Lords Sitting of 27 February 1985

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

Lord Vinson
Nigel Vinson, Esquire, LVO, having been created Baron Vinson, of Roddam Dene in the County of Northumberland, for life—Was, in his robes, introduced between the Lord Northfield and the Baroness Cox.

Mr. Rudolf Hess
2.46 p.m.
Lady Saltoun: 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 is the cost to the United Kingdom of guarding Mr. Rudolf Hess in prison.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Young): My Lords, there is no cost to the United Kingdom arising from Hess's imprisonment. All the costs of the three Western powers are borne by the German authorities.
Lady Saltoun: My Lords, I thank the noble Minister for that Answer. May I ask her whether, in view of the forthcoming special 40th anniversary celebrations in commemoration of VE Day, her noble friend will approach the nations concerned in order to secure the liberation of Herr Rudolf Hess as a gesture of peace and goodwill?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships will understand that it would not be right for me to give the House an undertaking to make a further approach on a specific occasion. However, I should like to assure the noble Lady that successive British Governments, together with the Governments of France and the United States, have argued for Hess's release on humanitarian grounds. Her Majesty's Government have made more than 20 such appeals to the Soviet Union, most recently in November 1984.

Cross-Channel Fixed Link
2.48 p.m.
Lord Davies of Leek: 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 still interested in establishing a link with Europe either in the form of a bridge or a tunnel; and whether a study of existing freight and passenger traffic via France has been made.
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, as I said in reply to my noble friend Lord Bessborough in the unstarred
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debate on this subject on 16th January, the Government remain willing to facilitate the construction of a cross-Channel fixed link by the private sector if it can be financed without support from public funds or Government guarantees against commercial or technical risks. On the second point raised by the noble Lord, a full study of existing and expected freight and passenger traffic was included in the report of an Anglo-French study group published in June 1982 (Cmnd 8561). But promoters will no doubt make their own up-to-date traffic forecasts before developing firm proposals to submit to the two Governments.
Lord Davies of Leek: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that comprehensive reply. Will the noble Lord tell the House whether the committee is still in existence or whether consultations are still taking place between the French and ourselves on this issue?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: Yes, my Lords, the joint Anglo-French working group which is preparing guidelines has been asked to complete its work by the end of February (that is, tomorrow) and intends to submit its report on time. The exact date upon which guidelines can be issued to promoters will depend on whether there are any points remaining to be resolved in discussion between my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and his French counterpart.
Lord Underhill: My Lords, does the Minister agree that there are many other factors involved, apart from the commercial viability that will be left to private capital? Is it intended that the Government will issue a White Paper covering the whole sphere and all the problems involved?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, I have no knowledge of any proposal to issue a White Paper. The guidelines for the promoters will of course be published; and it is hoped that they will be available in about a month's time.
Lord Ferrier: My Lords, can my noble friend say whether these estimates will include a calculation in respect of the police, Customs and security staffs who will be necessary for the 24 hour-a-day watch that will have to be kept in respect of any such bridge or tunnel?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, all the factors which my noble friend has mentioned are being very closely considered by my right honourable friend.

European Fighter Aircraft Project
2.51 p.m.
The Earl of Kinnoull: 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 is being made on an agreed definition of the European fighter aircraft project and on future work-sharing in its production.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces (Lord Trefgarne): My Lords, the

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significant events since my noble friend last raised this matter include the signing by the Chiefs of the Air Staffs of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom of a European staff target defining their needs for a future combat aircraft, and the receipt within the last two weeks of the industrial study, which began last September. I am afraid that it is too early to say what work-sharing arrangements might be agreed, but we anticipate, if past precedent is adopted, that work-sharing would relate to the number of aircraft each air force would need.
The Earl of Kinnoull: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. Is he aware that, despite what he has just said, there is serious concern at the slow progress on this important project? Can my noble friend remind us of the time-scale within which the RAF and NATO air forces require this aircraft to be brought into service? Secondly, can my noble friend remind us of the global number of aircraft and the number required for the RAF?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords. I am sorry if my noble friend thinks that progress has been slow, but this is a very complicated subject. The aircraft are required for service in about the mid-1990s, or shortly thereafter. The total number of aircraft anticipated is of the order of 1,100, of which the United Kingdom's share might be in the region of 250.
Lord Gisborough: My Lords, can my noble friend say whether this project involves the agile combat aircraft, and, if so, whether it is the British agile combat aircraft or the French one?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, this is a collaborative project. The British and French aeroplanes which I believe my noble friend has in mind are simply technology demonstrators and are not meant to be prototypes for this project.
The Earl of Kinnoull: My Lords, can my noble friend give us a small clue as to the likely future progress of Ministers in considering and improving the development stage of this project?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, the Defence Ministers concerned will be considering the feasibility study some time later this year. After that we shall move to what I think is called the project definition phase. Further decisions will need to be taken after that.

Business
2.53 p.m.
Lord Denham: My Lords, it may be for the convenience of your Lordships if I say a few words at this point about the arrangements for this afternoon's short debates standing in the names of the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, and my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard. It is customary in short debates that the mover is allowed approximately 15 minutes and that the Minister should rise to reply not less than 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the debate.
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In the case of the short debate in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, this means that all other speeches should be limited to a maximum of 11 minutes. If any noble Lord should speak at greater length, it will be to the disadvantage of subsequent speakers in the debate. In the case of the short debate in the name of my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard the number of noble Lords wishing to speak is such that the standard will be even longer and it is not necessary to propose any formal time limit. I feel sure, however, that noble Lords speaking in both debates would wish to exercise a voluntary restraint in keeping with the spirit of these short debates.

Refugees: Third World
2.54 p.m.
Viscount Buckmaster Viscount Buckmaster rose to call attention to the situation of the refugees in the third world; and to move for Papers.
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, my pleasure in winning the ballot for the short debate this afternoon is heightened by the fact that this is the first time in my entire life that I have ever won a ballot for anything, whether it be for a short debate in your Lordship's House, a lottery, a raffle for a church bazaar, or what have you. But what is much more important of course is that this good fortune of mine enables us to focus our attention today, with the aid of that great range of expertise which your Lordships always deploy on such occasions, on one of the three terrible problems of the third world, the other two being of course world hunger, which is confined largely to Africa, and violations of human rights, which is also of grave concern to me.
However, I find that I have once more embarked upon a vast and complex subject, and in the limited time available to me I can give only the briefest and barest outline of it. I shall confine my presentation to four main areas: the statistical, the tragic, the remedial and the triumphant.
Before I plunge into a sea of statistics. I should perhaps explain that, in dealing with refugees, I shall be following the definition in the Oxford dictionary which defines a refugee as someone who has taken sanctuary in another country as a result of religious or political persecution. There are, of course, a great number of refugees who fled their home countries. For example, refugees from Ethiopia have fled to the Sudan at the rate of 3,000 a day; they are refugees from hunger, and we assume that they will go back to their home countries when the rains return. As far as I can ascertain—and I am sure that noble Lords will realise that it is extremely difficult to obtain precise figures—the total number of refugees in the world is in the region of 14 million. That is a colossal figure indeed, but that figure is even more staggering when one realises that in 1951 the total was 1.5 million.
Of that large total of 14 million, about 5½ to 6 million are being looked after by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, to which I shall refer in future simply as the commission. The largest concentrations of these refugees are to be found in Pakistan, which has 2,300,000 refugees from Afghanistan, although I should say that the Pakistan

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Government put the figure at 2,900,000; in the Sudan which has 700,000 refugees, mostly from Ethiopia; in Somalia which again has 700,000, also from Ethiopia; in Central America and Mexico which have 341,000 refugees; in Southern Africa, which has 240,000; in Tanzania which has 180,000; and in South-East Asia, which has 160,000. That gives a total of 5½ to 6 million refugees, including small groups elsewhere.
The remaining 4 million are people who are still called refugees; but they have found their own way in the world, and many of them live in Britain and elsewhere. In addition, we have some 4 million Palestinian refugees; 1,925,000 are living in the camps surrounding Israel and Palestine, in Syria, the Lebanon, and so on; and there are 2 million who once more are fending for themselves. I shall have a little to say about them later on. They are looked after, not by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, but by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian Refugees.
I must now turn from figures to faces and consider the situation of the third world refugees, particularly those who, in the words of the Bible, are,
"going through the vale of misery".
One must accept that a great many of them have come from areas where terror and torture, senseless slaughter, degradation and despair have formed the permanent backdrop to their lives. Of course, although they are happy to have asylum in the countries where they now live, their deprivations weigh very heavily on them. Of these, I think that the most serious, quite apart even from the meagre diet, the cramped living conditions, and so on, are the lack of beauty and the lack of hope. It was Plato who said:
"Let our youth live in a beautiful land".
One of the most terrible things that strikes one today going through these refugee camps, is the monochrome monotony of their conditions, enlivened perhaps by a little piece of Palestinian embroidery, or the tiny tinkle of brilliance from the lips of a wise old man.
Then there is hope. It was Bacon who said, "Hope is a good breakfast", and indeed it is. It makes a splendid breakfast. It sustains us throughout the day, like bacon and eggs. Although I would not say that hope is entirely extinguished, there are areas, particularly among the Palestinians—people who have been in refugee camps now for a great many years since 1948, and they are still there now 20, 30 and 40 years on, or thereabouts—where one sometimes feels that almost every spark of hope has been extinguished from those sighing, suffering, sorrowing thousands.
However, my Lords, sighing and suffering ill-become your Lordships' House, and we must examine now what is being done for all these refugees throughout the world. The short answer is a great deal. The Commission, to which I referred earlier, is now looking after 5½ million refugees in 82 third world countries. Their activities are chronicled in this superb volume which I have with me. It does not make good bedtime reading certainly, but it helps to while away the tedium of a snowy Saturday afternoon.
It shows above all that the commission value the individual as highly as the group. If I have a theme to my speech today it is just that concern for the
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individual. Indeed one gets the impression that the commission are just as much concerned about the 2,300,00 refugees in Pakistan as they are about the 14 in Niger.
They concern themselves greatly with emergencies, and that is one of their most important tasks. In addition to that of course they are working with great energy and application on continuing projects—agricultural projects, well-drilling, counselling services, and so on—but their main object is to secure what they call durable solutions. These may take three forms: repatriation to the country of origin; settlement in the country of asylum; or resettlement in countries like Great Britain, Canada, and so on.
There are in this country altogether something like 140,000 refugees. They are being looked after extremely well by the British Refugee Council, which co-ordinates the work of the two bodies mainly concerned, the Ockenden Venture and Refugee Action. I have limitless praise for the Ockenden Venture. I wish I could tell your Lordships more about their work. It is magnificent. They take these children who are bewildered, perplexed and disorientated. However, within a few days they are running around, speaking English, and so on. It is a labour of limitless love if ever there was one.
Refugee Action started in 1981 and is also doing splendid work. The Vietnamese Children's Centre is going along the same lines, too. Then there are many other charities. There is the British Red Cross, which was the first in the field, and is now concerned with protection, relief and development. There is the Save the Children Fund which have projects all over the third world. There is Oxfam which are concerned with well-drilling, and so on. Then there are the French groups such as Médicins sans frontières; the German Brot für die Welt; and the American group World Vision—brash and brassy perhaps but no less effective. There is a splendid infrastructure, my Lords.
What of finance? The Commission's expenditure in the current year is likely to be about 500 million dollars. Of that sum the United States contribute about 122 million dollars. Although this may seem a large sum it pales into insignificance compared with the fact that the United States defence budget is 285 billion (I repeat "billion") dollars.
What of Her Majesty's Government's performance? It is pretty good I think on the whole. We could give it, I think, beta plus. It ranks roughly on a level with Federal Germany, better than France, much better than Italy, but not as good as the Scandinavian countries, of which Norway is outstandingly the best. Nevertheless, despite this good achievement I have four questions which I should like to put to the noble Lord the Minister, and I have given him notice of these.
First, can he assure the House that Her Majesty's Government will continue to support the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and organisations like Oxfam which are concerned with refugee problems? Secondly, could the Minister tell the House whether the Home Office is prepared to adopt a rather more flexible policy in regard to the admission of refugees? I think there particularly of the importance of reuniting families and of the terrible

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sufferings endured by those people, particularly from Uganda, who know that their lives may be in danger if they return.
Thirdly, I would ask the Minister whether it is not possible for the waiting time for such people to be reduced? There are some refugees—I have met several as I am in contact with a great many in this country—who have been waiting for four whole years. What a terrible situation! They are unable to work, and all the time this terrible Sword of Damocles, represented by their terror of returning to their own countries, is suspended above their heads. Finally, I should like the Minister to give due consideration to the removal of the refugees from the closed camps in Hong Kong (about which another speaker will tell your Lordships, and particularly to reunite families bearing in mind that there are now 434 refugees in the open and closed camps in Hong Kong who have relations in Great Britain.
I turn in conclusion to the triumphant. How, one may ask, can there be any triumph in a situation so fraught with misery and despair? And yet I know of so many refugees who have triumphed. When I think of these triumphs I am reminded of the saxifrage plant, that tiny, slender, fragile plant bursting its way up through the rocky ground. In just the same way so many refugees triumph, forging their way ahead, bursting through those rocky barriers of hostility and indifference; forever going on ahead, forging upwards, outwards and onwards. And this is wonderful to behold.
There are many who have triumphed. I can give your Lordships just two brief examples. There was a cripple, a refugee from Uganda, who was living in penury in Kenya. He came to Britain and was looked after by the Commission and by the Ockenden Venture. In a short time he has settled down here, passing his exams, and doing very well. Another Ugandan came, again from Kenya, and he bore on his body all the scars of persecution. He had that dazed, stunned expression of those who have suffered too much fear. In a short while he had once more adjusted himself, and although he was no academic, he has passed two A-levels at C standard. Is that not triumph, my Lords?
Although there is triumph in abundance, there is also continuing tragedy in abundance in the third world. When I look upon those great lava flows of misery slowly engulfing so many areas, the apparently unstoppable stream of refugees pouring into Sudan from Ethiopia, the continuing terror of torture camps, the gallows and the gun, that great myriad of unfed mouths, those hoards of scantily clad bodies, I feel myself overwhelmed by a great wave of helplessness and despair.
It is on those occasions that I look at the last judgment in St. Matthew's Gospel, which not only brings me back to the cornerstone of my speech, but it contains the most glorious, the supreme justification for work among refugees. I quote from St. Matthew Chapter 25, Verse 35:
"For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye took me in: Naked and ye clothed me".
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And a little further on:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me".
My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.11 p.m.
Lord McNair: My Lords, I applaud the initiative of the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, in calling our attention today to the situation of the refugees in the third world. I congratulate him on his patience and eventual luck in the ballot, and also upon his excellent speech. I should also like to utter a heartfelt "Hear, hear!" to the tributes which he paid to the UNHCR and the British Refugee Council.
I do not intend to speak about any special group of refugees. I am sure I can rely on others to focus attention on the particular and localised problems of which they have special knowledge. I want to try to talk about the problem as a whole, and more about prevention than cure. Without, I hope, stepping out of order, I shall not interpret the terms of the Motion in too narrow a sense. In strict legality you cannot be a refugee until you have crossed a national frontier, but if someone is squatting in an emergency feeding centre in the Horn of Africa with their baby dying in their lap I do not suppose they bother too much about which side of the border they are on, if, indeed, they know. For the purposes of this debate I would rather take the word "refugees" to cover all people who have been grossly deprived of some of the more basic human rights, whether or not they are still in their country of origin; in other words, to include potential refugees.
This definitional problem may serve to remind us that the topic we are considering is only a part of a much bigger and even more tragic totality. If one can imagine a huge canvas by a Goya or a Breughel depicting the entire spectrum of man's beastliness 1985—style, it is possible that the refugees of the world would be just a detail in the corner. Indeed, in some ways and in some areas they may, for all their pitiable plight, be among the relatively lucky ones. There can be few resettled refugees who are not haunted by the memory of relatives and friends they left behind, the ones who did not get away: those, for example, who died in their attempt to escape from persecution, starvation or both, or those who are still languishing, prisoners of conscience, in the torture-houses which have erupted all over the face of this planet like symptoms of the plague.
In truth, your refugee may not be, in Wordsworth's phrase, the "most unhappy man of men" but it is his situation that we are considering here today. Since it is better to help those we can help than to weep for those we cannot, I welcome this chance to bring to the attention of the House the most remarkable piece of work which I have ever read on this subject. It is described as A Study on Human Rights and Massive Exoduses. It was addressed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. It was written in 1981 by His Highness Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan after he had ceased to be the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The three classical solutions to refugee problems, as the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, reminded us, used to be voluntary repatriation, local integration in

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the country of first asylum or resettlement in third countries. But these solutions are simply not adequate for the massive exoduses of recent years. So, to quote from paragraph 5 of the report:
"Many governments have reached the conclusion that serious attention must be paid to analysing the forces which get people on the move, with a view particularly to considering whether means can be found to avert new large-scale refugee situations".
That, alas, was written four years ago, before Ethiopia.
There follows a comparison of the two schools of international law: the progressive school, which sees individuals rather than states as the subjects of international law; and the classic school, beloved of governments, which reverses the order and enshrines the sovereign prerogatives of the nation state. Prince Sadruddin is too much of a diplomat and a United Nations man to say it, but if one likes clear-cut distinctions between "goodies" and "baddies" then in refugee situations the baddy is almost bound to be a government.
I should perhaps remind your Lordships that this report, which I am trying to summarise in a few minutes, was A Study on Human Rights and Massive Exoduses. It follows that more emphasis is laid on the political than on the economic causes of exodus, though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, is by no means silent about the economic factors. I am afraid, though, that a quick perusal of that declaration serves only to show what a wildly Utopian document it was and how far we are from its realisation. A few almost random quotations will illustrate this point. I quote:
"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person".
"No one shall he subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".
"All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law".
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile".
"Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country".
"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion…".
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression…".
Did not every single one of those assertions of our rights immediately remind your Lordships of frequent examples of their gross denial? What of Article 21, which I think is worth quoting in full:

"(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures".

What proportion of the world's population could understand, let alone have any hope of ever enjoying, the provisions of that article? In case its recital might make us feel too smug in this country, let me also quote the first two sections of Article 23:

"(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work".

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The denial, wilful or unavoidable, of some or all of these human rights, as well as of others, such as the right to
"food, clothing, housing and medical care",
forms a large proportion of what the report calls the "push factors". These are the forces which get people on the move, but there are of course others. War, either civil or international; the imposition by force of exotic ideologies on uneducated people to whose traditions they are repugnant; the inheritance by emerging ex-colonial countries of ethnically meaningless frontiers; premature and uncontrolled urbanisation; and ill-advised agrarian policies which oblige subsistence farmers to turn to cash crops for export. Incidentally, the term "subsistence farming" is often used in a derogatory sense, but, surely, subsistence is a great deal better than starvation.
These are among the "push factors". What are the "pull factors" which beckon from abroad and lure people into attempts to emigrate which, at least occasionally, they may come to regret? The most obvious, perhaps, is that cliché, the shrinking world. Travel and communications have accelerated almost exponentially. Before the advent of the transistor radio and of television most people in the world's poorest countries simply did not know that there were other places where life was easier. Now they do know. They know also that in the democratic countries of the developed north we pay something more than lip service to human rights; and this is another magnet. They may hear in our broadcasts criticisms of their governments which may sadly mislead them into believing that our doors are always open.
These are some of the "pull factors", but the most potent, I suspect, is aid itself. This may sound heartless. It is certainly not an argument against giving aid. What I am suggesting is that development aid given in time in the country of origin could often forestall and avert these mass migrations to neighbouring countries where aid is known to be available or believed to be available.
In other words—and I have to leave out a lot of what I had prepared to say—do we not clearly need an early-warning system to predict these crises before they occur? In nearly every case they are predictable. Should the United Nations not set up a radar chain of multi-disciplinary observers, as it were, strategically placed throughout the third world? Might it not be appropriate for the Secretary-General to appoint a special representative for humanitarian questions, among whose duties would be the establishment and supervision of this early-warning system? These are among the recommendations which conclude the Sadruddin Report. I have no time to describe them to your Lordships in detail. I think I had better leave it at that, with apologies for having miscalculated the duration of my speech.
3.22 p.m.
Viscount Brentford: My Lords, I rise to my feet with a lot of fear and trepidation, first, because it is the first time that I have risen to speak in your Lordships' House but also because of the enormous size of the subject which we are discussing—and the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, in opening this debate, put the figure at 14 million, which is a very large

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number of people. Of course, the refugee is no new phenomenon in the world. I exercised my mind to try to work out who were the first refugees in the world and I suggested to myself that perhaps Adam and Eve were the first refugees. They fell out with the lawful authority in the Garden of Eden and were driven out. I imagine that they must have had a problem in finding a government in any host country with which to register, let alone any representative from the commission. Refugees we have always had with us and, I suspect, always shall.
However, my Lords, I do not want to talk about famine relief, which is dealing with the urgent needs. That is a subject which has been discussed before in your Lordships' House. My concern is to see long-term development aid stimulated for refugees. There is an enormous problem nowadays arising from the fact that the countries to which refugees go are what I call the "LICs"—the "low income countries". This is in contrast with the post-war generation of refugees.
The question of refugees does not lend itself so well to publicity as does that of famine relief. I find that many people ask, "Why bother about long-term solutions when the immediate needs, such as the need for food, are so urgent?" I read in today's newspapers that it was claimed that 1,500 people were dying daily from starvation in just one area in Ethiopia. The needs are horrendous. But I contend that we must not lose sight of the needs in long-term situations. Some 15 years ago the commission's funds were mostly spent on these durable solutions, on long-term solutions. But at the beginning of this decade that proportion fell to just over a quarter. It is hoped, however, that during this year the proportion will have risen to 40 per cent. I am very encouraged by that increase.
I should like to make a number of practical points which I shall illustrate largely from East Africa and that area of Africa. First, I feel very strongly that a refugee is not a person dissimilar from everydody else on this globe. Every refugee is a human being like the rest of us and deserves the same care and courtesy. I am sure that your Lordships with your traditional courtesy extended to faltering maiden speakers will understand what I mean. Therefore, I should like to urge officials who are concerned with registering refugees to humanise and simplify the procedures for registration wherever possible. I have come across many instances where a great deal of mental suffering is caused by those procedures.
The second point I should like to make is that I feel that more encouragement should be given to refugees to help themselves. A recent conference agreed that refugees should not be treated so much as people for whom we must do something, but rather as people whom we must assist in doing what they want for themselves. I believe that that is a very important distinction. Many refugees are skilled or semi-skilled and among them there is a great reservoir of energy and power to help themselves. I believe that the more refugees themselves can be involved, both in planning about refugees and in action taken to support them, the better.
Thirdly, I would suggest that the aim should be to make as many refugees and groups of refugees as
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possible self-supporting. To provide the means of work for people who have been displaced from their homes will strengthen their dignity in a way that to receive food handouts for 20 years will not. However, refugees must not have more favoured status than the nationals of the host country.
Let me illustrate this from the problem of Sudan. Officially, I gather, the total figure for Sudan a couple of days ago was 990,000 refugees—which, I estimate, probably means that by the end of this debate in your Lordships' House, the figure will have passed a million. Many people put the number substantially higher. In East Sudan alone, the area next door to Ethiopia, there are officially three-quarters of a million; but, again, many people put the figure there at a million refugees. But in that area there are only 2½ million Sudanese nationals. This illustrates the problem that there is in providing for refugees. In Sudan itself there have been cases of friction arising with local Sudanese farmers, and it is important that they are not seen to suffer in relation to the refugees. Close co-operation is needed between host Governments, refugee relief agencies and other development agencies so that refugees and nationals are both assisted.
Fourthly, I believe that more attention should be paid to the land factor. Experiments in leasing or lending land have taken place. Land projects have gone on in Zambia and in Tanzania and experiments have taken place in Western Kenya; but there is a problem of some people discouraging land experiments because of land shortage. I suggest that more attention needs to be given to methods by which land is borrowed for the benefit of refugees but in ways that do not threaten the nationals.
Fifthly, I should like to see more research into refugee development aid to ensure that the limited resources available are used as effectively as possible. I have come across very little accountability among the voluntary agencies—I do not include the commission in that—and there seems to be very little evaluation of their efforts. I have heard stories, as I am sure have many of your Lordships, of a substantial waste of money taking place. More research into problems of integration and resettlement. as has already been mentioned by the noble Lord. Lord McNair, is needed.
Finally, the other topic I should like to mention is the need for more training of people managing refugee programmes at grass roots in the countries where there are refugees. Such training would enhance the capacity of host countries to cope much more effectively with the refugees in them. One of the few organisations I have come across that deals with both the research and the training I have mentioned is Queen Elizabeth House in Oxford. I believe that the Government should ensure that its programme continues. I should like to see this country taking the lead in the world both in research and in training of nationals and agriculturalists, of whom we have many in this country in both these fields.
3.33 p.m.
Lord Soper: My Lords, it is my privilege to be the first to felicitate the noble Viscount on his maiden speech. I do so with alacrity and with gratitude for the

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way in which he blended a genuine concern for the refugees with a reasoned argument as to the way in which those refugees might be succoured. I believe this to be a very important issue, alike because it is relatively unknown and because it does not immediately command the kind of response which a glimpse of a naked and starving child can evoke, as compared with the best-laid panorama of concern for those who are refugees. It is for that reason that not only do I thank the noble Viscount who has just spoken, but also offer my thanks to the noble Viscount who initiated this debate for the passion with which he invested this problem and for the fact that here we are presented with a matter of such overwhelming importance as to escape, unfortunately, the concern and interest of a great many people who could be emotionally stirred; but it is much more difficult emotionally to promote that kind of response among those who are refugees.
To me, the outstanding and all-important element that belongs to this problem—alongside, of course, the sheer misery that it contains—is its epidemic characteristics. Reading through the Churches' document on refugees, it is interesting and informative to note that almost every page contains a reference to the characteristic nature of the refugee problem in the modern world. I believe that to be so, and unless we are prepared alike to look at the human suffering of the refugee and at those causes of this wholesale condemnation of so many of our fellow human beings to misery, and unless we are prepared to see these in context, I think that we shall not properly utilise the opportunity which the noble Viscount has so generously offered to us.
It is perfectly obvious that by the Convention of the United Nations of 1951, by the Protocol of 1967 and by the decision of the Organisation for African Unity in 1969, it is now possible, with certain reservations, to denote who are refugees and where they are to be found. There is a welcome recognition now of the definition of the refugee, which enables people to spotlight the problem much more clearly than heretofore; I only wish they would.
Secondly, it is perfectly obvious, to me at least, that if the problem is epidemic, as I suggest beyond any peradventure it is, then it has to be faced not only from the standpoint of humanitarianism, but also by asking the question, which the Churches' report also repeatedly asked: Why has this problem become so general and what are the underlying causes? I propose to use what little time I have to say something on this last subject and on that particular theme.
There is no doubt at all that the refugee is the residuary legatee of fear; and in a world of armed might it is not surprising that the threat of war, let alone the actuality of war, has promoted fear in countless millions of people. I am well aware of the conviction, which I hold as clearly as ever I have done, that only a process of wholesale disarmament can begin to meet this kind of universal fear. But I shall not dilate upon that theme because there is one which is even more apposite or even more immediate.
The translation of the concept of the nation-state of Northern Europe to the third world has contained within itself one great and almost impossible situation.
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We know that a great many of the areas of Africa do not naturally fall within the boundaries that have been allotted to them by colonialism in the first place and by later divisions of territory. I should like to give an example of it which is perfectly simple. There are many Somalis living on each side of Ethiopia. The fact that there are now 1 a million refugee Somalis living in Somalia (which is an intolerable burden for Somalia itself) is entirely due to the fact that the lines of demarcation between Ethiopia and Somalia were artificially drawn in terms of the nation-state and not in terms of tribalism at all.
Secondly, with regard to Nigeria, it is now a matter of common knowledge that the Hausa, the Ibo and the Yoruba are tribally distinct, not only in their habits but in the fact that the Hausa are generally Islamic and, although they are not particularly ardent Christians, the Ibos and Yorubas have a Christian background. In that is a promotion of fear, particularly with the kind of aggressiveness which now belongs to much which is called "religious fervour". I turn to that with regret, but I think in honesty it needs to be said.
It may surprise your Lordships to know that probably among the first refugees were Canaanites—those who belonged to that heavenly country in the Negro spiritual—who were turned out at the behest of the Lord in order to make room for the Israelites. This is not a matter of conjecture and I would particularly refer it to those who have a slavish addiction—shall we say?—to the Old Testament. It is to be found in the 33rd Chapter of Exodus. I find insufferable the Judeo-Christian tradition—in regard to which, in many respects, I suppose Islam must be regarded as a heresy—as an attitude to the nation-state which is incompatible with what I believe to be the true prospects of peace on earth and the reclamation of the refugee. I protest as vigorously as I can at the attitude of imperialism which still belongs to much of organised Christianity, to say nothing of Jewry and to say even less of Islam. Here is a situation in which those who slavishly regard the idea of God as having predestined certain groups to certain places—and, whatever happens to those that were first there, they should be turned out in the interests of God's will—seem to me to be entirely irresponsible and contrary to the spirit of the Christian faith to which I should like to adhere. We in the Christian Church today represent a dominant and very largely a proud authority over parts of this earth to which we have no rights whatever.
That leads me to the only other matter that I wish to raise. I think that we are in an apocalyptic age. It is almost silly to say that in such a short debate. The nuclear age is apocalyptic—of course it is. But I believe that there is no precedent for the kind of problems which now confront a world which cannot solve its problems in terms of the traditional ideas of governmental authority as represented in the West. It is in that regard that I hope that this debate will not only inform a great many who are indifferent, will not only stimulate many to see why the refugee is so common and so afflicted, but will also be some way to a recognition that we have now to do what we can to move, however desperately it is in practice and however difficult it is so to do, away from the concept

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of the nation state to something which belongs much more to—shall I say?—world government.
I finish with this simple comment: that all the methods which hitherto have been advocated for the alleviation of the distress of those who are refugees depend for their authorisation and fulfillment on the will of the nation state. We need an overall authority to go beyond that. Inasmuch as I began by saying something in this context of the trouble when we think of the religious adherence to prospects of domination in terms of land, let me finish with another quotation which comes from Micah. It is that everyone will walk in the name of his god, and every man will sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. When we cease to make refugees because we make them afraid, I think we shall begin to see that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
3.43 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: My Lords, the world's compassion for refugees is bedevilled by false assumptions. This is why I so welcomed the remarkable maiden speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford, particularly for his lucid and informed account of the situation that helped us to see the human side behind the millions. When we talk about people in millions, or even in tens of thousands, we inevitably generalise. We reduce all of them to a stereotype, a single image that stands for the lot and immediately we go wrong.
That happens whether we are dealing with statistics and the figures disguise the human face, or whether we watch the television screen and see those familiar stock images of destitution which now assail our minds and our eyes, with almost little regard for the country in which it is once again happening. There is a uniform of need, and those who wear it are condemned to make an impression on those who watch, which entirely removes the question: of what kind is the need? We merely see people in need. We imagine that we know what they need, but needs are so different and this, again, is where we make our mistakes.
If I may venture on a personal reminiscence, I remember sitting somewhere in India with an Indian woman journalist who was also a photographer, and she was literally shocked to the core after some weeks that she had been spending in a famine area. She told me—and broke down in the telling—of how one evening she had gone into the home of an Indian peasant family and had watched the mother of the household doling out to the wide-eyed children in a little circle the food that they were to receive—the first in 48 hours. It was only every two days that she could afford to give them a measure of food. As the photographer watched from a corner she saw one little 12–year old girl slip out from the circle with her tiny bowl of rice into the yard just beyond, and offer her food to an emaciated little calf in the corner which was her personal pet.
Let us never forget that, however hungry a starving person may be, he or she has even greater needs than the need for food. It may be the need to have one other creature dependent on your love. These are people that we are talking about when we describe refugees. Their needs cannot necessarily be summed up and we
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do not necessarily know best what is best for them. Two of the assumptions that we so easily fall into are these: Poor nations are not good at organising or paupers are incapable. Neither of those has the remotest basis of truth and yet we assume it over and over again when we plan for those who are in need.
The ebodiment of these false assumptions is the refugee camp, where you see people after 10, after 20 and sometimes, as we have heard, after 40 years, totally stagnated—a dead end, with no hope and no way out. They are merely dependent on the world's charity for the rest of their lives. Those camps were intended for temporary emergency, but there has been no solution and not very much attempt to open up any new life. They are permanently dependent.
But the pauper is not incapable. One has only to see the very poor people in any of the great cities of Nigeria to realise the enormous, ebullient entrepeneureship that will break out over and over again as one little man fails in a lorry business and within six months he has started a hairdressing salon. It goes on and on. It is natural for the human creature, when he is on a basic survival level, to produce extraordinary brilliance in ways and means of resourcefulness, and this is what we are dealing with when we talk about refugees.
I remember a Swiss couple in a very poor country. She devoted herself to the poorest of the wives. He went around in a quixotic way. For example, he told me once that outside a fruit shop which had a plate glass window there was a man with a little fruit stall trying to undercut. In front of the fruit stall there was a little man squatting on the pavement, with two dozen oranges on a dirty white cloth, and he was trying to undercut as well. You see this in every Asian and African township. The Swiss man went over to the man with the dirty cloth and they got into conversation. He asked him: "If you suddenly had £10, what would you do?" Without hesitation, the man said; "I would get the materials and make myself a barrow and I would be made." "All right" said the Swiss, "here is £10. Here is my address and pay me back when you can." The Swiss spent 14 years doing that. He raised the money from small charities in the western world and went back. He told me that in those 14 years he had never yet met one person who did not have an immediate answer to the question "What would you do if you had £10?" and in the 14 years there had been only four cases that had not paid back the £10.
Those are the kind of people that we are dealing with when we speak about the very poor. We have to make use of their resourcefulness for their own pride and also in order to solve the problem. The refugee camp is no solution whatever. Over 60 per cent. of the refugees all over Africa are being coped with by African states, mainly by local communities who have absorbed them. They have provided land and the materials for housing. Then the refugees have made themselves self-supporting at a subsistence level, and very often have started to organise themselves communally for basic practical education and for health services. When we see on a television screen that long pilgrimage of people pushing their only possessions on small barrows or carrying them on their heads we should remember that every one in a

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hundred might be a well-qualified doctor; several might be school teachers. They are not all helpless peasants; they are as varied as any other part of the population, but they are on the run. When they can settle down there is an enormous amount of expertise and ability, and a strange communal power of organising for survival. This we must make use of.
In the last moment that is allowed me I want therefore to plead for more responsibility to be given to the voluntary agencies. I do not want to disparage the commission, but the voluntary agencies have a very special advantage. They can produce personnel who are willing to go down and be involved at the grass roots. They know about an appropriate technology because they are closely in touch with the Intermediate Technology group. They know about the small use of executive personnel. Their executive superstructure is on the whole much lighter and far less of the total funds are spent in that way. They are much more free from the political undercurrents and so they are able without Government jealousy to benefit the total community and not just the refugees in the area.
I greatly welcome the assurance that was given by the Minister for Overseas Development at the Second International Conference on Assistance for Refugees in Africa last July that in a new direction it is the intention of that ministry to pour more funds into backing projects undertaken by the voluntary agencies. I do believe that there is our hope, because those are the people who are working to bring into operation all the resourcefulness of those who are the poor and the refugees.
3.52 p.m.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, may I add my thanks to the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, for inaugurating this debate at what I believe to be a very vital moment in the terrible problems of refugees? Perhaps I may also add my congratulations to the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford, on his absolutely brilliant maiden speech. I hope very much that we shall have the honour of hearing him many times, if not on this subject, then on other subjects in which he obviously has great skill.
My interest in refugees dates back to the year 1960–61, when the World Refugee Year appeal was organised by the United Nations, and resulted in a magnificent amount of money being raised and work being done. It happened that I had been for a number of years a delegate to the United Nations. I was asked if I would head in this country the World Refugee Year appeal, which I did with trepidation but in the end with remarkable success. The fact was that we raised more than £10 million in one year for refugees and this was something which had never been done before.
The money was raised for the purpose of clearing the camps in Europe and also in the Middle East. We succeeded, and what is depressing to me today is that, while we ended up with fewer than a million refugees at that time, we now have, as the noble Viscount said, 14 million refugees. This is a tragedy and everybody who has spoken today has offered very remarkable suggestions as to how we may be able to help.
I should like also to congratulate the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the office which
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operates here. They have continued all the time and without hesitation to press the urgency of these matters. They have had a tremendous response from the voluntary agencies, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester has just mentioned. I too feel very strongly that we must try to do all we can to help the voluntary agencies because they have a great advantage. They are, working on the spot; they are non-political; and they are not subject to propaganda and the problems of different types of religions. The voluntary agencies are in many ways the most important agencies to help with this refugee problem.
I should also like to add my thanks and congratulations to the Minister, Mr. Timothy Raison, who has just been mentioned and who has now found an extra £5 million for the voluntary agencies. This follows on 1984, when £10 million was given by Her Majesty's Government to help with these great problems. I am sure that this money is well spent but we could do with much more if it were available. Unfortunately, as we know, it is not.
One thing that has been very encouraging is the remarkable response to the tragedy which is going on in Ethiopia today. The Ethiopian appeal, which we have all been watching on television, has again raised the interest and shown the generosity of the British public in the way in which World Refugee Year did 25 years ago. That in many ways is very remarkable and also very encouraging. I saw only yesterday or the day before that Oliver Walston, the son of the noble Lord, Lord Walston, has raised more than £1 million from the farmers and has gone over to Ethiopia to help at this very moment with the problems of starvation which we all know exist in Ethiopia.
Obviously, permanent settlement is what we should most like to help with. In one of the excellent documents which I have been sent for this debate by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner, I have read of the work which is being done by the Ockenden Venture, directed by Miss Joyce Pearce, and also the remarkable work done by the Save the Children Fund and by other voluntary organisations, all actively engaged at this moment in doing practical things.
I do agree with the right reverend Prelate when he says that we can help these workers, that we can train them and that we should do everything we can so that they are able to establish a permanent method of helping the refugees to help themselves. I am sure that that is one of the most important things we can do.
In Britain, we have been very generous in the past in taking refugees and giving asylum, but it remains extremely difficult because, although we should like to help as much as we possibly can, we are in the awkward position of having a great many unemployed and not much work to offer to these people. I think that self-help and resettlement, on which the High Commissioner and the voluntary agencies are working so hard in these countries, seem to offer a better solution than bringing people into the European picture again.
We should do all we possibly can to help the people on the spot to learn to earn their own living. As the right reverend Prelate has said, many people are doing it now, but there could be many more if help was

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available. I should like to see us giving as much help as we possibly can to the refugees through the voluntary agencies. I am sure that that is the way in which we really would be able to conquer some of these problems. It is a very depressing fact that these problems continue to increase when, 25 years ago, we hoped very much that we had done something to eliminate the problem of refugees for ever. Alas, we did not realise what the wars, the quarrels and the political difficulties were going to be. We are now faced with something far worse than in 1960. I only hope that we shall all encourage everyone to do what they can to meet the existing problems in a new way; in the way suggested by many speakers in this debate.
4 p.m.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, not only am I very grateful to the noble Viscount for the subject of this debate this afternoon but I am most thankful that he won the ballot for this particular Wednesday, as it coincides with my return from a 10–day visit to the Sudan. Therefore, I feel better equipped to join in this debate. I visited the Sudan in my capacity as president of UNICEF in the United Kingdom. Not only did I go to see the health and water projects designed to focus effort on self-reliance and self-help, but I was able to see also something of the refugee camps both within the country and outside it. I will confine my remarks purely to the crisis within the Sudan.
At the outset, one should make a distinction between the refugees who are on the borders of the Sudan and those refugees from the drought areas within the Sudan who are now collected together in camps for displaced persons, usually in the urban areas. As regards the border camps, the latest estimate I have—and I know that figures vary according to their source, and mine are not the same as those of the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford—comes from UNICEF in Khartoum, and shows that on the eastern border of the Sudan the camps contain 350,000 Ethiopians; in the west, 300,000 Chadians; and in the north, 124,000 Ugandans. The Sudanese Government anticipate that a further 150,000 Ethiopians will come to the border in the coming months. This means that the Sudanese Government and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, assisted by the other relief agencies working in The Sudan, are attempting to keep alive well over 900,000 refugees on their borders.
So far as the crisis within the Sudan is concerned, it is estimated that as many as 4½ million Sudanese people are affected by the drought and the failure of their last four harvests. Of these, the most seriously affected are those who mainly come from the nomadic tribes and who have left their traditional grazing areas in the Red Sea, Darfur and Kordofan provinces. They have congregated in camps, large and small, mainly situated around the urban areas, in their search for food and water and for fodder for their remaining livestock.
Although it is obviously very difficult to estimate the precise numbers of these people because they are constantly on the move, it is thought that in the official camps for displaced persons within the Sudan there are probably 500,000 people—but more like 1 million actually on the move within the country. The cruel
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irony, as has already been pointed out, is that however miserable the conditions may be in the border refugee camps, sometimes the people there are better off than the displaced Sudanese who are receiving help from local authorities and from the international relief workers, which in some cases is less good than that which the UNHCR is able to offer refugees on the borders.
I visited two camps for displaced persons. One was in the Omdurman area on the outskirts of Khartoum. It will be difficult for me ever to forget the pitiful sight of families congregated there and which their terrible destitution presented. They started arriving towards the end of last year, and a peak figure of 80,000 people was reported. They had lost their livestock on the way, either because they died or because they were sold. The selling prices of all livestock were absolutely rock bottom. A horse was worth only two Sudanese pounds at the time I was there. The women have sold their last pieces of silver jewellery and these people had virtually nothing.
Moreover, many of these people—especially the children and babies—were in a very weakened physical condition as a result of prolonged malnutrition and from the long journey many of them had made by road, by truck. or on foot to get to the camps. There is no doubt that the sight of destitute people who are bereft even of their own natural environment is the most poignant sight of all. These people had erected miserable shelters in the waste land on the outskirts of Khartoum and were left with absolutely nothing. A rescue operation to maintain for them even the most basic structure of life had been mounted by a great network of international relief agencies. On the day I was there, UNICEF had drilled a bore hole to provide a water supply; French women doctors from Mėdecins sans Frontiėres were there distributing EEC food; and the Islamic African Relief Agency, which is very active in the Sudan, had set up their centre. One volunteer Sudanese doctor had set up his medical camp and treated nearly 5,000 children since they arrived. Despite all this, very many people, naturally, had died of starvation.
At another camp I visited outside the tiny Nile Province town of Atbara, there were many members of the Baja tribe who had been particularly affected by the drought in their usual grazing areas. They had congregated round the town and, again, were dependent on international relief and on the help and generosity of the people of the town. This, I found very surprising; that although the services of the town were under very great strain in terms of food, water and medical services, the generosity and welcome extended by the people of the town to the interlopers was a great lesson to us all.
Finally, I will say a few words about the rescue operation that is being mounted by relief and aid agencies in response to the crisis purely in the Sudan. There is very close co-operation between the local authorities and all the agencies, who have created a structure in which they try to keep themselves informed about the areas of greatest need within the country, so that they may give help there. But from the point of view of the work done by UNICEF, about which I am most authorised to speak, they are attempting to help in camps both on the borders and

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in the country itself. That help is very great, but of course it is nowhere as great as UNICEF would like—and that is because of insufficient funds.
At the request of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNICEF have provided water supplies in a great many cases in the refugee camps on the border—both by the provision of hand pumps and by the loan of drilling rigs. They have provided also medical supplies, including the oral rehydration salts which are a great life-saver for the many children who are suffering from the killing disease of diarrhoea. UNICEF have also provided vaccines for measles and, in one case, for cholera.
So far as the camps for displaced persons within the Sudan are concerned, UNICEF have provided a great deal in the way of water supplies and food of high nutritional value, particularly for the children who are growing more and more malnourished as the drought worsens. UNICEF have of course had to divert a considerable amount of their funds in response to the emergency. They have so far diverted half a million dollars to creating help in the emergency, and this is in addition to their normal water and health programme. But to be fully effective in response to the real need, UNICEF have made an appeal for the Sudan alone of around 5 million dollars, to carry out emergency programmes. I fear that only £500,000 has been pledged or given towards this, apart from £100,000 which has been transferred from the United Committee for UNICEF and which has been sent to the Sudan for its accelerated programmes.
However, there is a great worry about the rest of the money. The British Government, I know, provided 1 million dollars to the general appeal for 67 million dollars made in October last by the Executive Director of UNICEF. Since then. there has been nothing. How will UNICEF carry out these important projects? As the noble Viscount said, projects which have long-term benefits are of great importance, and, as a development agency, UNICEF has always focused on this very much indeed. I do not, of course, have to say how great the impending catastrophe will be if the rains expected in May or June do not arrive, as they have not come for the last four harvests. It is a very real fear.
Finally, I feel that the present situation is unprecedented, in that we in the rich countries are aware of the extent of the human catastrophe facing the people of the drought-ridden areas of Africa, but we are not doing anywhere near enough to avert it. This analogy occurred to me: it is as if a group of well-to-do people were standing on the pavement in safety watching a defenceless and vulnerable person standing in the middle of the road in the path of a colossal vehicle which is bearing down, bent on his annihilation, and are doing nothing to stop it. I feel that a response from the governments of the richer countries is very necessary.
4.12 p.m.
Lord Chitnis: My Lords, like all noble Lords who have spoken I am grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, for introducing a debate on this fearsomely difficult subject. I suppose all refugees have enormous problems, and always have had, but perhaps contemporary refugees have a new problem.
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In an age of rapid but fickle media concern they have to fight for the attention of the world.
Therefore, I should like to press the case for those who in some dreadful scale of values are second class refugees; that is, those who have not only lost all they have but also do not have the protection of the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees. In my experience these come in two kinds. First, there are refugees in their own country. I know that the noble Viscount. Lord Buckmaster—or if not him, the Oxford English Dictionary—apparently does not accept that these people are refugees. Indeed, they have a name of their own: the internally displaced. That is about all they do have.
I first saw this problem at first hand in El Salvador, where, a few years ago, I found a small group of people living in abysmally awful conditions. Very naively, I thought the conditions so awful that something could and must he done about them, so I wrote to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees suggesting that something be done. I was astonished to receive a long, charming and even mellifluous letter in reply which, when translated into plain language, asked me, please, to go away because these people had nothing to do with him as he did not consider them to be refugees. So far as I can make out, for budgetary rather than humane reasons, the present High Commissioner is rather more restrictive in defining what is a refugee than was his predecessor, because at the same time as I am talking of the Government of El Salvador asked UNHCR for help in dealing with its internal refugees but was refused.
The condition of these people is every bit as appalling as that of any other kind of refugee. They are trapped in basements, confined in camps or slums without any facilities and living in fear of their lives. It is not something that happens just in El Salvador, Guatemala and Central America. It happens, of course, in parts of Asia and Africa, too. I find absolutely no way of differentiating their plight from the more conventionally recognised refugees. So, difficult though it is, I hope that Her Majesty's Government will do more in pressing on the relevant organisations, particularly the United Nations and UNHCR, to expand their definition of the term "refugee" so that something can be done to help these people. What certainly must not be done is leave this matter to the International Committee of the Red Cross, because it simply will not be able to cope.
The other kinds of refugees who do not have the protection of the United Nations convention are those from where the convention is not accepted. I find it particularly sad that among these places should be included Hong Kong. Although China, Japan and the Philippines have been able to adhere to the 1951 convention, Britain still continues to maintain that it cannot be applied to Hong Kong. The result of this affects thousands of people. I have not seen them myself but staff of the organisation I have the honour to chair—Refugee Action—have.
I am referring particularly to the refugees from Vietnam who are living in open and closed camps. I should have thought that the closed camps were a particular cause for concern. I have been told that I must not describe them as deplorable but I see no reason why I should not because surely they are.

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Indeed, as far as I can make out, the conditions are deliberately kept deplorable to act as a deterrent to those who might otherwise feel that they could seek refuge in Hong Kong. But what it means is that for a family—of which there are very many—home is one segment of a two-tier bunk where there is no privacy and no normal life whatever. What it means is that thousands of people are being kept in what are simply overcrowded prisons. Indeed, the camps are run by the Correctional Services Department of the Hong Kong Government.
What will happen to these people, who are effectively trapped? They cannot go home. They would not want to and they would not be accepted. They cannot go to third countries. I should not think there is the option of absorbing them into the Hong Kong population, given what is to happen to the Colony. Britain itself will only allow very few people here for family reunions and is generally adopting a very restrictive policy. There is one small step, at least, which can be taken. The noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, referred to the 434 people (I think it is 435 but it is not a great difference) in the open and closed camps who have close relatives in this country. Could not these people, at least, be admitted here? I know of no great principle that would be breached and no floodgates that would be opened if that were allowed to happen. It might also be worth doing when we bear in mind that the Australians have certainly said that they will watch the British policy on the admission of people from Hong Kong to this country and will take from us a cue for deciding to what extent they should take more people into their country.
Leaving aside the problem of those few hundred people, what of the others? What is going to happen to them? I did not raise this issue during the debate on Hong Kong last week because I presumed that the position would be sorted out by 1997; but when will it be, and how will it be?
4.18 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, is to be applauded for raising this issue. It is right that this House should deal with and express itself on matters such as this—matters of great and widespread human suffering. I am tempted to follow the line of other speakers and relate some of my experiences over the past 35 years in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia and Africa, where I have continually visited refugee camps. In fact, it is only three months ago since I was in Delhi visiting the refugee camps of the Sikh community after the tragedy which befell it last November. I do not intend to follow that line because we have written and we have talked for so long about the problem of refugees, the problem of hunger and the problem of suffering, that it seems to me to be more important to address ourselves to what can be done.
I here pay my tribute to the maiden speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford, and take his speech as my theme. Unless we address ourselves, first, to the real causes of the refugee problem and, secondly, to the long-term remedies, we are really only talking to the converted.
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I would suggest that there are two central causes of the refugee problem. The first is civil conflict. It is unfortunate that when one talks of civil conflict, particularly in Africa, so many people in this country immediately have a picture of tribal warfare. I must say here that many sections of our media only perpetuate those myths. The latest example was the "Panorama" programme of the BBC on Monday, which, in purporting to describe the conditions in Zimbabwe and to analyse their causes, showed itself to be woefully ignorant and disgracefully biased.
I would take just two issues from the programme to point up what I am speaking about. The British public watching that programme were misled into believing that the violence in the state of Zimbabwe is caused by traditional tribal conflicts between the Shona and Ndebele. Well, there ain't no Shona. There never has been such a thing as a Shona tribe. There are Shona-speaking communities, which are not a tribe; and they have many tensions among them, and always have had. There are greater tensions among many of them than there are between Shona speakers and Ndebele speakers. The programme perpetuated an unhistorical myth.
Secondly, viewers were led to believe that the detentions without trial in Zimbabwe—which treatment we all detest—were in a category different from the detentions without trial in Northern Ireland. They are not. There is the same basic cause, which can be illustrated. There is the very great difficulty of bringing terrorists to trial when witnesses are in fear of their lives if they appear in court. I simply use that as an instance of how the British public are constantly misled as to the causes of civil conflict on the African continent and in other parts of the world.
So far as the issue of civil conflict and its bearing on the refugee problem is concerned, we must not forget that it was we Europeans who drew the totally artificial frontiers on the continent of Africa, cutting right through tribes. Mind you, that has one advantage. Many refugees in Africa are different from refugees in other parts of the world because when they cross a frontier they may still be with their own people. Nevertheless, the human suffering is increasing, as we have heard this afternoon. At the moment that is particularly illustrated by the situation in the Sudan, but it goes right through the Sahel area, the drought area, and right down through East and Central Africa. The number of refugees is increasing exponentially.
Then we must consider the form of de-colonisation. It was Lee Kuan Yew, the wise man from Singapore, who at a Commonwealth Conference a few years ago said that one of the biggest charges against the British policy of de-colonisation was that it left the colonies to come to independence without a basic system of security to preserve the states which the Europeans had created. Conflicts are inevitable.
I would just remind the House that the problem of refugees should not be foreign to us. Europe has suffered from a refugee problem at least since the beginning of the century. In fact, I remember that the very first prize which I won at school was for an essay on the work of the League of Nations among refugees and in resettling them in Europe after the First World War.

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Civil conflicts inevitably increase the refugee problem, but the second and I think perhaps the more fundamental issue is that of famine. Although there is not a great deal that we can do to prevent civil conflicts, or indeed international conflicts, in the African states—there are some things which we can do, but we do not have time to discuss that subject this afternoon—without doubt there are things which we can do, should do and should have done to prevent famine.
Again going back to the colonial era, so many of the economies of what are now known as the developing nations were distorted and disrupted right from the days of the slave trade. Let us not forget, either, that as recently as immediately after the last world war this country was begging the African nations and their people to produce food for us. Let us remember the Tanganyikan groundnut scheme. There was a great wave of diplomatic activity to get Africans to export food because we were short of it. Let us not forget that there was a great accumulation of food for Britain produced in the first few years after the Second World War. That inevitably added to the natural disaster of the droughts. This is the latest one over the past four years, but there have been others since the last world war.
I ask the noble Lord who is to wind up for the Government to answer a question in this context. The drought in Ethiopia that has so hit the conscience of the world over the past few months was predicted over two years ago by all the major voluntary organisations. Indeed, it was the subject of a United Nations examination which was never published but which not only predicted the famine but pointed out how it could be averted. What were we doing two and a half years ago, in 1982, when we knew that that was coming and when some of us were pressing the Government to take action?
I would ask the noble Lord this question. Why is it that this Government, along with the Government of the United States, have been and are still sabotaging the most constructive organisation of the United Nations—the International Fund for Agricultural Development—which is expressly designed, not to give food aid and succour the hungry now but to prevent millions starving in the famines of the future? That organisation is designed to help the peoples of the developing countries of the world to increase their agricultural production. It surely meets all the criteria that this or any other Government could ask for. It is constructive. It can prevent famine by increasing agricultural production. It can also prevent social conflict through the same means. It has low administrative costs. It has a good reputation for reaching the poorest people in the developing world. It has financial support from the OPEC countries. It has a voting structure which includes both OPEC and the developing world along with the industrial world in a balanced way.
Why is that organisation being sabotaged by being denied funds by the British and American Governments? Surely it is the organisation which can prevent the tragedy and disaster of famine, which has so shocked the world this and last year, from recurring next year and in five or ten years' time, when the cost to the human race will be even greater. We must now
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tackle the basic problem of helping people to provide food for themselves, as the noble Viscount said in his most welcome and remarkable maiden speech.
4 30 p.m.
Lord Bauer: My Lords, many people in this House and many more, but less fortunate, outside will be grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, for his Motion and for the eloquent speech with which he supported it. I should like also to add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Brentford on his wholly exceptional maiden speech.
The suffering of third world refugees is widespread and chronic. It tends to be forgotten between crises. The appalling fate of refugees from Vietnam has by now been superseded by events in Africa.
I begin with a micro-example. In 1970, in South India, I met a lowly clerk. His humble job seemed incongruous with his intelligence and education. He was a refugee from Burma. He had two good A-levels and was heading for a third when, in 1964, his family were expelled from Rangoon where they had been pharmacists since 1884. They found it very difficult to get jobs in Tamil Nadu, where they were aliens. Their closest relative lived in Bradford. Since the second world war, many thousands of refugees have fled to South India from Sri Lanka, Burma and elsewhere.
As other speakers before me have noted, in Asia, the Levant and Africa there always have been refugees from communal conflict and natural disaster. But in recent decades new forces have been unleashed. Violent conflicts are more frequent and widespread. Persecution and brutality have become more systematic and intense. More significant is the tension, conflict, persecution and fear that have emerged in countries where previously the different communities lived together peaceably for generations, as in Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Long study and reflection have persuaded me that such conflict, where there was little or none before, is the result of the wholesale politicisation of life, especially economic life.
It was often said in pre-war Malaya that the Chinese did not mind who owned the cow as long as they could milk it; although the Chinese earned their prosperity and did not extract it from others. The truth is that people are not deeply agitated about who governs them when a country is lightly ruled and its government confine themselves largely to such tasks as public security, foreign affairs, education, health and basic communications. The situation changes radically when the government directly control much of the economy through state enterprises, monopolies of export and import, licensing of industrial and commercial activity and when they enforce quotas of employment that discriminate on a racial basis. Malaysia and South Africa are familiar examples of such discrimination which is, however, ubiquitous in Asia and Africa.
At least as early as 1965 jobs in Kenya were advertised as restricted to Kenyan citizens of African origin. In Nigeria Ibo clerks, book-keepers and craftsmen are denied employment in the Hausa and Fulani-dominated north, with the result that there is a surplus of them in Eastern Nigeria and a shortage in Northern Nigeria where costly technical assistance missions are despatched to remedy the situation.

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When life is extensively politicised people's economic and even physical survival may depend on political and administrative decisions. The stakes in the fight for political power, both gains and losses, are much increased. This inflames tension and conflict and sets up centrifugal forces, at least until all opposition is forcibly suppressed. These dangers are especially evident in multi-racial and multi-cultural societies where they bring about persecution, expulsions and even massacres.
The more far-reaching the controls, the worse the results. When private production and trade are suppressed and the most enterprising people persecuted, large sectors of the economy decline, disdevelop and even revert to subsistence conditions. Such sequences are often accompanied by neglect of the primary tasks of government, including even the maintenance of elementary public security, made more difficult by civil conflict and economic collapse. This grim cycle is evident not only in Ethiopia and the Sahel, but in varying degrees also in much of Asia and Africa.
Politicisation of economic life is behind much of the third world refugees problem. The result is tragic, but also anomalous. The great majority of refugees in Asia and Africa have fled from governments which still receive United Kingdom aid or multi-lateral aid to which we contribute. Western aid has enabled many of these governments to survive and to pursue their destructive policies. The hundreds of thousands of refugees in Southern Sudan, who have been there since long before the recent famine, are all from countries which routinely receive Western aid, usually including United Kingdom aid. The Western donors now contribute substantially to new forms of UN assistance to refugees while, at the same time, they finance the governments which cause their plight.
What should we do? We should generously support non-politicised charities and other organisations trying to help refugees, including the Red Cross, various teaching and medical missions and the French-based Mėdecins sans Frontierės, to which the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, has already referred, which has expanded from small beginnings to being a significant support for refugees and others in the third world.
But this is only a minor palliative. At the same time we should drastically cut or eliminate aid to governments responsible for the plight of the refugees. At the very least we should impose stringent conditions and withdraw aid if the conditions are not met.
We cannot wash our hands of guilt if we continue to use taxpayers' money to underpin policies that cause such distress and then proffer further gifts to ameliorate its consequences marginally and temporarily.
4.39 p.m.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, we are extremely grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, for giving us this opportunity to debate a tragic subject, and also for his opening speech. His personal experience of many of the countries afflicted
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with the problem enabled him to speak with authority and feeling. He and the other noble Lords who have spoken have brought home to us the scale and the awful tragedy of the refugee problem in the world today.
I should like to congratulate first the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford, whose father I remember, with respect, as a fellow Member in another place and, of course, as a Member of this House. We were delighted to hear the noble Viscount speak today. He said that he felt rather nervous. Lloyd George used to say that whenever he got up to make a speech he felt butterflies in his tummy, but when he was speaking he tried to demonstrate that they were not there. The noble Viscount, even if he was nervous, gave us no such impression. His delivery was excellent, his content was thoughtful and helpful, and we look forward to hearing him many times in the future.
I should like also to congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester on his speech. I understand that it may well be his last speech in this House before he retires. I should like, on behalf of my noble friends on this side of the House, to pay a very warm tribute to the right reverend Prelate for his contribution to this House during the period he has represented his historic diocese, and to wish him a long and happy retirement. I should like also to thank him for his thoughtful and compassionate speech. He obviously knows the subject. He knows this area very well, and we benefited from what he said.
A number of noble Lords dealt with the question of definition: what is a refugee? The noble Lord, Lord Chitnis, paid attention to this. It is well to remember that the refugees who come under the protection of the United Nations High Commission are defined as:
"Persons who, owing to well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality or political opinions, are outside their country of origin and cannot, or owing to such fear do not wish to, avail themselves of the protection of that country".
We recognise of course that that is only one category of refugee, albeit an important one. Those who flee from the country in which they live to seek safety from some natural disaster, such as earthquakes, floods or persistent drought, are also refugees, and when their terrible plight was brought home to people in this country and the Western world it drew a remarkable response from individuals and organisations and, indeed, from governments.
This is also an age-old problem, as some noble Lords have reminded us, and this country has a long and honourable tradition of extending asylum, especially to political refugees. The Motion refers to the third world, but the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, reminded us that the world refugee problem is wider. Indeed, it was centred here in Europe in the 1940s, when millions of people were uprooted by war and by changes in political alignments and national boundaries. Most of them have by now created new lives for themselves in a new environment, but there are still refugees in Europe. It is calculated that there are now in Europe about 567,000 refugees, of whom 146,000 reside in this country. Among the most recent arrivals have been refugees from Indo-China and Poland, and I believe that assistance to those needing help comes from local sources in this country. There are 849,000 refugees in

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the United States, 338,000 in Canada, and 304,000 in Australia, including boat people. I mention these figures to show that the Western world does play its part, although it is often criticised for not doing enough.
The noble Viscount and other noble Lords gave us the dreadful catalogue of suffering, country by country: 2½ million refugees from Afghanistan in Pakistan; the 1·9 million refugees under the care of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, of whom one-third live in 61 camps scattered throughout the Middle East. Nor can we forget the dreadful problem of the Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Chitnis, in his speech, and the cases which exist even today in the sub-continent of India and which have just been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Bauer.
While it is impossible to say that the problem in any one area is worse than in another, I think noble Lords concluded that for sheer size the refugee problem in Africa is desperate. The total is estimated at over 5 million refugees and displaced persons, and the flight of many Sudanese to Western Ethiopia following the new Islamic legislation, as well as the movement of half a million Eritrean and Tigrean refugees to Sudan from Ethiopia, has compounded the difficulties. The countries of the Horn of Africa are bedevilled by territorial conflicts and political rivalries, and, as we know, a large number of the long-suffering people are starving to death or are on the verge of doing so. It is a terrible commentary on the times we live in.
The Economist summed it up on 22nd December. I think this is worth quoting to noble Lords. This is what the Economist said:
"The Ethiopians have not only had three years of drought and two decades of civil war to contend with. They have also been hit by government policies which since the late 1970s have reduced agricultural production by an average of 5 per cent. a year. This—as well as the cruelty of the rain-gods—is why Ethiopia has had to beg for food from the rest of the world…By the end of the year, 250,000 hungry Ethiopians in the dry north will have been loaded in lorries and aircraft and resettled in the south-west. Another 2·5 million are due to be resettled by 1994. This is not going to solve the problem of Ethiopia's agricultural inefficiency; and the Ethiopian government does not seem receptive to alternative remedies. Two years ago an Oxford economist, Mr. Keith Griffin, wrote a detailed plan for reform at the behest of Colonel Mengistu. The Ethiopian ruler has suppressed the report".
I do not think there is any need to comment further on that.
My noble friend Lady Ewart-Biggs gave us a moving and important account of her visit to Sudan, and I am sure that we are all extremely grateful to her. As she said, the position is critical, with half a million refugees from Ethiopia and Chad there. Appeals which the aid agencies have been making for Ethiopia are now being repeated for Sudan. I should like to take this opportunity to pay the warmest possible tribute, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, to Oxfam, Christian Aid and the other voluntary agencies for their remarkable efforts at this time. The United Nations Commission also deserves our thanks and support. I think we should recognise the daunting size of its task, and I am sure that Her Majesty's Government fully support its objectives.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Sr. Perez de Cueller, said recently:
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"The problem of refugees can be resolved only with the settlement of the root political causes".
My noble friend Lord Hatch, in his speech, devoted a good deal of time to this. As he indicated, there are several such causes, and they are not easily dealt with. Many African nations were built on the basis of artificial colonial boundaries, as my noble friend Lord Hatch said. Their governments have lacked central authority, for tribal and other reasons, and they have been unable to cope with international economic recessions. Political instability and inability to deal with economic problems have created acute social tensions and we can literally observe month by month the deterioration of the quality of life in these unhappy countries.
One of the most tragic and the most wicked aspects of the crisis is that it has been made worse by the manner in which the superpowers and former colonial countries have intervened there. Local disputes have escalated into larger disasters and into wars, and scarce money has been spent on sophisticated armaments from the East and from the West by countries where millions are living below susbsistence level or are starving to death. This was a point well made by my noble friend Lord Soper, in a characteristically powerful speech. Added to this is the drought and famine which now appears to be the norm in many of these countries.
The final question in this debate is: what can he done in these grim circumstances? Are we just talking into the air, or is there something which Her Majesty's Government can do? The fact is that finding permanent solutions to such an immense problem is a task that can he tackled only on the international level. The receiving countries have been generous, but they are also among the poorest countries in the world. They just cannot cope. The international community has responded. Money, time and energy, and the sacrifice of some of the best men and women in the world, have been channelled into programmes to help refugees, but they have not averted the crisis.
The British Refugee Council give five main reasons why the programmes have not been effective. First, they say that these programmes have simply just failed to keep pace with the scope of the problem. My Lords, that is understandable. Secondly, they say that errors have been made in allocating and administering available resources; thirdly, that there has been too much emphasis on the provision of emergency relief, at the expense of assistance that will promote self-sufficiency, development and integration into the local community; and fourthly, that refugee camps should only be regarded as a bridge towards permanent solutions. Finally, they say that the programmes have been implemented without due regard to long-term planning. The United Nations Commission, I believe, recognise these weaknesses and they have commented that to be successful the programmes must encourage the participation of the refugees themselves. They must be part and parcel of any effort towards rehabilitation.
The value of this debate is that it gives the Minister the opportunity to clarify the British Government's views and to respond to this crisis. The noble Lord will be aware of the Second International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa (ICARA II) and its

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attempt to gain international acceptance of these principles and other essential innovations. I believe that it is right and fair to say that Britain has always regarded Africa as a priority area in humanitarian and refugee relief. On the broader issues raised by ICARA II the Government have not yet issued a policy statement. I note that the Government's representative on the United Nations Commission has made cautious speeches on the search for solutions, on extending the area of development, and on additionality. She is of course reflecting the Government's general attitude towards the problem.
Everyone in this Chamber appreciates the difficulties; but a clear statement of Government policy giving details of their approach to lasting solutions for refugees in Africa would be an important step forward. Two things are desirable: unilaterally, a constructive commitment as urged by the British Refugee Council; and, multilaterally, a more positive lead through the United Nations Commission than we have given hitherto. Both of those commitments would reflect the mood of the British people at this time, and we hope that the Minister will respond accordingly.
4.52 p.m.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I should like to add to those of every other noble Lord who has spoken my words of gratitude to the noble Viscount for raising this subject this afternoon. It is as topical as it is heartrending. The plight of the refugees in Africa that we watch nightly on our television screens from the comfort of our living rooms has awoken the conscience of this country and, indeed, across the world. It is right that we should discuss this issue. I welcome the opportunity to put the Government's views on record and to recount the steps that we are taking.
I am particularly pleased that my noble friend Lord Brentford has been able to make his maiden speech on this occasion and I should like to congratulate him upon it. I hope that we shall have the chance of hearing my noble friend again soon and often thereafter on this topic and perhaps on others.
I should like to add my tribute to that paid by the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester, who will be retiring very shortly. It is not often that we know in advance that a Member of your Lordships' House is speaking for the last time because they normally only leave your Lordships' Chamber feet first, so to speak. Happily that is not the case with the right reverend Prelate and I hope that we shall see him again here at your Lordships' House in the future although not, of course, as a speaking Member.
The problem that we are discussing this evening is a daunting one. It can, like most things, be reduced to statistics. These tell their own tale of trends and comparisons, even if they disguise the harsh details of individual suffering. As recently as 1959, World Refugee Year, there were 1·2 million refugees or thereabouts. Last year there were something in the region of 10 million. This is considerably more than at the end of the Second World War, the greatest upheaval of modern history. Most regions of the third
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world are affected. It is difficult to arrive at a realistic figure for Africa in present conditions. But estimates are in the region of 4 million. In Asia some 4 million Afghans are in refugee camps. This is the largest single concentration of refugees in the world. Over one-fifth of the population of Afghanistan have now been forced to flee their country following the Soviet invasion.
Further east, the Vietnamese boat people have brought critical problems to their immediate sanctuaries, particularly Hong Kong. They have also drawn attention, with the grim tales of piratical attacks, to the plight and vulnerability of those fleeing from oppression. Elsewhere, in Latin America, in the Middle East or recently, for example, on the Thai/Cambodian border there are similar stories and more tragic statistics.
Many of these refugees are victims of natural disaster; for example, the great drought now spreading relentlessly across the African continent. These disasters are very much in the news. But we need to acknowledge that the majority of refugees in the world have been reduced to these straits as a result of acts by man, not nature. They are fleeing from external aggression or occupation. Or they are escaping with their lives from internal persecution and oppression. These are political problems which require political solutions, a point to which I shall return.
These refugee problems, whether man-made or natural, are compounded because most of today's 10 million or so refugees have left one very poor third world country to settle in another. Their arrival often has a critical impact on their anxious hosts. Efforts made by these countries to cope in a humanitarian way, despite the overwhelming strain on their resources, are often not sufficiently recognised. But the problem is frequently beyond them. They have enough problems of their own. The rest of the world must share the burden. It is a global responsibility.
The United Kingdom therefore shares this responsibility. We have as a nation a long and proud tradition of granting refuge to those in fear of persecution. We underlined this concern by becoming a party to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. Seven years later it was a British initiative, under the Government of my noble friend Lord Stockton, which led to the 1959 United Nations World Refugee Year. We also took the initiative in calling for the convening of the International Conference on Indo-Chinese Refugees in 1979, and I recall repeating the Statement to your Lordships at the time.
The aim of all these measures was to give an international dimension to the problem. We believe that the right approach is to channel our help through the international organisations and voluntary agencies which are capable of reacting to this international dimension. The major international agency in this field is the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Originally established in 1951 for a period of three years, this organisation has become the focal point for the international effort to alleviate refugee problems throughout the world.
Its main objectives are to find permanent solutions to refugee problems through voluntary return to the country of origin, or permanent settlement in the first

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country of asylum or a neighbouring country, or resettlement in a third country.
Other key organisations include the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees; the Red Cross; and the British voluntary agencies, which are very much in the minds of many of your Lordships, including in particular the right reverend Prelate, this evening. We are firmly committed to supporting the activities of all these organisations.
Like these organisations our fundamental aim is to work for long-term solutions. Resettlement in Western industrialised countries such as the United Kingdom often brings problems of adaptation. We believe that the voluntary return of refugees to their homes in their own countries is the most desirable long-term solution for the majority of them. Where this is not possible, we must seek to help the host countries as best we can. Where such durable solutions are not imminent, we believe that it is necessary to support the traditional care and maintenance programmes fostering self-reliance among refugees. Such activities help to build a relationship between refugee aid and the development of the less developed countries, where so many of the refugees are found.
The record of this Government in this field is one of which we can be proud. Each year for the past four years we have contributed £5.4 million to the UNHCR's general programme. Over the same period we have contributed £5 million annually to the core budget of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. In addition, we do our best to respond to all special appeals from all the refugee relief agencies. In the current financial year our responses to these appeals have included £5.9 million to the UNHCR, £3. I million to the International Committee of the Red Cross, £2.9 million to the League of Red Cross Societies, and £1.6 million to the British Voluntary Agencies, of which £657,000 went to the Save the Children Fund. We have already pledged £250,000 towards the 1985 budget of the UN Border Relief Operation on the Thai/Cambodian border; and I am pleased to announce that my right honourable friend the Minister for Overseas Development has just approved a further grant of £250,000 towards these costs.
In addition to emergency relief, we have always recognised the importance of more durable solutions. We were one of the first donors to respond to the UNHCR World Bank initiative to income generating projects for the Afghan refugees in Pakistan. To date we have provided £1,750,000 for this purpose. At the Second International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa last July, my right honourable friend the Minister for Overseas Development announced a further £5 million to support the infrastructure needs of those countries providing a haven for refugees in Africa. The scheme will be operated through the voluntary agencies during the period 1984–89. This will provide support for local communities as well as refugees, a point well made by my noble friend Lord Brentford.
We have recently also agreed a £100,000 contribution to the UNHCR's income-generating projects in Sudan. We support the Orderly Departure Programme for family reunion cases leaving Vietnam, and the Thai Government's anti-piracy operations
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aimed at deterring attacks on Vietnamese refugee boats. Together these account for £225,000. Closer to home we support the work of the British Refugee Council with grants totalling over £320,000.
I should now like to turn to some of the detailed points raised during this afternoon's debate. The noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, asked whether the Government could adopt a more flexible approach on the granting of political asylum to refugees from the third world. The 1951 Convention on Refugees defines a refugee as a person outside his home country who is unable or unwilling to return there because of a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. We not only comply scrupulously with the obligations under the convention and protocol, but already in fact go beyond the obligations under it. A person who is not considered to be a refugee under the convention may still be allowed to remain here exceptionally because of the particular circumstances of his case or in the light of the situation prevailing in his home country.
Indeed, the situation in some countries has caused us to establish several exceptional policies for certain nationals. In recent years the countries concerned have included Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Poland and Uganda. Under these policies less stringent tests than the criteria for refugees are applied in deciding whether a person should be allowed to remain here exceptionally, normally for 12 months in the first instance. Extensions are normally granted if there have been no material changes of circumstances.
I believe these indicate that we do operate flexible policies towards those who seek refuge in this country. Our record is commendable. In the period from 1979 to 1983 over 7,500 people were granted asylum here. In addition, in the period from 1st July 1983 to 30th June 1984 some 770 applicants were granted leave to remain here exceptionally. These figures do not include some 19,000 or so Vietnamese refugees who have also been admitted. In the same five-year period some 170 Ugandan nationals were granted asylum, and in the period from 1st July 1983 to 30th June 1984–74 Ugandans were granted exceptional leave to remain. Only 12 applications were refused during this time.
The noble Viscount also referred to delays before applicants for political asylum hear the outcome of their applications. I do not know whether the noble Lord has a particular case in mind when he referred to a four-year delay, but I do know that such a delay would be a matter of major concern to the Home Office. If the noble Lord could let me have details of any case he has in mind, I shall ensure that it is looked into straightaway.
It is unfortunately true that on average asylum applications take longer to decide than other applications under the immigration rules. In the past they have tended to take six months or more. We acknowledge that the average delay on such cases is too long; but asylum applications are among the most difficult and sensitive of immigration cases and decisions are routinely taken at higher levels than for other types of casework.

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Inquiries outside the department are often necessary and in the great majority of cases an in-depth interview is undertaken. The continuing high level of asylum applications—over 3,500 in 1983 compared with some 1,500 in 1979—when combined with the continuing unsettled and unpredictable nature of world events has regrettably given rise to some delays. Our objective is to reduce the number of cases under consideration. To this end steps have already been taken to increase the strength of the Home Office Refugee Unit.
The noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, also asked about further consideration for reuniting refugee families, our policy towards Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong who have relatives in this country, and whether a more liberal policy might encourage other community countries to follow our lead.
The United Kingdom already acknowledges its obligations towards the spouse and minor dependent children of refugees in this country and those Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong who fall into that category are admitted to this country. Applications from other relatives are considered in the light of the particular circumstances of their cases and against the background of the provisions of the immigration rules. Admission can be granted where there are circumstances of a particularly unusual and compelling compassionate nature beyond that generally experienced by Vietnamese seeking reunion. I think that that partially answers the point put to me by the noble Lord, Lord Chitnis, but I shall return to his remarks in a moment.
The existence of almost 19,000 Vietnamese refugees in the United Kingdom and our continuing commitments represent very substantial efforts to help these refugees. Only a few of the many other nationalities who seek refuge in the United Kingdom come close to benefiting to the same degree in an comparable period to time. Nevertheless, we recognise our responsibility for Hong Kong and have a particular concern to resolve the problems of Vietnamese refugees there. The fact that well over half the Vietnamese refugees in this country have been taken from Hong Kong is recognition of that. My honourable friend the Minister of State at the Home Office has recently informed the British Refugee Council that he is willing to look again at certain cases which have previously been refused, but where there are arguments for reversing that decision.
I should now like to turn to some of the other points that have been made during the course of this debate, and I shall come in a moment to the items raised by the noble Lord, Lord Chitnis. The noble Lord, Lord McNair, mentioned the need to have an early warning system for refugee disasters. These disasters are of course so often caused by sudden political crises, wars or revolutions which are difficult to foresee. But I accept that prevention is better than cure in this and other fields.
The noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, referred to the work of UNICEF. I, too, should like to pay tribute to their work. Indeed, the Government have given them £1 million in this financial year. The noble Baroness also referred to the problems in Africa, on
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the lines of several other noble Lords. As I have already explained, there is indeed a major refugee problem, but there is also a distinction that needs to be made here. Many of those affected have left their homes in search of food; not all have crossed international frontiers in search of asylum and so have become refugees. In addition to the help of the international refugee relief agencies. we are of course responding massively through the normal aid budget to the crisis in Africa.
Returning to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Chitnis, the noble Lord asked me particularly about the closed centre policy. This was introduced in July 1982 in an attempt to deter further boat people from setting out from Vietnam. The measure was forced on the Hong Kong Government by events—resettlement prospects for those in Hong Kong's camps were deteriorating while refugees continued to arrive. That is still the situation although the arrival rate has declined, and the Hong Kong Government can therefore see no alternative but to continue the policy at present. I have to admit that the policy is a regrettable necessity in the circumstances, and I hope and believe that it will only be a temporary one.
The noble Lord, Lord Chitnis, asked me too about the application of the 1951 convention to Hong Kong. I can tell the noble Lord that it was decided not to extend the convention to Hong Kong because of the territory's small size and geographical vulnerability to mass, illegal immigration. The 1967 protocol was applied only to those territories to which the 1951 convention was extended. The Hong Kong Government nevertheless co-operates fully with the office of the UNHCR, and Hong Kong has, as I am sure he will agree, made a major contribution to the international effort to assist Indo-Chinese refugees.
I would also point out that the UNHCR co-operate in the running of the closed centres and help to fund them. Incidentally, to our knowledge none of the countries of the region giving temporary asylum to Vietnamese and other Indo-Chinese refugees is party to the 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol, but nevertheless they, like Hong Kong, co-operate so far as possible with the UNHCR in the protection of, and assistance to, refugees.
The noble Lord, Lord Hatch, asked me about the International Fund for Agricultural Development. We are members of this UN organisation. Perhaps I could be allowed to write to the noble Lord about our policy towards it.
My Lords, in conclusion I should like to draw your Lordships' attention to what I believe are the three key points underlying what we have discussed this afternoon. First, I hope we shall not overlook the fact that so often there are political problems which lie at the heart of the matter where millions are compelled to give up their homes, their land and their livelihood for the squalor and hopelessness of so many of the world's refugee camps. Political problems call for long-term political solutions. We have to create the conditions where refugees can return to their countries of origin of their own free will.
Secondly, the problem is not only of massive proportions; by its very nature it requires international solutions. Our best hope lies in working with the world

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community through the international and voluntary agencies for real and lasting solutions. Finally, my Lords, there will always be pressure for us to do more. It is right that this should be so, for the plight of the world's refugees touches us at every level. I have recited what we are doing in response. I am content to be judged accordingly.
5.13 p.m.
Viscount Buckmaster: My Lords, I think all of your Lordships will agree that this has been a remarkable debate, and for me a very moving one indeed. Everyone would accept that the quality of the speeches has been superb, and it has been a most wide-ranging debate. I am indeed filled with admiration and humility. Admiration at the range and quality of the speeches, and humility at the extent of the gaps in my own knowledge which were revealed.
May I congratulate particularly, as many others have, the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford, who spoke with that poise and self-assurance which I always try to cultivate but so seldom succeed in doing. The noble Lord, Lord McNair, and the noble Lord, Lord Chitnis, both made valuable contributions, and here I should emphasise that their knowledge and experience of the refugee situation is much greater than mine.
I was delighted to hear the voice of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester. I hoped that at some stage I might be able to persuade him to speak on my own pet subject of Uganda, but it looks now as if this is impossible. It is a subject dear to my heart, but I cannot say any more about it now. May I also most warmly thank the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition, who always contributes so helpfully and supportively to my speeches on these occasions. I am grateful, too, to the noble Lord the Minister for his helpful replies.
We have covered the ground fully, but since I think I still have a minute or two to spare I must fill in one lacuna. Others were filled in very ably by my noble friend Lord Chitnis about Hong Kong, a subject about which I know nothing at all, but I should like to say a few words about the Palestinian refugees. I had hoped that the noble Lord, Lord Caradon, who, as many of your Lordships know, has an unrivalled knowledge about this sphere, would have been able to contribute. I persuaded him to do so, but in the event he had to go to the United States. We also greatly missed the participation in the debate of the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, whose knowledge of Ockenden, and so on, is quite superb.
Just a few words about the Palestinians because we have all of us spoken about refugees who are suffering. When I opened this debate I said that there are a great many others who, although they are called refugees, are sometimes living in great affluence; and I think particularly of these Palestinian refugees. One sees them all over the Middle East in Saudi Arabia, in Abu Dhabi, and so on, and in Latin America, and they are doing most marvellous work. They are working as doctors, engineers, civil servants, and businessmen, and, let us face it, many of them are earning far more money then most of us in your Lordships' House. I would just make that point.
Finally, I think we would all agree that the language of suffering is universal. It surely now remains for us to
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persuade the world to direct its conscience to the implications of this frightening nightmare. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Natural Medicine
5.17 p.m.
Viscount Massereene and Ferrard Viscount Massereene and Ferrard rose to call attention to the recent developments in natural medicine and the need for an independent register of qualified practitioners based on the register of the Institute for Complementary Medicine; and to move for Papers.
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, my reason for putting down this Motion for debate is that I wish to draw attention to the greatly increasing numbers of the public who are now benefiting from the various therapeutic treatment and medicines. The natural medicines, and the therapies, do not impinge in any way on orthodox medicine, surgery, and our excellent emergency services. However, your Lordships may ask why I, of all people, have brought up this matter, since it is not exactly my line of country. I agree, but I have many friends and acquaintances who have had their various aches and pains cured by practitioners in these therapies when their GPs have failed to achieve this.
You may also ask why I have drawn attention to the Institute for Complementary Medicine and why I have put them in my Motion as, in my opinion, they are the most important of the associations dealing in this matter of the therapies. I appreciate that there are other associations and I do not wish to criticise them in any way. All I would say is that I wish that they would all get together and stop being what I would call rather fragmented.
The Institute for Complementary Medicine has 54 branches in the country, apart from its headquarters in Portland Place. Last year it had 4½ million consultations and the numbers of these consultations are apparently growing every year. The institute also has an international network of collaborators. It was the first to institute and initiate pure research into natural therapies in the United Kingdom. It also has a good computer-based reference library, including practitioners and their patients, and an information centre totalling 1,200 organisations. That is the chief reason I chose the Institute for Complementary Medicine, because it appears to me that it is the leader in the therapies, though that is only my opinion.
I have often thought that, with a little official encouragement, treatment by qualified practitioners of the five basic therapies would save the National Health Service many millions of pounds. I have always been interested in trying to make suggestions for cutting down public expenditure. Last year the drug bill for the National Health Service was £1½ billion. That is a staggering figure. That sum would build many new hospitals, probably as many as 50 or 60 or even, I am told, up to 70. It would also equip many hospitals with the most up-to-date electronic instruments. It seems absurd that that vast amount of money should be paid out for drugs.
My only personal experience of being cured by therapy treatment was a long time ago. I put my

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cartilage out and could not walk because my knee was doubled up. My GP could do nothing about it and neither could another GP to whom I went. I was advised that I should have to be treated by the surgeon's knife. I did not fancy that because I was reasonably young then and quite active. I thought that if the surgeons got at my knee I should probably not be able to climb or run so well. So I went to what in those days was called a "quack". He made up a preparation which appeared to be a mixture of iodine and castor oil. I thought "Oh, my God, he is going to ask me to drink this muck". Of course he did not ask me to do that, but he massaged my knee two or three times with this amazing mixture and I have never again had any trouble since. That made me think a bit. But I would hardly call that a natural medicine; it was a bit too simple for that.
When we speak of natural medicine, I am sure—though I may be wrong—that many of your Lordships do not realise that 39 factories manufacture these natural medicines, with a turnover of £50 million a year. This is increasing every year. The new rules regarding medicine that came in with the 1968 Act and the thalidomide tragedy, which was caused by synthetic medicine, quite rightly made the reviewing of medicines far stricter than perhaps it had been. Under that Act, the Minister was bound to have on his commission of experts representation from the Natural Medicines Group, under whom these factories operate. The Minister had that provision to start with, but apparently today there is no such expert from the Natural Medicines Group to advise the commission. The members of the commission are all experts in their sphere, but their sphere is not natural medicine. It is rather like appointing a zoologist to a committee of botanists. What the Natural Medicines Group wants is to go back to the position that existed after the 1968 Act and to have some representation on the Minister's commission.
I should like to ask the Minister if he will pass that on to the appropriate department in the Department of Health and Social Security to see whether the natural medicines group can be given representation on this commission. It seems wrong that it is not represented. I feel that if it is not, the commission will, in time, phase out natural medicines. That would be a disaster, for there would then be a surge of unlicensed medicines because the public use these medicines and the practice is growing. It would be unfortunate if that happened, because no one wants the market flooded with unlicensed medicines.
The other matter I should like to raise is that I do not understand why there cannot be more harmony between orthodox medicine and the therapy practitioners. It is a growing movement today. Plato said in the Republic in 382 BC that the cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole. It is a great error of our day in the treatment of the human body that physicians first separate the soul from the body.
I will not go into the details of the therapies because many of your Lordships will know more than I do, but there are basically five therapies, and I may say that their names are very difficult to pronounce: osteopathy, chiropraxis, herbal medicine, homeopathy and
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acupuncture. The Institute of Complementary Medicine does have leading practitioners in all these services.
I believe we must remember that, in our urban society—and I think that we are 90 per cent. urban in this country—the strains of living in modern society have brought tensions of mind which, of course, also bring physical tensions to the body that were quite unknown to our forefathers. The therapies come into their own here. They play a great part in the nation's health.
The Institute of Complementary Medicine is extremely concerned at the quality of professional practitioners. Training is of particular concern to the institute because, if there is not excellent training and complete safety, the public will not have full confidence. One of the things that the institute is doing as regards education is setting up institutions which have education committees to assess the various curricula. Training in these therapies varies according to the discipline. The study time ranges from two to six years and students also have to understand the essential medical sciences.
My Lords, I think that I have spoken long enough, but I should like to say that I believe there should be some official acknowledgment; for it is very disheartening for students—and some of these young people are brilliant and rise to the heights of their profession—that there is no such acknowledgment. I really cannot see why it should not be granted. I appreciate that some of the associations within the therapies do not always see eye to eye, but I entreat them to try to come together, because otherwise I imagine that they will not get this official acknowledgment—by which I mean that, if they have official acknowledgment, then, like the dentists (and I assume that students in dentistry get grants) they will get grants just as do other students. Even students doing pottery get grants. How much more important, surely, is it that students who are saving people from suffering should get grants? It is not that I am asking for grants. The institute, like many others of these associations, is a charitable effort, for which I think it is much to be admired.
My Lords, I should like to end on the point that, again, I implore the various associations who practise these therapies to try to come together. The Institute of Complementary Medicine obviously has no wish to try to monopolise—in fact, they could not do so—the various other associations; but I feel that it offers a kind of shell within which the various associations could come together and form a loose federation. Eventually it might happen that one day it would become affiliated to the BMA. I have great respect for the BMA, but I hope that it will not follow King Canute in regard to the natural medicines and therapies—because it will not hold back the tide; this is a growing organisation. I beg to move for Papers.
5.36 p.m.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, I am sure that I speak for all noble Lords when I say how delighted I was to hear that the noble Viscount had been saved those years ago from the surgeon's knife. The story that the noble Viscount told is one which, as a doctor, I have heard on many occasions. But I say that it is an

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important story and the message contained in it should not be lost on any of us. The noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, has done us all a service by raising a matter of the utmost importance but also one of very considerble complexity
I hope that the noble Viscount will forgive me if I say that I am not yet entirely convinced that the method he has seized upon—that is via the register of the Institute of Complementary Medicine—is necessarily the right method whereby we should deal with this whole business. But I do say that a method must be found and, when found, that that method should cover not just "natural medicine"—whatever that is; it is referred to specifically in the Motion—but, of course, other new forms of treatment as well.
These new forms of treatment—some of them are not all that new; some are very old indeed—are more usually referred to collectively as alternative medicine. Some refer to this by other titles, such as complementary medicine, fringe medicine, natural medicine, and so on; while opponents still talk bluntly of quacks. I am not one of the opponents but I should like to begin by underlining some of the snags which lie in the way of opening the doors of medicine to unorthodox practitioners.
There have always been fully qualified, properly registered, doctors whose methods of treatment were very far from orthodox. In fact, progress is only made by people having the courage and the independence to escape from orthodoxy. In his day, for example, Jenner, whose work saw the end of smallpox, was regarded as highly unorthodox; and Pasteur and Freud were dismissed by some as dangerous quacks. If, once accepted, methods of medical practice were regarded as accepted for all time, we should still be back in the days of Galen—and those who know anything at all about medicine will know that that was indeed a very long time ago.
Thus, I say that it is extremely dangerous, in my view, to acquire the habit of automatically resisting anything new. That is something of which my profession has very often been accused, sometimes, I acknowledge, with justification. On the other hand—and I say this as a matter of some importance—it seems to me that there are equal dangers in embracing every new idea with uncritical enthusiasm. So where does that leave things like acupuncture, faith healing, chiropraxis, naturopathy, homeopathy, and all the others which may receive mention in our debate in the House today?
It is still not fully understood by the lay public, nor is it understood even by some doctors, that the law does not give doctors a monopoly over the treatment of patients. The Dental Act, on the other hand, makes it a criminal offence for any but a registered dental practitioner to carry out dental treatment, except for those working legitimately under the direct control and supervision of dentists. Similarly, the Opticians Act gives opticians a monopoly, which Parliament has recently, and wisely in my view, weakened—a monopoly over optometry and related matters. Qualified and registered pharmacists have a monopoly over the sale and dispensing of certain drugs. Solicitors still have, but only just, a monopoly over house conveyancing.
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What surprises many people is that it is not an offence for anybody to examine and treat patients, provided that teeth and eyes are not treated and that controlled drugs are not used. If my recollection is correct, the only other legal restraints are that it is an offence for unregistered people to treat pulmonary tuberculosis or venereal disease. Otherwise the sky is the limit and an engine driver is perfectly free to diagnose and treat cancer or diabetes, although he cannot represent himself as being a registered medical practitioner when he is not: nor, of course, is he immune from prosecution for damages should he cause damage.
As an example, many years ago in North Wales, a very severely injured miner used his compensation money, which was quite considerable, to purchase and set up a shop as a herbalist. He treated anything: he treated anybody who came into the shop. When fire destroyed his premises at the end of his first year in business, his loss-of-profits claim, as settled by insurers—I know this as a matter of fact—amounted to £200 per week. That was in the 1930s and that man had no training, except as a collier, and he may very well have had no skills.
I am not making any plea here for the law to be altered to make granny a criminal if she advises her grandchildren about their warts; but this does indicate that there are two sides to this argument about opening our doors to all exponents of alternative medicine. My view, as a doctor, is clear. If people have skills which can help our patients—and thus help us as doctors—they should be enabled to use those skills. And if those skills are worth having, they are worth having in the National Health Service. Some, though not all, chiropractors have proved beyond peradventure that they have skills which we doctors do not possess, and it is foolish to deny our patients access to those skills.
But which chiropractors and which osteopaths? Therein lies the problem. Some are highly trained and highly qualified, but others merely call themselves osteopaths—and the chap next door can do that whenever he likes. The Professions Supplementary to Medicine Act provides for the proper recognition of those professions which have put their own houses in order by setting standards of training and qualification and by imposing standards of conduct on their members. The Act came into force in 1960 and I think it has been subject to perhaps one amendment since. I think it is clearly time that other skills and other groups of practitioners were added to it.
It is well known (no doubt the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, when he comes to speak will also refer to this) that in New Zealand the chiropractors have done exactly that: in other words, they have put their own house in order. The result is that New Zealand citizens can now have access to them in the same way as they have access to doctors. Here in Britain nearly all these professions (if that is the right word) of alternative medicine are at present in an uncontrolled state, similar to the uncontrolled state of the estate agents. For years and years, in your Lordships' House and in another place, Members have been talking about the need for some kind of regulation of the estate agents. It cannot be done until they put their own house in order. The same applies to some of the practitioners

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who have real skills and real ability. But they, too, collectively, must put their own house in order. Until their ranks are organised and their people are trained and registered, they cannot really be let in, if I may use that phrase, if the public are to be protected against fraud, exploitation and incompetence.
I think we should proceed by way of the Professions Supplementary to Medicine Act, which was passed, as I said, in 1960. It is high time that some of the professions (again, if that is the proper word) which we are now considering organised themselves in such a way that the 1960 Act could deal with them. The early part of the Act deals with the establishment and maintenance of registers, qualifications for registration, approval of courses, qualifications and institutions, supervision of approved institutions and examinations for approved qualifications, and so on. There are disciplinary provisions for investigating complaints and for the removal of names from the register for crime, infamous conduct, and so on.
What is needed is, first, to guarantee to the public that people who are giving treatment of one form or another possess the necessary degree of skill, and, secondly, that they are operating within clearly defined guidelines of ethical and professional conduct. Until that can be done, I do not feel we can make a great deal of progress. I think I should say here that it is recognised that fully registered doctors have been trained in, and have practised, homoeopathy, acupuncture and osteopathy for years, and now our profession seems to be encouraging doctors to acquire those skills. There are some who may say that that is just an attempt to keep others out. I hope not. Perhaps it might indicate a new spirit of liberalism among doctors.
Perhaps before I finish, which will be very shortly, I might just refer to one other point which was raised by the noble Viscount. He referred to the nation's drug bill and to our dependence, as a nation, on physical remedies of one kind or another. I think he made a very important point indeed there—and I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, that I am not going to start talking about restricted lists, be they black or white, or about any of the other controversial matters about which we have had so much discussion recently. But the noble Viscount was quite right: the drugs bill is too high. In part the responsibility rests with my profession of medicine, because it is so much simpler and easier to give a patient a bottle of inert medicine than to spend 20 minutes explaining that he does not need any medicine at all and that the condition will get better on its own. So, in a sense, to the extent to which members of the medical profession, as it were, have been ready to cut down the time of their work by dishing out physical remedies, they have reinforced the faith of our public in medicines and drugs as a sort of magic talisman to ward off all illness. That is something that we must get away from as a society as a whole. With these new developments in alternative medicines and these new attitudes—holistic medicine and all the other phrases which are used—we may gradually be encouraging a slightly more healthy attitude towards illness and about health among the public as a whole.
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I think the noble Viscount's Motion has done a very useful service in drawing attention to matters which are very complex. We must do two things. First, we must make sure that skills which are valuable are made readily available to those people who can benefit from those skills. Secondly, we must make sure that the public are protected from fraud, exploitation and from work of people who do not possess the skills which are necessary.
Lord O'Brien of Lothbury: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I be permitted to ask him a question? In view of what he said about the fact that the medical profession has no monopoly in its particular field, under the law is it regarded as a privileged therapeutic assault if someone who is not a qualified graduate from, say, the Royal College of Surgeons, inserts a knife into a consenting patient, presuming to give him an operation which will cure his malady?
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, I am not a lawyer but to the best of my knowledge—which is, if I may say so, considerable on this point—the law does not make it an offence for an unqualified person to operate on a patient. The law provides no protection for the person who does that if something goes wrong—and it might very well go wrong—and of course the person is not qualified to sign a death certificate or to do certain other things which might be a necessary consequence of the action the noble Lord referred to. But it is a fact that the general assumption that the law somewhere has given doctors a monopoly, is false. There is no monopoly. Anybody is entitled to treat patients, but a person is not entitled to pose as a registered medical practitioner when he is not. He is entitled to treat patients; and many do.
5.50 p.m.
Lord Colwyn: My Lords, I have been boring my friends, relatives, patients and Members of your Lordships' House for many years on the subject introduced by my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard this afternoon. Now I have a splendid opportunity to address a captive audience, however small, who probably will not interrupt me on a subject which has radically changed my personal and professional life over the last five years or six years.
I must declare an interest in that, as a practising dental surgeon, I use complementary or alternative methods of treatment for some of my patients, and I am also involved as a founder committee member of the British Dental Society for Clinical Nutrition—a society set up to advise members of the dental and allied professions of the importance that dietary and environmental factors play in the concept of total health for our patients. I make no apology for being influenced by, among others, George Vithoulkas, whose book The Science of Homeopathy forms the basis of much of what I have to say this afternoon.
I do not wish to appear to be against orthodox medicine or to offend the noble Lords, Lord Winstanley or Lord Pitt of Hampstead, but I feel that the harmony which my noble friend Lord Massereene talked about in his introduction between the orthodox and the complementary sciences would be of great benefit to us all. Until recently the human race has

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done very little effectively to ensure good health. Despite modern advances in dealing with acute illness, the massive proportion of chronic disease today makes one worry that the human race may be losing its health for good. As throughout history, modern treatment therapy is quite helpless when faced with crippling chronic diseases and is consequently reduced to providing merely palliative, rather than curative, treatment.
Recently, great interest has been shown all over the world concerning the fundamental assumptions underlying medical care, as a result, I am sure, of the enormous amount of suffering that people are undergoing today in the face of a disproportionately small amount of relief available through the various accepted therapies. Because of the emergence of such doubts, alternative therapies have become popular and, in desperation, people are trying them indiscriminately. Once loss of confidence in orthodox approaches occurs, one is then at a loss to evaluate accurately the efficacy and safety of the alternatives. Thus, by contrast, it becomes clear that the prevailing medical system has not explained the laws and principles governing health and disease. Such an explanation has not been forthcoming, because in fact it has never been formulated even within the medical profession iself.
Looking back into medical history, one can find volumes of empirical data and experimental results, but no general laws or principles to support them or arising from them. It is not unreasonable to conclude that medicine is the only branch of science that has based its structure on opinions and suppositions, rather than on laws and principles. Owing to this weakness of conception, our medical system is failing to persuade the population in its efficacy or ability to produce satisfactory and continuous therapeutic results, especially in the face of one of the most frustrating and rapidly increasing crises facing medicine today—that of chronic disease.
In the 18th and 19th centuries Samuel Hahnemann formulated for the first time in the history of medicine the complete laws and principles governing health and disease and proved them in actual clinical experience. Nobody listened to him. Apparently his ideas were too advanced for the primitive state of mind in which his colleagues lived. They were unable to grasp an idea centuries in advance of their thinking. Instead the more materialistic concepts put forward by Louis Pasteur were accepted. These concepts fitted more adequately the need for concrete conceptualisation. Pasteur's theories and research into the nature of microbes led everyone to believe that the cause of illness had been explained.
As the modern science of bacteriology has advanced, however, it has come to the conclusion that both the microbe and constitutional susceptibility are necessary to initiate the disease process. Yet modern physicians seem to have closed their eyes to this fact. They continue to hunt down new microbes, viruses, bacteria, etc., and then develop powerful drugs with which to kill them.
An example of this is the massive effort to explain the cause of Legionnaires' disease or, more recently, AIDS, where the entire effort has been focused on the microbial cause and has largely ignored the
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constitutional susceptibility of the victims. Another perfectly valid approach, which might even produce better results, would be to study the relative resistance of the survivors of the supposedly virulent organism. Unfortunately, the obsession of medical researchers with their determination to pursue the erroneous idea of microbes and concrete causative factors in illness, despite increasingly disappointing results especially in chronic disease, is leading progressively to the development of increasingly toxic drugs which themselves are becoming a significant public health menace.
It must be evident to most thoughtful patients today that the obsessive search for concrete cause of illness is, in fact, not really the basis of modern therapeutics anyway. The vast majority of drugs prescribed for illnesses such as arthritis, asthma, colitis, ulcers, heart disease, epilepsy, anxiety and depression are not designed to be curative even in their original conception. They do not strike at the cause at all, but merely offer a rather pallid hope for relief—even if the danger of side effects is disregarded. This, in itself, is a sign of the helplessness of modern medicine to deal effectively with disease.
Consider, for a moment, my Lords, what the ideal therapeutic system should be. Of course, it must be effective, but it must be effective with minimal risk, or ideally no risk, to the patient. Its effectiveness must be based upon not merely the alleviation or absence of symptoms, but upon the enhanced constitutional strength and well-being of the individual—on the increased ability of the individual to live life to the fullest. It should not be prohibitively expensive and it should be readily accessible and understandable to all members of the population.
At present we find ourselves in the midst of disorder and disease. In an age of unprecedented technological advance we also see unprecedented damage being done to the atmosphere, the water and the land. Because human violations of the laws of nature result in the contamination of the environment and, in turn, place an increased stress on the ability of the individual to function, and the fact that mankind has gradually lost the inner awareness which would have enabled the correct perception of the laws of nature which must be respected, we see, collectively and individually, human beings both affecting and being affected by the environment. As we deviate increasingly from the laws of nature, a vicious cycle is established which requires great insight and energy to correct.
For each individual in this situation there may be a wide variety of possible responses to external stresses. Some people seem to be relatively unaffected by external or internal disturbances. They are in a state of relative balance which is maintained with minimal effort. Most people, on the other hand, experience degrees of imbalance ranging from slight to very severe. These are the people we consider diseased in the broadest use of the term. In such people the disturbance manifests itself in a highly individualistic and varied manner, but always the disturbance can be viewed as an imbalance of the organism's ability to cope with internal influences.
The basic question of why some people can cope with stresses effortlessly and others become disturbed

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easily has separated the major traditions of medical thinking throughout medical history. On the one hand, the rationalist tradition, which leads to modern orthodox medical thinking, focuses on what concrete factors lead to sickness in a person, in the hope that somehow understanding the exciting cause of illness will enable curative intervention. This approach has been tested quite adequately throughout history, yet we still see a steady and alarming increase of crippling degenerative disease. On the other hand, the empiric tradition of thought focuses on the question: what enables a person to remain healthy despite many noxious influences? This question and its answer form much of the basis for the complementary medicine practised today.
I have said many times in your Lordships' House that I am convinced that the influence of our complementary practitioners will play an ever-increasing role in the nation's health in the future. A topical example of this is the recent closure of the Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham for three weeks, while they deal with a massive backlog of young patients with infected middle ear problems. This is a classic osteopathic problem which can be treated by an osteopath, knowledgable in the skills of cranial osteopathy, in a very few minutes, with no hospital beds, no surgeons, no anaesthetists and at minimal cost.
A register is a good idea as members of the public, who are at their most vulnerable when they tend to turn to alternative medicine, and orthodox practitioners, can be offered some guidance as to the expertise of the alternative sources of treatment. There will always be complementary medicine, however recognised the established alternatives become. I know of quite remarkable results achieved by alternative practitioners who would never be acceptable to a central register.
As the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, and the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, said, the individual associations must put their own houses in order. They must establish criteria for training and experience before being registered by the Institute for Complementary Medicine, as in the subject of our debate, or the newly formed Council for Complementary Medicine whose press conference I attended yesterday. I have to make the comment that these two bodies seem to be in total disagreement while both claim to represent the alternatives. A great number now have transferred their allegiance to the Council for Complementary Medicine. They must get their act together.
In the future I hope that the Government may be able to consider setting up a Royal Commission or similar body to advise on the possible formation of a self-regulating governing council such as the General Medical Council or the General Dental Council which will then be able to have its own statutory registration. I thank my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard for introducing our debate this afternoon. I know of the great interest of my noble friend the Minister in alternative medicine, and I hope that he will be sympathetic if this subject comes up again; for without any doubt the future of the nation's health and that of orthodox medicine will become more and more
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dependent on the alternative holistic approach to good health.
6.2 p.m.
Lord Ferrier: My Lords, I also join the other speakers in thanking the noble Viscount for bringing forward this matter for discussion in your Lordships' House. Strongly as I support the case for complementary medicine, I am not willing at this stage to support his suggestion about a register for the Institute for Complementary Medicine. I was much persuaded by what the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, said—that a register would be of great benefit, but "register" to what end?
The difficulty about the wording of the Motion before your Lordships is the use of the words "qualified practitioners". Qualified by whom? To what end? For this reason I think that what the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, said goes a long way—namely, that the associations of these therapists may perhaps have to put their case in order. But the issue must be much more narrow than is indicated by a register for the Institute for Complementary Medicine.
The fact is that, of the therapies to which reference is made, only two are really near the position of being able to prepare a register. Those are the ones which the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, has mentioned; chiropractic and osteopathy—not that I am unsympathetic to acupuncture. My late wife was greatly relieved of pain for many moons at the end of her life by acupuncture; she benefited at one time from radionics; but it seems to me that the only two therapies which are sitting there ready for registration and acceptance by the National Health Service are chiropractic and osteopathy.
Your Lordships know of my track record and you would be surprised if I addressed the House in any other terms. As the years have gone by I have urged the advantages of manipulative therapy as the main feature of complementary medicine, not only for its value in relieving pain but for the fact that in saving pain and saving distress it saves money in avoiding periods of inactivity, in avoiding sick leave and consequent loss of earnings and production. Experience in terms of such therapies shows savings in the use of drugs and the like.
The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, mentioned to me the other day the case of queues of children waiting for some particular treatment which could have been avoided if manipulative therapy had been available. The same applies to a great many of the illnesses which are prevalent today. For the reasons which I have described in previous debates, my family have relied on chiropractic treatments to keep us in action despite various injuries over the years.
Ten years ago my chiropractor complained to me that a back pain sufferer who had failed to obtain relief from the health service came to him. He asked for the X-rays for her case from the infirmary, but the request was refused. I actually put down a Question on this subject in your Lordships' House. The Answer was quite plain: that the National Health Service would not part with material which might fall into unqualified hands.

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This Question and Answer on X-rays was followed by a debate in 1976, since when interest in the manifest advantages of manipulative therapy has changed the general attitude of the public and—dare I say so?—of the medical profession to the whole question of using complementary medicine. I emphasise the word "complementary" because it is different from supplementary medicine. There are therapies in this list—I cite chiropractic and osteopathy—which are manifestly complementary rather than merely supplementary.
Whereas 10 years ago it was not a question of whether these therapies would be accepted, now the question is: when are they going to be accepted? They are bound to be accepted; the time is coming. After all, the part of the complementary medicine in the treatment of many ailments is recognised almost all round the world—this country being almost alone in disregarding it.
The Motion of my noble friend is a step in the direction required, but the idea of a register seems to be an over-simplification. The problem is the use of the words "qualified practitioner". Qualified by whom? How qualified? And qualified to what end?
I do not know how many noble Lords have access to BUPA's new Manual of Fitness and Well-Being, but I could not resist bringing to the attention of your Lordships a paragraph on page 272 referring to techniques of chiropractic, which states:
"Chiropractic is the most widely recognised form of alternative, drugless medicine in the world, with more than eight million Americans currently receiving treatment. Unlike osteopathy, which is confined to the treatment of mechanical disorders, it is concerned with a 'system' of disease, and its treatments have a wider scope".
This is an indication of how the climate—if I may use that word—has changed. It is now a question of when we shall be able to see to it that the public have access to manipulative therapy in terms of the National Health Service.
There is no doubt that the attitude of the public has changed over the past year or two. Evidence of changing opinion on this subject is that we now speak of complementary medicine rather than supplementary medicine. We owe a great debt of gratitude to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales for concentrating the thoughts of the public and the press on the question of the use of complementary medicine.
The subject of chiropractic X-rays, to which I have referred, is an interesting one. In a Question in your Lordships' House on 26th November 1974, I asked the Minister concerned,
"whether or not he agrees that the time has come for chiropractors to be recognised as an integral part of our National Health system, and that legislation might be comtemplated to this end, as it has been in a number of other countries".—[Official Report, 26/11/74; col. 1233.]
I look forward to hearing the Minister's reply on this occasion, and before that I look forward to hearing from my noble friend Lord Cullen, with his extensive knowledge of the business of Government at that end of the spectrum, and of the problems facing supplementary medicines. (Your Lordships will forgive me for displaying the effects of an infection in my throat.)
It is no use creating about this therapy or that therapy before the BMA has been persuaded of the
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case being made. My personal view is that the association is not likely to be persuaded in respect of any therapy, except by positive proof that the same is scientifically sound. No amount of sentimental enthusiasm can take the place of scientific justification.
Without casting aspersions against any of the therapists listed among the supporters of the institute, I believe that only chiropractic and osteopathic practitioners with the background of a successful training college rank further consideration in this respect. The Bournemouth College, through its relations with the EEC (which is a point that must be borne in mind now that we are members of the Common Market), and enjoying as it does worldwide recognition, ranks as a candidate for acceptance by the Department of Health. Incidentally, the dean of that college is a Dane.
I hold no brief for the DHS—rather the reverse—over the cost of spectacles and the muddle about the selection of prescription rights, which do not seem to hold out much hope of savings in the end. The reverse would he the case if manipulative therapy could be made available. I am certain that it is rich in its possibilities. My noble friend Lord Colwyn has made several points in this respect. My heart goes out to the Ministers on the Front Bench when their job is to defend the department. What is the department doing about the suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, that therapists should set their house in order? Is there any encouragement coming from that quarter? The answer is, no, none at all.
I look forward to what is to be said at the end of this debate. I believe I am right in saying that a number of the private health funds are now recognising fees for chiropractic and osteopathic attention as a liability. They ought to know, when they do that, that it will pay. I thank the noble Viscount for moving this Motion, and although I support the main trend of his thoughts, I do not like the idea of making the institute the source of a register.
6.16 p.m.
Lord Cullen of Ashbourne: My Lords, I should like to add my thanks to my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard for initiating this debate and for giving me the opportunity to make a very short contribution. Perhaps I should begin by declaring my interest in this subject. For many years I have been chairman of the Osteopathic Educational Foundation and as a result have been in close contact with the General Council for the Register of Osteopaths; or the GCRO.
The GCRO represents the vast majority of osteopaths who have been trained on the full four-year course or who, as registered medical practitioners, have completed a 13-month postgraduate course at the London College of Osteopathic Medicine. The GCRO was set up as an independent register in 1936, virtually 50 years ago, following a recommendation made by a Select Committee of your Lordships' House. It maintains a rigid code of ethics and inspects those schools from which it draws its members at regular intervals. To use the words of the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, qualified osteopaths have put their house in order.

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As far as I know, the GCRO is the only organisation in the field of complementary medicine which has such a wide base, and therefore it sees no advantage to the public or to its members in being drawn into any organisation of various therapies with varying standards of training and education. Accordingly, the GCRO has at no time permitted the Institute of Complementary Medicine to publish the details contained in its own directory of members issued annually.
It was made clear in a press release published in October 1983 that the Faculty of Homoeopathy, the British Osteopaths Association and the British Naturopath and Osteopathic Association, together with the GCRO, did not wish to be associated with the ICM. My noble friend Lord Ferrier has today confirmed my understanding that the chiropractors are of the same mind. Therefore, it is really not clear to me on what grounds we are being asked to consider this matter today. Not only does the GCRO not wish to be associated with the ICM, but nor does it wish to be associated with another organisation, launched only yesterday, claiming to represent a number of therapies including osteopathy. The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, referred to this in his extremely interesting speech.
There seems to be a very confused state of affairs when both the ICM and the Council for Complementary and Alternative Medicine—called the CCAM—are both claiming to represent the osteopaths, among others. I am told that the number of practitioners of all therapies who have joined the CCAM is about 1,200; whereas the GCRO has over 650 registered osteopaths. Perhaps the suggestion by the CCAM that an independent Government inquiry into alternative therapies should be undertaken is worthy of consideration. It might at least clear the air. Whether some umbrella organisation would be useful in helping some therapies to develop I am not competent to say. However, I am authorised to say that the GCRO, for the present at any rate, wishes to remain independent. I look forward to hearing the views of Her Majesty's Government, and I hope some clarification of what is taking place.
Lord Ferrier: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down may I correct a misunderstanding? What I said about the British Chiropractors Association not wanting to be associated with the association is my view based on the opinion which was expressed to us that the Professions Supplementary to Medicine Act is not acceptable to people who insist that they should continue to have the right to see the patient directly and not always after referral from a doctor. I believe that last year's chairman of the BCA is a member of the Council of Complementary and Alternative Medicine to which my noble friend Lord Colwyn referred.
Lord Cullen of Ashbourne: I am grateful, my Lords.
6.22 p.m.
Lord Prys-Davies: My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, for having brought this subject before your Lordships'
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House this evening. I hope that the debate will serve a useful purpose. It will have served such a purpose if it gives encouragement to the considerable and growing body of opinion among practitioners of the natural therapies who want to see natural medicine taking its place as a profession among other disciplines. However, that implies more than the register—and I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier. It has implications for the training institutions, for the syllabus, the qualifications and agreed standards of practice and agreed codes of ethics. I believe that this is what this debate is fundamentally about.
The noble Viscount and other noble Lords have given us a pretty clear picture of what is happening in the United Kingdom. During recent years, natural medicine—call it alternative medicine or complementary medicine; these terms have yet to be defined—has been a rapidly growing area of health care; as, indeed, it has been in all countries of Western Europe. In third world countries and many countries in Asia it is making a substantial contribution to health care. A report published in 1983 by the Council of Europe reviewing the role of natural medicine in Europe concluded that the growing demand by the public for alternative medicine cannot simply be dismissed. I quote from the report:
"It is not possible to consider this as a medical side-issue. Its permanence reflects an existing public need which is in urgent need of definition and analysis."
For that reason I very much welcome the BMA inquiry which was set up in 1982 or 1983. I hope that when its report is published later this year the alternative therapists will have no reasonable cause to be suspicious of the medical establishment.
The point has been made, and I am sure there is a great deal of truth in it, that there is a lack of harmony and there is suspicion between orthodox medicine and non-orthodox medicine. In the light of the BMA report, when it sees the light of day, and in the light of the report of the Council of Europe it may well be that the Government themselves should set up a much fuller inquiry to consider the contribution which natural medicine can make to the greater efficiency or effectiveness of the National Health Service, and indeed to bring about a better degree of self-government within the area of natural medicine. The point has been made by all speakers this evening that the time may well be upon us when the Government ought to be setting up a fuller inquiry.
We know that at least 1 million people a year—I understand the figure could be very much higher and as high as 2½ million—each paying an initial consultation fee of about £11 or £15 and a fee of about £6 or £10 for subsequent visits (the service is not available on the NHS) are looking to natural medicine for relief from pain and suffering. It is estimated that this number is increasing by about 15 per cent. per annum. That is why alternative medicine has been described as the second biggest growth industry in Britain; second only to that of computer technology. It is paradoxical—and this point has been made—that there should be this rapid growth in natural medicine in our country although we have one of the best health services in the world. In common with the vast majority of our people I give the NHS my fullest support.

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Therefore, why has a trickle of interest in alternative medicine become, in recent years, a flood? The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, devoted a substantial part of his notable speech to an analysis of the reasons why we have seen this growth in natural medicine. I merely refer to the main issues which the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, identified. There are the deep fears of the side effects of powerful drugs and there is dismay at the apparent inability of orthodox medicine to cure backaches, migraine and crippling degenerative conditions. I merely ask: is it possible that we may have over-concentrated on technology to the relative neglect of some other aspects of healing?
The Council of Europe report to which I have already referred—and I am grateful to the DHSS for having sent me a copy of it—estimates that there are in this country about 7,800 full and part-time therapists of alternative medicine, of which 4,100 are practising members of professional bodies. In addition, it is estimated that there are about 20,000 men and women practising healing of one form or another.
I now come to the point which has been made forcefully by the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley. There are among the almost 30,000 quacks and bogus therapists offering their services. Anyone can set up in business and call himself or herself a therapist of alternative medicine. Anyone can pose as a therapist of alternative medicine without let or hindrance, whether or not he has received any training at all or whether or not he has any kind of qualifications, provided that he does not use the title "doctor". I acknowledge the intervention from the Cross-Benches, but I was under the impression that one could not undertake surgery unless one was a surgeon. But the noble Lord has associations with the Royal college and no doubt the Minister will have something to say on this when he comes to answer.
Although alternative medicine has a respectable ancestry, there is in our country no preventive legislation affecting that area of health care. Except for a few honourable exceptions, there is very little disciplinary control within the main groups of alternative medicine, which are represented by over 50 separate associations and which vary from very large organisations to very small groups. For all our just and proper concern to establish and maintain standards in the NHS, we have not bothered with the standards of the therapists of complementary medicine outside the NHS, with one or two exceptions. Therefore the position is unsatisfactory.
There are 44 colleges which teach one or more of the natural therapies. About a dozen to 15 offer full-time courses. Three of the institutions confine their intake of students to medical doctors. It is never an easy task to find teachers of quality in any discipline. I understand that some of the training institutes are very good indeed, but I also understand that standards in others, where the standards are known, are very uneven. I am told that there is no agreed syllabus, there is no external professional control over training and there is no external monitoring of examination standards.
There is therefore an urgent need for a survey or investigation of the education and training available at the numerous private commercial institutes, possibly in the same way as medical education in the United
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States and Europe was surveyed by Flexner in the early part of this century. I have a feeling—and it is no more than a feeling—that, if the department were to establish such an investigation, within a year or two some of those colleges would close their doors for ever and others would be radically reorganised.
Given the growing demand by the public for alternative medicine, we need safeguards for the public. Here I go along entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley. Yes, we want minimum standards of training. Yes, qualifying examinations need to be standardised. Yes, there is a need at the end of the day to introduce a system of registration of suitably qualified practitioners of alternative medicine.
The Motion refers to the Institute for Complementary Medicine. I understand that within the limits of its modest budget that charity has done splendid work. It came unheralded on the scene a few years ago and has sought to be a guardian of the public interest. But then we heard yesterday that in this city a Council for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was launched, with the blessing of the noble Lord, Lord Home of the Hirsel, to maintain awareness of the disciplines of complementary and alternative medicine and to raise standards. Although that is evidence of a division—of a house which is divided—nevertheless, I believe that it is also an indication of the growing self-confidence among reputable therapists that at least alternative medicine is coming in from the cold and that it is here to stay. But I would agree with the noble Lords that the institute and the council ought to be getting their act together.
I have therefore no doubt that the therapists of natural medicine who seek a recognised status as professionals are now at the same stage, or will very shortly be at the same stage, as the doctors almost a century ago, the dentists about half a century ago, I think, and the opticians about 30 years ago when they were called upon to take a firm decision to put their house in order. That is another message which is coming through loud and clear this evening in this debate—that the therapists must put their house in order.
The noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, has done natural medicine a great service by initiating this debate, which he did with firmness and good humour.
6.36 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Lord Glenarthur): My Lords, I certainly join with all those who have thanked my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard for introducing this debate today. We have had a useful and, I think, a constructive airing of a topic of increasing interest not just to your Lordships but to the public at large.
I have sometimes heard the suggestion—and I think that my noble friend seemed to indicate this—that the distinction between alternative therapies and conventional medicine is that conventional medicine looks at the special condition and tries to treat or cure that, whereas the alternative therapist takes a holistic approach to the patient. That, it is suggested, is why

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there is such an increasing interest in the alternative therapy movement. I would not accept such a distinction; neither would the vast majority of the medical profession. Since the time of Hippocrates himself, medicine has been a holistic profession. The medical practitioner must be concerned with appropriate care. Appropriate in this context means not just for the presenting condition, but for the whole of the patient as an individual in the context of family, friends and community. I know of nothing in the advent of the scientific method, or indeed of high technology, that in any way affects that traditional approach of the healer to his patient. Conventional medicine is, and must be, holistic in this sense.
The prime concern of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State, and my fellow Ministers must be for the National Health Service for which we have statutory responsibility. It is sometimes suggested—and it has been suggested again today—that some of these alternative therapies ought to be available within the National Health Service. I can understand these points of view. To a very large extent, however, that is in the hands not of Government but of the practitioners of these alternative therapies themselves and of their professional organisations. As the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, said, we should all like to see available in the health service as wide a range of effective treatments and therapies as possible. But Ministers cannot simply dictate what treatment shall be prescribed or provided; nor can we force upon the medical and other professions already practising within the health service the services of other practitioners.
The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, raised the question of the Council for the Professions Supplementary to Medicine. So far as that is concerned, I understand that the council is still ready to consider applications from groups representing alternative therapies, should they wish to apply. The adoption a few years ago of a set of criteria for applicants means that such groups can now see what is expected of them, and I understand that the registrar is always willing to have informal discussions before any formal application is made. Such groups need not therefore risk a public rejection.
Health service medical care is based on treatment by registered medical practitioners, either as general practitioners in the community, or as hospital doctors. It is a basic principle that the decisions on the treatment a patient receives, and who provides it rest with the doctor concerned. It must be recognised that at present many doctors, and others, are highly sceptical about some of the alternative therapies and are quite unable to accept the principles upon which they are based. On the other hand, there is growing recognition by others that particular therapies do employ some methods that can bring relief to patients where other methods of treatment have not succeeded. Some doctors do themselves employ alternative therapies. If they wish to see wider use of these methods, then it is up to those medical practitioners who employ them to convince more of their colleagues of the effectiveness and efficacy of this form of treatment.
Here, I think, we come to a basic problem. The
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range of therapies practised is very wide. Indeed, many of them are based upon different principles and different methods. Should we not therefore concentrate on greater recognition of individual therapies or even of particular techniques within particular therapies? I realise, of course, that increasingly some alternative therapists are seeking to employ a range of different techniques. That must be a matter for them and they are quite at liberty to practise within the constraints of commom law. Yet it does cause problems for greater recognition which would be a necessary first step towards wider use of therapies within the health service.
My noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard and the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, raised the question of the availability of natural medicines and similar products. I can say that the Government have no wish whatever to interfere with the rights of the individual to buy them and to use them. However, obviously we have a duty to protect the public from harmful products, and the Medicines Act exists for that purpose. These medicines are therefore subject to its provisions. Provided they meet acceptable standards of efficacy, safety and quality, suppliers and patients need have no fears. So far as the particular point which my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard made about the membership of committees set up under the Medicines Act 1968 is concerned, those committees and the officials serving them are of course aware of the public interest in alternative medicines. Their responsibilities under the Act are directed towards safeguarding patients' safety and they make no recommendations regarding the relative efficacy of individual medicines or of one form of treatment compared with another. But I have no doubt that they would give sympathetic consideration to any points put to them by those who favour the natural medicines.
I think it worth while to return for a moment to the question of greater recognition for particular therapies. I have to say to my noble friend Lord Ferrier that whether they be complementary, supplementary or merely alternative is really a matter for practitioners to decide for themselves. Yet there are a number of basic principles that any profession would need to demonstrate before it is worth even considering their role within the spectrum of health care. The first and foremost is that the therapy treats adequately a particular specific condition. I think this was a point made by my noble friend Lord Colwyn. It sounds obvious and yet it has been one of the most significant barriers to any form of recognition for particular alternative therapies. Blind faith is not enough. Medical care is too important to be dealt with purely on the basis of unsupported claims. The proponents of a particular therapy need to be able to demonstrate beyond doubt the efficacy of their treatment, however difficult that must be. Yet there are hopeful developments.
The noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, and my noble friend Lord Ferrier referred to the establishment by the British Medical Association of their working party to consider the efficacy of alternative therapies. It is, in my view too, to be greatly welcomed. It will provide an independent evaluation. So far as concerns the suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Cullen and

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my noble friend Lord Colwyn about an independent Government inquiry or a Royal Commission, I do not see any compelling reason to hold one at the moment, at least until we have the results of the BMA inquiry. Inquiries in other countries, such as New Zealand, have focused on whether the cost of alternative care, such as chiropractic, could be paid for through their health insurance reimbursement schemes. This, of course, does not arise in the context of our National Health Service structure. It must be for the professions themselves to prove their case, and they might even have to do it therapy by therapy.
A second development to be welcomed is one within the alternative therapy movement itself. I understand that a group of representatives from leading alternative therapies have come together to form the Research Council for Complementary Medicine. The council's purpose is to raise funds for research and to investigate ways in which it is possible for the therapeutic effectiveness of complementary approaches to health care to be assessed. I know it is not the only group with that aim, but nevertheless the approach seems commendable. I understand that the council intends to recruit a research fellow to study existing and innovative research techniques and to advise on methodologies appropriate to the field of complementary medicine. I am particularly glad to note that the project is supported by the Medical Research Council, which is, I understand, to contribute to the funding of the research fellow.
Demonstrating the efficacy of the therapy is a first essential, but there are other things that a profession must do before it can be given proper recognition. It must show—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, and the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, will agree with this—that it has reached maturity and, for example, has an established and recognised governing body. It must show that the therapy is based upon a systematic body of knowledge, and, while that may not be wholly scientific in character, it must be compatible with the general body of knowledge acknowledged as the basis of contemporary medical practice.
Such a profession must have an accepted working relationship with the organisations of medical practitioners. It must have recognised courses of training which must be generally recognised to be adequate. Examinations must be demonstrably adequate and properly constructed and should, for instance, make use of external examiners. A profession ought to have an appropriate and acceptable code of conduct, regulating relationships with patients and members of other professions. I believe it would also need to show that the members of the profession were willing to be governed by that code. Fine words in this case are not enough. But I was encouraged by what my noble friend Lord Cullen said about the osteopaths.
Some may emphasise certain of those points more than others, but they are all criteria against which the existing bodies and professions within the alternative therapy field could usefully match themselves, and against which they will be judged by conventional practitioners.
In all that I have said so far, I have tried to show that the necessary action and the initiative are entirely in
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the hands of the alternative practitioners themselves. The main interest of Her Majesty's Government must be in the National Health Service itself and in promoting as wide a range of therapies as possible within that service for the effective treatment of patients. The alternative therapies I have discussed so far are, in the main, outside the remit of the National Health Service. We would hope that any patient who wishes to make use of an alternative practitioner would first go to see his general practitioner to ensure that there is not some underlying condition which could be missed by a lay practitioner without conventional medical qualifications.
My noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard and one other speaker raised the question of a saving of money through alternative therapies. I note the points that were made but most alternative medicine is provided privately at present. If this was undertaken within the health service it would result in an additional load on public resources. Many alternative therapies are in fact quite labour intensive because of their one-to-one nature and the longer consultation process which they need. This, too, does bring its own high cost, but I would not deny that there may be some potential for savings. However, we have to rely, at the end of the day, on doctors' clinical judgment of whether such treatment is suitable for their patients.
The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, gave some examples of the freedom to practise to which I referred. He in fact referred to two or three examples where there were statutory reasons why one could not practise certain things. Two of them which I think I ought to mention are, of course, created by the Venereal Diseases Act and the Cancer Act, which I think is an important point to put across. I think that that perhaps answers the point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord O'Brien of Lothbury.
But there is generally a perfect right to practise under common law. I can see little advantage in attempting to change that position with regard to alternative therapies. In general I can see no justification now for affording to alternative therapies in general any wider powers than those they already have by common law. Neither am I convinced that there is any case for seeking to impose, by statute, any further regulation of alternative therapy.
It might be, of course, that some particular profession or group of professions would decide that in their own interests and those of their patients they needed to pursue a tighter regulation of their affairs. One way of doing that could be some form of registration, statutory or otherwise. In regard to statutory registration, we could undertake only to consider the proposals on their merits. We should of course also need to take fully into account the views of others, including the medical profession. In regard to non-statutory registration—and this is particularly relevant to my noble friend's Motion—it is important that the register should inspire the full confidence of the major professions and organisations concerned.
My noble friend's Motion mentions the Institute for Complementary Medicine and its register. I understand that not all the major organisations in the field are included in that, nor would they always endorse the qualification's of others on the register.

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That can only cast doubt in the mind of the public, who can legitimately expect the professions to get together and put forward commonly-acceptable proposals. To that extent, I endorse my noble friend's views and those of my noble friend Lord Colwyn and other noble Lords who have spoken this afternoon.
I was interested to hear that yesterday a new organisation was launched—the Council for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which was referred to by my noble friend Lord Colwyn. It, too, I understand, hopes to develop a register which will be policed and endorsed by eight of the leading organisations. Its objective of raising and maintaining standards is certainly to be welcomed, but my hope is that the public are not to be faced with two or even more rival registers. That would definitely not be in the interests of either patients or practitioners.
Our position must be that if people want National Health Service care, then it is available and is provided by people who hold statutorily-recognised qualifications. If they seek care outside the NHS, then the prime responsibility lies with the individual patient to satisfy himself about the standards of the person concerned. It is in the interests of private patients of alternative practitioners to take the trouble to find out enough about it to be clear which are the well-established bodies in a particular field and then consult a member of one of those bodies. Having said that, I must say that we have no evidence of people being injured or harmed by inadequately-qualified alternative practitioners. I must repeat that the true protection for a patient wishing to see an alternative practitioner is, first, to see his or her general practitioner in case a condition exists which the lay practitioner may not recognise.
I have discussed alternative therapies as if they existed solely outside the National Health Service. But that is not the case. Over the years some fringe medical practices have come to be accepted as part of conventional medical treatment. Medical science and healing are also a developing art. I know that there are some medical practitioners who practise manipulative techniques themselves which are little different from osteopathy or chiropractic. Some doctors practise acupuncture. Many doctors practise homoeopathy, and there are indeed four hospitals within the National Health Service where homoeopathic treatment is available. That has been the case since 1948.
It is always dangerous to speculate about the future, but, if the alternative therapy professions remain committed to demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt the efficacy of their therapies, then that ought to lead to a better meeting of minds between all those concerned with provision of good health care. Meanwhile, the general attitude of Her Majesty's Government towards alternative therapy must be one of benign neutrality. What we all want to see is the best possible treatment available for patients provided in the most cost- effective way by those best able to provide it. That is a considerable challenge to conventional and alternative practitioners alike.
6.54 p.m.
Viscount Massereene and Ferrard: My Lords, I should like to thank all noble Lords who have spoken
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in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, has taught me something. I am sure he could teach me a lot about medicine; I know very little about it. I was never under the impression that someone without any qualification at all could treat people. It is extraordinary. I should have thought he would be had up for fraud.
I have learnt quite a lot in this debate. I enjoyed very much the speech by my noble friend Lord Colwyn, which was really expert. I felt that he was on the side of alternative medicine. I am afraid that my noble friend Lord Cullen of Ashbourne was not on the side of my Motion but was on the side of one of the therapies. My noble friend Lord Ferrier knows a great deal about this subject and I felt that he, too, was in favour of alternative medicine. I was very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, appeared to be in favour of alternative medicine. He made some kind remarks about the Institute for Complementary Medicine.
I shall now turn to my noble friend Lord Glenarthur, who made his usual very good speech. I should like to say to him, in regard to the manufacture of natural medicines, that he may like to know that some European countries—for instance, Germany—have on their commission of experts representatives of those advocating natural medicine. Germany is not the only such country. I feel that the DHSS could be more forthcoming to help alternative medicine. On the other hand, as I said in my speech, unless those concerned stop their in-fighting and come together it will be difficult to have them officially recognised and qualified. As I pointed out, it really rests on the question of harmony—harmony with orthodox medicine and harmony among all the alternative medicines.
In regard to the idea that Her Majesty's Government should set up a commission to look into alternative medicines, I want to say that I should be in favour of a Royal Commission, but of course the history of so many Royal Commissions is that they take two or three years and then their reports are pigeon-holed. Certainly I should be extremely pleased to see a Royal Commission on this question of alternative medicine.
There is a further debate to come after this one and I do not want to delay the House any longer. I should like to thank again all noble Lords who have spoken for their extremely good speeches, which were far better than mine. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Government Subsidisation: De Lorean Enterprise
6.58 p.m.
Lord Bruce-Gardyne Lord Bruce-Gardyne rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether, in the light of their response to the 25th Report of the Public Accounts Committee (H.C. 127), they will outline the steps which they intend to take to ensure that there can be no repetition of the squandering of tax revenues on the De Lorean enterprise.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I think we were all brought up on the principle that there is no point in crying over spilt milk, and it is not my intention to do so tonight. Approximately £80 million of the taxpayers' money was spilt on Mr. De Lorean. Some of it, I suspect, was lapped up by the "fat cats" of the IRA, but I do not believe there is much point in chasing that today. What I am concerned with, and have been concerned with for some time, is the need to ensure that, so far as is humanly possible, we avert a repetition in the future of this lunatic adventure. It is really in that context that I want to pose a few questions to my noble friend.
I have, of course, studied with great interest the White Paper published 10 days ago by the Northern Ireland Department as a second reply to the Public Accounts Committee on this matter. If I may venture to say so to my noble friend, I was highly impressed, in particular, by the 13 specific steps to which the Northern Ireland Department is committing itself and its officials in the light of another plausible adventurer happening to appear before them. I can only say that I hope that my noble friend will do his best to ensure that all other departments in Whitehall are circularised with what seem to me to be some extremely sensible preventive steps.
However, what still concerns me is the problem that arises when the initial error has been committed and the propensity then occurs to pour more good money after bad. I have always felt that, within the Civil Service and local administration generally, there is a tendency to behave like the office boy who puts his fingers into the till to chance a flutter on a horse. When the horse does not come home, he puts his fingers in again in the hope that he can recoup his original investment before the loss of the money is discovered.
I must honestly say to my noble friend that I do not feel altogether confident that so far we have looked sufficently at the need to try and ensure that in future, if such a folly as this were to be perpetrated, we shall know how to stop it before far more damage is done. In the first place, I find it worrying that the Public Accounts Committee was told—and I refer to Question 1470 of the evidence—by the current head of the Northern Ireland Industrial Development Board that, following the De Lorean affair, so far as he was aware, "no heads have rolled". Indeed, one has the impression that quite a number of heads have rolled onwards and upwards since. I wonder whether that actually gives entirely the right message to those who face the next plausible entrepreneur to come along.
However, more widely, I am very concerned about what seems to me to be a remarkable failure to date to consider the implications of parliamentary accountability in this whole affair. In recent weeks Parliament has spent hours of furious debate on the interesting question of whether it was or was not accurately informed about the circumstances of the sinking of a foreign vessel in a war engagement designed to put at risk the forces of the Crown. Yet so far no attention of any kind has been paid to the information—or, rather, the lack of it—given to Parliament before it was too late to stop the total loss of £80 million of the taxpayers' cash. The Public Accounts Committee did not go into this matter, because it is debarred from cross-questioning Ministers and it is essentially
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concerned with what happens to money after it has been voted by Parliament. I personally, for that reason, believed all the way through that it was a gross error to commit this particular inquiry to the Public Accounts Committee; I believe that it should have been given to a special Select Committee established for the purpose.
I want to ask my noble friend a number of specific questions about statements which were given to Parliament over the period between March 1979 and early 1980, which I have to say do not seem to bear much relationship to the facts as we know them prevailing at the time the statements were made.
The initial agreement concluded by the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mr. Mason, with Mr. De Lorean in the summer of 1978 was never reported to Parliament because Parliament apparently in its wisdom never asked any details about it. I find that extraordinary, but it happens to be the case. However, in March 1979, the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Mr. Concannon, told Parliament that the "technical feasibility" of the De Lorean project has been considered before the first cash was laid on:
"in two studies commissioned from Booz, Allen and Hamilton, and A. T. Kearney".—[Official Report, Commons, 20/3/79; col. 590.]
In fact, we know that one of those studies was commissioned by Mr. De Lorean himself and the other was commissioned by the Puerto Rican Government. Had nobody told Mr. Concannon that, and if not, why not?
In May, 1979 his successor, my honourable friend Mr. Giles Shaw, told me in a Written Answer in the House of Commons that:
"On the assumption that 2,000 permanent jobs will be created, it is estimated that Government grant and loans"—
to De Lorean—
"will total £17,953 per job".—[Official Report, Commons, 24/5/79; col. 177.]
Yet according to the Public Accounts Committee, the Northern Ireland Department itself had calculated, on the same assumptions and on the same basis one year earlier, that the actual cost per job would be £18,400. What shrank the job cost in the interval?—bearing in mind that of course there was no reference in the answer that I received to NIDA's equity investment in the project.
In January 1980 my honourable friend Mr. Shaw told the Commons that "some slippage" in construction of the Dunmurry factory, "had now been rectified". Four months later we were told that the slippage had got unrectified again to the tune of three months. How did that come about?
In January 1980, Mr. Shaw revealed to the Commons that there was an,
"EEC subvention … £7.5 million has been put into the De Lorean project, and this will abate the liability for public sector payment".
Did it abate the liability for that payment? What happened to that subvention? I have never been able to trace it since.
In July 1979, Mr. Shaw told the House of Commons that "monitoring" of the project:
"is being actively and safely undertaken".

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In April 1981, his successor, my honourable friend Mr. Adam Butler, assured us that Her Majesty's Government were,
"entirely satisfied with the monitoring of the company".
Presumably my honourable friend Mr. Shaw had not been informed that already, as we now know, by the summer of 1979, McKinsey, who were the retained consultants in this affair, were deeply alarmed by the lack of monitoring. Furthermore, how did it come about that my honourable friend Mr. Butler had apparently never been informed that by July 1980 it had become "completely clear" to one of NIDA's own monitors within the business, Mr. Hopkins, that "the nominee directors were powerless"? If, presumably, my honourable friend was not given that information, then surely he should have been given it. In February 1980, Mr Shaw told the Commons that "orders in excess" of 20,000 De Loreans had already "been placed by dealers" in the United States for the calendar year 1981. From where did that information come?—because it does not appear to have borne very close relationship to the actual facts.
In August 1980, the then Northern Ireland Secretary told us that the Government's last financial obligations to De Lorean had been discharged. In November, my honourable friend Mr. Shaw confirmed that there were "no proposals for further assistance". Yet less than three months later another £10 million "time-limited guarantee" was unveiled. Once again we are assured that the Government had "no further financial obligation" to Mr. De Lorean. Yet three months later there was yet another £7 million time-limited guarantee. Were Ministers not forewarned that that was going to happen?
On 3rd December 1981, my honourable friend Mr. Butler told us that "sales" of De Loreans were currently "running ahead of production". Yet now we learn from the McKinsey status report of January 1982 that in the first week of December production had amounted to 403 vehicles; whereas retail sales in the first 10 days of December had amounted to just 123. And in the immediately preceding weeks the disparities had been even greater. Who had misinformed the Minister? And why?
Finally—and this is much the most serious question in the whole matter—there is the agreement of 5th August 1980 between Mr. De Lorean and my right honourable friend the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, at which the taxpayer was put in for another £14 million. The Public Accounts Committee has told us that nine months earlier, in the autumn of 1979, NIDA's representatives on the De Lorean board were already expressing:
"considerable criticism about financial control of the company".
They had been given reassurances, as a result of which they had decided not to "cut off financial support at this stage". All the same, the then head of NIDA, had in January 1980 felt it necessary to write what was described as a "formal letter of dissatisfaction" to De Lorean. In June 1980 the Chief Executive of NIDA had telexed De Lorean telling him that the company:
"has simply got to face financial realities … immediately".
In July he had actually blocked the transfer of funds to New York.
Just weeks after that, almost days after that, my right honourable friend the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland received Mr. De Lorean—alone, it would appear—and handed over another £14 million of the taxpayers' money for which he had been asking. How come that he had not been informed at that stage of his own department's growing dismay at what was going on? My right honourable friend explained to the Commons that at that time he had no choice in the matter. He said:
"We found we had a commitment … to provide funds to bring"
the De Lorean car "to market launch". Who had told him that there was such a commitment? We now know that the master agreement of 1978 contains not one word about additional funds. It is true that there was a covering letter which said that:
"the Department shall … be prepared to consider the company's application for increasing the expenditure authorised under the offer and the Department's decision will take into account the company's employment performance at the date of such an application".
I would point out that by August 1980, when Mr. De Lorean was making this latest application, the company's "employment performance" was that it had still failed to take on board more than about 80 per cent. of the recruits whom it was supposed to have recruited from day one. Who doctored this agreement and the covering letter in order to persuade my right honourable friend the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland that he had no choice but to comply with Mr. De Lorean's request, and why?
In my view, these are all questions that must be answered unless the principle of parliamentary accountability is to be regarded as a mockery. My noble friend answered a Question for Written Answer of mine today about that other great Northern Ireland project, Lear Fan, in which he referred to the terms of the agreement entered into with that business and the commitments which the Government had under that agreement. I would beg him to demand to see the original copy of that agreement in order to make quite sure that what he is told about it is literally the substance of the agreement; because on the basis of the De Lorean example we cannot be too sure.
I conclude with, I hope, a constructive suggestion. If we really want to avoid a repetition of this monumental folly, I am sure that the department's 13 steps, if I can call them that, will help. I think that the odd rolled head would help even more. But something else is needed. I submit that it might be this. When Ministers have it in mind to put our shirts upon a horse, I suggest that they should be required to join in the flutter personally by investing a set percentage—I would suggest 5 per cent., but I do not stick on a particular figure—of their personal net wealth in the project. Obviously, with my right honourable friend the present Secretary of State for Northern Ireland this would be a modest sum. With someone such as Mr. Wedgwood Benn it would be very much greater. However, the important point is that they would be required to put their cash where their mouth is, and I submit that that might—it just might—do more to avert a repetition of De Loreans in the future than anything else we could do.
7.14 p.m.
Lord Underhill: My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bruce-Gardyne, for putting down

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this Question and raising the important matter of accountability. Again, one of the problems—and possibly it is more acute in the case of Northern Ireland matters than in some other matters—is that our only opportunity to raise such issues is by way of Unstarred Questions or on the periodical appropriation orders that come before us. However, here there is the situation of some £77 million of public money lost. I shall try to avoid raising some of the points which the noble Lord has raised, but there will be some questions which I shall wish to ask, though perhaps in a more understanding fashion than was the case when Ministers faced this particular proposal.
We are told that in June 1978 the Department of Commerce and the development agency had before them the prospectus of the De Lorean motor company, which had been published only in March that year, and which had been inspected by the Securities Exchange Commission in the United States. This was accompanied by certified accounts and balance sheet details of the De Lorean background and a history of the development of the proposed car.
We were then told that all these documents helped to influence the department and the development agency, as a result of which they consulted Ministers, who decided that an offer of assistance should be made. We were told that both the Department of Commerce and the development agency representatives were greatly impressed by the competence and experience of the De Lorean management. Yet, we are also told in the Select Committee's report that the team which was looking into this matter consulted no American bank, no financial institution and no automobile companies with regard to the De Lorean project during the visit that they paid to America. Indeed, at no time did either the department or the development agency approach any American banks or American financial analysts for a report. The Select Committee says that that was very surprising.
The Select Committee says that the question of the investigation into personal qualities and commercial reputation, including the credit-worthiness of Mr. De Lorean, left much to be desired. The Select Committee quotes what it refers to as an astonishing reply which it received on this matter—that the agreement was with the De Lorean company and not with Mr. De Lorean personally, and therefore there was no need to look into these particular matters.
The Select Committee report also tells us that no independent engineering investigation was undertaken. I must make the same comment as the Select Committee: that this was remarkable. The Select Committee considered the adequacy of the assessment and among its comments I find that there was pressure by Mr. De Lorean for an early decision to be taken. There is also the point—and this is where I shall be a little less harsh than the noble Lord—that at that time Ministers recognised that there was a possibility of 2,000 jobs being at stake.
The response of the Department of Finance refers to two points. First, a condition was to be laid down that the plant must be set up in West Belfast which is,
"an area of acute economic and social deprivation",
with unemployment five times that in the Greater Belfast region, which itself was well above the Great
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Britain average. I think that I should quote part of point four of the department's memorandum. It says:
"These were the circumstances in which Government faced the task of tackling the economic problems which were judged to be a significant part of the complex of interacting political, security, social and economic difficulties which existed and still exist in West Belfast, and in which the De Lorean project, offering 2,000 jobs in the area, was considered".
I am not excusing them and am not detracting from the importance of the questions which the noble Lord posed; I believe that they are very important. But we must consider that we cannot look at a matter such as this free from the political, security and other matters which existed in West Belfast at that time.
As the noble Lord says, we had statement after statement which questioned the whole financial control and administration of the project, but we are told that despite this questioning the board decided to proceed subject to Government approval. Obviously the Government's approval will be given to a great extent on the advice given by both the Department of Commerce and the Development Agency.
We are told by the Select Committee—and I think we would all agree that this was necessary—that in view of the amount of public money involved, monitoring assumed considerable importance. The report sets out various arrangements which were made. As the noble Lord has said, there were questions raised even within 12 months of the master agreement being signed on the matters of financial control of the company.
The Department of Finance, in its response, seems to disagree with the Select Committee on the degree of monitoring. It states in item 8:
"From the early days of the project [the development agency] was receiving detailed information on performance against plan and this flow of information was steadily expanded as experience of the project developed".
Is the Select Committee correct in saying that reports were made of insufficient information and that the monitoring was not satisfactory, or is the comment of the Department of Finance correct? They cannot both be correct.
The report of the Select Committee sets out an account of events and the degree of questioning about the performance of the project which took place. We have reported to us that in February 1981—and this is not a party political matter; the period covered here, 1977 to 1981, covers two different Governments because we had an election in 1979—further financial guarantees were given, and that these were again increased three months afterwards in May of that year. Paragraph 31 of the Select Committe Report states that,
"Ministers were fully involved",
in those two decisions. And yet within 12 months we had the financial collapse and the receiver being appointed.
The Select Committee in particular criticised the Department of Commerce's assessment, and said that the detailed negotiations were inadequate. It said that the department did not have a sufficiently experienced team available to carry out this work, and emphasised that in negotiations those who were conducting them on behalf of the Government must match experience and negotiating skills.

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Again we must refer to point 6 of the Memorandum. Point 6 of the memorandum says:
"The team of officials which negotiated the De Lorean project was responsible for the negotiation in 1978 and 1979 of 6 other new American Investments which are currently providing some 2,300 jobs (20 per cent. of all the existing jobs in US companies in Northern Ireland). Some of these companies have subsequently entered into expansion agreements".
Therefore is the criticism in the Select Committee report that the team which carried out these negotiations was insufficiently experienced correct, or is the statement in the Department of Finance memorandum correct? The Select Committee also said that the monitoring was not satisfactory. I have quoted what the Department of Finance memorandum said in reply to that.
There is also the question that the nominee directors had no experience in the automobile industry. Is that correct? If so, one can see why we have the comment later in the Select Committee report that the nominee directors were, in effect, powerless.
Again in fairness one has to quote paragraph 100 of the Select Committee's report. They say:
"We wish however to record that those involved have a number of positive achievements to their credit, many of which reflect well on Northern Ireland as a location for new industry. They built a modern automobile plant on a greenfield site; developed and produced a new car of acceptable quality, with labour new to the industry, and using new methods for mass-producing fibre glass body shells; employed 2,600 people at peak production; and established a distribution network throughout the United States—all in two and a half years".
That is a conclusion arrived at by the Select Committee despite all the criticisms it makes of the handling of the project and the negotiations.
It goes on to say that it might have been sensible to have been less ambitious and to have,
"aimed at producing under 10,000 cars a year, mounted with an eye for strict economy and with tight financial control, efficiently monitored, and without the massive misappropriation of funds which took place".
and that this scheme "might have succeeded".
We are told in the memorandum of the Department of Finance at paragraph 13, that Government policy has changed.
"A project such as De Lorean would not be supported."
I think we ought to know further about that change of Government policy. It says:
"only for projects in which a substantial part of the financial resources is provided by the private sector"
will such a scheme be supported. I must ask the noble Lord, what about Shorts? Shorts is owned 100 per cent. by the Government. Nobody here would challenge additional finance being given to Shorts, which has proved to be one of the most successful industries in Northern Ireland. Additional funds are still being given to Shorts, and I hope that we shall have some clarification as to what this so-called change of policy of the Government really means.
While we all regard the handling of this particular project as a tragedy, and it shows a lack of proper accountability, one has to consider the absence of outside investment possibilities in Northern Ireland. I see in the Department of Finance's final memorandum in the last sentence:
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"In the end the commitment of public funds did not provide lasting economic benefit. Policy has, however, changed. An investment of this nature would not now be supported under present Government policy".
I think we ought to find out what is the change of Government policy.
I would remind the noble Lord who will reply what I have said many a time in discussing Northern Ireland economic matters: the official figures state clearly that public sector employment in Northern Ireland counts for 45.8 per cent. of total employment. If we have too rigid a policy in carrying out what it is suggested here the Government intend to do, we could find not only further development halted in Northern Ireland but maybe even a contraction.
7.29 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Lord Lyell): My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships are immensely grateful to my noble friend for raising this fascinating subject this evening, and indeed for the, in the main, constructive questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Underhill. Perhaps I may start by thanking my noble friend for the tone in which he asked his series of questions.
Perhaps he will accept that I find his last suggestion most easily dealt with. He suggested that Ministers taking such decisions as were taken over this particular case might well wish to support such an enterprise from their own resources. I marvelled at my noble friend's moderation. I am sure he will agree, after some of his comments, that if we pursue this idea too far, he and I, and indeed your Lordships, might well become entangled with that well-known firm of libel lawyers, Messrs. Sue, Grabitt, and Run, since I shall report swiftly the thoughts of my noble friend to my right honourable friend. Quite what might be thought by the right honourable Member for Chesterfield in the other place I do not know; I shall leave it to him to put something into expression if he wishes.
A great deal of concern has been expressed in your Lordships' House, quite properly, as well as outside the House, about Mr. De Lorean and his company. All of us have the benefit of this detailed and interesting report from the Public Accounts Committee. I think your Lordships will agree that the main areas of concern expressed this evening by the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, and by my noble friend, are in four parts: the circumstances within which the initial decision was taken; the nature of the initial assessment; the high level of contribution from public funds, which was mentioned in his last comments by the noble Lord, Lord Underhill; and (this was a continuing thread through my noble friend's comments) the nature of the arrangements for monitoring the affair.
All of us would have to admit that there are important lessons to be learned from this case. The Government share the committee's serious concern about the loss of public funds. The Government are determined that all available steps will be taken to recover as much of the loss as is possible. Indeed, we shall ensure that the lessons to be learnt from the events are fully reflected in the arrangements for dealing with industrial development in Northern Ireland. I assure your Lordships further that the Government's

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policy has since changed and that projects such as that proposed by Mr. De Lorean would certainly not now be supported. I stress that industrial support is made available only for projects in which a substantial part of the financial resources are provided by the private sector. I also give an assurance that the lessons to be learnt from the events that have been spoken of this evening are now fully reflected in the arrangements for dealing with industrial development in Northern Ireland.
I would add as an obiter dicta that I take on board the caveat of my noble friend that he mentioned in connection with a reply that I gave him today. I shall re-read what he said tonight and re-read everything else. I am grateful for his warning, but I have taken note of what he said and taken note of what I wrote to him today.
I shall go into the lessons which arise from the De Lorean affair in some detail, but before that I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, and my noble friend will accept that it is worthwhile commenting on the circumstances in which the initial decision to support this project was taken. Let us not forget that the year was 1978, as has been mentioned by the noble Lord and my noble friend. A proper understanding of the whole project is essential if any of us is correctly to assess the lessons that we have to learn from it. If we take first the decision to invest in the project, we see that during the period up to 1978 Northern Ireland had been experiencing the greatest difficulty in attracting new investment, without which it was impossible to contain, still less to reverse, the, even then, rising trend in unemployment. This unemployment was already by far the highest in any region in the United Kingdom. The problem was particularly acute in West Belfast, where successive governments had attempted every conventional remedy for job creation, without success. Against this background the De Lorean project provided the Government of the day with an opportunity to try a new approach to this intractable problem of unemployment. The Government's part of the bargain was to provide the bulk of the funds and the promoter's was to provide and to manage the project.
I fully, share the concern that your Lordships have expressed about a project conceived and structured in this way. There were obvious risks, but against this the sought for pay-off for the Government would have been in the form of a large number of jobs in an unemployment blackspot. We had hoped that it would have created spin-off employment elsewhere and substantial royalty income. These are three separate factors. Further, any internationally mobile investment project such as was offered, with the prospect of 2,000 jobs, would find itself the focus of intense competition from all kinds of regions anxious to secure its location. The De Lorean project was no exception.
At the time of the first approach to Northern Ireland the project had been thoroughly evaluated by several locations and firm offers of assistance had been put on the table. As my noble friend mentioned, Puerto Rico had a head start and remained a strong competitor throughout this time. In the circumstances, the time which the NIDA and the Department of Commerce in Northern Ireland had for negotiations was limited.
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Indeed, the timescale for assessment of that project had to be accelerated. Nevertheless, the Government insisted on the preparation of an appropriate corporate plan and commissioned the firm of McKinsey to report on it. To supplement this the Government had access to a number of substantial studies already carried out—my noble friend has mentioned them—by Booz Allen and Hamilton as well as a report by A. T. Kearney. I grant that of these one was prepared for the company and the other prepared for Puerto Rico. I think that my noble friend and the noble Lord would see that on reading the McKinsey report.
The question of monitoring this project has been raised and quite rightly so, but I must put this question in perspective. We see in the report of the Public Accounts Committee that when monitoring projects one has to choose the right path between, on the one hand, over-detailed control and, on the other, over-reliance on the capabilities of the management. The De Lorean Motor Company Limited was a private sector company and not a public corporation. The monitoring arrangements were not designed to give the Government any detailed or day-to-day control. The arrangements which were made were designed to monitor the progress of the business and secondly, to give the Government agencies detailed information on performance against the plan. Of course, the usual arrangements for professional company audit were in place, because the arrangements made in connection with monitoring were not designed to detect misappropriation. I am sure that my noble friend and your Lordships accept that the arrangements for an audit are more specifically designed to detect misappropriation. I believe that every Member of your Lordships' House will be aware that the IDB has initiated legal action against Arthur Andersen, the auditors, and in these circumstances I am sure your Lordships will understand fully if I do not go further on this aspect.
Turning now to the lessons of the project, I have already assured your Lordships, and do so again, that changes have been made and, above all, we have learned these lessons. Indeed, the lessons have been very thoroughly learned. The main change is that, as a matter of Government policy, industrial support is made available only for projects in which a substantial proportion of the financial resource is provided by the private sector. It follows, therefore, that a number of the features for which this project has been criticised should not recur. But we also recognise that it is vital to ensure that the lessons for the future are properly applied in the context of conventional industrial development casework. As a result, 13 key points have been identified and disseminated to officials of the Industrial Development Board as guidelines for any future operations. These guidelines have been set out in the supplementary memorandum from the Department of Finance and Personnel and were published on 18th February this year.
I hope that your Lordships will bear with me if I do not repeat all of these in detail but take your Lordships through the key features as we understand them. First of all, in considering any cases of possible investment in the Province, the IDB has access to a range of skills appropriate to each project and, above all, to the

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relevant technical advice. The organisation takes whatever time is required to assess fully the project's viability including the consideration of what we have to call the "worst-case scenario". I am sure that your Lordships will agree that careful thought must be given to the composition of an experienced team with proved negotiating skills and, where appropriate, even to bringing in outside expertise. The second key point, we believe, is that the management quality is examined as part of the assessment process, and, where a new company is involved, the personal qualities and indeed the reputation of the entrepreneur are also investigated. I hope that my noble friend will accept that particular point.
The third key point that we see is that the responsibilities of the parties are clearly defined in an unambiguous financial-systems agreement. We stress very much that particular point. The objectives and the standards of performance and, where appropriate, detailed monitoring arrangements are all agreed in advance with financial systems payable on established performance criteria being met. The fourth key point that we see is that, where possible, agreements are based upon the principle of phased investment with a maximum initial commitment from the private investors; and we believe that care is taken to see that there is an adequate further reserve of private funds available should that project run into difficulties.
The fifth key point that we stress is that IDB have prepared and have issued extensive guidelines for the use of nominee directors which are designed to familiarise them with their particular duties. Of course, these duties can vary as we have seen in the case of De Lorean; and we took that on board. The sixth key point that we believe emanates from the lessons to be learned is that careful consideration always is given to the structure of the company; and the aim that we have is to secure a legal commitment from the company which has the overall or ultimate responsibility for the performance of those obligations. I have gone through the aspects of the affair as we have seen them.
May I turn now to the remarks made by my noble friend in asking this Unstarred Question? First of all, my noble friend raised the point that a significant part of the funding of the De Lorean project may have been diverted to what I think he called the "fat cats" of the IRA. I would ask my noble friend that if he has any evidence at all to this particular effect, or if he has any evidence at all, I should be glad to receive it and I shall certainly direct this for the swiftest action with the appropriate authorities.
My noble friend went on to note that the 13 lessons identified by the Public Accounts Committee related to the initial application and agreement only. As is normally the case in matters of investigations like this, my noble friend is absolutely right; but I am sure that he would accept that it is extremely important to ensure that future agreements are negotiated in the light of these lessons, and a satisfactory initial agreement which, in particular, addresses subsequent monitoring arrangements will do much to avoid difficulties later on in the life of a particular project. Next, my noble friend referred to the comments made by the Chief Executive of the IDB in evidence to the
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Public Accounts Committee. I think my noble friend mentioned the fascinating case that no heads had rolled as a result of the De Lorean affair. My noble friend will find that in Question No. 1470.
I would invite him and the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, to examine Question No. 1471, where, in reply, the same Chief Executive of the IDB mentioned that many things were possible with 20/20 hindsight. I am sure that both the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, and my noble friend will possibly temper their thoughts with that in mind as well. I would further stress in this context and draw my noble friend's attention to the fact that the team which negotiated the De Lorean project was also responsible in the most trying circumstances for the introduction of other sophisticated and highly successful American investments in Northern Ireland. The noble Lord, Lord Underhill, raised that point. I think it is in the memorandum of the Department of Finance and Personnel and, as the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, mentioned, these now provide 2,300 jobs, which is about 20 per cent. of all the jobs in the current investment of American firms in Northern Ireland. I believe that the quantity and quality of this particular achievement bears favourable comparison with regional development activity in most other areas in recent years.
My noble friend was kind enough to give me clear advance notice of the questions that he raised this evening. I hope that my noble friend and your Lordships will accept that I have found it impossible to have sufficient time to consult all the former Ministers on their particular actions and what they mentioned in the form in which the noble Lord raised them this evening. My noble friend mentioned that he regards these questions that he raised as being of the greatest importance, and we accept that; but I want to give my noble friend a considered reply. I hope he will accept that to give him a precise, accurate and full reply this evening will be impossible because, in courtesy, I must consult in some cases with my honourable friends and in other cases with my right honourable friends and the former Ministers who were involved in the statements. Indeed, all those statements were from Hansard reports, mostly of another place.
I will reply to my noble friend in writing on those questions that I cannot deal with this evening. But there are two questions that I am able to deal with now. I would confirm that the European Community paid a grant of £6·7 million in respect of the De Lorean project. I understand that the figure mentioned by my honourable friend Mr. Giles Shaw, in the other place in the course of his remarks was of the order of £7·5 million. I think my noble friend will understand that there was, I believe, a commitment, and that the actual grant paid was £6·7 million. This was in respect to the De Lorean project and was paid to the Department of Commerce in Northern Ireland. It was shown in the Northern Ireland appropriation accounts. This sum was reclaimed by the Community in 1983–84 following the collapse of the company.
A noble Lord: Good!
Lord Lyell: At least I have satisfied the noble Lord on one of his questions and I am delighted. A note of triumph has been sounded.

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My noble friend also referred to the Question, again answered by my honourable friend in another place, Mr. Giles Shaw, about sales and dealers. I think the question raised was about the production of 20,000 motor cars. I would refer my noble friend to the terms of the Answer which was given by my honourable friend the Minister in February 1980. This indicated that the information that he had, the up-to-date information, the only information that he could then obtain, came from the company itself. I apologise to my noble friend that I cannot go further than that. I undertake that we shall take on board every one of the questions that he has raised. I shall reply to him very fully. I intend to make this a priority so far as speed is concerned.
If I may confine myself to a general comment on the entire project, if my noble friend and your Lordships would accept this, the De Lorean project was a very large and complex venture. It moved rapidly from negotiation to master agreement, through product development and the construction of a factory—and, let us not forget, on a greenfield site—to mass production of a very complicated motor car; and it moved on to sales in the United States market. There were financial difficulties throughout its life, and ultimately of course those led to its collapse. In such a fast-moving and complex scene it would seem perfectly reasonable to me that all the Ministers gave information to Parliament in good faith. I hope this will explain, at least this evening, a number of points which were raised by my noble friend.
The noble Lord, Lord Underhill, mentioned a number of criticisms which he quite rightly said were highlighted by the Public Accounts Committee. I assure him that those criticisms have been considered by the Industrial Development Board in the 13 lessons, and it has really put a great deal of study into the De Lorean experience and has taken on board these particular lessons.
I should like to conclude by suggesting to your Lordships that the project of the De Lorean cars was always a very high-risk venture. In the event it foundered, and the commitment of public funds did not provide any lasting economic benefit. There is,
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however, one benefit that we can salvage from the wreckage. It has been touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Underhill; that is, of course, the careful application of the lessons to future casework. I hope that I have been able to satisfy your Lordships that the lessons have been learned and that changes reflecting those lessons have been made.
I should like to pick up two important points which were made by the Public Accounts Committee in its report. First, the committee would not, and does not, want the Industrial Development Board to become excessively over-cautious and bureaucratic as an organisation, in danger of rejecting viable opportunities for simple fear of criticism. I strongly endorse this, because we live in a competitive world, and in this competitive situation the IDB will have to be prepared to make very finely balanced judgments about the future viability of projects under negotiation, within of course its new operating procedures.
Secondly, I wish, as indeed did the committee, as referred to in, I think, paragraph 100 of its report, to record that there are important aspects of this case which reflect well on Northern Ireland generally and on West Belfast in particular as a location for new industry. The De Lorean organisation established a modern automobile plant on a greenfield site. It developed a new car, using new methods for mass-producing fibre-glass body shells of an entirely new design. I established a distribution network—all in two-and-a-half years. By any standards that was a major achievement, and it reflected particular credit on the West Belfast workforce. Both the workforce and the Government more than fulfilled their responsibilities to this project, and it is a pity that others did not fulfil theirs. I hope that other investors who focus on the highly effective operational performance by the workforce will have taken note and, above all, will give the area an opportunity to show its paces in the future.
House adjourned at seven minutes before eight o'clock.