also to the noble Lord, Lord Perry, for his vivid description of the invigorating personality he sees as the right person for general manager. I would not disagree with him one jot. I should add that the team did hope that at unit level in particular clinicians might be attracted to taking on this responsibility.
The inquiry team's recommendations about the department have also received a lot of attention. I want to make it clear that we are not taking over to run the National Health Service directly from the Elephant and Castle, as I know some people fear. What we are doing is to strengthen the existing arrangements so that Ministers are provided with a better, more responsive tool to help them fulfil their responsibilities. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has already set up a health service supervisory board as recommended by the inquiry team. Members of this board include, so far, health Ministers, the Permanent Secretary and the chief medical officer. Mr. Griffiths himself has also agreed to serve. My right honourable friend may consider making additional appointments to the board and he is of course aware of the views of the nursing profession, in particular that the chief nursing officer should be a member of the board. My noble friend Lady Cox spoke eloquently on this point. The Secretary of State has made it quite clear that the chief nursing officer will be involved in all matters concerning the supervisory board which might affect nursing interests, and in fact she has been present at the meetings held so far. Nurses need have no fear that my right honourable friend does not give full recognition to their essential position within the National Health Service.
The board's job is to advise the Secretary of State on overall strategy and planning for the health service. Directly accountable to the supervisory board, the
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inquiry team proposed a management board which would bring together all the present management functions now within the department. My right honourable friend said in evidence to the Social Services Select Committee that the aim of the management changes was to reduce functions at the centre and, following from that, reductions in staff. Arrangements are now in hand to set up the management board, including the appointment of a chairman, as the noble Baroness, Lady Robson, said; and the appointment has been advertised.
Yes, my Lords, it will be a difficult job. Any job which is of such huge importance and involves so much money, so many people and such an essential service is going to be a difficult job. The chairman of the National Health Service Management Board will rank as a Second Permanent Secretary in the Civil Service. His salary, however, will not be tied to that rank but will be negotiable. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, particularly stressed that point. I hope he will accept the fact that I cannot name a figure because no figure has been fixed. The important thing, again, is to get the right person for the job; and the type of calibre of man or woman he identified in his speech is the person of considerable eminence that we feel is essential to do the job that will be required of him.
Lord Taylor: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Minister for a moment? I am delighted to hear what he has just said, and particularly that the amount is negotiable. That is the best news we have had for a very long time.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I am glad the noble Lord is pleased with that. I ought also to make it clear that of course there is no intention to appoint the personnel director before the general manager is in post.
I should stress—this answers the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ennals—that these changes at the centre will not in any way change Ministers' existing statutory responsibilities; and present accountability arrangements will remain unchanged. I hope that this reassures the noble Baroness, Lady Robson. My right honourable friend has gone on record as saying this will be the case, and of course Ministers will chair reviews as is done at present. Rather, the point of these changes is to give a clear lead from the top towards implementing the general management function and other changes. This in turn will give impetus to devolution.
The inquiry team believe firmly, as we do, that management responsibilities should be devolved as near to the patient and the community as is practicable. Most decisions can and should be taken at unit level. This means, among other things, that clinicians should play a large part in managing resources since they make the decisions about individual patients that determine how many of those resources are used. I was glad to hear the most helpful analysis of the noble Lord, Lord Hunter, regarding the importance and the difficulties of involving doctors in management. I also share the views expressed by my noble friend Lord Mottistone on the importance of an enhanced programme of management training for clinicians and others—something which I am sure will

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be an early task for the management board and for the health authorities to consider.
I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rea, for raising the points which the BMA have already raised with us. I am sorry that he forgot to bring his notes with him. I have a list with me and if time permitted I would welcome the opportunity to read out the answers to some of the points that were raised. However, perhaps I can make it known to your Lordships that the department has replied to the 27 questions raised by the BMA, and no doubt your Lordships would be interested to hear the answers. I can certainly let the noble Lord have a copy of them, but I do not want to take up more time on that now.
Coming to terms with the realities of clinical freedom in a world of limited resources is the subject of wide debate in the medical profession. It is encouraging to hear the views of the noble Lord, Lord Hunter, and others, on the growing recognition among doctors that they should take the lead, through clinical audit and other forms of peer review, in ensuring that available resources are used where most needed.
The Government fully recognise the point that the noble Lord also made about the need for relevant and timely information if clinicians and others are to be able to reach properly-informed decisions about the services they provide. The noble Lord, Lord Hunter, and the noble Baroness. Lady Robson, raised this particular point on costs. The Government recognise the point they made. Action is in hand and more is planned. To try to get this information involves a long-term programme: there is the question of computers, which is a point that was particularly raised. We cannot hope to achieve this overnight, but the important thing is to start now and not to believe that because it is a difficult task it is not worth doing. We have already set in hand a good deal of work to help develop the general capability which is sought, for example, through the work being done on basic health service information needs by the group under the chairmanship of Mrs. Edith Körner, to which the noble Lord referred.
I am particularly pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Hunter, and others, placed such emphasis today on the importance of winning the hearts and minds of all those involved—particularly the doctors and nurses—in looking after patients and in bringing about this fundamental change in philosophy of health service management. The management inquiry team stressed that the greatest benefit to patients could result from management changes at unit level—and I cannot say often enough that this is what any change we introduce is all about.
I share the views expressed by those who have praised the health service, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Gaitskell, and the compliments she paid to it. There is so much to praise about it, but nothing is perfect in this world; no one can sit back and say, "All is well; there is nothing more to be done." It would be arrogant and foolish to do so. There are many within the National Health Service itself who see scope for improvement and welcome the aims and objectives of the Griffiths Report.
Finally, I should like to thank all your Lordships for
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the many helpful points that have been made and, in particular, about the problems and complexities of achieving changes in management at unit level. These remarks will be studied with care and will provide a most useful contribution to the general debate which has been going on on the report's implications and on how to carry forward its recommendations. I am certain that my right honourable friend will study carefully the views expressed today and will take them into account in deciding what guidance he will issue to health authorities.
Lord Hunter of Newington: My Lords, I hoped at the start of this debate that most of the principal issues that will have to be looked at squarely would be looked at. I must congratulate all the speakers for contributing in the way that they have. Most of the main problems have been looked at—sometimes from widely differing points of view—but I hope the opportunity now exists elsewhere for this debate to be studied and for due weight to be given to the views that have been expressed by the experienced Members of your Lordships' House. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Independent Schools
5.50 p.m.
Lord Gainford Lord Gainford rose to call attention to the assistance given by independent schools to state schools in Britain; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, moving the Motion in my name is a milestone among many adventures in your Lordships' House, which have included asking an Unstarred Question and introducing a Bill. Today it is my privilege to initiate a debate for the first time. At the start, I declare an interest in that I am a governor of a small independent school at Quainton Hall in Hindes Road, Harrow, and I should like to tell your Lordships something about my school. I put down my Motion about six weeks ago and I was very pleasantly surprised when my name came out of the hat so quickly. I am slightly disappointed that this debate should fall on a day when there is a slight strike by teachers. If anything comes out of this debate today which might help that situation, I shall be very glad. Your Lordships need no reminder that teachers are often overworked, overlooked and taken for granted.
I want to begin by giving some first-hand facts about the school of which I am a governor. A little way down Hindes Road in Harrow is a maintained school named Norbury First and Middle, and the two headmasters work very closely together with the following results. Norbury children have been using Quainton Hall swimming pool. Norbury school also uses the Harrow leisure centre, but often when schools have to use a public swimming pool only limited numbers of children can be taken there at one time. When Quainton Hall's gymnasium was being rebuilt. Norbury provided gym facilities and helped with the storage of equipment. Thus the Quainton Hall boys were not only able to continue their physical training but they won a cup. The Norbury children participated in Quainton Hall's evening gymnastic club. Both schools meet each other in sporting matches.
There is particular encouragement to attend each other's plays, concerts and fairs. Norbury school has no school orchestra of its own but it has some talented players, so the children have been invited to attend training sessions with Quainton Hall's orchestra. Both headmasters serve on the local committee for the biennial street carnival in the district. Both schools have co-operated in instruction on road safety.
There is also an agreement that if any state of emergency, such as a fire, arises in either school, the other school will immediately open its doors and take in the pupils. Both schools also go in for entertaining elderly people with concerts, parties and expeditions. The headmaster of Quainton Hall maintains links with a number of independent and maintained schools, whose headmasters visit each other very regularly and exchange ideas. I could easily give statistics for other schools but to do so would take far too long.
I want to show that the independent school sector is an important factor in the national education system. One of the fundamental liberties which your Lordships are constantly supporting is the right of parents to choose which school to send their children to; if necessary, out of the maintained sector. In recent years, that has become a matter of considerable political controversy. In fact, the independent sector has been forced to keep on arguing and campaigning for its own existence.
Independent schools account for around 6 per cent. of the school population of this country. They have very high academic standards and are one of the best ways of helping children, particularly those who are below average ability. They instil a desire for hard work, discipline and initiative which this country particularly needs. Such values are not just the preserve of the independent sector. Many maintained schools can, and do, provide—and proudly—similar values. What is now needed is co-operation rather than confrontation, to improve the overall educational provision for the children of today and of the future, and it is up to the politicians to see that such co-operation develops.
To take a quick look at the present situation, there are many examples of links between the two. Pupils of many schools benefit from local agreements between the two sectors; for example, by sharing equipment, teaching aids, text books, musical scores, musical instruments, dramatic material and even minibuses for expeditions. There is also the important matter of exchanges of staff with skills in, for example, music, science, computing and sport.
There are, too, exchanges of pupils, which are particularly important when a school provides tuition on a certain subject to a class which is not very big. If another school has pupils who want to take up a certain subject but cannot take it in their own school, they are invited to join the class in the other school. There are many opportunities for the use of sports facilities by local agreement. This co-operation must be, and is, a two-way system. Personal contact is vital. Heads of schools and their staff must, and do, get together to plan what their schools can offer, and this can even include courses for teachers themselves.
The assisted places scheme takes pupil exchange one
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step further. In doing so, it has shown how the independent sector helps the maintained sector and provides a wider choice of school for parents. It is the individual child who matters and who is helped by this system, and it aims to offer these children the opportunity to develop their talents. The scheme has already shown that the heads of maintained schools are helpful in their attitude towards the scheme, and parents with a low income find that talented children are particularly benefited. The assisted places scheme provides a bridge between the two sectors and it must be supported because it shows that the two sectors are complementary.
There are four areas where this can be seen. One is boarding. Boarding schools can be an awful bore to some people, but unfortunately they are necessary when parents are abroad or when handicapped children have to be educated. I have some knowledge of that through the Invalid Children's Aid Association, of which I am a member. For almost three years I was chairman of one of their committees and raised funds for the Pilgrim School in Seaford, Sussex. This is a boarding school for boys with asthma and breathing problems. The boys were very active and did not like being considered as invalids. They did everything to show that they were not invalids but, because of their problem, they had to have an education which could be combined with medical treatment.
I have much sympathy also for children who need special tuition if they have a speech defect. I know of its pure, hellish misery, since I had a speech defect when I was a child. There is also the problem of denominational education. Many independent schools were founded and, by tradition, were committed to certain religious forms of education. The state sector cannot provide sufficient religious education to meet the demand in this country, particularly now that there are so many citizens of so many varying faiths.
I turn to the encouragement of the arts, which the independent schools help considerably. First, any form of art—whether it be literature, acting, music—is a skill and, once acquired, is something of which to be proud. It creates confidence and hope. I remember a film, which I first saw in 1941, in which a famous jazz player, Paul Whiteman, was talking to Mickey Rooney. The subject was rhythm in life, and he said, "Teach a boy to blow a trumpet and he will never blow a safe". That bit of dramatic sentimentality may have oversimplified the matter, but it drives home the point that appreciation of a skill by others creates the stimulus. A musician must have people to listen to him or to her; a writer must have people to read his books; an actor must have people to come to see him act.
Secondly, let me turn to the importance of making one's own entertainment. Boredom is a parasite. Your Lordships know that I have asked one or two Questions about hooliganism at football matches. I asked such a Question a few days ago, and one of the answers was that boredom leads to hooliganism. Boredom is one of the reasons for young people letting themselves go in such a way. They cannot create; therefore they take pleasure in destroying. I am grateful that in my youth my home was in the Western Highlands. It was a very beautiful place but it was very

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isolated. The nearest telephone was three miles away. My brothers and I were thrown on our own resources. We were often criticised for reading certain forms of literature which were popular with the young in those days. They used to cost tuppence a week. Such copies as survive now fetch about £10 in certain shops in the West End. We were criticised for reading those comics, so we got down to it and produced our own. We had far more fun producing them than we got from buying the comics we were criticised for reading.
Looking back to my own schooldays, I was a boy who, under the orthodox system of education, did not flourish very well. In fact, I did not flourish at all until I was forced into becoming one of the earliest pupils at Gordonstoun. I am delighted that my noble kinsman Lord Beaumont of Whitley is to join me in this debate because he, too, had experience of Gordonstoun, though a little later than I. One of the maxims of Kurt Hahn, who founded the school and who continually impressed upon us its importance, was that the function of a school is not just to educate but to provide a service to its local community. Gordonstoun provides service to the community—mountain rescue, a fire service and, in my days, a watcher system which was recognised by HM Coastguard. On stormy nights the boys kept watch at a certain part of the coast.
When I was speaking to my noble kinsman recently I asked him about an article which he wrote, the record of which seems to have disappeared, although I have dug into the archives at the British Museum. However, this article was written 22 years ago. If, therefore, my noble kinsman comments on this article it seems that we shall have only our memories to draw upon. The article was written at a time of great excitement about Prince Charles's entry into Gordonstoun as a new boy. My noble kinsman's article highlighted the services which Gordonstoun could provide but, because of its rural setting, I believe that he wrote, "What is needed is the urban equivalent". What the independent schools are now offering to others is getting towards the urban equivalent of community service.
It is a two-way system. I put down the Motion that independent schools are helping maintained schools, but maintained schools also help the independent schools. Whichever school helps another, it must not be done in a patronising way and it must not try to take advantage of what that other institution cannot offer. I greatly look forward to hearing the other speakers in the debate. My Lords. I beg to move for Papers.
6.9 p.m.
Baroness David: My Lords, I must admit that I was rather taken aback when I read the Motion put down in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Gainford. I wondered where there had been a mistake, but it was still there the next day so I realised that it was correct. We have now heard his case and his interesting account of the co-operation between the two kinds of schools in music, sport, acting, and so on. I congratu-late him on having his name drawn out of the hat and having his first debate.
Most of us, when the subject of assistance between the private and maintained sectors of education arises, think of the assistance given to the independent schools by the state. In February, we were debating the
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new regulations for the Assisted Places Scheme; regulations which continued the trend of relaxing the safeguards which had been agreed when the 1980 Act was going through Parliament and which the noble Baroness will well remember. Perhaps I may say how nice it is to see the noble Baroness at the other Dispatch Box on an education matter again.
Those safeguards and assurances made Sections 17 and 18 of the Act a little more palatable to those who were worried about the repercussions of siphoning off some of the brighter pupils from state schools into the private sector. Pupils can now transfer at any age and not just at 11, 13 and 16. At 16 the local authority does not have to agree to the transfer. In parenthesis, it is interesting that there are substantial numbers transferring from the independent to the maintained sector.
As an example, in South Cambridgeshire, 151 transferred in 1981, representing 9 per cent. of the total enrolment at sixth form colleges; 181 in 1982. representing 10 per cent. of the total; and 186 in 1983, representing 12 per cent. At one stage, colleges in Hampshire and Surrey were turning away applicants, and in Oxfordshire two years ago, 117 moved into the state system and only 13 came out of it. So it is small wonder that there was some pressure for the veto to be removed.
The financial arrangements have been updated generously, making it easier for parents. The means test for the remission of fees has been relaxed. The level of income at or below which fees are to be wholly remitted is set at £6,040 instead of the present £5,616—an increase of 7¾ per cent. It is worth remembering that student grants are going up by only 4 per cent.
While the loss of the assisted place pupils damages the state schools (and I cannot agree with the noble Lord, Lord Gainford, when he says that this helps the maintained schools, if I heard him aright) these pupils are undoubtedly an educational asset to the private schools. They are, equally certainly, a financial asset. The cost of the assisted places scheme this year is £ 16.5 million. The noble Earl, Lord Swinton, told us that there will be an additional £7 million for it next year, and by 1988 the scheme will cost about £50 million. In answer to a Written Question by Mr. Clement Freud in another place, the Minister said that the number of schools which would have more than 20 per cent. of pupils paid for under the assisted places scheme by 1988 will be 47: 50 schools would have more than 30 per cent. and 44 schools more than 40 per cent. That is, 141 of the 225 schools in the scheme will be receiving a very substantial sum from the state.
It has been admitted that the scheme is a lifeline to some of the less well-known private schools—even those within the Headmasters' Conference, which have strict academic criteria for admission to their ranks. By boosting the intake of highly academic children, one head confessed that it had prevented his small day school from sliding down into the "gin and Jaguar" belt of minor private schools. That was in a report from the 1981 HMC conference.
Then there is the benefit from charitable status, tax relief and rate relief. I do not have the up-to-date figures but in 1978–79, these schools received £25

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million in tax relief and £ 1 million in rate relief. No doubt the sums are much bigger five years later—and if the Minister has them, it would be interesting to know. It is enough to pay for 3,000 teachers or so, anyway.
In respect of boarding places, there have been a number of reports over the years—the Fleming, the Newsom, and the Martin. The Fleming and Newsom reports had the aim of bringing together the two sectors—the private and the maintained—but for various reasons they had little success. The Martin report was doing something rather different, in looking at boarding needs. The independent schools undoubtedly contribute in providing places, but of course they also benefit to the tune of about £56 million.
According to my information, there are about 120,000 boarding places in independent schools, against about 8,500 in maintained schools. (And I should be grateful for an authoritative figure from the Minister, because mine may be out of date.) More than 32,000 British families working overseas in industry, the armed services and the diplomatic service send their children back to board in English schools. There are other categories of boarders, such as those whose family circumstances necessitate boarding because of home conditions—I refer to frequent movers, one-parent families, orphans, maladjusted children, and so on. The local authorities pay tor these places.
There were about 7,500 places for the handicapped but I suspect that because of local education authorities' straitened financial circumstances and the philosophy prevailing of integrating as many children as possible into ordinary schools, these places are being reduced fairly fast. I do not want to be ungracious because the private schools are giving a service to the state in providing necessary boarding places. The cost to LEAs of maintaining their own boarding schools would be even greater; no one authority needs a boarding school. To make the exercise economically possible, there would have to be co-operation between authorities, and that is not always easy to organise. A boarding hostel alongside a state day school is a possibility, and I believe that that is being done in some cases.
A word about the curriculum. The curriculum is where one would expect there to be experiment and innovation in the independent sector because of the size of classes and other advantages they have. The Southampton maths project—the SMP—got going in four major independent schools, but it was quickly taken up by the state schools, which played their part in its development. I believe that the same is true of Nuffield Science. But both were 25 years ago. I have recently been reading the HMI report, Classics in Independent Schools, which was published this year. Thirty-three schools were visited. The chapter on curricular planning is not particularly complimentary; I will quote one paragraph:
"HMI looked especially for signs that the classics teachers had taken an interest in recent thinking about the curriculum and the proposals for examination reform especially at 16 plus. Of these two areas, rather more knowledge was evinced about the latter, but even here only a small handful of schools was well-informed. No classics department showed any sign of awareness of the curriculum
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documents recently published, including the statement about classics in the publication Curriculum 11–16".
I found that rather surprising because that might have been an area in which they were experimenting.
The innovations and experiments now to be found in the Micro-Electronics Programme—the MEP—in maintained schools are considerable. A comprehensive school in Cambridge where I was a governor until fairly recently has pioneered some work with software for computer education. This started because of the interests of two particular teachers. They have created programs which can be sold. The MEP have bought some and an independent company has now been set up—the sort of enterprise the Government are constantly asking for. Two primary teachers from Cambridgeshire schools are on the national Primary Software Committee because of the work they have started in their own schools, and I am sure that these two examples are indicative of what is going on in many of our state schools.
Community service was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Gainford. The Independent Schools Information Service pamphlet, under the heading "Contribution to Education—Pioneering" says that community service, physical fitness, self-reliance and Outward Bound schools were introduced into the English education system by Kurt Hahn at Gordonstoun—and the noble Lord referred to this. All credit to Kurt Hahn—but I would venture to query the monopoly of Gordonstoun in this respect. I should like to remind your Lordships of Henry Morris, who pioneered the village college and the whole philosophy of the community school and community involvement some 60 years ago. The whole of the local population was to be welcomed to activities within the colleges, and adult tutors were there to go out to the other villages to involve them in new interests. What started in rural areas has spread to urban areas, and the community school or college—including the community primary school—is now to be found in every LEA area; and most successful they are, too.
What is very clear from the ISIS pamphlet I have mentioned is that the private or independent schools (as they now prefer to call themselves, because it gives the right flavour of self-help) are onto a big promotion job. Tim Devlin, director of national ISIS, has put heart and soul into the business. Obviously there are not only fears of loss of charitable status, and so on, but also of loss of numbers because of the decline in the birth rate. In 1980 there were 731,800 13-year-olds. In 1984 there are 706,600. In 1991 there will be only 520,200. So there is some cause for anxiety. Fees at these schools are high and have gone up by about twice the rate of inflation. There is now a fighting fund into which at least £170,000 flowed last year. There are 155 action groups across the country raising money and which propagandise on behalf of private schooling. The 28,000 ISIS members are asked to recruit one new member each (raising another £140,000 in subscriptions) and to spread the facts in favour of independent schools widely and positively.
Tim Devlin, in a carefully calculated article in the TES last August, admitted:
"Not all independent schools money comes from just fees. Some comes from the community (that is, the ratepayer) through rates relief and some from the general public (that is. the taxpayer)

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through tax relief. Legally the schools' claim to these fiscal benefits is based on education as a charitable purpose. Morally, in years to come, with the pressure on the public purse becoming even greater, I am not so sure. Some independent schools do a tremendous amount to meet boarding need, provide choirs for cathedrals, maintain ancient buildings and justify their charitable status in other ways. Others probably do not. Within the next 10 years, independent schools",
he went on,
"would be wise to devise some machinery by which each school individually can earn and justify any funds it receives from the public purse. It would be a small price to pay for a place in the mainstream of education and for immunity from party political attack."
I repeat, "would be wise to devise some machinery". Well, some schools are paying heed to this advice and devising their machinery. Eton has offered a 10-day course this summer to 120 Oxbridge candidates from maintained schools. Eton felt that maintained schools "had been having a rough time", the headmaster said, and they wanted to help in a way that the schools would find acceptable. Applications have flooded in, which is not surprising. Many have had to be turned away. No doubt most of them will enjoy the experience and learn from it, and I hope that we shall hear the result of the experiment, but to me it smacks just a little of the paternalistic.
The Quakers, too, are having a bit of a crisis of conscience:
"We do not want to provide a haven, a privilege for wealthy parents",
said Mr. McKee, headmaster of Ackworth School, a Quaker-run boarding school. He wanted the nine Quaker schools to form a unit under central Government to fill the unmet need for boarding schools and particularly to help the disadvantaged who had to be away from home. I would not wish to query the liberal motives of the Quakers, their traditional care for the individual and their service to the community, but it is significant of the trend of the independent schools to look outward, whether for altruistic or for other reasons. I have mentioned two possible schemes and I am sure there are many others. There is certainly room for co-operation over boarding provision.
Of one thing there can be no doubt. The Government's policy is increasingly to support and to subsidise the independent schools. There was a very revealing speech given at the end of 1982 by Mr. Leon Brittan when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It was a speech given to Carmel College. he said:
"The independent sector of education is so diverse and flourishing that it has all the characteristics which we would expect of a well-functioning market. The sadness is that the private sector is all too regrettably in practice the only area of education where consumer choice predominates."
I wonder whether he has talked to Sir Keith about the great opportunities that the 1981 Act has given for parental choice which we hear of so continually. I now continue with Mr. Brittan. He goes on:
"But even with charitable status and assisted places the indepen-dent schools are at present bound to remain to some degree socially and intellectually exclusive. That is why we are considering an education voucher scheme, under which almost all parents would be able to send their children with Government assistance to private schools."
"Almost all" your Lordships will note. What thoughts has he for the rest? For the schools the state now
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provides for 94 per cent. of its children? Anyway, thank goodness the voucher system seems to have vanished in a puff of smoke—we hope for good. Of course, the independent schools will remain, as Leon Brittan said, socially and intellectually exclusive and, therefore, divisive. He went on—it is hard to believe, but he did—
"Private education is the last bastion against totalitarianism and while even 6 per cent. of British schooling is private, somewhere the customer is king and so the rest of us are less likely to be slaves. But our task, as a society, must be to go further and to create conditions which do not just permit independent education to survive, but rather encourage it to prosper."
So the Tory philosophy is quite clear. We know what they believe in.
If the independent schools are to remain, as the Tories most certainly intend they should, it can be argued that they should be truly independent. Charitable status, tax relief, rate relief, special covenants, and insurance schemes are all hidden subsidies and should go. Those who praise the achievements of the private sector ought to make quite clear what advantages they have that the maintained sector does not: advantages that make their achievements so much easier to attain. The classes are smaller (the average in prep schools is 14); the pupil/teacher ratio is much better; there is more generous pay for teachers. If pupils are disruptive or difficult they can be expelled and the state schools are obliged by law to take them in. So it is a much easier job that those teachers have than do their counterparts in the state system. There is another aspect. Most independent schools have a national catchment area and that makes a difference, too.
If our schools had the resources they need, which I am sure many of those working in and for the education service, whether teachers, parents, officers or education committee members would like them to have, if the schools had the teachers, the ancillary staff, the equipment and the books, they could do just as successful a job as the most prestigious of the independent schools. What we ask this Government, who at times seem so half-hearted in their commitment to the schools that 94 per cent. of our children attend, is to show their belief in, and some enthusiasm for, the service and really to invest in education. That is the best hope for the country, too.
6.27 p.m.
Lord Beaumont of Whitley: My Lords, I should like to congratulate my noble kinsman on having initiated this debate. I must confess that when it first came forward my reaction was almost the same as that of the noble Baroness, Lady David—not that I did not believe my eyes, but when I saw that we were invited to discuss the assistance given by independent schools to state schools in Britain I thought that it would be a very short debate. Indeed, so it is proving. I think that is a pity because there are a number of good reasons why we should welcome as much interplay as possible between the two sectors.
It is significant that in the two speeches we have had so far we have had only two specific instances of where this has happened; where this help from independent schools for state schools has occurred. In my speech your Lordships will get only one instance, which leaves

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only a couple of speeches in which to get the flood of information which we would like to have about any co-operation there is between the two sectors of schooling.
I should like to start, very briefly and succinctly, by stating my party's position on the whole question of independent schools. We are in the classic position, particularly of a small party which has not been in power for a long time, that we would not start from here. We are in a situation where the independent schools are a bigger sector here than they are anywhere else. I know that ISIS has all sorts of information which proves that that is not so but, in fact, in other countries the situation is very different. The combination which we have of a highly divisive class-based education system is unique to this country, and that is very sad. Very many of these schools, taken individually, are good schools. But it seems to me that the sector as a whole has nothing but a divisive and sad effect on British society, and it has had for a considerable time.
The golden opportunity to do something about that came with the reports of the Public Schools Commission. The Newsom Report was good and informative. Mr. John Pardoe and myself, representing the Liberal Party, produced a pamphlet suggesting a method of funding the reforms. Sir John Newsom commended it as being the most sensible comment which had been produced on the report. Unfortunately, as the noble Baroness said, nothing happened. Unfortunate it was that it was the noble Baroness's party that was largely to blame. It was in power at the time and did not choose to take up the matter, quite clearly because there was no agreement within the party.
Within that party there are intense differences on matters of this kind; it found it difficult to get everyone to agree whether independent schools should be done away with or reformed. We believed that they should have been reformed. A golden chance was missed. Later on, the situation was worsened by the abolition of the direct grant schools which, however logical, destroyed a vital link between the independent and state sectors. What we must do from here surely is to welcome any co-operation there can possibly be between the two sectors. Our regret must be that there is so little. As I have already mentioned, this debate is an example of that. The next Left-wing Government of any kind must act on this matter. We all ought to be as sympathetic as possible to any positive proposals, and to occasions like this one, which has been provided by my noble kinsman, to discuss this matter.
We have already heard a couple of examples of help given by the independent schools to the state school system. I have also been going out and trying to find examples. Again, I suspect like other noble Lords, I find that they are few and far between. I came across one famous example. One of the interesting things about this field is that there are famous examples, and that in itself points out the poverty of the field. You ask people and the same two or three examples of co-operation between schools turn up every time.
I was talking this time to someone who had been chairman of the education committee in the area which takes in Dauntseys and Lavington, which is one
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of the famous co-operations, where a sharing of subjects had led to the wide use of the sixth form of the independent school by the local state school. Unfortunately, over recent years that has been slightly flagging, partly I think because the independent school has been doing rather better than it was at the time the arrangement was undertaken. This is one of our problems. Independent schools tend to turn their minds to these matters only when there is something that they need to get out of it. That is human nature and I am not blaming them, but I think that it accounts for the paucity in the past. It also possibly gives us a little hope for the future.
The noble Baroness, Lady David, spoke of the forecasts for the number of pupils coming into the independent sector schools. The question of co-education in independent schools was given a tremendous fillip when the schools realised that if they brought girls in at their sixth form they could fill up the sixth forms, which were getting rather depleted, partly because they needed more numbers, as sixth forms do, or they needed to have a much bigger school below, or because they were losing a large number of pupils to the state system at that level. A lot of people now do not want to spend their time between the ages of 16 and 18 in the rather strict discipline of an old-fashioned single-sex boarding school, but are very happy to move where there are sixth form colleges and other such state institutions. As a result of that there was this immense boom in co-education at sixth form level in the independent sector.
If we take a lesson from that, I think that we might be able to look forward to a time when the independent schools will be looking to the need to bring more pupils into their sixth form. If their numbers are going down anyway, if the present trend against staying on in boarding schools at that stage increases, and if there is a possibility of bringing in pupils and turning the sixth form of the independent school into something like a sixth form college and it being paid for by the local authorities on a capitation basis, there is a real chance of much greater co-operation in the future. Whatever our ideological attitudes, I do not see that that can be anything but a great advantage to the children concerned, to both systems and to the education of this country as a whole.
In the meantime, I think that we should encourage as much interplay as possible. In particular one of the good things which might be encouraged, and which has been mentioned by one or two of my informants, is the possibility of staff exchanges. There are various drawbacks and obstacles to this; nevertheless it is something which I think a great many staff in both sectors would welcome. I have not given the noble Baroness. Lady Young, any notice of this question, but if she can say whether the Government or the Department of Education can in any way encourage this, it would be a step forward.
My party is deeply disturbed about the divisive effect of the large independent school system in this country, but we welcome every effort which is made to try to narrow the gap between the two sectors and which will contribute towards some kind of solution in the future. Unfortunately, a solution looks a very long way away and it is difficult to envisage. But in the meantime we must do the best we can and be very

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thankful that there are men and women of good will working in both sectors of education who can help to bring about a rapprochement.
6.38 p.m.
Lord Taylor of Blackburn: My Lords, like the other speakers, I welcome the debate; but when I put down my name I had no idea what would be said or how the debate would proceed. I speak with a little background knowledge. I served on the Public Schools Commission under Professor Donaldson and not Professor Newsom—let me make that quite clear. I later had the privilege of being the chairman of the committee that made the recommendations regarding the management and government of schools. I was also president of the Association of Education Committees. I have had some experience of visiting both public and state schools.
During the report stage of the Public Schools Commission, we visited some 70 to 80 public schools throughout England and Wales. During the time of the Taylor Committee on governors and managers we visited some 60 local authorities and saw what was going on in the state system with the partnership there. Therefore we could see many things that were taking place. The noble Lord, in his opening speech, referred to the way in which the independent school was sharing its resources with the state schools; but the state schools have been sharing their resources for many, many years. This has been a partnership in many areas, whereby there has been full co-operation and long may this co-operation continue.
In the same way that the local education authorities have been taking up places in boarding schools with those children whose parents are in Her Majesty's forces, are missionaries overseas, or are people who, for one reason or another, require to take employment away from this country.
I must make a point of this: it sounded to me as though it was felt that the state sector had never been doing much regarding religious education. But may I make it absolutely clear that one of the outstanding requirements in the 1944 Education Act—in fact the only statutory main requirement in the 1944 Act—on the curriculum is regarding the teaching of religious instruction, and my noble friend ought to be aware of this.
Referring to boarding school education, may I say that 1 am sure that many of these special schools which deal with those children who have various deformities or defects of one kind or another would not be able to carry on without the aid of local authorities which send children with those needs to the special schools. Therefore there is a partnership in that way.
I also had the privilege of being a founder member with Lord Louis Mountbatten and Sir George Shuster of the Atlantic College in Llantwit Major. It was my responsibility to encourage local authorities to provide scholarships for the school at that time. This was a partnership as well. So please remember, my Lords, that the partnership is two ways: the state gives as much, if not more, to the independent schools. I am sure that it is the wish of many members on this side of the House to retain the independent schools.
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providing they are truly independent. The only thing that we on this side of the House want is to make sure that the independent schools rise to the level of the state schools in this country.
6.43 p.m.
Baroness Young: My Lords, the House must be grateful to my noble friend Lord Gainford for raising this important subject. It concerns the very nature of the education system that we have in this country. Tonight I should like to reflect on that theme and say something about education in England and Wales. I will not speak about Scotland. It is not that many of the principles do not apply there but because, as many noble Lords know very well, separate legislation applies in Scotland.
The Motion we have been addressing, if my noble friend will permit me to say so, presupposes an essential division between the maintained and the independent sectors. I think all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate so far have drawn attention to that fact and most have gone on—as my noble friend did—to talk about bridging that division. This evening, I should like to put it to the House that we do not have two education systems in England and Wales but one, and that is the one enshrined in the Education Act of 1944 for which a most distinguished Member of this House, now sadly no longer with us, must take the credit.
It is one system, with two sectors—the maintained sector and the independent sector. But the maintained sector is not the monolith that some would have us believe. It comprises what in many countries would be regarded as state schools and Church schools. In England and Wales we have the so-called state sector categories of schools which are run by local authorities—the county and maintained special schools—and other categories where a voluntary body, usually a denominational one, has important responsibilities and a measure of control. The main element common to all categories of maintained schools is that the local education authority has the responsibility for the current costs of the school. Our system is unusual too in that direct control of schools is not vested in central government, but devolved—to local authorities and in many respects to the schools themselves, both to their governors and to their teachers. It is not surprising then that on the ground the forms of provision across the country are enormously diverse. There are two-tier systems of schools, three-tier systems and four-tier systems; in the secondary phase there are selective systems and comprehensive ones. There are also special schools catering for a wide range of handicaps and disabilities. The responsiveness of the system to local needs and demands is one of its greatest strengths.
What goes under the umbrella of "maintained provision" caters for 19 out of 20 school children. There are many excellent schools in it, and there are weak ones. Maintained schools differ importantly from independent schools in that they cannot choose their pupils, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady David. They have to take all-comers. They have to make the very best of educating children who sometimes have little inclination to schooling, or whose parents are indifferent to their progress. They

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come in for a lot of criticism if they fail. Their task is anything but easy. Noble Lords will, however, be aware that the thrust of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State's policies and initiatives recently has been to raise the standards of attainment of pupils in the maintained sector, through the development of broadly agreed objectives for the curriculum, through an improved system of examinations at 16-plus and through an enhancement of teaching quality. The aim of these policies is of course relevant also to the independent sector and their success, for example in relation to the 16-plus examinations, will benefit the independent sector, too.
The independent sector offers quite as much diversity, (though it is much smaller) as the maintained sector. In many ways it complements it. There are some who think only of the famous public schools when they hear of independent schools. These schools are deservedly famous. But they are only a part of the picture. Many of the former direct grant schools are independent, and have strong traditions of close links with their immediate community. There are all manner of specialist independent schools, which it would be difficult, indeed uneconomic, for the maintained sector to provide. I am thinking here of the schools for the gifted—for example, the music and ballet schools, which the Government themselves support through their fee remission scheme. The independent sector has also made a speciality in other forms of provision. Perhaps the most striking example is boarding. Independent schools provide the great majority of boarding places in this country. Another example is the schools which cater for various special educational needs. Sometimes such schools are designated as special schools by the Secretary of State and. in return for complying with regulations covering many aspects of their work, derive certain financial and other advantages.
The independent sector performs one function which is particularly important in an open society. It provides schools for those minority groups who have an outlook on life, or an educational philosophy, which is not shared by many others. Under this heading come also those schools which are consciously experimental. Amid this diversity, there is quite as wide a range of standards—if not a wider one—as that in the maintained sector. Some of our independent schools stand as beacons of excellence, and the country would be much poorer without them. Some, without being outstanding, are doing good work. Some others, if we are frank, are indifferent.
It is sometimes forgotten that the 1944 Act gave the Secretary of State direct statutory responsibilities towards the independent schools. He has a duty to take action against those who fall below minimum standards, and at a time when his policies are directed towards raising standards across the board, the independent schools are not overlooked. Let me here dispose of one myth that independent schools are no longer inspected by Her Majesty's inspectors. They most certainly are, and quite a number of reports on independent school inspections have been published in the 15 months since the Secretary of State decided to make all HMI reports available to the public. Some excellent independent schools have been reported on, and there is much in those reports which I have no
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doubt is of wide relevance. Equally, some reports have been published on poor schools, and in pursuance both of his statutory duties and his commitment to raise standards, the Secretary of State has not hesitated to take action against them.
Perhaps noble Lords will be beginning to think that there is more in common between the independent and maintained sectors than is often realised. I have cited the sheer diversity in both sectors—in each case the result of freedom from central control—but I have made it clear that this freedom is constrained by the necessity to achieve acceptable standards. Both sectors offer many examples of excellence for all to follow.
Let me continue this notion of commonality. The independent and maintained sectors are already, to a considerable extent, interdependent. Seen from the point of view of an individual child making his or her way up through school, there is not much of a gulf. Pupil movement between the sectors is quite common. For example, some children attend a primary school and move into an independent school thereafter. Quite a few pupils from the independent sector move into the maintained sector for their sixth form studies; this, too, was a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady David. Local education authorities frequently place children previously educated in a maintained school in an independent school on educational grounds; that is, because the child requires a boarding education, or has special educational needs.
One systematic form of movement from the maintained to the independent sector is provided by the assisted places scheme. I was interested to hear the noble Lord. Lord Beaumont, regret the ending of the direct grant school system; for of course the assisted places scheme was introduced in many respects to replace that system. The Government believe that this scheme is proving its educational value in widening the choice available to parents of bright children, and is doing so without the detriment to the maintained sector that opponents of the scheme were all too ready to predict.
The noble Baroness, Lady David, asked a number of questions about the assisted places scheme, but I think that these were fully answered by my noble friend Lord Swinton in the debate on the regulations that was taken last February. The noble Baroness also asked about the subsidies to independent schools. There are of course various forms of public subsidy to independent schools. The value of the subsidies is extremely hard to calculate, but it is probably of the order of £100 million to £200 million. However, for comparison I would point out that the cost of bringing all independent school pupils into the maintained sector could be anything up to £500 million, depending on the availability of spare capacity.
I now turn to the teachers. Where were they trained?—in all probability in an establishment run with public funds. Where did they do their teaching practice?—possibily in a maintained school, possibly in an independent one. Where did they gain their first job?—again, possibly in either sector. Where do they get their in-service training? The great majority of courses are run out of public funds. Teachers in independent schools often have access to the resources offered by local authority-run teachers' centres,

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libraries and museums. The majority of them are in the same superannuation scheme as maintained school teachers. Several teacher associations draw members from both the maintained and the independent sector. There are often close links—particularly at local level—between the professional associations. 1 would particularly cite here the example of the Secondary Heads Association and the Headmasters' Conference.
The noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, asked whether the Government could do anything to encourage staff exchanges. This is a difficult question to answer because the fact is that encouraging staff exchanges is not a matter for which governments can legislate. The initiative must come at local level.
As regards the curriculum and examinations, much work on curriculum development has been a joint effort on the part of representtives of both sectors. The independent schools made an important contribution, for example, to the Nuffield projects, to the work of the Assessment of Performance Unit; and today there is close co-operation in the development of microelectronics education. Here I may say that schools in both sectors are benefiting from central Government grants to buy microcomputers. Moreover, the two sectors use the same public examination systems; and each has a stake in, and has much to contribute to, the current developments on this front.
Finally, in his opening remarks my noble friend Lord Gainford referred to a number of examples of initiatives at local level on the part of individual independent schools to widen what is on offer to the maintained school pupils. He also paid tribute to initiatives on the part of the maintained schools, and, indeed, he referred to this as a two-way system—something with which I agree. 1 applaud both sets of initiatives.
One major development in recent years has been the opening up of maintained school facilities— workshops, sports halls, theatres, and so on—for the wider use of the community. This is admirable, particularly so when resources are scarce. I also understand that maintained schools and independent schools alike increasingly open their doors to pupils from other schools who wish to pursue subjects not timetabled at their own schools. This again makes excellent economic sense and can only foster a spirit of co-operation between the two systems. Furthermore, schools frequently work together in the arts—for example, in joint orchestras—and in sport.
All of this is evidence that the two sectors—if we must so describe them—do work together. Those who seek to drive a wedge between them have underestimated the determination of the schools themselves to work for what is best for the pupils.
Lord Gainford: My Lords, by your leave, I should like to say that I am very grateful to noble Lords and noble Baronesses for taking part in this short debate. My noble kinsman Lord Beaumont said it was a pity that it should be a short debate, but I think that it has been all the better that the information has come forward very concisely, and it has been most valuable. Some years ago I heard a theory that if you want to
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learn a subject, write a book about it. I would make an amendment to that and say: if you want to learn a subject, initiate a debate in your Lordships' House. I have learned much in the last hour. I am most grateful for the support and contributions of noble Lords to this debate. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Child Abduction Bill
Brought from the Commons, read a first time; and to be printed.

Prayer Book Protection Bill [H.L.]
6.58 p.m.
Lord Sudeley: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. In revising this Bill of 1981 I should like to begin by mentioning that several noble Lords have written to me very much regretting that they cannot be present this evening; but at the same time they are very much behind my intention in the Bill. They are the noble Lords, Lord Dacre and Lord Vaizey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox.
At the outset I should also like to thank the most reverend Primate the Archbiship of Canterbury for being present this evening. I also wish to thank the Archbishop most warmly for his public statement on the Prayer Book in the Daily Telegraph on 23rd February. The statement has been described as generous and personal. It says that the Prayer Book should be properly taught in theological colleges, and it seek to help over the position of the Prayer Book at parish level.
Hitherto, it has been difficult for the laity to disagree with the incumbent who prefers the new services. Knowing this, the Archbishop has written that it is the responsibility of all Church people—clergy, as well as laity—who love the Prayer Book to show boldness with fervent zeal. The Archbishop has done his very best to see that the wishes of the laity who prefer the Prayer Book at parish level should be untrammelled. I should also like to thank the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of York for their recent commitments towards the Prayer Book. The Bishop of London's commitment was clear in his review of a book of essays on the present state of the Church of England entitled When will Ye be Wise? in the Daily Telegraph earlier this year. In his new book Church and Nation in a Secular Age, the Archbishop of York has given some of his reasons for his attachment to the old rites. The Archbishop of York has declared that the Alternative Service Book is full of mistakes, banalities and imperfections. The Archbishop of York has said that the new language of the Lord's Prayer is damagingly divisive as well as linguistically inept. The Archbishop said that much good would be done if this failure was to be publicly admitted and churches encouraged to revert to the exclusive use of the traditional version.
With these signals of goodwill from the highest level in the Church and especially from the Archbishop of 3Canterbury, why should I be seeking to revive the Bill

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of 1981 this evening? I think possibly that the assistance of Parliament is necessary to secure a better place for the Prayer Book in the Church of England because there is the question of what the Archbishop of Canterbury and his episcopate together can do to secure a better deal for the Prayer Book from the Synod. The Archbishop of Canterbury was largely responsible for the debate in the Synod at the end of February when the House of Bishops appealed for the re-authorisation of Series 1, couched in Prayer Book language and form. But the Synod then only agreed to further discussion of this issue and the vote in the House of Laity was less than the two-thirds that would be required if the re-authorisation is to be agreed to in its final form.
There is secondly the question of what the bishops as a whole have been unwilling to do. In consequence of the success of this Bill in 1981 the bishops passed a series of resolutions to improve the status of the Prayer Book in the Church of England stating in particular that it should be further taught and used in theological colleges and that the adequate use of the Prayer Book at parish level should be discussed at bishops' councils. I am afraid, however, that the bishops have hardly troubled to implement their own recommendations.
To consider first the theological colleges, which many would regard as the key to the whole issue, letters went out to their principals from the president of the Prayer Book Society, Sir John Colville, and the replies show that the position has hardly changed since the bishops passed their resolutions. Out of a total of about 14 theological colleges, it is true that three or four use the Prayer Book for worship for about a third of the time, but these are the same group as did so before the bishops made their resolutions. Rite B in the Alternative Service Book, which can be relatively traditional in language largely along the lines of Series 2, is almost completely neglected and in some colleges a total monopoly has been established for the more modern Rite A. I have circulated my supporters in the House with the exact details of one theological college after another but rather than weary the House with that information, I thought that I would refer to the point of view that lies behind the statistics.
Is investigation required of whether candidates seeking ordination are turned down because they prefer the Prayer Book? This may be suggested when some colleges justify their present practice on the grounds that ordinands do not want services other than the modern Rite A. Two colleges regard the Prayer Book as out of date. Another college declared that the highly structured service of the Prayer Book in old English with little participation was difficult to get used to. Another college said that if the young clergy preferred the new service, the college itself was not to blame. Consideration had to be given to the services that the ordinands knew before their training and would find after their training in the parishes that they served. According to the circulated comments on the liturgy of a further theological college, the parliamentary supporters of the Bill in 1981 showed little learning, knowledge or good sense and theological colleges should not for a moment permit themselves to be made into the whipping boy for the troubles of parliamentarians.
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To come next to the discussion of the adequate use of the Prayer Book at parish level, letters from Sir John Colville to the bishops and the replies were analysed by Dr. Derek Brewer, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. To put the matter into a few sentences, about five of the replies were helpful. As to the other replies, they showed that the bishops were not going to implement their own recommendations. About half of the bishops did not reply to Sir John Colville's letter, and as for the rest, the replies were defensive or evasive and some said that no action should be taken.
Let me describe this in more detail. First, as to the five bishops who were favourable, three had good suggestions. One bishop said that a short manual should be produced for guidance on how the Prayer Book should be used in conformity with modern practice and in conformity with the law. Another bishop said that pressure should be put on the Secretary of State for Education to include study of the Prayer Book in the syllabus of religious education. Another bishop said that at his council it was accepted that the clergy may have no idea how to celebrate a Prayer Book service of Holy Communion. This bishop added that at a meeting of junior clergy and training incumbents he would express the hope that recently ordained clergy would have the opportunity to celebrate a Prayer Book service of Holy Communion from time to time.
I come now to the majority of the bishops' replies and summarise their chief points. According to the minutes of a debate of one bishop's council, it was said that use of the Prayer Book in theological colleges would not necessarily do the students any good. One bishop said that to use the Prayer Book for early service or in the week was not to marginalise it. Five bishops said that the Alternative Service Book was not imposed by clergy who were handling the problem with tact. Two bishops said that no action should be taken. Two bishops said that the Prayer Book was out of date, one saying it was wrong to think of the Prayer Book as a prime source of spirituality to a large section of the Church and the other that the Church had no responsibility for sincerely religious people who felt edged out by the changing pattern of Christian life. Finally, two bishops said that the Prayer Book was theologically inadequate, one saying that the Alterna-tive Service Book had important theological differences and the other that the Prayer Book failed entirely to celebrate the Resurrection.
Much necessary work is needed to improve the teaching and use of the Prayer Book in theological colleges and to enable the laity who so wish to have the Prayer Book at parish level. I urge that what the bishops have not done in these directions might be assisted by a Select Committee that can compel the production of documents and the presence of witnesses, and the proceedings of which would be published. Such a Select Committee would go far to bring out into the open both the position of the theological colleges and how at parish level—I shall be speaking further on this theme later—the new services have been foisted on a reluctant laity.
Such a Select Committee could examine the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1974 over what were his intentions with regard to the Prayer Book when the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure

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was accepted that year by Parliament. The then Archbishop of Canterbury assured the House that the Prayer Book would continue to hold a secure place in the Church of England. It was, I think, because that asssurance was broken that this Bill succeeded in 1981. The area covered by many Select Committees may roughly be described as science and technology and business in Brussels. A Select Committee on the Prayer Book would be most unusual and I suspect that the Government may say that a Select Committee would be inappropriate both because of the heavy demands already made by Select Committees on the time of the parliamentary clerks and also because of the constitutional impropriety—I shall be touching further upon this later—of initiating the Bill in Parliament when all legislation on Church matters should come from the Synod. But according to my understanding of the Clerk of the Parliaments and the Public Bill Office, the test of whether there will be a Select Committee is the strength of feeling in the House.
So far, I have not touched on the third of the resolutions made by the Bishops in consequence of the success of the Bill in 1981, that a new addition of the pamphlet, Worship and Doctrine—A Guide for Parishes, giving guidelines to the laity over the forms of service which should be used, ought to be more widely distributed than previous editions.
In his correspondance with the Secretary-General of the Synod, a Member of another place called attention to how the new edition is biased against the Prayer Book, and hopefully a side result of this debate will be yet a further edition in which the phrasing of the pamphlet will be fairer. The present new edition states that, while legally decisions about options are for the incumbent, he may wish to take account of the view of the parochial church council or the congregation. Why here is there no mention of the right of the laity on the parochial church council to insist on the Prayer Book, and why is there no mention in the new pamphlet of consultation between the incumbent and the parochial church council about the options to be used within any given rite. As it is, the incumbent may agree to use Rite B with options which bear little or no resemblance to the Prayer Book, while the congregation may not even know about the options which exist in the style of the Prayer Book itself.
The revision of the pamphlet on the lines that I have suggested and its fuller distribution might have some impact, and yet the same end could be achieved in other ways. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury fell silent when I suggested to him that he should accede to the suggestion of the chairman of the House of Laity in the Synod that the adequate use of the Prayer Book at parish level might be restored if bishops were to lean on their clergy. Then, if nothing were to come of this recommendation, could use not now be made of a pastoral letter? Given that it was a pastoral letter which propagated the new services, could not a further pastoral letter be read out from pulpits throughout the land setting out exactly what the rights of the laity are over the Prayer Book if they join their parochial church council?
Here, as so often in politics, issues previously discussed repeat themselves and, in anticipation of
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familiar arguments. I shall try here and there to provide familiar replies with a touch of difference. In 1918 there was adumbrated by the Government the argument about the constitutional impropriety of initiating the battle of the Bill in Parliament instead of allowing the Bill to come to Parliament from the Synod. A wedge was driven through that argument through the acceptance of this Bill in 1981 by both Houses of Parliament. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that the argument will appear all over again today.
I believe that I can take some of the weight out of that argument if I stress that it is not the object of this Bill to appear on the statute book. We all know that that could never happen. In setting up a Select Committee, the aim of the Bill is merely to collect a valuable body of evidence about the Church. Furthermore—and I think that this point needs to be hammered a little—as at present constituted, the House of Laity in the Synod, which is probably unlikely to accept Series 1. is not a proper democratic body for the voice of the laity in the Church of England, owing to the indirect basis of its electoral representation.
The parish sends a representative to the Deanery Synod; it is only the Deanery Synod which sends a representative to the General Synod. So the man in the pew seldom knows who his representative is in the General Synod. Possibly this is what the new right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham had in mind when he declared recently on the BBC programme "Sunday" that the Synod was highly unrepresentative. Certainly in his new book, Church and Nation in a Secular Age, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York was very critical of the present electoral basis of the House of Laity in the Synod.
The point is also likely to be made in this debate that further legislation is not the recipe for the folly of the laity preferring the Prayer Book, who already have the machinery they need in the form of their rights on parochial church councils. Certainly it is an object of this debate to alert the laity to their rights and encourage their exercise. Yet any failure here of the laity so far is not the full explanation of the disappearance of the Prayer Book over large tracts of the land when Professor David Martin's Gallup Poll has shown that most of the laity would prefer to have it. An examination is needed by a Select Committee as to why and how the existing machinery has gone wrong.
Parochial church councils were brought into being and have worked better to cope with administrative problems than to contend with the vicar over questions of liturgy. The correspondence in the Daily Telegraph following the Archbishop's statement shows how the clergy have taken advantage of that weakness. One letter says that there are parishes which have welcomed the freshness of the Alternative Service Book services only to be surprised and distressed to find that the incumbent was subsequently determined to deny them the 1662 rite. In one case this happened despite two resolutions by the parochial church council asking for the occasional use of the 1662 rite.
Then a further letter from the chairman of the Prayer Book Society drew attention to the vicar's notes in a parish magazine which stated that it was the

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bishop's wish that all churches in his diocese should use the Alternative Service Book. The chairman of the Prayer Book Society said that if this was not a three-line Whip on parochial church councils to adopt the Alternative Service Book, then he did not know what a three-line Whip was.
Parochial church councils may not function as they should because they can consist of the packed men of the vicar. On this let me quote a complaint from overseas. At an AGM in 1983 there was a clear vote that one of the two services held on Sunday mornings should be according to the Prayer Book. Yet the parochial church council overrode the decision that was made by the AGM, and the parish magazine massaged the minutes of the AGM, stating that the Prayer Book was only wanted by a vociferous minority. On a visit the bishop asked that the parishoners should abide by a majority decision to have the new services.
Lastly, the threat may be uttered in this debate that a parliamentary Select Committee on the Prayer Book would put at risk the independence of the Church, which ought to disestablish itself. On this matter let me observe that the independence of the Church is one thing; its immunity from inquiry and debate must be quite another. Furthermore, on previous showings it is difficult to see that the threat of disestablishment in the face of parliamentary activity over the Prayer Book is anything more than a smokescreen. The Secretary-General of the Synod set up the smokescreen when I intimated to him in 1978 my intention to bring before the House my Prayer Book (Ballot of Laity) Bill. Despite my introduction into the House of the Prayer Book (Ballot of Laity) Bill 1978 and the success of the Bill in 1981, the Church is still not disestablished.
In conclusion, let me observe that speeches in favour of the Prayer Book are not unlikely to criticise the language and theology of the new services, and I have made a few notes on this. The disappearance of the poetry of the old language means that the liturgy must lose much of its potency as a living oral tradition. It also means the disappearance of poetic imagery from our worship, with the theological suggestion that Christianity can be rationalised.
Nor is this the only way in which the change of language may introduce a theological shift of meaning, it has been pointed out how, by changing "thou" into "you" in the new services, we slide into giving God orders when we say to God "You take away the sins of the world", or we slide into giving God information about himself when, in the Te Deum, we say to God, "You are God".
As an instance of where, independently of the question of language, the new services tend towards error, we say not that Christ was born incarnate of the Virgin Mary, but that he did so by the power of the Holy Spirit, which allows the believer to suppose that Joseph, fortified by the Holy Spirit, had a part in the fatherhood of Christ. There are no new heresies. They are all old ones, and the tendency complained of here is towards the Arian heresy, which threatened to secularise Christianity in the ancient world as Marxists would secularise it in the world today.
I cannot move this Bill to a Second Reading unless the feeling of the House justifies that. Therefore, may
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I say that I will keep an open mind during the course of the debate in order to try to gain the feeling of the House, and only on that will I make a judgment as to whether to move that the Bill be read a second time. I beg to move.
Moved, that the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Sudeley.)
7.21 p.m.
The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: My Lords, I should like first to thank the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, for the manner and generosity of his speech, not least in the references he has made to recent writings and statements of those of us who sit on this Bench. In responding to the speech of the noble Lord, I want to emphasise four points. First, I want to make it clear that I understand the reasons which have prompted the noble Lord to bring forward this Bill and the genuine anxieties behind it. Secondly. I want to set out what the intentions of the Church of England were in introducing the Alternative Service Book in 1980, and what they were not.
Thirdly, 1 want to explain the steps which the Church has taken since the last debate in this House two years ago to assist the carrying out of these intentions. And, fourthly, I want to state my strong view that to pass this Bill is not the right way forward and could, indeed, damage seriously the delicate fabricate of Church/State relations which I believe that the great majority of those in this House deeply value and wish to see preserved. Indeed, I believe that the passage of the Bill could have the reverse effect to that which the promoters have in mind. Therefore, at the end of my speech, I shall appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, having heard our case, to withdraw his Motion.
First, the reasons behind the Bill. I want to pay the noble Lord the compliment of taking what he says extremely seriously. I am well aware of the deep affection which Cranmer's incomparable language— in the Collects, in the prayers in the communion service, in the offices of morning and evening prayer, to take just some examples—holds for so many of us who were brought up on the Book of Common Prayer.
I know, too, for I use them often for my own devotions, of the majesty of Coverdale's Psalter and the Epistles and Gospels in the Authorised Version which are contained in that book. Some of your Lordships may have read the recent article in the Daily Telegraph in which I said:
"The vigour, the rhythm and even the strangeness of Prayer Book language makes it memorable, and what a person remembers shapes his personality. In today's world, unless we are steeped in the language and the perspectives of faith, then we shall all too easily become assimilated to the assumptions of a passing age whose talk and thought assigns no central place to God. 1 believe that there is no substitute for knowing sacred texts and prayers by heart, and the Prayer Book, and perhaps particularly its Psalter, is a treasury of memorable texts. 'Treasured words', as Iris Murdoch has observed of the Prayer Book, 'encourage, console and save',".
When I said in that article,
"I will do everything in my power to see that the Prayer Book continues to be, in the words of the Pastoral Letter issued by my brother Archbishop and me in 1980. 'a living element in the tradition of the Church' ".
I meant what I stated. It was no idle or passing commitment. Nor does it represent any sort of change

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of mind or improvement. Naturally, I always hope for improvement in myself, but this is an opinion to which I have adhered throughout all this debate.
Why then did the Church of England decide that it needed also an alternative book couched in more contemporary language, and with its passages of Scripture taken from modern translations? I would ask those who dislike the new book to appreciate the situation in which the Church finds itself today—in an increasingly secularised society, ministering to many who have not inherited the practice of Church worship in the way in which so many of us were privileged to do. Many of these are "new Christians"; they include many young people from homes where they have not been fed with the regular diet of prayer and Bible reading which may have nourished us, living on housing estates, in down-town areas of inner cities, or in new suburban sprawls. If the Church was to do its task in this new situation, there was a demand that the word of God should be heard in modern translations and for alternative services to be available in more contemporary language.
This was in no way peculiar to the Church of England: in almost every part of the Anglican Communion, rapidly growing in its totality as one of the most widely distributed Christian families in the world, this process has been going on, and in other Churches too. Roman Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, all have been engaged in similar enterprises and for the same reasons. Most of us have found new insights through the use of modern translations of the Scriptures, and are grateful for many things in the Church of England's new book—most notably for the emphasis on some of the central themes of our faith which have been restored, such as the activity of the Holy Spirit and the joy of the Resurrection.
The intention was not to displace the Book of Common Prayer but to provide an alternative to it. The intention was, as our statements made clear at the time, that both books should continue to be used. Together they provide. I believe, a richness in our Anglican worship. It is this total inheritance which I want to commend and see preserved. I sometimes wonder whether some of those whose vigour in defending the Book of Common Prayer has been so marked could not be a little readier to acknowledge that the Alternative Service Book also has merits—-and already for many new Christians, treasured words and prayers.
Two years ago, when the noble Lord. Lord Sudeley, introduced a Bill rather similar to this (which was given a Second Reading by 28 votes to 17 in the early hours of the morning) the Alternative Service Book was barely a year old. It is hardly surprising that its introduction had engendered a certain euphoria. The General Synod had spent many, many hours debating and revising it, and there was an understandable pride that, after years of worshipping out of pamphlets, the Church of England had this new book available for use both in Church and in the home.
My impression is that in the intervening two years the situation has to some extent been modified. Sales of the Book of Common Prayer continue, and in many parishes there has been some movement back towards
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its use. This is certainly so with morning and evening prayer, where the new services have only partly caught on, and many prefer to sing the Canticles in their traditional form. The old book holds its place strongly in cathedral worship. The older style marriage service (which is the 1928 revision—virtually no one follows the 1662 form of that service) is still much used, as it was by the Prince of Wales and his bride three years ago.
It is with the communion service that the new book has won most acceptance, and this is partly because of the current practice for parish or family communion as the main Sunday service in so many places. Here, the new rite, with its variety and opportunities for more participation by the congregation than is possible with the Book of Common Prayer service, has won genuine popularity, because it seems to answer many people's needs as well as being close to the original shape of the liturgy and the practice of other Churches.
After the debate in this House in 1981, the House of Bishops took stock of the position. After a serious discussion they carried some motions which showed an awareness of the feeling in this House. The first motion—having received reports of the deliberations in both Houses of Parliament on the use of the Book of Common Prayer and having given serious attention to the issues raised—resolved to deal with them as matters of pastoral concern and to discuss liturgical developments and the use of the Book of Common Prayer and the Alternative Service Book with the Bishops' Councils in their respect dioceses. I believe that has been honoured.
The second motion asks the Standing Committee of the General Synod to prepare a fresh edition of the leaflet Worship and Doctrine: A Guide for Parishes and asks that it be given a much wider distribution. I believe that has been honoured. The third motion notes the information given to the General Synod in February 1981 regarding the use of the Book of Common Prayer in theological colleges, and asks that governing bodies and principals pay attention to this matter with a view to securing the use of both the Book of Common Prayer and the Alternative Service Book in teaching and in worship.
In the winter of 1982–83, the House of Bishops asked its members to submit any surveys or other reports prepared since their 1981 debates which could illustrate the position reached. About the same time, Sir John Colville—as president of the Prayer Book Society—wrote to all diocesan bishops and to the principals of theological colleges to elicit similar information. Some replied to his letters: others I understand, feeling that this was a somewhat peremptory demand, did not.
It is difficult to analyse the results which the House of Bishops gathered in any systematic way. The bishops who will speak later in this debate will mention the position in their own dioceses. I believe that the fact that this exercise took place in itself helped to bring home to parishes the intentions of the Church in this matter, which I have referred to. It has greatly helped to ensure that the question of which forms of service should be used has continued—and will continue—to be put on the Church's current agenda.

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On the guide, I must stress that we are dealing here with local decisions. Bishops and the General Synod can advise but they cannot dictate. The rules setting out how decisions on these matters should be taken in each parish are set out very clearly in the guide. The position of the parochial church council is fully safeguarded. Here are two extracts:
"In taking their decision, the incumbent and the parochial church council need to remember that they have to bear in mind the interests and the needs of the parish as a whole. They should give particular attention to the views and needs of those who come to church regularly, and if there are differences of view they should seek wherever possible to find a solution that meets the widest range of needs which is possible and practicable. They should also bear in mind those who come to church occasionally, e.g. at major festivals."
"There is a need for sympathetic understanding and generosity in the taking of decisions. If there is a minority of any size within a parish the attempt should be made to cater for it. There is special need for generosity in respect of Sunday worship. This may mean the adoption of a mixed pattern of services. It may mean more gradual change than some would like, or some change where the majority would prefer none. Where the incumbent and parochial church council are aware of unhappiness amongst some parishioners in respect of the pattern of worship which is being adopted it will generally be found to be helpful to set a term to any agreement which they make, so that there can be the assurance of review and further discussion."
Where, unhappily, an incumbent and his church council cannot reach agreement on this matter, the guide sets out clearly that the 1662 forms of service must be used, subject to the proviso that, if in the past four years another form has been used for at least two years, then the church council may require that that form should be used. The rights of the laity are well enshrined in these procedures.
On the question of the theological colleges, the bishops have gone further than their resolution stated. Through their inspectors they now require that the Book of Common Prayer should remain in use both in teaching and in worship. I believe it is right, however, that in preparing a man for the ministry he must be trained in the use of all forms of service for which congregations have the right to ask. We are responsible for the inspections of theological colleges.
There has been one other recent development to which the noble Lord referred. One of the difficulties in discussion on the use of the Prayer Book is to establish whether it is the 1662 text which some people want or the form of that text—with certain additions and omissions—that has been frequently used since 1928. When people ask for the Prayer Book communion service it is often this service that they want in the traditional language. It is technically known in Church circles by the uninspiring title: Series 1.
This service was authorised until 1980 when, with the introduction of the Alternative Service Book, the authority to use it was withdrawn. With my encouragement the bishops recently decided to ask the General Synod to re-authorise this service, and the Series 1 baptism service too. The matter was debated in February, when it was agreed that the necessary legislation should be introduced. It will require a two-thirds majority in each of the three Houses of the Synod and, rather exceptionally perhaps, the House of Laity passed the motion in February by rather less than this. I hope, however, that the necessary
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legislation will in due course be passed. I mention this matter because it shows the concern of the bishops that the Prayer Book communion service, as it was in general use, shall once more be properly available to the Church.
Finally, let me say a word about the situation which could be precipitated if Lord Sudeley's Bill became law. I believe that the overriding objection to this Bill is constitutional. I do not want to go into this in detail, and of course I accept that Parliament is sovereign and can, if it thinks fit, still legislate for the Church of England. But the fact is that, since the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 (the last occasion on which Parliament legislated for the Church without the Church's consent) the tradition has been maintained that it does not do so. In 1919 this position was formalised by the Church Assembly (Powers) Act, and in 1974 the process was completed by the passing of the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure. This has been a happy development in Church/State relations and that is a state of affairs which I profoundly hope will continue. I fear gravely for the results on the delicate balance of Church/State relations if this Bill were to be passed.
As your Lordships know, there are some in the Church who would like disturbed the arrangements which Parliament has seen fit to pass, which enable the Church of England to operate what is really a form of delegated legislation. They would like to see the ties between Church and State sundered. They are aware that, if the clock seemed to be turning back in the Church of England, they would have much support from the Anglican Communion engaged in international conversations with the Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches. I believe, however, that the majority within the Church of England wants to preserve these ties. And this, interestingly, appears to be the view of the leaders of the other Churches of this land. It is a view to which in the present situation I hold very firmly.
I have therefore to say, with all the persuasion that I can command, that this Bill is not the way to deal with these matters. I earnestly ask this House not to go down that road. I am prepared to give the House my assurance that it is the intention of the bishops to keep before the Church the fact that the Alternative Service Book is, as its name indicates, an alternative service book. The proper place in which these matters should be resolved is parish by parish by the elected representatives of the lay people and their incumbent. The safeguards against enthusiasm—and this can be on the part of the clergy or the laity, and can militate on behalf of either book—exist. It is for the laity to use them, not for Parliament to legislate in the way in which this Bill proposes.
I hope very much therefore that, having heard what I have said and what other bishops will say later in this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, will feel that he should withdraw his Motion. This will enable this question to be further discussed in the places where it is appropriate for this to happen, where it must happen and where the interest generated in recent times will ensure that it does happen; that is, in the General, Diocesan and Deanery synods, and above all in the parish church councils up and down this land.
7.44 p.m.
Lord Beaumont of Whitley: My Lords, some of us who speak from party Front Benches on this Bill can find ourselves in a rather difficult situation reduced, as I certainly am, to speaking about why we should not be speaking. My party historically varies in its attitude to the establishment of the Church of England from the cool to the frigid and it is for this reason among others that, on the whole, we have over a period of time very much welcomed the taking over by the Church of the regulation of its own affairs with the minimum recourse to Parliament. There are of course a number of Liberals who resent the continuation of what they see as the advantages of the establishment with outside control. The ability of the Church of England to have its cake and eat it has long been the wonder, if not necessarily the admiration, of all.
But our welcoming of the Church's self-government means that my party as a whole is not a supporter of this Bill as it stands. There are members of my party who would like to see the approach that it represents brought into effect; but the party as a whole feels that the course which Parliament and the Church have taken over the past few years is the right one. Again, normally, we are very much in favour of giving Private Members' Bills second readings and amending them in Committee, if necessary. I will come to that if I may at the end of my short speech. In this case, the Bill has been exceedingly well drafted and we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, for bringing before us a better Bill than we had to consider last time. This is one of the reasons, I must say, that I cannot see much point in a Committee stage; because I think either one accepts this Bill as it stands or rejects it. I am far from sure—as I gather has been said by other people behind the scenes—that we should devote the scarce resources of this House to a Select Committee.
Having said that on behalf of my party, perhaps I may move for a moment or two to a personal point of view. One of the most important duties of a parish priest, or a parish priest-in-council, if I may coin a phrase—rather like the Queen in Parliament; and I think that in these days one should not think except in terms of the parish priest-in-council—is to provide Sunday by Sunday a framework of worship in which the layman can feel at home. I do not mean by that dreary uniformity but I think it does mean a stable framework within which freedom to experiment can thrive.
In my experience, both as a parish priest and as a layman, this framework is not best achieved by the device of different services on different Sundays. Of course, that consideration catches the desire of some parishoners to cleave to that which they know; but it is not wrong to move on sensitively using the utmost pastoral care. And we must remember that the old order changeth giving place to new and God fulfils himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world. It is very often the good and the beautiful which we may have to sacrifice for the best. We all lament some of the losses which have happened in the Church services. There have been plenty of gains, too, theologically, and, perhaps, also sometimes in language. "Delight my soul in the greatness of the Lord" is a wonderful new sentence in the vocabulary
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and, I hope, now in the memories of the British Churches.
This Bill it seems to me is not the way forward. I was rather shocked when the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, stated that the object of the exercise was not to achieve a Bill but to set up a Select Committee. I cast no aspersions at all on his motives, which I know to be of the best and of the most sincere; but I wonder whether this is not an abuse of the processes of this House to put forward a Bill for this particular purpose. There would have been other powers that we could have taken. In any case, although I cannot from my Front Bench give any guidance to members of my party, I suggest that to grant a commitment at this stage for this purpose, given the resources of the House, would not be the right way forward.
7.50 p.m.
Lord Elton: My Lords, I am speaking in this debate entirely as a private Member of your Lordships' House. My noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor will be setting out the Government's view both of this Bill and of how it should be handled. The views I express are entirely my own, and I hope that your Lordships will not attach undue weight to them because of the position at which I am now standing.
I speak with some diffidence because your Lordships can say, I think, with every justification that you have heard enough of my voice on other subjects already. That I entirely understand and I shall be very brief. My only claim to your Lordships' attention—apart from the fact that I have been a worshipping member of the Church of England for half a century or so—is that I have in my time also been a member of two parochial church councils, a warden of two churches, and I am at present a member of a third parochial church council and a warden of a third church. I am, therefore, familiar with the various orders of service available for use in the Church of England and I have, after all, used the Book of Common Prayer since I was old enough to read. I entirely understand the deep affection in which the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, holds the Book of Common Prayer. I share it. I was greatly heartened, therefore, by the recognition of its value and the commitment to its continuation given by the most reverend Primate at the beginning of his reply to the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley.
I see with equal clarity—because I have also been teacher and a politican for many years—the tremendous advantages offered by orders of service written in words where the meaning springs immediately to the eyes, ears, and, indeed, the hearts of the new arrivals and new members that our Church so desperately needs. I was equally reassured by what was said by the most reverend Primate about that as well. I assure you, my Lords, that I am not here to argue the merits of any order of service; that is not, to my mind, what this debate is about.
As a member of a parochial church council and as a church warden, I also have experience of the way in which those orders of service are in practice chosen, and that is, to my mind, what this debate is about. The way in which this choice is to be made is out in the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 1974, which was introduced by the most reverend

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Primate the then Archbiship of Canterbury on his 70th birthday and in the very last hours of his office. He explained both the working of his Measure and the considerable safeguards incorporated in it most clearly, and your Lordships can find them explained with equal clarity, though with rather less eloquence, in the pamphlet from which the most reverend Primate has quoted, "Worship and Doctrine—A Guide for Parishes" fourth edition, 1982, widely available for the cost of only 10 pence. So, the pamphlet is generally available and the issues we are discussing are therefore widely known and, I believe, pretty well understood.
I well remember how, in 1974, the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, and other noble Lords felt that the views of the laity were disregarded both in the General Synod, which generated the measure, and in the parishes where it would be implemented. That unease is as essential to his argument today as it was in 1974. The General Synod they then felt, and still feel, was elected by a means so indirect as to make it unrepresentative. On that point it is not necessary for us to argue, whatever its merits.
Your Lordships can well and properly feel that directness of election is what gives most authority to the views of a representative body. There does need to be an immediacy of contact between an electorate and its representative: that is clearly recognised in our parliamentary constitution, and I accept it. It would be difficult for a Member of either House not to do so.
If immediacy is important, then so, clearly, is size. The larger the electorate, the less immediate will the relationship be between the representative and those represented. The smaller the unit, therefore, the stronger the link and the more authentic the representative voice. In so small and intimate a community as a parish church it really is possible for elected members to speak with a real knowledge of the views and feelings of those whom they represent. All this must weigh with your Lordships when you reflect that the worship and doctrine Measure, which this Bill seeks in part to unpick, actually entrenches the advice and direction of the parochial church council as an inviolable right, superior in this matter even to those of the incumbent. The parochial church council is made up only of parishioners and regular worshippers in the parish church; not even all parishioners, but only those on the electoral roll of the parish church and, of course, the parish clergy. If immediacy means authority, then parochial church councils must be among the most authoritative bodies in the country. The 1974 Measure very properly provides that every effort shall be made for the choice of orders of service to be made by agreement between the incumbent and the parochial church council. But a central feature of that Measure is that where there is no such agreement, as the most reverend Primate has said, either the 1662 form of service shall be used or the parochial church council may require another authorised form of service which has been in use in that parish for at least two years.
Their decision on what order of service to adopt is a decision which the incumbent must respect, which he must implement and from which he has no appeal either to his bishop, to the Synod or to anyone else. I
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shall be happy to be corrected on that, if necessary, but that is as I read the rubric and the law. Your Lordships might think from what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, that this was not in the leaflet to which I referred but I am sure that was not his intention, because as the most reverend Primate made clear, that is clearly spelled out in paragraph 14 on page 4.
These bodies, entrusted with this authority, are made up of an overwhelming lay majority. They are the effective and authoritative voice of the congregation. To suggest, as was suggested in yesterday's Times, that—following the 1974 Act—
"for the first time in its history the Church of England was free to ingore completely the wishes",
of that congregation, is to ignore absolutely the way in which this structure works. On the question of what orders of service to follow, the 1974 Measure does not silence the congregation—it makes it supreme. It did not empower the clergy to ignore the congregation; it empowered the congregation to ignore the clergy, though I hope very much that that never comes to pass. The body truly representative of that congregation—the parochial church council—is free to adopt either an order of service that has been in use for two years or, by default, the 1662 service. The wishes of the democratically elected majority are therefore paramount in this matter. Indeed, when the measure was being developed the anxieties about the preservation of the 1662 order were foreseen and catered for. The scales were actually weighted in its favour, as we have seen. The wishes of the majority are therefore really catered for.
But what of the minority? What of the two or three, or the two dozen of three dozen who wish to gather together and follow a rite different from that favoured by the majority, and about whom I think the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, is properly exercised? Ought not their needs to be catered for? I do not doubt that they should be. The most reverend Primate has set out how they should be catered for, and it is set out in the pamphlet. In that I am on common ground with the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, as is, indeed, the Church. The deep affection which I expressed for the forms of service set out in the Book of Common Prayer in our debate on the Measure in 1974 is no weaker now than it was when I spoke of it then—when I may have been almost too passionate. I want access to those forms as he wants access to them. On that issue also we are on common ground. Where I differ from him sharply and decisively, and where I hope your Lordships will differ from him also, is the means by which we secure it.
Let us acknowledge that there are difficulties to be overcome. Let us acknowledge that a Church is infinitely more than its ritual and that the Christian life consists equally of infinitely more than formal worship. But that worship is an essential focus of the Christian community and an indispensible means of drawing that community together. One difficulty, therefore, is that the practice of two different forms of worship in one parish may result in the de facto creation of two separate congregations and communities within it. That may arise under present arrangements where the rights of the minority are not entrenched in law, but depend upon the compassion and understanding of one section of the Christian community for another. It can and does already

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happen that different services attract different congregations. But that need not happen, and if it does happen and happens through discussion, understanding and consent, it need not be divisive.
But if you give to minorities—as this Bill would give to them—an entrenched right to establish their own practice in a particular service once a month, then you are actually inviting them to assert that right with no need to discuss, with no need to persuade, with no need to engage the sympathy and understanding of the rest of the Christian Community, and on those grounds alone I would resist this measure even if it were proposed in the proper forum. There are enough divisions in the body of Christ already without our encouraging more by legislation.
But I do not think this measure is being proposed in the proper forum. I believe now, as I believed in 1974, that the proper body to govern the worship of the Church of England is the Church of England itself. It has an elaborate democratic system of its own in which every member of every congregation in every parish in every diocese is entitled to enrol and to vote. The rights of that electorate are, as I have already shown, firmly entrenched at the very lowest and most effectual level, and no decision of the General Synod purports to set them aside. In an age of increasing secularism it really is not for the representatives of the secular state to dictate the forms of worship to be followed by the Church. The proper place for this debate is not, I believe, in your Lordships' House or in another place at all. It is within the Church, and noble Lords like the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, could be of far more effect and command even greater respect if they were to exert themselves within the Church and not within a separate and secular body.
I do not deny that the airing of this question outside the Church may be valuable. It does at least give a very public platform to people of whom it may perhaps appear, from what we have heard already on the subject, the Church has taken a little less care than it might have done. As a churchman, I accept the criticism that that implies. But of one thing I am in no doubt: it would be a very great pity indeed if Parliament were to take back to itself the right to determine the forms of worship observed in the Church. Still less ought we to try to interfere in other aspects of the life of the Church or to arrogate to Parliament an authority in things of the spirit that may exist on paper, but for which it is manifestly unsuited in practice.
If this Bill were to reach the statute book it would amount to a statement of secular and temporal authority over religious and spiritual matters that I think would be regrettable. That will not be immediately in prospect, even if your Lordships give it a Second Reading. None the less, I very much regret that the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, should think it necessary and proper to deal with this matter from outside the Church of which he is himself a member.
While I regret the Bill, I deplore the second Motion standing in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley. If that were to be passed—I say this in the most friendly manner—then the immediate prospect would be that a Select Committee of your Lordships' House of Parliament would be set up with inquisitorial
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powers to probe and question the affairs of the Church as well as the affairs of Parliament. That indeed is the aim which the noble Lord has said he has in mind. That I find repugnant. That is not a proper function of this House. I say that with no disrespect and no disloyalty. I am a member both of the Church of England and of this House of Parliament. I am loyal to both, and those loyalties are not in conflict. The Church ministers to the spiritual needs of the nation: Parliament looks after its temporal needs. Each has its proper sphere of control. The sphere of control is, and needs to be, a good deal narrower than the sphere of comment. Both Church and Parliament can properly comment on the other's affairs.
The noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, and others have commented very tellingly on the Church this evening. It is proper that they should and I hope that what they have said will be well noted in the proper quarter, because it is a product of a need that is very real and very keenly felt. To that I can testify. But comment is one thing: control is another. And a Select Committee with the power to summon witnesses and formulate legislation—legislation aimed directly and specifically at intervening in decisions democratically taken by means specifically approved by Parliament—would amount to an assertion of an authority which this House of Parliament helped to transfer to the Church a decade ago. That would be a long step backwards in history and I hope that your Lordships will have no part of it.
I have the greatest respect for, and sympathy with, the noble Lord, who moved his Motion in eloquent terms, testified to an honourable feeling and gave witness to the feelings of others. I hope he understands that I have every feeling of friendship and respect for him, but I hope that he will not proceed further down this path.
8.4 p.m.
Lord Glenamara: My Lords, near the city of Teheran there is a very beautiful garden and in the middle of that garden there is a tomb of a famous Persian poet. Lying on the top of the tomb is a book; and it is said that anyone with a problem opening the book at random and putting his finger on the page will find words of solace, comfort and guidance.
I believe that in this county we have two such books. The first is the Book of Common Prayer and the second is the Authorised Version of the Bible. We are in danger of losing both by neglect in our parish churches—in the parish churches of the Church established by law. I emphasise that because we have heard already, and we are going to hear a great deal more, about the so-called constitutional issue. There is no constitutional issue. We are told that because of convention and the Worship and Doctrine Measure, we now have no constitutional right to discuss the noble Lord's Bill. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop did not go so far as that, but that has been said and will be said.
Last time, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said that the Bill raised grave questions of constitutional propriety. As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop has said, the British Parliament is sovereign. The British Parliament can

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discuss anything it likes and the British Parliament can legislate on anything it likes. If these two propositions do not commend themselves to your Lordships, there is an ample basis for this debate. No one can possibly deny that this Parliament can legislate about a body which has been created by law. If we can legislate about the unions (as we are doing) which are not created by law and about how they run their affairs, we can most certainly legislate about how the Church of England, created by law, should run its affairs.
In the last debate on this matter the Lord Bishop of Durham (who is now the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, and we are delighted to see him here this evening) said that the key issue was whether the legislation under which the Church of England regulates its worship was adequate to protect the interests of those who want to worship according to the Book of Comon Prayer. I suggest that it is not. We have now had 10 years of so-called alternative services and, in my view, that decade has shown beyond any doubt that the synodical government of the Church of England does not or cannot defend this priceless part of our heritage. Therefore, it being a Church established by law, Parliament has the right, and in my view the duty, to do so.
It is often said that there was an understanding in 1974 that Parliament would never again intervene. I was the Minister concerned with this at that time. There was no understanding. There was an understanding of a different kind, certainly on the part of the Government; and the other understanding was that if we commended the Worship and Doctrine Measure to Parliament the Church itself would improve its own democracy, so that the views of all its members could be brought to bear on its decisions. That understanding, certainly on the part of the Government, has been quietly ignored.
Of course the machinery is there, as the noble Lord, Lord Elton, has just said—deanery, diocese and General Synod—but the good people who go there represent themselves and are coming to see themselves as the voice of the Church. How often is a parish meeting held of all the laity of the parish, not just the few who are on the parochial church council, to collect the views of the ordinary churchgoer on the forms of service, on women priests, on remarriage in church or any of the other great issues—or a deanery meeting? There is well-documented evidence that parishioners who try to have their views on the Alternative Service Book and the Book of Common Prayer taken into account at parochial church council meetings are meeting considerable pressure from the clergy to "lay off", and in some cases they meet outright hostility. That, as I see it, is as far removed from Christian charity as it is possible to get.
So here we are for the third time, and we are extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, for allowing us to make once more our gesture of disquiet, for that is what it is.
We had the Gallup Poll, which showed an overwhelming support for the Book of Common Prayer, and that drew from the Secretary-General of the General Synod the comment that by the ballot the critics of the Alternative Service Book had shot their bolt and that he would be sceptical about any results
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with which Professor Martin was associated. Anybody who knows Professor Martin would take great exception to that. Then we had the petition of the 600 representing many facets of our national life. That was received with stony silence in the Synod, although the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York explained in our last debate that that was because of a procedural difficulty. Then, in 1981, both Houses of Parliament voted in favour of the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley.
After all that, there is no real improvement in the position of the Book of Common Prayer in our parish churches. So I ask the Bench of Bishops—and we are so grateful to see so many of them here this evening—tell us, please, how do we ordinary churchgoers reach the ears, the minds and the hearts of the clergy, particularly the younger ones who are just coming out of the theological colleges knowing hardly anything about the Book of Common Prayer? Alternative services have been going for 10 years now and, in many cases, the younger clergy have been brought up with them. There is no doubt whatever that the colleges are instilling or leaving in their students the idea that the Book of Common Prayer is, if I may use the Archbishop's term, a dignified fossil. The theological colleges are, I believe, the nub of this problem and it is a nub with which the bishops themselves can deal. They can do something about it.
The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York said in our last debate:
"I fully admit that there is legitimate cause for concern"; [Official Report, 8/4/81; col. 622.]
that is, about the colleges. How do we reach the ears, the minds and the hearts of such people as the gentleman referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, the liturgist at Cranmer Hall in Durham, of all places, who said about the debate on his last Bill:
"The Bill's supporters showed little knowledge, learning or good sense and the colleges should not for a moment let themselves be made the whipping boy for the troubles of Parliament".
I have no idea what he meant by those words, but how do we reach a mind like that? One wonders whether a gentleman like that is really in the same Church as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has written in the clearest, most unambiguous terms and has spoken this even in clear terms about the place of the Book of Common Prayer in ordination training.
How do we reach people like the Dean of Lincoln who, at a morning Eucharist service, said those those who opposed the new services were like the trolls who die at sunrise? I do not feel like a troll—I may look like one, but I do not feel like one, and I am certainly not going to die at sunrise—or I hope not! Or how do we reach the Canon Colin Buchanans of this world who accuse us of outright deception? We are extremely grateful to the bishops for the action which they took in 1982 after our last debate, and for their three recommendations in their subsequent statement. But we have looked for results on the ground and have done so in some depth, but, quite frankly, the position of the Book of Common Prayer in our parish churches is worse then it was two years ago.
The last thing that I wish to do is to doubt the good faith of the bishops. Some, as I shall mention in a

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moment, have been extremely helpful and are just as concerned as we are. But when I hear of one of them telling a theological college that the bishops' statement need not be taken too seriously, I just wonder whether some of them saw it as buying time until everybody gets used to the Alternative Service Book and all the hullabaloo about the Book of Common Prayer dies away. It is not going to go away. I and the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, and many thousands of churchgoers throughout the country, will continue as the Archbishop has urged us to do, to be vocal in our support for the Book of Common Prayer and to,
"show boldness and fervent zeal to ensure that it is heard."
Another development is causing great concern. I referred earlier to the Synod's regarding itself as the "voice of the Church". This has manifested itself since the passing of the Worship and Doctrine Measure in a growing tendency in the Church to regard those of us who want to preserve the Book of Common Prayer as outsiders. The Church is becoming polarised, with insiders who support the ASB and outsiders who support the Book of Common Prayer. I am a politician who disagrees with the neglect of the Book of Common Prayer, and I am an outsider and am told that I have little knowledge, little learning or little good sense.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London has put his finger exactly on this point and I am so grateful to him. I quote what he has written:
"This sense of frustration is made more acute by unceasing pressure for active membership of the Church of England to be judged by enthusiasm for a range of contemporary fashions. As a result, many people feel unchurched by the one Church in this land which is given pastoral responsibility for everyone."
The word "unchurched" is exactly right.
I was christened in the Church of England, I was confirmed in the same Church, I went to a Church of England school and I went to a Church of England college. I have attended church all my life. In a book about my boyhood last year, I described in great detail the effect of the church services on my life. I have now passed the three score years and 10 and now I feel for the first time among the unchurched. The Church of England is not an exclusive club owned by the Synods, by the church bureaucracy or by the clergy. I always thought that it was the Body of Christ in which we all have a place and a part. So what, I ask the Bishops, of those of us who feel unchurched by this struggle to retain our heritage? Certainly, a little more Christian charity from the Church's ministers towards those of us who disagree would not come amiss.
Having said all that, I should be churlish and, indeed, dishonest if I did not express my great gratitude—and "gratitude" is a very small word—to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for his quite splendid article. I think that he chose an extraordinary vehicle for it, because the trendy clergy—and they are the main problem—read The Guardian; they do not read the Daily Telegraph. But I hope very much that it will be circulated to every incumbent in England and read from every pulpit. Surely Church House can rise to that. I just question him when he says that the Book of Common Prayer is widely used. My personal knowledge, and our in depth monitoring in the Prayer Book Society, indicate that that is not so.
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Secondly, I must express my gratitude to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York—I am so glad that he has not interrupted me tonight; he did so many times in the last debate—for his comments in his book. Church and Nation in a Secular Age. He said that the Alternative Service Book is:
"Full of mistakes, banalities and imperfections".
Of the Lord's Prayer, he said it was so awful that we should use the old form of words. May I tell him that I always say the old words, no matter what the people around me are saying. I hope that at least that message can go out from the House of Lords tonight.
The Lord Archbishop of York: My Lords, since I have been twice quoted from my book on the subject, may I ask the noble Lord whether he has read some of the other things I have said about both the Book of Common Prayer and the Alternative Service Book in the chapter from which he quoted?
Lord Glenamara: Yes. my Lords, and the right reverend Prelate and I appeared together recently on "Any Questions", so I know his views on a great many other matters, too. Thirdly, I should like to express my gratitude to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London for his perceptive, sensitive remarks, from which I have already quoted. These three key figures—we are most grateful that they are all here tonight—have given us real hope.
I have not mentioned the linguistic argument, though I am sure that there is an argument to be made. I am quite sure that the most reverend Primates the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have made it much more succinctly than I could. Nor have I mentioned the doctrinal argument. Perhaps we make too much of it. However, 1 believe that our doctrine has been tilted a little in the Alternative Service Book.
The only points I make are. first, that those of us who want to retain the Book of Common Prayer (and we are almost certainly the majority) should have our wishes treated with a little more charity and generosity than at present by the clergy and the Church bureaucracy; and, secondly, that the theological colleges should ensure that nobody leaves college without a sound knowledge of the Book of Common Prayer and without having used it in worship. I believe the Bishops could ensure that that comes about. The Church of England has lost most of its teacher training colleges, which produced generations of Christian teachers. It is losing a great many of its schools, in which generations of children learned about the Anglican faith and its services and memorised considerable parts of them. I can still say the whole of the Church Catechism. It is, then, all the more important to preserve this precious part of our Christian heritage, not as a museum exhibit but as part of the living worship of the Church.
Finally, I am a democratic Socialist. Therefore I am committed to widespread change in society. Why, then, should I wish to preserve Cranmer's Prayer Book and King James's Bible? The answer is very simple. I want to change many things in society in order to make them accord more closely with the things which do not change, and the most memorable expression of these unchanging things is to be found in the Bible and the Prayer Book. That is why I, a Socialist, am very

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proud and pleased to give warm support this evening to Lord Sudeley's Bill.
8.23 p.m.
Lord Home of the Hirsel: My Lords, I should like to join those who have expressed their gratitude to my noble friend Lord Sudeley for the thoughful manner in which he has moved the Second Reading of his Bill. I confess that when, in the past, the fur has begun to fly on liturgical matters my instinct has been to take cover. I am not ashamed of that reaction. In history, so much damage has been done by dogma, and doctrine has been responsible for so much human misery, that it is high time for tolerance. Above all, I wish reason and common sense to prevail in my own Church and in all the Churches, and in particular between the state and the Church. In this particular case, when we are discussing the use of the Prayer Book of 1662, I see no reason for conflict. That opinion is reinforced by the speech of the most reverend Primate which we have had the privilege of listening to tonight, in which, authoritatively and with definition, he has given guidance to the clergy about the use of the Prayer Book.
I am firmly in favour of the regular use in worship of the Prayer Book. In the words of the most reverend Primate, I want it to be a living element in the services of the Church. The reverence of it has inspired generations of Christians. It exemplifies scholarship and poetry. It gives us, in the simplest yet in the most expressive prose, perhaps the best passages in the English language. Also, I doubt very much whether, in order to recruit to the Christian faith, it is necessary to resort to the Dictionery of Modern English. Certainly that has not been proved. I hope, then, that with leadership from the bishops a Prayer Book of proved excellence will not be allowed to die of neglect, but will remain, above all (I would emphasise the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara) a part of the curriculum and of the worship of the theological colleges. That is fundamental for the future. Now that the most reverend Primate has spoken in particular on that issue, I hope that many of the anxieties of my noble friend will have been removed—as, I must confess, mine have been.
Nevertheless, whatever I may feel about the Prayer Book—and other noble Lords have expressed their strong views—our society is changing so quickly that the clergy must be allowed to experiment with various kinds of services in order to see whether they may, particularly among the young, strike a spark of recognition that Christianity has something to say to them in these modern days. Parliament has agreed that the bishops and the clergy should be given that chance, and I believe that they are taking it. Fifty years ago I should have been shocked if I had been asked to sing "I danced till the morning." Now I do so, not only with pleasure but with reverence. There is, therefore, a case for change so that the young may easily be attracted by new language, carefully and reverently used. Therefore my plea is that the old and the new should be encouraged to reinforce each other. That, I take it, was the emphasis laid this evening in his speech by the most reverend Primate.
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I must tell my noble friend Lord Sudeley that while, as I hope he can see, I have sympathy with many of the points he has made, I trust that he will not divide the House this evening. If he were to do so, we might have to proceed with his second proposal for a Select Committee of this House. I shall leave the constitutional propriety of such a course to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor. The noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, was, of course, right—Parliament can do anything. The question is whether Parliament in a particular case should or should not do something. In my opinion, it would be a very questionable use of the procedures of this House to set up a Select Committee, which would in effect be a continuing monitor of the Bench of Bishops.
I suggest that we cannot treat these matters, which involve principle, conscience and emotion, as we might treat agricultural regulations emanating from the European Community in Brussels. If at any time we are to have a renewed dispute between Parliament and Church, at least let us have it on the Floor of both Houses of Parliament; let us not send it upstairs in a hole-and-corner way. I hope it will not come to that.
I said at the start of my speech that there is a basis here for a reasonable, commonsense compromise— using that word in the best sense. I trust therefore that having ventured those views today, and having preserved his right of course to act again, as he feels right, in the future, my noble friend Lord Sudeley will not ask us to vote this evening.
8.30 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Chichester: My Lords, I yield to no one in my respect and regard for the Prayer Book as one of our chief standards of doctrine and in my affection for its language as a vehicle of worship. As required by the canons, I read matins and evensong every day—and I choose to do so from the Book of Common Prayer, usually with a lesson from the Authorised Version of the Bible. But it is the merits of a Bill and not the merits of a book with which we are concerned this evening. I will ask for your Lordships' patience if I begin with a brief survey of attempts to control public worship by parliamentary legislation since the middle of the last century, when a combina-tion of social change and theological renewal began to make the pattern of worship which had prevailed in the two previous centuries increasingly unsatisfactory.
A Royal Commission was set up in 1867 to inquire into the new rubrics, orders and directions for regulating the course and conduct of public worship. Over the next four years it published four reports in four folio volumes—three of them very thick. All except one were accompanied by notes of discontent from various members dissenting. The small legislative result was the lectionary of 1870 and a permission to shorten certain of the services on particular occasions.
Following this came the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, which was an attempt to restrict or abolish certain new ceremonies and forms of worship. This resulted eventually in four clergymen being sent to prison, to the great embarrassment of the authorities. After that, the Act became a dead letter. That led to a second Royal Commission—this time on the ecclesiastical courts, and which again produced a

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report in four thick folio volumes with little practical result.
In 1904 a third Royal Commission on eccesiastical discipline was set up. Two years later, it produced four fat folio volumes which arrived at two main conclusions. The first was, that the law on public worship in the Church was too narrow for the religious life of the present generation. The second was, that the machinery for discipline had broken down. It was that which led to the issue of letters of business to the two convocations to revise the Prayer Book and eventually to the revised Prayer Book, which was twice rejected by the House of Commons in 1927 and 1928.
Following those rejections, a large part of the revised Prayer Book came into general use. What many people mean today when they speak of "the Prayer Book" is in fact the 1928 form. Some of us are old enough to remember all the excitement and controversy which attended the 1927 and 1928 debates; the arguments in the House of Commons about the doctrine of the holy communion and the reservation of the sacrament for the communion of the sick, and about how the book was rejected largely by the votes there of those who were not members of the Church of England.
There was a widespread feeling that that was all very unsuitable and that if liturgical revision was to be taken up again, as surely it must, because the law had remained (as the 1906 commission had said) too narrow to be enforced, then some other way must be found; a way which would enable revised services to be tested by use and again revised before final authorisation—and a way that would not again involve Parliament in detailed discussion on points of doctrine. Such feeling, I believe, came to be shared as much inside as outside Parliament. It was a recognition of the difficulties which arise when it is attempted to control public worship by statute. After some initial trials, a better way was found in the Worship and Doctrine Measure.
I hope that we shall not overlook that history of statutes and Royal Commissions tonight, and that, by the passing of this Bill and the setting up of a Select Committee, we shall not open up a fresh era of conflict—which history suggests can only end in futility. We must all surely have been greatly moved by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, but I was astounded and shocked to hear him say that the Church of England was created by law. Whenever we institute a person to an incumbency or licence him to an office—whenever a bishop is consecrated—there is a statement which has to be read and to which that person has to give assent. It begins with the words,
"The Church of England is part of the one, holy. Catholic and Apostolic Church".
It is a Church which I have always understood derives from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and not from English law.
The most reverend Primate has expressed the hope that the bishops will speak of what is happening in their own dioceses and of what we are trying to do. I should now like to do that. As much has been said of them, let me begin with our theological college, because we have one at Chichester. In March 1982 it was clear that the Prayer Book was not being used in
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that college. Now there is a Prayer Book service once a day on most days of the week throughout the term there. In 1980 I wrote to all the clergy of the diocese of Chichester giving some advice about how to use the new services and also enclosing the official leaflet on worship and doctrine to which reference has alrady been made. I asked them and their parochial church councils to give sympathetic consideration to those who wished the Prayer Book services to be used.
A year later I issued a questionnaire to discover what services were being used. Of the forms sent out, 333—that is, more than 90 per cent.—were returned. They showed that 120 parishes in the diocese were using the Prayer Book communion service as a mid-morning Sunday service and that 219 of them were using Prayer Book matins as a mid-morning Sunday service. We have a number of churches in which there are two main mid-morning Sunday matins followed by communion. In the survey, 250 parishes were using Prayer Book evensong as against 46 using the ASB evensong. That suggests to me that the Prayer Book services are much more widely available than is often alleged. No doubt there have been mistakes and there has been rashness on the part of some of the clergy. There have been excesses of enthusiasm, but from my own experience may I ask your Lordships to be cautious about accepting unreservedly the statements made concerning these matters.
One of the two secretaries, for example, of the Prayer Book Society has stated in print, and repeated at a public meeting, that I forbade the circulation of the third edition of the worship and doctrine leaflet. I did no such thing. He has also stated in a report that on a winter Sunday in Worthing it is not possible to make one's Prayer Book communion in the hours of daylight. On reading that I telephoned three churches in Worthing and found that each of them has a mid-morning Prayer Book communion service on one or more Sundays in the month.
Only last August the chairman of the Prayer Book Society wrote to me to say that the situation in the Seaford area for those who wished to worship according to the Book of Common Prayer is an unhappy one. The Seaford area includes Seaford proper where there is sung matins according to the Prayer Book at 11.15 every Sunday and a Prayer Book communion service at 12.15 on the first Sunday in the month. At St. Luke's there is 8 a.m. communion each Sunday according to the Prayer Book. At Bishopstone all services are according to the Prayer Book, and there is a notice in the porch saying that the parish supports the Prayer Book Society. The chairman apologised that he had been misinformed, but I am afraid that the local branch secretary who had supplied the misinformation continues to assert that she was correct.
May I add to that a letter which I received from a lady complaining that in her parochial church council the new forms of services had been imposed on the council by the incumbent, who said that I wished them to be used. It so happens that a member of that parochial church council is a very senior and distinguished lay member of our bishop's council. I therefore asked him. He had been on that parochial council for a number of years under two successive incumbents, during the time when the new services

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were being introduced. He said that what this lady had written was entirely untrue, and that there had been complete, full and free discussion without any attempt on the part of either of the two successive incumbents to impose their will.
Trying to deal with such complaints and trying to ascertain what are the real facts in each case is complicated by the question: what is a Prayer Book service? The most reverend Primate has already touched on this. In the questionnaire which I sent out in 1981 I asked the clergy to say what variations they made from the Prayer Book communion service. As was to be expected, many used the shortened commandments and omitted the three long exhortations. When my staff analysed the returns they found that there were 40 different variations recorded.
In a letter to the bishops in 1981 the president of the Prayer Book Society appears to want a 1662 Holy Communion service as it stands. One of the vice-presidents, Mr. Field, in a letter to The Times, pleads for Series I—that is, roughly the Prayer Book prayers in the ASB order. All these add to the difficulty of ensuring that the wishes of parishioners are properly met and that minorities are adequately cared for. I hope that they are not matters which your Lordships would wish to see pursued in a Select Committee of this House.
I hope I have said enough to show that the bishops do care about these matters and spend a good deal of time in trying to deal with individual problems as well as attempting to guide clergy and parishes generally in the right way. I fear that if this Bill becomes law it will add to our problems and will stir up conflict rather than bring reconciliation.
The main period of liturgical revision which began over 20 years ago has only recently ended with the publication of the Alternative Services Book. It was inevitable that during that time mistakes would be made. What we need now is a substantial period of time to reflect upon that experience, to heal injuries and to sort out the right way of using what we now have. Care and sensitivity are needed. In all this the bishops have a special responsibility and a leading role to play. I hope that your Lordships will trust that in this we do try to act from a high sense of duty and that you will not make our task more difficult by passing this Bill.
8.47 p.m.
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, whatever else my noble friend, Lord Sudeley, may have achieved he has managed to muster more bishops than I have ever seen before in this Chamber since I have had the privilege of being in this House. To be slightly serious, we ought to be deeply grateful to them because we all know what tremendous commitments they have in their dioceses and it is splendid that they have all been able to attend. I add my thanks to the most reverend Primate for his introductory speech and in making the position so clear.
However, I welcome this Bill as a courageous attempt—and I mean courageous—by my noble friend Lord Sudeley to ensure that the Book of Common Prayer should retain its proper place in the
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worship of the Church of England. I supported my noble friend when he introduced his earlier Bills, and I am deeply concerned that, notwithstanding the actions by the bishops in 1982 and at other times, as we have heard, in many places lip service only seems to have been paid to the views both of the Houses of Parliament, where the matter has been debated, as well as to those of a host of lay, sincere, Anglican Christians; not to mention more recently the letter to the Daily Telegraph by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I hasten to add that this stricture does not apply now to the parishes in which I worship. We have three amalgamated parishes with five churches and the balance between old and new forms of worship is nearly satisfactory. I do not suppose it ever will be wholly satisfactory, particularly when making allowance for the rector's need to get around all his churches. I am not sure that my wife, who until recently has sat on the parochial church council, would say that that is satisfactory, but that is not the subject of this Bill.
My concern is threefold. Many of these points have been made and I shall make them briefly. First, there are some failings of the ASB itself. Secondly, there is clear evidence that a large number of parishes have not listened, and apparently do not intend to listen, to the arguments for an even balance between old and new forms of worship. Thirdly, there is evidence that the theological colleges are among the leaders in apparently seeking to phase out the Book of Common Prayer altogether. I accept absolutely that that is not the wish of any of the most reverend or right reverend Prelates who have spoken tonight or probably of any other bishops, but that is the way it looks.
With regard to the ASB, the wording of individual prayers has been unnecessarily and excessively modernised. Many of the splendid old phrases could have been retained without upsetting the balance of the new formats. A second criticism is that there are far too many alternatives. I can see the problem, but in practical terms there are far too many alternatives. Both these failings, in particular, are irritating and a positive hindrance to reverent prayer for many who make up the hard core of the Church (the middle-aged and the elderly) without—and this is an important factor—being an attraction to the young. My knowledge is that young people are perfectly capable of appreciating the fine phrases of the old Prayer Book and the old Bible and resent the thought that they are being spoonfed. For this reason I find it hard to understand why so many clergy seem to be rigorously antipathetic to the Book of Common Prayer and King James's Bible and why, indeed, on many occasions they manipulate affairs within their parishes so that the voice of those parishioners who wish to retain a balance between old and new is positively suppressed. Like the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, I can only imagine that it is because of the blinkered attitude of the theological colleges, of which there is much evidence. This was highlighted in some detail by my noble friend Lord Sudeley.
My rector told me last Sunday, when I was telling him about this debate, that when he was trained for the priesthood 13 years ago his college was one of only two, among 14, that included any teaching of the 1662

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Prayer Book in its courses. He feared that such teaching might be even less now.
Of course it is important to attract the young into the Church but it is questionable whether Rite A will help that much. It must also be appreciated by clergy that they must retain the older members. This is more especially necessary because, as we get nearer to the grave, we need the sympathetic support of the Church more and so far as is possible in the language which helps us to pray. On this point I would sympathise greatly with the thought of the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, that people can feel unchurched by the impact of the modern phraseology.
For all those reasons, I believe that my noble friend's Bill is of great importance. From what has been said, I suppose that this is too much to hope for, but I would have hoped that the General Synod would see that this intervention by Parliament was complementary to its work and not an attempt to reverse the decentralising gift by Parliament in 1974 and in earlier years. Accordingly, I shall support my noble friend's Motion for a Second Reading and, if he moves it, That the Bill be committed to a Select Committee, if it is his decision so to do.
8.52 p.m.
Lord Howard of Henderskelfe: My Lords, contrary to the usual practice, I believe that I should start by declaring that I do not have an interest in the subject of this Bill, inasmuch as it cannot affect the methods and the kind of worship which takes place in the chapel which replaced the original parish church where I reside. There is no parochial church council to hold forth about it, because we are—and this may well be news to the mot reverend Primate of England, in whose diocese I reside—an Archbishop's peculiar.
However, I shall not delay your Lordships with diversions on that theme because I am chiefly concerned with the impact of this Bill, and the Select Committee with which it is proposed to follow it up, on the relationship between Church and state. We all know—we have had plenty of discussion about this—about Parliament being unable to bind its successors. What it has given with one hand it can take away at a later date with another. These matters are governed by well-understood conventions as well as by constitutional law. We sat up until a pretty late hour on Monday night discussing the constitutional position of the conventions which obtain between central Government and the local authorities. I think that where we have, as we do have, an unwritten constitution, the conventions which govern the way in which we operate are of greater importance than they are in a country in which there is a written constitution, a Supreme Court to interpret it, and so on.
The Church of England has not had its liturgy legislated for for 110 years. Your Lordships have been told that that particular operation resulted in four clergymen going to prison, which was not thought to be a very good idea. The Church of England in fact has been more or less autonomous for the whole of my lifetime. In the past 10 years it has extended that autonomy to governance of matters of doctrine and worship.
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The measures which your Lordships are asked under the present system to approve by affirmative resolution may not be entirely palatable, but nevertheless no one could suggest that they were taken by the General Synod in other than the most serious and solemn manner, after having sought divine guidance. It seems to me that to introduce a Bill into this House which at any rate appears to ignore a procedure which has reached maturity over a period of some 65 years, since the 1919 enabling Act, is, to say the least, hardly in accordance with the conventions which have prevailed and developed over that time. What matters, I believe, are not the actual, strictly laid down conventions of the law but how they are interpreted and perceived in their intent and effect as much as in their actual content.
I believe that there is a considerable amount of confusion, which has been referred to earlier, about what kind of liturgy we are discussing. I do not want to go into that in any detail at all, but I do not believe that all the Members of your Lordships' House who refer to the 1662 Prayer Book realise precisely what that Prayer Book contains. I wonder whether any Member of your Lordships' House has in fact ever heard the Commination Service with its inclusion of the words:
"Cursed is the man that maketh any carved or molten image;
Cursed is he that curseth his father or mother:
Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour's landmark"—
I am sure that that will appeal to some of the landowners in your Lordships' House—
"Cursed is he that maketh the blind go out of his way",
and so on, including lying with your neighbour's wife. That is particularly cursed. I think the parish in which that was last delivered must have been extremely similar to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Nor do I believe that many of your Lordships will have heard in the Holy Communion service itself—the central service of our Church—either of the two long exhortations. I certainly have not and I have been unable to discover in my brief researches with the Bishops who are here tonight that they have ever heard them either. There are many other similar examples. As has been suggested, what is probably being asked for is a variation on the 1662 book which is not all that different to the 1928 book. There are numerous other difficulties in the Bill. I shall not go into the details. The definition of the principal morning service is one which, if we did ever quite get as far as the Committee stage, might cause us considerable problems.
Every Church of which I have any knowledge has been giving deep thought to its doctrine and its acts of worship during the past 30 years. The Church of England can hardly be expected to be an exception to this general rule. We may not as individuals agree with what the Church is doing. In that respect, the more we talk about what the General Synod does, the more I believe that it is a very great pity that there is not one Member of your Lordships' House who is a member of the General Synod where these matters are discussed in great detail.
May I be allowed to remind your Lordships who take a particular interest in these matters that there will be an opportunity next year for this to be rectified, when the new General Synod is to be elected? It is perfectly open for any Member of your Lordships' House who happens to be on the electoral roll and is

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a member of the Church of England to stand for the General Synod, where no doubt he will be listened to with close attention. There are four Members of the other House, two of whom I believe are co-opted and two who are there in another way.
I may be one of the newest comers to this House, though I have spent many years wearing other hats, listening to your Lordships' debates and admiring the civilised way in which they were conducted. I sometimes think that the way we are described as a revising House is a somewhat derogatory description, as anyone who sits through the Committee stages of our Bills, where we consider every clause, line and word very carefully, will agree. Anything which could harm the value and reputation of this House, or disturb its relationships with other organisms of the body politic is to be deprecated, and I greatly fear that the introduction of a Bill such as this, at not infrequent intervals, will not enhance our relationships with other bodies.
Furthermore—and I believe that this is a very real danger indeed—it may well strengthen the mood, which is stronger than many of your Lordships may realise, of encouragement towards disestablishment and the complete separation of Church and state. It may be thought that I am exaggerating the effect of what some of your Lordships may believe to be a harmless little Bill designed to secure a limited objective. Anything which might lead towards a move to disestablishment within the Church itself can only be described as fissiparous, though, by contrast, any move from outside to disestablish the Church could unite it, as Bishop Hemsley Henson so wisely remarked many years ago. I do not think I need to list the considerable constitutional problems which would arise and which would surround the position of Her Majesty the Queen as supreme governor of the Church of England—she is not, incidentally, the head of the Church as she was referred to in the last debate, a position which was assumed by Henry VIII and, curiously, enough, maintained by Bloody Mary. It would also have repercussions upon the position of the Bench of Bishops and right the way through to the body of the Church down to parish level. Curiously enough, any such move could do nothing but harm to relationships with other Churches in this country which have increasingly, in the last half-century come to value the connection between the Church of England and the state as at least a formal statement of the state's Christian foundation.
This House has many very useful and time-consuming functions to perform, and I am afraid that I can only regard the introduction of a measure such as this and its further pursuance—after the opportunity which is given to air the views which have been expressed with such eloquence and such courtesy this evening—as a gross waste of your Lordships' time. I trust—and may I endorse indeed the request of the noble Lord, Lord Home of the Hirsel—that the noble Lord whose name it bears will agree to withdraw this Bill.
9.3 p.m.
Lord Milverton: My Lords, why is it that some of us are still prepared to speak for the Prayer Book, and even for the 1928 Service which, as all noble Lords
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know, one can use for a liturgy? The reason is that the guarantees and safeguards, as promised by certain measures such as the Worship and Doctrine Measure, seem to have been set aside without the intention—for example, from the pamphlet entitled: Where Stands the Prayer Book Now?
The voices of many who are quite happy with the Prayer Book are regarded as shortsighted. For instance, this is brought out from the Backgrounder:
"Priests are mostly trained in atmospheres where the Prayer Book is ignored, even despised, and it is not surprising that many go out into parishes to convert the benighted… There is the growing tendency to see the Church of England in terms of outsiders and insiders and the insiders insist that those who disagree with them are outsiders, casual hangers-on or just 'tribal Christians'. The 'outsiders' whose voices arouse most resentment are the press which has kept up a steady barrage of criticism in favour of traditional worship, and Christian intellectuals, especially writers, and concerned politicians".
I should like to quote from the book by Doctor John Habgood, the Lord Archbishop of York. This has already been mentioned. May I also say how nice it is to see so many bishops here with us tonight. On page 142 of Church and Nation in a Secular Age the most reverend Primate says:
"revision has proved to be damagingly divisive as well as linguis-tically inept. I believe it would do much good if the failure were to be publicly admitted, and if Churches were to be encouraged to revert to the exclusive use of the traditional version".
This statement came from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, reviewing a book by Anthony Kilmister entitled When will Ye be wise?:
"They articulate a sense of frustration, sometimes approaching despair, which is felt by many who cannot articulate it for themselves."
We are not saying that the people who like the new services should not have them. We are only asking that the Prayer Book services be available at a decent frequency and time. People of all ages who love the Prayer Book are still as committed to a true understanding of worship and faith as those who appreciate the new services. But in some cases their God-given nature has a quieter way of responding; yet it is still as warm and loving. The Church needs both outlooks rather than having just the one kind. The supporters of the new services can, without the realisation of the fact, put the others outside as the hinderers and blockers of true Christian worship.
The study of the 1662 Prayer Book, especially the liturgy, is something that could be more profitably done at theological colleges than is apparent, and it could also be used more fully at college services. It was heartening to hear the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester, who has just spoken. The fact that this is not being done is evident from reliable research work referred to in the bunch of papers that I have here.
A liturgy needs to encourage and lead one on to a sense of awe as well as encouraging and challenging thoughts. We are in a climate where there will be the need for a variety of forms of worship and liturgy, rather than just one.
I wish to quote from the Church Times of 6th April. It is a letter from Professor David Martin, the last paragraph of which reads:
"One thing is certain. The atmosphere has been enormously improved by the Archbishop's article and by your leader. If means

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can be found to remedy the outstanding injustices, then I believe that those of us who have campaigned for many years in the universities, in the senior Press, and in Parliament would wish for nothing better than to fold our tents".
I should like to say how heartening it was to hear the speech of His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, and to feel that maybe his Grace and the other noble Prelates are perhaps more understanding and have more feeling towards us than we might have realised.
In many people's eyes, Series 2 was preferable to Series 3. The prayer of intercession for the Church militant is far better in Series 2 because it is precise and definite. Series 3 tends to be long, rather than precise, and is not really challenging. The short and precise are more challenging and they tend to help develop a sense of awe and thoughtfulness.
Worship is for people to be led to express their thoughts—not just easy thoughts without having to exert the mind. The new liturgy is long-winded, with perhaps the thought in relation to God being rather misty. That is of course how some of us feel about it, though, in all honesty, we have tried to grow to like it, love it—or whatever the right term may be.
What I have said this evening confirms what were my thoughts in the debate on Wednesday, 8th April 1981. I wish to quote from col. 655 of the Official Report:
"The way religious experience is expressed varies with people, and it is not right that any one view should imply that others are practising worship with inadequate appreciation or understanding. … The souls of many need this book as an equal partner to the new services".
We do well to remember some words of the late Dr. Eric Abbott, Dean of Westminster. He used to use the phrase.
"The givenness of things in relation to the gifts God has given us".
It seems to me that there is a special givenness about the Prayer Book in the sense that it was given to our Church in a particular way by the inspiration of its authors; and for centuries such a gift has played a unique part in both the corporate life of our nation and the personal lives of individual Christians. This should not be neglected or lightly set aside.
As a parish priest I can truthfully say that in my parishes I have done my best to try to meet the needs of all people, whatever their feelings towards liturgy and services. I can honestly say that there is the Series 3 as well as the Prayer Book. But I can also honestly say that on the whole the new liturgy, the new services, have not really clicked, though, when Series 2 and 3 came out, I had meetings of the PCC to go through them first of all.
In spirit and feeling I give my support to my noble friend Lord Sudeley. Yet somehow I feel that, if our hopes could really be met, one would wish the matter not to have to go as far as he might like. I should also like to say to the noble Prelates, "Do go on giving us hope as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has implied tonight". Do go on giving us hope; help us to appreciate those who like the new services and help those who like the new services to appreciate us. So, in spirit and feeling, I give my wholehearted support to my noble friend, Lord Sudeley, and may God bless the Prayer Book.
9.15 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, in the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford, when it is being used a a cathedral and not as a college chapel, the Prayer Book, and the Prayer Book only, is used at the principal services. Almost the sole exception to this is the ordination service, and, having used both the old and the new ordinals now for over 14 years, I can say without hesitation that the new one makes much clearer to a congregation in a form that they can assimilate what is the office and work of a priest. The general diet of daily worship in the cathedral, however, is that of the Book of Common Prayer. I am glad to say that a sizeable congregation is common.
Just across the road, there are a number of parish churches where the predominant form of worship—predominant but not exclusive—is according to the Alternative Service Book. Here, too, contrary to some impressions given in the media, the congregations are extremely flourishing. On many Sunday mornings, the total congregations of those six churches will amount to around 2,000 people. You thus have in the centre of Oxford a remarkable microcosm of the Church of England in its comprehensiveness. I submit that that traditional virtue should be one of the major points for consideration in our debate.
It is true that the Church of England has proved less comprehensive vis-à-vis other denominations during the past few years than it could or should have done. That is no particular matter of pride to us. Nevertheless, it is still true, as it was before the ASB came into being, whether we recognise it or not, that within her borders, the Church contains a pretty wide variety of rites, not to mention a variety of ways in which the same rite is presented. Surely, this is, within reasonable limits, a healthy state of affairs. For the function of the Church is to help her members to pray as they can and not as they cannot. And, since the membership of the national Church should, by definition, be wide, we should expect a wide variety of religious approach as, indeed, from his point of view, the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, has argued. We should not in these latter days seek to contain it within too rigid a uniformity.
I should like to give a little more data about the theological colleges. My very recent inquiries of the three in or near Oxford which represent roughly three different kinds of churchmanship within the Church of England, have shown the following results. All three use the Prayer Book at matins and/or evensong for at least one term regularly in every year, and two of them more often than that. One college does not use the Prayer Book for Holy Communion at all. One uses it exclusively every other term, and the third uses it once a week throughout the term. That shows true Anglican diversity.
In all the three colleges, there is instruction in the Prayer Book in the course of teaching about the liturgy of the Church and in one specifically in doctrine also. That is a situation that needs monitoring but I do not think that it is one to induce despair. I do not know that it deserves some of the strictures made in this debate.

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It has always been a welcome feature of your Lordships' House that it has been willing to listen to the voice of those who have first-hand experience of any matter under debate, not that such voices are necessarily infallible, but they do bring news from the front line across a wide sector. We have had a number of such voices this evening from different points of view within the Church. I only hope that you will be willing to include the bishops. They do not, as sometimes represented, sit at home all the time opening mail from the Prayer Book Society. Nor do they, thank goodness, sit all the time in Church House attending meetings of the General Synod. They go about their dioceses as practitioners, not just as administrators, and they join in the worship of a large number of parishes, colleges, schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Among these, there are places where the Prayer Book—and only the Prayer Book—seems fitting and proper. Those whose piety was formed by the Prayer Book, as mine was, may rejoice to find it. But there are also places—and not a few either—where the modern-language liturgies seem much more appropriate and where they have obviously become a real and living vehicle for the worship of those congregations. To call these services "trendy", to use a rather overworked word in some circles, is, I submit, a misjudgment of their quality.
The argument which was put forward yesterday in The Times, that it is only the bishops and clergy who, for some obscure reason, and right across the country, wish to foist new services upon unwilling congregations thereby stirring up no end of trouble for themselves, seems prima facie to be implausible, and in fact I find it unsupported by the evidence in my own diocese.
The ASB has established itself with surprising rapidity in the affections of a good many Anglicans, not all of them belonging to the younger generation either, and therefore not all of them discarding the Book of Common Prayer. I am well aware that to some of your Lordships this does not apply, to put it mildly; nor indeed is it compulsory that it should. But there may be a case for:
"laying aside all private interests, prejudices and partial affections",
in the words of that mighty prayer with which we begin each Session of this House, in order to respect in a proper Anglican spirit the prayer that has become congenial to others.
It is an interesting paradox that the Book of
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Common Prayer which on the whole, has the theology which lays great stress upon our state as miserable sinners who are unable of themselves to help themselves, should have made such an appeal to English people of a rather different temper. It may be that there is some law of spiritual compensation at work here. But one cannot help observing that some of the more ardent champions of the Prayer Book at the moment do seem very obviously formed by this kind of theology. The combination of Augustinian doctrine and state power may have seemed possible in the 16th century, but I believe that the mismatch is a good deal plainer in our own day.
I am afraid that if this Bill were to pass, it would actually do harm to those who love the Prayer Book and who wish to maintain its use in the eyes of their fellow worshippers in the Church of England who are of a different mind. For it will seem to them like a form of coercion by what could, in some parishes at any rate, be quite a small minority, and I submit that that would be contrary to natural justice, which it is the proper aim of Parliament to uphold.
I am aware that in this place it is a temptation to discuss the content of this Bill as if it were partly a constitutional question and partly a cultural one. I trust that noble Lords would not think well of the Lords Spiritual if they were to regard it primarily as either of those rather than as a religious question. To us, and I am sure also to many of your Lordships, it is a question of enabling a large variety of people —nowadays many with little in the way of biblical culture or family religious background—to worship within the national Church.
We may regret—I do regret—that the days are past when the young had to learn the Prayer Book Collects or the answers in the Catechism off by heart—at least, we may regret it safely now that we ourselves no longer have to do it. But if we were to think that we could legislate for such practices to be incorporated into the educational system that we now have, we should surely be making a great mistake and inviting disappointment. By the same token, I do not believe that in 1984 the cause of the Book of Common Prayer will be assisted by fresh legislation. It will be assisted only by trying to commend its treasures to those who have hitherto been ignorant of them, and in that process—and I speak as one who has corresponded at length, and I hope fruitfully, with Sir John Colville —we could and should be willing to co-operate.
9.25 p.m.
Lord Beswick: My Lords, we have heard a formidable case against this Bill from the Bench of Bishops. I am bound to say that I found myself wondering what a difference there would have been had those right reverend Prelates and the most reverend Primate joined us in, say, the Matrimonial Provisions Bill. Had they then have attended in such force, had they then given the same sort of lead, had they then employed the same debating skill, how much more chance we would have had against the skill of the noble and learned Lord who sits upon the Woolsack.
I rise with more than a little diffidence to support the Second Reading of this Bill, and I have to say that I have no great theological learning and I am not a member of any society within the Anglican Church. I speak before an imposing Bench of the Archbishop and the Bishops—I must say that I agree so much with my noble friend Lord Glenamara when he says it is a delight to see them—as a very humble rank and file member of our Church. I imagine I probably kneel for communion as regularly as the noble Lord, Lord Elton, and I have served as a member of a parochial church council; but I am bound to say to him that I just have not seen the lively democracy with which he said that this subject had been discussed in the parishes. I did not recognise what he was describing as being within his experience.
I humbly say to the most reverend Primate that all the provisions and all the protections about which he spoke as to the use of the Common Prayer Book just do not seem to have operated in many of the parishes. Of course I listened to what was said by the right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Chichester and the Bishop of Oxford, and we have to take account of what they say. They speak of two areas, but there are other areas in the country, and the experience there I think is somewhat different.
My dear wife occasionally says to me with great kindness that my grasp of doctrinal principle is not too deeply rooted, and I am sure she is right; but I would claim to have a love for, and a feeling for, the English language, and I would claim to have some knowledge and experience of judging when a message—in this case a Christian message—is getting over. On the first point, that of language, I ask to be forgiven if, in the interest of brevity, I say starkly what I feel about the language style of these alternative services.
Frankly, I am amazed at the sheer conceit of those who sat down to improve upon the language of the Book of Common Prayer. Amendment, adjustment, elimination of some repetition, yes. But to rewrite —for the sake of rewriting apparently—I just cannot understand. What they eventually produced seemed to me to have all the beauty and all the appeal of a circular from the Department of the Environment.
I have tried to understand the reasoning about this rewriting. It would seem that there was an honest and understandable desire to widen the appeal of the established Christian Church, and that would be a desire that I wholeheartedly share. But having decided the objective, the reasoning seems to have followed
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that of the BBC if they see a dwindling audience, or certain editors if they face a reducing readership. That reasoning is to popularise or, in other words, to cheapen the appeal, and that appears to be certainly the recipe of the BBC and the tabloid press. The quality of today's British tabloid press is sad enough, but infinitely more serious would be a cheapening of the Christian appeal. I have yet to learn of one new worshipper at the church which I attend who has been persuaded to join the congregation because of the use of this do-it-yourself language. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Home of the Hirsel, was absolutely right when he said he could see no reason for this new kind of language as a medium of recruiting into the Church of England. I should be delighted if some evidence could be given to me of people who had come into the congregation because of this use of the new service.
I make one last point. The most reverend Primate spoke of the delicate fabric of the relationship between Church and State. Much has been said about the implications of this Bill and that if it were carried through it would mean Parliament impinging upon the authority of the Church. In this country and in this age I see no danger whatsoever of Parliament wishing to usurp the authority or the responsibilities of the work of the Church: far from it.
I would venture to point to a more real and a more serious danger. If Parliament and the people who elect it choose to ignore our Church of England indeed that would mean decline of influence and ultimately complete impotence. I should like to emphasise this: it gives me pleasure to see so many from the Church of England hierarchy in the Chamber this evening. How great it would be if this was a common occurrence, instead of a special occasion, to try to dampen down the interests and enthusiasm of Members of a House of Parliament.
The value of the Church in our national life is not simply the celebration of the Eucharist or the preaching to a limited congregation. I want to widen the influence of the Anglican Church. I am sure we all take pride and satisfaction in the fact that if we have a national or a personal tragedy it is so often to the Church to whom people turn for comfort. I should like to feel that this reliance upon the Church by the nation, by individuals, not necessarily regular communicants, could be increased.
The most reverend Primate said that Parliament and Church were not in conflict. But as I see it, it is not a question of conflict that we are talking about here: it is a question of complement. How can we bring both Parliament and the Church closer together? Far from impinging upon the activities of the Anglican Church, this proposed Select Committee to study the Bill seems to me to be an example of how we could stimulate interest, how we could bring people together to consider how best things could be put over. If there are noble Lords here—the noble Lord, Lord Elton, seemed to be one of them—who think that this work could be best confined to the parochial church councils or to the higher committees, they are entitled to think it; but I see no great evidence that at the present time that they are making great headway.

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This Bill and the action of the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, in introducing it, would have been justified if only because it provides the opportunity and the incentive to the most reverend Primate to come to make the speech that he made. The speeches of the right reverend Prelates the Bishops of Chichester and Oxford I am sure will be studied very carefully. However, I still feel how wonderful it would be if they could agree with us that there was some merit in having this Bill and the implications of it considered honestlv by Members of the House of Parliament.
9.35 p.m.
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, following the example of my noble friend Lord Elton, I should explain that I, too, have been a church warden, possibly for longer than I should have been but not for such a variety of parishes as has my peripatetic and noble friend who sits on the Front Bench. Also, I happen to have held the office of High Steward of Norwich Cathedral and in that respect I am not elevated, as is the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Henderskelfe, through an archbishop peculiar or any other type of archbishop. The views which 1 express this evening are entirely my own and in no way reiterate those of anyone connected with Norwich Cathedral. Indeed, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich does not even know what I propose to say. and I hope that I shall not embarrass him by what I may say.
My Lords, I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Sudeley on the intellectual content of his speech, which was considerable. I do not think that his Bill has found many friends but it brought a goodly posse of bishops. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, was slightly unfair to the bishops' Benches. If such a turnout of bishops as we have seen this evening were to be a regular occurrence then they would not be doing the duty that they have to do. They are regular attenders and regular supporters of your Lordships' House, are greatly welcome when they appear and it is quite right that they should come in force this evening to defend their own patch, as it were.
My Lords, I believe that it would be wrong to give this Bill a Second Reading. Whether we like it or not, the Church of England has its own procedures set up by Parliament under which it can conduct itself and its services; and I think that it would be wrong for Parliament to interfere in that respect. If the parishes wish for certain services then they can have them and there is a procedure for that. But, of course, the Church of England is the Established Church and my noble friend Lord Elton let light into my noble friend Lord Sudeley for bringing in this Bill in the first place. I thought that that was slightly unfair because, as it is the Established Church, Parliament has certain rights and certain responsibilities in connection with it. The mere fact that this Bill has been presented and discussed this evening gives weight to that.
Having said that I do not think that we ought to give the Bill a Second Reading, I have a sneaking sympathy for my noble friend Lord Sudeley. The Church of England has undergone great changes, changes which it has brought largely upon itself. We have had in the
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variety of services, Series 1, Series 2, Series 3, the Alternative Series, Rite A and Rite B, and they are both very different things. The Book of Common Prayer, for all its formality and legality, seems to have become relegated. As soon as one gets used to one type of service, one finds that one is moved on to another. I suppose that this is done because one must have variety and cater for all tastes. We now have a kaleidoscope of services which can be used.
The most reverend Primate quite rightly said that there should be a generosity of approach towards services. Of course, the most reverend Primate is right. But the trouble is that if one has five or six different services one tends to like one over and above the other five. So that the mathematical statistics are that there is a five-to-one chance that one will be attending a service which one would prefer not to have had. I sometimes wonder whether this is a contributory factor to the churches not being as full as they might be. As my noble friend Lord Mottistone said, in an effort to draw in the non-attenders, we may unwittingly have turned away the regulars.
Instead of unity this variety of services has sometimes created disharmony, and there is certainly no evidence that the young people themselves automatically prefer the newer version. I sometimes think it might be another example of what modesty once compelled me to call "Ferrers law"—which says that everything has the reverse effect of that intended. Even the Lord's Prayer and the Creed are no longer constant in their use. I am bound to say I find this greatly disturbing. Many find it an irritant that at the most solemn part of the service there is commonality neither of use nor of diction, and that you have to concentrate and read where previously the response was automatic and natural.
I admire the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, who is not now in his seat, says he sticks to the original; so do I, but in my obstinacy to do so I find I have to remember which is the original and therefore the concentration goes. The distinctions between "on earth" and "in earth"; "who are in Heaven" and "which art in Heaven"; "I believe" and "We believe"; "thou" and "you"; and the fact that the president leads the service and not the priest or minister, I find greatly disturbing. This is tinkering with words, which improve little but destroy much. In an endeavour to provide something for everyone one wonders whether the purists and reformers have not squeezed out simplicity, tradition and beauty—and sometimes possibly reverence.
The most reverend Primate reminded us that the Church of England has not been alone in this great change. Indeed, it has not. The Roman Catholics, too, have been subjected to even more reforming zeal. One monseigneur said to me once, "When the Roman Catholics changed from Latin to vernacular, we had to move to the modern language; we did not have anything different. But you in the Church of England have had this magnificent language and yet you have dispensed with it"—and what a pity that is.
I well remember on one occasion having tea in your Lordships' House with a noble Lord and the right reverend Prelate the late Bishop of Leicester, Dr. Ronald Williams. We were talking about the

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vernacular and the Catholic service. The noble Lord who was with me said he always went to a Church of England service when he went abroad, and if he could not find one he used to go to the nearest Catholic church. He said, "I always knew where I was, the service was the same in every single country. Last year I went to Portugal, I did not understand a word except 'Ho Senor', to which the right reverend Prelate said, twinkling his eye as he always did, 'And that was the most important part of the service'."
I hope that this Bill will not get a Second Reading; I do not believe it is the right thing for us to do. But if the Church complains at this Bill, it is at least partly responsible for it. In their endeavour to try to find something for everyone, many feel that they have lost what they knew and have not got what they want. Maybe that is a reactionary view, but I fear it is one that some hold, and if the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, has used the vehicle of a parliamentary Bill to make his bleat, or, as the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, said in that most moving speech, a "gesture of disquiet", then I for one do not blame him.
9.44 p.m.
Lady Saltoun: My Lords, like the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, I hope that this Bill will not get a Second Reading, but I am still extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, for introducing it, because it gives an opportunity to some of us who know and love the Books of Common Prayer of 1662 and 1928 to say what we think. I am a member of the Scottish Episcopal Church where we have the lovely 1929 Prayer Book, which derives from the 1662 Church of England Prayer Book. So, why am I bothering? I am bothering because what happens in the Church of England one year happens in the Scottish Episcopal Church the next year. It is infectious, like the 'flu.
I am also extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, for his splendid speech and for what he said about lowering standards to attract a larger audience. I would suggest that the Church of England should try to put over the glories of its traditional services a bit harder, and that those who do not want those glories can join some other church which does not have them.
I think the average member of a church belongs to that church for one of two reasons. The first is that he was brought up to be a member of it by parents or guardians who were members too. The second is that he became a member of it by choice, preferring it either to another church or faith, or to no church or faith at all. Now the average church member is often a not very religious chap and he does not give a brass farthing for dogma of any kind. What he minds about is having the kind of service he likes and through which he feels he can make direct personal contact with the Almighty. To many, the alternative forms are downright offensive, and irritate them to the point where they can no longer worship in church.
To the average church member of middle age or older the Prayer Book is the Church of England. It is what distinguishes it from every other denomination. Apart from the sheer beauty of the words, there is, I think, another consideration. In a world of very rapid change, people can feel very lost and disorientated;
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and a church which is always the same, with the same ceremonies and the same words, can be like an anchor in a stormy sea, and the only thing they have left to cling to. Perhaps this applies more to older people, but it applies; and surely they, who are still the backbone of many congregations, do matter a little. To deny them the services they have grown up with and loved is just sheer intolerant, arrogant folly; but it is being done in the name of Christianity, just as people have in the past been tortured and massacred in the name of Christianity.
We are not asking very much. We are not trying to deny the alternative services to those who prefer them. All we ask is to have a small proportion of the available Church services according to the Book of Common Prayer and at times when older people who want them can reasonably attend—not early in the morning or late at night or on a weekday when their employment may make attendance difficult or impossible. I do not think it is a great deal to ask, and it is something that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has told us we are supposed to have. But we are not always getting it.
No one can be prosecuted for not attending church, not nowadays, and if your average churchgoer does not get what he wants he will just stay away, and so will what he puts in the plate stay away, and there will not be very much that anyone can do about it.
9.48 p.m.
Earl Waldegrave: My Lords, I too, should like to follow the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, and say that I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Sudeley for having brought this matter before your Lordships again this evening, although I might perhaps have wished that it could have been brought before us in some other form. It has enabled us to state the views that have been stated so cogently by very many speakers tonight and we have had the very great honour and advantage of hearing from the most reverend Primate a really generous and really important speech which has been most helpful and for which the whole Church I think must be most grateful that that speech will be on record.
I do not want to be uncharitable, but I am afraid that we have in these past 10 years—the Worship and Doctrine Measure was passed in 1974 and I made an inordinately long speech then so that I promise I will not make anything like so long a speech tonight—had very great assurances in high places, but I have not always been quite sure that lower down the line the promises and assurances have been carried out in quite the same way as we could have wished.
There is great sadness among so many of us that, despite these assurances, we so seldom hear those comfortable words. Perhaps we must put up with the change of words, the trivial words of the new language. But one sometimes wonders whether, through this trivial fiddling with language, comes the outward and audible sound—if I may parody these words from the catechism—of a far from trivial inward and spiritual change. That feeling that some of us have had is not wholly assuaged.
Of course, it is not only the Prayer Book but the Authorised Version of the Bible. We find in very few

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churches now the Authorised Version of the Bible on the lecterns—at any rate, in the village churches which I often visit. I know of at least one diocese where they were brought to the centre; I do not know whether voluntarily or by ordinance, and I shall not specify where the centre is or what the diocese is. But I know that after they got there most of them went to pulp, because there was not room on the small village lectern for both Bibles. I suppose that some incumbents asked, "What are we supposed to do with these?" so they went to pulp.
But I cannot go quite all the way with the noble Lord, Lord Elton. The democracy is there all right, and it is a splendid set-up; but it is sometimes rather overwhelmed by that other word which is often confused with democracy—that is, bureaucracy.
A really large and apparently growing bureaucracy is one of the weaknesses and not one of the strengths of the present Church of England. There they sit on some of the prime sites, as the land surveyors would say, in Westminster and in the centres of other cities and it must be an extremely expensive bureaucracy. One only hopes that the very large copyright royalties for the many volumes of the ASB—I heard that 2 million volumes have been sold and that the royalty is in the region of 40p—will help to pay for the bureaucracy. But I would prefer that the royalties were used to reduce the sometimes very heavy quotas that we have to pay in the parishes.
It is rather unfair when we are sometimes told, "If you want 1662. you have got to have 1662 hook, line and sinker. You have got to have the exhortations. You have got to have the Commination." The noble Lord, Lord Howard, raised that point. No, my Lords, we do not have to have that. My father was a priest. He was born in 1854 and died in 1936. He told me towards the end of his life that he had never heard read in a church, and had never read himself, one of the exhortations. That is quite a long time ago. When these new measures were being introduced we were told that if there was a division we could be compelled to have what we had had two years previously. This meant that if one had had Series 2 for two years, one would have to stick to Series 2 if there was a division. But what we had had for 150 years, not for two years, was something very much like the 1928 Prayer Book. When we tried to put the 1928 Prayer Book into law, we all knew how wrong this was. But nobody thought that we were doing anything illegal when we used in effect the 1928 Prayer Book.
Lord Howard of Henderskelfe: My Lords, I did not suggest that one had to have 1662 and nothing but 1662. I said that I was not sure that all those who talked about 1662 really appreciated what they were talking about.
Earl Waldegrave: My Lords, I know that that is what the noble Lord said, but I believe the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester mentioned that 1662 was not what we had been using—that we had been using 1928. I remember the surprise I felt when. 10 or 15 years ago, I was in the choir stalls of Westminster Abbey and saw there the 1928 Prayer Book. To make the legalistic point, as some parish
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clergy have done, that if you are asking for 1662 you are jolly well going to have it, is not quite "playing cricket". The Book of Common Prayer evolved without bureaucracy or Acts of Parliament. The exhortations were dropped and were not used. This was a very much more inexpensive way of modernising the Prayer Book than having all these Synods.
This is just what we were told the other day to do on a quite different subject. When we were discussing the Rates Bill we were told that an evolution, a convention, had grown up that local government did not go against central Government. Only if those conventional powers were exceeded did legislation have to be introduced to stop it. It is interesting to note—this must be a record—that while I am speaking here my son is at this moment speaking in another place. That is why I make the point that evolution applies just as much to this question as to civil politics. There will always be far too many variations. Clergymen like to use their own extempore prayers. It is trivial to say that they are illegal. We must not use blunt instruments.
My second point is that when the pamphlet of guidance which the noble Lord, Lord Elton, described to us is properly used, and we have the chance sometimes to hear the Prayer Book, it may be that the elderly will welcome it. I was born in 1905 but I still manage to go to church every Sunday at 8 o'clock, because the Prayer Book is then used. There used to be a very sensible service for elderly people: matins and communion. After matins, elderly people stayed behind if they had been unable to get to the 8 o'clock service. It would be charitable and kind if that arrangement could still be in existence, although I very much doubt whether there are many churches in which that still goes on.
What is the way forward from here? I agree with what has been said by most of the speakers tonight —that it would be unwise for us to vote a Second Reading to this Bill. Yet there is a paradox here; it is not wrong and it is not unwise, because the Queen is still the head of the Church—
The Earl of Lauderdale: She is the Protector, my Lords.
Earl Waldegrave: Yes. my Lords, the Protector of the Church—but she is the Defender of the Faith, on my coins anyway. I want to suggest that there may be a precedent and a convention or custom which we might use here. This very day (and this is a coincidence that may have some significance) we have heard two short debates. They have not been Unstarred Questions which a Minister must answer, and they have not been Bills. These short debates might be the way in which we could deal with such matters from time to time, without infringing any constitutional rules and without getting mixed up in trying to legislate about worship or doctrine in the Church—which has, rightly and properly, been by Act of Parliament delegated to the synod and signed, sealed and delivered in the Worship and Doctrine Measure.
Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, would consider that if he were not to take this debate to its logical conclusion and demand a vote on a Second

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Reading, or to set up a Select Committee (which I really do feel would be rather a horror and should not be done), he could withdraw his Bill now and consider some other proper parliamentary form by which we can discuss these matters from time to time, if enough people think that it is worth doing.
10.2 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Derby: My Lords, several references have been made to the fact that there is a large attendance of bishops this evening. There are six people in this House who were in days past principals of theological colleges. Five of them are on these Benches, and one is on the Cross-Benches in the person of the noble Lord, Lord Blanch. All of us ceased to be principals of theological colleges long before the current debate began, so we cannot produce out of our heads the kind of evidence that would answer some of the criticisms which have been made. I would ask your Lordships to remember that the principals of theological colleges are a bit like Saint Sebastian; arrows are shot at them from all directions. I ask you to treat them and those who work with them with the justice that is characteristic of this nation; that you listen to both sides of the evidence and take little account of only one side—which can so often be distorted.
My purpose is to speak first of my own present experience. Over the past two years in the diocese of Derby the suffragan bishop and I and the two archdeacons have visited every parish of the diocese to discuss with the people there a wide range of questions about their work. These have been parish meetings and not simply meetings with parochial church councils. We did not raise directly (because we have raised this question before) matters of the forms of service in use. At only one of the 78 meetings which I have attended has the issue which we are discussing this evening been brought forward in any contentious fashion.
The last rural deanery that I completed—one of our most country ones—has 16 parishes in it and in only one of the 16 is the Alternative Service Book used at all. There is one parish in the patronage of the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, where Series 2 is used for the communion, but in his other parish it is the Prayer Book and the Prayer Book only which is the religion of the Protestants there, or whoever they may happen to be.
Only yesterday morning I received representations from one parochial church council about the needs and the traditions of the parish in connection with the appointment of the new incumbent. One sentence in the representations reads:
"Both rites A and B and the Book of Common Prayer have been in regular use".
Later on in the morning the incumbent of another parish came to see me and said that they have abandoned the Alternative Service Book for evensong and gone back to the Prayer Book. Although this is not a communion service following matins they have on certain Sunday evenings of the month a full Prayer Book communion service following evensong.
It is very easy to produce criticisms of the services in the Alternative Service Book. It is also easy to produce
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criticisms of some of the language in the Book of Common Prayer, but the exercise of detailed and often trifling criticism is not edifying in the very least. There has been singularly little effort, in my judgment, to understand the purpose of the production of the Alternative Service Book and the various services included in it. Only yesterday there was an article in The Times which criticised the Alternative Service Book for leaving out parts of the Prayer Book which have not been in use in the Church of England—like the long exhortation in the communion—since 1928. This kind of ignorant criticism has been frequently produced. If there is to be a proper assessment of our forms of service all the facts need to be looked at together.
Part of the reason for the lack of replies from bishops to the inquiry which was sent to us by the Prayer Book Society was the offensiveness of a great deal of the attack, both on us personally and on the Alternative Service Book. The offensiveness appeared even in the polished propaganda of the 600. In the glossy document of essays which was sent out I have found what I think is the only place where I have been described in writing as being a "hornet". The other hornets who were supposed to be put in a bottle with me were credited with opinions which I do not possess. I was there partly because I served on the Church of England Liturgical Commission for the first 20 years of its life, and after that on various revision committees of the General Synod, including the one which revised the Series 3 communion service. I can only say out of my experience that what we were trying to do was totally different from what is alleged. We were not engaged, and never thought of ourselves as being engaged, in any destructive work, and nor did we see ourselves engaged in any new effort of recruitment.
I think that there are parishes where some people have been drawn partly into the life and worship of the Church through the new services, but what is incontrovertible is that many people in past (fairly recent) generations were repelled by the Prayer Book services. That is why, during the 1930s in particular, great efforts were made to liven up the Prayer Book services—to decorate them in various ways, to provide themes, and so on. It is partly in reaction to this rejection of the Prayer Book services that the Alternative Service Book was produced.
As with anything new, we always have to grow into it. I had great hesitation in the beginning over making the change from the use of "thou" language to "you" language. But through actual experience, I have come to find it deeply reverent. But I also find myself capable of going round the diocese and joining without any difficulty at all in the Prayer Book service, or what is alleged to be the Prayer Book service, modified by evolution, the vicar's whim, or whatever it may be. We always have to grow into any new world of thought. People had to make a great change from medieval thinking to Renaissance and the Reformation. There have been changes of thought of great importance since then.
When there are changes of thought of these kinds, these have to be expressed in liturgy. But this is not a mere Church of England activity. Throughout the Anglican Communion and throughout Christendom the liturgical movement has been leading to changes in

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public worship. I can only testify to the benefits that I have had as a result of this movement and to my own experience of the value of the Alternative Service Book. Lord Glenamara spoke movingly. Like him, I have found solace and comfort in the Prayer Book and its services. For 18 years I taught it, not simply as something dry as dust, but as something which was part of a much wider teaching of worship. But I also find solace and comfort in the Alternative Service Book, which is full of the Bible. This is one great thing about it. By its new selection of readings, it provides a great body of teaching, devotion and meditation.
We need to remember that, while some young people respond warmly to the Prayer Book when they are introduced to it, others find its world of discourse almost impossible to enter into. But the spirit of any service can be spoiled by the way in which it is conducted. In my experience, this happens both over Prayer Book services now and in the past and over the new services. Sensitiveness is always required in the leading of public worship. As I see the situation, much of the criticism of the modern services is due to their accompaniments rather than to the structure and wording of the services themselves. I hope that your Lordships here and people elsewhere will distinguish between the actual services and the way in which they are presented, because they can be presented very differently indeed.
It is practice which is so often disturbing. But there is vitality both in the old and in the new. Last Sunday morning I took part in a celebration of the Holy Communion according to Rite A of the Alternative Service Book. It was a down-town church where the electoral roll is comprised pretty well of the regular members of the congregation and that congregation only. It is the kind of parish which is largely alienated from Christian faith. That service was vital. In the evening I was preaching at a Prayer Book evensong. After the third collect there was a wider selection of prayers. Is that Prayer Book, or is it not, for the purpose of this debate? But the service again was a vital one.
It is important to see the possibilities in the different sorts of service. There are unwise clergymen, just as there are unwise politicians. There are pig-headed clergymen, just as there are pig-headed politicians. I greatly regret some of the misguided retorts which have been made by various people to those who have argued the case for keeping the Prayer Book as a live form of worship within the Church. But there are also wise and reasonable, as well as knowledgeable and understanding, clergymen, and I know a very large number of them.
Our major need at the present time in the worship of the Church of England seems to me to be that we should defer to one another and take note of one another's views. But in this process, decisions in accordance with the law as it now stands must be made by the parochial church council. The noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, said that it is "difficult"—I think that was his word—or "impossible", for lay people to disagree with the vicar. Believe me, it is nothing of the kind! It may be difficult in a few situations. It is easy to disagree with the chairman of the parochial church council, just as it is easy to disagree with the president of the
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diocesan synod, and disagreement often shows itself. Those who find themselves up against difficulties over parochial decisions have their own remedy.
The noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, quoted the guide for parishes about the worship and doctrine Measure, and he said that,
"the incumbent is entirely free to make the decisions about the options within the alternative services."
That depends on the attitude of the parochial church council; and paragraph 12 admits this, but goes on to say,
"In some parishes, however, there is a period of discussion and experiment leading up to the production of a parish edition of whichever form of service is preferred. Such editions customarily include those options which the parish intends to use and exclude the rest".
But the document then goes on to advise that the decisions made at any time about the forms of service or about the options within them should come up for review after a certain period of time. The parochial church council must make the decisions. If they discharge their responsibilities rightly, they are bound to consider the views of the different groups of people represented in the parish. Twenty per cent. of the membership of the electoral roll need only consider themselves, and that seems to me to be a grave limitation in the Bill which is before us.
The parochial church council must show consideration first for minorities, and particularly for those who live and move and have their being in the Book of Common Prayer. Secondly, they must give consideration to those on the fringe of life of the Church who regard themselves as loyal members but seldom attend church services, perhaps only coming at Christmas or Easter and possibly contributing to the urgent repairs of the church building. They must be considered.
Thirdly, the parochial church council should give consideration to those who are not yet members. It is not sufficient to be inward looking, and in all our own debates about what we prefer and find most helpful these people who are outside the fellowship need to be given very careful concern. Some may well be attracted, coming into a Prayer Book service, and saying, as people said in St. Paul's time,
"Truly God is among you indeed".
But very few people nowadays make their way into faith in Christ and the fellowship of the Church through sharing in public worship—at any rate, at the beginning.
Then, fourthly, the parochial church council must consider those who are most regular in their attendance, who administer the life of the church to which they belong: clean the building; do the flowers; run the organisations: give £1 in every £20 of their take-home pay and support their giving or other giving by deed of covenant. They are always bearing the burden and heat of the day.
If the desires of that group of people can be completely over-ruled by those who do none of those things, and who perhaps support only the summer fete or the Christmas bazaar, they may well feel resentment. It would, of course, be wrong if they did, because they ought to have concern for those others. But they have a commitment, while there is no

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commitment at all involved in signing the electoral roll, unless a person is resident outside the parish, when there must be regular church attendance for six months. But residence qualifying with baptism for being on the roll is no mark of commitment at all.
We do not want a situation (as has already been suggested this evening) in which different groups of church members are joined in battle with one another. We must keep open the possibility of open-minded discussion and joint decision. I believe that the passing of this Bill would prevent this kind of discussion, because people would be ranged on competitive sides. If the Bill is passed and goes on through further stages, what sanctions do your Lordships believe can be applied? When the law has been applied to public worship in the past, men, including clergymen, have gone to prison. Is it the intention that that sanction should be applied in the future?
The electoral roll is an electoral roll. It gives the authority to elect. Its membership does not exist for itself. Through the electoral roll elections are made to the parochial church council, Deanery Synod, Diocesan Synod, and General Synod. Why do those who so much want the Prayer Book not share in this synodical system? Very few seem to do so. Invitations have been extended to them this evening, and I hope that some will be accepted.
All these different grades of representative bodies were involved in the making of the Alternative Service Book, and as it went through its different stages I was myself involved in a wide range of informal consultations in many parishes and deaneries in our own diocese. It is vital that those who are concerned should be involved in any decision to keep the Prayer Book as a live option.
The position in the Church of England now is very different from what it was when the first English Prayer Book was authorised in 1549. There was no possibility of dissent from if, the old could not be used. That is not now the situation. The freedom still exists for the Prayer Book to be used, and my evidence is that it is widely used; and where it is not and there is bitter feeling, there is a remedy.
It has been suggested that bishops have great powers. Well, we have no power to order around parishes or clergymen. If we were to attempt to do so in most areas of the Church's life, we should again be up against severe criticism. We can simply teach and persuade, and do this individually and corporately. Despite the small collection of disturbing remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, I hope that your Lordships will be reassured by the knowledge that we do attempt to teach and give guidance and seek to have fairness of decision in the life of the parishes in our dioceses.
10.24 p.m.
Lord Bishopston: My Lords, I feel that we have tonight had an extremely good and wide-ranging debate, covering a variety of subjects, and I believe that every speech we have heard has been of great importance. We are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, for the opportunity that he has given us to look at this matter. We have had his contribution and
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that of my noble friend Lord Glenamara. They have both struck a nostalgic note, to which I am sure all of us respond. There has been the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Home, who referred to a variety of things that go on in church, including the fact that Sidney Carter's delightful folk music is not always out of place. We have heard the noble Lord, Lord Howard, who has the great virtue of having his own chapel where one can, if one wishes, have the Book of Common Prayer all the time. The noble Lord also expressed concern for other churches.
The noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, referred to a collection of bishops. I think that he called them a posse. Maybe, the word a "surplus" of bishops would be more appropriate. I am not saying that any of them are unwelcome and that we have too many of them tonight. It is a tribute to the noble Lord. Lord Sudeley, that so many of our Church leaders have come to listen and also to indicate their concern over what may be done to deal with the situation. The noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, mentioned—rightly I think—that this was an opportunity for us to say what we think. That may be long overdue. The noble Earl, Lord Waldegrave, referred to the important speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Some of the remarks that I wish to make were best summed up by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby when he referred to those who are alienated from the Christian faith and put in a plea for the minorities and those on the fringes of the Church. During my time as a Church Commissioner, I have dealt with pastoral measures. It has not been uncommon to find churches that have services that are best described by the words Calvinistic Sovereign Grace. There is therefore the variety that the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Derby, seeks.
I suppose that it would not be inappropriate to say that although the noble Lord. Lord Sudeley, wants a Select Committee to look at all these aspects, many would agree that we have had very much the effect of a Select Committee this evening; so many views have been expressed with great sincerity and passion.
In speaking from the Opposition Dispatch Box, I must make clear that on this Private Member's Bill I speak only for myself. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, has made the same point. I also speak as a Member of your Lordships' House who is a regular worshipper Sunday by Sunday and week by week and who therefore has what might be called a working and worshipping knowledge of the finer details of the matters now before the House. That knowledge and experience has been gained not only as a person in the pew over a lifetime but also as a former Second Church Estates Commissioner in another place and still a Church Commissioner but not a member of the General Synod, although I have stood for election.
When claims are made that some people do not speak with any knowledge of what goes on. it is important to recognise that in synodical government, the man in the pew has a say at the local level, the deanery level and the diocesan level, and in the General Synod, which is answerable to those who elect it. When my noble friend Lord Glenamara rightly queries the so-called democracy of synodical government, most of us in all parties should like to

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think that our parties have that same kind of answerability, accountability and the ability to listen, as I believe, is true in many parts of our Church. But of course the answer to all these problems is for the man in the pew and for the elector in local government, in national Government or in the Church, to know what are his rights and to take his place in expressing his opinion.
In considering whether to give the Bill a Second Reading, noble Lords will bear in mind not only the constitutional aspects but also the consequences of reversing what has been called long-established and accepted procedure. Surely, those who want to stand fast in favour of tradition in Church matters will not seek changes without full consultation between Church and state even at this stage. Most of us would I think admit that the initiative should come from the General Synod itself.
Concern has been expressed about the role and the usage of the Book of Common Prayer in the Church, with some very strong claims that the procedures to ensure its use have not been adequate or, if they have, that they have not been observed. Indeed, we are grateful for the presence of the right reverend Prelates, who tonight have afforded the House the benefit of a reply from the Church and, if I may say so, have shown clear evidence of their concern about the matters put forward by noble Lords; they have not only answered some of the allegations made but have also made suggestions whereby something may be done about it and changes brought about.
There are at least two aspects which need our attention. One is the important constitutional aspect, to which reference has been made, whereby the Second Reading and the passage of the Bill would— notwithstanding the supremacy of Parliament—be putting the long-established and accepted procedures regulating the relationship of Church and state into reverse. As the most reverend Primate reminded us, it was in fact 110 years ago in the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 that Parliament legislated for the Church without the Church's consent. We must ask ourselves tonight whether a Private Member's Bill is the occasion for us to go back to a situation of so long ago. I suggest that there could be problems if we did.
The Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 1975 came before Parliament at that time and the then Archbishop of Canterbury in this House asked:
"Ought a Christian Church, through its own chief pastors, ministers and laity, to have the ordering of its own forms of worship?"
He said:
"I do not believe that there is a single Church in Christendom which would not answer, 'Yes, a Christian Church ought to have the ordering of its own forms of worship'".
He then went on to say:
"Certainly every province of the world-wide Anglican Communion would say this". [Official Report, 14/11/74; cols. 868–869.]
I believe that these words have been echoed by the noble Lords here this evening. In the other place my successor as Second Church Estates Commissioner at that time introduced the Measure. The debate, in which my noble friend Lord Glenamara took part— then as Lord President of the Council and Leader of
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the House of Commons (it should be noted, under a Labour Government)—lasted seven hours. Therefore, one can be sure that all points of view, many of them expressed here tonight, were taken into account. In fairness to my noble friend, although he did not make the kind of speech which he has made tonight, one could read into it some of the concerns which he has expressed this evening. I know of his anxiety to ensure that the measure was carried out in the way in which we thought it should be.
The next question concerns the wording of the Measure and whether the Book of Common Prayer has been able to be used in the way intended. Allegations have been made by some noble Lords about the procedure in which the parson, the parochial church council and the person in the pew have a say in what forms of service are used. As I say, we need that kind of democracy in our political parties and, indeed, in our trade unions, the CBI and other organisations, with people taking part. It is no good people grumbling about the organisation or the procedures if they do not have their say and exercise their rights. We and the Church might concern ourselves with ways in which that can be done. I do not believe that the political parties can be of very much help there. Nevertheless, it is important.
The Church has been very forthcoming with information and literature about the rights of those who can have a say. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, referred to the pamphlet on worship and doctrine, which 1 have here. It might be better if that pamphlet was summarised a little more, made shorter and made more available so that people can better understand it. It is rather a long document, but it ought to be more easily available.
However, there is hardly any excuse for not knowing that the Book of Common Prayer is still one of the two books of prayer for the Church, because in my ASB in the preface, right at the start so that people can know, it says:
"The Church of England has traditionally sought to maintain a balance between the old and the new. For the first time since the Act of Uniformity, this balance and its public worship is now officially expressed in two books, rather than in one"—
not one book, but two books.
"The Alternative Service Book (1980), as its name implies, is intended to supplement the Book of Common Prayer, not supersede it."
That is most important, and there is no reason for a congregation to say that we have no alternative because our Prayer Book says right at the start what our rights are. Later the preface says:
"Christians have become readier to accept that, even within a single church, unity need no longer be seen to entail strict uniformity of practice. The provision of alternative services is to be welcomed as an enrichment of the Church's life rather than as a threat to its integrity."
There we have a summary of what has been said from the Benches this evening.
How does one sum up? In favour of the Bill is that it can be said that if passed through Second Reading and referred to a Select Committee the whole matter, the whole controversy about the role of the Book of Common Prayer, can be debated, no matter, incidentally, how limited the numbers of those concerned may be. We all know of course of clergy

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who, in order to satisfy what may be a minority wanting the BCP in the parish, have put on special services which have not been well attended and have had to be terminated. If this Bill went through, the Church would have to put on services whether or not they were attended. But the fact is that they can still be available.
Having heard the debate and the views of the Church's representatives, noble Lords may well be satisfied that the provisions do ensure that the ASB is only an alternative to the BCP, and the right reverend Prelates have referred to steps taken since the last debate, as indeed have the noble Lords, Lord Sudeley and Lord Glenamara. So their words have not been unheeded, and doubtless of course the views expressed tonight will be taken into account.
I believe that this debate should be seen as one concerned with the many millions who attend church—more, it seems, than attend football matches—and who have grown to know and to love all forms of service, including the Book of Common Prayer, of course. It has been claimed that some have been discouraged from church-going because of the changes in relation to the Book of Common Prayer. I know from experience that when special regard has been paid to some with that point of view and that need, the support has not always been forthcoming. But what about the younger people? What about the families and the young children who, I feel sure, we all welcome to our church and of whom it can be said, of course, that our delights far exceed their distraction? They have come to know and to love the ASB series, and they would not wish to be dictated to by Parliament or anyone else as to the form of services they use.
Many millions of younger people can also see beauty in the ASB. Indeed many of them know very little about the Book of Common Prayer if they are of the younger, newer generations. It is good to see people from all walks of life, of all colours and origins, streaming into our Anglican churches, and indeed into churches of all denominations, to experience the form of service which gives them an opportunity to worship, to share a fellowship, and to strengthen the bond between them and their families and their Creator, in a world which sorely needs what inspiration a strong faith can offer. I believe, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said a few moments ago, that membership of the Church is not only for church people; it has to minister to a wider world.
I want to end with a quotation which I think is important and which may well give us a perspective. I have been thinking as I have sat here, as I am sure have other noble Lords, about what the world outside, with all its problems, its concerns with defence, health, social security, unemployment and all the troubles of our time, may think of a Chamber debating the finer points, no matter how important they may be. I want to quote from a speech made by Sir Stafford Cripps in the other place on 23rd October 1947. I quote it because I have carried this with me for many years because Sir Stafford Cripps was my MP and led to my becoming a Christian Socialist. I quote his words:
"I wish that today our country could refresh its heart with a deep draught of that Christian Faith which has come down to us over
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2,000 years, and has, over those centuries, inspired the peoples of Europe to fresh efforts and new hopes. It is that spirit and not our own material hopes and difficulties that can be the most potent source of our inspiration, call it by what name you will; self sacrifice honour, love or comradeship: it is the strongest power in our lives, and at this moment of deep difficulty in our history, we need its supporting strength as never before."
I believe that that gives the perspective that the Church has a worldwide role and that we have to make sure that our procedures, our liturgy, our worship and our doctrine respond to the needs of the time. Noble Lords may be grateful for the opportunity which the noble Lord, Lord Sudeley, has afforded us tonight to debate this matter. They may well be grateful to those who brought the Bill to our attention and for the opportunity to express themselves with all their sincerity and forthrightness. Those who have the responsibility for conducting the affairs of the Church —that includes all of us, of course—can read what has been said and I think would do well to take heed. I believe that the remedy lies with the man in the pew, and it is our task to make him, and the world at large, see the relevance of the faith for which we stand.
10.41 p.m.
The Lord Chancellor (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone): My Lords, when my noble friend Lord Sudeley introduced the debate he said that he would be trying to assess at the end of it what the feeling of the House should be. When I heard him say that I assumed that he would try to take into account the feeling of the House as regards what would be done at the end of the debate by way of a Division or no Division.
I hope that I am not mistaking the feeling of those, some of whom sympathised with my noble friend and some of whom sympathised rather less, when I say that there is an almost overwhelming sense that I have received at the end of the debate that we would very much rather that there was no Division and that he did not press this matter to a Division.
Noble Lords: Hear, hear!
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I agreed enormously with what was said by my noble friend Lord Waldegrave who in many respects sympathised with my noble friends Lord Sudeley and Lord Home of the Hirsel; but the noble Earl pointed out that it would be very easy to have had this debate on a Motion. Even if the House wanted a Select Committee —which for various reasons I shall try to persuade the House it should not do—that could be done by a simple Motion.
However, we are faced with a Bill and it is a Bill that I very much hope will not be pressed. I say that to my noble friend. I would not have said it. It formed no part of my planned speech, but I respond in that way to what he said simply because of what he said at the beginning of his own speech.
The Church of England is by law established, and although my noble friend Lord Elton and the noble Lords, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, and Lord Bishopston, said that they were speaking their own opinions, I too am speaking my own opinion in the sense that I shall say nothing which I do not sincerely

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believe. It has been thought right that a Government spokesman should conclude the debate before my noble friend replies. I speak in a real sense for the Government. That does not mean that I do not believe what I shall say, but it does mean that I am not going to say a great number of other things which I should very much have liked to have said if I had not been speaking for the Government.
I start by saying: what is the Church of England? I listened with some emotion to the passionate defence of the Authorised Version of the Prayer Book by the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara; but both as a lawyer and as a member of the Church of England, I was almost horrified to hear him create the impression in the early part of his speech that the Church of England was created by law. It is established by law, and the Queen is not its head but its supreme governor; but it is not created by law. The Church of England is either part of the body of Christ or it is nothing. It is either part of Christ's holy catholic and apostolic church or it is nothing, and far better wound up. But the Prayer Book itself—and I know the noble Lady will forgive me quoting from Article 20—says
"The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men"—
which gives her rather a poor look out. But, at any rate, it is more than a creation of law.
The Church of England is the mother Church of a group of Churches circling the globe. That group of Churches retains the historic episcopate (as we call it) and at the same time proclaims some of the principal doctrines of catholic Christianity of the West and, at the same time, of the Protestant Reformation. It is in the same communion as the Episcopal Church in Scotland to which the noble Lady belongs, not the established Church of that part of the Kingdom. It is of the same group of churches as the Church of Ireland (disestablished more than a century ago) of the Church in Wales (disestablished in my lifetime) of the Protestant Episcopal Churches of America and Canada, of Churches in Australia and New Zealand, of the Church in South Africa and sister Churches in North and South India. For historic reasons, it retains a legal establishment in England; but, as has been repeatedly recalled (particularly from the Bishops' Bench) over the past 150 years Parliament has deliberately distanced itself from the internal management of its structures, doctrines and disciplines. It has done so continuously and it has done so cumulatively over the years from the resumption of the debates in the Convocations in the 19th Century to the last and most complete step taken by the Measure in 1974 when Parliament and the Church mutually agreed that doctrine and liturgy in the Church of England had best be left to the internal structures and organisms of the Church itself.
Of course, it is true—nor should we ever try to forget—that the Church of England is the trustee of some of the most valuable parts of our religious heritage. Some part of this consists in stone and mortar. St Paul's, Westminster Abbey, York Minster and Canterbury Cathedral are incomparable parish churches. With other episcopal Churches, and thus not alone, the Church of England is also the inheritor of one of the great liturgies of Christendom expressed in almost magical language, which exists as a norm but
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never as a bed of Procrustes, throughout the Anglican Communion in various forms: in Scotland, in parish churches in Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand—in most of which I have worshipped—in Ghana, where I have worshipped, and over the African continent.
It is always recognisable but the details of its worship—and here I am merely reiterating in a slightly different form what came from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby and, I think, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester—vary almost indefinitely if one looks at the actual words of individual prayers. Yet, in all the forms in which it is found and also like all living things which are still evolving, the genius of Cranmer, Archbishop and martyr, can still be unmistakably discerned in them all.
It is into this extremely sensitive spiritual area, with all its nuances, with all its associations, with all its implications for Church, state and society, that this Bill has been introduced for Second Reading. I must say that I listened with great care, I think, to almost every word of this debate. Statistically speaking, the supporters of my noble friend Lord Sudeley devoted exactly 60 seconds to the contents of the Bill, and that was beginning with the 15th minute of my noble friend's speech. It is with the contents of the Bill that we must be concerned if this matter is to be pressed to a Division. This is not an academic debate, but a debate on the Second Reading of a Bill, with a Motion to follow.
I am bound to say that if one looks at the contents of the Bill one has seen why my noble friend has devoted just 60 seconds to it, and they were 60 very remarkable seconds in the 15th and 16th minutes of his speech. What he said—and I took down almost his exact words—was that it was not the object of this Bill to appear on the statute book, but to set up a Select Committee. Well, my Lords, I have never heard the Second Reading of a Bill proposed in language of that sort unless, of course, it was not proposed to press it to a Division.
But if it is to be taken seriously as a Bill, I have to say that for the reasons given by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester, it is anachronistic, it is constitutionally unsound, it is unworkable, it is unenforceable (indeed, without any machinery for enforcement as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said), and, in so far as democracy is, or ought to be, applicable to a Christian community, undemocratic.
Incidentally, it misuses the electoral roll for the purposes for which the electoral roll ought never to have been used. The electoral roll, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said, is intended to be used for the purpose of electing people to the parochial church council. I venture to suggest, with great respect to my noble friend Lord Sudeley, and those who are associated with him, that no other Christian community, established or disestablished, in this twentieth century could tolerate such treatment at the hands of a secular power after the Measure of 1974. If a similar attempt were made upon the internal affairs of the Kirk Assembly of the established Church of Scotland, let us say. to re-establish episcopacy

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—because Parliament is quite strong enough to do that (it is, after all. as my noble friend suggested, sovereign) —fiery crosses would be lit in the heather from John O'Groats to the Sol way Firth. If such an intrusion were to be made (for Parliament is sovereign) into the affairs of the Baptist Union, or the Methodist Conference, there would be riots in Wales, and Lord Soper would come down to this House—I am sorry he is not here now—and rend his cassock at the blasphemy.
There must, of course, be some kind of limit on the activities of established Churches merely because they are established, whether the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, or the Church of England, but the establishment of their very different forms of Church government is, I believe, of very great advantage to both countries, and a want of sensitivity to the integrity and self-respect of the clergy and laity of the Church of England such as would be displayed if this Bill were allowed to become law would, I think, be recognised as intolerable by any self-respecting Christian community.
I said this Bill is unworkable, because it depends (first look at Clause 3(1)) upon the opinion of the incumbent as to what is the principal service, and the incumbent is me whom ex hypothesi my noble friend does not trust. It has to be his opinion of the service which, but for the Bill, would be most frequently attended, when ex hypothesi after the Bill became law that service would no longer exist, or would not exist at the same time. I said it is unworkable because the service out of the Book of Common Prayer, which is to take its place, is neither defined nor designated: not denned—and how many variations on it we have already heard this evening—and not designated as to which service is meant. It could, for aught I know, be the churching of women or the commination service, for aught the Bill says it could.
I said it was unenforceable, and that point was touched on by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby: and both gave the same reason basically. The Bishop of Chichester took us through the history of the attempts to legislate from the mid-19th century onwards. It is not a very reassuring picture because every time Parliament has attempted to legislate it has either tried to put some poor old clergyman in prison for having some incense or something, or else it has been totally ignored, like the rejection by the House of Commons of the Prayer Book of 1928, which as several noble Lords have said is usually recognised as the Book of Common Prayer today. It is therefore unenforceable, and no attempt has been made in the draft to enforce it—quite rightly, too, because it cannot be done. There is no compulsion, incidentally, on that minority who are on the electoral roll but, as the right reverend Prelate says, have no commitment to the rest of the congregation, ever to attend a service. My noble friend might at least have put into his Bill a provision such as that which occurred in the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity, that if they did not go every Sunday they would be fined 400 marks.
I said it was undemocratic because it gives not a veto but a power of compulsion on a quite inconsiderable minority upon whom no kind of reciprocal duty or responsibility is imposed. When I compare this wild,
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slipshod arrangement with the very careful safeguards of the measure of 1974 which this Bill would override, I am overcome with the presumption of its proponents.
I note what has been said about theological colleges—I have never ventured into one myself—but my noble friend has nothing about theological colleges in his Bill. It deals solely with services in parochial life. He could have done that just as well in a Motion. I am told, of course, that the real object is to set up a Select Committee. But surely it must be obvious to your Lordships that if one thing were required to make the Measure even more objectionable than the Bill itself, it is the suggestion that it be referred to a Select Committee instead of the will of the House through its usual ordinary Committee procedures. I would have thought that, if nothing else could be agreed, it would have been considered obvious that a constitutional Bill of this importance and this degree of controversy would be taken in the ordinary way on the Floor of the House.
My Lords, I understand that no prior consultation of any kind took place through the usual channels, either upon the question whether and, if so, which Members of the House might be prepared to serve on such a committee, or, in a sense worse still, what effect the appointment of such a committee might be expected to have on the existing commitments of the staff of the House. I have made the necessary inquiries. The House does not really have resources to handle more than one ad hoc Select Committee at a time. There is already a Select Committee considering two Private Members' Bills relating to small charities—a typical example, one might think, of the proper function of a Select Committee. I am informed that that committee is not likely to report until June or July, and there are already plans for a further Select Committee in the pipeline which would take precedence over this one. Thus, even if there were not weightier arguments against it, my noble friend's proposal would disrupt the existing programme, and embarrass those who are responsible for deploying the staff.
There are, none the less, grave reasons why if the Bill were to be given a Second Reading, it should not go to a Select Committee and for that purpose I refer—and I think I need only to refer—to the leader in The Times newspaper this morning.
"In effect"—
says The Times—
"it would be a committee of Parliament charged with chivvying and cajoling such bodies as theological colleges into altering their liturgical customs to favour the Book of Common Prayer, in place of their alleged present neglect of it. This is not really appropriate work for such a body: and inside the church—particularly in the theological colleges—it would be enormously resented. It would also make nonsense of the central principle of the 1974 Worship and Doctrine Measure, that the Church of England, within limits laid down by Parliament, should take control of its everyday affairs where liturgy and doctrine is concerned. That is in turn central to the looser relationship between church and state which has gradually evolved this last half century, which is fundamentally important for the church's well-being, and which must be allowed to evolve further at its own speed not accelerated or reversed for the advantage of specific causes, however worthwhile they may be."
I said that I was giving the best attention that I could to the Bill on behalf of the Government. There are a very great number of other things that I should have

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liked to say on my own behalf, but which I refrain from saying at this hour, and also because of the position where I stand. I am not less an admirer of the Book of Common Prayer than anyone who has supported this Bill tonight. It has its weaknesses but it has its magic, and it is of its magic that I am most conscious when I pray in church. None the less, I would say to my noble friend: "You have had your day in court now for the second time in two years. I believe that the overwhelming sense of the House is that you should not take this further tonight, and that instead you should put down Motions from time to time, as and when you feel that the situation demands it. But do not try to impose shackles on the Church of England which, to the great advantage of Parliament as well as of the Church, have been forsworn by the Measure of 1974."
11.3 p.m.
Lord Sudeley: My Lords, the hour is late, so possibly it is the feeling of the House that I should not sum up in detail. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor quoted from a leader in The Times. The leader in the Daily Telegraph expressed the hope that noble Lords would not be led astray by the forensic skill of the Lord Chancellor—
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I hope that my noble friend will let me intervene for a moment. It did not say "led astray"; it said "bamboozled". And I ask myself what, in my public life, have I ever done to have such a gross charge made against my personal character? I do not bamboozle Parliament.
Lord Sudeley: My Lords, I used an adjectival form of a softer vein. I thought it was more appropriate—
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I hope that my noble friend will either disavow the charge contained at the end of that disgraceful leading article, or else that he will not repeat it or alternatively he will try to justify it. When in my public life, I ask my noble friend, have I ever attempted to bamboozle Parliament? If he cannot show an example, I hope that he will disavow the sentiment.
Lord Sudeley: My Lords, the sentiment would be better if it had been expressed in a softer vein. I used the expression "led astray", not "bamboozled". I think it is the feeling of the House that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor is perfectly correct, that the Bill would not be carried on Second Reading. But I should like to thank very much all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and also the right reverend Prelates. Chiefly, I should like to thank very much indeed the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. The reason I particularly want to thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury is because the principal value and point of this debate has been the very clear terms in which he has expressed the need for training ordinands in theological colleges in the use of the Prayer Book. The position has not been satisfactory and it ought to be improved.
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The strength of feeling on the subject of the Prayer Book which has been expressed this evening by the noble Lord, Lord Glenamara, the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, the noble Earl, Lord Waldegrave, and the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, has been expressed throughout the country. There is a great gale of feeling throughout the country on this question, whatever may be the more neutral atmosphere in the House.
I conclude by saying that if necessary I shall preserve my right, as the noble Lord, Lord Home of the Hirsel, suggested, to bring back the subject, but I very much hope that this will not be necessary and that the assurance which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury gave about theological colleges will be carried through. Therefore, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Second Reading.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn.
Bill, by leave, withdrawn.

Cardiff City Council Bill
Brought from the Commons, read a first time, and referred to the Examiners.
House adjourned at six minutes past eleven o'clock.