Lords Sitting of 21 July 1987

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers— Read by the Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells
Several Lords—Took the Oath.

British Gas plc: Progress Report
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will report on the progress of British Gas in the private sector.
The Earl of Dundee: My Lords. it is not the normal practice of Her Majesty's Government to report on the progress of private sector companies. The Chairman of British Gas, Sir Denis Rooke, made a preliminary announcement of the 1987 results on the 17th June. He reported profits of £1,293 million before tax on an historic cost basis and announced a 4·5 per cent tariff reduction, with both rates per therm and standing charges being reduced. British Gas's report and accounts will be sent to shareholders, currently numbering some 3 million, later this month.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, I thank the noble Earl very much for that excellent reply. I have been requested to ask whether the changes in gas prices could possibly be altered more consistently, as they change too often and it is difficult for horticulturists. Is that possible?
The Earl of Dundee: My Lords, every effort will be made to ensure that gas prices are stable. Your Lordships will be aware of the regulatory system which is now in force and which is monitored by Ofgas in order to make sure that price increases are always less than inflation.
Lord Mulley: My Lords, is not one of the problems of privatising essential utilities that this House and Parliament generally lose any influence and control over their affairs?
The Earl of Dundee: My Lords, this House continues to have an influence, as naturally does the other place, over our affairs; but now the decision has been taken to put British Gas in the private sector it is obviously up to British Gas itself to manage its own affairs.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, will my noble friend pass on the excellent example of British Gas in reducing prices after privatisation to those companies or organisations still remaining in the public sector?
The Earl of Dundee: Yes, indeed, my Lords, I shall pass on my noble friend's remarks.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that we believe that he has set a desirable precedent today in answering and apparently taking ministerial responsibility for a private industry? Can he also say whether the reduction of 4½ per cent. in gas tariffs is not rather mean, bearing in mind that oil prices have fallen by 16p over the last couple of years? Is British Gas not giving more attention to shareholders' interests than consumers' interests?
The Earl of Dundee: No, my Lords, I would not agree with that. I think that the consumers' interests are the interests which are mainly taken into account. I very much welcome the recent 4.5 per cent. cut in tariffs. The reduction passes on to tariff customers the lower gas purchase prices now forecast by British Gas, as well as efficiency gains, and this is of course required by the new regulatory system whose operation is monitored by Ofgas.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, will my noble friend the Minister accept that he is not answering for private industry but is answering a Question in your Lordships' House?
The Earl of Dundee: My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend.
Lord Ezra: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl whether the Government have received complaints from certain industrial consumers about the pricing and contract policies pursued by British Gas in view of its strong market position, and, if so, what they propose to do about it?
The Earl of Dundee: My Lords, I think perhaps that is another Question.

Job Creation in the Countryside
2.40 p.m.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what encouragement is being offered to create jobs in the countryside.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, in England the Development Commission, with its subsidiary the Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas (COSIRA), is the Government's main agency for creating jobs in the countryside. Details of other agencies in England, and in Scotland and Wales, are provided in the Government's booklets on Rural Enterprise and Development, Action for Rural Enterprise and Rural Scotland, published on 10th March. A wide range of assistance is given to assist job creation, including provision of premises, advice and assistance with finance.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that satisfactory reply. Can he give further details of what has been achieved, first, by the Bill, and, secondly, by the Agricultural Training Bill which was passed at the end of the last Parliament?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, government departments and agencies are carrying forward many successful job-creating initiatives. For example, through its 100 per cent. finance workshop programme, the Development Commission has provided about 10,000 job opportunities in England since 1981.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether, in addition to jobs being created in the countryside, some action will be taken to create jobs in the inner cities in order to start erasing the grim effects of the neglect of the past seven or eight years?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, that question is very wide of the Question on the Order Paper.
Lord Taylor of Gryfe: My Lords, is the Minister aware that forestry is a major contributor to employment in the countryside? It now employs 40,000 people. Therefore may I have an assurance that there will be continued government support for an expanding forestry policy in both the public and the private sector?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord is well aware of this Government's support of forestry. However, I feel that the broader part of his question is very wide of the Question on the Order Paper.
Baroness David: My Lords, I should like to remind the Minister that it is the European Year of the Environment. Is the Minister aware that many jobs can be created in the environmental field in rural areas, as well as in other parts of the country: for example, cleaning the beaches and the rivers; pollution control technology; boosting rural tourism; increasing access to the countryside; and energy conservation'? Many jobs can be created in this way and it would be suitable if they were created during this environmental year. Are the Government pushing this matter?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, this Government are extremely concerned about the countryside and about employment there. However, I feel that some of the points raised by the noble Baroness will be dealt with by local authorities rather than by the Government.
The Earl of Selkirk: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that small or medium-size industrial estates can be of real value in the countryside generally?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am grateful for my noble friend's comments. Decisions on such matters are taken by the planning and local authorities.
Lord Sainsbury: My Lords, is the Minister aware, as I am sure he is, that very little of the food produced in our countryside reaches the consumer in the form in which it leaves the farms? Will the Minister agree that there is a fine opportunity to locate the processing of food—food that needs manufacture—in rural areas?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am sure your Lordships are grateful that this matter has been brought to our attention. The Government are well aware of it, and are particularly keen to see farmers add value to products by producing those which are closer to what will appear on the shelves of supermarkets.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, in one of his replies the noble Lord was good enough to make a welcome reference to Wales—albeit a passing reference. Is he aware that the development of the countryside in Wales is the responsibility of the Welsh Development Agency and the Mid-Wales Development Corporation? Is the noble Lord further aware that there is general complaint in Wales, where unemployment is very high, that both those agencies are underfunded? Can the noble Lord say whether the Government have it in mind to increase the funds so that something can be done about the unemployed people?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am not in a position to answer that question because I feel that it does not have regard to that on the Order Paper today.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, when the noble Lord comes to answer Questions of this general kind about the United Kingdom, will he make certain that he briefs himself about Wales?
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that the same question applies to the Islands and Highlands Development Board and the Scottish Development Agency? Will the noble Lord say—and it is entirely in line with the Question—whether jobs created under the new scheme equal the loss of jobs in agriculture over the past year?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I shall have to write to the noble Lord in respect of that question.
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the Isle of Wight receives much less support from central government than does either Wales or Scotland? Is he further aware that it has a higher unemployment rate?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, 1 am unable to answer questions on specific areas of the United Kingdom.
Lord Glenamara: My Lords, will the noble Lord agree that two factors make this problem extremely urgent? The first is the imminent changes in farming, which will certainly mean a great deal of land being taken out of production; and the second is the continuing growth of technology in farming, which will mean fewer people being employed. Do not those two factors make the problem probably as important

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as that of the inner cities, and ought not the Government to attach more priority to it?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, we are aware of the changes that are occurring in agriculture. Accordingly, we have increased expenditure to cope with the problem.
Lord Walston: My Lords, would the noble Lord not agree that if this problem is to be met, it must be possible for people living in rural areas to move easily from their own village to another village or small town where there is employment and that public transportation in rural areas can play a vital part in this process?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am not in a position today, unfortunately, to answer questions on transport.
Lord Carter: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that in the last 10 years real incomes in farming in this country have declined by 40 per cent. whereas, in the European Community, there has been an average decline of about 25 per cent.? Is he aware that at the same time the number of jobs lost in this country in agriculture has been 70,000? If the squeeze on farm incomes that we are now experiencing continues, would he not agree that there will soon be a surplus of farm labour as well as of cereals?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, one of the reasons why we have increased expenditure on the Development Commission is precisely that.
The Earl of Perth: My Lords, would the noble Lord agree that this Question and the one preceding it, with all respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, are really not suitable as Questions of the starred type and that it would be far more suitable if such very general Questions were the subject of either Unstarred Questions or short debates?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, my experience in this House, as the noble Earl is probably well aware, is extremely limited. I would not feel it right or proper to pass comment.

EC: Budget Discipline
2.52 p.m.
Lord Bruce of Donington: 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 proposals they propose to make to the Economic and Finance Council of the European Communities in order to secure the imposition of annual cash limits on the Commission's "compulsory" (or "obligatory") expenditure.
The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Lord Young of Graffham): My Lords, the agricultural guideline limit within the Community's existing
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budget discipline agreement provides for expenditure on agriculture to grow no faster than the Community's own resources base. As the recent European Council recognised, the guideline needs to be reinforced by changes in the agricultural regulations to enable the Commission to keep the level of expenditure within the budget provision. The Government have suggested some ideas for stabilisers to restrain expenditure in individual commodity regimes.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply. Is he aware of the view, which has been expressed by the Commission itself, that the existing phrase "a budget discipline" covers a complete farce lacking any control whatever over the financial expenditure of the Community?
Is the noble Lord further aware that almost immediately following Fontainebleau it was agreed by the Council of Ministers that the Economic and Finance Council members should always be present with the agricultural ministers when price fixing took place? Is he also aware that when, on the last occasion, the finance ministers absented themselves, the Agricultural Council was left free from the financial constraints that would otherwise have applied in determining agricultural price levels?
Lord Young of Graffham: No, my Lords, I am not aware that the present regime is a farce. I am aware that there are difficulties: that is why we have suggested stabilisers. This is a Community-wide problem and it must be dealt with by the Community as a whole.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, the noble Lord mentioned the proposed schemes. I assume he was referring to the excellent Ministry of Agriculture proposal for a voluntary set-aside scheme without which we shall never reduce the surplus of cereals. Can the noble Lord say what progress has been made in putting that scheme forward?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, the specific Question referred to the concept of stabilisers which I hope will come into being in order to limit specific commodity over-production. It is a very difficult problem; one that must be addressed by all members of the Community. We must look at mechanisms whereby gross over-production of farm produce within the Community can be redressed in a sensible and sustainable way.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, would the Minister not agree that while a question of this calibre concerns the entire Community, someone has to initiate new ideas? I recall during my years in Europe that Britain initiated many things. Do the Government intend to do any initiating on this particular problem?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, that is exactly what we have been doing at the last two councils.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, before the noble Lord pursues the matter further, will he please consult his right honourable friend the Prime

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Minister whose views on this aspect would appear, on the face of it, to coincide more with mine than with his?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, the noble Lord must form his own conclusions. They are not mine.

"Observer" Article: Alleged Offences
2.56 p.m.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government why no charges have been brought in respect of the allegations contained in the article in the Observer, page 41, of Sunday 5th July, written by Melanie McFadyean and Ole Hansen, and what action is proposed in the matter.
The Lord Chancellor (Lord Havers): My Lords, a file of evidence concerning alleged offences of gross indecency and indecent assault by Mr. Oliver Grieveson against: his three sons was submitted by the Cleveland Constabulary to the Cleveland branch of the Cleveland/North Yorkshire Crown Prosecution Service in December 1986. The three sons—Mr. Oliver Paul Grieveson, Mr. Barry Grieveson and Mr. Philip Grieveson—are now aged 38, 32 and 22 respectively.
The last incident complained of occurred in 1974. Having regard in particular to the staleness of the offences, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that the public interest did not require proceedings and accordingly advised that no further action be taken in the matter.
A further file of evidence was submitted by the Cleveland Constabulary to the CPS in June 1987, incorporating additional material supplied to the police by Mr. Oliver Paul Grieveson, Mr. Barry Grieveson and Mr. Philip Grieveson. The CPS reviewed the case again but found no reason to alter its previous decision to take no action in the matter. I should also add that, contrary to the impression given in the newspaper article, Mr. Grieveson has received the advice of a consultant psychiatrist.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor for that long and detailed reply. However, would he not agree that lay people, reading the facts of the case about what took place some years ago, might find it difficult to understand that there was obviously evidence against the father, substantiated by three sons, and yet it now appears that the noble and learned Lord is saying that no action is to be taken, simply on the basis that it is out of time?
It is really out of time? Is it not possible for the matter to be reconsidered, bearing in mind that this area of the United Kingdom is under the spotlight with the present chief of police decrying certain
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people for not helping the police in this type of prosecution? I leave it at that.
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, it really is a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service. Staleness is of course an important factor which it took into consideration. But there would be many others. For example, I think of the present ages of the three sons concerned, and their having to give evidence at least 14 years after the event.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: My Lords, is it not important to remember that the question of whether or not to prosecute in any given case is not truly a government responsibility but a responsibility under the supervision of the Attorney-General in his professional—not his ministerial—capacity?
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble and learned friend. I have a sort of reciprocal arrangement with my right honourable and learned friend the Attorney-General. It was usually me, as Attorney-General, acting as the agent; but in this case it is the other way round. I think we are right in setting up the CPS to give a great deal of independence to those running the local branches.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, I am sorry to have to come back. But surely when a matter like this is made public it is the duty of people holding public office to question whether the right procedures have been followed. Mistakes have been made in the past and can be made in the future. I should like to ask the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor if he would cast his mind towards the part of the report stating that it had been suggested that the three sons could bring a private prosecution against their own father? If something is tragically wrong, surely this is a last resort, and it ought to be done by the DPP.
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I have little to add. As I have said, we have delegated as far as possible. It is interesting that in the newspaper article to which the noble Lord referred it was said by the sons that they had done this in order to force their father to have psychiatric treatment. He has now taken that advice.

Business
3 p.m.
Lord Denham: My Lords, at a convenient moment after 3.30 this afternoon my noble friend Lord Glenarthur will, with the leave of the House, repeat a Statement that is being made in another place on the Iran/Iraq conflict.

Coroners Bill [H.L.]
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to consolidate the Coroners Acts 1887 to 1980 and certain related enactments, with amendments to give effect to the recommendations of the Law Commission. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a first time.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill read a first time, and to be printed.

Business of the House
The Lord President of the Council (Viscount Whitelaw): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order 38 (Arrangement of the Order Paper) be suspended on Thursday next to enable the Motion on Lords' expenses to be taken before the Motion to approve the Ministerial and other Salaries Order 1987.—(Viscount Whitelaw.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Western Isles Islands Council (Vatersay Causeway) Order Confirmation Bill
Considered on Report.

British Shipbuilders (Borrowing Powers) Bill
3.5 p.m.
Brought from the Commons, and read a first time.
Then, Standing Order No. 44 having been dispensed with (pursuant to Resolution of 16th July):
Lord Beaverbrook: My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
The Bill is short and technical. It concerns British Shipbuilders borrowing limits which is a statutory ceiling on the corporation's borrowing placed by the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Act 1977. The borrowing in question covers the funds that British Shipbuilders may acquire from the Government in the form of public dividend capital and also loans from the commercial market.
The limit on the corporation's borrowing stands at £1,400 million as a result of the British Shipbuilders Borrowing Powers (Increase of Limit) Order, which was debated in another place in December last year. This limit will be breached imminently—in fact, by the end of this month. The Bill that is before your Lordships' House proposes an increase in the borrowing limit to £1,550 million and makes provision for further increases to £1,800 million subject to affirmative resolution in another place.
I should make it clear that the borrowing limit does not apply to the intervention fund paid in support of individual orders; neither does the Bill actually vote any money to the corporation. It simply provides British Shipbuilders with the power to receive money. The provision of funds in the form of public dividend capital is a matter for Parliament to decide through the normal procedures for voting money.
In recent years the world shipbuilding market has remained severely depressed. The major European shipbuilders and the Japanese have had to restructure, and even the Koreans are now feeling the
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pinch. Orders placed last year totalled 9 million tonnes throughout the world, which is only half of what could have been built if all yards had been working to capacity.
Against that gloomy picture British Shipbuilders has had to exert itself to the utmost to win orders. I am glad to be able to say that all the yards have work, and with the China order for container ships at Govan and the Danish ferries at North-East Shipbuilders the large yards have work until 1989. Considerable government help was required in the present market to secure those orders, so let it not be said that this Government have no interest in supporting the industry.
The corporation's approach is to strive continually to improve efficiency which ranges from securing better components at cheaper prices through the whole spectrum of organising the workforce's tasks and providing them with the most advanced manufacturing systems. The Government have done all that they can to support British Shipbuilders—with public dividend capital to meet the needs of the business, intervention fund support to help win orders and the diplomatic support necessary for challenging new markets such as China. Whatever help we may give, the survival of British Shipbuilders depends in the main on itself, its own efforts to win orders and to build ships to time and to cost. However, for the immediate future the corporation must have an increase in its borrowing limit by the end of the month in order to continue to trade. I commend this Bill to your Lordships and I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Beaverbrook.)
3.8 p.m.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beaverbrook, for introducing the Second Reading of this Bill, which we on this side of the House support. I shall not detain your Lordships for very long but there are one or two points that I feel I ought to make because this Bill gives us what is more or less an annual opportunity briefly to review the state of the British shipbuilding industry.
I should like to ask the noble Lord to deal with a technical point when he comes to reply for the Government. Clause 2(2) of the Bill says, "This Act extends to Northern Ireland". Does that affect in any way the relationship between British Shipbuilders and Harland and Wolff? There have been some difficulties between the two manufacturers and indeed some chasing of orders which may be allocated to the one or to the other, and I should be grateful if the noble Lord could spend a little time developing that relationship for us.
As the noble Lord has pointed out, the general state of shipbuilding in Britain is not particularly happy. We are now coming up to the tenth anniversary of the creation of British Shipbuilders. Britain used to have 25 per cent. of world orders; it now has 2 per cent. of world orders. Half of the yards in Europe that have closed in the past 10 years are in the United Kingdom. The 70 yards and facilities that British Shipbuilders inherited have declined to seven;

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the workforce of 80,000 that it inherited has become a workforce of somewhat less than 6,000. Other European Community countries suffered job losses of approximately 30 per cent. to 50 per cent.; the United Kingdom has suffered job losses of somewhere around 300 per cent.
I refer the noble Lord and your Lordships to a remark that was made by a Minister formerly responsible for shipbuilding who is now the Financial Secretary to the Treasury in another place when two years ago he said words to the effect that British Shipbuilders employed fewer than 12,000 people in merchant shipbuilding and engine building and that if it declined much further it would simply disappear—the road would run out. Since then the workforce has more or less halved.
We accept what the noble Lord said about international competition and that the Government and British Shipbuilders have an exceedingly difficult task in obtaining their share of world orders at the present time, which is a particularly difficult period since, as I understand it, South Korea is still expanding capacity and the Japanese have announced that as long as there is an ocean to sail on they will build ships to sail on it.
What can he done? First of all, there is the question of competition between various members of the European Community. I understand that that is now governed by the sixth directive. I should like to ask the noble Lord how he regards the position of the Brittany Ferries order, which was diverted from Govan shipbuilders to a French shipbuilder, through intervention from the French Government. This is perhaps the first real test of the sixth directive and I should he grateful if the noble Lord would tell us whether the Government wish to pursue this to the furthest point that they possibly can.
The second question that I have of the noble Lord is this. How far is it possible in the Government's view to persuade British shipowners, who are less willing to buy ships at home than shipowners of other nationalities, to do more for British yards? So far as I am aware, the Japanese since 1947 have built 100 per cent. of their merchant fleet in Japan. In our case I understand the figure to be 50 per cent. Even with the rise of South Korea, Japanese shipowners seem to be determined, for various reasons which no doubt are explicable, to build in Japan. Is it not possible to consider, since your Lordships debated the parlous state of the merchant marine only the other day, some sort of scrap and build programme such as we had in the 1930s under the British Shipping (Assistance) Act, which was of very great help to yards at that time?
My last question concerns a particular region of the United Kingdom which of course is Scotland. Scotland has developed with government encouragement a new capability for servicing the oil industry in the North Seas. It appears now that UIE, and possibly other Scottish yards, are under severe constraint and are possibly threatened with closure. I do not have to point out to your Lordships, or indeed to the noble Lord, that were that to happen it would have a severe impact on the Scottish economy. If oil prices recover, and if there is more exploration
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activity in the North Sea, then it would seem only sensible that the Scottish effort in this direction should be supported and not allowed to fail. If it does fail, the inexorable decline forecast by the former shipbuilding Minister that I quoted a minute ago would undoubtedly take place and would have dire effects on the Scottish economy.
I do not wish to detain your Lordships longer. The noble Lord has been kind enough to explain the purpose of the Bill. We support it and we wish it well. I hope that the noble Lord will take my remarks in the friendly and constructive spirit in which they are meant, because we wish the Bill to go forward.
3.12 p.m.
Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran: My Lords, I first apologise for not having my name on the speakers' list, but I assure your Lordships that I shall be brief in the observations I make. Like the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, we are also grateful to the Minister for his clear explanation of this Bill, which we support. In view of the lucid and practical approach of the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, I do not wish to press the matter any further. But I should like to mention one aspect which it appears to me the Minister considers to be of some importance in regard to the shipbuilding industry generally. As I understood him, he mentioned the importance of spare parts.
I should therefore like to ask the Minister —if he is not able to answer me now, perhaps he will do so later—whether he knows that there is a Bill threatened to come before the House where the position of spare parts for equipment which is used for shipbuilding purposes may be the subject of rather draconian legislation in regard to designs. Where there is no patent protection or design protection of spare parts, they should be capable of being manufactured by any firm. I understand that there may be a large loss of jobs if the Government go on with their proposals for new design rights in the intellectual property Bill and the innovation Bill, which I understand are coming before the House after the Recess.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend how the £1,800 million maximum borrowing here compares with the equivalent situation in Japan? Also is he in a position to say what the interest on the borrowing is likely to be here compared with Japan?
3.15 p.m.
Lord Beaverbrook: My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken in our short debate on this Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Williams, said, the corporation has considerable difficulties but there can be no expectation of a blank cheque. British Shipbuilders has a new chairman of only two months' standing. He is reviewing the industry and looking at how all its problems can be tackled. He has promised a corporate plan in the autumn which Ministers will be considering very carefully indeed.
The noble Lord, Lord Williams, asked me how this Bill extends to Northern Ireland. The Bill provides scope for British Shipbuilders to borrow and there

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are entirely separate arrangements for the financing of Harland and Wolff. The fact that this Bill extends to Northern Ireland is thus largely a technicality. Harland and Wolff is not affected in any way by the Bill. Also we would try to ensure that there was fair competition between British Shipbuilders and Harland and Wolff on any particular order.
With regard to the noble Lord's question about the fairness of the Brittany Ferries' order, we cannot prevent the French, and nor can the Commission, from keeping the order in France. In this case the French are in a uniquely strong position to determine where the order is to be built. I should point out that the Commission is now looking at this matter. It is looking not only at the aid package offered by the French but also at the aid package which we had offered for the building of the ship in the United Kingdom.
The noble Lord also mentioned ship scrapping. Ships are already being scrapped at a rate much higher than new orders are being placed. Last year alone 31 million gross tonnes of ships were scrapped and only 9 million tonnes were ordered. There is clearly no sense in subsidising a process that is already taking place on a major scale.
With regard to the industry and Scotland, as I have already said, of course the Government are doing everything they can to help the industry and the areas in which it is concentrated. There are considerable assisted areas in the North of England and in Scotland, and the Government want to see the yards do the very best they can in the circumstances of the world economic situation in shipbuilding. Perhaps I may write to the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran, on the point that he made. I have not had notice of that question and perhaps I can come back to him on the subject.
Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran: My Lords, I am very much obliged to the noble Lord.
Lord Beaverbrook: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Harmar-Nicholls asked me the position as regards borrowing by the Japanese industry. I do not have any figures on that. If I can find out any, I shall again write to him. Meanwhile, I commend the Bill to the House.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, in addition to what the noble Lord, Lord Harmar-Nicholls, asked, could he find out whether assistance in Japan and in Korea is by borrowing or by grant?
Lord Beaverbrook: Yes, my Lords, I shall look into the matter and write to the noble Lord. Perhaps he would like to have a copy of the letter.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps I may ask him again on Brittany Ferries whether the Government are prepared to pursue this matter according to the terms of the sixth directive, under which, as I understand it, there is no aid to European shipyards without the Commission's approval.
Lord Beaverbrook: My Lords, I understand on this particular order, as a result of the investigations, that no one can now provide state aid to secure it without the Commission's approval. So, yes, we shall do everything we can to pursue the order for this country but it has now attracted the interest of the Commission, which is looking into it.
On Question, Bill read a second time; Committee negatived.
Then, Standing Order No. 44 having been suspended (pursuant to Resolution of 16th July), Bill read a third time, and passed.

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

Building Societies Investor Protection Scheme (Maximum Protected Investment) Order 1987
3.20 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Transport (Lord Brabazon of Tara): My Lords, I beg to move that the draft Building Societies Invester Protection Scheme (Maximum Protected Investment) Order 1987 laid before the House on 2nd July be approved. This draft order fulfils a commitment given in another place earlier this year during the passage of what was then the Banking Bill. I am pleased to be able to honour that commitment.
The Building Societies Act has created a scheme, the investor protection scheme, whose purpose is to ensure that, should any building society become insolvent, investors in that society do not lose all their money. This scheme provides for a fund to be created out of levies on all other societies, from which payments can be made to investors in the insolvent society. The scheme covers up to 90 per cent. of each investor's investment, but subject to an upper limit of £10,000. The Banking Act contains similar provisions.
This draft order varies one part of the scheme. It increases the maximum cover to £20,000. If approved, the maximum possible payment to investors will double from £9,000 to £18 000. Investor protection is a much debated matter. During the passage of the Building Societies Bill, I was pressed to increase the limit we are debating today. Similar pressure was applied during the passage of the Banking Bill, and the Government decided that it was now the right time to make the increase for both sets of legislation. This order reflects that decision for building societies.
It is right briefly to consider the purpose of protective provisions of this sort. Each indvidual investor has an obligation to consider where best to place his funds. No protection scheme should provide 100 per cent. cover. Investors' primary protection is the quality of society management, backed by the

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supervisory regime set out in the Building Societies Act, and now being given effect by the Building Societies commission. But deposit-taking institutions form a vital part of everyone's lives. It is right that small investors in them should be protected.
The £10,000 limit was introduced in banking legislation in 1979. An increase to take account of inflation would put the limit at over £18,000 today. So an increase to £20,000 provides broadly the same level of protection in real terms as that in 1979. In that time, there has been an increase in the size and number of larger scale investments by the public. At the end of 1984, only 4 per cent. of society share accounts held over £10,000. By the end of 1986, the figure was 6.2 per cent. The figures are probably larger still now. So the Government believe that it is now right to increase the limit.
The investor protection board has been consulted about this proposal, as required by the Building Societies Act. It endorses the change. It is likely that the new figure will remain in place for some while. But it will be kept under review as the pattern of investment by small investors varies. The relevant provisions of the Banking Act are intended to come into effect on 1st October this year. We propose therefore that this order take effect on the same day. I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 2nd July be approved. [1st Report from the Joint Committee—(Lord Brabazon of Tura.)
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, we are most grateful to the noble Lord for having given a short introduction to this order. We also thank him for indirectly paying a tribute to my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel, who in the course of the passage of the Banking Bill and also the Financial Services Bill urged precisely this course upon the noble Lord and was rebutted at the time.
We are grateful as Her Majesty's Opposition to play such a constructive part in persuading the Government to do the right thing and we are most grateful to the noble Lord. He mentioned that he had approval but he did not mention what the attitude of the building societies themselves was in this matter. Perhaps he could give us some information as to whether building societies are now satisfied with the position as they see it.
We on this side know perfectly well the pressures that have been placed upon building societies owing to the withdrawal of funds for investment in TSB and for investment in some of the newly privatised interests. We should like the noble Lord's assurance that in view of the massive withdrawals that have taken place for investment in those types of equities he is completely satisfied with the position as he has now presented it to the House. Otherwise, we on this side of the House completely support this order and trust your Lordships will approve it.
Lord Strabolgi: My Lords, I should like, if I may, to say a few words. I suppose that I must declare a past interest as I was until April of this year the chairman of a building society, although I have now
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retired as I am over the statutory age required by the Building Societies Act 1986.
In addition to what my noble friend Lord Bruce has said about the representations made by my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel, I also venture to remind your Lordships that I raised this matter, as the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, well remembers, during the passage of the Building Societies Act through this House. I thought at that time that it was inconsistent to have an amount as small as £10,000 when there is absolutely no ceiling now on the amount that investors can invest in building societies. It used until recently to be £30,000 and the ceiling was removed by the Government quite rightly in my view. I therefore thought that the amount of £10,000—in actual fact it is only £9,000, as the noble Lord has said—was very small and almost derisory. The noble Lord, on behalf of the Government, resisted that amendment and I should therefore like to know why what was not acceptable to the Government last year is now acceptable.
The noble Lord implied that it was because of the falling value of money, but on the other hand the Government are very proud to remind us continually, almost daily, that they have got inflation under control; so that argument does not seem to me to be valid. Therefore I should like to know why the noble Lord would not accept what I proposed and why he is putting it forward now.
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Bruce of Donington and Lord Strabolgi, for their general acceptance of the order laid before your Lordships this afternoon. In answer to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, I understand that building societies are content with the order and its contents. In regard to giving the noble Lord an assurance that withdrawals made from building societies to pay for applications for privatisation or indeed any other kind of share issue mean that the building societies remain in a position to fulfil their part of the order laid before your Lordships, that is a matter for the commission. I am sure that the commission will watch out for that but I think that in actual fact the amounts of money about which we are talking are relatively small in comparison with the overall figures for building society investments, especially when one takes into account the amount of money which goes back after unsuccessful applications have been taken account of.
The noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, and I well remember how on 3rd July last year he moved an amendment to raise the limit to £30,000. He has asked me a difficult question as to why we have changed our minds within just a little over 12 months. I did not say in my opening remarks that it was due to the falling value of money during the past 12 months. In fact, the value of money has fallen very little during the past 12 months but it was generally a pressure put upon us during the passing of the Banking Act and it is only natural that this limit should go hand in hand with that in the new Banking Act.
Perhaps the noble Lord had some influence in the fact that we changed our minds. As a Government we

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are flexible, as noble Lords will be aware. Therefore, I think that we have done the right thing. We have not gone quite so far as the noble Lord's amendment would have wished. That amendment of a year ago mentioned £30,000. However, we have met the noble Lord half way between £10,000 and £30,000. Therefore, I beg to move.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords, perhaps my noble friend will allow me to say that it is refreshing to have a Government who in answer to sound arguments are prepared to change. That is what I call good, sensible government.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Education (Assisted Places) (Amendment) Regulations 1987
3.30 p.m.
The Earl of Arran The Earl of Arran rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 25th June be approved [1st Report from the Joint Committee].
The noble Earl said: My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Hooper is currently attending a Commonwealth education Ministers' conference in Kenya, it is my pleasant task to explain to your Lordships the amending regulations governing the administration of the assisted places scheme.
They are on this occasion entirely concerned with good housekeeping and need not, I hope, detain your Lordships long. The assisted places scheme was established in 1981 for the purpose of widening the educational opportunities of able children from less well-off families. It provides their parents with assistance towards the fees of some of the best independent schools in the country. That assistance is on a sliding scale, depending on parental income, and the regulations before your Lordships are mainly concerned with annual revision of those scales. The amendments are therefore of a procedural rather than a susbtantial nature.
Regulation 1 is concerned with title and timing and does not, I judge, require detailed comment. Regulation 1(2) essentially allows school bursars to use parental income scales ahead of the start of term for determining a child's eligibility for the scheme and assessing fee remission questions for existing assisted pupils.
Regulation 2 increases the allowance for dependent relatives from £900 to £950. That is the amount which can be disregarded from gross income for the purposes of deciding the relevant income against which parental contributions towards fees are assessed. Regulation 3 arises from the Finance Act 1986 and brings up to date the references to the relevant income tax legislation in Schedule 1 to the principal assisted places regulations. Income applied on donations under a payroll deduction scheme and reinvested dividend income under personal equity plans are to be included in the computation of relevant income.
Regulation 4 provides for the updating of income scales used for assessing the amount of parents' contributions towards fees. The threshold at or below which parents pay nothing towards fees is raised from
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£6,806 to £6,972, with consequential rises in the other income bands.
The amendments which I have just described are essentially necessary revisions for the continued smooth running of this successful scheme. If any noble Lords require further clarification on any point, I shall do my best to answer them in closing. I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 25th June be approved. [1st Report from the Joint Committee.]—(The Earl of Arran.)
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to face the noble Earl across the Table on this first occasion. I am sure that both he and I would rather be with the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, in Nairobi than here.
I accept the assurances given by the noble Earl and am convinced by the arguments which he has put forward that this is merely a housekeeping amendment. We have seen this amendment for the last couple of years and it is necessary to update the figures in the assisted places scheme every year. We entirely accept that and we shall not oppose the order.
However, it would not be right to let the occasion pass without saying that we still feel that the assisted places scheme encourages educational apartheid rather than the best educational system for all the school children in our country. Had we had the opportunity, we should have been seeking, without any detriment to the interests of those already taking part in the scheme, to run it down gradually to a close.
It is also necessary to say that when the Education Bill comes before us, as we understand it, there will be proposals to extend the numbers of children to benefit from the assisted places scheme. That will be a move which we shall certainly oppose. In the meantime, these regulations can be seen as consequential on existing legislation and we do not oppose them.
Lord Ritchie of Dundee: My Lords, I should like to thank the Minister for his particularly clear exposition of the new regulations, to which we on these Benches also have no objection. I have the impression that the only times at which I have had the honour to speak on this subject in your Lordships' House previously have been during the dinner hour or at some other time when attendance was a bit sparse. As the stalls are now a bit fuller, I should like to say from these Benches that we also regret the necessity for this scheme.
We feel that it was the first step in the process which will be carried further in the impending Education Bill, whereby the Government, instead of saying to the lower 40 per cent. in our education service, "This is our education service; we are attempting to make it the best in the world. We hope that you will benefit from it and that it will fulfil your needs", are saying to the top 40 per cent., "We know our education service is not good enough for you and here are some ways of getting out of it". I feel that the fortunate few tend to benefit and the less fortunate

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many will suffer proportionately. The scheme also tends to accentuate and perpetuate differences of which we already have too many in this country.
Perhaps I may ask the Minister three questions. If he cannot answer them now, perhaps he will be kind enough to write to me. First, I should be interested to know the estimated number of assisted places for the forthcoming year both in terms of those offered and those taken up. Secondly, can the Minister tell me the ultimate maximum? Perhaps I should know that but I hope that he will be kind enough to confirm the figure for my information. Thirdly, is he able to tell me the costing per child when compared with what that child's education would cost in the state sector? Perhaps the noble Earl will be kind enough to answer in due course if not immediately.
Lord Aldington: My Lords, may I intervene briefly and declare a small interest? I am chairman of the Independent Schools Joint Council. I welcome the regulations, as did the Opposition spokesman, as procedural or housekeeping. I had hoped that we should not get involved in the greater and more philosophical argument about the value of the assisted places scheme to the education system of this country.
I do not propose to involve myself in that argument. However, I must be allowed to express regret that Opposition spokesmen, having said that this is a housekeeping change, then proceed to make statements which in my opinion are absolutely wrong. I shall reserve my position, if I may, and say that I propose to counter those statements when we come to consider the Education Bill.
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, I find it somewhat distressing, and it now appears to have become traditional, that noble Lords opposite criticise such regulations. I must express disappointment that they continue their opposition to this obviously successful and popular scheme, which is now in its sixth year.
There are now over 24,000 pupils benefiting from it. Out of those, approximately three-quarters come from families with incomes under £10,500 per annum. The scale for determining the amount of fee remission is intentionally a stiff one and only those families with incomes currently below £6,807 qualify for completely free places. Even so, in the current school year, nearly 40 per cent. of all assisted pupils are eligible for full remission of fees.
It is quite clear that the scheme is squarely benefiting those lower income families for whom it was originally devised. Furthermore, the scheme is not a means of supporting those families, albeit of lower income, whose children would have entered the independent sector without the aid of an assisted place. Under the principal regulations, participating schools must ensure that at least 60 per cent. of their assisted pupils attended state schools immediately before taking up their assisted place. In practice, and with very few exceptions, this requirement has been met and with a good deal to spare.
The assisted places scheme is plainly achieving its objective of opening up some of the best independent schools to children who almost certainly would not
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otherwise have been able to look to them as an option. That can only be to their and this nation's advantage.
As regards the three questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, the estimated number of places is between 24,000 and 25,000; the estimated maximum is 35,000 places; and the cost per child is £1,759. I hope that I have answered the points which have been raised. If, when I have studied Hansard, I find that I have missed any, I trust noble Lords will allow me to write to them with the answer.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Iran-Iraq Conflict
3.42 p.m.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Glenarthur): My Lords, with the leave of the House I shall now repeat a Statement about yesterday's Security Council Resolution No. 598 on the Iran-Iraq conflict which is being made in another place by my right honourable and learned friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary. The Statement is as follows:
"My attendance at yesterday's Security Council meeting, together with six other Foreign Ministers, underlines the importance which we attach to this resolution: as well as representing a united approach by the five permanent members it owes much to British initiative, and is the culmination of many months' work.
"This resolution, which was passed unanimously by the council, is mandatory, and demands an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of forces to internationally recognised boundaries without delay. It is carefully balanced and favours neither of the parties more than the other. Both should be able to accept it. In the event of non-compliance the council will meet to discuss possible enforcement measures.
"The Secretary-General will have a major role in the implementation of the resolution and with bringing the parties to a negotiated settlement of the conflict. This mandatory resolution reflects the gravity with which the whole international community views the continuing conflict between Iran and Iraq and the consequent threat to stability and peace. The resolution is a determined attempt to tackle the underlying causes of tension in the region.
"Attacks on shipping are at present the most dangerous symptom of that tension. I made clear in yesterday's Security Council debate the urgent need not only for a settlement of the conflict as a whole, but also for a halt to attacks on shipping in the Gulf. It is vital to uphold the principle of freedom of navigation, and the Armilla patrol continues to play its part by providing protection for British vessels.
"The world has never been more united in seeking an end to this bloody and senseless conflict. The international community yesterday made plain to the parties that it looks for a comprehensive, just and honourable settlement of the dispute

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through negotiation and diplomacy rather than by force of arms. The UN resolution offers both parties the right way forward. I am sure the whole House will join me in urging them to seize that opportunity"
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord for repeating the Statement. We welcome the initiative of the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and the part he played in the discussions in the Security Council. The Iran-Iraq war has continued for almost seven years, and we understand that about a million lives have been lost during those years. Therefore, we welcome most warmly any initiative which attempts to resolve this dangerous situation and to end this cruel and pointless war.
Can the noble Lord say that although the resolution of the United Nations has been accepted by Iraq, Iran has not yet agreed to it? The Foreign Secretary is quoted in The Times this morning as saying that if either side does not agree, then,
"this Council will use all its powers under the Charter to make the resolution effective".
Can the noble Lord clarify that point? What sanctions does the council consider appropriate and effective? It may be a premature question and perhaps we may have to come back to it later. However, if the noble Lord can say anything now we would be grateful.
The resolution which has been agreed by the Security Council calls upon all states to exercise the utmost restraint and to refrain from any act which may lead to further escalation. Do the Government believe that the decision of the United States to re-flag Kuwaiti ships is affected by this part of the resolution? Do the Government further believe that the continued existence of the Iranian procurement office in London is compatible with that part of the resolution? That is a matter about which we have had a good deal of doubt for a long time, as the noble Lord knows. However, in the present critical position, perhaps further thought should be given to the matter.
As regards the reference to attacks on shipping, can the Minister say how many British protection vessels are now deployed in the Gulf'? Do the Government have any plans to increase that number? What ships will be entitled specifically to protection by British vessels?
Finally, the Gulf war has global implications as the House knows. The Iraq attack on USS "Stark", Irangate, the beating up of Edwin Chaplin and the cold relationship between France and Iran at the moment are all examples of what is a very dangerous situation. I agree that the resolution is balanced and fair. I am glad it is mandatory. As the Statement said, it provides an honourable solution which both these countries should be prepared to accept forthwith.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, on these Benches, we associate ourselves with the words of the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, in congratulating the Foreign Secretary on his part in obtaining the resolution, and
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also the British permanent representative and his staff in New York. It has been a long haul and it has been well done. It is clearly for the good of the world.
I have one question to add to those put by the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, which I ask out of real puzzlement and not in a critical way. Can the Government comment on the flagging of the Kuwaiti tankers? Is the Soviet proposal to lend tankers to Kuwait to be put under the Kuwaiti flag still going forward? Also, what is the meaning of the American plan, which is now in operation, to put Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag?
Why has the United States chosen to send the tankers in the following order; first, the 400,000 tonne-plus "Bridgeton", which is one of the biggest ships in the world, and, consequently, if lost in an attack by the other side will create one of the biggest fusses in the world; and secondly, a much smaller liquid natural gas carrier which, if hit, would result in the biggest possible explosion in the world possibly releasing a cloud of unexploded natural gas and constituting one of the major uncontrolled hazards imaginable in the world? What is the state of play of the Soviet plan and what is the meaning of the American plan? In the opinion of Her Majesty's Government how do the answers to those two questions reflect upon the likely success of this admirable resolution?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Cledwyn and Lord Kennet, for expressing their satisfaction with the achievement yesterday in New York. I am also grateful for the welcome they have given to the Statement of my right honourable and learned friend.
The noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, asked about acceptance of the resolution by Iran in particular. It is true that the Iranian Government have not yet accepted and we urge them to comply with it. The noble Lord asked about enforcement measures. We must first hope that they will not be required. There are various alternatives which can be used and an arms embargo is perhaps the most obvious and relevant measure in this case. I doubt whether other measures would be generally acceptable. The details remain to be carefully discussed, but at the moment we have to see whether the resolution will be adopted by Iran. Clearly it is a little early to say at the moment. There are a number of different possibilities for the enforcement measure which the noble Lord is thinking about.
As for reflagging, that is basically a commercial matter and does not affect us in quite the same way as perhaps the possibilities of enforcement measures. The changes which have been made in flagging are, I understand, commercial.
As regards the Iranian military procurement office in London, I am aware that allegations have been made concerning its activities. There have been various rumours and accusations of breaches of United Kingdom law. These have been investigated but they have not been substantiated. Any evidence of illegal activity will be investigated most thoroughly by the appropriate authorities. I cannot usefully add to the facts which in the past have been made plain to your Lordships by my noble friend Lady Young.

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As for the Armilla patrol, at present it consists of three vessels, as I explained on an earlier occasion. It is in the area to offer reassurance and help to British ships in an emergency. We keep the operations of the patrol under constant review in the light of changing circumstances. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Defence said last November that the patrol would be spending more time in the Gulf. In January of this year it was deemed necessary temporarily to deploy the third warship to the area to assist or substitute for Armilla ships as necessary.
The noble Lord, Lord Kennet, raised a number of different questions associated with reflagging. He also asked for explanations about why the United States had chosen to send in vessels in a particular order or including a specific type of vessel. Those are matters for the United States to answer and not for me. In respect of flagging, while I understand the concerns raised, they are largely matters for commercial decision and not for the Government. In conclusion, I am grateful to both noble Lords for the welcome they gave to the resolution achieved in New York yesterday.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that this is a superb resolution? It is rather late in coming from the United Nations, but another good aspect is that for once the Security Council seems to have achieved a new-found unity and we in this Chamber most certainly should put on record that a magnificent speech was made by Sir Geoffrey Howe. I think it had a colossal effect on the thinking of the Security Council and we should acknowledge that.
What now is the possible danger? Is the Minister able to give some indication of the probability that the Iranian Government will step up their hostility towards Iraq? They might now use all kinds of obscene weapons and endeavour to wipe out the Iraqi nation, because they can compel even children to go to war for absurd reasons.
Despite this remarkable resolution and the tremendous contribution made by Sir Geoffrey Howe, can the Minister say that the Government are aware that other action may have to be contemplated not only if Iran does not agree with the United Nations resolution but, indeed, if it undertakes some form of action in direct opposition to it?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his welcome of my right honourable and learned friend's speech yesterday at the United Nations. The possibility of Iran either not accepting the resolution or, indeed, as the noble Lord suggested, perhaps escalating the conflict in some other way, is hypothetical. The important point surely, and our first priority, as I believe the noble Lord will agree, is to persuade the two sides—Iran and Iraq—to accept, or at least not to reject, the resolution. I am certain that the message which goes out from all in your Lordships' House is that both sides should comply with it at once.
Lord Gladwyn: My Lords, as one of the few surviving drafters of the Charter of the United Nations I need hardly say that I greatly welcome this
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possibly unique occasion on which the charter is apparently, largely owing to the splendid efforts of the Foreign Secretary, being applied in accordance with the original intention.
The present resolution, welcome thought it is, is presumably only a first move, or it may only be a first move. It seems doubtful, to say the least, whether it will be accepted by both sides and notably by the Iranians. Let us hope that it will be, but it seems doubtful.
What will be really important, and indeed epoch making, is if it is then followed by actual provisions for an enforceable prohibition of arms supplies to both sides. If such a resolution receives the votes of the five permanent members and a few others— there is no need for unanimity under the charter—then it will become legally binding on all members of the United Nations. In that event of course it will be the duty of the Security Council to take all means, including presumably first of all a blockade, to see that it is abided by.
I suggest that rather than in effect taking what might be the equivalent of enforcement measures on their own, the United States would be well advised, if possible, to wait and see, first of all, whether the present resolution is complied with by both sides and, if not, whether another resolution is passed on the enforcement issue. If it is passed we shall presumably do our bit to help the enforcement. If it is not passed and the present resolution is rejected, it is presumably open to all states to protect their vessels passing through the Gulf to the extent to which they are capable of so doing.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I think the noble Lord will agree that the move to enforcement, if that proves necessary, must he very carefully thought through and it must be prepared. These are matters which will have to be discussed among the other permanent members. I feel that neither side in this conflict can expect to flout for long the wishes of the international community, as expressed by the Security Council, without serious repercussions. As I said in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, we have to see what happens. An arms embargo is the most obvious measure. I note what the noble Lord said about protection of vessels.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: My Lords, is it not particularly gratifying that the resolution was both unanimous and mandatory? Should we not be making a mistake if we were to anticipate the possible reaction of either of the two combatant powers to its mandatory character? Should we not be making a mistake also to pursue hypothetical questions about the protection of ships in the Gulf, which would become unnecessary if both parties accepted the resolution?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I think that my noble and learned friend is quite right. He highlights two very important words, "mandatory" and "unanimous". I quite agree with what he says.
Lord Hankey: My Lords, this is an extraordinarily satisfactory development in what is a most dangerous

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situation. Can the Government give us any indication of how opinions can be brought to bear on the Iranian Government? So few of the great powers seem to have any effective means of talking to the Iranians now. Do the Government know how the Secretary-General of the United Nations is proposing to develop the resolution, because presumably he could go back to talk to President Khomeini if he was impressed by anything—about which one is not sure?
Finally, may I ask whether the Government agree that the rather quiet means by which the British have been convoying their ships seems not to have been very effective? Would it not have paid us to adopt a higher profile, as the Americans are now doing? If we had done that, might it not have discouraged the extremely dangerous development of the situation in the Persian Gulf?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I do not think that it is wise to consider hypothetical questions about how we might or might not have approached the task of the Armilla patrol in setting about its work over the last months. I am not sure that that is helpful. The important point is that the Gulf must be free for shipping of all kinds.
So far as monitorng compliance with the new resolution, the United Nations Secretary-General is charged to send observer teams, and he will be discussing the modalities of that with Iran and Iraq. Those teams, as I understand it, could be dispatched at very short notice. It is up to the Security Council on receipt of a report from the United Nations Secretary-General to determine whether the resolution is being complied with.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, may I put a question to the Minister about the British naval vessels in the Gulf? It was announced yesterday that these ships had been authorised to defend themselves if attacked. As a former naval officer I find that a most extraordinary thing to say. Surely the Royal Navy does not need any such authority to defend itself if attacked. Can the noble Lord give any further indication of the instructions to the captains of these vessels?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, the noble Lord is referring to what is known as the rules of engagement. We do not discuss these in detail, so I am afraid that I cannot tell him what he wants to know.

Meat and Livestock Commission Levy Scheme (Confirmation) Order 1987
4.5 p.m.
Lord Hesketh Lord Hesketh rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 27th April be approved [19th Report from the Joint Committee].
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this scheme is presented in accordance with the requirements of Section 13 of the Agriculture Act 1967, as amended by the Agriculture Acts of 1970 and 1986. The order replaces the existing levy scheme set out in the
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schedule to the Meat and Livestock Commission Levy Scheme (Confirmation) Order 1979 and varied in 1981. It provides for a new scheme, which has two features. First, the current joint levy, to which both producers and slaughterers equally contribute, is retained. This joint levy raises money to meet the MLC's general expenses just as in the past. Secondly, the order introduces a new levy to fund species promotion. This will be payable by producers alone. In both instances the levy scheme stipulates the maximum amount that can be charged. However, the actual amounts within these maxima will continue to be determined by the MLC in consultation with the appropriate representatives of the industry.
Your Lordships may find it useful to recall the background to the development of this new promotional levy, sometimes called the "bolt-on" levy. Over the years there has been a growing awareness within all sectors of the British meat and livestock industry that production and marketing must be more fully integrated and that marketing requirements must be explored and assessed and production systems geared to meet consumer demand if meat promotion is to be really effective. Nevertheless, meat promotion is a difficult area. It is an area where there are differing views on the best mix of promotional activities and how they should be funded. This was why the MLC set up an independent review team in 1984 to review the promotion of British meat.
The resulting Webb Report proposed that the existing levies should continue to be used to support the MLC's general activities and its campaigns to promote the positive image of meat. Funding for this should remain shared equally between producers and the meat trade. But the report also recommended that producers alone should be enabled to contribute, through a new and additional statutory levy element, for theme and species promotion. This is the "bolt-on" levy. The conclusions of the Webb Report were generally accepted by the industry, and last year the Government brought forward legislation in the Agriculture Act 1986 to provide the necessary framework to permit the new element in the levy to be raised. This too was widely welcomed by the House.
The Commission's draft scheme would give effect to the Webb recommendation on species promotion. The proposed species promotion levy has been the subject of very wide consultation with the industry over recent months. Organisations representing the prospective levy payers welcome it. Indeed they are anxious for funds to be raised as soon as possible so that the promotion councils established for the different species of meat can press ahead with enhanced promotion campaigns for beef, lamb and pork this year.
The draft scheme also retains the existing maxima for jointly funded levy. The Commission announced last August that the actual rates for general levy would not be increased in the current financial year so as to minimise the increased burden on livestock producers. In fact the MLC has not raised general levy rates since 1983/84, despite inflation, and has maintained its level of activity by increasing efficiency.
I am pleased to pay tribute to the Commission's responsible and professional approach in successfully presenting the case for meat and meat products as part of a balanced and healthy diet. The MLC has worked co-operatively and successfully with health authorities to get over the message that meat continues to be an excellent source of protein, vitamins and minerals. The Commission's response to the Webb Report, its implementation of a new marketing strategy and the reorganising of its meat promotion effort have all been commendable and importantly have been carried forward with a strong measure of support from producer organisations, whose members will be paying the new levy. I understand they are keen that collection for the new levy should start as soon as possible—a strong endorsement. Clearly the present order will help the MLC to continue its valuable work on meat promotion and much else besides. I ask your Lordships to support the Motion. I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 27th April be approved. [19th Report from the Joint Committee] —(Lord Hesketh.)
4.9 p.m.
Lord Gallacher: My Lords, I first thank the noble Lord for introducing so clearly the details of the order. In one respect, as he says, it breaks new ground; namely, the introduction of the species promotion levy. It was gratifying to hear that producers apparently are in great haste to see the levy introduced and, indeed, to pay it. That is a novel situation in the meat trade so far as I am concerned. I hope that the producers will be satisfied with the outcome of the expenditure for which the levy now provides maximum rates in respect of cattle, sheep and pigs.
I noted that the maxima vary over the general expenses levy in certain respects. No doubt there are good reasons why the cattle species promotion levy should be 40p more, the sheep levy 4p less and the pig levy remain the same. I shall not ask the Minister to tell us now why all these things are as they are but in due season he might care to let me know.
Perhaps we may whether, in introducing this new form of generic advertising, which I think is what it is, there will he the maximum co-operation between the Meat and Livestock Commission and the producer for which it is acting as well as the Food from Britain organisation. One has felt for a long time that much of what is being done in this area; if properly co-ordinated, could at the end of the day serve better the needs of producers and the consumer.
I should like to raise one further point with the Minister. Although the general expenses levy is not being increased—and, as he has said in his remarks, it has been held at 1983–84 levels—the collection of the levy falls in the main on slaughterers acting as agents on behalf of the Meat and Livestock Commission but with an obligation both to collect and account for the money. Some years ago the Meat and Livestock Commission attempted rationalisation of slaughterhouse capacity in England and Wales which was felt at that time to be
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excessive. There were indeed a number of small slaughterhouses operating at less than capacity. It tabled as a basis for discussion and after study three schemes for the industry to consider. I wonder whether the Minister could tell us if anything positive emanated from that initiative. One would not expect to have a reply to such a question without notice this afternoon but perhaps at some future time he might care to let me know. We welcome the levy and again thank the Minister for the manner in which he introduced it.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, we on these Benches would like to welcome the order. I should like to pay tribute to the work of the Meat and Livestock Commission in general which I think is of great value. Only this morning before I left home the Minister will be pleased to hear that I was reading some of the costings of the schemes for grazing cattle. I shall be going home after we rise to read the general work on the pig industry. This is all very important and is much appreciated by farming as a whole.
I welcome the new order and the new payment and will be very happy to pay it. However, I have always been a little puzzled about why the producers should pay the whole of the promotional levy. Perhaps the Minister can explain a little further why the manufacturing and retailing industry, which takes more out of the public by way of cash than does the primary producer, is unwilling to pay its share or has been excused from paying its share. I know that producers generally have welcomed the order but they thought when it was being discussed that perhaps the trade—manufacturing and retail—might well pay its share. Perhaps the Minister could tell us why it is not so doing.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, the Meat and Livestock Commission has a wide brief. At the centre is the furtherance of the British livestock and livestock products industry. The noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshic, asked why more people were not contributing to the new promotional levy. It would probably be quite difficult to persuade the retailers to engage in this and the vast majority of producers are in agreement that we want to get the marketing of the product improved as fast as possible.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, as I said to the Minister, in the case of the normal levy there is no difficulty in collecting it from both sides.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie knows, this levy is in addition to the normal levy. However, it has been welcomed and I hope that we shall see the benefits of it sooner rather than later.
The noble Lord, Lord Gallacher, referred to the collection of the levy by slaughterers. The MLC has several times considered appropriate means of collecting the levy but has always come back to the levy at slaughter point as the most effective and practical way. I am sure that it will continue to investigate it because, as with any levy, those who have to collect it do tend to complain and feel that others could also do it.

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I was grateful that both sides of the House welcomed this move and I hope it will be seen as a positive one for the industry as a whole. It is clear that the producer organisations attach considerable importance to the new levy in their efforts to promote British meat. I feel sure that the MLC can co-ordinate these efforts to good effect, working through the promotion councils it has set up. I ask your Lordships to support the Motion.
Lord Rugby: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down perhaps I may ask him one question. If the levy is to be used for the purposes of promoting the livestock products, especially beef, could he draw the attention of those who are drawing the levy to the fact that the British services, especially the Navy, which obtains Uruguayan beef, utilise and are provisioned by foreign beef? Surely it is about time the commission carried out its task and promoted British products for the services of this country.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I shall most certainly draw this to the attention of my right honourable friend.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Supplementary Benefit (Requirements and Resources) Amendment Regulations 1987
4.15 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Lord Skelmersdale)The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Lord Skelmersdale) rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 9th July be approved [1st Report from the Joint Committee]
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the first Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I trust that it will also be for the convenience of the House if I speak at the same time to the second Motion in my name.
The draft regulations order put into effect amendments to the supplementary benefit regulations dealing with the payment of benefit to people in residential care and nursing homes. It also uprates the amount of the student grant that can be disregarded in respect of books and equipment. We are always being told that not enough money is spent on student books, and this is a practical way to ease the problem.
The draft regulations are a lot more complicated and deal principally with the payment of supplementary benefit to people in small residential care homes; that is, homes with three or fewer residents which cannot register with a local authority. People living in these homes can get supplementary benefit up to the same limits as registered residential care homes. The intention was that this should only happen where the care given was clearly equivalent to that given in a registered home and thus the costs of the home justified higher benefit levels. However, there is doubt as to whether the current regulations actually achieve this aim. There has also been widespread concern that the present benefit provisions positively encourage the setting up of small homes regardless of the services provided.
The amendments in these draft regulations restore the original policy intention. The new definition, at regulation 2(b), takes the provision of staff of a reasonable calibre as a proxy for additional costs. The higher limit will apply where the home provides personal care and there are at least two people with relevant experience employed in providing that care. At least one of those people must be available throughout the working day and one must be on call throughout the night to care for residents. Residents must also have free access to the home at all times.
This new definition should ensure that rates of benefit bear a defensible relationship with costs. It should also be simpler to administer than the present provisions. Specifying the requirements for the higher limit provides a system which will be clearer for adjudication officers who will have sharply defined parameters within which to work, claimants who will know what help they can expect and those providing care for whom the position will be much clearer.
Your Lordships will have observed that a few claimants may already be receiving higher rates of benefit which would be considered inappropriate under the new provisions. Regulation 3 protects their position. Their benefit will remain unchanged until there is a relevant change in their circumstances.
The amendment regulations also include, at Regulation 2(a), a new definition of a "nursing home". This is a technical amendment to make it clear that references to nursing homes in the supplementary benefit requirements regulations are to registered homes.
Finally, on the amendment regulations I should mention Regulation 4 which deals with a quite different aspect of supplementary benefit. Regulation 4 reflects the increased rates of student grants for the academic year 1987–88. Within the new rates of grant there is an increased allocation for books and equipment. The supplementary benefit regulations provide a specific disregard for this element of the student grant and the purpose of this regulation is to uprate that disregard to the new level.
I turn now to the Pensioners' Lump Sum Payments Order, which provides for the payment of the £10 Christmas bonus. It provides for the payment of a non-taxable Christmas bonus of £10 in the week commencing 7th December to retirement pensioners and to recipients of the other qualifying benefits specified on the Pensioners' Payments and Social Security Act 1979.
As we look forward to our summer holidays it must inevitably strike your Lordships as inappropriate that the House should be called upon to debate the payment of a Christmas bonus some six months in advance. I am pleased therefore to be able to remind the House that this is in fact the last time that such a debate will be necessary. From next year payment of the bonus will be made automatically as one of the very welcome administrative simplifications resulting from the Social Security Act 1986.
I firmly believe that pensioners budgeting for Christmas need the assurance of that contribution to their expenses which this payment provides. That is

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why we have paid the bonus every year we have been in office, why we gave pensioners statutory entitlement in 1979 not taking it away on a temporary basis when economic circumstances dictate as they did in 1975 and 1976 and why, as I mentioned before, we have now made receipt of the bonus an automatic right in primary legislation.
I am proud that this year we are paying the bonus to a record number of pensioners at an estimated cost of around £114 million. I accept that this is only a small part of the £22 billion that pensioners receive in benefit. This is right and proper, for what pensioners need most is day-to-day support. That we are clearly giving them, not just through the social security system but through protecting that part of pensioners' incomes which they have built up independently. Pensioners who have set aside money for their retirement, either through occupational or private pensions schemes or in the form of savings, can now enjoy the benefits of this foresight without fear of the effects of inflation. The result, as I hardly need remind the House, has been a substantial increase in pensioners' incomes. Between 1979 and 1985 their average weekly net income from all sources rose by almost a fifth in real terms. These are of course average figures and there are still some pensioners less well-off than we should like to see.
The result of this is that pensioners as a group have seen their living standards rise over twice as fast of those of the population as a whole. That is what matters to pensioners and that is what will enable them to save for a comfortable and happy Christmas. The order before the House today provides a worthwhile contribution towards that end and I commend it, together with the draft Supplementary Benefit Amendment Regulations, to the House.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 9th July be approved. [1st Report from the Joint Committee.]—[Lord Skelmersdale.]
Baroness Jeger: My Lords, we are glad to welcome these regulations in principle. Some months ago we raised the question in your Lordships' House about more control being needed in small homes with four or fewer people. It might seem a bit churlish, having asked for these controls to be brought in, to ask the noble Lord a few questions, but if we do not get the details right today we shall be laying up difficulties for the people who will have to implement what the Minister agrees are very complicated rules.
We need to know whether in homes with fewer than four persons that number could go down to three, two or one. Moreover could one put up one's decrepit old parents in one's house and call that a home within the terms of these regulations? In paragraph 2 it is stated:
"Those responsible persons [must] have at least one year's relevant experience in caring for persons in need of the category of personal care for which the establishment provides such care".
I simply cannot understand what that means. Does it mean that in one of these small homes there are a diversity of disabilities? One person might be blind, another may have arthritis, another may have senile
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dementia and another might be suffering from some other disability. How can we define care for persons,
"in need of the category of personal care"?
Does it mean that these small homes must take only one kind of disability? That would cause difficulties and would undo some of the intentions of the regulations.
Sub-paragraph (iii), to which the Minister referred, provides:
"at least one responsible person is available throughout the day".
Does that mean that the same person has to be available throughout the day, because that might involve longer hours than would be considered desirable? I ask this question particularly because in the next paragraph, (iv), it states:
"throughout the night, at least one responsible person is on call".
Is it not meant in sub-paragraph (iii) that throughout the day at least one person should be on duty? There is no inference that it should be the same person. If the noble Lord agrees with me, then I suggest that sub-paragraph (iii) should read "throughout the day". I know these are details but I am thinking of the people working in the homes who will want to know about their working conditions.
In paragraph 3 I notice that the transitional provisions, which we all welcome, are to be applied where the adjudication officer had made the decision before 27th July. I must ask what happens if a person had applied before 27th July, but because of delays—we know that there have been all sorts of staff problems in overworked social security offices—the decision was not reached until after 27th July. Will there not then be some unfairness to the persons concerned. Why or how are all these regulations to be implemented? I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that there will be considerable increases in staff especially for adjudication officers.
We welcome the slight improvement to the student disregard. I am curious as to how the figure of £210 was arrived at as an increase over £187. Was it a question of inflation or does it take into account the fact that the price of books has increased vastly more than the general cost of living index? Perhaps while we are on this point the Minister can give us some information about student support. The fifth report of the Social Security Advisory Committee is anxious that student support should be taken out of social security. A House of Commons Select Committee on Education, Science and Art, said in its report last December (at paragraph 24):
"In our view it is right that the Government should seek to remove student support from the social security system".
I understand that the Secretary of State for Education is taking a long look at the whole subject of financial support for students. I wonder whether the Minister can tell us how that study is progressing. I should be happy if student support could be totally separated from social security because at the moment it causes confusion, a double lot of work in two departments and is not really the way to go about these things.
I shall be very short in my remarks on the pensioners' lump sum payments, though I appreciate that the Minister had to use the opportunity for his

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party political comments. I shall be happy only when all our old people are living in such comfort and well-being the whole year round that they do not have to depend on a Santa Claus hand-out at Christmas.
4.30 p.m.
Lord Banks: My Lords, I too should like to join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, for his explanation of these regulations and this order. Dealing with the regulations first, Regulation 4 relating to students is immediately acceptable, although whether or not the revised disregard is adequate is another matter. It is related to the general question of the adequacy of students' grant which falls rather outside the scope of our debate this afternoon.
It could be argued that the object of Regulation 2 is to effect a reduction in spending. The fact that the transitional protection is provided for those residents currently in small care residential homes which will no longer meet the definition of such a home supports the view that a cut, however small, is being made for the future. Have the Government any estimate of the numbers likely to be affected and in the long run the sum likely to be saved?
Of course the Government say that standards are being tightened and control is being extended and we can only welcome that intention most warmly. However, we are bound to ask whether penalising claimants is the fairest way to control institutions. Is it not perhaps better to place any necessary regulations directly on the institutions, requiring them to maintain certain standards, rather than to penalise a claimant who finds himself being cared for in an institution which does not reach the required standard? Finally on this question, can the noble Lord say when the report of the DHSS local government working party, chaired by Joan Firth, is to be published?
Turning to the Pensioners' Lump Sum Payments Order, as the noble Lord explained to us, that provides for the payment this year of the £10 Christmas bonus, and of course we do not oppose that. However, we are bound to repeat our complaint, which has been voiced many times, that the Government are allowing the value of the bonus to decline each year. If particular social security benefits are thought by the Government to be necessary, they should be index-linked, or convincing reasons should be advanced why a lower real value of benefit is now appropriate. We have seen this gradual decline happen with other benefits, and 1 think particularly of the death grant. The Government allow the benefit to decline and then they say that it is not worth continuing it and that it would cost too much to restore it to its original value.
In the recent Alliance election manifesto we proposed a double pension in the first week of December, which of course at current rates would mean that a single person would receive £39.50 and a married couple £63.35. We reckoned that the net cost of that would be £268 million. Of course that is an item in a budget of over £40 billion. It was part of the package of improvements to social security that we
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put forward and that we intended to pay for in part by restricting mortgage interest relief to the standard rate, and replacing the personal allowances against income for tax purposes by an allowance against tax which would have been worth the same at all levels of income tax.
If the pensioners' Christmas bonus is to be continued into the future, then some form of indexation will surely be necessary. The noble Lord spoke about the position of pensioners generally and indicated that it had improved over recent years, which was partly due to the fact that in the early days of the Government there was a link with earnings. Now the Government have broken that link with earnings and it is a fact, is it not, that earnings are increasing faster than prices? Is it not also a fact that the Government's future estimates are all worked out on the assumption that that situation will continue? If that situation does continue, will not the position of pensioners deteriorate and any advantage that there may have been be wiped out?
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, I am grateful both to the noble Baroness and to the noble Lord for their general welcome of this order. Clearly there are some detailed questions about which I shall do my best to talk. Equally clearly there are some points which will need a second look, especially those of the noble Lord, Lord Banks, who of course is an acknowledged expert in this particular subject whereas I, equally clearly, am not.
We have had an interesting debate and a large number of points have been raised. The provisions of the regulations dealing with very small homes represent a necessary tightening up of the present arrangements. They ensure that higher benefit limits will apply only where the level of provision and the costs of the home would justify those higher levels.
The noble Lord, Lord Banks, asked me whether a better way of controlling these homes would be through the registration system rather than through, as he suggested we were doing, the social security system. In fact we do indeed control them through registration which is why this order is only concerned with the very small homes: the ones to which the noble Baroness, Lady Jeger, referred as those with one, two or three persons. I agreed very much with her implied comment on the social mix that is needed. I do not approve of homes being specialised because the residents happen to have arteriosclerosis, or whatever particular disease it happens to be. That probably is my answer to her question on paragraph 2(f)(ii). So far as what "throughout the day" and "on duty at night" mean, they mean that there must be someone available in the flesh, as it were, during the day but during the night they are allowed to be asleep as long as they are on call and can respond to whatever emergencies are thrown up.
The noble Baroness also asked what "relevant experience" meant for staff in very small homes. This will, as it is now, be a decision for the relevant adjudication officer. The chief adjudication officer will be advising that "relevant experience" should be regarded as experience in caring for the category or categories of persons for whom the home provides accommodation. These may be found in the same person or possibly not, but it will be for the relevant

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adjudication officer to make that decision. In reaching it he, or she, may seek the opinion of the local social services authority or other professional bodies. The regulations specifically exclude a close relative from hoarder status, so that is the answer to the noble Baroness's question about a decrepit relative. Equally a claimant must be a boarder before he, or she, can receive residential care rates.
I do not think that this is the moment to get into a tremendous educational-financial debate, but I take the points that have been made about the review of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science of the financial benefits for students. As to how far that has gone I am afraid that I cannot at this moment advise the House.
The noble Lord, Lord Banks, asked about the adequacy of the disregard for students. Clearly, it is not the be-all and end-all of the matter, and indeed in my opening speech I did not claim that it was. I said that this is a practical way to ease the problem. I readily admit that it will be nice to go further when circumstances and financial arrangements allow.
Not surprisingly, both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord turned to the lump sum payment order and the Christmas bonus. I accept that the value of the bonus has fallen since its introduction. That is because successive governments have put resources where, as the noble Baroness and I agree, they are most needed —into improving weekly benefits and services for elderly people. An increase of £1 in the Christmas bonus, or in any other payment being made to the same number of people, would cost £11 million, and restoration would cost £400 million at today's prices.
The noble Lord, Lord Banks, referred to the Alliance manifesto. At the time I noted it with interest, especially the promise to pay a week's double pension at Christmas. However, I had difficulty in understanding it as it was phrased. The noble Lord's comments will help me understand it once I have taken the matter on board.
The great problem is that any lump sum payment will be made indiscriminately, whether people need it or not. I agree that it is equally welcome to both groups, but there is a certain indiscrimination which I do not find attractive. As regards the linking of basic pension increases to earnings, the present Administration came to office with a commitment to increase pensions in line with the movement in prices. This has been done despite the fact that pensions are being paid to many more pensioners than in 1978. However, I cannot emphasise too strongly that pensioners' living standards cannot be mentioned in terms of the basic pension alone; a point which I made fairly strongly in my opening speech.
Last, but by no means least, I was asked whether the draft regulations represented a cut. As far as I am able to establish, the answer to that question is no, but if I am wrong I shall certainly write to the noble Lord, Lord Banks, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Jeger. My Lords, I beg to move.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Pensioners' Lump Sum Payments Order 1987
4.43 p.m.
Lord Skelmersdale Lord Skelmersdale rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 7th July be approved [1st Report from the Joint Committee].
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the second Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 7th July be approved. [1st Report from the Joint Committee]—(Lord Skelmersdale]
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Inner Urban Areas
4.44 p.m.
Lord Dean of Beswick Lord Dean of Beswick rose to ask Her Majesty's Government how they propose to deal with the deteriorating situation in inner urban areas.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I should first like to explain briefly why I am putting this Question to the Secretary of State. I should also like to offer the noble Lord my belated congratulations on appointment to his new office. With no sense of sarcasm, I wish him success in that office, because it is an onerous and heavy burden. A difficult problem faces us as a nation. The noble Lord has the job of dealing with it.
We have just come through a general election which the Secretary of State's party won quite convincingly. Nevertheless, that carries with it serious responsibilities. The Government's manifesto, the words of the Prime Minister, the gracious Speech and subsequently the strong support in a completely non-political sense of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, encapsulate the concern of all about this difficult problem.
Noble Lords will be aware that over the past two years this and related subjects have been dealt with in depth in this House; more so than in another place. We had a first-class debate nearly two years ago on the report of the Duke of Edinburgh's commission on housing when contributions were made from all parts of your Lordships' House. The Motion was moved eloquently and with great feeling by the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm whose name I am glad to see on the list of speakers today. That was followed in February by the debate led by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, in relation to the publication Faith in the City, the Runcie Report.
Both those reports homed in on the problem with which we are now concerned. There was a great deal of agreement on what ought to be done. I do not want to go through the list of figures as regards the financial requirements required to deal with the problem. The figures have been printed and quoted over and over again. Because of the time factor—there is another Unstarred Question on the Order Paper—I do not think that there is any point in repeating the exercise. I shall refer to one matter towards the end of my remarks but I shall be quite brief.
Although the Question refers only to the inner cities, one cannot deal with an inner city problem on its own in a city. I take the view that the inner city is the pulse, the engine-room, of that city. I believe as do the Government—and I think that if my party had won the election we should have had to accept the fact—that the private sector has a considerable role to play in the refurbishment of the inner cities. I have been talking to a number of people about this subject. I gain the impression, as I have said before in your Lordships' House, that the Government may have to weigh their input much higher than that of the private sector. I repeat that I am now talking about the inner cities and not the rest of the cities.
I was surprised when I saw quotes in the Sunday Times, as I am sure was the Secretary of State at about the time of his appointment, stating that the Government were hoping to attract £4 of private sector money for every pound that they spent. I thought that that figure was optimistic; but on examination I found it not to be so and that the private sector has exceeded that input.
That is the inner city problem. I am a resident of a large city. I was brought up in another large city which has a tighter knit community. I visit my home city now and again and I do not like what I see. The heart is dying and there is talk of renewing it. However, there is a form of arterio-sclerosis spreading outwards. I left Manchester in 1982. I lived in a nice area about three-and-a-half to four miles from the centre, on the border of Denton. When I now visit that area, which is not very often, I can see deterioration setting in. Unless the Government take full cognisance of this disease, which is spreading outwards, we shall be swamped by it. I believe that it must be done concurrently with the issue about which we are talking today.
How is the problem to be tackled? I believe that it would be fatal if the Government attempted to impose a solution on local authorities. I think they certainly ought to ask the local authorities to participate and give them the chance to do so. It may well be that local authorities who were foolish enough to be obstructive have to be bypassed but I urge the Government, before it comes to that, to take local authorities into their confidence, discuss matters with them and give them a chance to make an input into their own situation. I am sure the Secretary of State is aware that although the docklands redevelopment and refurbishment scheme has been a success, it has not been free from substantial criticism by the people who traditionally lived in that area. They have complained about being given no part in decision-making, of being bypassed and of being priced out of the areas where historically they have lived for a very long time.
Having said that, obviously one of the largest problems in the inner cities and the near-inner cities is housing. In the main I am talking about the public sector where we are in a difficult situation. I do not think the Government's policy of offering participation or allowing tenants to opt out of local authority control will work, because in most of the areas we are talking about 50 per cent. or so of the tenants either receive social security benefit or feature
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in the housing revenue account to a substantial degree. I do not see them wanting to form their own housing associations unless somebody (such as the Government) will pick up the bill, because the type of person I am talking about will not have the money to do it. As I say, it is on record that 50 per cent. or more of such people are in a large number of inner city areas.
Therefore I put two questions to the Secretary of State in an objective manner. I know he has not been long in his present job but he must know of some ideas emerging about action to be taken. Is it the Government's intention to restore some of the cuts? I say "some" because I would not ask for all of them to be restored. If that could be done it would help local authorities to deal with their housing problems, and if it is not done in conjunction with the redevelopment of the inner cities it will be very difficult. The two are interdependent and should be done together.
However, I am not talking just about the public sector, because the area of housing which is causing most concern at the moment and which is deteriorating faster than any other is the owner-occupied sector. Sixty per cent. of the people in this country are owner-occupiers and the properties are deteriorating faster in the private sector because of the lack of finance on the part of the owners to keep their properties in a reasonable state of repair.
I am aware of the time factor, but before I close I should like to refer to another area of revenue which has always been available to local authorities. It is an historical fact that since 1979 the rate support grant to local authorities in general has been cut by £21.5 billion. I do not subscribe to the belief that local authorities in the main spend money stupidly. There are some local authorities who do some very silly things, but in terms of the whole picture the number is miniscule and has had no effect whatever on the situation we are faced with today.
If I may, I should like briefly to quote from two independent bodies who have given recent assessments of what has happened. The first quotation comes from Private Housebuilding in the Inner Cities, a report from an independent commission prepared for the House Builders Federation. The report is very extensive but I shall give a brief quotation:
"Whilst we note the Government's new inner city initiative, we were forcibly struck by the fact that urban regeneration, of which new private housebuilding is an essential part, requires very much more investment than at present. Increased private sector investment on the scale needed will be forthcoming only if there is, first, substantially more public investment".
That is not a political document: it comes from a report prepared for the House Builders Federation and it underpins what we have been saying.
I also have here a document entitled Charter for Jobs. This report was issued during June and it says that in housing alone in this country an urgent need for £85 billion can be identified at present. The point I am trying to make is that one cannot expect the Government to wave a magic wand and produce something of that order. However, unless we start to mean what we say, to put our money where our mouth is and start to attack this deterioration in the inner cities that is now spreading outwards, we are

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doomed to failure. The social and financial costs of that will be both colossal and unbearable.
I have tried to put my questions to the Secretary of State in an objective manner. I am grateful to your Lordships for the intense way you have listened to what 1 had to say, and on the basis of that I am looking forward to the contributions of my colleagues and to the response by the Secretary of State at the end of the debate.
4.56 p.m.
Lord Bonham-Carter: My Lords, we must all thank the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, for introducing this subject, which is one of the utmost importance and one which we should pick up from time to time in this House. As he said, we last discussed it on 2nd February in a debate initiated by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman. It was to me an extremely important and useful debate. I should like to add that I wholly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dean, in his reference to the fact that we are not talking about inner cities only. Many of the outer cities suffer from the same problems as the inner cities, but this is now a term of art and when we talk about "inner cities" we mean also other areas suffering from deprivation. I should also like to say how glad I am to see the noble Lord, Lord Young, in his place today to answer this debate.
In the debate on 2nd February the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, emphasised two particular points for our attention. The first was the importance of partnership, in particular partnership, as the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, said, between the Government and local authorities. Whatever the Government's plans, in my view they will not succeed unless they establish a proper partnership between central government and local authorities, which are after all the elected representatives of people living in the area.
I was looking today at a publication just issued by the Department of the Environment with the title Managing Work Spaces. I was looking at it in our leisure space in the Library and I found, briefly, that it bore out the point that in almost all the schemes which it studied and to which it gave particular praise the partnership between the Government and the local authority was very close and useful.
The second point to which the noble and learned Lord drew attention was the very real danger of alienation from what he called the mainstream of British life on the part of those who suffer most from the disadvantages of living in our inner cities; that is to say, the ethnic minorities.
On the same occasion the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury emphasised the view of his commission that the nation is confronted by, "a grave and fundamental injustice"—those were his words—in urban priority areas. In the light of that debate, of what was said then and of what has been said just now by the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, I welcome the Government's interest in this problem of our inner cities. If it has been inspired, as some cynics suggest, by the desire to get votes in those areas, it does not shock me in the least. That, after all, is how democracy works.
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Votes are to politicians what money is to businessmen. It was an American politician in the 19th century who said:
"Politicians are not men. They are hogs and you must hit them on the snout".
If one wants to hit a politician on the snout the way to do it—unless he is a Member of this House—is to vote against him. If the Government's response to a rather poor vote in the last election from the inner city areas is to pay attention to them, all strength to their elbow.
However, in looking at those policies we must examine and probe the means that the Government intend to employ, their intentions and, if I may say so, their misconceptions. I do not want to be beastly to the noble Lord, Lord Young, but in answer to questions put to him by some Members of this House about the efficiency of British Telecom he said that it had produced a great deal more cellular telephones in the past few years since privatisation. I say in reply that cellular telephones or their analogues are not matters of great interest to the inhabitants of inner cities.
The criteria by which we must judge the Government's plans for the inner cities are those of public service and public interest. Those are the four words by which their policies must be judged. I should be happier if I heard them rather more frequently used by members of the present administration.
It is not true, as is sometimes said, that inner city problems have suddenly hit us in the past 20 years. They have been with us ever since cities developed and since the 18th century and the "rookeries" in London. Nor, I should add, are they confined to this country. They exist in the Bidonvilles of France, in Naples in Italy and above all in New York and Chicago.
In the debate on February 2nd, the noble Lord, Lord Young, did not convince me that there was any real connection between the amount of local authority housing and the intensity of inner city deprivation. What is true and undeniable is that in the United Kingdom, the United States and France the chief victims of inner city deprivation are the ethnic minorities.
It is the case—and this is the area on which I should like to concentrate—that unemployment among the ethnic minorities overall is double that found among the rest of the population. Further among ethnic minorities unemployment in the group aged between 16 and 25 is of the order of 60 per cent. in many inner cities. It is a pretty serious and formidable problem and one that we must confront.
Hence, when we consider the Government's plans and those plans become clearer, we must ask ourselves whether they will substantially change the disadvantage suffered by ethnic minorities in our inner cities. Some of those disadvantages are shared by other groups who live in the inner cities but some are due to racial discrimination. If those policies do not correct what the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury called the "injustice" which those people suffer and do not take into account the huge public interest that is involved in

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dealing constructively with the problem, they will have failed and the danger of alienation from the mainstream of British life to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, drew attention, will come much closer.
Race relations legislation is sometimes blamed for having failed to deal with the problem. I believe that that is to misunderstand the purposes and the expectations which the introduction of that legislation intended to achieve. It was hoped to state a position taken by society as a whole which condemned racial discrimination, and to provide governments—the present and successive governments—with a platform or launching pad to base and launch other policies. It was hoped that that legislation would be followed up by the Government setting an example in their own practice in the Civil Service, the nationalised industries and elsewhere, and that by setting such an example they would be able to lead industry, the trade unions and others to take positive steps to deal with this very serious and enduring problem.
That did not happen. For example, the introduction of monitoring in the Civil Service has only recently taken place, and I think I am right in saying that it was introduced in the Armed Services as late as last year. Another way in which the Government could have set an example would have been by insisting in contracts that they entered into with industry that the firms with which those contracts were concluded should pursue equal opportunity policies. This is particularly important in connection with inner city plans, especially the Local Government Bill, which was introduced by the Secretary of State for the Environment.
Arising out of that Bill I should like to put two questions to the Minister. First, will that Bill or will it not make it possible for a local authority offering a contract to insist on the employment of local people? That is one important question. Secondly, and equally important, will that Bill or will it not allow the local authority to carry out its obligations under Section 71(b) of the Race Relations Act 1976:
"to promote equality of opportunity and good relations, between persons of different racial groups"?
Those are two crucial questions. If the answers are in the negative the objectives that lie behind the Government's inner city policies will be called into question and a great opportunity will have been missed.
I hope therefore that the Minister will be able to tell the House whether either the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or the Secretary of State for the Environment is correct in the differing interpretations of the Local Government Bill as recently reported in the Guardian and other newspapers. I believe that his answer will tell your Lordships how serious the Government are about tackling the problems of our inner cities and about promoting equality of opportunity irrespective of race, colour or national or ethnic origin. I hope that the Minister will give the House a clear and unequivocal answer to those questions. In my view that answer is crucial to the future civility of our society.
5.7 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Durham: My Lords, I too should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, for providing this opportunity, before we go into recess, to register with the Government some points to which we believe Ministers need to pay attention as they go ahead with various initiatives in the inner cities. I am grateful also for the opportunity that is thus presented to me to say on behalf of my fellow Bishops and indeed perhaps on behalf of the General Synod of the Church of England how glad we are that the Government have made that very important declaration of intent about the inner cities.
We do not claim any credit at all for it, not only because we depend upon grace and not upon works, but also lest it should discourage the Government, as they seem to feel from time to time that our interventions are a little off-putting. So we do not claim any credit, though we note the initiatives, encourage them and wish to be critical collaborators in their progress, in the hope that the Government will move in a positive and permanent direction. We are aware, as has been said, that the problems that we are tackling are intractable. We are not dealing with problems that have built up over five years; they extend over 100 years.
We are therefore not concerned with five-year projects to solve those problems but with initiatives that must become part of the plans and patterns of our national life for all the foreseeable future. It seems to me therefore that it is all the more important to place the initiatives which the Government are proposing to take and are developing in the broadest possible context and neither to expect too much of them nor to suppose that they will be sufficient or successful on their own.
I should like to draw attention to three problem areas, two of which have already been touched on, which I suggest the Government need to note and give very careful attention to as they carry on with their plans. First, surely, all ideology, political theorising and philosophical preferences apart, it must be absolutely clear that the thrust of private enterprise alone—and I stress the word "alone"—cannot be sufficient to rejuvenate our inner cities and our outer suburban housing estates and other troubled areas.
To build a viable and worthwhile society for the 21st century, out of what we must surely call the debris of the various industrial and political initiatives of the 19th and 20th centuries, must require a great deal of state activity and public investment as well as private enterprise. I should like to illustrate this once again from the housing area, because that happens to have come my way also lately, but also because I think it illustrates the wider issues.
For instance, in the speech of the president of the House Builders Federation there is this paragraph which I find echoed elsewhere:
"in many urban areas, where de-industrialisation and unemployment constitute the main constraints on the housing market, the public sector must also play a major role. The private sector cannot operate in areas where the existing residents cannot afford either to buy or to pay a full market rent. Nor can it create markets and attract people back to urban areas in which the environment is depressed, disfigured and presents no hope of change".

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This note is also sounded and made more broad in some notes which I took the chance of getting out of a local authority next to where I live, because I had recently been discussing with them how they and the church could collaborate in tackling some of these problems. This is part of the note I received:
"The Government implies that private developers can and will build the new homes needed in inner city areas. The Council has actively encouraged such private investment, by making available land and carrying out extensive works to improve the surrounding environment. Despite this, the private sector is loath to invest. Unlike the Docklands most inner areas are characterised by low, even negative land values, which render private investment schemes high risk, which even the Government's Urban Development Grant scheme has been unable to overcome.
The cycle of deprivation is matched by a cycle of declining investment leading to disinvestment. Local businesses and private investors look to Government agencies and local government to generate the 'environment' in which to invest. The reduction in public sector expenditure in inner cities is providing exactly the wrong signal".
That is from a local authority that I know to have been actively engaged in collaborating with private funds and so on in developing things.
There is also the same point made in the report to which the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, referred, where there is the remark that,
"The effective demand for new housing at market prices is low in most inner city areas. The fundamental need is for low-cost 'affordable' housing for the low income and unemployed groups who live there, and this in general means subsidising housing to rent.".
This is a further point of great importance. The report goes on:
"In areas where the economy is buoyant the ability of inner city dwellers who are prospective owners to afford their own property is reduced by the increase in prices caused by the demand for new or refurbished houses from people on higher incomes."
How do the Government intend to deal with what we might call the problem of "Yuppification"? It is clear that it is useless to behave as if the problems of the inner cities and the outer housing estates can be solved simply and solely by making money. Making money has its own very grave problems especially for people who simply cannot get in on the act either immediately or indefinitely. So the construction of a viable 21st century society must require very substantial state activity and very substantial continuing public funding, even if, or precisely so that, the market may do all that it can.
That leads me to my second point, which is that the revitalising of our inner cities and our outer housing estates must include a vital and continuing element of local trust and local collaboration. That is a point that has already been made but I feel it very urgently from my part of the world and I should like to stress it again. That must include a positive approach to, and a positive role for, local authorities.
Of course there are clashes of approach and principle—there are bound to be—and sometimes these clashes are foolishly and obstructively maintained on ideological grounds. But surely an aggressive approach to this, which looks as if it is equally ideologically motivated, is hardly the way to continue and is certainly not the way to build up the trust, the confidence and the working together which is essential. After all, all ideologically-determined policies and programmes risk stupid mistakes.
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Secondly, central politicians and bureaucrats are not necessarily any wiser than local politicians or bureaucrats. If I may comment theologically in this House, it seems to me to be a matter of solidarity and sin. Central people sin centrally and local people sin locally, just as, I might add, religious people sin religiously. So there must be consultation and sharing and give and take, or things will go badly wrong.
Moreover, the people who are now in the depressed and deprived areas must have a voice, and must have a voice before they have the money to pay for their choices. Otherwise there may very well be great distress in such matters as inner city unrest and outer city vandalism. In any case, and even more importantly, surely we must mobilise the resources of all our people, which requires wide consultation and wide collaboration. So I would urge the Government to restore partnership to local authorities and be very careful to listen to local people.
That leads me to my final point, which is this. We all know that the problems of the inner cities will take a lot of solving and a lot of moving forward. While we are doing this, in collaboration, I hope, with the Government—critical collaboration, but collaboration nonetheless—I would urge the Government to pay particular attention to others of their policies which affect the people who are suffering now in these deprived areas.
The point that I should like to make is not political but strictly pastoral, and it is this. Will the Government please pay attention to what is actually going on in many inner city areas, because of the effects of the social security reviews, the new regulations and so on? They are undoubtedly making the difficult life of poor people very much more difficult. And will the Government please think very hard about the poll tax? Maybe they are clear about the principle of it and should press forward with it. But will they please think about the implications and applications, and see that it does not make worse-off people worse off in the name of a responsibility which, in any case, they cannot possibly exercise?
Will the Government please listen and consider the way housing benefits actually work? I simply have to testify that there is no doubt at all that on housing estates in places such as Tyneside, Sunderland, Cleveland and many other places in my diocese, as well as right across the country—this is not a North-South divide—the conditions of people in inner cities are being made worse by the application of government regulations. Therefore I hope that while we search forward in these difficult matters, the Government will urgently consider the balance of private enterprise and continued public funding which is required, the restoration of local authorities to positive roles and the need to be very sensitive about what is happening now to people who can do nothing but wait.
5.19 p.m.
Lord Bellwin: My Lords, it is a convention of the House that noble Lords sit in accordance with their political beliefs and allegiances. If anyone were to propose that that should be afforded as a privilege to the right reverend Prelates I should be glad to second

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it. I do not see why they should not have that same opportunity.
The opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, was very good. It was temperate, responsible and touched on the problems that concern us. As your Lordships may know, he comes from Leeds. That must be very much to his credit and advantage. He made a telling point. I wonder whether he appreciated quite how telling it was. He said that he used to live in Manchester and that when he goes back there now from time to time he is unhappy at the deterioration that he sees. I am sure that he is quite right about that. I am glad that he did not talk about the deterioration in Leeds, because it has not deteriorated. It has its problems, as have so many other areas—I shall touch on that in a moment—but it has not deteriorated. It has become and is becoming better.
That is a key point, because over the last years one of the great problems which has bedevilled all matters pertaining to local government is that the situation varies so much in different areas. Trying to legislate to apply the same policies to each and every one in itself is a great problem, because that often means that one does things which need not be done and fails to do other things which need to be done. This problem is not easy to cope with, as I know so well from so many years of having tried to do so.
I find it hard to get away from the habit of trying to pick up on what previous speakers have said. Noble Lords may know that I did that for a long time. Therefore before I make my few remarks, while I also keep an eye on the time, I must say how much I agreed—unlike in the last debate-with so much of what the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, said, especially when he talked about ethnic minorities, discrimination and the need for equal opportunity. No one in your Lordships' House would quarrel with the points that the noble Lord made. The problem is how we do things to make happen what we all wish to see brought about. It is not easy, because when one discriminates positively one is still discriminating. People do not like discrimination, whichever way it may go. I am sure that the Government will take heed of what the noble Lord said on that because he made a fundamental point about something which is a great worry for everyone.
I have only one point to make as regards the noble Lord's remarks and I wish I had made it in the last debate on faith in the inner cities. My point is that there is still scope for people to help themselves. I think that history will show that other immigrant communities did a great deal to help themselves. People within them helped each other. They were obsessed with education. They came to a country deprived and with nothing, but they wanted to help themselves. They were very grateful for being received and for the help that they were given, small though it was, but they also helped themselves. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, will not think ill of me for making that point because I believe it very passionately and it is part of the debate.
Where do we go from here? There can be no doubt that the problems exist and in some places they are worse than in others. This is not a political debate as
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such and I am anxious not to make political points if I can avoid it, but I am bound to say that there are areas where the deprivation and dereliction are at their worst and where, as the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, said, authorities do not always help themselves. If we are saying that money is essential, and of course it is, the authorities also must help themselves by making sure that their priorities for spending are on those things which really count, such as dealing with empty houses and other dwellings. That to me is a priority. But to be able to do that the authorities must look at such matters as collecting the rents that are owed. An authority cannot help people by allowing them to run into debt, because that upsets the whole of people's lives and it means that an authority is not carrying out its function correctly.
There are authorities where as much as 60 and more per cent. of rents go uncollected. The authority needs that money for various things yet it allows that to happen. My plea is that that too is part of this debate and should not be overlooked. If we turn away from it and we say that it is a political point, we are missing something fundamental and I hope that we shall not do that.
When I look at the thousands of empty houses in the London borough of Lambeth and the hundreds that are empty in Wandsworth I have to ask why that is so. They are neighbouring authorities. Why is it that one authority can achieve something and the other cannot? The answer is that one of them makes spending on empty houses a priority while the other makes other matters a priority. The other authority makes as its priority other things that no one in this House would support as being fair and reasonable, especially if we are to be concerned about what I think the right reverend Prelate referred to as public service and public interest. That is also what being in local government is supposed to be all about. It is a pity that it is not always concerned about that.
What do we have to see being done? What must we say to government? Of course they must continue with their initiatives. No one initiative solves the whole problem, but there have been many of them and in many cases they do a lot of good, although they do not solve the whole problem. The Government have paid out £3,000 million in the last eight years as direct urban grants. That has produced another £1 billion or £2 billion from the private sector and in my view it will produce more in the future. That is important and must continue, although it is not the whole of the answer. However, it is the extent to which the Government can induce others to come along and play their part that is important.
But the initiatives themselves, the task forces, the enterprise agencies, of which I am told there are more than 300—and I had the privilege of opening the second one—have produced thousands of jobs in a small way. They have not tried to replace the declining industries, but nevertheless thousands of jobs have been created. The enterprise zones have been much decried by some but not by others. They have not been decried by those who are working in areas where previously they could not find work. The enterprise zones are not the whole answer to the problem but they are a part of it.

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The business in the community project, the inner city enterprises, the urban development grants and the urban regeneration grants all have a part to play and all contribute something towards solving this one problem. Everyone who has spoken so far, and I suspect those who will speak later, will agree that there is no one solution. As we say in Yorkshire and as I have said in your Lordships' House before, we have got to get them in singles. But we have got to get them and one way in which we shall do it is by a whole series of enterprises and initiatives.
I want to say a few words on housing, which, as everyone will agree, is the key to this problem. The Government must do something. They must ensure that land is made available. The land registers arc there but they are not being used as they should he. There is much more scope for government to do more to ensure that both authorities and other statutory public bodies make land available. The document from the House Builders Federation which was referred to by previous speakers mentions again and again the need for land. The Government have a marvellous derelict land grant scheme and I submit to them that a priority for that should be in the inner cities to a greater extent than it has been hitherto.
The Government have to look at land and at the money being spent on infrastructure. Land is the key. Ask any builder, public or private, and any householder. It is the key and it is what the Government must concentrate upon.
The Government must look at the way their urban development grant schemes are working. It is natural for civil servants and bureaucrats to be concerned about the spending of every penny. They have to account for the money and that is understandable. However, that is contrary to what a private developer does when he takes a risk. He wishes to take a risk and other people wish to make sure he does not take a risk. How can grants flow quickly, freely and smoothly in the face of that dilemma? I had the same problem when I was in the department and I ask my noble friend the Minister to look carefully at it. The system works slowly and it frustrates and discourages people who want to do things and who may walk away time and time again.
Local authorities have their part to play in housing. They have to make land available and they must call in the private sector to help them. The part they have to play is not the only part, but it is a critical one. They should be brought in, encouraged, worked with and enabled to do the job. They should be told the kind of housing we want. It is not a question of building housing at the top end of the scale, and no one proposes that.
If we work together with local authorities we can produce housing for rent. The Housing Association tells me, to my great pleasure, that it is putting up £30 million of Housing Association money and bringing in £70 million in private sector money for assured tenancy housing for rent. It can be done if the will and imagination are there. I hope that they are going to be there. My plea to my noble friend is for flexibility. If at the moment 30 per cent. is all that can be put towards it, let us keep an open mind. Flexibility is essential in this debate.
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Concerning the docklands, I wish to say a few words about the criticism that what is involved is not housing for the people. Perhaps I may cite a few figures which astounded me. In 1981 there were 14,000 local authority houses in docklands. Since then 12,000 dwellings have been built; some 7.600 are on LDDC land and the rest are on private sector land. Of the dwellings built on LDDC land, 59 per cent. have been sold for less than £40,000. That is housing which is not for rent but for sale. I do not think that anyone would say that those figures represent expenditure beyond the pocket of a great many people. That should be borne in mind. The current programme is for a further 16,000 dwellings on LDDC land and 9,000 on private sector land. It is very encouraging when one looks at the dereliction which has existed there for decades. One may not like everything that is being built there but one must compare it with what was there before. It is dynamic and it is bringing in jobs. The jobs now are measured not in thousands but in tens of thousands.
This is a big subject. It has been debated a number of times and no doubt will be again. I am sure your Lordships are aware of the various proposals for urban development corporations. They are not the answer everywhere but they are a help in some places. The problem is vast and did not come about overnight. It will not go away overnight. But I now have the feeling that there is a wish in all sectors to work together, along with all the voluntary agencies, to make it happen. The Government have clearly stated their determination that it will happen. I have great confidence that there is a new feeling about this problem. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, for giving us the opportunity once again to debate it.
Lord Pitt of Hampstead: My Lords, when I heard the Prime Minister's positive statement that something was to be done for the inner cities, I felt very pleased and very happy. Then, in a funny sort of way, I began to think. I thought: "My God, this is probably just another gimmick, very much like Branson cleaning up London". I thought of the things which this Government have done in the past eight years which have made the inner cities worse.
I therefore wish to ask the Minister whether the proposals for tackling the problems of the inner cities means a change in policy on behalf of the Government. Unless it does, we are being fooled. Over the past eight years, the Government have made inner cities worse, first, by their attitude to the rate support grant. The Government deliberately reduced central government contributions to local government expenditure. As a consequence, the local authorities have had nearly £3 billion less in rate support grant than they would have had.
However, that is not all. The Government adopted a policy of penalties. What are they called?
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: Clawback.
Lord Pitt of Hampstead: As a consequence, the rate support grant to many of the worst areas was reduced. As I have said before, if we have a formula which, when it is put into the computer, produces the

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worst and most deprived areas as areas of overspending, the formula must be wrong. The Government have never accepted that. The consequence is that most of the poorest areas in this country have had the worst treatment from the Government in terms of rate support grant. I hope that the proposal of the Government to tackle the problems of the inner cities means that their policy is going to be changed.
The second matter is housing. The Government have had a myopic view of housing policy. Their policy has been to increase home ownership. There is nothing wrong with that. However, we need to provide enough houses for people in need. That has never been done. Over the past eight years we have had a steady reduction in the amount of housing being provided. It is a fact that we have had a steady reduction in the number of houses being provided. What is worse is that we have had a steady increase in homelessness. We have had a policy by which local authorities have been allowed to use their revenue expenditure to put such people in bed and breakfast accommodation. At the same time, they were being forbidden to use the capital receipts in their possession to build houses in which they could house such people.
We have also had a steady attack, as we have had tonight from the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, on empty houses. In London, the largest number of empty houses are Government owned. The next largest number of empty houses are privately owned. The local authority owned group are the smallest. I do not defend the fact that local authority houses remain empty. I am chairman of Shelter and our literature shows that we have spent a lot of time attacking local authorities for having their properties empty. Therefore, I am not defending it, but I am saying that you can be positive rather than negative. The Government have regarded this situation as a nice piece of propaganda and therefore have never attempted to co-operate with the local authorities to reduce the number of empty houses. Instead time is spent attacking the local authorities for having empty houses. I hope that the plan, the suggestion that we are to deal with the inner cities, means that these policies are to be changed.
I am glad that my noble friend Lord Bonham-Carter raised the question of ethnic minorities. There is no way of tackling the problems of inner cities without dealing with that particular problem. Although only 4 per cent. of the population of this country are from ethnic minorities, a large percentage of the population of inner cities are people from the ethnic minorities, and there are some areas where the figure is as high as 30 per cent. Even worse, they form a much higher percentage of the unemployed than should be represented by their percentage in the population. They form a very much higher percentage of the homeless than should be represented by their population. If we are to tackle the problem of the inner cities, we have to tackle the problem of disadvantage based on race, which is basic to many of the problems.
The noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, talked about self-help. When these chaps came here from the
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Caribbean there were plenty of jobs and they came here because the country needed their labour. Unemployment was never a problem. However, they could not find anywhere to live and there were plenty of notices which said "No blacks allowed" or "No blacks accepted". That situation has changed. They had to buy houses together, co-operatively, and they then rented them to each other.
Of course they then found discrimination at every level. They had trouble in borrowing money because the building societies and the banks discriminated against them. Even worse, they often found that they were exploited. For example, if they bought a house with a sitting tenant they found that the sitting tenant was the owner. These are all experiences that they have had. However, the situation has changed. But in those days waiting lists were long and because people had to live a certain length of time in a borough before being put on the waiting list it was not possible for them to get local authority housing.
With a lot of self-help they adopted methods which enabled them to manage. At the moment many of them are living in very dilapidated housing as owner-occupiers. However, as to whether owner-occupation is a great policy, that needs a lot more thought. Again, I speak from knowledge. Many old people who own their own houses cannot repair them. Much of the deteriorating property that we have is as a result of old people owning houses that they cannot repair. One needs policies covering all sorts of matters and again I am not condemning the right to buy. It is a nice enough policy if it is accompanied by other policies which balance it out. We have not had the width of policies in housing that are required, and the width of policies in the relationship between local authorities and central government which would enable local authorities to play the part they should be playing in dealing with these problems.
There is a local government Act which is aiming to stop local authorities doing what I have suggested many times in your Lordships' House central government should be doing; namely, using their power as an employer or contractor to make sure that the people they employ and the people with whom they have contracts respect the Race Relations Act and in so doing respect the Commission for Racial Equality code of practice. If that is made a condition, many of the barriers preventing people of ethnic minorities getting jobs will be broken down.
As I have said before in your Lordships' House, that can be achieved through an executive order. This did much more to reduce discrimination in employment in the United States than the Act that followed years later. All they did was to insist through an executive order that in federal employment there should be equal opportunities. There is nothing to prevent this government doing the same. Many local authorities have done just that. What is the situation now? We have in the other place a Bill which would prevent the local authorities doing so. They must have contacts only on commercial terms. So once contracts are seen to be only on commercial terms they are barred. Also, the provision of local labour for many of the schemes we are talking about will be barred because the terms are not commercial.

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Therefore I am hoping that when the Minister replies he will tell me that the statement that the Government are going to attack the problems of the inner cities means that they will change their policies in these matters. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Dean for initiating the debate. I hope that the Minister will be able to give some reassurance.
5.48 p.m.
Lord Vinson: My Lords, we should indeed be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, for raising this timely debate.
Your Lordships may wonder why someone who is known to be chairman of a government body deeply concerned with helping to create jobs in rural areas should wish to speak in a debate on our inner cities. It is because I believe there are many important lessons to be learnt from the social cohesion that is found in villages.
In many respects villages represent social patterns that have remained unchanged over the ages. There are natural communities where people know their neighbour (even if they do not necessarily love him) and where community spirit is such that people will quite automatically come to the aid and comfort of those in distress, keep an eye on the elderly, or box the ears of the young when they are up to no good. In other words, they are a settlement pattern that works in the wider sense of the word. This is a pattern that does not throw up many of the intractable social problems found in our urban cities, or when these occur they are on an infinitely lesser scale per head of population.
I now turn to towns and the self-inflicted wounds that society has brought upon itself, not least in that dreadful period in the 'sixties when planning concepts went unquestioned, when comprehensive redevelopment destroyed our inner cities and with it destroyed the social cohesion and civic pride that went with the old urban village. Prior to that many cities had, by quite natural social evolutionary processes, moulded themselves as a series of urban villages, places where people lived and worked, places as in rural England where people know their neighbour, could call upon him and could rely upon him. That is not the case now, where so often people live anonymously and abandoned at the top of tower blocks. The road to social disintegration is indeed paved with good intentions and for the best of reasons. It was considered wrong that people should live in close proximity to their work, and in many ways at the time this reasoning was right. Houses sheltering under the gasworks or next door to the steel mill gave a ghastly existence to the inhabitants.
But zoning was carried too far. We enforced commuting so that people had to cross town to their place of work in the industrial estate. At weekends those areas became silent and uninhabited save for the presence of teenagers or others hell-bent on vandalism.
The natural employment created by the exchange of local goods and services was made much harder. By destroying the local economy we destroyed jobs. But there is hope. Technology dictated the life patterns of people because it was necessary for them
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to live cheek-by-jowl to the mill or the mine in which they worked. Yet technology can come to our rescue by allowing production on a scale and in a manner which again enables people to live in closer proximity to their work under conditions that are environmentally wholly acceptable.
Some argue that zoning is still right and that work and jobs should be separated. Yet here in London some of our most expensive houses are to be found in mews cheek-by-jowl to the pub on one side and the repair garage on the other. Such houses are in high demand; so, obviously, someone wishing to live there does not mind the village atmosphere, the social life and the bustle that permeates the district both on weekdays and at weekends.
The point I am trying to make is that we have to re-create the urban village along the settlement pattern of the old rural village. Of course, many other major issues in this important debate have been very ably dealt with tonight by other noble Lords. I wish to concentrate on this particular point. If we wish to get social cohesion, self-policing, good neighbourliness and a strong sense of community, we must build our towns in such a way that their fabric encourages this. We must make them user-friendly.
Modern small-scale technology is now no less environmentally detracting than were the butcher's, the baker's and the candlestick maker's activities in both the urban and rural villages. I urge all those associated with urban redevelopment to plan deliberately to build some houses with small workshops—craft homes, if you like—or buildings where people can live and work on the same spot; places in which the small plumber can keep his equipment, the artist can have his studio and the dressmaker can make her dresses while keeping an eye on the children. They would be places in which a million small-scale economic activities, subject to sensible environmental safety and fire regulations, can take place and by which means people can earn a living, employ themselves and create jobs for others.
Such places will increasingly meet the changing work patterns and demands of our time. Of course, this is not the answer alone, but I believe it to be one very important answer. It will require planning that consciously allows the development of such mixed hereditaments—workshop homes that people can own as well as rent, because where nobody really owns nobody really cares.
It may mean, in order to get the concept rolling, giving the same rate reduction treatment or other priorities which are offered in enterprise zones. I see nothing wrong with that. Somehow, we must begin to plant the social roots of urban village life and recreate small-scale society where jobs become interdependent, are locally based and where people take in and out their own laundry, so to speak. In this way our towns will return to being whole communities. People will naturally trade with each other and so will help to create the fabric that provides social cohesion, self-help, self-reliance and civic pride.
There is nothing particularly new in my suggestion—is like rediscovering the wheel—but I believe that the recreation of the urban village is the

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key to recreating prosperity in our inner cities. It is the natural, social and economic pattern to which human beings aspire. Jobs are created in rural areas in this way; they always have been. We must encourage the same sort of development in our urban areas. Therefore, I congratulate the Government on giving such high priority to urban redevelopment in their new programme and I urge them to promote this concept.
5.55 p.m.
Lord Seebohm: My Lords, I make no apology for speaking once more about housing. I do not propose to go into any details of facts and figures because that has been done ad nauseam in the past. In this House we had a long debate on the Duke of Edinburgh's commission. We have had publications like Faith in the City and we have had the latest report from the House Builders Federation. Therefore, I am not going to weary your Lordships with any of those figures.
In my opinion, and I think in the opinion of everybody else, the situation is intolerable. It is still deteriorating and everybody is asking: why have successive governments not taken the necessary steps, not necessarily to greatly improve conditions, but to stop them deteriorating further? I see very little sign of that at the present time.
I ask myself what are the reasons? Is it because they just do not care? I believe that to be absolutely untrue. They care a lot, and I believe that this Government care a lot. I have come to the conclusion that it must be for reasons of finance. I have looked at this a little more carefully and I have done a few back-of-envelope calculations. My first conclusion concerns what is called the PSBR which seems to crop up quite irrelevantly in such a situation. By the time the current privatisation plans are completed the Government will have taken about £18 billion of private sector savings. Apparently that is not looked upon as inflationary. As far as we know, the money has not been used necessarily for capital purposes; but still it is not looked upon as inflationary.
I believe that the public of this country feel so strongly about housing that they would support a national housing loan of many billions, raised on commercial terms. It would not be inflationary. It would have no effect on the PSBR. But it might well give an opportunity to start making a major attack on the housing situation. I give one small example. I am told that there are many youngsters who have been given money to pay £65 a week for bed and breakfast. That is £3,380 a year. If considered as 10 per cent. of capital, that means £33,800 is being used to supply bed and breakfast for one person.
I am also told that if you want to build a hostel, shall we say, to a modest university standard, with perhaps two people to a bedroom, this can be done for between £7,000 and £10,000 per unit per bedroom. On my calculations, therefore, for every £30,000 spent, it would be possible to house not one person but somewhere between six and eight. That makes a lot of sense to me and I have the feeling that it is one of the most important things that we can now do. To build hostels for the young homeless would result, I believe, in an economic saving to the country.
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The next point I make has been made previously, but I think it is worth stressing. Housing for rent is becoming more and more necessary not simply for the poor but also for the mobility of labour and for various other perfectly obvious reasons. In this connection, I mention a proposition which has come forward recently—that people should be entitled to let spare rooms in their houses without any restriction. That would bring in possibly £60 a week for a couple of rooms and it should be tax free. It should have no effect whatever on the receipts of the Exchequer. It would not cost anybody anything; it would bring unused assets into use; and it could make a real impact on the mobility of labour.
I ask the Government three questions. First, does the Minister accept that the housing situation is desperate and getting worse? Secondly, does he agree that finance can be raised without causing inflation or having any effect on the PSBR? Finally, does he agree that there is plenty of slack in the construction industry and that a massive attack on the crumbling infrastructure could make a significant impact on reducing unemployment?
When I wound up the debate on the Duke of Edinburgh's commission, I said that from the beginning of all time, happiness has depended on satisfactory board and lodging. By "board", we mean food and, my goodness, we have enough of that. By "lodging", we mean a watertight and warm home for everyone and, my goodness, we do not have that.
6 p.m.
Lord Sefton of Garston: My Lords, one of the problems of being half-way down the list in a debate of this nature is that one looks at one's original notes and wants to throw them away, so it is fortunate when a noble Lord refers to an item already in one's notes because that gives one an "in".
It is very wrong to keep referring to people outside the Chamber. May I try to remove some of the myths and delusions of today that appear to centre on the problem of inner city areas? First, as has been said, the problem is not new. It goes back years, and it changes in its nature. In Liverpool, it changed from handling the immigration of the Irish as a result of the potato famine to dealing with a situation that was so insanitary that Liverpool became the first city to appoint a medical officer of health because of the danger that threatened the wealthier members of the community.
Now there is another problem. It arises because of some of the things that occurred in other periods. Some experts on inner city problems seem to have no knowledge at all of it. I listened to the president of the RIBA the other night, and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, appears to have been listening also. Indeed, the speech of the noble Lord may well have been written by the president of the RIBA.
I take one point from the speech—that the 1960s failed. Failed to do what? No answer. The 1960s was a new problem created out of a very old problem. If there was one place in which this national disease was centred, it was Liverpool—and I like to think that I know a little about Liverpool. If the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, looks up the history of Liverpool, he

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will see that in the 1960s we were taking out sand from basement dwellings put there by the medical officer of health to prevent the poor Irish from going back to insanitary conditions. That was the problem we were trying to solve in the 1960s.
I do not see why I should boast about what Liverpool did between 1945 and 1953 because in the main it was run by the Conservative Party.
The 1960s failed? Tell that to the people in Bidder Street. Bidder Street was a very famous street in the 1950s. Bessie Braddock in another place told of the reality then of bug-ridden, cockroach-infested dwellings that were built by private enterprise to ensure that dockers were on top of the job, to be able to tumble into work and tumble out of work into the pubs owned by the same people. That is what the 1960s were designed for.
The president of the RIBA and those people who carry out nice little schemes of 120 houses which they then tart them up with little coloured porches that make no contribution at all seem not to realise what the housing problem of the country was. It was of tremendous magnitude. There is a block of flats in Liverpool's dockland called Logan Towers, named after one of the serving Members of Parliament in that area; he was Father of another place. The Logan family—I opposed it—were pleased that that block of flats was built because the alternative to getting rid of the slums and not erecting that kind of building was to send people out into the green fields of Netherfield or Kirkby, and they did not want to do that.
We were pressured not by architects but by central government because, under the stupid arrangement about the financing of local government, they completely ignored the fact that, if one exported the population to give them decent housing in green fields, rate support was lost for the government of the day. That is another problem that the RIBA does not face up to. Go and tell it to the people of Bidder Street. Above all, go and tell all those people who are living in excellent conditions in some of the finest housing built under Nye Bevan on the outskirts of Liverpool and in the suburbs of Liverpool that the houses built in the 1960s were a failure. You would be torn to pieces if you went there and tried to do it.
Very happy communities were built in Liverpool. I resent the suggestion of these johnny-come-latelies that they know all there is to know about the problems. The problems of people in inner areas, as the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, said, will not be solved until they are in a position to help themselves. Do not tell somebody who owes rent in a local authority house, "Go and help yourself". If a person on supplementary benefit has a choice between buying the kid a new pair of shoes and paying the rent, the shoes are going to come first. Do not tell these people to go and help themselves. That is what they are doing—helping themselves, helping the kids to shoes as an alternative to paying the rent. One may well blame the local authority for not being strict enough in enforcing collection of the rent, but I do not, and I make no apologies for it. If it were left to me to say to somebody, "The kid goes without shoes and you
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pay the rent", I am sorry, but I should not make that choice.
Local government in those days in trying to tackle housing was dealing with an outdated system. Let me give an example. The inner area problem arises because of the congestion created within the inner area to keep the economy going. It was vital to the interests of the shipping industry in Liverpool that people should be housed right by the docks. It was also vital that, instead of water being given to people in houses, it should be provided for ships. That is what made Liverpool famous—a copious supply of clean, pure water so that ships could sail long distances throughout the world. The water was taken to the docks, not to people's houses; so that left another problem.
Because of this congestion and its effect upon the rich shipowners just outside the city centre, the rich shipowners left Liverpool. What happened? All the money on which they lived was generated in the city of Liverpool. Where did they spend it? Not in Liverpool;—oh, no. They took it to the Wirral, to Southport, into the rural areas of Lancashire and spent it there, denying the city of Liverpool the resources that its people had themselves created.
That is the fundamental problem of the inner city areas. While it affects Liverpool, it is not only Liverpool, because Liverpool is the nation writ large. Let me ask the Secretary of State a question. I congratulate him on his new responsibilities and I sympathise with him in the task he has. I have already asked him some questions to which I have not had answers. I made a statement that more money is put into the South-East of England than is spent on the whole of regional aid for the rest of the country. I may be wrong. It would not be the first time I have been wrong. I should like to see the Secretary of State get the figures out and then add on the amount of money that is spent on subsidies to people who are employed in the South-East. I refer to money spent by the private trade—banks are paying an extra £3,000 over and above anywhere in the North—and the extra money the Government have to pay to keep staff in London.
Several steps could be taken to cure the problems in Merseyside. We could create 402,000 square feet of office space in the Merseyside area and people it with employees. Overnight that would solve the Merseyside problem. In 12 months 402,000 square feet of office space was occupied by this Government in an area from St. Albans to Newbury and down to Horsham. They took it last year. The year before it was nil. What are the Government doing? Are they helping Merseyside? Are they helping the North? I ask the Secretary of State another question. Perhaps he will write to me with the answer. Is it vitally necessary that the people employed in that 402,000 square feet of office space should carry on their profession in those areas? Could they not be moved, as was once proposed by central government, to another part of the country and so help distribute the plentiful resources of this country? That kind of argument can be repeated over and over again.
I wonder what the nation would say if I said there were 10,000 vacancies for railway workers in the North-West. There are 10,000 vacancies for railway

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workers in the South-East. Why? It is because the congestion in the South-East is now similar to the problems of congestion that were caused in places like Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. If we want to do something about it, we can. I do not know whether noble Lords accept the simple premise—I accept it utterly and completely—that the standard and quality of life that a person enjoys depends in the main on his economic circumstancs. If it does, why do we not redistribute some of the wealth that is hanging around in the South-East of England and then leave it to the people of Merseyside, Manchester, Birmingham and the rest to apply those resources to cure the problems? They will cure them.
We hear from the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales. They are very concerned and are starting new ideas—trusts and so on. We do not want them. We do not need them. Liverpool has a history as long as your arm of that kind of thing. Tomorrow morning I shall be meeting the general secretary of the Young Persons' Housing Association in Liverpool. Over the past quarter of a century it has taken Victorian blocks in Liverpool, which were deserted by the wealthy people, the cultured people, who went out to Southport when the bombs started dropping, and has converted them into good housing. We do not need the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Edinburgh. We have a long history of doing such things. Such improvements have now been going on for 40 or 50 years. Merseyside Improved Housing has taken houses that were in multi-occupation and has cleaned them up and provided flats. Maritime Housing, the secretary of which was a responsible Member of the House of Commons, has been doing the same thing. We have the know-how. If you want to become modern then go to the Eldonian Association, which has had enough publicity lately—Liverpool born, Liverpool bred and producing a very good job indeed.
I make no apology for coming down to the basic requirements for solving some of the problems of the inner cities. I know there is a problem in London, but match the problem that obtains in regard to unemployment in London against the 10,000 vacancies and the vacancies elsewhere in the South-East. The problem in the South-East is the proper distribution of opportunities. That does not come from London Docklands. Go and tell some of the people on supplementary benefit that they have to pay only £45,000 for a house and they can have one in docklands. That shows the gap that exists between Parliament and the suffering of ordinary people. My Lords, £45,000 is a fortune beyond the grasp of hundreds of thousands of working class people, yet we talk about it lightly here: "It is only £45,000".
Let the Government set up a Select Committee—perhaps the Secretary of State will examine that proposition—to see how they can get rid of some of the staff in Victoria Street and put the MPs there instead of talking about putting their offices in Westminster Hall. Let them see how many people out of the Ministry of Employment they could move nearer the customers in the North. They do not all need to be here. They do not all come running over to see Ministers. The heads do so keep them here. There are hundreds of other jobs. Fundamentally the
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Government are saying to the private sector, "Please look at the possibility of diverting your resources and investing in the North". That is what they are saying, so let them put their money where their mouth is. I say to the Government, "Look at the problem". I do not say, "Do it"; I merely say. "Look at the problem". Somebody is looking at his watch.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, that is the problem.
Lord Sefton of Garston: My Lords, perhaps I may say this to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. The Church of England is the established church and is part of our community. It knows what the problems are because it has a good many bishops up in the North who know them. Perhaps the right reverend Prelate can answer the question. When it was proposed that they move their offices, why on earth did they not move them out nearer the people? If they did that perhaps the people would then begin to realise that somebody was concerned about the North and about the people.
6.18 p.m.
Lord Thomas of Swynnerton: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sefton of Garston, took us back in time to Liverpool in the 1960s in order to correct any sense of parochiality. I hope I shall be forgiven if I remind the House that in the 1820s Lord Liverpool, whose electoral achievements we have been reminded of recently in a significant manner, remarked to the then French Ambassador, Monsieur Chateaubriand:
"What are we to do with these enormous towns? One false step and we are lost".
In the 19th century there were a number of developments; gas lighting, Victorian morality and an innovation, which at the time was resented as something imported from France—namely, the police. I should like to try in this perceived new crisis to echo the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, that this problem is not unique to this country at this time. We ought to be willing to consider some historical and geographical lessons. We should notice how this country was the first country in the world in the middle of the 19th century to have a majority of its population living in urban circumstances. This has happened in all other countries since that time but we were the first. Naturally, we have some problems which derive from that not desired pre-eminence. That is particularly so since the collective approach to housing, although philanthropically intended when it was begun, often resulted in geographical immobility in our cities which, had that collective approach existed before the rise of those cities, would probably have prevented those cities from rising in the first place.
Some of the effects of other housing policies were put particularly brilliantly by my noble friend Lord Vinson, whose speech I shall read with great attention, as will other noble Lords. In particular we ought to bear in mind what he said about the effects of commuting. The fact is that the ease of commuting and weekending—which are consequences of prosperity—have often had the effect of making cities leaderless half the time. We should also be willing to learn from our European partners, with whom we are now economically so closely associated, even our

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Latin partners often in places poorer than either Liverpool or Glasgow. Perhaps particularly we can learn from our Latin partners—pace the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter—whose citizens and leaders have gone to immense efforts to try to try to preserve and expand local activities of dazzling variety, which may not necessarily have brought prosperity but which at least have maintained or extended civic morale and pride.
I regret the absence of the right reverend Prelate, but I should like to ask Church leaders in particular, whose dimensions and interests have evolved so considerably in the last generation, whether in the next generation they could not devote some of their ample energies and intelligences to see whether—I must put this carefully—their post-reformation distrust of such manifestations as carnivals with a religious basis could not in modern circumstances be re-examined. Sometimes in Latin cities good strict Protestants mutter the word "paganism" as they see great processions pass in the Mediterranean countries in Easter week. Paganism? It is life itself, usually inspired by private endeavour, private dedication and with a minimum of public money.
Your Lordships may think that I am teasing the Secretary of State with my Latin ways. I am not. As a resident of Notting Hill—indeed I am proud to say that my title designation derives from Notting Hill—I know the benefit of the Notting Hill carnival in summer. I walked through Toxteth Park soon after the last famous riots there. Of course, as your Lordships will be aware, the housing in that suburb of Liverpool is decayed. The people were undoubtedly shabby; nevertheless the housing was not irredeemable and the people were not starving. That was not the problem. When I was there a prosperous West Indian said to me, "It is not money these people want; they can get it. It is not even work, because most of them get some of it. They are bored. What they want is a bit of life". That is perfectly true of ordinary white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as much as it is true of West Indians.
We as a nation are often looked on as experts in preserving the continuity of ceremonial and celebration. The survival of your Lordships' House with its marvellous rituals reminds us of that. The survival of the fashionability of Oxford and Cambridge attest to that. The success of the Jubilee celebrations reminded us of that, but the surviving sense of ceremony, so important in people's lives and so important in preserving civic pride, affects only a tiny minority and too rarely.
6.25 p.m.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: My Lords, over the weekend I visited many of the inner city projects being carried out in the Handsworth area. I was thrilled with many of the things that I saw and disappointed with some that were not moving as fast. Yesterday reading the Guardian I found that there might be a form of new money coming from the Government from the possible use of new town commission sales which might boost the income which the Government could spend on the inner cities. I felt that perhaps we were on the right road. But one reads this morning on the front page of the
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Guardian that at the Chancellor is considering plans to reform taxation which would cut the tax dues of many rich people living on unearned income.
It seems a strange paradox that on the one hand the Government are saying that there is not enough money—therefore those who are living in the inner cities will still continue to suffer—and on the other hand are giving it to the very wealthy. That is a dichotomy if ever there was one.
I have been interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, said. I am always interested in Lord Bellwin and his comments because he was a local government man. When he sat on the Government Front Bench it was obvious in many debates that he sympathised with the noble Lords, Lord Sefton and Lord Stallard, and others including myself who knew all about local government. He was sympathetic although he had government policy to put through. As the noble Lord quite rightly said, each of the urban areas presents different problems and different strategies are needed. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Sefton, that there are large tracts of land in Liverpool because docks are not used now. We see the same in London where huge tracts of land could be used for reviving not only the economic but the housing situation.
Then we come to other areas. It is a difficult term to use but I am thinking particularly of the Black Country. For those people who do not know the Black Country, it is the area surrounding Birmingham, which includes Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall and Sandwell. The nomenclature "black" does not come from the inhabitants but originally from the smoke and filth that came from the steelworks and furnaces in that area. Perhaps the only good thing about the steel furnaces and other works closing down is that the air is now clearer.
In the Black County area there are very serious problems of land derelection. Where steelworks are being dismantled and mine shafts are being removed the land is covered with furnace slag and toxic substances that have penetrated the soils and is thus delaying the progress of building on those sites.
I ask the noble Lord, Lord Young, whether one ought not to consider very seriously a greater concentration of derelict land grant in those areas. There are certain problems to be overcome. In Birmingham the largest tract of open land we have is where the Saltley gasworks was. The whole area has been worked over and over for the last two years in an endeavour to get the soil into a reasonable state before it can be built on. When I mentioned the Saltley gasworks that seemed to cause a smile to cross the face of the noble Lord, Lord Young, and he passed his comment on to his noble friend next to him. People lived and still live cheek by jowl with the gasworks, because some people always have to live the wrong side of the tracks. Perhaps it will not be those who will profit when the Chancellor benefits those on unearned incomes. Therefore in Birmingham there is not a problem like the one we find in Liverpool or in London. The inner city problem in Birmingham is that of money to maintain the homes we already have rather than building more.

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There are no factories in the Handsworth area; there never were factories in that area. There is a huge Victorian park, the largest in the city. On the fringe of Handsworth, where the area borders the city centre, there was a large factory that made jewellery for Samuel, but it is now closed down. That is not therefore the problem in Birmingham.
I must remind the Minister that Birmingham's core area now consititutes the largest and most severe concentration of deprivation in the city. Unemployment in the city has to be put in graphic terms. For the decline in employment in Birmingham has been more marked than anywhere else in the country. Since 1971 the city has experienced employment losses of 190,000, nearly twice that of Scotland and Wales put together. The majority of those jobs were in manufacturing. Most of the people lived near the city centre where all the large factories were located.
It is important to recognise that Birmingham provides perhaps the widest range of policies that can be brought to bear on inner-city problems. The noble Lord, Lord Young, will know that the Minister of Trade and Industry, on a visit to Birmingham yesterday, complimented the city again on the refurbishment of houses there. It is important for the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, and the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter—who is not here—to recognise that Mr. Clarke was pleased that the city, through the building contractor, has taken on a considerable number of coloured persons in that area not as labourers but for training so that they become competent on the job.
However, as the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, has said, that might not be possible in the future. It appears that the Environment Secretary has different opinions to those of the trade and industry Minister. It is important to recognise that Tarmac, a large building contractor, has acted with the compliance of the local authority.
Then there is the housing crisis. I tried to do my homework before preparing these notes. In the Library there is a reference sheet called The Urban Programme. Since May 1968 somebody, somewhere, in various departments to do with inner cities has been talking a lot; but I am not sure that the action has really worked. From local government grants in 1969 to community development projects, urban deprivation units, inner-city studies and comprehensive community programmes, so it goes on for page after page. There are the urban development corporations. Then, following the riots in Toxteth, we decide to re-hash our programmes, and Ed Berman, a director of Inter Action, is appointed by the Secretary of State as a special adviser to the inner cities.
It goes on and on. But all the time what we are doing is just changing the name of the money we are putting in. We are not doing anything else. As the name is changed the amount of money becomes smaller. The noble Lord shakes his head as he did when the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, spoke. I wonder sometimes whether the Government have figures. The local authorities have figures. I can give figures for Birmingham which prove conclusively—I am not
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going to use them—that although a great deal of money was received under the urban aid programme, Birmingham is not as well off as it was five years ago.
The noble Lord will find figures to disprove what I am going to say. He will not give the whole figures. That is how figures are bandied around. Local authorities are often accused of intolerable delays in the planning mechanism. I ask the Minister to examine the length of time it takes for development grants to be processed in Whitehall. I ask whether the process has been slower since regional offices ceased processing the grants? Is it because development grants are not now being processed in Birmingham and have to come down to Whitehall that the whole process has become slower?
I am informed that in January of this year the local authorities put in their claims under the urban aid programme and are still awaiting replies. These include several enveloping schemes. If they are not started before the end of the year the money is lost. I would ask the Minister to examine the situation, bearing in mind that local authorities are normally the ones that are criticised.
Since 1979 the underlying problems of the inner cities have gradually grown worse. Those of us who live in these areas know it. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, that public sector funding through local authority main programmes has been reduced, and of course unemployment has taken its place. Therefore, people who are living in the inner cities need a great deal of encouragement.
When I was a Member of the other place, somebody said that people have to learn to stand on their own two feet. People are a bit more cheeky in the other place, and somebody shouted out, "But what if you haven't got any feet?" Some people living in the inner cities are becoming morally despondent. And of course ill-health is now creeping into those areas.
Ministers who want to see for themselves should consider coming overnight and having working breakfasts and working lunches. Before going out on their visits, they would have the opportunity of speaking to people in the area—the CBI, the chamber of commerce, trade unions and local councillors. Ministers would hear what people have to say. They would be told of the problems and find out the things that were going wrong; and then they could go round and get the publicity in seeing what was being done.
I should like to make an urgent plea to Ministers to do without their limousines and police escorts. It does not endear them at all to people in the inner cities. There has been mention of the report of the building trade. It is important to note the remarks of the president of that organisation when he says that he can see the need for a housing ministry. He states:
"Therefore I firmly believe that housing, to be given the consideration and priority it merits, must be taken away from the… budget-slashing DoE and established in a separate Housing Ministry, with its own unequivocal priorities".
On that note, I thank noble Lords for being patient with me.
6.41 p.m.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, I should like to thank my noble friend Lord Dean for posing the Question to

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the Minister. The Question asks Her Majesty's Government:
"how they propose to deal with the deteriorating situation in inner urban areas".
It is encumbent on all noble Lords who participate in the debate to point to some of the areas of deprivation if possible. Previous speakers in the debate have done just that.
Most speakers have referred to the fact that the problems are not new. The problems of our inner cities have been universally acknowledged for many years. Millions of words have been written and spoken in reports, surveys and debates in this House and elsewhere, and many more words will be spoken in the months to come as legislation unfolds. In his eloquent speech my noble friend Lord Pitt pointed to many incidents of deprivation and deterioration in our inner cities. I too welcomed the Prime Minister's initial reaction to winning the election when it was stated in the Independent on 13th June, (and I say this to prove that I am trying to be impartial):
"Mrs. Thatcher had only one substantial political point to make to her party workers. She told them, for the first time explicitly, what the education, housing and urban improvement policies which form the most radical planks of her third term manifesto are all about".
She said:
"from Monday, we have got a big job to do in those inner cities…".
Like the noble Lord, I welcome those remarks. I was pleased to hear that and I hope that she meant it. However, I should have been happier if she had not gone on to say:
"because we want them, too, next time".
I thought that that set the wrong note for a debate on the problems of the inner cities which will range nationwide for a long time to come. In my view that is not the right foot on which to set off.
It is true that many initiatives have been taken and tried. There have been many successes over the years, particularly since the 1977 paper on the inner cities and the initiatives put forward by the then Secretary of State, the right honourable Peter Shore. Many successes flowed from that programme and we should be churlish to say that there have been no successes in the programmes that have been initiated by this Government, as far as they have gone. It is strange that in tabling this Question it can be said that conditions have deteriorated since 1979. I hope to give a few examples.
An article I read recently in a Town and Country Planning Association publication summed up the matter by stating that the conditions of our inner city areas:
"are characterised by the communities suffering from acute collective and personal deprivation across the full range of social, economic and environmental necessities".
That is not a bad summation of what happens in inner areas such as the one in which I live. The article went on to ask:
"What kind of priority for inner city areas is it that creates a situation whereby the funds made available under the Urban Programme have been massively exceeded by the funds lost through reductions in Rate Support Grants…?".
I am not reading from a Labour Party publication. The article states that both the rate support grants and the housing subsidy have been reduced. For example, in the case of inner London a recent report
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prepared for a GLC conference on inner city policy showed that during the period from 1979/1980 to 1983/1984 inner London gained £261 million in urban programme funding while losing £865 million in rate support grants. Speakers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, quote only the first part of those figures but we must have the whole picture. Of course they have received money from the programme but they have lost massively in excess of that amount because of rate support grants. We must look at all the figures if we are to understand the situation.
This applies not only to London because Manchester City Council gained an extra £9 million in real terms from the Urban Programme between 1980/1981 and 1984/1985 while losing some £100 million in rate support grant settlements within the same period. If we wish to understand the deterioration those statistics are important. They are massive sums of money to take away from local authorities particularly when, as has been said before, the reductions have affected most of the areas with the greatest level of need and the greatest deterioration in circumstances.
In addition the co-ordinating and overview role of local authorities, which we have all known and participated in, has and is being shifted to non-elected bodies such as the urban development corporations. The noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, mentioned such a corporation but this is raising further problems and we have not yet heard the end of them. As more and more corporations are set up other problems will develop and we could have a chaotic and dangerous situation if the protests from the first experiments are not heeded. I know that most noble Lords are well aware of the problems that have been raised by the LDDC as well as other points which have been raised.
One of the advantages of being placed lower down on the list of speakers is that almost everything has been said. However, by now it has been forgotten and perhaps I can say it again—or some of it! I should like to concentrate my final remarks on the question of housing and the homeless. I have spent many years in that field and was very active as chairman of the all-party child group. In that area there have been some of the most fierce deteriorations in the inner cities. With the financial cuts have come cuts in the public housing sector. Public housing is probably the only source accessible to the kind of people we are discussing in the inner cities. The public housing programme was cut by 40 per cent. The housing association movement is working at half the level at which it was working in 1979. The figure is down from 40,000 dwellings at that date to about 18,000 now. That is deterioration and that is what we are speaking of in this Question.
Further deterioration and disrepair of existing stock has been equally dramatic and I should like to relate some of the effects of the programmes on the homeless. We are talking of people to whom the right to buy is a meaningless slogan, as has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Sefton. We are not talking of people who could even contemplate buying. In my area they could not even contemplate renting at £85 to £150 per week. If noble Lords do not believe me, they should buy the Hampstead and

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Highgate Express where advertisements appealing to the homeless are laid out by the dozen at that rent. To those people the right to buy and other such slogans are empty words.
For the first time in the post-war period the number of officially classified homeless households has topped 100,000.
There are record numbers of homeless families in bed and breakfast accommodation. The cost in financial terms, to say nothing of the social cost, has rocketed. I do not want to weary the House with too many statistics but I should like to give one or two statistics in regard to bed and breakfast accommodation. In my own area, which I know fairly well—the London borough of Camden—in 1981 there were 69 families in bed and breakfast accommodation. In March 1987 that number had gone up to 1,258—a fairly massive increase. In 1981 they were spending £211,865 on bed and breakfast accommodation and in 1986–87 that figure had gone up to £12 million.
I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, who gave some suggestions as to how that ludicrous situation could be prevented. In the London borough of Hackney conditions were similar. In June 1981 there were 92 in bed and breakfast accommodation and in 1987 that number had gone up to 473. In 1981 the cost was £482,000 and in 1986–87 it was £6,157,000. In Tower Hamlets the number in bed and breakfast accommodation in 1981 was 46 and in 1987 it was 930. The cost has risen from £414,000 in 1981 to —17,292,000 in 1986–87.
In anybody's figures those are massive increases and they represent a massive deterioration in the circumstances of many people. Over 8,000 families are living in appalling conditions and they live there for months or years. Nearly 10 times as many households as in 1981 are involved and it is costing 15 times as much to keep them in those hotels now. That is excluding money spent by DHSS. If that was added, the sum would be colossal. That is an example of the deterioration since 1979. I have chosen the years 1981 to 1987.
There are still thousands of others, including the single homeless, who do not qualify for housing and they are not on any authority's housing list. Many of them are excluded from priority need under Part III of the Housing Act 1985, and that was a deterioration too. They have no roof at all. Many people involved in this field know that "cardboard city", as we call it, is extending, and the situation, even for those people who already have nothing, is getting worse, if that is possible. If I could take some of your Lordships on trips that I go on you might begin to understand some of the deprivation and deterioration that exists. At one point last year I invited the noble Lord to come with me on a visit to Hackney. He declined, and he has not been since. I think they invited him too but he would not go. It is an important area if he is talking about the inner cities and he ought to understand it. I imagine the invitation is still open.
All these problems continue to deteriorate. In inner London four-fifths of the properties available for the homeless, according to another survey, lacked
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satisfactory means of escape from fire. We have made numerous suggestions for improvement over the past few years but have met with a blank reply. These are potential death traps. The cost of upgrading and putting right disrepair in the London area alone was estimated to be between £1,350 million and £1,691 million. So the programme gets bigger and bigger and the deterioration is there for all to see. I say it is mainly the Government's responsibility because, first, we have their ideology, their dogma. The Government have abandoned any belief, if they ever had it, in the criterion of need for housing. They have abandoned that altogether. In fact, they do all they can to dismantle local housing authorities and to shackle housing associations, whose whole approach to housing has been based on meeting housing need.
Secondly, as has been mentioned, it is now just over two years ago since the Government brought in that disgusting and shocking piece of legislation on board and lodging regulations, forcing young homeless people to become, as the Government were warned would happen by their own Social Security Advisory Committee, virtually an army of young vagrants wandering all over the country.
I should like to end by giving two further examples of current attitudes towards the homeless, because this situation of deterioration and deprivation in the inner cities is also having a backlash effect on the homeless. People are adopting harder attitudes to them. It seems to be an intractable problem. They do not want to face it. Attitudes are hardening against these unfortunate people. That is something that I deprecate. One example has been much publicised and we all know it. In Tower Hamlets the council is seeking to declare a large number of homeless families intentionally homeless on the grounds that one partner has connections in Bangladesh. I hope some solution will soon be found to that problem.
The other example concerns Westminster. The council recently announced the policy of transporting its homeless families outside the borough's boundaries. Again, I can do no better than quote very briefly from the press release issued by the Bayswater Hotel Homelessness Project. It says:
"In the same week that Westminster City Council started transporting its homeless families outside the borough boundaries, it slashed the number of council flats which will be available to let to people in priority housing need. In a new 'designated sale' policy, Westminster councillors earmarked 9,300 of its flats. As soon as a flat becomes vacant it will be kept empty until it can be sold. The Council intends to sell off at least 500 flats a year, in addition to sales to sitting tenants under the 'Right to Buy' scheme. The Council's report spelt out that this will lead to more people kept in temporary accommodation at an extra cost of £1·7 million per year; substantially reduced ability to meet the needs of homeless people; most priority housing categories closed; and drastic reduction of housing for top medical priority cases. The Council took the decision contrary to the recommendations of a private consultants' report which they had commissioned which stressed the increased need for social housing in the city."
So I hope that somebody is listening. I hope that the last few words of the Prime Minister's remarks to her party workers at the end of the election were just made in the heat of the moment and that she did not really mean that was going to be the Government's aproach to this problem because if she did mean it, then God help the people I have tried to describe to your Lordships tonight.
6.58 p.m.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, we are all grateful to my noble friend, Lord Dean of Beswick for raising this important Question, particularly at this stage. It is of course the topic of the moment, as a number of speakers have pointed out. We have had a wide-ranging discussion with many extremely thoughtful contributions from many noble Lords. I am sure that the noble Lord the Secretary of State will have a lot to chew on when he goes away and reads Hansard carefully, as I am sure he will.
I do not intend to follow certain other speakers in talking about the problem of housing. That is not because I belittle the problem—it is certainly one of the central problems in the inner urban areas—but it is because there have been a number of distinguished contributions this evening from the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Durham, from the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, and from my noble friends, Lords Stallard and Sefton and Lady Fisher. So I do not wish to burden the Secretary of State with an analysis of housing. However, I look forward to hearing the response he will make to the questions put to him by the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, on the connection between housing finance and the public sector borrowing requirement. The Secretary of State's response is something from which I think we could all learn. Nor indeed do I intend to follow the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, down the road of carnivals and religious processions. I am sure that there is a contribution to be made by such events but I do not believe that they are essential to the problem. However, to a certain extent I do follow him when I come to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, abut the necessity to build communities with the same kind of village solidarity as one is used to in the rural areas.
The Secretary of State has undertaken a job, and I shall be asking him exactly what job it is. Not only have the inner cities been a subject of considerable concern from the days of Lord Liverpool onwards but they have been the subject of considerable Government action. After all, in 1968 my noble friend Lord Wilson of Rievaulx announced an urban aid programme which was followed in 1969 by a community development project, itself followed by the setting up of an urban deprivation unit by the noble Lord, Lord Carr of Hadley, when he was Home Secretary. In 1974 the then Labour Home Secretary, Mr. Roy Jenkins, launched a comprehensive community programme and my right honourable friend Mr. Peter Shore, as my noble friend Lord Stallard said, produced what I think was the last major statement of public policy in the 1977 White Paper entitled Policy for the Inner Cities. Since then we have had a series of initiatives under different names.
As my noble friend Lady Fisher said, we have had a special adviser to the Secretary of State to advise on ways to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the inner cities. We have had city action teams, employment task forces—which I believe have now become inner city task forces—and other initiatives. There is no shortage of names or expressions to describe the various arrangements that governments of both parties have made.
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The point that has been made, which I must make again, is that we welcome any initiative in the inner cities or the urban areas that is not just another gimmick or something wrapped up in a different piece of paper. We must ask the Secretary of State exactly what is new about the Government's proposals. Indeed, we must ask him to tell us what the Government are proposing because at the moment we have simply a declaration of intention without a very clear idea of exactly what policies will be put in place.
There are three points that I should like to make about those policies when they arrive and some further points to be made on behalf of the Opposition. There are also some questions that I should like to ask the Secretary of State to answer. The first point is that we must accept the very important observation made by the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, who said that no problem of one inner city is the same as another; there is enormous variation between urban areas up and down the country. indeed, my noble friend Lord Dean of Beswick rightly went somewhat further when he said that there is no clear definition of an inner city and that the problems of inner cities areas tend to spill over into the suburbs and vice versa.
I must also make the point—and this subject was broached by the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter— that the role of local authorities and communities in any urban area action scheme is absolutely essential. I very much appreciated the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, who rightly said that there was a whole mass of schemes but that the central point about them was that they involved local authorities and local communities in particular. The noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, referred to the document entitled Managing Workspaces recently published by the Department of the Environment. He pointed out that most of the projects cited in that document were the product of the urban programme operated through the local authorities.
I do not want to detail them all and I give only one or two examples: Hackney Enterprise Workshop is financed through the urban programme via the Hackney Council; Nottingham Enterprise Workshop is financed through the urban programme by way of the Nottingham City Council; Aire Street Workshop, Leeds, is financed through the urban programme and Leeds City Council; Chelmsford Borough Council has financed the Globe House Workspace in Chelmsford. I shall not go through the whole list. As the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, said, the important theme that runs right through this study is that the relationship between the various governmental institutions—and I mean central and local government—and the community and the desire of people to help themselves are fundamental to any programme. In so far as the Government adopt that strategy, we shall certainly support it.
I come to my second point. It is very easy for Members of this House and people living in the prosperous South-East and rural areas of the country to be patronising about people who live in the inner cities. It is easy to say that they should help themselves, get off their backsides and generally offer

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to the community a contribution of the type that we make. That is a very dangerous attitude and a perilous trap to fall into. I believe that self-help is important. I also believe that we have to treat people as part of the same community to which we ourselves belong. It is no good looking down on people and saying, "Here is our charity; you can take this to help yourselves". We have to regard any job or task that is given to people or that people undertake for themselves, as a task that we ourselves undertake. We are all part of the same community. If there is to be a programme along those lines, again we support it.
The third point that I wish to make comes back to something said by the noble Lord, Lord Vinson. We have to create inner cities or urban areas—whatever one chooses to call them—in, to use a French expression, la dimension humaine (the human dimension). We can no longer afford to consider such great tracts of land and buildings as the right environment for people of the 21st century to live in. If that is helped by small firms, as Mr. Trippier recently announced, then so be it. If large firms can help—not, as I think the Secretary of State has said, by investing in inner cities, because that probably will not happen but by sourcing from small firms in inner cities, by doing what BAT has done in one of the projects cited in Managing Workspaces, by contributing to the establishment of a small enterprise—then that is something that must be welcomed and encouraged.
Nevertheless, having said that, I think we must come back to the very important comments that were made by the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, about something the Americans know as "contract compliance". I believe that we must have a clear statement from the Government that where projects of a largish scale are embarked on by Government with government funding. there must be proper protection for the local community to make sure that the jobs go where they are needed. We cannot have people moving in, completing a contract and moving out again. That is an important and fundamental point.
So far as the Opposition is concerned, we are looking forward to hearing what the Secretary of State has to say about current government policy. He will have to satisfy us on six points, the first being that this is not an elaborate political exercise to undermine elected local authorities. Secondly, he must satisfy us that the Government will work with local communities rather than against them, and that the character of the community will be preserved and encouraged.
Thirdly, we need to be assured that small firms of all kinds will be encouraged—and we make no distinction between service industries, manufacturing, craft industries or whatever they might be—while safeguarding the conditions of the people who work in them; in other words, that there will be no sweatshops; and there must be fair opportunities for the ethnic minorities in the inner cities. Next, we need to be satisfied that the financial institutions which the Government intend to use as vehicles are adapted to the task. We like the idea of development agencies and local enterprise boards.
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We believe that the urban programme, working through local authorities, has been successful. We should like to see those initiatives continue.
Next, we need a clear line of responsibility. I understand that the noble Lord the Secretary of State has been given the task of co-ordinating the inner city programme. I should like to ask the noble Lord whether that is true and, if it is true, what the expression "co-ordinating the inner city programme" really means in fact. Who is in charge? What we cannot afford is another public relations exercise of the Mr. Richard Branson type. For personal reasons, I would hate to see the noble Lord the Secretary of State disappear under a balloon of hot air and land uncomfortably in the Irish Sea. So what is the new policy, who is in charge, what is to be the role of the local authorities and what financial framework have the Government in mind?
There are major questions that the Government have to answer and we believe that it is time for a major statement of government policy. We would prefer to see this in a White Paper. If the noble Lord the Secretary of State can announce today that there will be a White Paper, the Question put down by my noble friend Lord Dean of Beswick will have achieved a great deal.
7.11 p.m.
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, I am indeed grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, for giving us the opportunity of having what I thought was billed as an Unstarred Question, but which has turned out to be a not inconsiderable debate into the problems of the inner cities. It is inevitable with a problem of this dimension, which so exercises our interest, that a number of views have been aired. The diversity of those views is important for there can be no mechanical solution to the problems of the inner cities. Tackling those problems requires the contribution of many people and groups within our society.
The great danger in debating such problems is that it leads people to believe, first, that there is a set of identifiable solutions, and, secondly, that the Government can provide those solutions. But those traditional tramlines, along which too often people's thoughts run, have not solved the problems of inner cities in the past and I think that such beliefs have prevented the development of new approaches.
I should be the very first to say that resources are important, and of course the right structure of government is important too. I can give many examples of the new initiatives which the Government have been developing over the past few years, which have put financial resources into the inner cities and have tried new ways of co-ordinating government activities. But the most important step forward is the recognition that the key to tackling the problems of the inner cities lies in people and in participation. Neither is a certain identifiable solution. Both depend upon what actually happens on the streets of the inner cities. But each is fundamental to any durable approach to inner cities.
The people philosophy is central. Personal initiative and self-reliance are just as important to the economic life of the inner cities as they are to

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community life. Individual responsibility and commitment are crucial to the new projects and initiatives which we are setting up in urban areas, and it is in engaging people on the ground that our initiatives will either succeed or fail. This approach is sometimes misinterpreted. I do not believe that every individual can run a business or that self-employment is the only way to tackle inner city problems. But I do believe that in generating the self-confidence and the dynamism which people need to run their own businesses, we will see many more businesses than we do today and that those qualities will help in all jobs.
Neither is this the policy of leaving people alone to sort out their own problems. Education, training, financial and community support are all essential ingredients to break through the circle of deprivation and poverty which have prevented people from realising their own potential. But we must never forget that we are helping people to realise their own potential. Perhaps it is apposite that I should quote Canon Barnet, who worked in the east end of London and observed, "Careless giving has made the poor poorer". It makes people poorer by taking away their will and drive to succeed themselves. Money alone makes people poorer in spirit and our job is to enrich those spirits. I am sure that in that one simple statement is something with which all sides of your Lordships' House will have no difficulty in agreeing.
Partnerships too are crucial. We need better partnerships within central government. Better targeting and co-ordination for policies at a local level has been the objective of our city action teams and is an important part of the work of our inner city task forces. What is important is not to run programmes as discreet unrelated activities but to focus them around the problems of people in the local area. Better partnerships are needed between central and local government. Most local authorities work happily with us, but, alas, there are times when political philosophy can get in the way. The immensity of the problems which we face in inner cities should override such considerations.
Better partnerships between local authorities are needed too. A coherent strategy has sometimes been prevented as inner cities are covered by a number of local authorities. I hope that the use of urban development corporations and the new mini-urban development corporations will help to speed up the process of development and bring derelict land back into use.
Finally, better partnerships are of course essential between the public and the private sectors. We are continually looking for ways to bring private enterprise into the inner cities. Urban development corporations are proving an important way to achieve that. Many companies are now participating with us in the inner city task forces, and the activities of organisations such as Business in the Community greatly add to the success of these initiatives. So people and participation are the basis of our approach to the inner cities. Within that approach can be identified a number of the policies about which noble Lords spoke during our debate.
The noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, was, I am glad to say, happy to agree with me about the importance of the private sector and of partnerships
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with local authorities. Indeed, he referred time and time again to the importance of the housing sector. We are committed to restoring the housing sector, but not necessarily just the public housing sector.
The noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, in an aside which I did not quite follow, said that I referred at one time to the importance of cellular telephones. He did not quite see the relevance of that to the inner cities. Of course it is the relevance of wealth creation to the inner cities that I was talking about. The noble Lord referred to ethnic minorities and said how unions should co-operate better with governments. He regretted the fact that it had taken so long to introduce ethnic minority monitoring into the Civil Service. But it was the very Civil Service unions that prevented us from introducing ethnic minority monitoring and there were considerable bouts of industrial action before we could bring that in.
The noble Lord also talked quite passionately about ethnic minorities in the inner cities. It is a subject about which I lay some claim to personal knowledge. My own father arrived in this country some 82 years ago and lived in an inner city. He was part of a wave which followed wave upon wave of people of different ethnic origins who came to our country, who came to the inner cities and then, having progressed, moved on. I too was born in an inner city area.
What we have today is another wave of people of ethnic minorities who have come in in the past 20 or 30 years. Fifty or 80 years ago, there were no government schemes to get people out of the inner cities, but it was accomplished. What we have to do today is to recognise not only that circumstances have changed but also that it is not at all possible to leave all this to he done by government. We must have a partnership between those who live in the inner cities and the Government themselves.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said that private enterprise would not be enough. Of course the state is important in this regard but we cannot leave matters to the state alone. That is a point that I should like to return to later, for if we look at the contributions of the state in clearing some of the inner cities we should realise that over the past few decades we have created far more harm than good in many ways.
The right reverend Prelate referred to some difficulties in social security and housing benefits. If the right reverend Prelate has details of such difficulties I hope that he will write to me and let me know about them, and I shall deal with them. He referred to the poll tax. The arrangements for the community charge are that those who are on social security will receive a rebate of 80 per cent. and the balance of that payment will be adjusted by an increase in their social security. We are not going to impose a tax on people who are not in a position to pay it, but the community charge is an important development. I have no doubt that all noble Lords will have an opportunity to comment on it in the coming months.
My noble friend Lord Bellwin gave us some wise words. He referred to different areas and to different problems. He said that different problems demanded different solutions. He is absolutely right in that. One

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of the reasons that we have 16 inner city task forces is that we are looking at different areas in parts of our inner cities to find different solutions so that we can learn from that and progress and start to find the quickest and the best way to help to solve the difficulties we have.
My noble friend also referred to bad housekeeping by local authorities. There can be little doubt that in the past many authorities have not proved themselves to be model landlords either in looking after their housing or in collecting their rents. That is a problem which I hope our current housing Bill will attempt to address. My noble friend also referred to a whole series of enterprises and initiatives and made a plea for flexibility. I certainly accede to that and I hope that we shall find ways of being flexible in the future.
The noble Lord, Lord Pitt of Hampstead, asked whether the Government had changed their policies. I must assure the noble Lord that in one respect that he mentioned we have not, alas, changed our policies. He accused us of cutting rate support grant and of wishing to give indiscriminate amounts of money to local government. A number of noble Lords have referred to a reduction in rate support grant. That reduction was accompanied by a vast increase in rating on those who lived within the inner cities. That was one of the most powerful reasons for driving employment out of inner city areas and for making them pockets of unemployment and helping them, one upon the other, to breed further bad conditions.
Lord Pitt of Hampstead: My Lords, that is very much the point. It is the Government's reduction of the rate support grant plus their use of penalties which has caused a lot of the increased rates in the inner London areas. However, it is not only the inner city areas in London that I am talking about. That is the point that I was making and I am afraid that the answer the noble Lord gives me does not meet that point.
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, I shall not enter into private debate with the noble Lord, Lord Pitt of Hampstead, but the very word "penalty" is there for a purpose. It was because of the amount of spending by local government that the Government reduced the rate support grant.
I well recall—I have referred to this matter before in your Lordships' House—that about seven years ago officials from the GLC came to me about the provision of workshop accommodation in inner London areas. They said that it would be perfectly possible in Wanstead but not in Lambeth because of the level of rates which already prevailed in that area. The rating policy of many local authorities made employment deserts in our great cities. That is entirely another problem.
My noble friend Lord Vinson made the wise point that the social cohesion of the village was something that we should try to recreate in the inner city. Recreating small-scale societies and making communities whole again is very much part of the policy of the Government. We do not believe in the vast monolithic structures which have come about so often. We believe very much that we should try to recreate small-scale employment and give people the
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responsibility and opportunity of working for themselves.
The noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, asked me three questions but, alas, my only answer to him is, no. There is no way yet known in which one can create money. So if one wishes to spend more money on housing, that must have an effect on either inflation or interest rates or on other matters. The noble Lord also suggested that we could do something about helping employment or the economy by building many more houses. I am sure the noble Lord is aware that at the present time we have run into one of those periods of brick shortages and skill shortages. I hope very much that we shall see more houses being built, but we have to have the conditions in which we can obtain the skills of those who are needed to build the houses. I hope very much that as part of the policy of the programme which the Government have been following we shall see many of those conditions come about.
I shall be brief with the rest of my remarks. The noble Lord, Lord Sefton of Garston, asked how the 'sixties had failed. It is the monolithic, almost Stalinist housing estates that we created in the fifties and the 'sixties in many of the suburbs of our great cities which today are pockets of unemployment and the areas which are now known as the inner cties.
My former Parliamentary Private Secretary, who is now a junior Minister in my Department, Mr. Robert Atkins, was chairman of the housing committee which received a Civic Trust award in 1971 for a place called Broadwater Farm, where 15 years later there was a riot. It is that structure of living which we are seeking to break up. The housing Bill will break that up by giving people tenancy opportunities to choose their own landlords.
I have just one aside. The noble Lord, Lord Sefton of Garston, said that the Department of Employment should take its civil servants out of London. The department has thousands of civil servants in Sheffield and in Bootle. Over 90 per cent. of the 60,000 people who work for the Department of Employment work well outside London. I suspect that about half of them work in the North.
My noble friend Lord Thomas of Swynnerton invited me to come to the carnival. The great thing about the Notting Hill Carnival is the sense of identity which it gives. I believe that anything of that nature can only serve a good purpose.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fisher of Rednal, was worried about something she had read in the Guardian. I am often worried about matters that I read in the Guardian but I wish to reassure the noble Baroness that it may not come to pass. The noble Baroness referred to the industrial dereliction in the Black Country. I agree with the noble Baroness that that is one of the areas which are now described as the inner city. It is one of a vast number of areas of our country which served the nation well in the Industrial Revolution but which today are scenes of considerable industrial dereliction. That is why I am very glad that we have established an urban development corporation in the Black Country and I believe that it will have good effects.
I wish to pay tribute to the way in which the local authority in Birmingham is working with the

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Government. We shall initiate many good schemes together and considerable progress will be made in Birmingham. I hope that Birmingham may serve to be a good example for other authorities which are less co-operative.
The noble Lord, Lord Stallard, also gave me a list of authorities which have imposed large increases for bed and breakfast accommodation. Although specific authorities may have had those increases I shall he very interested and I shall look at the figures in London as a whole to see what effect that has had. But it is sometimes difficult to take particular authorities and not see the effect on their neighbours.
The noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, gave me a historical survey which ended up with a number of the schemes which I, alas, am responsible for introducing. I hope that they will prove to be successful. The noble Lord accused me of falling into a trap into which we have definitely not fallen. We are not condescending about the inner cities. We do not believe that their misfortunes serve them right and that they should get off their bottoms and work for themselves. But we do believe in helping people to work for themselves. I regretted the slightly cheap joke at Mr. Branson, who is working very hard and is creating a number of jobs round the country. I gladly welcome all those who come in from the private sector and volunteered their time and effort to work in government schemes to help specifically long-term unemployment. I do not regard that as a matter to be laughed at.
There are many other areas which could be discussed. However, I ask your Lordships to bear in mind two short facts. First, ideas to help inner cities can only be effective in a successful, growing economy. Inner cities are sharing in our economic success. Unemployment in the main conurbations of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and even Liverpool has fallen by around 8½ per cent. in the year to May 1987. Unemployment in the areas covered by the eight original inner city task forces fell by more than 9 per cent. Unemployment nationally has fallen by a fraction over 9 per cent. So there have been benefits to the inner cities and I believe that those benefits will continue.
I should be the first to accept that economic growth alone will not be sufficient to tackle the problems of the inner cities. Therefore I should like to assure all noble Lords that they should not be misled by media reports of disagreements between different departments or Ministers. We are working together very happily. But we are also looking at new ways to tackle the problems of the inner cities.
I am glad to say that English Industrial Estates, which up to now has been concentrating on building factories in the North-East, the North-West and many other development areas and has been very active in providing small industrial units and developing science parks, will now be looking to develop and run managed workshops in inner city areas to help people to work either for themselves or in co-operatives and in partnerships. I believe that that process of participation of the private sector, the churches and voluntary organisations will play a critical role.
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I commend to your Lordships' House just one example of the sort of initiative which I hope will grow in the years to come. In Leeds, Chappletown Harehills Enterprise Limited is being set up and guided by a board of businessmen and local community leaders. It is supported by central government and the city council. Imperial Chemical Industries is also helping to provide finance. The main aim will be to encourage greater independence among the local community by running employment and training initiatives and by promoting enterprise through providing starter units and enterprise training. That is one way in which central government, local government, the public sector, the private sector, local businessmen and those who live in the inner cities can work together for the greater good.
I hope that the result of the policies of the Government during the course of this Parliament will be that when we have a similar debate at a future time, noble Lords opposite will accept that the policy towards inner cities is working, and working well.
Lord Bonham-Carter: My Lords, before the Minister sits down, will he be so good as to answer a specific question which I put to him in the course of my speech? My question concerns contract compliance. Is the interpretation of the new local government Bill by the Secretary of State for the Environment correct; or is that which is alleged to have been put by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster correct? In other words, in connection with contract compliance, will the Bill allow a local authority offering a contract to insist on the employment of local people, or, even more, will it allow them to carry out their duties under the Race Relations Act of promoting equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different groups? That is the whole point of contract compliance.
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, although I have the privilege of speaking for a number of government departments in your Lordships' House, the Department of the Environment is not one of them. That Bill will come before your Lordships' House in due course and I assure the noble Lord that there will be nothing in it to prevent the operation of the Race Relations Act. However, I suspect that the details are better left to be explored at that time.

Broadcasting Authorities: Responsibilities
7.35 p.m.
Lord Chalfont Lord Chalfont rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are satisfied that the broadcasting authorities discharged their statutory responsibilities during the period leading up to the general election.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, my intention, so far as it may prove possible to achieve it, is to consider this issue outside the narrow context of party political confrontation. Broadcasting, and more especially television, is, for better or worse, the medium by which the great majority of people in this country receive information and form their opinions.

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It therefore seems to me that the standards set by the broadcasting authorities should be a matter of serious concern to intelligent people right across the political spectrum.
My Question this evening arises partly from an answer given by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, when he replied to a Question which I asked on 29th June. In the course of replying, the noble Earl said, on the subject of impartiality, that,
"taken as an overall spectrum, I gather that the results from the BBC would perhaps be judged to be fair".—[Official Report, 29/6/87; col. 27.]
In the light of certain events which took place during the general election and in the light of certain comments made as a result, I thought that that was a judgment of very considerable significance. I should like to explain why.
It seems to me that in answer to the Question which I have tabled today, there are, for practical purposes, three ways in which the body politic, as represented in your Lordships' House, might react. The first is that there might be a general expression on all sides of the House of complete satisfaction with the way in which the broadcasting authorities discharged their responsibilities, If that were the case, I should be driven to the conclusion that my own doubts were unfounded and unjustified.
The second possibility is an expression from all of dissatisfaction and criticism. That would be a somewhat different matter. In the past, we have had experience of broadcasting spokesmen, when faced with universal disapprobation, replying along the lines of, "If we are attacked on all sides, we must have got something right". A moment's examination of that kind of fallacy will show it to be totally empty. It was disposed of by no less a person than Mr. Alan Protheroe who was, until recently, the assistant director-general of the BBC. In a paper which he prepared for the General Advisory Council of the BBC in 1983 he wrote:
"Such complacency no longer serves as a defence in a society which is increasingly complex".
He was right. If a broadcasting organisation, enjoined by its statutory obligations to balance and objectivity, is attacked on all sides for lack of those qualities, it is not getting something right; it is getting everything wrong.
The third possible reaction is a mixed one. One side of the political spectrum might profess itself to be satisfied with the performance of the broadcasting authorities and the other side might profess itself to be dissatisfied. If that were the case, it would seem to me that there is at least a presumption of some kind of lack of balance and objectivity. It is in that spirit that I wish to air the matter briefly today.
I begin by reminding the House of the relevant statutory obligations to which I referred. The most important is contained in the licence and agreement granted to the BBC by the Home Secretary subject to the terms of the Royal Charter and renewed, as your Lordships will recall, in April 1981. Clause 13 of that licence provides that,
"The Corporation shall at all times refrain from sending any broadcast matter, expressing the opinion of the Corporation on current affairs or on matters of public policy".
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That seems to me a very straightforward injunction. A similar duty is laid upon the Independent Broadcasting Authority in the Broadcasting Act in the following words:
"It shall be the duty of the Authority to secure the exclusion from the programmes broadcast by them of all expressions of opinion by the authority or their subsidiary, or by any programme contractor, on matters other than broadcasting which are of political or industrial controversy or relate to current public policy".
That is the same injunction in somewhat different words.
When an election is pending, those prohibitions are reinforced by Section 93 of the Representation of the People Act which deals mainly with the appearance of candidates in broadcast items. Having reminded the House of those statutory obligations, my question is whether there is general satisfaction on all sides of the political establishment of this country that those obligations were fully discharged specifically in the period leading up to the general election earlier this year. My own impression is that, to say the very least, there is room for doubt. I say this especially in respect of the BBC. It seemed to me, from my own experience of the broadcast matter during the election campaign, that independent television made a much greater effort at impartiality than the BBC, even if in some cases it was not always entirely successful.
If my perception that the BBC departed from the highest standards of balance and objectivity is justified, what was it that went wrong? Clearly, the BBC (and those who run it) know what is expected of them. In a resolution of the board of governors in 1981, annexed to the licence and agreement when it was issued by the Home Secretary, the following declaration appears:
"The Board recall that it has always been their object to treat controversial subjects with due impartiality and they intend to continue this policy".
As recently as June 1987, in its booklet, the BBC endorsed the view that it should have no editorial views of its own and went on to repeat the responsibility of the corporation for reporting political and other matters objectively, fairly and impartially. Such sentiments are unexceptionable. However, I seriously contend that during the recent election campaign those sentiments were ignored to a very disturbing extent. As I watched and listened to what I thought was super-saturated cover of the election, it seemed for a while that there was nothing else happening in the world except a general election in the United Kingdom. Often, during that coverage, I had some difficulty in recognising the commitment to fairness and impartiality. However, I had much less difficulty in identifying the editorial view of some of the BBC producers, interviewers and presenters.
I fully expect, indeed I know, that the corporation will be able to produce some convincing evidence based on fairly meticulous stop watch-work, that every one received a fair allocation of time. Of that I have no doubt. That is not the whole story. Anyone with any experience of television—from either side of the camera—knows what can be done by a producer with camera angles, reaction shots or the running order of a news programme. We may hear more about that before our brief exchange concludes this evening. We know how an aside by a radio reporter,

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or a knowing smile by a television interviewer, can colour the whole content of an interview or programme. And, of course, a great deal can be learned about the political leanings of an interviewer from whether or not his or her questioning is friendly or hostile.
No-one who shares my view that the BBC's output was less than scrupulously fair during the election is likely to be altogether surprised. I suggest that one of the reasons is that the BBC as a whole seems to have decided there is no longer any merit in one of the basic tenets and principles of serious journalism; namely, the strict distinction between fact and opinion. Nowadays, on broadcast programmes, the most inexperienced reporter or presenter is permitted, indeed, encouraged, to introduce his or her own opinion into what should be a straightforward account of facts and events, which is what a news programme is supposed to be. Mr. John Birt, the new deputy director-general of the BBC, has accepted that too many programmes in the past have taken sides. He also expressed a refreshing view when he said:
"a programme should inform, not tell the listener or viewer what to think".
Again, that is an unexceptionable point of view. However, if he really means it and if the new regime which we are told is operating in the BBC intends to put these principles into effect, may we now expect that the corporation will, for example, cease to make its editorial views known about the situation in South Africa? Mr. Alan Protheroe, when he was still assistant director-general of the BBC, in answer to a question, said:
"No, the BBC is not impartial as regards apartheid".
We must be absolutely clear about this matter. I am entitled to express my views about apartheid and have done so many times in the past. Any Member of this House, or the other place, is entitled to express views on South Africa; as is any newspaper, or private citizen. But, my Lords, the BBC is not. It is forbidden by its licence to do so. When the assistant director-general expresses such views, he is in direct breach, at least of the spirit, if not of the letter, of the licence issued to the BBC by the Home Secretary.
The same applies to official secrets. The assistant director-general— I am sorry to get at poor Mr. Protheroe so much, but he was assistant director-general at the time—said in a broadcast on Radio 4 in February 1987,
"the Official Secrets Act is really a dreadful piece of legislation, which I don't think should remain on the statute book".
Now that to use the words of the BBC's licence, is broadcasting an opinion on a matter of public policy. The Official Secrets Act is an Act of Parliament passed through both Houses of Parliament. It is not for the BBC to comment on such matters. If I wish, I can say that the Official Secrets Act is a piece of nonsense, as indeed can any of your Lordships, the head waiter at Claridge's or the publican at the Cross Keys. But the BBC may not. It is forbidden to do so by the terms of its licence.
Given the fact that we now know the editorial views of the BBC about the Official Secrets Act, it is perhaps not surprising that it commissioned to play
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a leading part in a series of television programmes dealing with national defence, intelligence and security, a notoriously disaffected journalist who is known to have been obsessively concerned with revealing to the public official secrets which successive governments of both parties have regarded as being better left unrevealed. I wonder what the aims were of the people who engaged this man, and what conclusion we are to draw from the statement made by the assistant director-general of the BBC who, when questioned about the matter in a radio programme, said, apparently seriously,
"I do not know whether Duncan Campbell is Left-wing or not".
I wonder where he has been. It may be said that this is all old-hat or past history. It is not quite past history. Noble Lords reading their newspapers this morning may have noticed a small item concerning a new series which the BBC is about to introduce, addressed to our Asian community. We learn that the presenter is to be Valerie Vas. I do not know whether the director-general knows the political opinions of Valerie Vas. I do. She has been the chairman of the police committee of the Ealing Borough Council. On two occasions she has delivered herself of some very interesting comments. She said, for example, that the police can now only be seen in the context of another branch of capitalist agencies in collusion. She went on to say of this country and of her borough:
"Let us make no mistake. Police state South Africa style is only a heart beat away."
That was said by the new presenter of a programme directed to the Asian community in this country.
The dangers of this must be fairly obvious and perhaps they might best be summed up if I may mention one more case—the celebrated case of Mr. Vincent Hanna. Some of you may know Mr. Hanna from his work on the Programme called "News-night". It is reliably reported that Mr. Hanna is to cover the party political conferences for the BBC this year. Last November, on behalf of an independent production company with which he is involved he wrote to several trade unions offering the services of that company. Part of the letter which he wrote reads as follows:
"Once you know the techniques of TV presentation, you can use the medium to infiltrate and control people's lives. It has been a source of irritation to me that the Trade Union movement has not had the advantage of using these techniques".
It is true that you can infiltrate people's minds and their lives by manipulating a medium. I think, however, we are entitled to be somewhat surprised that that should be a statement made by someone employed by the BBC to cover party political conferences.
It would be interesting indeed to speculate how many other media practitioners share Mr. Hanna's view of the role of television in a democracy. I know we shall be told that the BBC now has a new team at the top and that it will institute much needed changes. I say at once that I share the regard that was expresed in this House only a few days ago for the new chairman of the board of governors whom I know well and whom I have admired over many years. But I will watch with interest some of the key decisions that are going to have to be taken. For example, on production decisions, will Mr. Ian Curteis's play on

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the Falkland Islands now appear on BBC television? It was, we were told, moved only because of the proximity of the election. Or will it be replaced, as I rather suspect it will, by another play of a Mr. Charles Wood called "Tumbledown"? If your Lordships wish to know something about "Tumbledown", I quote from Mr. Charles Wood talking about his play. He said that he wrote it because,
"the Falklands War should never have happened; the fact that it did happen is a reason for shame, regret and anger".
I do not think one need be in any doubt as to what the general message of that play is going to be. Mr. Ian Curteis whose play, for some people, was a little too admiring of the performance of the armed forces in the Falkland war, has been told by the chairman of the BBC that the BBC is under no obligation to proceed with his play. That is the decision I shall look forward to with very great interest because I think it will tell us a lot about the new dispensation at the BBC.
It may well be that what is wrong at the BBC cannot by put right simply by appointing a new chairman and a new director-general and making some changes in the top management. If we take television and broadcasting seriously in this country we must ask a few more fundamental questions. Should we not now end the domination of television output by two enormous giant monopolies? Should the BBC—and I ask these questions not rhetorically but in the hope that the Minister may be able to answer them now be decentralised and broken up into smaller and separately accountable units which can be not only more efficiently administered but also kept more usefully under editorial control? Should there be an independent regulatory body to ensure that the statutory obligations are discharged? Do we need, as Professor Richard Clutterbuck of the University of Exeter has suggested, an institute on the lines of the General Medical Counil or the Law Society to impose professional standards upon broadcast practitioners? I ask the noble Earl who is to reply to examine the text of Sir Denis Forman's Dimbleby lecture delivered last week in which he will find some interesting material.
Television and radio are communications media of enormous influence and importance. As I have said, for a great majority of people nowadays, television is the principal and, perhaps for some people, the only source of news, views, and opinions. It formulates their tastes, habits, prejudices and political opinions and it forms them instantly. It is beyond doubt the most potent and significant medium of communication and it is likely to remain so for a very long time.
I conclude with these words. I believe it is developing, expecially in the case of the BBC, into an acute example of a modern tendency which has been called "adversary journalism". This is a concept of journalism in which all existing institutions are regarded as alien, hostile and threatening. In the old days of serious journalism, reporters and commentators examined political and social problems almost as though they were thinking carefully as to how they would solve those problems
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themselves if they were responsible and as though they were searching, as serious journalists, for measures and solutions which they might, in other circumstances, be putting into effect. Adversary journalism, on the other hand, is something quite different. It is instinctively destructive. Its purpose, quite simply, is to criticise, oppose and attack.
The BBC was once the standard bearer of serious journalism; it was synonymous with balance, objectivity, journalistic integrity and the highest standards of language, sensitivity and concern for the public which it served. There is no reason why it should not be so again. I ask the Minister to bear those considerations in mind when he comes to answer the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
7.58 p.m.
Lord Orr-Ewing: My Lords, I think we owe a debt of gratitude for the immense amount of work which the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has put into that Question and the points which he so forcefully and accurately made.
I am on record, over a period of more than 50 years in involvement with television, as supporting independent public service broadcasting. I wish to see standards and integrity restored. It does not need restoring among a large number of loyal producers. Their professionalism and their standards are not those of the younger generation who used to be called young Turks, but who are now getting rather more senior but not more responsible.
I shall not repeat the quotations and the obligations which the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has so ably put before the House. However. I draw attention to a new book which was published last month by the BBC called Fairness and Impartiality in Political Broadcasting. On page 1 of the preface—line one, in parliamentary terms—it says:
"The BBC has no editorial view of its own.It may not, and does not wish, to, express an opinion on matters of public polio.. Parliament has down the years, confirmed its opinion that the BBC, as a public corporation, should not have its own editorial opinion. The BBC's task is to report political and other matters objectively and dispassionately, fairly and impartially".
There will not be one noble Lord or noble Baroness in this Chamber who would not say, "Hear, hear". Every one of us believes exactly in that. It was prepared in reply to a case brought by the Alliance against the BBC and, incidentally, was signed by the late chairman and the assistant director-general, by their legal adviser and by the editor of BBC television news. It is on the record and carries out what is laid down by statute. However, our purpose is to question whether the above statements have lost some of their meaning for some of the day-to-day conduct of BBC news and current affairs. I was sad to see that these two will be merged in a new headquarters under the same staff because, once and for all, this makes a muddle between what is comment and what is news. That, I think, is unfortunate.
Although I shall concentrate more on BBC television programmes, that is not because IBA programmes are perfectly balanced, but they seem to make more effort to achieve impartiality. The ITV

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companies have an independent regulatory authority of their own to examine any errors that they may commit.
Moreover, the BBC is a public service with 25,000 employees and an annual income from the licence of £1,000 million a year. It is an immense organisation. On another occasion one might say that it is far too big to carry out its functions with efficiency, economy and effectiveness.
I want to re-examine briefly the statement
"The BBC has no editorial view of its own".
However, the views of producers and presenters seap through into many programmes, as those of us who listen assiduously will have noted. If the BBC let us know how many complaints it received about "Newsnight", "Panorama", "Today" and so on, the extent of public disquiet would be clear, but it publishes none of this.
The BBC has abandoned its policy of no editorial views in a number of areas, and I shall select three briefly. I shall not repeat what the noble Lord said about South Africa. As an individual I am totally opposed to apartheid. I would fight it wherever I could. However, that is not the task, and the BBC is not allowed to take up a position on that. I thought that it was interesting to see what happened when media control was imposed in South Africa. When this was first announced by the BBC it mentioned no fewer than 10 times—at the behest, by the way, of the National Union of Journalists—in one programme that this was now controlled and therefore it was not free to say what it wanted to. However, its correspondents in every Soviet country, in every Soviet satellite and in 100 countries throughout the world which have dictatorships and not parliamentary systems are always under control. It chooses only South Africa to say that it is inhibited in what it says.
Another area in which the BBC has opted out is tobacco smoking. I am not a smoker. If one starts selecting items in regard to which one does not feel bound to abide by the charter, the licence and the conditions laid down by Parliament, where is it to stop? There was a programme on BBC Radio London about which the producer was admonished. It was quite clear that he was totally against smoking, and he went on and on against it. That is taking an editorial viewpoint on a BBC station.
Incidentally, the BBC imposes its own standard on the tobacco companies in regard to sport and advertising. A voluntary agreement was reached between the industry and the broadcasting authorities as to how much advertising on the boards round Lord's and other places was allowed on television and what size it should be. The BBC goes further than any of that: it imposes its own standards. Incidentally the IBA imposes even stricter standards. Once one is on this slippery slope—the Official Secrets Act was the third area, but I shall not repeat what my noble friend said—it seems to me that one may go much further.
I am not at all sure that the anti-American anti-Reagan bias in many programmes is not a sign that
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in this area the BBC is beginning to feel that it is exempt from its statutory obligations. Has any noble Lord or any Member of Parliament ever heard the BBC put forward arguments in favour of the strategic defence initiative, SDI? Is the abuse of the USA the main preoccupation of the foreign desk of the newsroom, as some allege? In times of crisis—one remembers well Suez, the Falklands and Libya —does the BBC adopt a knee jerk anti-government policy initially, although it may modify its views later? It is sometimes argued by the BBC's supporters that, because the majority of the national newspapers lean to the Right, it is the BBC's duty to restore the balance. If the BBC staff take this view and the programmes reflect it, they are totally ignoring the responsibility laid on the BBC by Parliament.
We now have news bulletins. In the old days the news was sacrosanct; it was straight. In Sir John Reith's day it had to be read on the radio by a gentleman in a dinner jacket just to show he was a very responsible person. Until recently, it was straight news. Now it has progressively become a mish-mash of news, views and comments by carefully selected people to produce the result that the producer wants, sometimes interspersed with slices of investigative journalism hung on some small peg that may have occurred in the news.
Now that 90 per cent. of newsreaders are journalists, there is an increasing tendency to finish an item by adding a barbed and loaded remark. Perhaps this is to prove their journalistic prowess, perhaps to please their like-minded editors. I notice that a newsreader publicised last week that she is to receive £50,000 a year from ITN when she leaves the BBC and goes to the IBA. For £50,000 a year, one must be a pretty good journalist and newsreader. We are muddling the two tasks. One is comment and one is news.
There was a classic example of the barbed additional item that I noted and reported at the beginning of November. The main item was the decision by the International Olympic Committee to choose Barcelona and not Birmingham for the 1992 Olympic Games. At the end, the newsreader added some words in the following sense: "You could count this as one more casualty as a result of Margaret Thatcher's attitude to sanctions against South Africa". Honestly, my Lords, how can one possibly put that tag on a news item about the selection of Barcelona by the International Olympic Committee?
The rules and regulations laid down by the BBC are clear. They seem to be somewhat disregarded lower down the line of responsibility. Let me quote one incredible letter written by a senior assistant, Mr. Richard Dunn, in the director-general's secretariat in response to a viewer complaint about the lack of balance. I have the letter.
"A party which is in government is bound by its nature to be making controversial decisions every day. The taking of such decisions is the exercise of power, and in a democracy such as ours, it is the job of the BBC to question whether that power is being exercised in the best interests of society."
But who gave them the right on society's behalf?
He followed up by writing this:
"You will appreciate that it is the job of an independent organisation like the BBC to question the actions of politicians. When

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those politicians are in power, that questioning must be even more rigorous, and when the party is as active and radical as the present government, it is natural that the BBC finds that it has many areas of government action to examine on behalf of the democracy."
The director-general's secretariat I suppose is the equivalent of a Minister's private office. This gentleman must therefore be reflecting a general view in that office. In the election campaign a temporary secretary with Tory sympathies was working there. She was amazed to find that every morning when they gathered the conversation was, "What can we do to help defeat the Tories today?" This is the perfectly balanced, objective, unbiased BBC.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, I have restrained myself in most of this speech, particularly on the remarks about South Africa.
The noble Lord is quoting from somebody who he has not even named. He is mostly using hearsay and gossip. There is a great deal of nitpicking but very little substance to this. I think that we would prefer to hear something realistic and practical.
Lord Orr-Ewing: My Lords, I shall be delighted to name him. I do not think he will ever be admonished, but I shall be delighted to name him. He is Mr. Richard Dunn and he is described as senior assistant secretary. Does that satisfy the noble Baroness? Perhaps I may now go on.
During the campaign my wife and I used to stop canvassing at 8 p.m. for our son who was standing, hopelessly I may say, in Middlesbrough. We therefore had a chance of seeing the Nine o'clock News. My admiration for the slickness of the Labour Party's production was considerable but the loading of the news and the reporting was to me definitely biased. I have now had an opportunity—and, my gosh, it is boring—to sit through 50-minute programmes of video tape. I have examined these, especially those concerned with the last 10 days or fortnight of the campaign. There are many ways of achieving balance, and I am sure that in the timing the BBC was careful. But you can slant a programme, as I know only too well, by the selection of items, by the selection of witnesses or by the production techniques. A dominant part can be played by the order in which you cover items from the three different parties. This is particularly important when a programme goes on for 50 minutes. I cannot get any statistics on this but from my personal poll I suspect that half the audience—and it was expected to start at 10 million—probably switched off after 10 minutes, and probably another half after a further 10 minutes. So if you were not the first item you suffered.
On Monday 1st June the lead item was the Kinnock campaign. On Tuesday 2nd June the lead item was the Kinnock campaign. On Wednesday there was an exciting analysis of opinion polls, and Jon Snow could not hide his delight that the Labour Party was progressively closing the gap. On Thursday there was tremendous and extensive treatment—it was the main item—of Labour's claim about the health service and the well prepared story about the sad case of a boy who had been waiting so long for
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a heart operation. And so it went on. On several occasions the Alliance Party came second and on one occasion came first ahead of the Tory Party. No wonder the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, was moved to write his article in the Daily Express on 5th June and no wonder so many members of the public supported him.
I come now to public accountability. The assistant director general said on Feedback on 20th February:
"The BBC's responsibility lies directly to Parliament and to the public at large".
Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is being carried out meticulously. My Lords, 140,000 letters are received by the BBC a year. Not all of them are complaints. Two-thirds are about television. Many people who write feel that it is a frustrating occupation and find they do not get the attention or make the impact that they should. I think the BBC sees itself as representing the public. It should certainly listen more carefully and more sympathetically to the views of the public on a whole host of subjects.
The new regime seems to be tackling its gigantic task with dedication and guts; and it needs both. Professional standards have been slipping progressively over 30 years and it will take many years to restore them. Unless the chairman, governors and management take action to live up to their statutory obligation and their stated intentions, the pressure will mount for an independent regulatory authority. Any government of any complexion may be forced to create such an authority. Perhaps this will have to be done in any case as new forms of broadcasting by satellite, cable and pay-as-you-view emerge. Unless the new BBC regime succeeds, no government could continue to allow it to be hostile to public criticism and to be the only part of the media to remain judge and jury in its own case and invariably to conclude that it is not in error.
8.14 p.m.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, I echo the thanks of the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for introducing this interesting and important subject. Indeed, by putting his Unstarred Question in the manner in which he has done, the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, had done us another service. He had demonstrated beyond all possible doubt that the fact that a noble Lord sits on the Cross-Benches should not be taken to indicate that he is impartial; nor should it indicate that somehow the noble Lord should be placed somewhere in the middle of the political road. I hope the noble Lord will forgive me if I say that, from what I have heard him say on this occasion and on many others, it seems to me that he belongs to the authoritarian wing of politics of which, I am sure noble Lords will accept, there are two—one at each extreme of the political spectrum.
I have watched with great interest over something like 30 years the noble Lord's career. It seems to me that he has progressed slowly from the one wing to the other. But be that as it may, I do not question for a moment the perfect right of the noble Lord to raise

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these criticisms and to voice his anxieties. Indeed, I think that is a duty—a duty which he shares with everybody who is concerned about the freedom, the impartiality and the independence of broadcasting. We should all make our views known and we should criticise when we wish to do so; but I am bound to say, having listened most carefully to the noble Lord's speech—and I shall read it with care again in case I missed any points—that his individual criticisms were not all that strong. Some of them (and others that have been made by people with whom I know the noble Lord is in touch) are answered thoroughly and excellently by a BBC publication which came out very recently, Fairness and Impartiality in Political Broadcasting. It goes in great detail into some of the matters which have been raised, and answers those matters to my satisfaction if not to the noble Lord's. It seemed to me that his criticisms were aimed not so much at the broadcasting authorities which are referred to in the Unstarred Question but at individual people employed by those authorities. On that I think he is on rather dangerous ground.
The noble Lord appeared to want all the people who appear on televison as interviewers and presenters to have no opinions at all about anything. I do not want my television screen to be monopolised by people who do not have any opinions; but what is important is that enough variety of opinions must be expressed and must be expressed in different programmes. The noble Lord seemed to be talking about individual programmes presenting a view as if each programme should present a precise balance. There was time when the IBA operated in that way and appeared to suggest that every programme should be balanced within the individual programme. In my own case many years ago I was prevented from presenting a programme on smokeless zones, and the need for them, by the intervention of the Independent Broadcasting Authority's officer in the north who said that I could not do that unless I could drag along a reluctant representative of a backward local authority which did not believe in smokeless zones.
When the noble Lord, Lord Hill, became chairman he swept that away and required balance overall rather than balance in the individual programme. While the noble Lord is right to ventilate his criticisms, we do not want people who have no opinions. Of course they must have opinions. He has named some of the people who we know have opinions. But that to my mind does not take away from their ability to be broadcasters. What we really need is enough variety of people operating with enough autonomy and independence that we make sure that the whole spectrum of different views is adequately represented.
Lord Chalfont: My Lords, I intervene only to make the point that my main criticism was based upon the fact that the BBC itself expresses editorial opinions. I am not against people having individual opinions, but the BBC is debarred by its licence from expressing opinions as it has done.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, that of course I entirely support. I understand the terms of its licence and I endorse that fully. The BBC must not have an editorial view and must not express one. I note what the noble Lord said about what the BBC is reputed to have said about apartheid. It is right that these criticisms should be made. That is part of the price of the freedom of our broadcasting institutions. It is right that the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority should listen to these criticisms and consider them carefully. I think that the BBC has considered many of these criticisms carefully and has answered them. I would say this. When this kind of criticism is made in one or other of the two Houses of Parliament the broadcasting authorities should listen but I hope they will not automatically support what is said.
I have to remind your Lordships (and I think all noble Lords know) that we have gone to great lengths in this country—and rightly in my view—to distance the control of broadcasting from Parliament in general and from government in particular. It is immensely important that we keep broadcasting free from the control of both central and local government. We were absolutely right some years ago when we insisted that local government should have no stake in local radio. Local radio should be the critic of the local council not its mouthpiece and the same applies to central government.
We have set up with the charter the governors of the BBC and with the Independent Broadcasting Act the chairman and members of the authority. They operate under the Act, which has been described by the noble Lord, and under the charter and have a statutory duty to fulfil those obligations. They also have statutory duties under the Representation of the People Act, as the noble Lord rightly said, but in the main people who might be in breach of that during a pre-election period would be candidates rather than the broadcasting authorities. The broadcasting authorities have a duty to ensure that they do not knowingly lead candidates into breaches of the Representation of the People Act. I am not aware that they have done so.
There is a problem in relation to balance and political impartiality with regard to the governors of the BBC and the members of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. That arises from the fact that the chairman and governors of the BBC and the chairman and members of the IBA are all appointed by the government of the day. These people serve for a comparatively short period. It seems that governments now last for a much longer period. In the past six months five new members have been appointed to the Independent Broadcasting Authority. I have no doubt that these are all excellent people; but I believe there is a possibility—bearing in mind that it is the Government who appoint the governors and the members of the Independent Television Authority—the time could come when a government lasts for a very long time and when we have both those bodies packed with people who are perhaps rather more responsive to the views of the government of the day than some of us might regard as being wholly satisfactory.

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The same kind of thing is happening in another context in the United States of America where we now find that the Supreme Court is giving judgments wholly in accordance with the views of President Reagan—not surprisingly, for he has appointed them all. The same kind of thing happened in the old days under President Roosevelt when that Supreme Court came in the end to reflect his views. I mention this because I believe that if we finish up with members of the authority who are a little bit too favourable to the government of the day, whatever that government is, we shall possibly begin to undermine the very elaborate system we have devised (I believe it is an excellent system) whereby we ensure the independence of broadcasting from government.
Another problem arises from the relatively short tenure of members of these bodies, the governors of the BBC and the members of the authority. It seems to me that just when some of these people are beginning to learn a great deal about the broadcasting off they go. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, referred to the excellent Dimbleby lecture given by Sir Denis Forman last week, which I did not have the pleasure of hearing in person, but I read it in full in The Listener and I commend it to noble Lords. It makes some valid and important points. Sir Denis says that he believes that,
"The old English convention of gentlemen and players (amateurs on the board, professionals running the show) needs a fresh look".
We need on these boards governors and members who are a proper mixture of the great and the good, but we need also people with detailed professional knowledge of what is a very professional matter. We may possibly see some changes in that direction as time goes on.
I have voiced my anxieties; but I feel a little alarmed by the tendency of some members or former members of the present Government appearing to wish to intervene rather more in editorial matters than was formerly customary. I could have said the same 10 or 11 years ago when a similar thing was happening under another government. Here I quote again some words of Sir Denis Forman in his Dimbleby lecture. He said this:
"If the government of the day does not resist the temptation to get its hands on to television, we shall be on a downward spiral towards the French model of almost direct political control. The ultimate effect of this will be to ensure that a change of party means a change of person in television right down to the editor of the news".
We should think about that very carefully. I feel the greater threat to broadcasting in Britain—I have not the slightest doubt that our television and our radio is pre-eminent in the world and is far and away the best—is not the threat of political interference or political lack of balance. It is the threat of market forces, in that with an increasing number of channels, with satellite and so on, we are pushing the broadcasting authorities into the possibility of a mad rush for ratings and perhaps for money. Thereby broadcasting standards could suffer.
The noble Earl who is to reply to this debate has a formidable task. Perhaps he will forgive me for reminding him that nobody has done more than the noble Viscount the Leader of the House to maintain standards in broadcasting. I accept that partiality
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and balance are absolutely essential, but I believe that the maintenance of our standards in broadcasting is even more important. I venture to suggest that some of those matters are under threat.
I note that the noble Lord, Lord Annan, is to speak shortly. He chaired a most distinguished commission which brought out a wonderful report, but I think I am right in saying that it too showed a little more anxiety about standards than it did about balance and matters of this kind. It is essential that we maintain total freedom from government control of broadcasting and of those who broadcast.
I conclude again with some words from the Dimbleby lecture by Sir Denis Forman. He said:
"To our political masters of whatsoever party, I would say: first, be calm, be cool about broadcasting. Abuse each other on the screen as much as you like, but please do not move behind the screen and take over the controls".
To that I say, "Hear, hear".
8.27 p.m.
Lord Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon: My Lords, I confess that I find it a little difficult to relate some of what the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, said to the precise Question on the Order Paper. However, there is no doubt that this is an extraordinarily difficult subject because it is always productive of subjective views. It is almost impossible to have a completely objective view about the content of broadcasting and the motives behind it. When I was, for an unhappy period, allegedly in charge of government communications, I always received a great many letters from constituents of all parties complaining about the bias of the BBC and the other broadcasting authorities against the party which they supported. So I had all these broadcasts carefully monitored and found that over the period in question the political balance of the programmes was impeccable.
I came to the conclusion after some thought and after studying the correspondence that what happened was that when the listener heard something being said by a spokesman of his own political persuasion he really took no notice of it at all. It went over his head: he regarded it as plain common sense and did not really feel impressed one way or another. But if he heard a strongly expressed or tendentious view from somebody from another party, his blood pressure rose appreciably. At once, he reached for a pen and wrote to the BBC complaining of bias against his party. In fact the bias is, nine times out of ten, subjective. It is in the ear of the listener.
I feel a little sad that I should be criticising the BBC, because my relations with its interviewers and producers have always been excellent ever since I made my first sound broadcast rather more than 35 years ago. But I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, and my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing have a point in what they have been saying. It was not only during the election campaign that this bias was perceptible. In my view, it preceded the beginning of the election campaign.
I could not help noticing, for example—and I do not suppose for a moment that this was in any sense a breach of the BBC's charter of obligations—that for quite a long time before the election campaign

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began or even before the election had been called, when the Government had taken some action or made some important statement the normal procedure, at least on the radio after the 10.30 news (or during the 10.30 news, because, as my noble friend said, news and comment are not always rigidly segregated) was to have an interview with the Minister (and I would not criticise that; the questions were probing without in any sense being unfair) which was followed by equal time being given first to a spokesman of the Labour Party and then to a spokesman of the Alliance.
The psychological effect was obvious. The Minister had his innings, but then twice as long was taken up with Opposition spokesmen rubbishing what the Minister had said, and the Minister had no right of reply at all. The effect left on listeners was often that the Government must have been wrong. I have no doubt at all that this does not offend against the rules in any way, but there was no doubt what the psychological effect on the listeners was, and I do not believe that that effect was created unintentionally.
There are quite a lot of other things that one could quote.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, I dislike interrupting the noble Lord, because I agree with some of the things he has said. What does the noble Lord propose should be the answer to this? There is a party grouping, the Alliance. Should they not have their say? I did not want to lose that point because I did not know what the noble Lord's answer to this was going to be. This is the way our electoral system works.
Lord Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon: My Lords, I take the noble Baroness's point. I am not sure what the answer should be. All I am saying is that the effect of having a three or four minute interview with the Minister, however fair it is, and then having two consecutive interviews with spokesmen who oppose it and are trying to prove it wrong, with no right of reply from the Government, however brief, leaves an impression adverse to the Government. It cannot fail to do so.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, will the noble Lord allow me? Would this difficulty not arise from the attempt to balance the programme within an individual programme, rather than present perhaps several different unbalanced programmes?—the kind of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, objected to.
Lord Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon: My Lords, I see all this, but the fact is that for many months before the election campaign started this had been going on, and it became more noticeable the more obvious it became that an election was going to be called. I do not pretend to know exactly the answer to this. The answer is probably that if you give four minutes to a Minister and then four minutes to a
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Labour spokesman and four minutes to an Alliance spokesman to rubbish him, you ought to give the Minister one minute to reply. That seems to me to be a way in which some semblance of balance might be achieved.
However, there is not much doubt in my mind—and I think I am a pretty impartial viewer and listener; as I said, I have always had the best relations with the BBC and I respect it enormously— that a general anti-government atmosphere seemed to be developing. Of course it came to a climax on polling night when the BBC's election programme was introduced by a beaming David Dimbleby who announced, almost rubbing his hands, on the basis of one entirely inaccurate exit poll that this was going to be a very close-run thing, and obviously was delighted with it. But this sort of bias had been showing all the way through.
It really is not any good saying, "Ah, but the BBC was not offending against its charter or against the rules laid down for it". Technically it may not have been. But anybody who has listened to the views of ordinary electors around the country or canvassed people of different parties knows that the general impression was that the BBC was not being impartial in its treatment immediately before and during the election campaign.
What one is to do about this I am not sure that I know, but I think that the new dispensation at the BBC have to think seriously about it. Since we hope that they have another four years or so to think out how to handle the next general election campaign, they had better start now and do this seriously, whether by means of a committee or commission of some kind I am not sure. Commissions and committees do not always come up with sensible answers.
I am certain that there is point in what the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, and my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing said. Unless we grasp this fact as a reality and bear it in mind and try to do something about it, the situation is only too likely to get worse because people who stray just beyond the bounds of propriety and get away with it will stray even further beyond the bounds of propriety if they are not checked.
8.37 p.m.
Lord Renwick: My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for bringing up this subject. I make no apologies for taking one or two minutes to mention my past history because I had experience some time ago when my father was chairman of an independent television company. I had some opportunity then of talking to the senior directors and executives of that company on the formation, the running and the birth of "Independent Television News".
I remember well one conversation which stuck in my mind because, funnily enough, the problems of impartiality came up then with one of the directors who became a good friend of mine. He likened it to being the editor of a newspaper. I remember him saying that every night the news had to maintain a

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factual presentation without being boring and that there should be the due responsibility of an editor of a newspaper.
I was tempted to intervene when I heard the response from my noble friend the Minister to Lord Chalfont's Question on, I think, 29th June because I too found it difficult to understand how anybody could have failed to notice bias among newscasters and among interviewers on the lead-up to the election, and definitely in the pre-election period.
I watch quite a lot of television. I respect—and I think everybody respects—that the newscaster and the interviewer should certainly have political views of their own. I believe that a lot of people who watch some of the main and respected and experienced newscasters might for some time not be aware of an individual's own political bias. I was pleasantly surprised by the fair treatment given to political leaders in many interviews. The politician on either side was asked many strong questions and was allowed good time to give his views. Unfortunately, we look and listen to other interviewers and newscasters who are not aware that there is a restraint upon them as regards bias. The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, is right in saying that they are out for ratings and are competitive for viewers. That applies to both morning television and radio programmes. There is no doubt in my mind that some interviewers use political bias and antagonism to gain viewers and that that is expected of them. That is a sad statement to make.
I am in danger of incurring the wrath of the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, if I am not specific in naming names. My father and her husband were directors of ATV and worked together in the old days. I well respect the noble Baroness's husband as having experience in this field, much of which I am sure has rubbed off on the noble Baroness. I am looking forward to hearing her comments.
To return to the election night, my noble friend Lord Maude was quite right in what he said. I attended two parties that night. At the first party after dinner we turned on ITV and the exit poll showed an immediate lead of 40 for the Conservatives, increasing to 60 within a few minutes. I then went to another party, arriving after about an hour. It was attended by many people who, after having dinner, were watching BBC. I thought I had entered a different world. I had come from a party where we were happy and confident that we would have a majority of at least 50 or 60. However, at this party I saw a noble Lord who was in this House earlier and I said to him, "What is the matter? Haven't you heard the news? Don't you realise that it is now 11.30 and we are well ahead? The first two results have come in and the Conservatives are well ahead". He said, "No, is it true?" I asked him what had been happening and he said that they had been watching BBC for the last hour and a half. The news filtered through and we had a good party, but it took some time.
I do not want to take up any more of your Lordships' time except to ask: what is there to do? I agree that it should not be government policy to have
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too tight a rein, or any rein at all, over broadcasting. In talking about broadcasting are we talking about the distribution of information or the production of programmes? I believe that the new management of the BBC should carefully look again at the original role for which it was established in the 1920s. Things have changed and we have a totally different media environment. We have an international information industry which is growing up and needing a system of distribution. The BBC runs one of the methods of distribution of news and information; the IBA runs another; there is cable television and there should be DBS.
That is for the future and there may well be argument that the whole system should be examined in order to form a clearer idea of the role and responsibilities of the national broadcasting corporation. Is there still a need for one? I only ask and I believe that a re-assessment of the situation is in order.
I am aware of the Peacock Report and others but I am not sure that they have fully taken into account the enormous multinational and international industry of news, current affairs and information dissemination. If we have worries of political bias in the current constitution of the BBC, we should also be worried in future about bias in other forms of information. As the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, rightly said, television is the most powerful medium and an enormous former of opinion. It goes right into one's front room. It has an audio and visual impact far stronger than radio, and if one is watching television one is hooked and its views are impressed upon one. As such it has a responsibility of which the Government must be aware, and the Government should create the environment in which, in the future, we can be happy and satisfied that undue influence and bias cannot exist.
8.47 p.m.
Lord Annan: My Lords, a few moments ago the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, was mildly rebuked for going further than the scope of the Question. It seemed to me that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, went far wider in asking the Question and opened up all kinds of problems which we are now trying to debate. I came to your Lordships' House thinking that we should be talking about the coverage of the general election. It is difficult for someone outside party politics, such as myself, to understand why this should be a problem. I should like to ask the noble Earl whether he has any information from the BBC or IBA indicating that they have received formal complaints from any political party about the coverage. I find it difficult to believe that the Government have heard from the authorities that they have been accused of bias of that kind.
I do not see how either of the two major parties could complain. Everyone agrees that the Labour Party fought a competent and brilliant campaign and I cannot believe that it would consider that the medium was biased against it. Equally the Conservative Party won the election with a far greater majority than was forecast before the result. I cannot believe that it would consider itself hard

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done by and that it lost many votes owing to the bias against it. I do not know what the Alliance feels. But I must put it to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, that one must have massive research on the election coverage in order to make his case; namely that there has been substantial bias on one side or the other. You would have to run the whole coverage; you would have to get a panel of three impartial people to look at it and to make judgments. So, as I said, I was surprised that we strayed so far from the original Question, and I want to ask the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, whether during the election he looked at Channel 4, because his speech was almost entirely about the BBC. Channel 4 is something for which I have a very soft spot in my heart. I think it is an excellent channel. But if you ask me, "Does it have any particular complexion politically?" I am bound to say that I think it has a complexion which favours the Left rather than the Right. I thought the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, was going to weigh in about Channel 4.
I like Channel 4 because I think it does something which Mr. John Birt, who is now in a very responsible position at the BBC, advocated long ago. He said then that there was in the news a bias against understanding. If you just give the bare facts and nothing more it is very difficult sometimes for the public at large—of course I do not mean your Lordships, who are extremely well informed—to catch the import of the news. I think that is one of the reasons why the BBC has taken to having a member of its staff who, after the newscasters have given an item of news, will make a comment on it. It is perfectly clear that it is a comment and not just a news item. I think that was done perhaps to meet the point that Mr. Birt made before he ever went to the BBC.
There is another thing to which I should like to draw the attention of the House. Much play has been made about the BBC having an opinion about South Africa and apartheid. Should the BBC, or any other broadcasting organisation, have an opinion about communism and democracy? I ask because there are some things in our political life in which it seems to me that we have a rooted assumption in our political life. We say: "This is the way we believe the world should he ordered and that is not the way that the world should be ordered". Can a broadcasting organisation completely ignore an assumption of that kind?
Of course I take the point about South Africa, which I imagine Lord Orr-Ewing had in mind: the question of how South Africa moves—if it ever can move—from the kind of political setup it now has to one which all parties in this country believe is desirable. How that is to happen is indeed difficult, but I think that to say "no broadcasting organisation has any right to express an opinion about apartheid itself", is going to land you in deep and troublesome waters.
When I spoke of Channel 4, I had in mind the fact that all broadcasters when dealing with items of current affairs, are going to appear to those in authority to be hostile to authority. As someone who
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sometimes has been in a position of authority myself, I know exactly how disagreeable that is. You try and talk to the press and express your point of view; and you are then amazed that they show no disposition to believe you at all. And yet it is very important that those in authority should realise that people are going to be sceptical of the explanations they give.
If you look at the broadcasters' flagships—"Panorama" for the BBC and "World in Action" for ITV or at the output of Channel 4—you will find that they question authority. I think, too, that one has to recognise that people who are in the broadcasting organisations do not regard themselves as speaking with the voice of the BBC or of the particular commercial independent company of which they are a member. They think of themselves as speaking with the voice of the programme that they are on. I think here that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, was somewhat unfair to the broadcasters. He was entirely within his rights when he criticised Mr. Prothero, because Mr. Prothero was speaking as a senior official of the organisation. But on the programmes themselves you have to recognise that the people in them have a particular role in the programme.
It is true that broadcasters can go far too far in their criticism of politicians and I think there is one important case to bear in mind. I have this case in mind when I remember a statement which was made about a former Prime Minister. I cannot quite remember the exact words but it was something like:
"When his lips are moving you know he is lying."
Yes, it may sound funny, I know. But it was in fact calumny. The quotation I want to read to your Lordships comes from a famous case of Entick v. Carrington in 1765, when Lord Chief Justice Camden said:
"All civilised governments have punished calumny with severity; and with reason; for these compositions debauch the manners of the people; they excite a spirit of disobedience, and enervate the authority of government; they provoke and excite the passions of the people against their rulers, and the rulers oftentimes against the people."
So I think that in fact there are cases where broadcasters go far beyond the limit which I believe is permissible and which can do very grave harm. I think also that the broadcasters have got to realise that they are public service broadcasters whether they are in independent television or the BBC.
Let me try and meet the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. I, too, have criticised the BBC in recent years. It is not two years ago since I gave a long talk on Channel 4 in which I criticised the BBC severely for the attitude they took for instance on the Falklands War when reporters in radio went to interview the widows of those Welsh guardsmen who had lost their lives when their ship was struck by a missile in order to find out what their opinion now was of the war. That seemed to me to be totally inadmissible.
I also criticised the BBC at that time for the injunction to use the phrase "British troops" instead of "our troops". The nation was at war and it was a war which was supported by all the political parties, though of course there were dissidents who thought that the war was wrong. It seems to me that the BBC as a national corporation has a duty to remember that it owes obligations to the nation.

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I think that the BBC has in recent years got into great difficulties. There was the "Real Lives" controversy. I said in public that I thought that the then Home Secretary had behaved most unwisely. However, so did the staff of the corporation. There was no sense of obligation to the corporation and to my mind the strike by the journalists was a disgraceful affair which did great harm to the BBC and to Britain in the world east of the Iron Curtain.
It is not that I think that the BBC has been and remains without fault. I think some things went wrong. The libel suits showed lamentable error of judgment. Jeremy Isaacs once said about journalism: "Comment is free but facts come very expensive". That is something which all broadcasters ought to remember.
We now have a new deal at the BBC. We have a new chairman, a new vice-chairman, and a new director general and deputy director general—and, I might add, quite a number of other new faces are beginning to appear. There has been a very substantial reshuffle at the corporation and we ought to pay tribute to the new chairman, deputy-chairman and board of governors who are taking very seriously the criticisms that have been made in the past. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, rather pooh-poohed that fact. He went on to say something that I deeply deplore; namely, that the time had perhaps come to break up the corporation and to destroy something which is the admiration of the world.
The BBC is far more important than a few silly, mistaken ignoramuses among the junior staff, who will always make mistakes. The BBC is something for which this country is still enormously admired not merely for its presentation of news and comment on news but for its remarkable artistic output and for what it does for the arts in the country as a whole. I very much hope that the understandable irritation that is sometimes felt about the corporation will not be developed into a venomous attack on its very existence.
9.3 p.m.
Baroness Lane-Fox: My Lords, like all other noble Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for tabling this Unstarred Question. Memories can grow foggy about facts and events shown on screen and therefore it is especially important and salubrious that the noble Lord has paraded chapter and verse of so many very relevant happenings.
People such as I who cannot get about much are indebted to the BBC for bringing to us sporting events, wonderful scenery, documentaries, drama and much else. Basically we are its allies but not to the extent of being blinded to the bias that has been displayed in recent months and years. Credibility as regards its impartiality has been stretched too far.
The noble Lord, Lord Annan, doubted whether it would be possible to measure the balance or imbalance of any particular programme, but I should like to give just one illustration of that. One morning
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during the general election campaign Sue Lawley presented a phone-in programme which featured Norman Tebbit. The questioning on such a programme is generally tough and the questions need close and individual attention. Mr. Tebbit was answering pretty well in what was perhaps a rather gentler manner than is his usual wont when the presenter, Sue Lawley, started to interrupt him, which she did over and over again. To his great credit Norman Tebbit remained calm and cool. He answered a series of hostile questions most effectively despite being chivvied and bombarded throughout with what was an apparently aggressive barrage of interruptions from Sue Lawley. She kept telling him that he was not answering properly, and that line persisted until the end of the programme.
From my slight experience on the fringe of broadcasting I know that it is pointless to make a charge of bias unless one can prove imbalance. After three other shocked viewers had contacted me I drew my courage together and telephoned the BBC where I found an Ansaphone ready to take a message. I said that Miss Lawley had shown a lamentable and horrifying degree of bias and added that I proposed to make a judgment about balance when I had compared the programme with the way in which she dealt with Mr. Kinnock on the same programme the next day. The result of that test was that we saw Mr. Kinnock interrupted once or twice but it was done in a helpful and co-operative, if not to say encouraging manner. Measuring those two programmes for bias, there cannot be the slightest doubt where it lay.
The BBC's election polls provided some very interesting figures. Its forecast was for a majority of 26 against what turned out to be the reality of 101. Later it was promised to set up an inquiry to discover the reason for the discrepancy, and I hope that the public will soon be told the outcome.
Many of the BBC's old allies, as I am, want to be shown that partial mischief and suggestion in BBC broadcasting is on the way out. For this and many more fundamental reasons I wholeheartedly support the tabling of this Question.
9.8 p.m.
Lord Auckland: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has raised this Question in his usual buoyant manner. Unlike many noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, I have not been interviewed in this country on either sound radio or television. The only experience I have had was in New Zealand in 1971 when, three hours after landing at Mangere airport in Auckland on an official visit, I was interviewed by a fairly aggressive commentator for half-an-hour. He wanted to discuss the Common Market but that I refused to do, because Sir Geoffrey Rippon had just returned to this country having negotiated the deal. But I did answer a number of other questions and I had an example then of some fairly tough interviewing. As I said, since then I have never been invited to submit myself to the media.
I have taken part in five election campaigns, at least three of which were before the media really took an interest in electioneering as they do now. I take a

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rather different view of this matter from some of your Lordships, because, thank heavens, an election campaign is a short campaign and during that time the media have a very tough job to do. If I have a criticism of the media, it is about the overkill in an election campaign.
I remember that two weeks or so before the campaign finished, my dear wife, who was in politics before I was, said to me at 11 o'clock on a Monday evening, "For heaven's sake, dear, find something else besides these damned politicians." Three channels failed to provide an alternative and the fourth channel was showing a rock concert. Anything was better at that time of night than electioneering.
What we really have to do is to think of the future. What we are discussing now is somewhat déjà vu. In the words of the famous song from the Lilac Domino,
"What is done, you never, never can undo."
So what has been done during the last election campaign cannot be undone, but we have to think of the future. As a fairly compulsive viewer of television, particularly during the election campaign, I mourn the death of the Swingometer and Robert Mackenzie, because we then had a fairly impartial view of the campaign. We now have a surfeit of commentators.
I must say that during the election campaign I spent most of my time on business in Scotland, and latterly on the Isle of Man at a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference. Election night was spent in a hotel in Douglas with parliamentarians from Gibraltar, Cyprus and the Channel Islands, and what we saw was a whole lot of comment, particularly on the BBC, with an irritatingly measly ration of results.
My complaint—and I think it is the complaint of a lot of people—is not so much about the political bias of the campaign, but about the fact that the commentators themselves spent so much time discussing the various positions of the political parties, whereas what people wanted to know was the result in Eastbourne or Edinburgh, South. My message to the broadcasting authorities, and particularly to the BBC, would be to put that matter right and let us have more news about what is going on in the constituencies.
I like to switch, particularly during an election campaign—I did not get an opportunity this time—between the BBC and ITV, with half-an-hour of each. One can then get a rather fascinating insight into how the programmes are conducted. I do not possess video, so I have not had an opportunity six weeks later of recalling how the campaign went, and can only go by what went on at the time.
One suggestion which could be made—and Australia did this for a time—is completely to ban opinion polls during an election campaign. During the whole of our election campaign and well before it we suffered from a surfeit of opinion polls from all kinds of esoteric organisations. That is the main criticism of the campaign. I do not know whether opinion polls sway the electorate. I rather doubt whether they do but they are very irritating. I shall go almost further and say that for the last week of the campaign at least there should be a virtual ban on
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party political broadcasts. By then the electorate have made up their minds.
I conclude by saying that tonight in much that has been said during the debate, for which we are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, we have very largely been discussing the past. Whatever our views may be, there is much to learn for the next campaign in four years' time.
9.15 p.m.
Lord Thorneycroft: My Lords, I shall not come between the House and the noble Baroness for more than a few moments, but perhaps it may be helpful, even to the noble Baroness, if I make a few short comments on what has been said. The debate is rather apt both in origin and timing. Its mood comes from a speech which was made from the Cross-Benches by a noble Lord who has a very deep knowledge of a very difficult branch of journalism that is particularly concerned with defence. The noble Lord made a remarkably powerful speech which certainly deserves the deepest consideration by those new men who are now in charge of broadcasting in this country.
I must say that I share with the noble Lord, Lord Annan, a certain concern. It seems to me that we may be faced with a position in which the new masters of the BBC really succeed in gaining control of that organisation. But I agree that that would be difficult and could not be done quickly. But either that shall happen or some new as yet unspecified solution has got to be found. I share with the noble Lords, Lord Annan and Lord Chalfont, a very strong prejudice in favour of the first solution.
The debate is also apt in its timing. I said in this House a month or two before the general election that I regarded the lady as unstoppable and she was. I did not realise quite how unstoppable she was going to be, I must confess. But with great respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, there is really nothing that could be said by the BBC which had very much effect.
A rather rough interview that took place between Sue Lawley and a character as tough as Norman Tebbit was not going to change the course of history. In fact the Conservative Party had the tide well under it and one of the finest leaders that it has ever had and that interview was not going to affect it.
As regards the news bulletins which have been commented on, one never knows quite what their effect will be. I agree with what has been said about the impression they gave. There was a soft lens on Mr. Kinnock. Everybody praised the campaign which Mr. Gould had worked out. Mr. Kinnock was seen kissing everybody in sight and changing a baby's nappy. I thought that that was a brilliant idea. In my day it was much more difficult to change a baby's nappy because one had to hold a great pin and half the audience would be hoping that one swallowed it.
Nevertheless it was a brave stroke and I saluted Mr. Kinnock for doing it. Much later during that programme one heard a little of Margaret, but one mostly heard attacks on her. She was always shown right in the middle of some awful storm over one thing or the other. I am not complaining because in

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fact the public did not want to have their nappy being changed. The public wanted something very different. It wanted to see the leader who was under attack and who knew what she was going to do. On the whole, rather than criticise the television coverage, I believe that it rather helped us. Perhaps fortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, cast his speech rather wider than the actual question of the election. I believe that the important thing is that the BBC should read again what their licence says and what it is that they are really licensed to do.
If I may catch the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, for a moment (I do not wish to interrupt an important conference) no one is saying that the people in the BBC should not have opinions. They would not be there unless they had some opinions. A man must think about something or other. The important thing is that when he gets on the air, he should not reveal to us what his opinions are. He should get on with his job. We are not asking for nonentities. We are asking for men with a certain amount of background, knowledge and self-control.
People in the BBC can always have opinions. However, when they start expressing their opinions and letting us see what they are, apart from anything else the programmes get so dull, if I may say that to the noble Lord, Lord Annan. Is there anything duller than a BBC programme on Africa? And what a subject! It is a great, exciting and deeply tragic continent. With all its beauty and all its bitterness, one would think that some reporter would be enthused about presenting to us all the arguments and calling people in front of us to present them. But when one gets some rather drab, middle-aged gentleman who has obviously made up his mind long ago, there is no longer any excitement.
I think that what the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, and I are asking is whether, in this time and with these new leaders, we could not get the leaders of the BBC to do something about educating their staff on how to conduct such programmes. I admit that what the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, calls adversary journalism is very much in vogue. It is much easier to slam everything; every institution, every political party, every politician and everything in sight. In a way, one does not have to think because all that simply bubbles up. It is far more difficult to stand back and take a more balanced view and to think, as one looks at Africa, whether anyone could govern it. That was the first thought that struck me when I had been there for any length of time. It seemed to me to
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be an almost incredibly difficult problem. It bristles with opportunities for examination and for great men of all views to put them forward.
I also agree with what has been said about the Official Secrets Act. There is a case for not having such an Act or for amending it. However, amending it is probably even more difficult and is desperately hard. The need for, and dependence upon, people keeping the secrets they learn in government and in the Secret Service is a powerful case indeed. Instead of simply putting it out that they do not believe in the Official Secrets Act, why do they not argue that great moral issue and get people to argue it out in front of the public? It would make the BBC a far more interesting medium to listen to.
In a way, we all ought to be on the same side in this matter. At the moment the BBC staff may be, broadly speaking, a bit Left. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Annan, that Channel 4 is probably even "Lefter". It is my favourite programme. I do not know what that says about me or about Channel 4, but there are such views.
The situation is changing and new generations are coming along. There will be a new generation of young men and women in the BBC who will share the views of Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Gorbachev and others who think that corporatism and collective stuff is rather out, and that the new idea of the private sector, enterprise and the market is really in. We do not want them to take charge and say that collectivism is like apartheid, which we are all against. Once you open the door to such people it becomes very dangerous indeed. Once you allow them to judge what subject they think they can have a policy on, there is no knowing where it may stop.
In this debate I am left with a very deep concern. The case that is made out is sufficiently serious to warrant great thought by the BBC. I hope that in his reply the noble Earl will indicate that he will read the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, at dictation speed to the top levels in the BBC and ask them to really think about it. It is not a matter which they can dismiss. We are all concerned because we want that great institution to go on within the terms of its licence. We do not want to see something else introduced; we do not want to see governments interfering; and we do not want to see outside organisations monitoring it. Those would be bad ways of solving the problem. The solution lies with the BBC, but it is urgent, and the BBC should be told so.
9.26 p.m.
Lord Ferrier: My Lords, I apologise for jumping in, but I reached London only at lunch time. There is one specific point which the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, did not mention which I feel it is my duty to mention. He read from Clause 13 of the licence and agreement. I have done so before in this House. Looking at the Question before the House, I do not believe,
"that the Broadcasting Authorities discharged their statutory responsibilities during the period leading up to the General Election".
Why is that so? It is because "Today in Parliament", a well-recognised programme with approximately 200,000 listeners, used to be repeated the next morning as "Yesterday in Parliament". At that time of the day the listeners numbered a couple of million. But the BBC's "Yesterday in Parliament" is no longer a repeat of "Today in Parliament". The construction of "Yesterday in Parliament" is prepared by the producer, whereas "Today in Parliament" is produced by the parliamentary staff.
As I have said before, I feel that the House has been diddled by the BBC through its not repeating in "Yesterday in Parliament" the details broadcast in "Today in Parliament". In that respect it did not comply with the Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont.
9.29 p.m.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, the genesis of the debate is quite interesting and strange. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, in a Question on 29th June, asked the Government to set up an independent inquiry into the manner in which the Broadcasting authorities discharged their statutory duties. Tonight we are debating whether they fulfilled their statutory responsibilities in the period leading up to the general election, which is really a different question. As has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Annan, the debate has gone all over the place. Some noble Lords have kept to the aspect of the general election while others have talked about broadcasting in general terms. What I find rather amusing about the whole thing, in view of the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft, is that a former chairman of the Conservative Party spoke in, I might say, perhaps more generous terms about the BBC than the noble Lord from the Cross-Benches. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, appears to be to the Right of the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft.
Lord Chalfont: My Lords, will the noble Baroness give way for a moment? In what way is criticism of the BBC Right wing? That is a most curious remark.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, the remarks that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, made appeared in an article that he wrote on, I believe, 5th June published in the Daily Express. His comments were constantly decrying people who were anti-Thatcher and anti-Conservative, whereas the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft, brushed that aside in an amusing way.
It is worrying that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has not produced very hard or specific evidence for
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the accusations that he has made. He has repeated what appeared in the article in the Daily Express about the odd smile, the attitude and the movements, but we have been given no specific instances. It is quite wrong to put forward matters in this way. That applies also, I am afraid, to the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, who treated us to a great many generalisations.
Lord Orr-Ewing: My Lords, will the noble Baroness give way again? I have looked at all the tapes. I specifically obtained the videos and laboriously went through them. I was not speaking without having studied them, timed them, and listed the order in which people batted. I took immense trouble, as did my noble friend who was quoting facts, and very often BBC facts.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord should allow me to finish the sentence. I was about to say that what has worried me is that he and other noble Lords in this debate have quoted themselves as being quite impartial viewers and listeners. In fact, the noble Lord, Lord Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon, I felt, was taking a better line when he admitted that these perceptions were subjective, and went on to say that he was an impartial viewer and listener. Not one of us is an impartial viewer and listener. The great thing is to recognise our own partiality or prejudice.
Lord Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon: My Lords, I do not think I claimed to be impartial. I am not impartial and I never have been.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, I respectfully suggest that the noble Lord reads Hansard tomorrow. I have written down the words, "impartial viewer and listener". I think he will find that he said that. I may be wrong, but I do not think so. I wrote those words as he said them. I thought that contradicted his point about being subjective.
In the Daily Express the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, referred to the resistance of the British public who are suffering from being brainwashed. That is the word he used in the article. It has been pointed out several times, as we are all aware, that if this were true the eventual result of the election points to a very strong resistance on the part of the British public.
I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Renwick, spent such a miserable hour or so. I was switching from one channel to another. I was among a very Conservative group of people, because they were practically all Tories, and they did not seem to be at all upset. In fact, they were distressingly happy, almost from the beginning when the results began to appear. They seemed to have cottoned on. Comments have been made, for instance, that Peter Snow looked pleased when there was a Labour gain, or something like that. He was like that all the way through the election programme, like a small boy playing with trains. He loved the jumping round and

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working it out. It did not seem to be a question of who was or was not winning; the game was the important thing.
To be serious, what I find worrying is that the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, rest very much on his subjective perceptions. They are not backed by what I would call real evidence or proper analysis. This makes the debate somewhat pseudo. It is only natural for some to suspect that the real reason lies in the rather unfortunate attempt to influence broadcasters by using Parliament as a base for engaging in what amounts to unsubstantiated attacks on the integrity of broadcasters and journalists by the BBC and independent television.
We have all heard about Sue Lawley's interview with Norman Tebbit. It is obviously not right, whoever is being interviewed, that people should be hectored or interrupted. I have no qualms in agreeing with that immediately. Politicians or interviewees should be able to look after themselves. Those of us who have been interviewed, of whatever party, have found that interviewers can often be very sharp and at times almost impertinent. However, one always has the right to say if one wants, "Enough of this", and get up and go; or, as Harry Truman put it, if you do not like the heat you must keep out of the kitchen.
Broadcasters sometimes fall short of what I would call professionalism, which is why some of them behave in this way. They can be a touch too aggressive or interruptive. It is wrong when they are, whoever they are interviewing or whatever their personal beliefs; but we must recognise that they are only human and like the rest of us therefore given to mistakes and errors. Indeed, this has been recognized—I do not apologise for repeating what has been pointed out by several noble Lords—by the newly appointed director-general of the BBC, Mr. John Birt, who has responsibility for the corporation's news and current affairs output. He has instituted a review of methods of interviewing as part of his general re-examination of the journalistic output of the BBC. With respect, it would have been far better to await the result of the other initiatives that are being taken within the BBC and of its inquiry into the conduct of the election before embarking on such a debate.
In the last election the BBC set up an election advisory unit at the highest level. The unit met twice every day, was available for consultation by news and current affairs staff all over the country and was on call 24 hours a day. This is the first time that such a unit has worked in an election. Independent television, which did not have as great a political coverage as the BBC, nevertheless asks viewers whether they feel that television provides a fair and unbiased view of news and current affairs programmes. The BBC and ITV, it seems to me, are doing the best that they can, saving the odd mistakes that are made.
I go back to where we started. If television and radio were not impartial, where were they partial and in what direction? If they were lacking in balance, to which end of the electoral scale did they gravitate? If they failed to be objective, whose subjective
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judgments did they articulate? To whose tunes were they dancing?
With the exception of two or three speakers in tonight's debate, it has been clear which side they were on. Everybody else seems to have been absolutely convinced that the whole emphasis was against the Conservative Party and on the side of Labour. That is the way it has come over in this debate. If such partiality and imbalance cannot be expressed in very much tighter terms—and I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, has said—it does not really add up to a case for government taking extreme action that would be quite calamitous.
What we have to accept is what any reasonable person will accept, and does accept—that broadcasters discharged their statutory and other responsibilities. That is not to say that their coverage was perfect, that there were not areas for improvement and that at times there was not too much coverage or too little. But to identify room for improvement or suggest areas that might be dealt with in different and perhaps better ways is quite different from laying the ground for the kind of implicit and occasionally explicit condemnation in which the noble Lord who initiated the debate has indulged.
There is ample evidence, as we all know, that the public rely more on television for their information than on any other medium and there is also ample evidence that they trust that information more than any other; certainly, on the whole, more than the press. There is evidence in research undertaken by the Broadcasting Research Unit that the last thing the public want or expect is for the broadcasters to roll over like a pet poodle at the feet of their political masters. The public expect and demand searching, inquiring and critical questioning of all politicians; and on the whole, with perhaps a few lapses, that is what they got during the election campaign.
I must also point out that the phraseology of the Unstarred Question was not quite right. It is of course true that statutory obligations attach to the commerical television system—that it be impartial, objective and balanced—but the situation with the BBC is rather different. No such statutory obligations attach to it, though it has historically been the case that the BBC has recognised that it should be committed to such principles and has articulated this through a series of memoranda which have been issued and have been in force for many years now, and also in the conditions of its licence. Its actual statutory position is rather different.
It is important to be precise and clear in stating the problem, if that is what it be, and in discussing the details which are encapsulated by the problem.
Lord Chalfont: My Lords, perhaps the noble Baroness will give way for one moment while I ask her whether she does not regard the BBC's licence as imposing a statutory duty upon it.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, that is what I said, though the position is rather different from that of the IBA and the ITV companies.
Sir Denis Forman, in his Dimbleby lecture last week, from which the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, quoted, said:

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"Today the role of broadcasting authorities—the BBC and the IBA—is under threat. There is, for instance, the threat of political interference born of the desire of politicians the world over to have broadcasting say what they want it to say".
He went on to mention other threats. I feel that this constant carping at the broadcasting authorities when the criticisms are so fragilely based is an encouragement, unfortunately, for some of them to take more cowardly action than they might in presentation, a discouragement to experimentation unless we are very careful, and thoroughly bad for the health of our democratic society.
With all its faults, we are blessed with a first-class broadcasting system. Both parts are regulated, though one is commercial and the other is the BBC. Let us be very careful that we do not inflict harm on the broadcasting authorities, ourselves or our country. Let us be very careful what we do before taking any actions such as those that have been suggested tonight.
9.45 p.m.
The Minister of State, Home Office (The Earl of Caithness): My Lords, we have had a most useful debate and are particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for instituting the debate tonight. It is right that I make clear at this stage of the debate that I am not here to defend the broadcasting authorities. They are quite capable of defending themselves on any allegations made against them.
I have listened with great interest to what has been said this evening some of which has been familiar and some less so. I should like to answer some of the points that have been made and some of the questions that have been raised. But before doing so, I should like to remind your Lordships about the arrangement which we have for broadcasting in this country and in particular the special place of the broadcasting authorities.
The broadcasting authorities—and I am referring here primarily to the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority—are appointed to protect the public interest in broadcasting. They owe their existence principally to the fact that, unlike other forms of publishing, broadcasting is a monopoly. This fact is forced on us by the shortage of radio frequencies. In the words of the 1925 report which led to the establishment of the BBC, the broadcasting authorities are the trustees for the public interest. Their responsibility is a very large one. Every day, each day of the year, our four television channels broadcast about 100 different programmes. In addition, there are four national radio networks and about 100 local radio stations, many of which broadcast 24 hours a day. All this adds up to something like 20,000 hours of television broadcasting each year, and several hundred thousand hours of radio broadcasting. Even if we confine our attention to the period of the general election campaign, we are still talking about thousands of hours of broadcasting.
The words of the Broadcasting Act 1981 require the IBA to be satisfied so far as posssible that their programmes meet certain standards. The BBC must meet similar standards. We have discussed in this House on a number of occasions what those
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standards are. They include questions of taste, decency and offensiveness; the need for accuracy and due impartiality in the presentation of the news; and the need for due impartiality in the three areas: in news and news features; in matters of political or industrial controversy; and in matters of current public policy. I remind the House that the Broadcasting Act 1981 states that impartiality may be judged over a series of programmes taken as a whole, of which I believe the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, reminded us earlier.
The words "due impartiality" are important, because a broadcaster is not required to be impartial on matters such as drug trafficking, cruelty and racial intolerance, for example, on which society is virtually unanimous. Because of this the importance of good management is highlighted so that that line is not crossed.
The broadcasting authorities have a daunting task. It is clear that the individual members of the governing boards of the broadcasting authorities cannot, and do not, watch and listen to everything which their authority broadcasts. Still less do they vet programmes in advance, although from time to time this happens when the subject matter is particularly controversial. Their job is to see that working systems are in place to ensure that the obligations are fulfilled. At the most basic level this means that there should be staff in post of sufficient calibre and authority to be able to take difficult editorial decisions; that there are proper arrangements for referral upwards of awkward programmes; that programmes and programme makers are chosen from a range of backgrounds and points of view; and, most importantly, that producers, particularly in the area of current affairs, understand and respect the responsibilities that each of them bear.
Every year sees a substantial growth in the number of programmes broadcast in the United Kingdom. Not only do we have more terrestrial television channels, but each of those is broadcasting for more and more hours each day and night. We are now about to see the start of satellite broadcasting and we already have the beginning of a cable network capable of delivering an unlimited number of television channels.
The Government have recently put forward proposals for radio that would allow the development of many hundreds of new local stations. Clearly, if it is already impossible for the members of the broadcasting authorities to watch and hear every programme for which they are responsible, it is going to become increasingly so in the future.
However, should we be unduly anxious about this? The Government believe that subject to proper safeguards to ensure that single point of view does not dominate, the more voices that are able to be heard the better. The views of those at one extreme will be cancelled out by the views of those at another. This is the principle which we have accepted for many hundreds of years so far as the printed word is concerned, and I have no doubt that in the future, as and when the monopoly of the airwaves by the BBC and the IBA is diminished, so we shall increasingly come to accept it for broadcasting. That is the challenge that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, put to

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me as something of excitement for the future and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, took the opposite view and feared the same challenge.
However, in the meantime, while broadcasting remains a monopoly, the broadcasting authorities have important responsibilities. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, asks whether the Government are satisfied that they have discharged them properly. This question reminds me of the riddle of Juvenal—and I do not go into Latin because Latin was a language that I never got on with at school—and the English translation is, "who will guard the guards themselves?" The answer, I think, is that it is not the job of the Government to second guess the individual decisions or broad policies of the BBC or the IBA. That would be to fly in the face of Parliament's wishes and would be tantamount to saying that the Government knew better than the broadcasting authorities how they should fulfil the role which Parliament has laid upon them; or that the Government were more fully acquainted with the programmes shown during this period than the broadcasting authorities themselves. It is of course unrealistic to assume that that would be so.
We would not presume to tell the broadcasting authorities how to do their job, just as we would not tell the newspaper publishers, the Director of Public Prosecutions, or the Director of Fair Trading how to do theirs. There is only a very small number of people in government responsible for broadcasting matters and they are not paid to watch and monitor television programmes but to advise on the broad thrust of policy. Where the Government do have a role is in keeping in touch with opinion in the country and in Parliament about people's perception of broadcasting in the United Kingdom and whether the generality of opinion is that the present arrangements are producing the results which Parliament expected of them.
The public are not slow to write to the broadcasters, to Home Office Ministers or to their MPs when they have seen things on television which they consider are wrong, unfair or improper. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Maude recounted the days when he was responsible and did such a good job for Her Majesty's Government when he was in charge of broadcasting, and he has much more experience than I have on these matters. He reminded the House of the letters that he got.
If one compares the complaints received in the Home Office about an average cause célèbre with complaints about the coverage of the last general election, it seems clear that the latter was not an issue of major public concern. Complaints received in the Home Office in relation to a sexually explicit scene in Dennis Potter's "The Singing Detective" were 85 from members of the public and seven from MPs. On the general election coverage there were no complaints from members of the public and only three from MPs. Of these three, two were about ITN announcing the result of individual counts before the returning officer and were not therefore relevant. The one relevant complaint was from one MP about alleged bias by Cleveland Radio. I also could answer the noble Lord, Lord Annan, by saying that as far as
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I am aware there has not been a complaint by a political party. There were of course complaints received by the broadcasting authorities from the general public.
As on this test these figures show that no complaints from the public reached the Home Office, it can be argued that this was not a matter of great public concern, and that television had, by and large, a good election. It can be argued, as indeed it was by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, that it was perhaps spoiled by some overkill and by one or two instances of boorishness on the part of television journalists Even if this latter criticism is true, it is certainly no grounds on which to condemn the whole system. None of us would suppose that, in all the hours of general election coverage, there was not the occasional programme which was unfair to one side or another, which trivialised the issues, or in which an interviewer behaved in a high-handed manner. It is easy to forget that, not only during a general election but throughout the year, our broadcasting arrangements regularly produce informative programmes of high quality, with serious attempts at analysis of complex issues.
I am sure that the House will join me in expressing a debt of gratitude to the broadcasting authorities for the work that they carry out. The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, mentioned the dangers of political bias among members of the broadcasting authorities because they are appointed by governments. I am sure that the noble Lord was talking about a hypothetical situation rather than the present situation under this Conservative Government, where we have a chairman of the IBA and a vice-chairman of the BBC who are both distinguished former Labour Ministers.
It would be a particularly un-listening Minister not to have noted that most of your Lordships believe that there may have been an element of bias in the broadcast coverage of the election, but we must bear in mind the caution of my noble friend Lord Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon about the dangers of a subjective judgment in this area. Although some references were made to the attitude of some employees of the broadcasters, I did not note much in the way of specific example of bias in the election coverage itself. If there are some examples which noble Lords have in mind they should take their specific complaints to the broadcasters themselves. I am sure that the broadcasters will listen to the opinions that have been expressed tonight. As the noble Lord, Lord Annan, said, it is up to anyone concerned about the matters to make specific complaints.
I should remind the House that the governing boards are directly responsible for hiring and firing all senior managers within the broadcasting authorities. Recent events have shown that they are not slow to use these powers when they think that it is appropriate. They are also responsible for issuing detailed guidance for programme makers and editors on the standards which they expect their programmes to meet. In view of what I said earlier, I reiterate that where there is specific complaint it should be made to the authorities as the responsible body. I am sure that those authorities will take due note of anything that

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your Lordships say; as I believe they have taken due note of the recent Richard Dimbleby lecture given by Sir Denis Forman, mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Chalfont and Lord Winstanley, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Birk.
Clearly broadcasting is an important and complicated subject. I would not wish to argue that our present arrangements for regulating it are perfect or that mistakes are not made. However, it is clear from tonight that the House is on the same side as that which my noble friend Lord Thorneycroft desires. The arrangements of the authorities must meet the objectives which I believe we all agree are necessary: of independence from government; freedom of expression within the law; safeguards on matters such as taste and political impartiality; access to adequate sources of funding; and at the same time produce programmes of genuine quality and originality.

London Regional Transport (Penalty Fares) Bill [H.L.]
Reported from the Unopposed Bill Committee with amendments.
Whitchurch Bridge Bill
Brought from the Commons, read a first time, and referred to the Examiners.
Masonic Trust for Girls and Boys Bill
Reported from the Commons with the amendments agreed to.

Essex Bill [H.L.]
Reported from the Commons agreed to with amendments; the amendments were considered and agreed to.
House adjourned at two minutes before ten o'clock.