Lords Sitting of 18 December 1985

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Manchester): The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

Product Safety in European Community
Baroness Burton of Coventry: 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 are in a position to make a preliminary statement on product safety in the EEC as proposed in the pamphlet Better Safe submitted to them by the Consumers in the European Community Group (UK) and if not, when they expect to do so.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Lucas of Chilworth): My Lords, we welcome the publication and support the views of the Consumers in the European Community Group expressed in that booklet. We are encouraging the Commission to concentrate more on safety measures, where Community co-operation is needed. We are pressing particularly for progress on the Toy Safety Directive, and for extension of our home accident surveillance system on a Community-wide basis. Where Community procedures are slow we have to consider taking action on a national basis to protect consumers from known hazards. We shall be introducing our own legislation on a general safety requirement and to require child-resistant packaging for dangerous household chemicals, and shall continue to press for action on a Community front on harmonisation of safety standards and other measures where the Community has a significant role.
Baroness Burton of Coventry: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that most welcome statement, but may I ask him one question? Where dangerous products are notified to the Commision, would the Government feel able to suggest that the public be made aware of them?
Lord Lucas of Chilworth: My Lords, it is a little difficult for me to commit the Commision to making public all the matters that are put before it. I suggest that the noble Baroness herself, with her knowledge of consumer matters, might be a better way of ensuring that the public are made aware of concerns in that regard.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, the noble Lord has been kind enough to indicate that the Government propose to bring in legislation in due course. Will he give the House an assurance that, when legislation is brought in, the Government will give serious prior consideration to the means of enforcement of that legislation? Experience in the past has indicated—and,
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indeed, present experience indicates—that no matter what the laws are in regard to safety, they are very frequently ignored and the means of enforcement are very inadequate.
Lord Lucas of Chilworth: My Lords, of course I recognise the noble Lord's concern in this matter. The measures that are proposed in our White Paper on the suspension of supply, powers of seizure and cooperation of the enforcement authorities with Customs and Excise, should go a long way to prevent dangerous goods from reaching the shops. It is certainly our intention to stiffen up the enforcement procedures.
Baroness Burton of Coventry: My Lords, the Minister mentioned the home accident surveillance scheme, which was set up in this country in 1976 and which I believe his department is helping to propagate. Can he say what progress has been made in the Community to having such a scheme there?
Lord Lucas of Chilworth: My Lords, progress is very far advanced in that regard. One or two member states still have some reservations on points of detail and on the financial implications which still have to be sorted out. We hope to be able to secure agreement on a system before very much longer.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, may I ask whether the forthcoming legislation will cover the recent convention on product liability and enable us to discharge our obligations under that agreement?
Lord Lucas of Chilworth: Yes, my Lords.

Health Authorities: New Management Structure
2.35 p.m.
Lord Hunter of Newington: 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 savings have been made since the introduction of general managers of health authorities, and whether waiting lists have been reduced.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Baroness Trumpington): My Lords, since health authorities are only about half way through the process of appointing general managers it is too early to attempt to quantify results. With regard to the noble Lord's second point, waiting lists continue to fall. General management is, of course, as much about improving the quality of services to patients as it is about the effective use of resources.
Some savings from general management are already becoming evident. For example, a review of management structures in one large region has yielded savings in excess of £1¼ million. Similarly, changes to the planning and management of ancillary services in one district alone have saved nearly £1¼ million. On a national scale the total savings are much larger.
Lord Hunter of Newington: My Lords, may I thank the Minister for that reply which is hopeful. As the unit managers have now been appointed, may I ask the Minister whether she is aware of the concern in the nursing profession about who the unit managers in the wards will be? Does she think there is a possibility that the ward sister might be in charge of her ward, as she used to be before other activities were taken over by cleaning services and so on?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, any manager worth his or her salt will, of course, want to involve key support staff in the fullest possible way. Within units, the role of ward sisters will be absolutely crucial to good management and to patient satisfaction. I am sure that we can rely on unit managers, where they are not ward sisters, to recognise this and build on it.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, since the Question mentions savings, is it not the case that savings have been achieved by the Bloomsbury Health Aurthority by the closure of whole wards in central London all over Christmas? What emergency measures will the Government take to remedy that situation?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, I am not prepared to go into individual cases. The short closure of wards is a matter for the local health authorities. They close them only in extreme cases, and they take extreme care when they do.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, perhaps the Minister will go into a little more detail about the waiting lists, which were asked about earlier by the noble Lord. Will she give us the actual figures? Can she confirm that the present figures for waiting lists are still roughly 100,000 higher than they were during the days of the previous Administration, even taking into consideration the time when waiting lists shot up during periods of industrial action? Will she give the House some more information, please?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, on 31st March 1985 there were 674,534 people on in-patient waiting lists for all specialities. That is almost 80,000 fewer than at March 1979. This shows that there is a continuing downward trend following the disruption caused by the 1982 industrial action. Of course, some 50 per cent. of all admissions to hospital are immediate, and many of those on waiting lists already have a planned date of admission.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, will the noble Baroness recognise that she was making a comparison with a figure which I said had, during the period of industrial dispute, risen to a very high level? Does she not accept that the average during the period of the Labour Government was 95,000 lower than the figure she has now given us? When will the figures come down to even the average of those under the previous Government?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, that is a slightly unreasonable question, considering that I have just said there is a continuing downward trend. As the noble Lord said, during the period of industrial action
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the total increased by more than 120,000. I have just given the noble Lord the figures. If he does not remember them, perhaps he would like to read them in Hansard.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that giving only two figures does not show a trend of any sort?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, how many more figures would the noble Baroness like?
Baroness Seear: My Lords, the noble Baroness would like to have figures which show a statistically sound trend. Two figures do not show a statistically sound trend.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, will the noble Baroness be prepared to examine the anxiety that exists both within the British Medical Association and the Confederation of Health Service Employees? Since the introduction of managers who have concentrated on reducing costs there seems to have been, along with that policy, a demonstrable and disturbing drop in morale among nursing staff. What I am saying is supported by the British Medical Association and the Confederation of Health Service Employees who represent nurses and junior doctors.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, before I answer the noble Lord perhaps I may say to the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, that I shall be delighted to send her an entire table of statistical figures.
To turn to the noble Lord's question, I am aware of concerns expressed by nursing organisations. We take these very seriously, but I cannot go into the details now. We are barely 18 months into the introduction of a new system of health authority management. I sincerely hope that nurses will give it a go and play their full and vital part in developing the new system, especially when the new round of appointments comes up in 1987.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, will the noble Baroness take into her confidence at the Ministry both the representatives of the BMA and the Confederation of Health Service Employees? If she does so, I believe that what she and I wish to attain can be achieved.
Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, is the Minister satisfied that there is good movement of patients between districts if there are very long waiting lists in one district and vacant beds in the next district? Can the general managers look into this?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, we are, of course, aware of differences in waiting times in different districts. We are concerned that patients are not always able to see consultants as quickly as we would wish. Guidance has been issued to the health authorities over the years aimed at reducing the times patients have to wait. General practitioners are free to choose where they refer their patients, and waiting times are one factor they may take into account. This need not mean sending the patients very far. Neighbouring districts may well have considerable differences in waiting times.

Poundswick High School
2.42 p.m.
Lord Dean of Beswick: 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 have any plans to intervene in the dispute at Poundswick High School in Manchester, where a dispute involving graffiti has caused over 900 pupils to be denied their normal educational facilities for over seven weeks.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science has considered all the available information about the difficulties at Poundswick and has concluded that there is insufficient basis for his intervention under the very limited powers given to him by Section 68 of the Education Act 1944. Nevertheless, he is most concerned about the prolonged disruption to the education of many pupils and wrote to the Manchester education authority on 6th December asking how they propose to bring the disruption to an end.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl for that reply. Bearing in mind that the priority in this dispute is to restore to nearly a thousand pupils the normal education facilities to which they are entitled—I understand that they have been denied these facilities for three months now—may I ask whether a time limit was placed on the reply sought from the Manchester education authority? If the reply was negative, can the Minister tell us now so that alternative action can be taken to restore these education facilities?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, the original date for reply expired yesterday but I understand that talks have been going on all week between the different parties including of course ACAS. I have just heard but only over the telephone that discussions today have achieved some some measure of understanding. That is good news but I am afraid that I do not have any details. My right honourable friend still awaits a report from the authority.
Baroness Phillips: My Lords, is the Minister aware that this is an example of why the teachers are so demoralised? Here they had the support of their own governors, their own people and their own authority. Yet their own education authority would not support them. I can give the Minister many such examples. There must be some way in which the Government can intervene to make sure that those people who are doing a very difficult job have the proper support of the people who are there to give it.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I do not want to say too much at this stage because I understand that the talks are continuing and that there is some hope. Schools are governed in accordance with their articles of government. The articles of Poundswick school give the head teacher the power to suspend pupils where he or she considers that there is adequate cause. But the
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matter must be reported to the governors who must then consult with the local education authority with whom the final decision about exclusion rests.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships will be very grateful to hear this piece of potentially good news from the noble Earl the Minister. As he is probably aware, the Poundswick school is in the diocese of Manchester for which I have a responsibility. My colleague the Dean of Manchester Cathedral has been one of those engaged in trying to find some solution to this tragic and difficult dispute which has caused a great deal of disruption to education there. I should like to ask the noble Earl the Minister whether he will accept that this is, as has already been suggested, an indication of low morale among many teachers which goes much wider than Poundswick? One reason for low morale is the problem of discipline in secondary schools and the need for continued research into ways of dealing most fairly and adequately with disruptive pupils. Some of this may cost money in the nature of special units and visits to homes. I should like to be assured that there will be an effort to take on board whatever lessons there are to be learned from this sad dispute at Poundswick.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, just like the right reverend Prelate, I deplore vandalism in our schools and elsewhere. It might be fair to say that the Manchester authority set on record its own abhorrence of the kind of thing which happened here, but on careful examination of the case they concluded that permanent exclusion of the five boys would have been an excessive punishment. This is what gave rise to the dispute.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, will the noble Earl the Minister accept that there is an intermediate solution between permanent exclusion and leaving the boys responsible in the same school? The normal procedure surely is that the pupils who are responsible in these cases are expelled or suspended from the particular school but are taken up by other schools in the authority.
The Earl of Swinton: Yes, my Lords, this is absolutely true but this is very much a matter for the local authority, and perhaps unfortunately Manchester did not take this view itself.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, as I said before, I am extremely grateful to the noble Earl for the manner in which he has dealt with the Question. But is he not aware that the whole situation in schools in Manchester at present is very fragile? It is almost at the point where some of the teachers are talking about a withdrawal of educational services right across the board. I have no desire to embarrass or impinge on any negotiations that will be taking place, but I must ask the Minister to take note of the fact that if this issue is not resolved quickly—and it may need the intervention of the Secretary of State to do so—some of us fear for the education services in Manchester with which we have been historically proud to be associated.
The Earl of Swinton: Yes, my Lords, I understand the strength of feeling of the noble Lord, Lord Dean. Like him, I can only hope that the negotiations prove favourable. I do not think there is any possibility of my right honourable friend intervening any further because he simply does not have the powers. The only power he has to intervene in local matters under Section 99 of the Education Act 1944 is if he is satisfied that the local education authority is in default of a statutory duty; or under Section 68 of that Act, if he is satisfied that an authority has acted unreasonably. The fact that an authority has acted unreasonably has been interpreted by the courts as meaning in a way which no reasonable authority could have acted having due regard to their statutory duties.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, I shall be very brief. Within the meaning of the 1944 Act, do not the needs of the pupils transcend the views of the authority where education is concerned?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I am no lawyer. That is what the 1944 Act says. I understand that my right honourable friend has taken very high legal advice about this matter and this is what he is advised.

Cabinet Discussions: Alleged Dislcosure
2.50 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: 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 progress has been made by Scotland Yard on the investigations into possible breaches of the Official Secrets Act announced on 16th October.
The Lord Chancellor: (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone): My Lords, I very much regret to say that I have nothing to add to what I told the noble Lord on 16th October.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, does the noble and learned Lord not agree that after two months of investigation Parliament is entitled to receive some news from the Government as to how this investigation is progressing? In view of the fact that twice this year the Law Lords appear to have made fiascos out of their prosecutions of Clive Ponting and the Cyprus airmen, are we not entitled to know what has been happening over the past two months?
Is it the case, for instance as has been publicly reported, that one of the witnesses in this case when examined by Scotland Yard refused to sign her statement, alleging that the statement was not consistent with the evidence she had given?
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, what I tried to tell the noble Lord on 16th October was that in this House we answer on behalf of the Government and that this matter is not a government responsibility.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, surely it was the Government who passed this case to Scotland Yard.
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There was a public allegation in the previous week—in the second week of October—that a former Cabinet Minister and Privy Counsellor whom the Prime Minister was apparently very anxious to include again in her Government, had given away secrets during the Falklands war. I make no comment on the veracity of that allegation but in view of the previous prosecutions undertaken by the Law Officers of the Crown, surely Parliament is entitled to know precisely what has been happening over this two-month period.
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I can only advise the noble Lord to go to the Library and take out the very definitive statement on the obligations and positions of the Law Officers of the Crown as regards prosecutions, by Professor Edwards, in the second edition of his excellent work. If the noble Lord will study chapters 16 to 19, I think he will find the answer to his question. But as those three chapters are rather longer than what I propose to deal with in a Question and Answer, I ask the noble Lord to inform himself of the elementary constitutional position.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, as one who personally believes that persecution in the media of people in our public life sometimes goes too far, I ask the noble and learned Lord whether it would not be considerate in this case—and Scotland Yard might at least heed this question and the noble and learned Lord's answer—if a decision were reached as to whether or not a prosecution is to be brought fairly soon? The evidence in this case must be of the simplest kind, and I am asking my question from these Benches out of consideration for the person involved.
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I appreciate the consideration of the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon. I am sure that when the material is available to my right honourable and learned friend—and not Scotland Yard—upon which he can discharge his constitutional responsibilities he will, with his customary speed and agility, address himself to making a decision.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, in that case, and before I do my homework in the Library, can the noble and learned Lord give the House an assurance that when the investigations are completed he will report to this House or will be prepared to answer a Question in similar terms to mine this afternoon?
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, when the noble Lord has done his homework, as I am glad to hear that he is about to do, he will know that it will not be for me to do that which he has suggested.

Business
2.54 p.m.
Lord Denham: My Lords, at a convenient moment after 3.30 this afternoon my noble friend Lord Elton will, with the leave of the House, repeat a Statement that is to be made in another place on rate support grant.
It is usual at this point to say a word about the arrangements for this afternoon's two Short Debates.

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The number of speakers for the two debates this afternoon in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Stewart of Fulham and Lord Walston, is such that it is not necessary to propose any formal time limit. But I know that the House will appreciate it if noble Lords will keep their speeches to a reasonable length, having regard to the 15 minutes that is customary for the initiator of a debate.

Swansea City Council (Tawe Barrage) Bill [H.L.]
Read a third time, and passed, and sent to the Commons.

Business of the House
2.55 p.m.
The Lord President of the Council (Viscount Whitelaw): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order 44 (No two stages of a hill to be taken on one day) be suspended tomorrow.—(Viscount Whitelaw.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

House of Lords Offices
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Aberdare): My Lords, I beg to move that the First Report from the Select Committee on House of Lords Offices be agreed to.
Moved, That the First Report from the Select Committee be agreed to.—(Lord Aberdare.)
The Report was as follows:
1. Appointment of Sub-Committees
The following members of the Committee were appointed to the Sub-Committees:
(a) Library Sub-Committee

L. Ardwick

L. Kilmarnock

B. Birk

L. McIntosh of Haringey

L. Fanshawe of Richmond

E. Minto

E. Ferrers (Chairman)

L. Mowbray and Stourton

With the Clerk of the Parliaments.
With power to co-opt further Lords.
(b) Refreshment Sub-Committee

L. Ampthill (Chairman)

B. Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe

L. Ardwick

L. Nugent of Guildford

L. Denham

L. Ponsonby of Shulbrede

L. Greenway

E. St. Aldwyn

B. Hylton-Foster

L. Tordoff

With the Clerk of the Parliaments.
With power to co-opt further Lords.
(c) Works of Art Sub-Committee

B. Birk

E. Listowel

M. Cholmondeley

L. Strabolgi

L. Fanshawe of Richmond

B. Trumpington

L. Gibson (Chairman)

With the Clerk of the Parliaments.
With power to co-opt further Lords.
(d) Computer Sub-Committee

E. Ferrers

L. McIntosh of Haringey (Chairman)

E. Minto

With the Clerk of the Parliaments.
With power to co-opt further Lords.
(e) Staff of the House Sub-Committee

L. Aberdare (Chairman)

B. White

L. Nugent of Guildford

V. Whitelaw (L. President)

B. Seear

With the Clerk of the Parliaments and the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod.
With power to co-opt further Lords.
(f) Finance Sub-Committee

L. Aberdare (Chairman)

L. Kilmarnock

L. Ampthill

L. McIntosh of Haringey

L. Denham

L. Ponsonby of Shulbrede

E. Ferrers

L. Tordoff

With the Clerk of the Parliaments.
With power to co-opt further Lords.
(g) Administration Committee

L. Aberdare (Chairman)

B. Hylton-Foster

L. Ampthill

L. Kilmarnock

E. Cathcart

B. Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe

L. Denham

L. McIntosh of Haringey

E. Ferrers

L. Ponsonby of Shulbrede

L. Gibson

L. Tordoff

With the Clerk of the Parliaments and the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod.
With power to co-opt further Lords.
2. Parliament Office and Library
The Committee were informed of the appointments of Mr. H. F. Christopherson as temporary Committee Clerk in place of Miss F. M. McLeod and of Mrs. I. L. Victory as Library Clerk in place of Miss E. M. McInnes and authorised the employment of a part-time archivist in the Record Office.
3. Refreshment Department
The Committee authorised the upgrading of one post of Cook.
4. Revised Scales of Pay and Allowances
The Committee confirmed the application of the following memoranda etc. to applicable staff of the House of Lords:

CM/704

Revised rates of pay for grades above the rank of Chief Clerk.

Im 85/7

Revised rates of pay from 1 July 1985 for industrial grades in the Refreshment Department.

IM 85/6

Revised rates of London Weighting from 1 April 1985 for industrial grades in the Refreshment Department.

CM/710

Revised subsistence rates for meals and overnight accommodation payable to certain officials.

DEO dated 28.6.85

Special pay addition to secretarial grades.

5. Official Shorthand Writer
The Committee authorised a revised scale of fees for the Shorthand Writer.
6. Superannuation
The Committee were notified of the following awards made under the House of Lords Staff Pension Scheme:—

(a) Transfer Value payment to United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in respect of Mr. D. G. Marchant who resigned on 12 May 1979.

(b) Pension and lump sum to Mrs. J. E. Hudson, Cleaner, who retired on grounds of ill-health on 25 September 1985.

(c) Revised pension and lump sum to Mrs. J. V. Gulley, Cleaner, who retired after re-employed service on 7 September 1985.

(d) Revised pension and lump sum to Mrs. B. Warner, Cleaner, who retired after re-employed service on 2 November 1985.

(e) Revised pension and lump sum to Mrs. E. Farmer, Cleaner, who retired after re-employed service on 26 November 1985

(f) Preserved pension and lump sum to Mrs. A. M. Sandling, Cleaner, who resigned on 19 July 1985.

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Community Education and Employment
2.56 p.m.
Lord Stewart of Fulham rose Lord Stewart of Fulham rose to call attention to community education in the light of changing employment prospects and needs; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, on several occasions in recent years we have debated education but we have never touched on the question with which I am now concerned: the relationship between the different parts of the education process, stretching from the education of children to the educational pursuits of elderly and retired people, and the philosophy of trying to view them as part of one whole educational process. It is with this matter that I want to concern myself this afternoon in dealing with the concept that education should be a process that continues throughout life and that the connection between different parts of it should be stressed.
There is a story about a small girl who when she returned from her first day at school was asked by her parents how she had got on. She replied that she thought she had not got on very well because they said she had to go again the next day. We find that we have not only to go to school again the next day but that, if we are really zealous in learning and in life, we probably have to go on pursuing the process of acquiring knowledge in one way or another throughout our lives.
One of the persons who endeavoured to give flesh to that concept was Henry Morris, who was then what was called county education secretary, but who would now be called chief education officer, of the County of Cambridge in the 1920s. He started from the assumption that it was a mistake to keep education in school separate from education in the later periods of life. He began to develop what was known as the community school.
To begin with, a community school can develop in very simple ways. For example, the parents who took their children to elementary schools, as they were then called, could stay, watch the proceedings in class, and observe how their children were taught. The mothers who had brought their young children to school also had an opportunity to meet one another, discuss problems affecting their community, and as a result possibly start various kinds of community activity.
Again, if one is considering a secondary school, local industrialists can make a practice of visiting the school and can arrange for the older children to visit industries. It is interesting to notice that this is now being urged as part of the forthcoming Industry Year as a way of interesting children and the public at large in industry and curing this country of what is considered to be one of its vices—a tendency to underestimate the importance of industry in life. A community school could also engage in international activities, with some of its pupils occasionally visiting foreign countries and receiving visitors from them.
However, as time went on it was apparent that the growth of the activities of the community school was turning the school into something more than a school. The phrase most associated with Henry Morris's work is that of "village college"—the creation of an institu-
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tion which not only contained a school in the normal sense of the word but provided opportunities for the education of adults, for sport and recreation, and for the education of people who for any reason suffered in literacy. Today, of course, that would particularly relate to ethnic minorities and the education of the disabled.
The college established at Impington, Cambridgeshire, became exceptionally famous, but it was indeed only one of those associated with Morris's name and later to be imitated in other parts of the country. He found that if one creates an institution of this kind it can be done with a certain amount of economy. Any educational process which throws up the prospect of saving money is always likely to be received with greater enthusiasm by Governments than most educational proposals. If you make it possible for the same building to be used at certain parts of the day as a school, at other times a club and at other times as an evening institute for adult education classes; if you provide such facilities as a swimming pool, and if the schools can be used not only by children but by adults, one is getting an economy.
If I may, I should like at this point to make what appears to be a digression but what I think is not. A good many years ago there was an ill-natured joke about American education to the effect that someone had been awarded a doctorate of philosophy for a thesis on the subject of the duties of a high school janitor in the summer. The story went on to say that later a further degree was offered for a paper on the duties of a high school janitor in winter. The latter part I am inclined to doubt, but the former part requires some consideration.
On the first occasion on which I visited the United States I met a high school janitor in person. I found that not only did he perform the ordinary duties that we associate with that phrase but he was acquainted with almost all the various social, aesthetic, dramatic and political groupings in the neighbourhood. He knew the demands they would make on the school building when it was not being used as a school, and it was his business to see that there was a fair sharing out of the facilities. Surveying the considerable grounds that surrounded the school he was able to say what parts could most properly be used for recreational purposes, what could be better used for the growing of crops and what kind of crops could best be grown in his particular demesne. He was, in fact, an extremely important public official and it seems to me that if anyone obtained a doctorate by writing a full and imaginative description of his work that doctorate was indeed well earned.
The matter stuck in my mind because at about the same time there was a report, in, I think, The Times Educational Supplement, of a doctorate to be granted for a thesis on the use of marine imagery in the religious poetry of the 17th century. I am inclined, with my noble friends, to laugh at that. I am not quite sure whether that proves that I am a barbarian or whether it proves that a certain amount of what passes for learning in this country is, in fact, nonsense. My point is that the task that the janitor is engaged in is one of great importance. If we want to be successful in bringing about any important reform in this world one

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must have vision, an idea, and some sense of practicality. We are told that the human creature has been described as, "a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting". So he is capable of vision and ideas and aware, also, of the physical limitations of the world in which he lives.
The effect of the village college was to do both of those things: to put forward the ideal of a whole community interested in the educational process and helping each other in it, and a realisation of the economies that could be obtained by the useful application of that idea in the creation of a village college. At first this idea took root in Cambridgeshire, probably because of the exceptional genius of this particular educator Henry Morris. One must say at once that the success of community education is hound to depend on the existence of one or two people who are really zealous and inspired believers in it. It is not something which can be brought into existence merely by an administrative fiat.
From Cambridgeshire we find it spreading to adjoining Leicestershire. I am happy to see that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester is to take part in this debate. But now we find that the community schools and village colleges are to be discovered on the map in Hampshire, Newcastle, Coventry, Nottinghamshire—where there is, for example, at Sutton-in-Ashfield what I think is one of the first purpose-built community schools—in Devonshire, Clwyd, Lothian and in the Isle of Wight.
The result is that a great many different varieties of village college and community school have arisen and some of them have extended their function to link themselves up with, say, the police and with local authorities so that for almost any problem affecting the community as a whole the village college is a forum where a solution may be sought. I notice the recent creation of a Federation of Village Colleges in Ely which makes it possible, for example, to make much greater provision for transport by the pooling of the resources of a number of village colleges.
However, we find that after the initial starts in the 1920s for some little while movement hung back. It has now come forward again. Why is that so in the 1970s and onwards? There is one statistic that helps to provide an answer to that. In 1971 the number of persons of school age was twice the number of persons of pensionable age. By 1991 that proportion will be reversed: that is, we are having to give more attention to the educational needs of the older sections of the population. We are living in a world where we know that for a long time to come a great many people will not be able to obtain work. We have to deal with that partly by retraining, where the connection in the community college between industry and education will help, and partly by leisure-time pursuits, where the activities of village colleges in providing leisure-time activities for older people will be helpful.
We find also at the present time that we have the problem of an increasing number of people whose mother tongue is not English. Here again, the village college had anticipated our needs since the teaching of English as a second language was one of its activities. We are always talking—and I mentioned it before—of the need for taking a greater interest in industry, and we are to have an Industry Year. Here, again, the fact
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that the village college makes a point of keeping in touch with local industrialists suggests that it has something to contribute to the answer to this problem.
We are, of course, also chronically aware of the problems of public expenditure, as I have suggested. What I am advocating here is not a particularly expensive kind of educational reform. If, then. I am not asking for large sums of money—and I should not like to say that I am not asking for any money because I do not believe that Governments can do anything effective unless they are prepared to spend some money—what am I asking for? First, that the Government should take an interest in the village college and community education movement. They do not take a great deal of interest at present. At Coventry there is the Community Education Development Centre, but I believe that such financial assistance as it receives comes rather more from overseas foundations than from anywhere in this country. I think that the Government ought to acquaint themselves more fully with what the Community Education Development Centre does and with what is happening throughout the country, and that they should endeavour to promote the exchange of ideas between one local authority and another.
Because of the way that community education has grown up, there are different forms of it at the present time. I think it important that nobody should imagine that the particular form which they are used to is the only correct and orthodox form of community education. We still have a great deal to learn about how community education can develop. We want a fruitful exchange of ideas among the various local authorities that are practising it, and the Government could help in bringing that about. I think the Government should also remember that, with the steady decline in the number of people of school age, they will at any rate have something to spare to promote the education of the older people and the greater variety in education which the village college and the community education movement help to bring about.
In this short speech I hope to draw attention to the existence of community education and to some of the promise that it holds. I hope and believe that those who follow me will be able to describe more fully the fruits which it can bring and that at the end of the day we shall have an encouraging response from the Government. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.13 p.m.
Lord Ritchie of Dundee: My Lords, I should like first to express the sincere appreciation of the House to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, for having introduced this very interesting and very important subject. I think that perhaps appreciation is due particularly because there are quite a lot of noble Lords here and (if I dare say so in your Lordships' House) perhaps some who are a little hazy about just what community education constitutes. We have heard of adult education and of further education, but community education is quite a new idea and a new concept. Indeed, I was told yesterday by someone who is actually working in the field that at the last count there were 112 different definitions of it. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, for having made my own mind much clearer.

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Morris saw what is now generally recognised: that a great many people in adult life want and need education. They may need qualifications or they may just want education for its own sake—which in the mind of an educationist is the best reason. People of any age may feel that their own schooldays were wasted and may long to go back to being taught something, or they may have specialised too early or too drastically. I think we have probably all met doctors who have suddenly conceived a passion for opera, or historians who have wished they knew more about computers or Halley's comet. Or, again, housewives who were condemned to the drudgery of domesticity from a young age may long to rediscover their potential for something other than baby-care and preparing fish fingers, and may go out and learn jazz, ballet, pottery or Russian. Others may have left school illiterate or semi-literate and may be in desperate need of specialised help. One could go on indefinitely.
Community education will fulfil these needs, but it will do more. As the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, has pointed out to your Lordships already, if adult activities can really take place in schools even during daytime working hours, then a whole community of learning and leisure can be built up, so that it can be seen that education does not stop at 16 or 18 years of age but can be a lifelong adventure from the cradle to the grave. That was Henry Morris's dream.
These ideas are indeed becoming actualities in many parts of the country—in Cambridgeshire, as the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, has pointed out, and in Leicestershire, as the right reverend Prelate will no doubt tell us, and in other parts, too, as has been pointed out.
Just for a moment I should like to make the point that the expression "community education" can comprise and should be allowed to comprise an idea beyond these activities that we have been talking about. Bearing this in mind, I should like to say a few words about what is happening in London and in East Sussex, which are my own two chief centres of interest. The much maligned ILEA are, I believe, spending £70 million a year on adult and youth education. They have many problems, starting with the greatly increased numbers of retired people, including people who have retired young or have been made redundant. They are particularly concerned with very large numbers of women who have been imprisoned in the home while bringing up children and who now want to come out and do something else. They are reaching out to old people's homes, to hospitals, to hospices and to prisons—I believe with no little effect—to the physically and mentally handicapped and to the deaf and the blind.
Then, as the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, has said, there is the great immigrant population. Your Lordships will know how desperate is the plight of some of these folk, and how many of them, especially women, because of their ignorance of the world and their ignorance of the English language, do not dare even to go out. There are also the illiterates. They need out-reach help. A few years ago I had a call from a 59 year-old man who was illiterate. He was, in fact, a very successful builder, and it was only late in life, when he had made a big success of his business, that he was finally emboldened to come and ask for help. Until
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that age he had managed to conceal even from his employees that he could not read. His was an exceptional case, but your Lordships can imagine how there are many young people and not so young people in an area like London who would never dream or dare to come forward.
Of course, Inner London has other special problems; for example, school-leavers. I am told that six out of 10 youngsters, on leaving school, cannot expect to find work, and they are joined by youngsters drifting to London from rural areas who have no money, no work and no prospects. This section of the population is very resistant to any activity which is labelled educational, and presents a severe problem. I believe that the authority is doing all that it can to help these deprived people, who are many in number. It is also embarking on the project of community colleges. The greatest limitation, of course, is economic, and the current rate-capping situation has come as a severe blow. One is almost tempted to say that if more money could be spent on learning and leisure it would be less necessary to spend money on riot shields and plastic bullets.
In a rural area, the problems are nothing like so intractable, but villages do have their problems of isolation, for example. But in East Sussex there are three fully fledged community colleges such as those envisaged by Henry Morris: one at Portslade in the Brighton area, one at Battle and one at Wadhurst near my home. There are others at Crowborough, Heathfield and Uckfield moving in the same direction. Brighton and Hove Sixth Form College welcomes adults into its classes and the sixth formers are welcomed into the adult classes. Hastings Further Education centre has a department of youth work developing 24 village youth clubs and planning to train youth club leaders.
Community education is all those things, and all of them are good. But the essence of what we are talking about today is, I realise, the community or village college as envisaged by Henry Morris all that time ago—of the learning and leisure centre which can offer a welcome to all ages, where all these wonderful things can happen. I quote from the prospectus of the village college of Comberton where the subjects currently on offer are yoga, art, German, French, embroidery, dressmaking, pottery, typing, calligraphy, upholstery, computing, Italian, guitar, photography, welding, Spanish and ballroom dancing.
These are places, too, where that most basic and therapeutic of human diversions, drama, can be offered. That has been my great interest and I want to say just a word about it. It seems to me that the world is full of people, young and old, who want and need to take part in some sort of drama. Usually they cannot because nobody will pay them to do it. The overcrowding in the profession sees to that. Often there is no amateur opportunity. Amateur groups are apt to be closed shops and rural villages are often dead; but many need that outlet. My point is that the therapeutic and educational value of that activity is enormous. I have seen inarticulate, tongue-tied children transformed into confident, articulate youngsters, and potential young trouble-makers creatively diverted from mischief. I believe that activity to be a basic need in many human beings and

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one that is largely frustrated. I believe that it is the aim, for example, of the Dartington College of Arts to take drama into the community. May its endeavours flourish!
We need to see more and more of these community centres coming into existence—places where the barriers between adults and children and between school and the big world are broken down; where children learn that adults actually want to learn and adults can be reminded how hard learning is; where, as the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, said, there can be links between school and industry, and children can have work experience, and industrialists can support school projects; where the school can serve as a local information centre, help to tackle local problems, manage local enterprises, provide housing for festivals and exhibitions, and, in somebody's words, provide, "a cost-effective use of expensive plant and professional expertise". I believe it to be the education of the future.
3.23 p.m.
Baroness Carnegy of Lour: My Lords, I have special reason to be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, for introducing the debate from his lifelong experience, beginning, I believe, as a tutor in the WEA in his youth. For the same reason I have to declare a non-financial interest. I am the present chairman of the Scottish Community Education Council, a body appointed by the Secretary of State for Scotland to advise him on matters relating to community education and to promote its development in Scotland.
I want to say a word this afternoon about the close, and increasingly close, link that there should be between all the measures that we are now taking in this country to improve employment prospects through vocational education and training with the educational resources that exist within local communities. I wish to say why I believe there should be a much closer link than there is and what can be done. Through the various Government schemes of which we often speak—the youth training scheme, the community programme, programmes in schools, the adult training strategy, the open tech, and suchlike—much is being done to help people to achieve and maintain competence for life in the modern world. Indeed, we are moving towards a position where every individual citizen of whatever academic ability will have the possibility of possessing portable skills and knowledge which can be constantly updated and which will maximise his or her chances in the labour market.
But there is an important aspect of vocational education and training which, in my view, is still not adequately emphasised. We are teaching the skills but we are doing too little about the development of the person behind them to ensure that he has the confidence and personal ability to put them into action successfully. The way that the labour market is developing makes that more important than ever before. The November Manpower Services Commission Labour Market Quarterly Review confirms that there is a continuing trend towards more jobs in the service sector and fewer in manufacturing, more jobs in small firms and more self-employment.
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People who work in those areas and who will do so in the future—in hotels, shops, banks and the like—people who work in small firms and people who are self-employed, come face to face with the public all the time. For them it is extremely important—even more important than in the larger manufacturing firms—to be good at relationships, to be good at teamwork, to be imaginative, personable and sympathetic and to spot when something is wrong for somebody and know how to put it right. In all those jobs the person and the skills are totally inseparable.
The other trend is what is happening in unemployment. The number claiming benefit of 3 million-plus seems to have flattened out; but among those people the number of long-term unemployed has increased during the past year by 6 per cent. to 1·3 million. That increase is entirely among those unemployed for three years or more. For those unemployed for one to two years or two to three years the numbers have fallen. That suggests that among those claiming benefit a hard core is developing of people who have been out of work for three years or more. At present there are some 500,000 such people right across the working age range. To get back into work, or into work for the first time, such people need more than skills. They need confidence, ability to face an interview and renewed ability to apply themselves to work and to discipline themselves; and if they live in our most deprived city areas, as many do, their best hope is self-employment, and so they need even more of those qualities. For the long-term unemployed, vocational training means personal help as well as skills help.
The big problem is how that can be achieved in ways which are acceptable to the customer. Central and local government politicians and officials tend to look for the answer to schools, to further education colleges and to training centres. But who having finally escaped from school, wants to return for the sake of personal development; and who sees college lectures on personal development as relevant to skills training? Those who try to lay such things on find that not many do, at any rate among those who most need the help. It is a problem and at present it is a largely unsolved one.
Yet I would submit that there are potentially available within local communities learning opportunities and help of precisely the kind that many trainees are currently missing, and that these can be mobilised in the manner characteristic of community education to provide what people want in the way they want it, when and where they want it, acceptably and accessibly, with plenty of participation by the learners, and at comparatively small cost.
The noble Lords, Lord Stewart and Lord Ritchie, have indicated some of the contexts in which this could be done. Perhaps I can mention one or two others. Jobcentre staff and community programme supervisors and others coming into close contact with people who have been unemployed for a long time frequently find that a major factor in being unable to get a job is the sense of inadequacy and, indeed, the limitation of not being able to read or write properly or do basic calculations. That exists among people for whom English is not the first language but it also exists among very many for whom it is the first language.

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This is usually not admitted. It is just a fact. The question is what to do about it.
All over the country there are adult basic education tutors, ordinary people who have volunteered to work one-to-one in their home or in the home of the learner, without anyone else necessarily knowing that it is going on, to help people read, write and calculate. In Scotland alone, during the last 10 years, 86,000 people have been helped by 19,063 tutors. Last year 10,800 volunteers were at work. If their work is calculated out as being worth £5 an hour they have done £1·2 million worth of work in one year. The cost to the public purse is only the co-ordination and the training of the volunteers, which has to be done by a few professionals. It is a proven, possible and successful method and could, if necessary, be expanded. I wonder how many Jobcentre and community programme staff spot illiteracy when they meet it or think of putting people in touch with adult basic education people.
There are job clubs in many city centres, opening, typically, some four mornings a week. They are places where unemployed people can go for advice, information and personal help. They can discuss employment possibilities, find typewriters, get help to fill in forms and apply for jobs. That is community education. As both noble Lords who have spoken have described, adults are turning out to be glad to return to school in certain circumstances. In Scotland, there are community schools, as the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, said, in Lothian. There is another sort in the Grampian Region. In Strathclyde quite recently the schools have been open to adults. In a year, over 3,000 adults have joined young people in the classroom. So far, those adults, on the whole, have been engaged in non-vocational subjects. Many of them probably are not people who are particularly in need of vocational training. But the discussion in the classroom and the way in which they have talked about job possibilities and career prospects with the young people in the schools has completely altered attitudes in the classroom. They are doing community education within the school, it is reported.
For younger people, businessmen within the community are helping in many ways. Grants are being awarded to young people through the MSC, through the Royal Jubilee Trust, through Shell's Livewire Scheme and through other business schemes to help young people set up their own business and to provide them with business advice to help them develop as self-employed people. The Enterprise Youth Scheme in schools, under which businessmen come into schools to help young people to form a company and to manufacture a product, is working extremely well. They work out the costs and the likely return on capital, issue shares and manufacture, market and analyse. That is a very successful scheme that helps prepare the way to self-employment.
Youth information projects are very important in helping young people to find their way into the labour market. YES points, information points manned by young people themselves, that exist in many parts of Scotland are most successful. We have a Young Scot booklet which every 16 year-old receives to help him or her. One could go on. There are, as your Lordships know, many more learning opportunities that can be found within the community. These opportunities can
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often fill the gap that exists in formal education and training programmes especially on the side of personal development.
I would emphasise, along with the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, that these can be provided at comparatively little cost. There have to be some professional organisers and trainers. There have to be community education specialists and other specialists in this field with the right expertise to get the volunteers going. But the movement of comparatively small sums—very small sums—from the schools and further education budget in this direction can have a multiplier effect, can make big things possible and can redress the balance in vocational education and training.
The noble Lord, Lord Stewart, said that there should be more exchange of ideas. I agree with that. I suggest, too, that in their planning and their budgeting the Government, the MSC and every local authority in the land should consider what more they might do on these lines—and should consider it with urgency, because it is very urgent.
3.38 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester: My Lords, I am grateful indeed for what has been said by the noble Lords, Lord Stewart and Lord Ritchie, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy. They have well established the subject and drawn attention to some points that I wish to embroider. I am grateful to the noble Baroness who has spoken about the spiritual aspect of the subject and has alluded to unemployment, on which I hope to say something further. I am particularly grateful that we have already had some indication of the breadth of meaning behind the term "community education". I find in talking to those involved in community education in Leicestershire that they have imaginations of extreme fecundity. They are constantly renewing and revising their ideas. Nothing about community education could be more healthy than that.
We do not have in Leicestershire the kind of one-to-one education of which the noble Baroness spoke. That is a matter about which some of us feel somewhat envious. What we do have, however—it is the subject on which I wish principally to speak—are those shared institutions, usually called community colleges and community centres. There are now 320,000 people in Leicestershire actively involved in the work of those communities, chiefly as clients. There are 33 colleges and a number of community centres. Together they employ as full-time staff only 60 people. That is an interesting indication of the kind of resources that have to be put in and also of the results that can be achieved with such small manpower resources.
The variety of the institutions is tremendous. On the one hand, a rural community centre may be sharing buildings with a junior school. It will have a low budget and be geared to the needs of that rural community. On the other hand, we may have an urban community centre, again housed in a large school for infants and juniors with a total turnover of no more than £800 a year, but the value of whose work is almost beyond description.
Then we have the great community college which has more people passing through it than are served by the rural community centre. It may have 1,400 people

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a term enrolling for various activities and a turnover of £150,000 or more, meeting the need of the inner cities. No wonder it is difficult to make a clear and concise definition of what we are doing with community education.
The old idea of night school persists in the minds of many people. It is surprising how many people in Leicestershire who are attempting to keep themselves abreast of local developments are totally unaware or even confused as to what is going on in this field. We must not be distracted by those smaller institution's programmes which seem to provide a list of varied leisure pursuits—yoga, cake icing, the making of corn dollies and such things. But these are not to be despised—no, not at all—they have a community value far beyond what the mere trivial-sounding list can indicate.
However, it is more than life-long education, though it is essentially life-long education. The essential element about which we are talking is the community: the community taking part, the community taking responsibility, and the community benefiting. Every one of these institutions has its own constitution. There is no common model for that. They vary considerably because they are developed and adapted by the communities which they serve. All the institutions have a high degree of community control. The programme, the curriculum, the actual structure, the handling of the finance, are very largely in the hands of a community association or a community council.
The immediate benefit of this in terms of traditional attitudes towards education as provided is that it removes the sense of frustration for not getting what you want, and it ensures that the community has a chance to say what it wants. Fluctuations and changes in the programmes of community education institutions reflect the changing needs and wishes of the communities that they serve.
However, equally fundamental to the community element in the procedure is the integration of the whole education of all the community into one place, into one group. It is as important that the classroom door is open during the day when the children are there as it is that the adults are coming into the same building that the children use. I find on my own visits to schools in Leicestershire that I rarely go to a school where there are no parents present at whatever time of day that I go. Increasingly, there is a sense of identity between the parents and the school and therefore a sense of responsibility.
The educationists speak of the community relationship as being community provision of classes, sport, and creches—which are essential if there is to be any reasonable provision for women to take advantage of the opportunities offered. Community development—the teaching of people to act together, the forming of groups, and the fostering of leadership—is a matter of intense importance, particularly in some of our inner city areas where people are loth to take responsibilities outside their families, often because they feel that they are unable to carry out their responsibilities very well inside them.
Then the educationists speak of community action: the involving of groups with each other, and the selecting of purposes and intentions by the community
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itself. There is a religious dimension. The larger, inner city community colleges are providing help to religious groups many of which do not have their own temples or meeting places, or their own equipment, human or in terms of plant, for carrying out what they wish to do. You will therefore commonly find that Asian festivals are held in community colleges. The Church is not worried about this because the Church is immensely more rich in provision for places to hold her festivals and in human resources to carry them out. But where the Church can be involved is in the kind of community where the Church is still a vital part of it, on the whole the smaller place, probably the semi-rural or dormitory village, particularly where the Church has already a vigorous ecumenical element in its life. Then the community lives again in a religious sense when there is collaboration with the teaching resources that are in the Church and the leadership resources that are in the Church with those of the rest of the community. I regard this as an important and all too rare possibility.
The essential unity of all the constitutions of these varying institutions is guaranteed by the fact that every one of them has a single principal who is responsible for all activities taking place in the establishment. The headmistress of the infants' school will be warden of the community centre. The advantages of this to her become quickly apparent because of her renewed relationship not only with the parents but with the people among whom the parents and the children are living. Libraries are commonly shared and they need unified administration. It is interesting to find students and their parents using the same library for different purposes and using different parts of it at the same time. This revolutionises the attitude of many a parent towards what the children are doing in the library.
Shared financing is something on which I wish that I could speak with more detail and figures; but all the courses are paid for. This is not a free gift to the community. The community makes its own contribution. Roughly speaking an average cost is £1 an hour for a course. For some people that is quite a lot to pay, but they pay gladly and of course that gives the institution some leeway, some freedom, in what it chooses to do for itself. It has some of its own money, and therefore the possibilities of choice are widened.
Ordinary education being education by rule even though in modern education there is a wide degree of choice, community education is one where choice remains supreme. It is at this point that I believe that community education is most important in terms of the country's agony over unemployment, because choice leads to self determination. Self determination is one of the most agonising problems for some groups of our Leicester community. Our small Afro-Caribbean community suffers from the belief that it has no effective say in what happens to it. One of the reasons why young people are depressed at the prospect of unemployment is that they will not be provided with money; and money to them gives them some choice to live the kind of life that they wish.
Employment therefore being seen as the basis of free choice, if we put alongside it the degree of choice that can be offered by education, and particularly by this community style of education, we see that it is beginning to answer some of the deeper spiritual malaise which is incurred by unemployment.

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I notice that those who work in community colleges in Leicestershire are speaking less of employment than of occupation. This is partly in response to a realistic view which says that however much employment returns, it will never return in the same degree and in the same way to which our fathers were used to it. Occupation, which put more simply means a life with a point and a hope to it, is what the community college can help people to discover and to plan. Of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy, has said, skills are important. Indeed, the noble Lords have also made the same point. They can be touchingly important. On a recent visit to an inner city community college at which there was a simple ceremony for the handing out of diplomas in advanced English as a second language, it was heartening to discover that the highest diploma was going to a man who could not be there. He was a traffic warden who, because of his new diploma, could now be raised to superintendent, and his duties called him away.
Languages, mathematics and numeracy are referred to by people working in this field—but languages far richer than simply the teaching of better English as a second language. That same college teaches Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Gujerati, and has some things in Polish. These languages are taught in a way which will lead the people for whom these are their primary languages not merely to feel better in speaking them—and that, indeed, is a great thing—but also to achieve something by passing, say, an O-level examination. However, those for whom these are second languages can also learn them there. We should think what that does to increase the sense of community.
This choice of achievement implies self-esteem as well as skill. It makes it possible for people to evolve both short-term and long-term goals in their lives: occupation becomes an option even when employment does not seem to be an option. Self-esteem thus gained inevitably leads in some degree to estimating oneself in terms of one's service to the community, of the esteem which one is earning from the community. It may be that what is earned is the esteem of a good entertainer, of someone who makes life more interesting, who brings more pleasure to it and who adorns it in some way. That is the kind of self-esteem and service which we desperately need in inner city communities.
Let me tell your Lordships a little more about Hazel Street. Hazel Street may be familiar to your Lordships because the shadow of Leicester City's football ground falls over the school in which the college is held. Seventy per cent. of the people attending are single women. Most of them attend in the daytime, at the same time as the children are in school, though of course with separate programmes. The majority are women in their early 20s who became mothers at the age of 15. Very many of them are slightly euphemistically described as being exposed to non-accidental domestic injuries. Others suffer the family stress involved in living with an unemployed father. Another large group comprises divorced or elderly Asian women.
What happens to them when they go to this community centre? They learn about the society in
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which they live; they learn the things which they cannot readily find out about their dues—in other words, what is available to them in the way of help. They learn how to be better parents and some of the simple skills of child care, and, by working together in what one might call seminar-fashion, they learn some of the more delicate skills of child care. They learn to be less lonely. The noble Lord also referred to that fact. There is scarcely any loneliness greater than the loneliness of a woman living alone not very skilful in English and depressed about the conditions of her life. Therefore, advice takes up part of the work of this community centre.
It would be nice if one could give some kind of quantitative estimate of the effect. I have pushed for this quantitative estimate, and the only one I have been given is that the children in the school have a 98 per cent. attendance record, which astounds me. I can believe that there has been a fall in delinquency, and I can also accept that it has not been possible to quantify that fall. Similar benefits can be found in all these institutions.
A rural community centre has found that, through the community centre alone, the two villages—the new estate and the old village—have been able to come together, to work together and eventually to be cemented. In the largest of our colleges, the one with the widest spread of ethnic constituents, we have a very distinguished programme in the arts. From the money that they contribute to their own activities they are able to invite from outside Leicester groups of the highest quality, particularly those who belong to their own ethnic groups. This is an enormous enrichment, but perhaps the greatest of all is that visitors from Gujerat come to Moat College to see how it works.
I have repeated what was previously said about the full use of existing plant. The school does not close at three o'clock in the afternoon and remain empty until the next morning. There is much more wear and tear, although there is less vandalism. However, there are improvements for the school. The money made available by the community is used to improve the school. Impressive pieces of highly expensive equipment, particularly for physical education and for the use of the handicapped, have been provided in this way in some of our colleges. But, of course, success breeds success. A little more money from other sources would go a long way. I hope that a little more money will be found from outside the system, but I have to say that I do not wish to see too much injected from the outside because I believe that it might be debilitating. The liveliness of the movement as I see it working around me comes largely from the commitment of the community to do its own work.
3.56 p.m.
Lord Ardwick: My Lords, I have been impressed and deeply moved by what the right reverend Prelate has just told us. Many years ago I went to Leicester and saw the purpose-built comprehensive schools, and I thought that there was an absolutely splendid authority. However, I also noticed that the right reverend Prelate had to say that, even with this magnificent work going on, affecting so many people in this area, the work was not known to the general public. Why is that?

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I wonder how many of us knew what on earth it entailed when we saw that we were to debate the question of community education? It is a meaningless term. Even more meaningless is "community education development centre". I am afraid that today the word "community" has some very dubious associations. There is "community policing", which means being soft with bad boys; and there is a Community farm policy, which means giving hard prices to farmers. It is a very dubious word. I really think that this splendid movement must get itself a name.
It started off with "village college", which was all very well as long as there was a village. But today if you are thinking of an urban area, the word "village" is inappropriate and the word "college" is too posh, too highfalutin'. Therefore, something must be done if only to find a suitable acronym so that this movement can be publicised and can go ahead. In the discussions which we are now having on the nature of the English sabbath, the term "the fabric of society" has been used more than once. It is a useful term, and, as I have listened, I have often thought that the fabric is rather shabby in parts and is sometimes torn and tattered. Communities disintegrate. I only have to go back to that poverty-stricken district of inner Manchester, where I spent my boyhood and from which I take my name for evidence of that. Today a community can be destroyed even by efforts to improve it, such as slum clearance or the avoidance of the crippling burden of very large families.
In the last century, when the villagers came into the cities—and many of them in Manchester were Irish villagers—they suffered a loss of community. But, over time, communities were built in the cities around the churches and chapels, and around the co-operative movement with its men's guilds, its women's guilds, its mixed guilds, its smoking concerts, and its knife and fork tea parties. Communities were built around themselves and they were built around the factories with their sports clubs and their brass bands.
This old society, this recreation of the 19th century, is fading away fast today (if it has not already faded away) with de-industrialisation; with the disappearance of the extended family; with social mobility; with the geographic mobility of the motorcar. Therefore, we need today more creative efforts to create again this necessary sense of community.
I sometimes wonder whether the success of the radio serial—it is not a soap opera—"The Archers" is not due to an almost universal desire to live in a community as well knit as Ambridge appears to be. Of course, it is true that in radio and television we enjoy a boon that our ancestors never knew but in the end these boons, these blessings, are not a substitute for community. They are simply a means for making loneliness and social isolation more tolerable.
We are not pretending that community education is an answer to all the problems, but it is one of the promising creative efforts being made, and made successfully as we have heard in some parts, and it deserves to be attempted in many more. Most of us over the years have become perhaps vaguely aware of Henry Morris's pioneer work in Cambridgeshire on
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the village college. But most of us—like myself, I think, until recently—have not learnt how well that concept of Morris's has stood the test of time and been copied, developed, and adapted to various different circumstances.
The idea is basically so simple. You have a school, or a group of schools, which can serve the needs of the whole community from the playgroup, the pre-school children at one end, to the pensioners' clubs at the other; from the re-education of unemployed teenagers to the serious students in the WEA tutorial classes, or attempting the degree courses of the Open University.
Now it is possible to cater for those who feel the need in adult life for more basic education, or who wish to acquire skills, or who simply want to join their neighbours in some hobby, or some social activity, from ballroom dancing to caged birds. None of this needs to be costly. People are willing to pay fees to cover courses which require professional tutors, or they are willing to pay for the rent of a room for their club.
What the community gets out of it is the full use all the year round from morning until night of expensive premises which would normally be used only from 9 until 4 o'clock in the weeks between the school holidays. The centralisation of such services under the general supervision of a warden—I think the noble Baroness stressed this point—creates and feeds a community. For the teachers, school is a different kind of place inside the community and not just an outpost of the community. For the children, school is not for the dissident, difficult, and rebellious children; school is not a concentration camp for the young, but a place where everyone goes and everyone is happy to go. A village college, or a community educational and leisure centre, to use those terrible terms, is psychologically more accessible to the disadvantaged who need it most, to the unqualified, to the unstable, and to the physically handicapped.
There is a college of this kind on the outskirts of London which is doing remarkable work. It is created around a large comprehensive school which is blessed with 40 acres of open space. It is a school which has 80 teachers and 1,200 pupils. Among the things it does today is to provide women wishing to return to work with education which they need at hours at which they can attend, and it provides a crèche for their infant children.
For the manpower services it undertakes training in some needed skills, such as word processing or electronics. It has a youth training programme, a programme for long-term unemployed, and it also trains—I think they are called fire people—firemen and firewomen also for the GLC. The school is equipped with a splendid theatre where recently they have given performances of Gilbert and Sullivan and of Asian dancing, because this is a mixed ethnic area. Their sports facilities are used by no fewer than 5,000 people, and yet almost all of these people come within two miles of the school itself.
I have only touched the fringe of the movement, for it is a movement. It deserves to be studied and fostered not just by the Department of Education but by all government departments whose work would be assisted in this desirable and economic environment.

Rate Support Grant
4.7 p.m.
The Minister of State, Department of the Environment (Lord Elton): My Lords, with the leave of your Lordships I shall now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment. The Statement is as follows:
"With permission, Mr. Speaker, I will make a Statement about the 1986–87 rate support grant settlement and selective rate limitation for local authorities in England.
"I have laid before the House today the Rate Support Grant Report for 1986–87, together with Supplementary Reports adjusting grant for 1984–85 and 1985–86. Copies of the reports, the rate limits and other explanatory material being sent to local authorities today are available in the Library and the Vote Office.
"The main feature of the settlement is the abolition of expenditure targets and the associated grant penalties. This decision has been warmly welcomed by the great majority of local authorities. It is a major simplification of the grant system.
"Our aim is still to bring local authority current spending down to a level the economy can afford. Though we have a system which gives low spenders a fairer share of grant, we are maintaining strong pressure, even on them, not to take advantage of the abolition of targets to increase spending in real terms.
"The aggregate of Exchequer grant will be the same cash sum—£11,764 million—as the figure originally provided for this year. But it is about £400 million more than the amount of grant now being paid for this year, because local authorities are forfeiting £400 million through holdback. The grant which central Government will pay to local government next year will be about 46½ per cent. which is about the same as the figure for this year after allowing for holdback.
"Provision for local authority current expenditure has been set at £22½ thousand million. This figure takes no account of the additional provision of £1,250 million over four years which has been offered if satisfactory agreement can be reached on school teachers' duties and salary structure. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science has already indicated that, subject to the passage of the Education (Amendment) Bill, he is ready to bring forward £37 million from that sum in 1986–87 in order to secure the supervision of schools at midday.
"I announced provisional grant related expenditure assessments—GREAs—on 28th October. These incorporated various technical adjustments. The cities will benefit from changes in the concessionary fares and social work GREAs. The remote shires will gain from changes in the education GREA.
"I have considered carefully the many representations made to me since that announcement, but have decided that my original proposals should stand. Individual authorities' GREAs will however
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differ somewhat from the figures issued in October as a result of more up to date information.
"I am also changing the grant system so that the impact on the rates of every extra pound an authority spends or saves will be much sharper than before. As in past years, the pressure will become more severe if the authority's expenditure exceeds a threshold set at an average of 10 per cent. above GREA.
"The important message is that, for all but a handful of authorities, more spending will result in less grant and less spending will result in more grant.
"As usual, there are arrangements to limit the impact of distributional changes on individual authorities' grant entitlements. I have, too, ensured that the changes to the grant system required by the abolition of the Greater London Council and the metropolitan county councils are broadly neutral in their overall effects. If successor authorities carry out their inherited tasks more efficiently, their ratepayers will benefit significantly.
"I now turn to rate limitation. In July my predecessor announced the list of 12 authorities selected for rate limitation in 1986–87, together with expenditure levels. In most cases these represented a cash freeze on 1985–86 budgets.
"Seven of the 12 authorities have now applied to me for a redetermination of their expenditure levels—Camden, Greenwich, Hackney, Lewisham, Lambeth, Liverpool and Newcastle. I have considered their applications carefully and in each case have increased the expenditure level somewhat, though overall by substantially less than they themselves had sought.
"I am today proposing rate limits for these authorities. They have until January to make representations to me about a higher limit if they think it appropriate. Again, I shall of course consider carefully any representations they make.
"In five of the authorities, ratepayers should see a cut in their rate bills next year. In all 12 the rates will be lower than they would have been without capping. In 1985–86, rate capping has saved ratepayers in these areas hundreds of millions of pounds. They will have good cause to thank us again in 1986–87.
"My right honourable friends the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, and the Secretary of State for Transport are to make separate announcements about precept limitation for the new joint authorities in the metropolitan areas and London.
"If local authorities budget sensibly and economically, the average rate increase next year should be no higher than this year, and it could be lower. Higher spending will mean sharply higher rates. That is why local government must stand firm in their wage negotiations, and must implement the many savings identified by the Audit Commission.
"Mr. Speaker, my proposals for 1986–87 represent a major advance. I have abolished targets. I have improved GREs. I have established a clearer relationship between what councils get and what

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they spend. And I have built on the success of rate limitation in 1985–86. I commend them to the House."
That completes the Statement, my Lords.
4.15 p.m.
Baroness David: My Lords, I should like to thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. The Government congratulate themselves on the abolition of targets and penalties, but we must remember that local authorities can still be penalised very heavily if they go over the grant related expenditure. Grant related expenditure was not intended for such a purpose. Its purpose was to provide a level of central Government support to local services, to compensate authorities for the differences in rateable resources and the need to spend and to influence, not to control, expenditure decisions of local authorities.
What are the facts for this coming year? There will be an increase of 4½ per cent. in cash on last year's settlement figure for current expenditure, but there will be a £1¼ billion gap between local authorities' present policies and forward programmes and what has been put forward by the Government. The Government figure assumes a 5.9 per cent. increase in teachers' pay, I understand, and if the settlement is higher what are the Government going to do? The £1,250 million figure mentioned in the Statement over four years may turn out to be quite inadequate. The percentage of grant for 1986–87 is to be 46½ per cent., down from 48 per cent. this year. I think we have to remember that it was 61.6 per cent. in 1979–80. That has meant the withdrawal of £16.1 billion from local authorities' finances over that period.
Is it true that the Secretary of State has given figures and claims for individual authorities' grant claims to the press that have not been given to the House? That means that the real effect of changes from targets and penalties cannot be assessed properly by us at the moment. The statement refers to bringing spending down to a level that the economy can afford. What should be happening is that local authorities can have the freedom to decide to spend what is necessary for the needs of their area. As for the cities benefiting, the Statement the Secretary of State made on 28th October meant that half a per cent. of the national total of grant related expenditure shifted to the cities, £105 million of GRE, which is meaningless when one considers that the amount taken from the most deprived areas between 1981–82 and 1985–86 has been £427 million lost in block grant in real terms. The abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan counties has complicated the whole situation and we still do not know the true costs and financial consequences of abolition. How soon shall we know?
On rate capping we welcome the redetermination of expenditure levels so far as it goes for the seven authorities that applied; that is albeit at a lower level than they asked for. We hope that the Government will be generous in reconsidering the rate limits in January. We do not agree with the continuing fragmentation of the announcement of separate precepts for education, transport, the police, etc. All these are local government responsibilities.
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The Statement ends by referring to the savings identified by the Audit Commission and asks local government to stand firm in their wage negotiations. We all want efficiency in local government, but not at the cost of penalising the low paid. We must remember that one-third of manual workers are below the poverty line according to the Low Pay Unit.
Baroness Stedman: My Lords, from these Benches I too should like to thank the Minister for repeating the Statement to us today but I cannot refrain from commenting that it is once again very late. The Government do not seem to appreciate that local authorities start their budget procedure about September and aim to get it finished and finalised by the end of February or the beginning of March. Not to know what the rate support grant is until the Christmas vacation is pushing it a bit fine. It shows a reduced amount of money available and has ignored inflation. Those two parts we would deplore. But it may have switched a little more money to the inner cities and that we support.
But in spite of the Minister's optimism, I believe that all this leaves a massive shortfall and probably large or very large rate increases may have to come to maintain the services. I note the action regarding the 12 authorities and I am glad that seven of them have at last applied for redetermination. But when will the announcements be made about the precept limitation for the new joint authorities for transport in the metropolitan areas and London? They will also be working to a deadline as are the established local authorities.
The total grant is to be held at the same level in cash terms, but this represents a lower percentage. Does the Minister accept that if the percentage had been held at the same level the cash total would have been £400 million higher, which is just about the sum that the Treasury clawed back in penalties this year? With the new grant level the same as the old grant level after hold-back, it really demonstrates that what the Treasury has it hangs on to.
The targets have now been removed, but the effects of exceeding GREA are greater. Will the Minister confirm that if local authorities have to spend over the national amount to maintain their services then for every £1 they spend it will cost them £1·30 under the clawback arrangements? The Secretary of State in another place said that he would be introducing a system to ensure a smooth transition from the existing system to the new one. Does the Minister not understand that it is no good paying tribute to prudent authorities and then effectively reducing their grant? Many shire counties may well feel that this is exactly what is being proposed.
Many local authorities have overspent this year. Those which have overspent the least may benefit from some clawback from the very high spenders. However, it still leaves local authorities clutching at figures from thin air. Local authorities cannot operate by hazarding guesses on how much they may have before the year is out. The budget processes in local government become more and more like star-gazing exercises. The sooner the Government get to grips with the rating system and local government structure and finance, then the better it will be for all concerned.

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What we need is a financial reform to make the local councils less dependent on central Government and more directly accountable to their local ratepayers, together with a structural reform in the context of decentralisation of power from Whitehall to the regions and the creation of more simple, one-tier, all-purpose authorities.
Lord Elton: My Lords, perhaps I may start by breaking tradition in referring first to something that the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman, said. As she well knows, we are wrestling with the question of local government finance at this moment and expect to come forward with proposals in the new year. However, what we are looking at now is the immediate present and the recent past.
I have to say to the noble Baroness, Lady David, that the overall effect which we have achieved is to increase the needs assessment affecting the inner cities, which will, as a result, gain grant. Perhaps I may illustrate that by saying that in inner London the average needs assessment is £803 per head, compared with only £438 in the shires. In Islington, the GRE per head is £883; in Barnet it is £494; and in Mole Valley it is £378. Thus these bases from which our calculations are made are moved to fit the need of the areas in question; and this is something to which noble Lords have constantly been directing their attention over the last six months. We are increasing grant in London by £227 million, and in the metropolitan areas by £84 million.
I have to say that there remains huge scope for savings in badly-run councils. Perhaps I may illustrate that by saying that there are at present £23 million of rent arrears in Southwark. Most inner London boroughs have failed to improve productivity in refuse collection. A few have shown the way, and they have been able to make 40 per cent. staff savings. Therefore, the result of what we are doing is to direct resources to where we believe they are most needed—and we believe your Lordships agree with that—but leaving scope for savings which would materially increase the benefits, not only to the ratepayers but also to those in receipt of the savings.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman, referred to "clawback", which I think is probably a hangover from an earlier vocabulary. The system we now have is that 1.1 pence per £1 of spending per head, up to a threshold of 10 per cent. above the national average GRE, is the lower slope. At the threshold (as we used to call it) of 10 per cent. above the national average, the net marginal cost per £1 becomes 1.5 pence. The effect of this is that up to 10 per cent. above the national average GRE the marginal cost of each extra £1 per head of expenditure is 1.1 pence on the rates, and above that threshold it becomes 1.5 pence on the rates. That is the evidence, which ratepayers see, of the effect in financial terms of the policies of their authorities.
The noble Baroness asked me about further announcements. The precept limits as regards the Home Office will be announced today and those for transport as soon as possible. I think I was asked whether there was further to come for the teachers' pay in the current year. There is no more for 1985–86
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grant, but in 1986–87, as the Secretary of State said in his substantive Statement, there will be more available if there is a satisfactory agreement on restructuring.
I accept that it is late in the day for the local authorities. It usually is, I regret. In this case it is largely due to a case which your Lordships cannot have failed to have noticed was brought in your Lordships' House by Nottinghamshire and Bradford. It was from our point of view successfully resolved, but it was resolved at a time which meant that we could do nothing until it was already very late in the day.
Lord Sandford: My Lords, nothing in any Christmas pantomime can match the wonderland of horror and hilarity which now characterises the absurd, arbitrary and totally opaque system of arrangements known as local government finance; and this Statement only adds to it. I suggest that any of your Lordships who believe that I might be exaggerating could usefully spend an hour talking to the treasurer of your local council during the Recess and hear about multiple base positions, composite multipliers and gain caps, all three more pieces of jargon which have been added to the vocabulary in this Statement. I say that without seeing the actual details. This is what we already know about.
Perhaps I may illustrate the perversity of the whole matter by referring to what is now emerging as perhaps the worst case, and that is the urban programme grant. This is not properly reflected in the grant-related expenditure assessments. It is a grant designed to stimulate new programmes, new projects, in the urban programme cities. The effect is that after that grant has run for three years it is then removed and the cost of whatever has been stimulated by it is then borne on the rates; so that is an addition. That addition represents an increase in rate expenditure, and therefore attracts a loss of rate support grant. Thus, quite automatically, at the end of the three years of the urban programme grant the authority that has been receiving it is docked twice the amount. That is something which, with remarkable perspicacity, was commented on and heavily criticised, with good reason, by the Archbishop's Commission on Faith in the Cities.
Without any formal ministerial announcement, I think it is now true to say that block grant has totally lost its original purpose, which was an equalising function, and has now become a crude and entirely unfair system of rewarding reductions in expenditure and punishing increases in expenditure It is far too crude and unfair for that.
I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman, has said, and I was glad to hear my noble friend say that at some time in the new year some of the wraps will be taken off the proposals for a reform of local government finance. I would put it to him that that is nothing like enough. We must have an assurance that by this time next year we will have either a new system in force or a new system clearly set out and ready to come into force in the year thereafter. We cannot go on as we are.
4.30 p.m.
Lord Elton: My Lords, my noble friend would not expect me to stand up to defend the system which we are earnestly seeking to change.
Lord Sandford: Good!
Lord Elton: If I were to do so, my Lords, I suppose I would be carrying out the role in the pantomime which he feels would be appropriate to me at this season. I will not ask him which role that is, and I would ask him not to tell me. I would say that we are actually getting back, in a direction which he prefers, towards greater equalisation by dropping targets. I think he has already said "Thank goodness for that!" in the discussion on an earlier Statement, so I do not upbraid him for not saying it again.
I have already said as much as I properly can about the review of local government finance. I share, as do many people, the eagerness of my noble friend to get this thing out into the open. He, from his study of local government finance, will realise that it is a particularly complex position. We would not wish to be where we are. To get out of where we are and get to the right place needs very careful thought. That thought is now being given and will bear fruit in the Paper when it comes forward.
Baroness David: My Lords, the Minister said that the inner cities will be getting £205 million more this year. Where will that he coming from, and who will suffer?
Lord Elton: My Lords, the effect of our provisions, as I have said, is to give an advantage to the inner cities, and naturally, therefore, it must come from the remainder. We have had to cap the gains, which would help—I am sorry, my Lords; I am reading from the wrong paper. The point is that we have a finite sum and, as in all budgeting, one has to accept priorities. The first thing is to set the finite total of the budget, and that I have stated. I stated it in percentage terms, which are roughly very closely equivalent to the percentage terms of last year's settlement after holdback.
The next thing one has to do is to identify priorities. I think that my right honourable friend was absolutely right to detect a concern for the inner cities in both Houses of Parliament and in the country generally. It follows, therefore, that that is where the priority lies.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that, whatever the complexities and difficulties of the system of control, most responsible opinion feels that, given the scale of current local goverment expenditure, it is essential to the proper management of the British economy that that expenditure should be firmly and definitely limited lest the whole of economic policy be undermined by it? Is my noble friend also aware that some of us listened almost with horror to the observation of the noble Baroness opposite that it was not the amount that the national economy could afford but the needs of local authorities that should determine the total amount? Is he aware that it is that kind of irresponsibility which produces regular financial crises under Labour Governments?
Baroness David: My Lords—
Lord Elton: My Lords, it is the tradition of the House that I answer questions and that the noble Baroness puts them. To put her resentment into interrogative form must take a moment or two. I will provide her with that by thanking my noble friend for reminding me that I left out of my answer a very trenchant passage to the effect that it is the duty of central Government to control the borrowing of the public sector generally, and that if they do not do so the economy goes out of control. I would also say that the grant-related expenditure assessments, which, of course, is what GREA are, are an essential tool in achieving this. I think the noble Baroness was wrong to rebuke us for using them for that purpose.
Baroness David: My Lords, may I make myself clear as a result of what the noble Lord, Lord Boyd-Carpenter, has said? What I certainly meant to say was that it was for the elected members of local authorities to decide what to spend on the needs of their area.
Lord Elton: My Lords, I am not sure whether I ought to intervene in these exchanges, but it is clear that central Government have a role, and the role they have is to sharpen the perception of the local electorate about the decisions taken by local government. That is exactly the effect of what we have announced.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the noble Baroness has fully amplified and confirmed my own earlier observation that it is the policy of the party opposite to allow unlimited expenditure to be undertaken by local authorities—
Baroness David: My Lords—
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, I listened to the noble Baroness very carefully; I hope that she will show me a similar courtesy—to allow unlimited expenditure by local authorities to be undertaken regardless of the effect on the national economy? Is my noble friend aware that it is that attitude which explains the financial failures of successive Labour Governments?
Lord Elton: My Lords, my noble friend appears to me to be right, but if he is wrong, in the light of the cries of rejection and alarm from the Front Bench opposite, I am very glad of the conversion of the Front Bench opposite by my noble friend's powerful arguments.
Lord Barnett: My Lords, would the noble Lord the Minister care to tell his noble friend now what is the level of public expenditure as a percentage of the GDP by comparison with what it was in 1979?
Lord Elton: My Lords, not without notice. I think that the noble Lord behind him has been anxious to get his word in for some time.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, the Minister used the phrase from his Statement that the greater the spending by a local authority the less grant that authority would receive. This is germane to the exchange. Surely, local people, elected people, whatever their political complexion, are in a far better

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position to judge the needs of local people than the Government. If in actual fact what the Government are saying to local councils is, "We decide centrally not merely the global total but also, by the adjustments that have been made, what it is that you can spend", then this surely makes a nonsense of the phrase "local democracy".
Would the Minister care to tell the House precisely where the rents and the voids lie in the national Government sector? He has carefully drawn attention to a large amount of rent arrears in Southwark. Is it not a fact that local authorities have a far better record than the private sector, and that both of them have a far better record than the nationally-controlled sector, in housing? Is it not about time that the Minister discussed meaningfully with councils in great distress, who have great problems, particularly in London, and the inner cities, and paid more attention to what they are saying that their local people need?
Lord Elton: My Lords, the control that central Government exercise on local authority expenditure is implemented by the slope arrangements which I described a minute ago. This means that the cost of the provision of services by a local authority is converted into a cost per head of its grant-related expenditure. Central Government take an average of what all local authorities achieve in this. That is what they at present wish it to be. We then add a 10 per cent. threshold above that, and do not go into the steeper slope, the 1·5 pence marginal cost, until they have gone above the national average by 10 per cent. That is a very comfortable form of control compared with the absolute targeting which we have had in the past.
If you have to have a maximum of local authority expenditure for reasons which my noble friend has made amply clear, then this is the way to do it and to retain a strong element of local democracy, because the local authority makes its choice against that pattern of percentage of grant. It actually knows what the effect of its decisions will be, and they are reflected in the amount of rates which they have to charge to the ratepayers, who are their electors. You cannot describe that as being in any way remote from democracy.
Lord Sandford: My Lords, would not my noble friend nevertheless agree that the fundamental flaw in the whole system, which no Government for ages have tackled, is that far too many people are in a position to vote for things without having to pay any part of their cost?
Lord Elton: Absolutely, my Lords.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, will the Minister also agree that it is right and proper for a local council, if it wishes to increase its services, to recognise that that will be reflected in increased rates and allow the local ratepayers to decide at election time, and not for central Government to decide by curtailing the amount of rates which the council wishes to spend?
Lord Elton: Absolutely, my Lords, and that is what we do. But, because so much of the money comes not from the ratepayers but from central Government, we have to be certain that the decisions are reflected in the
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level of rates. If it is just a straightforward ratio of one to one, the effect is concealed by the level of central Government contribution and other sources of income to the local authorities. That is why we have this somewhat arcane system. It is in order to improve the reflectivity in the level of rates of the decisions taken by local government.
My noble friend has put his finger right on the point. At present, even when you have done that, so many people either are not affected, or think they are not affected, that it does not have sufficient effect. We believe, with the noble Lord opposite, that the proper control of local government is democratic and local control, and that is why we are looking at the system again.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I am sorry to say this, but we are going on at some length. May I read from Standing Orders, which state:
"Ministerial statements are made for the information of the House, and, although brief comments and questions for clarification are allowed, such statements should not be made the occasion for an immediate debate".
I have the feeling that this is turning into an immediate debate. If your Lordships do not think much of my ruling, perhaps you would like to have mercy on the poor Doorkeepers, whose dinner it is tonight, and who look after us so well throughout the year. The fact is that we have one-and-a-half debates still to go, and perhaps we can return to the debate on education. But before the debate is resumed, I should inform your Lordships that the revised time by which the debate must end is six o'clock.

Community Education and Employment
4.42 p.m.
Debate resumed.
The Countess of Mar: My Lords, when I first saw the title of this debate on the Order Paper I, as no doubt did many of your Lordships, thought instantly of the recreational and vocational adult evening classes which for many years have taken place in educational premises all over the country. I am immensely grateful, and very genuinely grateful, to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, who has brought this subject to our attention, for I have had my eyes opened to a facet of education about which I knew very little.
As a beneficiary of continuing education, I was prompted to inquire further into community education and I discovered in my own county of Hereford and Worcester that such a scheme was in the process of development. Frankley is just within the borders of Hereford and Worcester administratively, but most local people think of it as the fringe of the City of Birmingham. About 10 years ago a new housing estate was developed to accommodate some of the families at the top of the Birmingham housing list under an urban resettlement programme. By definition, these families are what we tend to describe as "problem families". But I prefer to think and talk of them as families with problems, many of which arise through no fault of their own.

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I am told by the community workers that at first it was very difficult to get any kind of neighbourly relationships off the ground, because families, while not necessarily regarding themselves as social outcasts, would regard their neighbours as such and would have nothing to do with them. The quality of housing on the estate was good, hut, because of the financial strictures imposed towards the end of the last decade, the local authority was unable to provide the recreational amenities, such as playgrounds and a swimming pool, which would have helped to build up a community spirit. The adults felt isolated, taken away from their family network. Unable to afford transport to help them keep in touch with their relatives, they tended to withdraw into themselves.
It is difficult for us in our position to visualise the social deprivation endured by these families. Over and over again, we, with our totally different standards, tell them to "Get on their bikes" or "Pull themselves up by their bootlaces". When you are at the bottom of the heap it is extremely difficult to do so on your own, and we really must accept and understand this if we are to help those who are less fortunate than ourselves.
Fortunately for this community, there are some people with vision who are prepared to try to help them. When the high school was planned and built six years ago it was as a cost-effective multi-use building. As well as the normal school facilities, it houses a public library, a youth centre, a day centre for the elderly and disabled, a sports hall and a small theatre. It also has above average craft facilities. It is not just a high school. It is the Frankley community high school. It benefits tremendously from a system of single line management. The headmaster of the school is also the warden of the site. There is also very close cooperation with the two first and two middle schools on the estate.
The high school provides the normal full-time courses for children until they reach 16, but there is also an in-built flexibility which enables some young people to take part-time courses in some subjects when they are 14. Two years ago, instead of the normal sixth forms, a post-I6 centre was developed. There was a steering committee whose members came from the Manpower Services Commission, the TUC, Cadbury's, Kalamazoo and the various county agencies. Students of all ages—literally 16 to 90—are able to take a great variety of courses, both recreational and vocational, and often the one will lead into the other.
The value of this to a community where standard adult classes are beyond their financial reach, and often at inconvenient times, cannot be measured. Many of the courses are free; some are pay-as-you-learn. There is an open learning scheme operated in conjunction with the National Extension College, where adults can buy, or be helped to buy, the materials necessary for their course. The post-16 coordinator is available on Thursday evenings with other tutors who provide any advice and assistance which may be required. There is also an outreach programme—and other noble Lords have spoken about the outreach programme—to help adults become literate and numerate. Many are too ashamed
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of their inadequacy to join a class, so in the initial stages they are taught individually in their own homes. I will say more of that later.
The centre is also the local managing agency for the Mode A YTS scheme and has the county agency for Mode B. Their community education programme includes courses for young people not accepted for YTS and for those who have failed to find employment, following a YTS course, at no charge. There is a matrix of studies which caters for several levels of students. For example, there are four computer courses running concurrently, between which students can move freely according to their ability.
To ease the transition from school to a technical or vocational education, there are plans afoot to rent an industrial unit which will contain a range of equipment needed to provide a sound training. It is expected to cost about £140,000 to set up and the headmaster has already received pledges of over £100,000. Unfortunately, the county council is unable to help, because its education budget is stretched beyond its limits, but interest has been shown by a number of agencies and by local industrialists. The idea for the unit arose from the EC publication Policies for Transition. It cuts out the fragmentation which has arisen from the seeming multitude of courses available to young people and the adult unemployed.
A little over two years ago, those involved with the adults and children on the estate realised that more needed to be done to help them feel that they were worthwhile citizens. Most of the families are larger than average with a preponderance of very young children, there are a number of single-parent families, and all of them have suffered bad experiences with authority in one way or another. The schools were receiving children with severe behavioural problems, not because the parents did not care—they simply did not know how to cope.
A project team, funded by urban aid grants, was set up with the brief to make a beneficial environment for the children. The team is led by an educational psychologist. Working with her are two teachers. They have gone out to all the homes on the estate and have made people welcome. It has been an enormous effort on their part, but a very worthwhile one. They have built up a rapport between home and school, by working with parents in their homes and encouraging them to help in the schools. They started initially with individual parents, then with small groups and now have built up enough confidence for parents to work together in their children's year groups.
The two teachers taught themselves by trial and error to teach adults the skills of literacy and numeracy and have now trained eight lay people as well. The scheme has grown through working with the parents, together with their children. Many of the adults had bad school experiences but now, with encouragement and support, are as keen as their children to learn.
Next term, on five Saturdays, there is to be a family workshop at the high school. The premises will be opened more widely than they usually are at weekends. There will be a market where people will be able to sell craft items they have made, food and other

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produce. There will be sporting activities and demonstrations—this is the social bait and gradually courses on child development for parents, a workshop for parents and teenagers and specifically for teenagers, a "life of your own" project to help them balance their need for independence with the prospect of long-term unemployment. The community high school will not be seen as Big Brother, but as a place where adults and young people can meet and work together to develop their interests and skill.
The craft tutors will not give lessons as such but will provide support and advice on the use of equipment. The aim of the project team is to wean both adults and children from their dependence on outside agencies and to foster a confident independent, outward-looking attitude in those they help. Before the project comes to its end in three years' time they hope to have forged links between parents of pre-school children and nursery teachers. Recent tests have shown that children of four are 10 months behind in their language development, and this has been seen to affect children at an increasing rate into adult life. By encouraging parents to recognise the importance of language to children from birth they hope to eliminate some of the behavioural problems which give cause to anger and frustration or withdrawal later in life.
I have said that I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham. I am also grateful to the senior inspector of Hereford and Worcester county council, the headmaster of the community high school and the project leader with whom I have spoken. I am sure that they will also be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, for they said to me that they feel as though they have suddenly been recognised from the wilderness. Their enthusiasm for their work seems to be boundless, and is remarkably infectious. I asked whether they had any problems. The first is that the days are too short. The second, that resourcing is too thin. They understand the problems in that area and hasten to say that Hereford and Worcester county council and other agencies give as much support as they can. The third and major worry is caused by the fact that they are working on the edge of a county shire and an urban conurbation.
They are very much aware that the Boundary Commission is to to sit within the next two years and the uncertainty over the possible transfer of Frankley from Hereford and Worcester to Birmingham is causing some anxiety. I know that the noble Earl the Minister can do nothing about their first problem, but may I suggest to him that he ask his right honourable friend in the other place to consider the creation of a fund, based on EC social fund lines, to support community education projects? May I also ask him whether it would be possible to obtain a statement of intent from the Boundary Commission which would enable this community to plan ahead with confidence? It is not just the teachers and those running it who are concerned, it is the local population.
It will probably take another 10 years for the value of this subtle form of family education or social engineering to become clear. My own impression is that such a positive means of providing education should be encouraged in every community, rural and urban alike, and that the people in that community can do nothing but benefit. Mind you, they must take
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part in it themselves and be willing to work hard themselves. I am sure that the noble Earl the Minister will agree.
4.53 p.m.
Baroness Phillips: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, for introducing this subject. Education is never received with any great enthusiasm and certain other subjects would have filled the Benches all around the House. I think it is some indication of what we feel about education. Lloyd George was supposed to have said once that the Welsh have a passion for education, the Scots have a respect for education and the English have no particular objection to it. The older I grow the more I feel that this is the case. If we are going to get community education we have to get our own perspective on education right in the first place. I speak as a former teacher and one who has been involved in what was laughingly called adult education for many years.
The NUT had the best definition of education that we have ever had. They said that it was for the happiness and fulfilment of the human being, the wealth of the nation and the moral fibre of our society. At present—and let us make no mistake about this—education is tied almost entirely to the work ethic. Chidren are urged to pass exams to get qualifications. I was in a class the other day when the teacher said to one girl, "If you don't get more A levels you will end up in a shop". I thought that that was rather hard on the retail industry which offers some very good career prospects. I recall when I was in the convent that we were threatened with something different: "If you don't work harder you will end up on the streets", but that is a rather lucrative occupation, I gather, so I do not think they would threaten them with that.
There is little doubt that the whole emphasis is on earning a living. Work is understood in only one way in our society—and that is work for pay. That is how the unemployed become not only very distraught, because they do not have work that will bring them money, but feel rejected and less than useful. It also means the young married women with whom I worked and whom I prefer to call homemakers. I was rather depressed that the noble Lord pictured them chained to a prison of drudgery. I am not sure that homemakers see themselves in that way. It is the most skilled occupation there is and the one which would be most sadly missed if it were not there. But this is the group who always say, "I am only a housewife", because the feeling is that they are not paid by money. I think the description on an income tax form is "non-gainfully employed", but they are making a great contribution to the community.
There are also the retired. I have the privilege of being president of the Pre-retirement Association which speaks for 10 million people over the age of 60. How are they described in our work-orientated society? They are generally described as "geriatric has-beens". That applies to anybody over the age of 60. This is all an attitude of mind which flows through and permeates the whole of our educational system. What I have tried for years to point out—and this is why I am absolutely delighted that we are talking about this subject today—is that everybody has a contribution to

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make to society. I taught the dull and backward (as they were then called) for two years and this showed me that every human being has talents. Some have many talents. Everybody has at least one. Many people go through life without their real talent being discovered. They are always second best at everything. It also shows clearly that we do not appreciate the role of the voluntary societies. What do they do for us? They run budgets as great as those of many of the institutions in the City. I shall not go further than that because they probably do it much better. They open all kinds of opportunities. They have created all kinds of pioneer efforts.
These people would not be regarded as working because they are working in a different situation altogether. Our society wastes material and people because we do not give them the opportunity to make a contribution to society. Most children still leave school with a sigh of relief and say, "Right, that's the end of it". We as educationalists fail somewhere. We do not light the flame of learning as we should do. But happily over the years, thanks to the pioneers of whom we have heard so many of your Lordships speak so eloquently, there is a feeling more and more that education is not bounded by our school days, that education is something that is about living.
I was very intrigued with the story told by the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, about the American janitor. When I worked in voluntary education it was my duty to try to obtain the use of a classroom in order that my women's groups could meet there. First, I had to have long interviews with the director of education; then I had to have long interviews with the district education officer; then I had to have long interviews with the head teacher; and finally, and most important of all, I had to have a long interview with the caretaker. If anybody was going to block the way of having a classroom it was he.
I am happy to hear of the use that is now being made of schools. I think of the struggles—and I am talking about the 1950s—that I had working in the new towns and working on the new estates where thousands of young women were transplanted and isolated, the very people who wanted to use their skills and talents and to acquire more learning. Those were the groups we were working on for our community education. Occasionally there was a spark of enthusiasm and somebody would say, "Yes, you have come to the right place". I have held groups in every kind of situation your Lordships can imagine. They included an old aeroplane hangar and an old shop that still had a "fish and chips" sign over the window. Nevertheless, people came in their hundreds to those meetings. They came with the enthusiasm to acquire new skills so that they could make a contribution. If I had time, I could tell your Lordships many exciting stories about people who acquired knowledge that they never really realised they could acquire, simply through community education.
It is still the case that schools are closed far too much. I once worked out that schools and colleges are closed for as nearly as many days of the year as they are opened. Playgrounds are closed and playing fields are closed. I am very glad to hear that people have
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broken through the terrible tangle of red tape in order to get access to schools.
We formed through the women's groups all the things that we are hearing about today dealing with pre-school education, education for those returning to work, education for those who wish to acquire new skills for other reasons, education for those who formerly had not been considered literate enough to participate, and, finally, education for those about to retire.
It should be remembered that we are now to have bonus years. The Bible makes mention of three score years and ten but now we are to have four score years and ten. Still, it is not much use living longer if one is not actually doing anything with that extra time. Here is another opportunity that community education is certainly taking on board. I had the privilege of visiting one of the community education centres in Bedford. It was a centre with a difference; one could only be admitted if one was aged over 50. Nothing so enhances the value of something as to give it some degree of exclusivity. At that centre every kind of language was being taught. Every type of skill was being imparted to the people there, who will now be able to make a contribution to society during their bonus years.
The community education movement has a great future but it needs much more encouragement. If this debate does nothing more than give it publicity then it will have been right to have it. But we are closing schools for various reasons. As a teacher, I see falling rolls in a different light from the Government. I see them as an opportunity to have at last small classes and to provide some children with the one-to-one situation that they deserve. But, no—schools are going to be closed. Let us not close those schools. Let us keep them as centres of community education. They would bring in far more people, who would not feel that they were in a school situation. The people are there who want that kind of education but they are not sure how to approach it. It is an exciting movement that deserves every help and encouragement. I hope that today's debate will stimulate that help and encouragement in some way.
5.3 p.m.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, in adding my thanks to my noble friend Lord Stewart of Fulham, I know that he will be less impressed by my thanks than he will be gratified by the response there has been to the debate he so ably introduced. Every speaker has referred to particular examples of good community education. The noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, spoke of London and Sussex; the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy, of Scotland; the right reverend Prelate, of Leicester; my noble friend Lord Ardwick, of the Cranford Community School in Hounslow; the noble Countess, Lady Mar, of I suppose it is now Hereford and Worcester but it may be Birmingham in the future; and my noble friend Lady Phillips, of Bedford. We have an impressive array of evidence that what was called by my noble friend Lady Phillips the community school movement does have a record of success on the ground in many parts of the country.
The question is not why this debate is being held now, because its importance is quite clear. The question arises: why has it not been held long before

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now? I shall not return to the subject of village colleges and Henry Morris because it has been covered very ably already. However, I want to return to Archbishop Temple in the time before the Education Act 1944, when he described education as being the cure to the evil of mental slavery, which he described as being as important as economic slavery as a scourge on our society. It is worth trying to look in policy terms at why at this particular time we need to be thinking again about the nature of our schooling and about why we need to be looking, in the terms of the Motion, at the effect of education on work and employment policies.
Traditionally, education has been one of the seven ages of man. Shakespeare described,
"the whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school".
If that is still sometimes the case, it is certainly not the case in the schools that have been described by many noble Lords this afternoon. However, it appears to me to be the case that the nature of schooling and the need for schooling is changing quite dramatically. I suggest that there is a need to raise standards in school. I do not mean that simply in the literal sense of increasing the number of examination successes, although the number has increased and is being increased. Bearing in mind the fact that there are still substantial sections of our population—women, ethnic minorites, and so on—who achieve lower examination results, the scope for a further improvement in that limited sense is still considerable.
There is the need to raise standards also in the much more important sense of giving those who are benefiting from education not only a better understanding of society around them but also the power to make their own contribution to a better society. I suggest that the kind of "adolescent ghettos", to use the phrase of Mrs. Anne Jones, the head of Cranford Community School, that still account for too many of our secondary schools are not the right place in which to achieve the raising of standards that I believe to be necessary.
Then again, the nature of work has been changing and many noble Lords have referred to that point. Traditionally the position has been that we think of work as being the only criterion of proper involvement and self-respect in our society. We think of work in a restrictive way; in the sense of being a year-round lifetime's occupation for usually one wage-earner per household. All of those preconceptions are breaking down. Work is becoming more flexible and our attitude towards work is also changing. We have less of the work ethic that was described earlier. We still want to work but we value our leisure and the flexibility that different work patterns make possible for us.
Only last week we discussed in this House the whole question of the contribution that higher education ought to make in the very great need for continuing education and lifetime learning. We discussed the undoubted fact that the potential demand for continuing education is very great. It is far greater than had been anticipated even 10 years go. It is not just a question of demographic demand. With falling rolls at our schools, there is an increasing complement of adults aged from 30 to 60, and indeed older, who are candidates for continuing education. There is also the
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experience, particularly through the Open University, of a huge, undiminishing and unmet demand for continuing education regardless of the initial qualifications of those who want to take part in it.
All those indications, it seems to me, show the importance of community education in our society.
What do we mean by that and how does it affect the various age groups? First, at 14 to 18 there are a number of traditional barriers which need to be broken down if we are to improve the performance and contribution of the educational system. It has always seemed to me that the distinction between education and vocational training is a very dangerous and a very limiting distinction. Unfortunately, it is now enshrined in the terms of reference of the Department of Education and Science on the one hand and the Manpower Services Commission on the other. I am going to suggest there there are things within the ambit of community education that can be done about that.
It always seemed to me that the break between education and work has been far too finite and far too complete and that work experience while young people are still participating in virtually full time education has a very great part to play; just as continuing education experience while young people are earning has a very great part to play. I am glad to say that for many years government programmes—this is not a party political point, they still continue—have served to some extent to break down that barrier.
As well as breaking down barriers I suggest that there need to be very considerable changes in the method of working in our secondary schools. It is not just a matter of the best use of the physical resources, although that is quite an important point and one that has been made on a number of occasions this afternoon. If we are to have a more flexible use of our physical resources surely that means that we must be thinking positively about more modular programmes which can be adapted to the wider variety of people who are to take part in them. Certainly we have to become accustomed to the idea of mixed age teaching; that is a critical point in community education.
I shall not refer at any length to the tertiary education sector because this was a subject of debate last week, but it is clear that if it is to take part in the kind of community education, which noble Lords have applauded, the higher and further education sector should be thinking again about the nature of the access it makes available. It must consider the extent to which it makes available education for those without formal qualifications, the extent to which it modernises the qualifications which are now required, and the extent to which it makes provision for minorities and the disadvantaged of various kinds.
The really important thing is what it does for adults. So many adults in our communities are now in a situation where a more open educational structure could be providing enormous help for them. Obviously we start with the adults who missed out on schooling; those who missed out on basic education. We have heard from a number of noble Lords about the continuing problems of adult illiteracy; those who missed out on the special measures which are now

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widely available but were certainly not widely available during the formative years of most of the people in our workforce.
There are the needs of those who have missed out on vocational training not because there was less vocational training in the past but because the vocational training which took place was for skills which are now no longer required and because most of the skills which are required started during the working life of the large part of our workforce. So the need for lifelong learning and the need for provision for the unemployed, the handicapped and the disadvantaged of various kinds is an essential element of the community education movement.
I think it is possible to put forward a number of different levels at which community education could be organised, starting from the very simplest level of the dual use of the physical facilities and going on to, I suppose, the do-gooder image where it is thought that the education authorities and educationists, being the "haves" in our society, go out to the community and offer of their bounty, their wisdom, to the "have nots" in the community. A much more realistic and hopeful view of this is where the educationists are a little more humble and recognise that there is a great deal to be learnt from the community itself, and where therefore the interaction of the education sector and the community is the essence of community education and where everybody—the educationists themselves, the pupils of school age and the adult pupils—are all learners and teachers in this society.
It is possible to go further and to have almost mystical views about the community as being some sort of indication of a higher quality of life. It is possible to go further and think of education and the community as being the agents for change in our society. I do not go that far. I am content that at a relatively practical level we can think of community schools as contributing to a greater sense of understanding among all of us of the nature of each other's problems and opportunities.
So where does this lead us in policy terms? I think there are a number of areas where not just Government but local education authorities, parents, and above all those engaged in full time education, must adapt to change if we are to achieve the objectives and to match the achievements which have been described this afternoon. I must say first that I have a severe doubt about some of the suggestions concerning parent involvement in schools. I do not refer to parent involvement in governing bodies—that is a matter for legislation which we understand is to come in February and I do not wish to anticipate that debate—but I know that if I were at school now I would not particularly want my parents to be attending the school and learning alongside me. I seem to remember that being at school was a welcome opportunity to make a break with my home background and to have a whole different set of social and other opportunities. If we mix too much home life and school life at family level there are a certain number of dangers.
In policy terms, what are the implications for the Government and for other participants in the education process? I suggest that the most important is
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teacher training. It is a fact that a very considerable proportion of our teachers now in service were trained at a time when in most training colleges and institutions the idea was that education was the communication of information one way; where the teacher stood in front of the class and the class absorbed knowledge. It will be extremely difficult for many teachers to learn that in many cases it does not work in that way. Certainly pupils learn from each other at least as much as they learn from teachers and also the teachers themselves can continue to improve by the way in which they learn from the pupils. What is actually required is what the French call a déformation professionnelle rather than a further formation professionnelle. I believe that the Government should give an indication that it is prepared to devote resources and give practical encouragement to the re-training of teachers in that way.
The continuous use of school buildings will make for a number of difficulties which local education authorities may encounter and which the Government may help to resolve. I believe that there are some instances in which the existing terms and conditions of service for teachers inhibit the kind of change which we have been describing this afternoon, and it is only the goodwill of the teachers in assenting to and participating in activities which, strictly speaking, do not form part of their duties that enables it to take place. I would suggest that the Government ought to be looking at the terms and conditions of teachers in such a way that they may have wider obligations but can also benefit from the exercise of those wider obligations.
As regards education and the training sector, we have heard some encouraging examples this afternoon of the way in which MSC activity is in fact taking place in schools. My noble friend Lord Ardwick described a Cranford community school, where a substantial amount of money comes from courses for women who wish to return to work which are funded both by MSC money and by European Community money. As we move into the two-year YTS programme, in the course of the next year, it seems to me that unless many more of the YTS activities are centred in our schools and colleges it is not really going to be doing as good a job as it ought to be.
We ought also perhaps to consider whether the CPVE ought not to take place at an earlier age with more work experience, and the full YTS to start at 17 years, but there perhaps I am going beyond the terms of reference of the Motion this afternoon. Yet these are important matters on which the Government ought at least to be giving guidance and help and probably in many cases funding.
The revival of the adult and continuing education effort, which to some extent has been shunted off into a corner after the expiry of the term of the Advisory Council in Adult and Continuing Education, ought now to be considered. Above all, in the light of the terms of this Motion, we should be thinking much more of the links of employers with schools and the Government ought to be giving every encouragement that they can to a movement which I know is increasing now through the local efforts of schools to make contact with employers and employers to make contact with the schools.

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In the coming years, with the change in the age of our population, we do have a real opportunity to take advantage of it and to make our schools more relevant to our society. I spoke at the beginning of my speech about the schools consisting of the whining schoolboys, which is the second of Shakespeare's "Ages of Man". I think perhaps we might exempt,
"the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms"
and maybe also the seventh age of,
"Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything",
and perhaps also we ought not to be arguing too much for vocational training for the soldier and the lover. But with those exceptions, education is about all the ages of men and women; and it has been very helpful and inspiring for me to be able to listen to the speeches in the debate this afternoon.
5.25 p.m.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham, on his success in the ballot, and to thank him and all the other noble Lords and Baronesses who have spoken for their contributions to this illuminating, well-informed and good-tempered debate. We have had the benefit of a wealth of experience, and a wide range of important and interesting issues have been aired.
I should like to start by reminding your Lordships of the Government's principal aims for all sectors of education. These were described in the White Paper, "Better Schools" (Cmnd. 9469), which was published earlier this year, in the following terms:
"To raise standards at all levels of ability; and to secure the best possible return for the resources which are found for education".
That is the context within which this debate is set. The premises, equipment and specialist knowledge and skills of teachers which are found in our schools and colleges are very valuable assets. All of them have a role to play in widening the scope of the overall educational offering to the community.
Noble Lords have already reminded us of the historical background. Community education is no modern innovation, though like so much in the education system it is a fluid concept which is influenced by changing needs and is shifting constantly in its emphasis as it seeks to meet them. It is a well-established facet of provision, which in some areas goes back for very many years. In other areas it is a notion which is only just beginning to take root. Its form is infinitely variable. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, who said that it came in 112 varieties. On my arithmetic, if we gave it two more, it could be known as "Super-Heinz".
Few would disagree in principle with the broad aim of wider use of educational provision and premises, especially school and college premises, by the community at large. But that general aim conceals the range of community use which exists. At its simplest, it may amount to no more than the use of school premises or playing fields in the evenings or at weekends by adults or young people. That kind of use is now, I am very glad to tell the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, very widespread, with 79 per cent. of all maintained schools in regular use outside school hours in term time and almost all secondary schools in such use.
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At the other extreme, community education encompasses extensive use during days, evenings and weekends of purpose-built combined educational and community accommodation by a number of different groups, from the very young to senior citizens, as we have heard so eloquently described by the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Leicester. Often, some of the buildings in that kind of use have been provided with the aid of funds from the Sports Council and the district council.
The Government welcome the steady growth in community education, both within the authorities already committed to the concept and among those now taking it up for the first time. In some cases, falling school rolls have provided the opportunity for the release of surplus accommodation which can be used for the benefit of the wider community—and I was delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, made mention of this.
The Department of Education and Science has sought to give practical encouragement to such developments where school closures are not possible through the design guidance of its Architects and Building Group. One recent example is Design Note 42 (1985), "Dukeries Complex—A Place for the Family" which describes a joint project by the Department's Architects and Building Group and county and district authorities in Nottinghamshire to adapt the buildings of a large secondary school to provide social, educational, sporting and recreational facilities for all sections of the local community, from toddlers to pensioners. I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of this paper with my brief and I found it an absolutely rivetting document. I would advise any of your Lordships who are interested in this particular facet of education to get hold of this document and read it.
Our schools are rich in valuable resources, both in terms of the skills and specialist knowledge of their teachers and in their buildings and equipment. It is obviously desirable to seek to use those resources as effectively as possible in meeting the many challenges which we, as a society, face today. That is a message which has come through loud and clear from everyone who has spoken in this debate.
There is a wide measure of agreement among educationists that a school's relationship with parents and with its local community is an essential indicator of its professional health. The education service has a role to play in meeting the increased demand for vocational preparation, for wider leisure facilities, and in contributing toward holding a community together, reducing vandalism and in overcoming alienation among disadvantaged groups. Nor are the benefits necessarily confined to the community outside the school. It may well be that the wider use of a school provides opportunities for the pupils to serve the community to its benefit and theirs—and there are many interesting and heartening examples of this to be found. Equally, the presence of adults in a school may have a noticeable effect in improving overall standards of pupil behaviour.
Of course, there is another side to the coin. The school population is declining in most areas and comparatively few new schools are being built. There is therefore only limited scope for the provision of new

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purpose-built community accommodation. Some existing buildings may not readily lend themselves to wider use by adults. There can also be difficult issues of staffing to resolve. Above all, the educational needs of the pupils themselves must be safeguarded.
As to the Government's position, they have always been supportive of the aim of community education and will continue to be so. But development depends heavily upon resources; and it is for local education authorities to decide upon the pattern of their educational provision and upon the allocation of resources to meet their chosen priorities. It would not therefore be right for central Government to rush local education authorities into a particular direction. Consistent encouragement has been given for the community use of maintained school premises and the Government hope that local authorities would continue to promote such use so far as practicable within the resources available to them.
I think that I detected only one small criticism of the Government in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Stewart. He said that the Government showed no interest whatsover in the subject. I must spend a little time contradicting that. My right honourable friend and his Ministerial colleagues are well aware of the range of community provision which exists in England. In the course of their visits to local education authorities they have of course seen a number of community schools and colleges and will continue to do so. My honourable friend the Minister of State had a useful exploratory discussion last month with representatives of the Community Education Development Centre, and he will have in mind when he visits educational establishments the points which were put to him in that discussion. The Department of Education and Science has published a number of reports by Her Majesty's Inspectorate on individual community schools and colleges together with advice on technical matters by its architects and building group.
I take note of the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, and endorsed by my noble friend Lady Carnegy of Lour that there is a need for the LEAs to get together for discussions and to circulate ideas among themselves. It is a most interesting suggestion, and I shall pass that and a number of other suggestions that have been made to my right honourable friend.
I think that I am having a fairly easy time, as I cannot remember ever having been asked so few questions. I was interested in the points raised by my noble friend Lady Carnegy. I am grateful to her for reminding us that community education includes the need to help those who are not likely to come forward themselves and who might be frightened off even by the relatively informal setting of a community school. I join her and the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, in paying tribute to the many volunteers who are prepared to go out to where need exists.
I agree that we should recognise the importance of the many learning opportunities that exist within the community to assist with the personal development of those who need help. I believe that education authorities are becoming increasingly aware of those opportunities and are prepared to develop them. They will doubtless take note of what is being achieved by their colleagues in Scotland. I am sure that we can all
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be grateful to my noble friend for bringing a Scottish dimension to the debate.
The noble Countess asked two specific questions. The first was on additional finance, and here I am afraid that I have to play Scrooge. My right honourable friend has recently announced his plan for local authority expenditure on education for 1986–87 (on 12th November). Those plans provide for a cash increase of nearly 6 per cent. over the previous year. Nevertheless, the increase falls short of authorities' wishes and will demand a considerable degree of economy. There can be no further increase upon the announced figures, given the overall need to restrain public expenditure.
The noble Countess also asked about trying to get the Boundary Commission not to move part of, I think it was, Hereford and Worcester into Birmingham. I am speaking off the cuff, but I imagine the answer is that if the Government were seen in any way to try to influence the Boundary Commission, even for the most brilliant of reasons, we should get into the most appalling trouble in the press.
The Countess of Mar: My Lords, I was not exactly asking for the area not to be moved from Hereford and Worcester into Birmingham but for a decision to be made as to whether it was to be moved, so that whichever local authority it is going to can plan and finance plans for the future.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, as I say, I am speaking entirely off the cuff and may be giving erroneous information, in which case I shall write to the noble Countess. I know that the timetables of the Boundary Commission are firmly planned and I doubt whether it will be possible, but I shall certainly look into the matter and write to the noble Countess.
The noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, asked about conditions of service for teachers. There can be difficult issues of teachers' conditions of service to resolve, and conditions of service for school teachers are not entirely the same as those for teachers in further education establishments, as indeed he pointed out. But those are matters which need to be resolved locally and on an individual basis. Given good will it has almost always been possible to overcome any problems that have arisen.
I think that we are at one in our support for the concept of community education; and we are at one in our desire to see a continued growth in its development. Where some of us differ is about the means by which that continued growth can best be achieved. I would not accept that pressure from the centre is necessarily the best way to achieve that. Indeed, such pressure might well be counter-productive. The development of community schools and colleges needs to arise from clearly identified local demands which have been properly discussed and agreed between the partners locally—that is to say, the community at large, the parents of pupils, the staff of the schools and other agencies concerned, and governing bodies and local authorities.
There are difficult issues to be faced and problems to be overcome. They include the identification of needs, educational issues, organisational issues, and often financial issues. Solutions cannot be imposed on those

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who will need to work together harmoniously to identify priorities and to solve the problems which arise. There must be a genuine willingness on their part to work together; and it is right therefore that the initiative should come from the local rather than the national level. For their part, the Government will continue to try to respond to initiatives in a helpful spirit and to disseminate widely the experience of successful practice.
This has been a valuable debate which reflects the breadth of experience which is to be found in this House. A number of interesting suggestions have been made and my right honourable friend will be taking careful note of them. I am grateful to my noble friend and to the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, for making suggestions about the MSC and the YTS, and I shall endeavour to see that other of my right honourable and honourable friends also have the views of your Lordships on these matters.
I have nothing more to say except once again to thank the noble Lord, Lord Stewart, for what has been a happy and interesting debate. I am glad to say that I have learnt a lot. Perhaps it is because Christmas is in the air, but I think that it has been a good afternoon.
Lord Stewart of Fulham: My Lords, I wish to express my thanks to those noble Lords who have contributed to the debate and enriched it with so many varied experiences. We have had as good as one could expect from a member of the Government on almost any topic. It is not in my nature to say much more than that about any member of any government. But for what it is, I say it. I only hope that those zealous people up and down the country who are engaged in the work of community education will feel that we have given them a fair run and interested the Government, the House and perhaps a wider audience in the valuable work that they are doing. With that, I ask leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Aid to African Agriculture
5.39 p.m.
Lord Walston Lord Walston rose to call attention to the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development, entitled UK Aid to African Agriculture: and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the object of this short debate is to call attention to the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development entitled United Kingdom Aid to African Agriculture. I would particularly draw your Lordships' attention to the fact that this is an all-party parliamentary group. The report which has been produced is the result of work of Members of both our Houses and Members of all our parties, including a most distinguished Cross-Bencher. Therefore, there can be no question of it being in any way party political or biased in one way or another.
The study of this problem started when the Ethiopian famine was fresh in our minds. I want, however to emphasise at the outset that the report does not deal in any way with famine; rather, it puts
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forward proposals for preventing future famines and, above all, what we in this country can do in that respect. In the long term—the very long term—the essential thing is to raise the standard of living of those who actually produce the food so that they have better lives. They will then remain on the land in order to produce food for their fellow countryman. This means better education, better medical services, clean water supplies, electricity, better communications—all things that normally in the third world are found only in urban areas. These matters are, however, very long term. We must press ahead with them, but the report does not concern itself with those matters. We must do all that we can to ensure that they are not neglected. But we must turn our minds also, and this afternoon in particular, to those things that will yield quicker results.
At one time, the United Kingdom was a leader in aid, not only in ideas and in study but also in actual cash contributions. Now, alas, we are falling far behind. It is perhaps of some significance that the two worst countries, when aid is expressed in terms of percentage of gross national product, are the two largest, the United States and the Soviet Union. At the top of the league, on the other hand, we find Norway, one of the smallest countries, which gives 128 dollars per head of its population and a fraction under 1 per cent. of its GNP. The Netherlands gives a fraction over 1 per cent. of its GNP and a total of 88 dollars per head of its population. In comparison, the United States gives 0.24 per cent. of its GNP and the Soviet bloc as a whole gives less than 0.2 per cent.—in fact 0.18 per cent.
I am afraid that the United Kingdom is not very far from the bottom of the league table of DAC countries. It is, in fact, third from the bottom giving 25 dollars per head of population and one third of 1 per cent. of our GNP. What is more, that amount is now 4 per cent. less in real terms over the last five years and it is still falling. This is not a record of which we can be proud. Let me say straightaway that we cannot look, as the Government will sometimes have us look, at private enterprise to fill this gap. Private investment is not making good the balance. Private export credits, direct investment and bank lending from this country have fallen from £4.5 billion in 1980 to only £1.3 billion in 1984.
During that time—four or five years—conditions in Africa have steadily worsened. There has, of course, been a drought about which all of us know—a drought which in Sahel has been going on for decades and which hit Ethiopia and the headlines two years ago. In certain areas, such as Ethiopia, the drought has been exacerbated by war and by civil unrest.
At the same time, earnings from agricultural exports have fallen by half what they were in 1978. If that was not enough, the debt service of these countries now totals 8 billion dollars. And, according to the director-general of the FAO, it will probably double over the next two years. The outlook is therefore not very bright.
The report makes simple and concrete proposals on how to improve the situation. I should like to go over it in detail but time obviously does not allow for that. I shall pick out some of the more important proposals that it makes. Of course, more resources are needed.

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Especially, we believe, a higher proportion of available resources must be given to small farmers, the subsistence farmers. They are the people who actually produce the food that their fellow countrymen want to eat. What is more, they produce it close, if not contiguous, to the areas where the hunger exists in its worst form. That obviates the necessity of lengthy and costly transport often over roads that are impassable at certain times of the year and often to areas that have no roads whatever, as we have found in the Sudan.
Plantation farming has its uses. It is very valuable and, in particular, it is an earner of foreign exchange. Often, when operated by the Commonwealth Development Corporation, with its satellite farmers and nucleus plantation, it is a valuable means of improving techniques and teaching new techniques. But, on the whole, the plantation farms do not actually grow the food that the people need. It is the small farmers who do that. Therefore, there must be more resources for small farmers.
Secondly, there is a need for more research. We have always been one of the leaders in research for tropical agriculture. But, again, alas, funds are now being reduced. Not many funds are needed. A million pounds produces enormous results. We have many good scientists who have been working on these matters and who can continue to work and add enormously to the knowledge that is essential if more food is to be grown.
Not only must high priority be given to more research but this must also be on a long-term basis. It may take anything from 15 to 20 years for the results of research really to become apparent in the fields themselves. If that research is cut off half way through, all the work already done is wasted. Thirdly, there must be understanding of the social conditions including all forms of local customs that exist in the countries that we are anxious to help. The projects must be geared to the capacity of the farmers themselves, to the capacity of the local officials and to the capacity of the experts in those countries. There is no point in having high-flown and extremely impressive projects which ignore local customs, ignore local habits, and require a far higher degree of training, sophistication and material than is available in the places where they are to be carried out. One must have, therefore, a very intimate knowledge of the social, economic and educational conditions of the countries where help is most needed.
Then, there is the question of stable prices—an essential aspect of this whole matter. I know that the EC has introduced an admirable scheme—what they call their Stabex system—to attempt to stabilise prices for certain amounts of commodities. But it has not been the resounding success that those of us who supported it in the early days hoped that it would be. In the case of sugar where it comes into play, there is the whole question of the sugar regime of the EC with the enormous overproduction, the dumping of the European surpluses on the world market, and thereby the drop in world prices of sugars to the lowest levels that have been known for many years, with devastating results on the balance of payments of these countries.
Then there is the need for more technical co-operation. There has been a very rapid decline recently in technical co-operation. It is very sad that that should be so because we have plenty of experts in tropical agriculture who are only too anxious to go out and help once more in the countries in which they have learned their jobs; and those countries are anxious to have them—there is no feeling against ex-patriates. We must therefore be prepared to supply and to pay for more technical co-operation in the shape of expatriates from this country to the third world.
Finally, I do not think that I can do better than to quote two of the paragraphs which come at the end of the report. We write there:
"We believe that the ODA should maintain a specific long term development aid programme which is inviolate. It should be equipped with a small provision for emergencies and when a larger response is needed"—
as, for instance, in the case of Ethiopia—
"this should be funded on the basis of additionality from one Government's contingency reserve and not from departmental funds".
The report goes on to say:
"The success of Live Aid and the established voluntary development agencies in fundraising is evidence that there is now strong public support for measures to relieve suffering in developing countries".
So the Government need have no fear of electoral unpopularity, even if they were influenced by such things, by making more money available for the ODA.
Finally we write:
"In such a climate of concern we feel that ODA would greatly enhance its reputation as a development agency if it could set out clearly its views on that range of complex issues such as 'food crops versus cash crops' and 'famine relief versus development aid' which currently befuddle so much of public and parliamentary debate".
I recommend this report to your Lordships. I hope that many of you who have not already read it will take the report as compulsory reading over the Christmas Recess. And I hope that the Government will pay particular attention to this—and again I underline it—All Party Parliamentary Group and its recommendations. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.54 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships would wish me to express appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Walston, for mounting this debate and introducing it in this way, and for all the work which he has done on this All Party Group and for his part in the production of this most valuable report.
It is perhaps significant that we are debating this just one week before Christmas. It was last Christmas that we saw horrific pictures on our television screens. Christmas is traditionally a season of caring and sharing, and its powerful message extends far beyond the ranks of those who go to our churches. It comes home to us all. There was indeed a massive public response to those pictures which appeared on television, as we all know, and to which reference has been made. Live Aid has been just one example of this. The noble Lord, Lord Walston, is surely quite right to point to this as showing that there is a real "head of steam"—if one may use that phrase—behind the need to give more in the field of development, and not simply famine relief.

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There are of course some in our country who feel that the Christian ethic, or any religious ethic, applies to individuals only and that it ought to be individual charity which really matters. But others recognise that there are fundamental issues of justice involved if we are to have a better world.
Some of your Lordships may have been at the House last October when we had this mass lobby on world poverty when more than 20,000 people from all over the country turned up outside the Houses of Parliament at the invitation of the aid agencies. I am sorry to say that that great lobby was disgracefully ignored by our leading quality daily newspaper, and indeed did not get the public coverage which it should have had. But I think that that showed, among many other indications, that many people in this country are now prepared to look in longer terms. Is it not true to say that this is always a fundamental difficulty in political life; and that politicians have to be aware that people think in terms of self interest, quite naturally, and normally short-term self interest? However, it is the task of politicians and statesmen frequently to point to longer-term self interest. If we are to have a better, more just, and more ordered world, we have to do a great deal better than we have done recently in the distribution of the world resources taking account particularly of the vast continent of Africa and the kind of problems which it now faces.
It is in that context that we can surely all give a very warm welcome both to the setting up of the All Party Parliamentary Group on overseas development which will carry on its good work; and to the fact that it has chosen as its first subject United Kingdom aid to African agriculture, and has produced what I would think on any showing is an excellent report. It is well condensed, not too long, and makes some very important points.
The noble Lord, Lord Walston, has already indicated that we are not debating famine. There has been a foreign affairs Select Committee which has reported on some of the implications of the terrible disaster of famine. But the report quite clearly recognises that famine has long term and deep rooted causes. In the opening page I read these words:
"our concerns are much more with the longer term problems of developing Africa's natural resources … The UK has a wealth of resources and expertise to offer in this field, much of which can be directed to help avoid future famines and contribute to the process of development and of economic rehabilitation.".
The report recognises clearly that there is a connection with famine because, after all, many of these countries live on the edge of starvation. It needs very little in the way of adverse weather conditions to tilt them over the edge in that way.
As your Lordships might almost expect me to say, I believe that there is a theological dimension to this because, properly understood, God places into the hands of mankind new ways of meeting the kind of natural disasters which have always affected human life most devastatingly, although never before have we lived in a global village when the consequences of these disasters were brought on to the television screens of our living rooms. All of us were caught out by the severity of the famine, the drought, which occurred a few months ago. But there were many warnings of it; and, indeed, the overseas agencies were warning
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people in this country. It is a matter of some wry surprise to them that it was not possible to take account of these warnings with greater vigour and speed until the pictures appeared on our television screens. Yet from the evidence that was given to the committee there is a quote from the FAO estimate of April 1984—already out of date—that every third African does not have enough to eat; that 150 million people are at risk. The evidence submitted by Christian Aid and CAFOD (two Christian bodies) on this points out that the problems are more widespread than is often recognised and have sometimes been concealed by governments reluctant to acknowledge their inability to cope. The African traditions of extended families and hospitality to strangers have absorbed the deprivation, turning it into a slow degradation, unseen until hunger and malnutrition culminate in death.
That I think is a true picture of what is happening in Africa today and is not simply something that happened some time ago. It is encouraging to see a change, and yet we must take with the encouragement a warning. The change is there. Western governments are accepting the need for development aid, and there are some indications of this on the agricultural front. The report makes that clear. It also makes clear that most African governments are now much more fully prepared to engage in a dialogue with donors on their overall policies.
Therefore, there is some hope that problems will be met in a better way in the years ahead. Yet we must always be careful not to be complacent. Some of your Lordships may have read the report in The Times yesterday from Nairobi from the Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, Mr. Saouma, who pointed out that although bumper crops are now being harvested in a number of African countries, this must not hide the urgent need to develop better farming and marketing systems if the disastrous drought and famine of 1984 is not be repeated. Mr. Saouma expressed his regret that donor countries which have generously supplied food and emergency aid to Africa are "rather less interested" in providing agricultural supplies to improve the efficiency of African farmers.
I should like to pick up this point; it is often said in this country about development aid by the man and woman in the street. They point to the enormous problems of rapidly increasing populations which are facing African countries. This is an aspect to which the report does not really give attention, although on a cursory reading I may have missed it. In the evidence (from which I have already quoted) that was given to the Committee, there is a section about population which is important. It states:
"With the population of sub-Saharan Africa growing at a rate of 2.7 per cent. per annum (the highest growth rate of any continent), some commentators have focused on population growth as an explanation of the food crisis. Christian Aid and CAFOD reject this theory as a diversion from the real underlying causes. It is poverty above all which is the cause of the high birth rate. Such birth rates have been a feature of every society, including Britain in the age of Malthus, where impoverished parents have had cause to fear for their babies' chances of survival",
and so protection of course for their old age.
Perhaps it might lighten the atmosphere a little at the end of the afternoon if I quote a very vivid Kenya

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memory of the Kenya Family Planning Association, which produced a most beautiful poster which began to appear all over the country to make the point about the need to have fewer babies. One half of the poster showed a beautiful hut with a well-dressed husband and wife sitting outside in the evening sun and two beautifully dressed children playing there. The other half of the poster showed a very dilapidated hut with a man and his wife sitting outside on packing cases in rags with some 10 children, equally in rags, playing around them. They had to withdraw the poster because word was going around that people were simply saying, "Look at that poor chap, he's only got two children"! I think that that makes the point that you need to see the population issue in the context of the social conditions in these countries. It is indeed a factor of the poverty which we are considering.
Population is certainly no excuse for not helping African countries, particularly because of our historic links with many of them. Therefore, it is encouraging to read from this report the account of the very positive view which they have of the quality of British aid. Many noble Lords will have read on one page of the report what is said in this context:
"we found that existing aid is of fine quality and that it represents a firm base on which a future expansion can be built".
I ask your Lordships to notice the phrase, "future expansion" because as the noble Lord, Lord Walston, pointed out, deep disappointment is expressed in this report at a run-down of the aid programme, and it can only be described in that way. One section of the report states:
"The impact of the UK's bilateral aid has, however, been progressively reduced by recent spending cuts. Aid projects of direct benefit to farmers have been run down and virtually no major new initiatives have been taken in this field in recent years, partly as a result of the general squeeze on the bilateral aid programme but also due to the demands from other areas of aid expenditure."
I am perfectly aware that Ministers in this House sit here debate after debate listening to pleas for increased public expenditure on every side. We live in hard times and all of us would be most unwise not to recognise that. Nevertheless, a very strong case indeed—many of us would believe an overwhelming case—can be made for an exception of this kind in the case of the aid programme. I shall listen with great interest to what the noble Lord the Minister says about this run-down in the aid programme, which is commented on so adversely in this report.
There is an argument of course that in some way private capital can take up the slack; but the report deals with that very effectively. The noble Lord, Lord Walston, has already pointed to this. There are reasons why it is impossible for private capital to pick up the tab, so to speak, of any run-down of official aid to African agriculture.
The report calls for a clear statement of policy in order that we may know more about what the Government's thinking really is and the direction in which we are progressing. Put simply, it declares:
"there appear to be susbstantial areas of inconsistency between what the Government says it is doing and what it actually does",
and they call for a statement which would very clearly indicate what the direction will be for the Overseas Development Administration in the years ahead.
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There are points in this report which are of great value and which would repay very careful study. One is the need to concentrate on subsistence African agriculture and not to be diverted by other projects which can be seen to be more attractive and which undoubtedly have a value. I am particularly interested in what is written in the report about a certain road on which I travelled some 10 years ago. I can assure your Lordships that it was a very uncomfortable journey by Land-Rover. One side of me was delighted to read in the report that the road from Makumbako to Songea in Tanzania has been built and improved as a result of a major effort of expenditure. However, the other side of me was disturbed to find that, for example, this took up 80 per cent. of the aid given in this field to Tanzania in 1983. Indeed, it has been a very expensive project. It can be justified on agricultural grounds because it has enabled certain crops to come out of this area near the lake where the rainfall is good and where agricultural production is high. Yet when we look at Tanzania as a whole and at the enormous needs of subsistence farmers, which are frequently referred to in the report, we must be disturbed at the amount of aid which goes on a project of that kind.
The report comments that:
"little UK aid is directly supporting the majority of African farmers in drier regions [in Tanzania] who grow primarily food staples for domestic consumption using primitive technology (often the handheld hoe)".
Therefore, it may be that projects like that become more attractive because of the commercial considerations and particularly because in certain areas our own factories can be kept busy on the production of goods for projects of that type. We should like to be assured that at all times the priorities in United Kingdom aid to African agriculture are determined by the real needs of those countries themselves and particularly of subsistence peasant farmers who live so near the edge of starvation if things go wrong.
There is a vast range of possibilities for increased aid: technical research, water schemes, improved seeds, fertilizers, soil conservation, experiments in mixed cropping—the possibilities are almost endless.
The report points to the key role of women in agriculture. This is something which may change in African countries in the years ahead because it is concerned with social systems, as we well know, and yet undoubtedly at the moment educational efforts should include or even be directed at women who play such a key role in this field.
May I say how glad I was to hear the reference of the noble Lord, Lord Walston, to the role of fairer terms for trade and the debt burden which faces many African countries, because the effect of any aid programme could be vitiated unless sensitive and imaginative measures are taken in that whole field.
Perhaps I may end by quoting the current Christian Aid slogan, which seems to me to apply very well to the subject of our debate today:
"After Christmas are you going to let the world's poor have the same old new year?"
That surely applies to United Kingdom aid to African agriculture today.
6.11 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, 30 years ago I was engaged with the late and much lamented Tommy Balogh in trying to persuade Kwame Nkrumah that it was far more important to develop his northern region, which is the main agricultural region, than to build things like independence arches and stadia in Accra. We failed, and we failed largely because Nkrumah's system was already in the hands of the American combine, Reuther, which was determined to pursue the Volta River Scheme, with its electrification and its creation of a new industrial town in Tema.
From the beginning of the 1960s Tommy Balogh and René Dumont and I were working along the road that René Dumont's leadership had paved, which can in simplistic terms be reduced to "hoes before tractors". We worked in Tanzania, where we had considerable success. We worked in Zambia, where again the bureaucracy was in the hands of the great copper companies, and failed there. I remember writing a report for President Kaunda in 1968 commenting on the draft of his new five-year plan, and pointing out how this was going to increase the economic development of the line of rail and continue to neglect the vast areas of the country which were inhabited by the rural poor. That is still the case today.
We tried in Sierra Leone, and there we came up against the demands of the diamond merchants and the diamond companies. It has not been totally a story of failure, but it has been largely so; and it would be patronising to suggest that the Africans are simply the victims of Western and capitalist forces. They are not. But a great proportion of the development that has come from the West over the past 40 years has tended to be in conjunction with those forces, those new forces in African countries, which have developed a consumer society, an industrial society, and an urban society at the expense of the vast majority of the people who live and depend on the rural areas. Indeed, I would suggest that both the capitalist philosophy and the communist philosophy are wrong for Africa because both of them, from their different directions, base their philosophy on the necessity, above all, for industrialisation to the neglect of the agricultural sector.
We received in his excellent introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Walston, a new report on African agriculture. It is only one of several which have been published at roughly the same time. There is the report to which he has referred, the United Kingdom Aid to African Agriculture; there is the Commonwealth secretariat's report, African Agriculture—Building for the Future; there are new briefings from Oxfam; there is the FAO report of this week; and only today there is the cri de coeur of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, which apparently had no budget at all last year but is hoping that the deficit which it today finds from the United Arab Emirates may be made up in order that it can continue its work.
The lesson of the report introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Walston, and of almost every other report issued over the last few years, is that this Government have abandoned African agriculturists. The figures that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, gave have been given many times in this House. It is a disgrace that
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this country, which, as he said, was once in the lead in the provision of overseas aid in the pursuit of international justice, should have fallen almost to the bottom of the league, and that while other countries—other countries such as he has listed but also including, for example, Finland, which has made the largest percentage increase in overseas aid of any country in the past year—have been increasing their aid to the poor this Government have been steadily whittling it away, and indeed slyly cutting it behind the back of the public until the public finds out.
As the right reverend Prelate pointed out, 20,000 members of the public came to our Palace last October in order to try to stimulate our consciences into what this country should be doing in contrast to what the Government have been doing. Perhaps that demonstration had the effect of preventing some of the cuts that the Government were intending to make in the aid budget, but the forecasts for the next few years indicate that almost certainly in real terms the aid budget as a whole will again be cut.
As this report points out it is not simply the total aid budget which is being cut, but it is particularly that part which goes to African agriculture and which goes to the poorest of the poor countries. Accompanying this lamentable record has been the supine following of President Reagan's anti-internationalist policy, particularly in relation to United Nations agencies.
We have been through this before. I personally do not like all-party reports. I do not like them because although they contribute, as this report certainly does, to the knowledge of the general public of the problem of aid and our responsibility to the world village, as the right reverend Prelate described it, and while they make a specific and valuable contribution to that, one feels after so many years that we have been here before.
We can criticise the Government, and we can criticise the policy of this Government and of the United States Government, but this does not seem to get down to any of the roots of the problem. After all, when we were in Government up to 1979 the aid programme was much larger than it is now, but we did not solve the problems of African agriculture.
I suggest that in the rest of the time that I have this evening we ought to be considering a new dimension in the whole development programme and concept of aid. I suggest to your Lordships, in addition to the compulsory reading that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, urged your Lordships to do during the Christmas Recess, a lesser known publication, The Ecologist, Volume 15, Nos. 1 and 2 of this year, in which your Lordships will find a very different approach, an analysis of the problems of African agriculture. From my personal experience I know this to be not the truth but a new approach which can perhaps, with the assistance of the aid agencies, do something that we have so far failed to do in raising the level of African agriculture. There is now less food produced in total in Africa than there was 30 years ago, despite the fact that the population has increased exponentially: the new population is not producing more food but much less food per head.
When I say that I do not like all-party reports it is because they tend to produce the facts and give good illustrations of factual situations without being able,

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because of their all-party nature, to contest the roots of policies. The Government have consistently told us that they believe that they cannot afford any more aid. That argument has been totally destroyed, both from the point of view of self interest and in comparison with our major competitors in a similar economic situation. Also they have said that they believe in private funds rather than public aid. The noble Lord, Lord Walston, has met this in stating amounts, percentages and proportions.
The Government have also said that they believe in the application of free market forces. I want to consider the impact of these two philosophies. It seems to me that both have led to the creation of large-scale projects, very largely of a nature that is useful to the industry of this country rather than to the immediate medium- and long-term needs of the recipient countries. The result of this has been that the steel mills and power stations, and even the bridges that they did not get contracts for, are remote from the ordinary people, particularly those in Africa. But it has a spin-off effect which has encouraged, stimulated and commanded an even greater spread of urbanisation, so that people are coming off the land faster and faster leaving the land barren and swelling the shanty towns of the cities. They are leaving the rural areas to decline into still deeper poverty.
It is the market forces that brought forth the great bank lending era, when there were petro-dollars to be thrown all over the world and when the banks were persuading African governments to borrow with very little chance of repayment. As the force of this industrialisation, the growth of urbanisation and the consumer society and the financial exchanges took place, so the growth of corruption and the distortions of African economies had an inevitable effect on rural decline.
Many of these industrial schemes, the ranching schemes and the large farm schemes have, we can now see, and have been seeing for many years, led to an expansion of the deserts of Africa, to an increase in soil erosion and to an accompanying growth of consumer societies. Where did this come from initially? It came from the compulsion on Africans to grow for export rather than for consumption, to lay out great ranches to export the beef or the cattle of large landowners. There was the supplanting of food growing by cotton growing in West Africa, by ground nuts, by coffee in East Africa. The consequence has been that feeding in Africa has declined, malnutrition has increased and social dislocation has become inevitable. I suggest that we have to consider the whole dimension of the development programme in conjunction with the Africans in their own country, particularly in the rural villages.
It is a remarkable fact that today many Africans in Tanzanian villages are eating better than they were two or three years ago. Why? Because their national economy has declined because the price of their exports has declined, so the African villages have been forced back into growing for their own consumption. This cannot go on indefinitely, but it indicates that Africans can grow food for themselves; they always have done. They need assistance in marketing, but, if the accent is put on marketing, a decline will occur in the nutrition of the people so that the country can
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export their goods and crops to pay the interest on the debts they have accumulated.
When I say that I do not like all-party reports, it is because, to my knowledge, no party except the Labour Party is looking seriously at the roots of this problem today. I know this because I am a member of the policy committee that is doing this work. Only the Labour Party would do this; it said so and showed that it could do so between 1977 and 1979. First, we would screen the United Nations and multilateral organisations, because much of what I have been describing has been the policy of the World Bank and the IMF. However, we then come to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, with a tiny budget, and one that was destroyed last year. The United States showed its antagonism to the new arrangements for budgeting last year, and this Government apparently did nothing. The International Fund for Agricultural Development is surely the finest multilateral agency for the very issues that we are discussing this afternoon. It has the lowest of all United Nations administrative costs. It has proved itself to be efficient in helping the small farmer.
Thus, we would screen the international organisations that a British Government should support. We would also pledge ourselves, and we have pledged ourselves, to achieve the United Nations objective of 0·7 per cent. of our GDP within the life of one Parliament as our contribution to international aid. We would recreate the Ministry of Overseas Development, as the central agency of Government, to investigate, supervise and collaborate with the recipient countries as it had begun to do before 1979.
This is a coherent policy, though not by any means a complete one. We are still looking at it very closely, in conjunction with the representatives of other countries. However, what I am suggesting is this. While the Government consider aid as a charity, and the Liberal Party and the SDP, to their credit, regard it very much as one of the non-governmental issues in the conventional sense, this desperately dangerous situation in Africa, in relation to the rural areas, agriculture and the provision of food has to be looked at radically, and I believe that we are the only people who are doing so.
6.32 p.m.
Lord Seebohm: My Lords, first of all, I should like to say how grateful I am to the noble Lord, Lord Walston, for allotting this particular lucky dip that he had in the ballot to this subject. I should also like to thank him, on behalf of the committee of which I am afraid I was a very poor member, for his tremendous energy in going abroad and finding out the facts for himself. He has not been talking in any sense from an academic point of view.
Naturally, the appalling history in recent times of starvation and a million deaths in Africa has aroused strong feelings of dismay and indignation that such things could possibly happen in the contemporary world. Our report looks very closely at only the British aid policies of the last five years and considers whether they have been directed towards preventing these kinds of tragic events. It is necessary to stress quite categorically that, although the impending disasters were foreseeable, and in fact were foreseen five years

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ago, nothing that could have been done in that time span could have prevented them. However, if the countries concerned had had the political will to do something more about it, they could, with help from the aid-giving countries, have greatly mitigated the enormity of the disaster.
What happened in the Sahel area was clearly and dramatically forecast by Barbara Ward over 20 years ago. Joseph Rowntree, in setting up his various trusts, said in a memorandum in 1904, addressed to the trustees:
"much current philanthropic effort is directed to remedying the more superficial manifestations of weakness or evil, while little thought or effort is directed to search out their underlying causes. For example, it is much easier to obtain funds for the famine stricken people of India than to originate and carry through a searching enquiry into the causes of the occurrence of these famines".
Nothing much has changed since 1904. Mutatis mutandis, that memorandum could be written today. However, to my mind, the blame must not be allowed to rest entirely on the aid policy of this country, as we have never been in a position to dictate policies to be adopted by the independent countries concerned.
I myself have been interested in this problem ever since my first tour of West Africa in 1954, and have been continually frustrated at the lack of any political will, except perhaps in Malawi. Like the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, I have had long conversations with Nkrumah, with Abubakar Tafewa Balewa, Kaunda and Nyerere. They all expressed agreement with everything I have said but they never did anything about it. It is easy to look backwards and this report may appear highly critical. However, this is not its intention. The objective is to open up discussion on the most effective way of using such resources as are available, rather than concentrating on the actual amount of money involved.
I warmly welcome the policy of natural resources aid, described in a note we received from the ODA. This indicated that priorities will now be given to support policy planning in the agricultural sector; agricultural research with special reference to mixed cropping systems; "on farm" adaptive research and crop production reforming systems, more emphasis being given to improving financial viability and the returns to the farm family. I believe that one of the most important things to have happened has been to raise the price of food in these countries in order to get more food produced. When the IMF saw Obote in Uganda they said he must double the price of food. He refused to do so; but some months later did so, and within 12 months food production increased by 140 per cent.
Owing to the serious financial position of the third world countries and the clear consequences now revealed as a result of neglect of this sector, there seems to be a changing environment. This committee believes that the conditions which effectively govern the implementation of these policies are at last improving. If this is really so, then we would wish to see a genuine stepping up of aid in this sector. We firmly believe that the general public has been so moved by the horrors of famine that an increase would be entirely acceptable, even if it meant positive sacrifices in other directions. Now is the time to
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reassure the LDCs, as Mr. Pisani did a few years ago, that if such policies were accepted the developed world would be firmly behind them. This is something that I think one has to say.
Meanwhile, much aid has gone to what is called programme aid. This is perhaps more important than we indicate in the report, as much of it is designed to maintain and repair installations and equipment that would otherwise be useless. An example of this was a grant of £500,000 this year to Kenya to supply spare parts, thereby bringing back into production 200 Land-Rovers which were lying idle. Much of this aid is disbursed through multinational agencies and there appears to have been a positive policy of moving away from bilateral aid, presumably in the hope that it will be more acceptable for helping development in what have been so far less politically popular areas. I am not sure how efficient these multilateral agencies are in disbursing aid, and I believe it is a mistake to reduce the bilateral element as much as we have done. This is (quite apart from the economic advantage to this country in providing the supplies needed) likely to be more effective in the Anglophone countries because of our special relationship, which on the whole remains.
United Kingdom technical co-operation we believe has declined much too rapidly in recent years. It will be interesting to know more precisely what the Government's plans are for this, particularly in the agricultural sector. An example was given by Oxfam in oral evidence, that research of food staple production on drier regions had been seriously neglected and, as Sir Roger Swynnerton explained, the major need in agricultural research is for continuity and patience. He felt that a 15- to 20-year time scale was appropriate, rather than the relatively short commitments, and the staff discontinuities, that have characterised our projects such as the Dryland Farming Scheme in Botswana. There is no place for "stop-go" practices in this field of operations. Some of the damage, such as "desertification", can never be repaired; but much can be done in semi-arid areas to restore land that has been abandoned.
To sum up, we must be realistic. The fact that recovery of cereal production in most countries is now assured for the coming year must not be taken as an excuse for reducing aid in the Sahel. Not only is there a vast area for rehabilitation programmes but the problems of transport and storage remain. Therefore, there will certainly be pockets of famine remaining to be dealt with. The long-term programme for prevention must now start.
Success, in my view, depends on four main features. First the political will of the local governments to see this policy implemented. Secondly, competence—greatly increased technical aid will be necessary, which means not only cash but personnel. Thirdly, integrity. Perhaps this is not quite so important in the agricultural sector but I am afraid that we have evidence that very little progress in the elimination of corruption is taking place in the countries that we are most trying to help. Fourthly, and most important, there is need for a policy from the developed countries of support over a long time span of from 15 to 20 years, to which we must commit ourselves.
As I said earlier, it is very easy to look backwards and we certainly do not wish to give the impression

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that British support for agricultural aid in Africa has no successes or strengths. We say that it is obvious that its successes outweigh its weaknesses and disappointments. But there is a strong argument for increasing our contribution once we are satisfied that it can be usefully applied. This, for my part, applies to the agricultural sector. I hope that this report will receive serious study both at home and overseas, particularly in other aid-giving agencies.
6.41 p.m.
Lord Vernon: My Lords, we are all grateful to my noble friend Lord Walston for introducing this debate. The working party report tells us a lot about how British aid to Africa is dispensed. It tells us that the quality of that aid is of a very high order, that it is satisfactory. Its principal conclusion, which I think is supported by what your Lordships have said this afternoon, is that we should step up the amount of aid which we are providing both in agricultural terms and overall. What, surprisingly, the report does not say, and what surely is of special interest to donor countries such as ours, is whether the aid is being really effective. Are the African recipients of aid becoming more efficient in agricultural terms; and are they producing more food for their people to eat? That, after all, must be the object of the exercise.
It is a little surprising that there is no appendix to the report giving an indication of trends of production over, say, a 10-year period, taking account of the good years as well as the bad. The only clue that I could find on this was the ominous reference on page 51 of the report to the vast problem of declining per capita food production in Africa. Then there is the rather revealing mention on page 39 of the difficulties of generating improvements in semi-arid regions under population pressures.
It is not just the semi-arid regions of Africa that are under pressure. The whole of Africa is under the severest possible population pressure. The population crisis in Africa is one of mammoth proportions, and I must tell my noble friend that I find it astonishing—and in this, I think, I agreed with the right reverend Prelate—that this vital aspect which has such a bearing on agricultural production should have been virtually ignored. If I understood him correctly, the right reverend Prelate and I would disagree on the result of the population growth. He seemed to suggest that it was poverty that was the cause of the famine and the lack of food, whereas I believe that the poverty is caused not by the present population but by the rate of population growth.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, may I venture to interrupt on a point of explanation so as to make clear that what I was saying was that population and rapid growth in population are caused by poverty? The illustration which I gave shows how the attitude to having large numbers of children in these societies is because of insecurity, particularly of people in old age, or high rates of infant mortality in the past and things of that kind. I was simply trying to make the point that it is no good targeting population as the cause of poverty when it is the other way round.
Lord Vernon: My Lords, I do not think that I was targeting that as the sole cause but as one of the causes. In a sense, it is a chicken-and-egg situation.
One of the African countries highlighted in the report was Kenya. According to the latest figures, the present Kenya population of 20·2 million is likely to double within the next 17 years. Another 20 million people will have to be housed, educated, provided with employment and fed in less than two decades. That is the daunting task facing the Kenya Government today. And what is happening in Kenya is happening in virtually every country in Africa.
I am not saying, of course, that Africa cannot support these numbers: it can. The problem lies in the speed with which the growth is taking place and which gives African governments insufficient time to build up their agricultural infrastructures and agricultural skills to cope with the crisis. If one looks again at the matter of African agricultural production, what appears to be happening is that production in absolute terms is growing only slightly. The noble Lord, Lord Hatch, was a little more depressing than that, if I understood him. He said that in fact agricultural production had gone down in absolute terms. But according to the figures which I see (and which are World Bank figures) African agricultural production has been going up annually and is still going up, although it is going up at a much slower rate.
To take again the example of Kenya, for instance, in the 1960 to 1970 period it was going up at the rate of 3·6 per cent. It is now going up at 2 per cent., and that is the overall production. If one looks at the per capita production, the situation is far more gloomy. It was going up at 0.7 per cent. in the 1960 to 1970 period, and it is now going down at 1·2 per cent. per annum. I shall not read out any more figures because they are all very similar.
What all this amounts to is that for the last 20 years African agricultural per capita production has been falling dramatically. Unless something can be done to reverse this trend, it is likely to do so at an increasing rate in the future. The lesson which I would suggest to your Lordships is obvious. It is one of which I hope the Government will take careful note. Money spent on reducing family size will in the final analysis produce far higher living standards for the bulk of the African population than any other aid we can give. Certainly, let us continue to give some of the high-quality agricultural aid that we have given to date, but let it be given in tandem with family planning aid and in accordance with detailed strategy worked out and monitored with the governments of the countries concerned.
My Lords, I should like to end my speech by quoting from a speech given by Mr. Robert McNamara to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research on November 1st 1985. This is what he said:
"In sum, overly rapid population growth strains virtually every component of a developing society. It expands the labour force faster than new jobs. It rings the cities with slums. It overstrains the food supply and the ecological life-support system. It entrenches illiteracy, malnourishment, and ill health. And it perpetuates a culture of poverty.
"Even in a vigorously prosperous environment, coping with such demographic pressures would be difficult. In the weak economies of sub-Saharan Africa they will be overwhelming. If appropriate action is delayed—if procrastination is prolonged—then we can be sure of only one thing: the problem will eventually be dealt with, but at an

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immeasurably higher cost. By famine, perhaps. Or by violent civil unrest. Or by draconian coercion in a context of public repression and private brutality."
It has been suggested that there should be some compulsory reading in the Christmas vacation. May I suggest that the full text of Mr. McNamara's speech should also be read.
6.51 p.m.
Lord Rea: My Lords, I, too, should like to congratulate the authors of the excellent all-party report which we are discussing this evening. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Walston, for his very clear summary of its findings and recommendations. Our topic this evening, as many noble Lords have pointed out, concerns a major part of what is perhaps the most important unsolved problem in the world today: how the first—and, we hope, one day the second—world can help the third to get on to its feet. Our colonial legacy is still very much with us and there is much evidence that we are now exploiting our colonies more effectively and at less cost than when we maintained garrisons and administrations in Africa. It is in this context that we should look at our aid programme.
We still get remarkably cheap commodities from the third world—so cheap, as the right reverend Prelate and my noble friend Lord Hatch have pointed out, that it has become impossible for the debtor nations to pay off their foreign debts. Some economists have suggested that the stabilising of commodity prices at about double their present level would be the biggest single measure towards helping the third world to become self-sufficient. The report that we are considering states:
"In many cases—e.g. coffee and sugar—the world price is now so low as to offer no hope of effective export earnings remuneration unless prices could stabilise at much higher levels."
But this could still leave many people in dire poverty and with insufficient food, because the economies of developing countries are not directed to helping the majority of the population who live on the land practising subsistence agriculture. Concentrating on cash crops for export has been the aim of governments in the third world, of many overseas companies with investments in the third world and, as my noble friend Lord Hatch pointed out, of many aid projects, very often to the neglect of the smallholder and the farmer.
In Africa and the third world generally, rural poverty is very much the rule, with migration to the outskirts of the cities, which are swollen by ramshackle shanty suburbs. African governments are often accused of keeping food prices low to feed those in the towns "who are their political masters". Another way of looking at it might be to say that if food prices were not kept low there would be starvation and riots, because most city dwellers are also extremely poor. But, if the farmers were to get better prices for their products, we should perhaps see a reversal of this drift to the cities and a repopulation of some of the rural areas.
To allow higher stable prices for farm produce is desirable, to provide incentives for farmers and to redress the imbalance between town and country, but it is politically and economically not quite so simple as it sounds and it needs to be done in stages. As the noble
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Lord, Lord Seebohm, pointed out, when it was done in Uganda it had amazingly quick results in increasing food production. In China it has also been done, as noble Lords are aware. It caused some resentment among city dwellers, who now see farmers in the country perhaps rather better off than themselves. This change has had considerable success, with a great improvement in food production. Some farmers in China have become very rich and have set up a variety of small industries and other enterprises. I am sure that other less socialist countries could do the same and, at the report points out, they are now more willing to consider doing so. This kind of internal change is suggested in the report so that African agriculture can get on to a sounder basis with opportunity for farmers to invest in good seeds, fertilisers, implements, suitable pesticides and storage and transport facilities.
All these hopeful aims are some way ahead, but African agriculture has a great future. Africa is potentially an enormously fertile part of the world. It has been calculated that there is more potential for rain-fed agricultural production than in the whole of Asia. It could become very rich, provided that the country is nurtured and cropped wisely, mainly, I think, in the ways that the old African farmer understands. Some of the methods now being used are leading to degradation of the land and—that awful word—desertification through the clearing of forests, overgrazing and eventual erosion during those short-lived torrential rains which occur even in semi-arid zones.
There are enormous problems ahead in changing agricultural practices which are harming the delicately poised semi-arid lands of sub-Saharan and East and Central Africa. But, as the report points out, there is no country more richly supplied with experts in this whole complex field than Britain. The report brings that out clearly. But it also states:
"we received unanimous agreement that UK agricultural research aid was insufficiently supported in terms of long-term commitment of funds and staff"—
a quotation similar to the one which the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, has already given us.
We have experts in this country who are willing and very able to go out and give valuable and much appreciated guidance to help get a whole continent on its feet, but they are having to remain at home or to work in other countries. I am sure that they are not idle. They are the very people who would be most willing to get on their bikes. The report goes on:
"UK technical co-operation is also a most valuable element in the aid programme and one which has declined much too rapidly in recent years … we believe that an expansion of manpower aid could easily be achieved (especially with respect to the willingness of competent trained personnel in tropical agriculture to take up appointments) once increased levels of funding are made available."
I wonder whether the noble Lord who is to reply will answer a question of which I have given him notice. How many institutions specialising in tropical agriculture does the United Kingdom fund in whole or in part; what have trends in funding been over the last few years and what is envisaged for the future? This is an area in which we have a unique opportunity to contribute both to the advancement of science and to the benefit of the African farmer.
In Africa, my own experience has been not in agriculture but in tropical paediatrics, especially the

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care of young children under five, but there is a very strong connection between the two. Wherever there is poverty, young children suffer most, especially those between one and two years old at or around the time of weaning.
Most children born in Africa today pass through a critical phase of under-nutrition at around that age and are likely to become very ill or die from common infections such as measles, pneumonia or gastroenteritis, which were the bane of this country in prewar days, whereas a well-nourished child will easily throw off these infections. It is possible to help mothers to feed their children with good, locally available foods in Africa to avoid this critical phase of under-nutrition. But it is necessary to provide suitable, simple clinics. These are springing up all over Africa providing maternal and child help and primary care.
This help on a local basis is much more effective if it can be part of an integrated rural or community development scheme which includes agricultural extension, adult literacy campaigns and encouragement of local enterprises—small enterprises, with appropriate technology. Many of these are growing up in Africa. Perhaps Asia is showing the quickest speed in advancement here. These require a very sustained effort, and they may take a long time to be established. Market and transport needs should probably be part of the scheme at the same time, but even isolated self-sufficient communities can be greatly helped.
The noble Lord, Lord Vernon, mentioned over-population, which is compounding the difficulties of improving the status of the poor in Africa, but experience throughout the world—and here I would most strongly agree with the right reverend Prelate—suggests that it is only when development occurs that the birthrate starts to come down. The right reverend Prelate is absolutely right in saying that poverty underlies excessive population pressure. It is only when parents see the likelihood of their children surviving that they will begin to have incentives to cut down on the size of their families. It comes when economic development penetrates right down to the lowest levels of society.
In regard to rural development, the report says:
"Many rural development schemes are necessarily small and slow spending but represent far more than the book value of the Government's financial contribution".
This is obviously in human and in long-term economic terms. There are also many non-governmental organisations, such as the Save the Children Fund, Christian Aid, War on Want and Oxfam, which have helped to develop such small rural projects. I should like to ask the noble Lord who is to reply—and I have given him notice of this question—how much aid or subvention the Government give to such non-government organisations in Africa. What have been the trends over the past few years, and how do they see the future of such co-operation?
It is often the case that these organisations have established good co-operative relations with local communities and can accomplish a great deal. They could accomplish even more with extra funds. When we last looked at this problem in the debate in March on third world starvation initiated by my noble friend
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Lord Hatch, the report which we are discussing tonight was still being put together. It is very sad to see that some of the very measures that were suggested by many noble Lords on that occasion as being the most important ones to reverse the downhill path of African agriculture are the very ones whose funding, the report shows, has been cut most. I refer, as many noble Lords have already done, to measures offering help and encouragement to the African farmer and smallholder at a local level. I refer to things such as access roads, simple water supplies, agricultural extension and community development, credit, particularly for seeds, fertilisers and implements, and help—(this is particularly important, and it also seems not to be forthcoming) in training extension workers and others to help farmers to improve their methods.
It is quite useful to look at the detailed appendices of the report. For example, in Kenya expenditure on rural access roads fell from £377,000 in 1981 to £42,000 in 1983, an 89 per cent. drop. In Tanzania, aid for rural water supplies fell from £1,169,000 in 1980 to £32,000 in 1983, a 97 per cent. drop. Total aid for agriculture in Tanzania, excluding the major Songea Road which the right reverend Prelate mentioned, fell from £3½ million in 1981 to £312,000 in 1983, a 90 per cent. drop. Aid for fertilisers in Africa as a whole fell from £600,000 in 1979 to zero in 1982 and 1983. As the report says:
"Little United Kingdom aid is directly supporting the majority of African farmers in drier regions who grow primarily food staples".
This is the quote which the right reverend Prelate gave earlier in which the use of the hand-held hoe as one of the most commonly used agricultural implements was mentioned.
I am fully aware that there is aid for Africa other than the United Kingdom bilateral aid, which is the main focus of the report. There is aid through the multilateral agencies—the World Bank, the EC and United Nations agencies—but rather like some other noble Lords who have spoken, I am not sure whether this aid is getting through to where it really matters. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, in saying that it is a great pity that the International Fund for Agricultural Development is so poorly supported. This helps small farmers directly with seeds, fertilisers, credit, extension services, draught animals and appropriate technology—the very things the report makes clear are needed.
I read recently that this year—this has already been pointed out by the right reverend Prelate—has been a very good one for African agriculture, but an article in the New Scientist giving the findings of Trevor Page, the head of emergency operations at the World Food Programme, says that despite this good crop it may well be wasted unless the good grain crops can be bought and moved to where they are needed. If this cannot be done the farmers will lose the money which they could be getting and it is possible that their will to succeed again next year will be sapped.
A very simple way of assisting improvement would be for the Government to help African Governments to pay their farmers in order to buy this surplus crop from them so that they would have a good return for their work and good luck, instead of letting prices slump so that the farmers remain impoverished and disheartened.

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I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, would personally like to find extra money for African agriculture—money which this report shows is clearly necessary. The noble Lord may well have his hands tied. Where is the money to come from without increasing taxes or increasing the public sector borrowing requirement?
Perhaps it could be found by reducing another large section of our budget. A recent calculation has been made that if world expenditure on arms for six months only could be diverted to peaceful use, then there would be enough to pay for a 20-year programme, which would be sufficient to satisfy permanently all the food and health needs of the third world. Put another way, an amount equivalent to less than 2½ per cent. of arms spending per annum would, over a 20-year period, give the same result. I believe that we could spare that small cut in our defence budget in order to turn the nuclear sword into a million ploughshares.
7.10 p.m.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, I shall not detain the House too long. Many arguments have been put at fair length to the Government and I think that the very able Minister on the Front Bench opposite should sit up and take notice because, although no one from the Back Benches of the Conservative Party has thought fit to speak on this important subject, four extremely influential members of the committee and the chairman are members of the Minister's party and are seized—as I am sure he is—of the importance of this subject.
Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, I like all-party committees. I do not believe that all wisdom resides on the Back Benches of the Labour Party. However, I am very glad to see that they are making the policy now, and not the Front Bench. It might even be better. I noted the unfortunate travels of the noble Lord, Lord Hatch. It seemed to me that wherever he went failure followed his efforts to convert the leaders of those countries to sensible policies. I am not surprised at that but it must be very disheartening for him.
The great feature about this report is that the committee showed tremendous enterprise. Furthermore, we should take note of the fact that banks have backed it. Banks are in many cases enormously foolish, but in some cases they are really quite sensible. Barclays have quite a good knowledge of Africa. The whole report is extraordinarily practical. I would have thought that practical Tories in particular would like the attitude shown on page 12 of the report, where, in dealing with the revitalisation of peasant agriculture, it refers to:
"aid linked to government policy reforms in the receiving country".
And later:
"Conversely, aid can be suspended in the event of inadequate Government action to promote such reforms".
I have always thought that such was common sense. I have never worshipped the sacred cow surrounding incompetent recipients—that is, governments who divert the money to themselves and not even to industrialisation. In the examples quoted, they diverted that money purely to prestige objects. For us, the donors, to insist upon competence is only common sense and it is the kind of condition that can really help the poor of the countries concerned.
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Neither can we say that agriculture is everything. One does not really get riches until one gets industrialisation. There are many examples from the past of competent agricultural countries where, nevertheless, it was only after people were taken off the land and put into industry that there really was a build-up in the wealth of the people. Especially because I am a farmer I realise that if one is to prosper as a farmer one must have customers.
The point that I like most about the report is the concentration on the peasant cultivator, the man who will actually produce the food. It is the essence of the report that, without him, one will not secure the rise in production per head that is required in Africa. It is only a question of competence because there is much more rain-fed land fit to be cultivated in Africa than there is in Asia. As we all know, the Indian sub-continent is now in a position to export food.
So it is a question of organisation. It is a question of security for the farmer. It is a question of pricing. It is also a question of protection. They need to live in a high tariff situation. In any developing country that is the traditional road to development and it must be right. So they need marketing and they need capital projects—dams, roads, and all the other developments that we know have been and can be successful in a great many places.
Above all, they need the long term the basic education and trust that can only be built up if the colleges of agriculture—and I am quoting from Scotland now—and the other educational units serving the farmers are there and are there for good. It takes a long time to build up that trust. One first has to build up trust in the institution and then in the people who are actually advising the farmers. There must be demonstration farms. The neighbouring farmers must be able to see that it will pay them to follow advice and that they can get away from subsistence agriculture, which is a grinding poverty in many cases, and make enough money to buy some of the things that other people have. Our bilateral aid can be used most usefully in this field—more so, probably, than in any other.
I believe also—and I should like the Minister's views on this—that the Government should be examining what we ought to do about (to use this appalling word) "desertification". Anyone who has flown over the deserts of North Africa will know that one comes across marvellous buildings and signs of the old granary of the Mediterranean. Now it is desert. That process is advancing at the most incredible speed. It can be stopped, but it can be stopped only by tree planting on a massive scale. That must be a multilateral job if ever there was one. It is one that we must tackle if we are to stop the whole of that area of the sub-Sahara from gradually expanding as desert. It is not true to say that there are cycles that will occur whatever happens. There is no question that cycles are occurring more frequently. If there are no trees and no vegetation then of course there will be less and less chance of the rains that are at the moment securing bumper crops in some places there.
The case is very strongly made for British aid doubling to the figure set by the United Nations. That is long-term common sense. If we are seen to be doing a good job there and we achieve improved prosperity,

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then that must be a good investment for Britain. The Government have been so short-sighted in the way they have handled the overseas students in this country and the harm that did. Surely the sensible Minister who is sitting there writing busily—great thoughts, I hope—will see the sense of the arguments that have been put from this side of the House and will give a satisfactory reply.
7.19 p.m.
Lord Oram: My Lords, perhaps at the outset I should declare a special interest in this report. Certainly it is not a financial interest, but I am privileged to be the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development which initiated the study which led to this report. In view of what my noble friend Lord Hatch said earlier I feel a little tempted to enter into a discussion with him about the value of all-party work but I only point out to him that in addition to this report, which I think he acknowledges is a very valuable contribution to the study of the problem of Africa, we have had a whole series of meetings over the past year in which we brought distinguished speakers to considerable and influential audiences "upstairs" which have increased the understanding of the very problems to which my noble friend Lord Hatch called attention.
Having said that I am the chairman of the committee, I wish to take no personal credit whatever for the report that we are discussing this evening. That was the work of a working party presided over by Mr. Jim Lester, and the credit goes to him and his colleagues who served on the working party, and particularly of course to the noble Lords, Lord Walston, and Lord Seebohm, who were on the working party and who have spoken in today's debate. I congratulate them both on their speeches and on the work which they did in the working party.
The working party was set up during the time when Ethiopia was on everyone's lips and it was when the drought in sub-Saharan Africa was calling for the sympathy of millions and a great deal of practical financial aid as well. It was in those circumstances that the committee decided that it was necessary to look well ahead, beyond the immediate crisis of the famine, and try to make a contribution to the problem of avoiding similar tragedies occurring in the future.
The value of the report I think owes much to the willingness of the members of the committee to assemble the opinions of the impressive list of consultants, set out on page 62, but also, as has been referred to, by travelling and seeking first-hand information in the four countries mentioned in the report. To me, that part of the report which deals with the studies of the four countries, and particularly the conclusions which are drawn from those four studies, form perhaps the most important part of the report. As my noble friend Lord Hatch pointed out, it is one study among a number that have been taking place over the past year. He referred to the report issued by the Commonwealth Secretariat, and of course others have been studying the problem—the World Bank, the Organisation of African Unity, and so on.
However, from our point of view I think that what distinguishes the report that we are discussing this
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evening, and what makes it particularly pertinent and valuable to us, is that it is the report which directs our attention to the record of the United Kingdom in relation to the African agricultural problem. It would be presumptuous of me to attempt to add very much to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Walston, and Lord Seebohm, concerning the substance of the report. All I will attempt to do is pick out a few of the issues which interest me in particular.
First, the essential message that I think comes through, particularly from the earlier part of the report, is that the amount of British aid going to African agriculture has declined over recent years. It is not just that aid to Africa has declined, but within that declining volume of aid the amount that is devoted to agriculture in Africa has declined to a serious degree. This decline has been allowed to take place in the face of the growing public pressure which has urged upon the Government and all concerned that more, not less, should be done in facing this problem.
There has been, as we well know and as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, an upsurge of expression of public opinion on this matter and it may be, as my noble friend Lord Hatch suggested, that the massive lobby of a few weeks ago stopped the cuts in overseas aid which were previously threatened. I believe that may have been the case and it should encourage all of us to continue to pressure the Government to make sure that they do not go in the wrong direction once again.
The second point that I wish particularly to mention, and to which others have referred, is the situation of subsistence farmers who, after all, are the major element in this problem. The report, on page 32 and elsewhere, reaches the conclusion that all too little United Kingdom aid gets through to those subsistence farmers in the villages. That, surely, presents the major challenge to us. I suggest it requires us to re-examine the methods by which aid to agriculture in Africa, or elsewhere for that matter, is applied in practice.
I refer to the several passages in the report concerning the work of the Commonwealth Development Corporation because I believe that important lessons are to be learnt from that organisation. It does not mean that the results of its work are always those that we would wish to see, but I believe that, by and large, it has instituted methods of agricultural development which ought to be examined and applied in different ways. In particular, I have in mind the way in which the Commonwealth Development Corporation works through nucleus estates whereby central services—warehousing and processing, and so on—are provided by the corporation centrally and production by the smallholders in the district around the central services is encouraged and improved by the advice and technical assistance which comes from the corporation. I believe that to be a most important clue as to what should be done about Africa's food problem; because if subsistance farmers are left unorganised and without central services they will remain subsistence farmers and when natural calamities occur, as in the recent drought, they have no reserve or resources to resist the adverse forces of nature.
I think that we should also note that what I have said about the CDC relates almost entirely—although

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some changes are taking place—to export commodities: tea, coffee, tobacco, and so on. What seems to me to be necessary is to apply the principle of their organisation not only to those export commodities but to food crops for local consumption. That, I believe, is what is needed in the present situation regarding food for the population of Africa.
In this connection, I would suggest that the organisation of agricultural co-operative societies is an important policy that we should look at more closely. Like the Commonwealth Development Corporation, co-operative societies can provide the central services while encouraging their individual members, the smallholding members, to increase their production from their own plots of land.
I know only too well that co-operatives in some parts of Africa have been having a bad press, and I believe that the main reason for this is that in some cases governments have mistakenly imposed pseudo-co-operative forms of organisation on the peasant populations, producing unfortunate reactions. My point is that they are not true co-operatives, because the essence of co-operative organisation is that it is based on the voluntary participation of the members of the co-operative. But that should not deter us from doing the job properly, and we ought to be providing technical assistance. We have great knowledge in our co-operative marketing societies in this country, and we ought to be providing technical assistance to help that form of organisation.
In another connection, my noble friend Lord Rea instanced what is happening in China, and I think that noble Lords will do well to study the situation in that country, as I have had the opportunity of doing on two recent occasions. There, co-operatives are being reorganised and strengthened on the basis of true co-operative principles, and the result—as I have seen and as is now increasingly being reported—is a staggering increase in agricultural production. If it can be done in China, it can be done in Africa. Over the last five years there has been a tremendous change in the fortunes of the peasants of China, and I believe that, given the proper leadership and the proper technical understanding some similar results could be achieved in Africa.
In conclusion, I should like to echo what has been said by several noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Walston, in his opening address—and the noble Lords, Lord Seebohm and Lord Rea, also made this point—about the need for much increased resources for research and technical assistance in relation to the problems of African agriculture. After all, we have built up in this county a great reputation for research in this field and we have great knowledge of what is needed in the way of research and technical assistance.
It was depressing for me when I read the report to read of the lack of resources found in this field by members of the working party, and I thoroughly agree with their recommendation that resources should be very much stepped up in this respect as well as in technical assistance. Perhaps the most depressing of the statistics that the report brings forward is that on page 20, relating to United Kingdom manpower, where there was a decline over the decade between
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1972 and 1982 from 7,402 down to 1,782. In the natural resources sector, in 1972 there were 740 manpower units—a figure which was reduced in 10 years to 183. That seems to me to be a really tragic decline. I make the point—the all-party point if you like—that that period covers governments of different colours. In this respect we are all guilty.
I can assure the noble Lord the Minister that if he now sees the light and if he is going to turn over a new leaf, then he will have all-party support in moving in that better direction. I hope that the effect of this report will be that the Government will re-examine their attitude to many of the problems which are brought out so effectively in this report and I hope that the noble Lord, when he replies, will tell us that the ODA is proposing to meet the challenge which this report presents to us.
7.35 p.m.
The Minister of State for Defence Support (Lord Trefgarne): My Lords, I should like to begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Walston, for tabling this Motion. It has provided a further and most welcome opportunity to debate development issues and to look ahead to consider how countries in Africa might best be helped through agricultural development to reduce the risk of drought and famine in the future. I think that it has been an interesting and constructive debate, opened so ably by the noble Lord and supported by so many others.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development is to be congratulated on their report on United Kingdom Aid to African Agriculture. While the report is critical of some aspects of the Government's past performance and current policy, overall the report is reasonably fair and balanced, and the Government welcome it.
I shall deal first with those parts of the report that appear to question the Government's commitment to agricultural development in Africa. I acknowledge that the real value of our assistance to agriculture and related activities in sub-Saharan Africa fell between 1979 and 1983. But during that period, when there were constraints on the overall aid programme, and in particular on bilateral country programmes, the proportion of all bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa for agriculture and related activities actually increased. Agricultural development is at the heart of our bilateral aid policy. It covers a wide spectrum, from plant genetics to feeder roads. In developing our programmes we have to take account of the priorities and wishes of aid-recipient countries but we aim to increase the agricultural content of these programmes where we can.
To judge by some of the articles in the press when the report was issued, one could be forgiven for thinking that it was highly critical of the Government's policy on agricultural development in Africa, but a closer reading reveals much common ground and endorsement of current policy. For example, while the report mentions the decline in aid spent directly on agriculture, it recognises the aid spent on projects which indirectly benefit the sector, including the rising allocations of programme aid. The Government welcome the endorsement that the report gives to this growing emphasis on programme aid.

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The report also draws attention to the need for rural development projects to help African farmers and herdsmen. The group has in mind the rather complicated integrated rural development schemes designed to help bring forward entire rural areas. These schemes were very much the fashion in the late 1970s but they have generally not worked well. We are now being very much more careful about putting new money into such integrated schemes. But we are still making some investments, and I think that the Parliamentary Group have not taken into account a number of rural development projects agreed in 1984. For example, my right honourable friend the Minister for Overseas Development approved commitments last year some £5 million to the equatorial region agricultural project in Southern Sudan, which is aimed at benefiting smallholders and building up agricultural services; and nearly £2 million for a settlement project for peasant farmers in Zimbabwe. Proposals for new allocations for rural development in the Sudan, Kenya and Zambia are under consideration at present.
The group recommended an increase in the overall level of the aid programme. A number of noble Lords echoed that sentiment. Your Lordships will already be aware that the Government have recently announced just such an increase. The planned aid allocation for 1986–87 will be £1,187 million, some £57 million more than the provision for 1985–86. For the two subsequent years the aid programme will rise to £1,230 million and £1,270 million respectively. These additions mean that, on present forecasts of United Kingdom inflation, aid will have more than maintained its real value since 1982–83.
This, I believe, demonstrates the Government's firm commitment in this field. We are also determined to maintain, and where possible improve, the effectiveness of our assistance, and I am grateful to the group for its recognition of the value of Britain's bilateral aid programme. We have a very clear policy in providing aid to Africa. It comprises three elements: first, fast-spending programme aid to support economic policy reform; secondly, manpower and training assistance, including consultancies, to strengthen local institutions; and thirdly, assistance to key sectors of the economy, focusing upon rehabilitation and maintenance. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, and one or two other noble Lords were particularly interested in our activities in the area of manpower and training assistance. Each of these elements has direct and indirect implications for food and agriculture which are vital for economic growth and the relief of poverty in Africa.
The group has expressed concern that the Government's policy of taking account of commercial considerations when allocating aid funds:
"tends to direct funding opportunities away from the agricultural sector and also away from Africa as a whole".
This is not the case. The share of bilateral aid going to the continent of Africa has remained broadly constant at around 40 per cent. since 1979. Our country programmes there, as in the rest of the world, reflect the spending priorities agreed with recipient governments, and take account of what other donors are doing and what Britain is best able to provide in terms of technical expertise, training, goods and
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services. Our starting point remains the individual developing country and its particular requirements. Our fundamental objective is to promote economic and social progress in developing countries and to alleviate poverty. Experience has shown that there is no inconsistency between this and the Government's obligation to help British firms realise the legitimate commercial benefits from the aid programme.
I turn now to agricultural research, an activity in which the report recognises the highly successful United Kingdom efforts. We very much agree that a long-term approach is needed, and our continuing and increasing support for the international agriculture research centres illustrates this. Five such centres are located in sub-Saharan Africa. Even so the impact in Africa has so far been less than in Asia, but this is to be expected in view of the formidable scientific and technical difficulties, let alone the other factors responsible for famine. In recent years we have contributed nearly £10 million to three of these centres.
Perhaps I may mention in parenthesis a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Rea, about the trend of our aid to international agricultural research centres, which is one of the points upon which he was good enough to give me prior notice. In total our contribution to the international agricultural research centres was £4.16 million in 1984 and rises to £4.9 million this year. It is expected to reach £5.33 million in 1986. I hope that those figures will reassure him of our support for these centres.
In addition, there are the national research projects undertaken within our bilateral African country programmes. These take the form of technical co-operation projects carried out in the country concerned and so, we hope, have the additional advantage of strengthening local skills and capacities through training and example. That again was a point in the mind of the noble Lord, Lord Walston.
Many research projects are commissioned under our functional research programme. For example, the Department of Soil Sciences at the University of Reading is determining the ability of different varieties of barley to withstand drought. The results will be used to develop a screening technique for use by barley breeders, and the technology will be extended to cover other crops of semi-arid areas such as sorghum, chickpeas and lentils. We also help African agriculture through our financial support for a number of British institutions which give scientific and technical help to developing countries—for example, the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine of the University of Edinburgh and the Tsetse Research Laboratory of the University of Bristol.
ODA's own scientific units—the Tropical Development and Research Institute and the Land Resources Development Centre—play a vital part in the Government's continuing response to African needs. For example, TDRI has an international reputation for its work on pests. Important progress is being made in the control of armyworm, the grainborer, and a number of other major scourges of crops, livestock and indeed man.
No debate on this subject would be comprehensive without a reference to the role played for many years by the Commonwealth Development Corporation, to

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which the noble Lord, Lord Oram, referred. Indeed, the report we are presently debating paid special tribute to the work done by CDC in the production of export crops and its pioneering of nucleus estates and outgrower schemes in Africa; and the noble Lord mentioned those, too. For those who are not familiar with the nucleus estate concept, the system enables farmers to grow cash crops for centralised processing and co-ordinated marketing while also growing food for their own and local consumption. Such projects have been particularly successful in countries which have adopted realistic pricing policies and have allowed a reasonable rate of return for the producers. Currently CDC has investments and commitments of £117 million, including funding for 11 nucleus estates in Africa involving 37,000 smallholders growing crops such as palm oil, rubber and sugar. I recall visiting some CDC-funded rubber plantations in the Ivory Coast in 1981.
While the sort of projects I have just described normally involve the growing of crops for export, CDC has also promoted and is managing two projects in Africa concerned exclusively with food for local consumption. In Zimbabwe, a project is being developed which provides services to a smallholder dairy settlement and produces a wide range of food crops. In Tanzania, CDC is involved in a substantial maize and bean project. The corporation is also participating in two other food projects managed by British companies.
I should also like to mention CDC's achievement in establishing in 1972 the Mananga Agricultural Management Centre in Swaziland which trains nationals of developing countries to plan and run agricultural ventures, including irrigation projects. This work has, of course, taken on special significance in the light of recent tragic events.
While this is a fine record, CDC is constantly seeking new ways of assisting agricultural development in Africa. Given its long association with the continent, both in the management of large-scale projects and in the motivation of small farmers, it is, perhaps uniquely equipped to do so.
All of us must be concerned at what the recent famine has shown up—that is, the longer-term trend towards degradation of the environment, especially in the dry and semi-arid areas, which is reflected in soil erosion, deforestation and the advance of the deserts. Perhaps I may reassure the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, that the phrase "and the advance of deserts" was inserted in my speech earlier this afternoon to replace the word "desertification" to which he took such exception, with which I agree. These are partly the result of environmental and climatic changes.
There seems to be a general trend towards falling rainfall in much of the Sahel region, although happily we can expect intermittent years of good rain like this one. The effects of this are magnified by Africa's fast-growing population and the consequent greater pressure on marginal land that tends to be farmed by poor traditional practices. Meanwhile, nomads are pushed into poorer land that cannot support their animals. This vicious circle leads to deforestation as bush and trees are cut down and burned for farming
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and firewood. We must do more to protect and where possible regenerate scarce natural resources. But this cannot have any lasting effects unless the people in the area concerned see its importance to them and can adapt their traditional way of life and their pattern of labour accordingly.
Work is continuing on local and exotic trees, bushes and grasses, which can help to meet people's essential needs for fruit, browse, shelter and firewood. But more research and propagation must be done. One of our major projects in Kenya is on soil and water conservation and forestry development. We are also looking at a social forestry scheme in Ghana. If your Lordships wonder what "social forestry" is, the answer is the provision of firewood.
I turn now to some of the other points raised during the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Walston, during his most illuminating opening speech, raised the question of the proportion of our aid that goes to the poorest countries. In fact, 80 per cent. of United Kingdom bilateral aid goes to countries with an income per head of 800 dollars or less, which is the International Development Agency eligibility threshold. Many of these are, of course, Commonwealth members. But all of our aid to the poorest countries is provided as grants rather than loans. I believe this to be the right policy in that particular area.
As for our aid performance overall, it is true that aid as reported to OECD was 0.33 per cent. of GNP in 1984. But there are fluctuations in donors' aid performance unrelated to changes in actual aid expenditure. In aid-spending terms, the figure for 1984, like 1983, was 0.35 per cent. As for our performance compared with that of other donors, our aid programme, as a percentage of GNP, is below that of France, Germany and Japan among the major donors but ahead of that of the United States and Italy. In absolute terms, we have the sixth largest aid programme, and within the European Community, the third largest.
I turn now to some of the remarks made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. The right reverend Prelate referred to the road project in Tanzania. This will open up fertile lands to the benefit of Tanzania and the small farmer. It was conceived many years ago not for commercial reasons, but different priorities might now well prevail. We are generally moving away from such large capital projects in Africa. I doubt whether many such projects will find a place in our programme in the future.
The right reverend Prelate referred also to the question of population growth. He was echoed in this by the noble Lord, Lord Vernon, and I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Rea, also touched upon it. Population growth must be seriously tackled by African countries. In a country like Kenya, with a growth rate of 4 per cent. a year, the population doubles every 17 or 18 years. We are helping African governments to tackle these problems. The cause is not poverty alone; nor is the relief of poverty the only remedy. One approach is helping to reduce infant mortality so that parents can be confident that their children will survive. Another approach is to encourage the education of women to provide them with employment opportunities as an alternative to child bearing and to promote knowledge of, and access

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to, methods of family planning. Overall, our assistance to population-related activities has increased from £1 million in 1977 to £12.3 million last year.
The noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, implied that the Government had apparently said that we believe in private aid flows rather than Government aid. That is not so. We recognise the important role of both of these. We have indeed facilitated the flow of investment overseas by abolishing exchange controls and encouraging host governments to be more receptive to foreign investment. But our policy is to seek solutions to the debt problem on a country basis. We support the role of the IMF and the World Bank. Through change in policies, particularly of the middle income countries, the confidence of the international capital markets can be restored. Aid should be concentrated primarily on the poorer developing countries. That is the policy and the practice of the Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Rea, asked about our policy towards Tanzania. Aid to agriculture in many countries is not justified when the policies that the country pursues would make it ineffective. I am afraid that this, sadly, is our view in regard to Tanzania. As for government aid to the voluntary agencies, we believe that much of the best work in rural development, particularly on small schemes, is done by the so-called NGOs. These have shown that they can often work effectively with rural communities. In the two financial years 1983–4 and 1985–86, our support for NGO projects through our joint funding scheme doubled from £2.4 million to £4.8 million. We shall maintain support at a substantial level. In addition, we collaborate with agencies in their relief efforts and meet a substantial share of the costs. We also support 1,100 British volunteers working in developing countries.
It is vital that we understand that the main responsibility for development in Africa—in agriculture as in other sectors—must lie with African countries themselves. The report rightly recognises that:
"there is limited scope for providing agricultural aid effectively where the overall policy environment is adverse".
Recipient countries must adopt policies, particularly in the pricing and marketing of agricultural produce, to encourage increased output. They must invest more in the peasant sector. They must preserve and regenerate natural resources. They must seriously tackle the population problem.
This debate has given me a welcome opportunity to outline how the Government are playing their part in the areas addressed by the report. And we are pleased that the document recognises the fine quality of the support that we can give. Indeed, in 1984 British aid to agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa amounted to £66 million. We are looking at ways to give more. But if our aid is to be effective, we depend on African countries making the necessary reforms in their economic and agricultural policies. The problems are certainly difficult, but I believe that with the right policies and the right help they can be successfully tackled.
Lord Walston: My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. They have
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been most stimulating and to a certain extent controversial, and I must say that I am tempted to embark upon a lengthy argument in respect of some of the points put forward by some of those who have spoken. That, however, would not be a very popular move. It would not be consistent with your Lordships' well-established custom. I shall therefore not embark upon that. I shall do no more than repeat my thanks to those who have taken part. I wish your Lordships a happy Christmas. I wish, too—I hope, on behalf of your Lordships—a happier new year to those people living in Africa and other parts of the third world than they have experienced recently. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.
House adjourned at eight o'clock.