Lords Sitting of 4 March 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 Sheffield.

BBC Scotland: Search Warrant
Lord Paget of Northampton: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have any statement to make about the actions of the Home Secretary, the Lord Advocate and the BBC (Scotland) on 29th and 30th January and thereafter.
The Lord Advocate (Lord Cameron of Lochbroom): No, my Lords, the events of 29th and 30th January and thereafter, and the actions of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Home Department and myself, in relation to the search of the BBC Scotland premises in Glasgow have already been explained and discussed in considerable detail in this House or in another place.
Lord Paget of Northampton: My Lords, has nothing happened since then? What was seized from the offices? What has happened to it? Has it all been returned to the BBC?
Lord Cameron of Lochbroom: No, my Lords, the inquiry still continues. I have to remind your Lordships that the material which was removed was so interwoven that it was not possible immediately to disentangle one kind of material from another. Indeed, that was the information given by the BBC to the police and reported to the Procurator Fiscal. It was confirmed by the police on examination of the material. Much of the material relating to the five programmes other than that on Zircon has since been returned to the BBC as a result of a sifting out operation carried out by the police. The police investigations continue and at the conclusion of the investigations the police will make a report to the Procurator Fiscal.
Lord Wilson of Langside: My Lords, may I ask the Lord Advocate whether, when he authorised the petition to the sheriff in terms of Section 9 of the Official Secrets Act, he had regard to the provisions of Section 11 of the District Courts (Scotland) Act 1975? As the noble and learned Lord knows, that Act abolished the role of the sheriff as an ex-officio justice of the peace. Accordingly, on the basis of what authority in law was the petition presented to the sheriff?
Lord Cameron of Lochbroom: My Lords, I am satisfied that the proper procedure for obtaining a search warrant was followed in this case, involving as it did an application by the Procurator Fiscal to a
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sheriff, who, as noble Lords will know, is not only legally qualified but is also the holder of a judicial office senior to that of a justice of the peace. He also possesses magisterial powers under common law and statute in relation to the granting of warrants.
The power of a sheriff to grant a search warrant on the application of the Procurator Fiscal has never depended on him being an ex-officio justice of the peace. I am satisfied that the involvement of the Procurator Fiscal and the sheriff in this case was in accordance with established law in Scotland.
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, is it not clear that, quite apart from the legalities which confused many of us and certainly confused me, the Government are entirely mistaken on this whole operation, which has brought them nothing but discredit? Should not they admit that and withdraw the whole thing right away?
Lord Cameron of Lochbroom: My Lords, I made it quite clear when I made a Statement to the House that this is a matter for the law officers and not for the Government. In this they act independently of government, and that was also the case in this instance.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, can the noble and learned Lord confirm that most of the papers removed by the police from the BBC in Glasgow were sifted through quickly and returned to the BBC? The balance of the papers, so I am informed, was apparently in no way as large in volume as those removed. Therefore, why is it taking so long to sift through those? When will the recommendation be made to the Procurator Fiscal?
Lord Cameron of Lochbroom: My Lords, it is true that the police, at the request of myself, sifted through material as quickly as they could in order to be certain of what could be returned properly to the BBC as not being relevant to the investigation they were making and continue to make. The police examination continues, but obviously at this stage I cannot give any indication to the House when it will be completed and when a report will be made to my Procurator Fiscal.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, will the noble and learned Lord hazard a guess as to what would have been the reaction of his noble friends on the Government Benches had a trawl of this kind been carried out when a Labour Government were in power? Bearing in mind that we are governed in this country largely by precedent, should we not regard new precedents with grave suspicion?
Lord Cameron of Lochbroom: My Lords, I hesitate to answer hypothetical questions of the kind which the noble Lord has just asked. However, I am bound to say that this case is only a precedent for showing what is perfectly ordinary procedure; namely, that where a report has been received of an offence of a serious nature having been committed which the prosecuting authorities are bound to take up and investigate, the use of search warrant procedure is a due process of law which it is perfectly appropriate to use, as it was used in this case.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords, following the last hypothetical question, may I ask my noble and learned friend whether it would be true to say that whatever government were in power and whatever their political persuasion it would still be a decision of the judiciary and the legal representatives, who are completely impartial and independent of any government of whatever party?
Lord Cameron of Lochbroom: My Lords, I am obliged to my noble friend. He is absolutely right. I should have expected a law officer of any government to have taken the same independent outlook that I have taken. Such has been the case in the past, and the outlook is one that any holder of my office takes in this kind of matter.
Lord Paget of Northampton: My Lords, in his original Answer to my Question the noble and learned Lord said nothing had happened, but since then he has told us that lots of things have happened. Is he surprised to find that my curiosity is unsatisfied? Does he remember the last time we had something of this sort, when a predecessor of his honourable and learned friend—I think it was the Lord Halifax of the day—took out a general warrant to seize the "North Britain" from Mr. Wilkes? He got into a great deal of trouble and received a good many writs and formidable judgments. Have the Government yet received any writ from the BBC, which I know is a soft touch? Surely by now they have received writs from Mr. Campbell.
Lord Cameron of Lochbroom: My Lords, the warrant that was issued was not a general warrant and no writ has been received from the BBC by any party so far as I am aware. As regards the warrant, noble Lords will be aware that the BBC took action in the English courts in relation to the showing of the Zircon film, but that was a civil action relating to an injunction. I think that the noble Lord will be aware of that.

Road Schemes: Grant Support
2.45 p.m.
Lord Brougham and Vaux: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many road schemes will be supported with transport supplementary grant in 1987–88.
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, in England we aim to support 340 major schemes costing 1 million or more. There are 70 new schemes for 1987–88. As regards the remaining 270, support will be maintained for schemes supported in previous settlements where local authorities continue to make satisfactory progress. In Wales, where the system is rather different, we aim to support 10 schemes costing £5 million or more, one of which is to be supported for the first time in 1987–88.
Lord Brougham and Vaux: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that very informative reply. Is he able to tell the House whether those figures include support for Channel Tunnel-related roads?
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, we have given the Kent County Council an assurance that transport supplementary grants for road schemes made necessary by the tunnel will be additional to the county's main accepted programme. In this settlement we have accepted around 80 per cent. of the county's bid for tunnel-related schemes.
Lord Underhill: My Lords, is it not the case that the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment issued a report last autumn on urban road appraisal which was critical of the cost assessment analysis for determining the grant and also of what was alleged to be a bias against urban areas? Have the Government considered that report and other recommendations and when will they be published?
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, I can confirm that the report of the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment, which was called Urban Road Appraisal, was published in October 1986. It supported the general application of cost benefit techniques and other aspects of trunk road assessment. It recommended ways in which those might be developed to cope with complex urban networks. The Government's response, which was also published in October, accepted the bulk of the committee's recommendations. The report did not identify any consistent bias in present methods. It provides a foundation of broad principles on which to develop and refine appraisal methods for both urban and interurban trunk roads. It also provides some advice which local authorities may find helpful when appraising their own roads. Economic benefits are only one of several factors that the Secretary of State considers when deciding the distribution of transport supplementary grant.
Lord Gisborough: My Lords, with reference to the Channel Tunnel-related roads, can my noble friend say whether there are any plans to improve the A.23 route, which is virtually the route from Westminster to the M.23?
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, I am afraid I cannot answer my noble friend now, but I shall write to him.

United States: Arms Sales
2.48 p.m.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether, in the light of evidence that the United States Administration has been preparing to buy Blowpipe missiles from Short Brothers of Belfast in order to pass them to the Nicaraguan Contras, they will henceforth make arms sales to the United States subject to a no-transfer clause.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Young): My Lords, no, the Tower Commission report did not suggest that Blowpipe missiles exported to the United States had been or might be diverted to the Contras.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, is it not the case that the Tower Commission reproduces as an annex to its report a document which shows Colonel Oliver North planning to obtain Blowpipe missiles from Shorts and divert them to the Contras? Are the Government aware that the Government of Afghanistan have put on public exhibition a Blowpipe missile which they say they captured from the rebels in their country, and that photographs of that missile have been published in the press? Are the Government further aware that there are quite circumstantial reports of Blowpipes being in the hands of Jonas Savimbi and his forces in Angola? If any of these reports are right, where do the Government think the missiles came from other than from the United States?
Baroness Young: My Lords, perhaps I may answer that supplementary question by saying that, following publication of the Tower Commission report, the United States Government have assured us that there are no Blowpipes in Contra hands and that there is no US intention to supply Blowpipe to the Contras.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, can the noble Baroness tell the House what procedures exist to ensure that arms exported from this country are used for the purposes specified? Can she further say a word about the company based in London known as KMS? Are Her Majesty's Government aware of the activities of that company and are they engaged in arms sales abroad?
Baroness Young: My Lords, the noble Lord will know that it is not our practice to discuss details of arms sales. So far as the KMS company is concerned, of course it is a commercial organisation.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, despite the secrecy about arms sales, does the noble Baroness agree that there is a good case for the Government to ensure that arms from this country are not transferred from the recipient country to another territory which, as is suggested in the Question, may well follow a policy of terrorism and intervention?
Baroness Young: My Lords, let me put the answer to the noble Lord's question in this way: the United States Government are fully aware of our views on the diversion of arms to the Contras, and a no-transfer clause would serve no useful purpose. With regard to other no-transfer clauses, it is not the Government's policy to comment on the details of contracts relating to individual arms sales to particular countries.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, further to the noble Baroness's reply to me, is she aware that I fully accept her integrity and accept without question what she says, and that I fully accept the Government's integrity in this matter and that they would not allow arms to be sold by this country for what may be regarded as illegal or improper purposes?
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Nevertheless, is she satisfied that the procedures are adequate to ensure that those arms do not go through the back door in some way without the Government knowing?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I appreciate the point that the noble Lord made in the preface to his question, but I should not have answered it if we were not satisfied with the procedures.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, does the Minister of State fully appreciate that my original Question was not intended to cast doubt on her word or that of the United States Government that no Blowpipes had gone to the Contras? It was to ask if, in view of the presence and free operation for some years of Colonel North in the White House basement, no doubt unknown to the State Department, it would not be a wise precaution to apply no-transfer agreements to the United States as we do to so many other countries?
Baroness Young: My Lords, I understand the point that the noble Lord is making. I think that I answered his question in an earlier point that I made.

AIDS: 1987 Figures
2.52 p.m.
Baroness Lane-Fox: 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 has been the increase in the numbers of people (a) contracting and (b) dying from AIDS in 1987 compared with 1986.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Baroness Trumpington): My Lords, by the end of January 1987 a cumulative total of 686 cases of persons suffering from the disease had been reported to the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, of whom 355 were known to have died. These figures include 337 new cases reported in 1986 and 153 deaths. In January 1987, 78 new cases of AIDS and 62 deaths were reported.
Baroness Lane-Fox: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply and congratulate the Government on their way of so explicitly telling the public of the horrors of the disease. I ask her whether her department was expecting the sharp rise in the number of cases during January.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, let me say how appreciative I am of my noble friend's first remarks. The number of cases is doubling every 10 months. We therefore expect each month's figures to be higher than those of the previous month. Other factors related to the method of reporting may have affected the January figures.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, the noble Baroness has given some new and disturbing figures. Can she now explain the serious discrepancy that has occurred in

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the number of deaths from AIDS reported in 1986? Can she reconcile two official statements made by her department? One was that there were 285 deaths in England and Wales in 1986, and the second was that over the same period there were 220 deaths in England and Wales, where AIDS or a similar term has been mentioned. Is not this matter so important that your Lordships' House and the country should have the facts clearly before them?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, the noble Lord may not be aware of a question answered by my honourable friend the Minister for Health on 3rd March in another place which gave the facts as he reported them then. I would merely say that the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys is currently investigating discrepancies between numbers of deaths from AIDS reported to the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre and those shown on death certificates.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, so the noble Baroness accepts that there are serious discrepancies. Has she any idea how long it will take before the country will be allowed to know just how many deaths from AIDS there were in 1986?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, I refer the noble Lord to my honourable friend's reply, which is as far as he can go for the present.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, surely the important fact is that the number is approximately doubling every 10 months. My figure for 1986 is 293. That leads us inevitably to the conclusion that if this progression continues we shall have about 20,000 cases in 1991. Although three-quarters of the cases so far have been in the London regions, can the noble Baroness say whether the Government are aware of the rise in other regions, particularly Oxford and the West Midlands, and whether they will be helping those regions to the same extent as they are helping the London regions which are suffering most of the burden at the moment?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, three-quarters of all reported cases have occurred in three of the Thames health regions; 96 per cent. of reported cases have occurred in England; 9 in Wales; 16 in Scotland and 2 in Northern Ireland. Local health authorities will use whatever money they feel they should for preventive and caring measures.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, my question was whether the regions which I mentioned will be getting any new money in view of the rising incidence of AIDS in their areas?
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, we have made various moneys available through various bodies. For instance, the MRC, which asked for 14 million, was given it. Worldwide research has been carried out. Where health authorities ask for money, their needs will be considered.

Business
2.58 p.m.
Lord Denham: My Lords, I should like to say a word about the arrangements for this afternoon's two short debates standing in the names of the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale. As the mover is allowed approximately 15 minutes and the Minister should rise to reply not less than 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the debate, in the case of the noble Viscount the number of speakers is such that it is not necessary to propose a formal time limit. But I know that the House would appreciate it if noble Lords would keep their speeches within the limits imposed by the spirit of these short debates.
In the case of the short debate in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, it means that all other speeches should be limited to a maximum of seven minutes. As that is a rather meagre ration, to encroach on other speakers' time would be even more unfair. I think I should remind noble Lords that the time is up when the figure 7 appears on the clock and not the figure 8.

Private Bill Procedure
The Lord President of the Council (Viscount Whitelaw): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
As your Lordships will recall, on 28th January last this House agreed the orders of reference of the Joint Committee on Private Legislation Procedure. The committee has since met and has expressed a wish to appoint specialist advisers. This power is not at present available to it in the terms of the order of the House of 28th January. I understand that this request from the committee to be able to appoint specialist advisers arises from a need to have expert advice to hand on planning inquiries and on the working of parliamentary agents. The Chairman of the Joint Committee, Mr. McNair-Wilson, approached the Lord Privy Seal and me with this request and we consider it to be entirely reasonable. The House of Commons agreed to a Motion on these lines yesterday and I hope that this House will now also agree that the committee has the power that it seeks to appoint specialist advisers.
Moved, That the Commons message of yesterday be now considered and that the committee have power to appoint specialist advisers.—(Viscount Whitelaw.)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and a message was sent to the Commons to acquaint them therewith.

Married Women and Part-Time Work
3 p.m.
Viscount Hanworthrose to call attention to the brain drain of qualified married women who require opportunities for part-time working while looking after their young children; and to move for Papers.
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, this is the third time in some 12 years that I have introduced a Motion

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on these lines. The only difference today is that I want to stress the potential seriousness of the brain drain. But I am also concerned for women without formal qualifications.
With exceptions, I believe that many women are better wives and parents if they have an interest outside the home. Taking a minimal chauvinist view, most men, when they come back from work, do not solely want to be regaled with conversations about household trivialities. Not only this, but in the more difficult situation today of bringing up a family—with the dangers of drug-taking and much else—a sense of proportion is needed. This can be obtained only if the wife has other, wider interests. I am reminded of the modern German saying to the effect that if you educate a woman you educate a whole family. The educated woman needs mental stimulus as much as anyone else. A successful marriage must surely be a partnership preferably of equals.
We like to think that we have established by legislation equality between the sexes and that this is all we need to do. Some protagonists even seem to believe that the sexes are the same. What nonsense, my Lords! The average woman—and I use the word "average" advisedly—has strengths and potentialities which are not found in most men. They have, however, a rather different temperament, and if we have any relationship with the animal kingdom this should be blindingly obvious.
What is however beyond any dispute is that women who want to found a family, and most do, are put at a grave disadvantage. It is possible of course to have the child, put it into someone else's care and immediately return to work. Some career women do this, but it presupposes that their earnings are well above that of the baby minders they have to employ, and therefore applicable only to a few; but even these few, I think, are probably wrong in doing so in the interest of their children. Some people think that the husband could just as well sacrifice his career as the woman could, but this ignores the maternal instinct and the differences on the average—again I use this term—between the sexes.
On this analysis we have to face a situation where far too many of our highly qualified women never return to their profession. I understand that 50 per cent. of women physicists never return, and that the wastage of women maths and science teachers is twice that of men. The consequences at a time of acute shortage of such teachers is obvious. Not quite so obvious is the shortage of really able people going into industry and commerce. I suspect most noble Lords would agree that this is one important reason for our industrial decline. The other reasons, and there are several, are not appropriate to this Motion. Some industrialists realise, I have been told, that under the right circumstances, married women can bring to their job not only experience but also a maturity and dedication which can be a good example to others. This has been recognised also, I believe, in the field of nursing.
With the now limited number of university and technical college places, we simply cannot afford to lose those who receive this privileged education. But to reduce the number of places available to women, because many do not later contribute to the nation's
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needs, is unacceptable. Moreover, even if we did this, I fancy that obtaining a balanced input of representative women students would be prejudiced and the problem of the brain drain would still remain.
No, we must look further to see what can be done at least to ameliorate the situation. In the past I have always received the greatest support from noble Baronesses in this House, but not always from those in industry and commerce. For this debate I wrote to some 12 or so of those who might be able to influence the situation and I am really heartened by their responses. Although, in the main, they cannot take part in this debate, they have expressed the wish to read Hansard afterwards.
I have left until last part-time working. It is the essence of this Motion, and its importance is that women who want to look after their children can return as soon as their young children go to morning school. The inevitable time away from work means that they become out of touch with fast-changing technologies, so the shorter the gap the better if they can hope to get back to any responsible position. But even then, retraining courses can be of enormous help. To meet the need there now exist "distance learning" courses which can mainly be taken at home. Short courses too are available.
Professor Daphne Jackson of the University of Surrey, pioneering a scheme for part-time research fellowships in universities for just this purpose, has raised £400,000 from a variety of industrial and charitable sources. It is, I think, generally acknowledged that motivated part-time workers can achieve as much as most others do in a much longer period. It is often argued that part-time working is impossible for employers; this was the attitude held originally in respect of part-time teachers and hospital workers. When staff shortages made part-time recruitment necessary, it was found to work out very well. The same is often said about research, but university lecturers are most certainly ony part-time researchers.
It is at least arguable that many women who are working full time would prefer part-time working if the opportunities were available and the conditions fairer. I conclude for this reason that our massive unemployment need not be a bar to what I am proposing. Not only is it difficult to find worthwhile part-time jobs or to return to work in any position of responsibility, but the terms for part-time work are unsatisfactory and financially unrewarding. I cite three reasons. Travelling any distance to work is expensive and can take a major proportion of the salary; pension provisions are usually disavantageous and unfair; and national insurance and other benefits are reduced in an unacceptable manner.
On the secretary level, I am sure that many managers could reorganise their work so as to employ two part-time-secretaries; perhaps one of really high calibre and a junior as a copy typist. It would very seldom be that both were ill or away at the same time.
Finally, I would like to summarise what I think should be done. First, there should be, over the whole field of employment, more opportunities for part-time working which in some cases may in fact be job sharing. Secondly, the conditions for part-time working should be improved, in particular benefits in

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respect of pensions and national insurance. Thirdly, there should be even more opportunities for up-dating courses. It is noteworthy that the Westminster Bank has a scheme whereby some married women can return to work after a five-year break on excellent terms. If they can do it, surely others could follow.
3.10 p.m.
Baroness Faithfull: My Lords, we must all be very grateful to the noble Viscount for raising this subject. It is a subject which is rarely discussed in your Lordships' House yet it is one which is of deep significance in the country today. Therefore, it is with some slight regret that I have to say that, as the second speaker, I shall approach it from a completely different angle, leaving other speakers, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Nicol and Lady Seear, who know more about industry and commerce to comment on that aspect. I wish to approach the problem from the point of view of the care of children which enables married women to work.
I believe that the insinuation of the Motion is that the world of industry, commerce and the professions—indeed the whole world of work outside the home—is experiencing a brain drain because married women require opportunities for part-time work while looking after their children. I hope that the noble Viscount will forgive me if I say that I wish that the emphasis of the Motion, while perhaps having the same practical implications, could have underlined the need to prevent the brain drain away from the home, while at the same time emphasising the need to provide part-time work which enriches the mother and enables her to look after the children perhaps in a much more sensible way.
I believe that a balance needs to be struck among the needs of the children, the needs of the mother and the needs of commerce. Unless those three points are looked at together and in balance we shall not achieve the right policy. With regard to that, I wish to pay tribute to Her Majesty's Government, who have recognised the needs of married women going out to work part-time but knowing that there are adequate resources in the community to care for their children.
The Under Fives Unit is a national centre for advice, guidance and information on current practice, thinking and research into the under fives field. It was started in May 1986. It is based on the National Children's Bureau and it is funded by the Department of Health and Social Security. It is operating as a separate unit within the National Children's Bureau. Although it is funded by the Department of Health and Social Security, the Secretary of State for Education has visited the bureau within the last fortnight to see, among other things, its work.
If women are to go out to work, whatever else happens, their children's well-being must be safeguarded. Furthermore, if mothers go out to work and the children are not cared for adequately, I suggest that they will not be good workers. Therefore, one must strike the balance, particularly for a mother with very young children, between the children receiving physical care and the sensitive emotional care which requires unhurried time. That means that work and
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time at home must not be rushed at from one side to the other.
I regret to say that in many areas in this country there are parents who for financial reasons must go out to work full-time, and I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord McGregor, will mention that fact. Therefore, it behoves us in this country to look to our children and their needs in this area.
I must say that the training of the people who look after young children leaves much to be desired. The pay of people looking after children in family centres is very poor, and the status of those who give loving care to children, thus enabling parents to go out to work, is valued very low in this country. The relationship between the staff, the child minders, the foster parents or the pre-school workers has not been sufficiently developed. If we are to press for women to have part-time jobs, and if we do not look after their children, it will rebound both on them and on us as a society.
Therefore I take a slightly different stance from the noble Viscount in saying that if we are to have women returning to industry part time, we must ensure that there is a wide range of facilities to meet the needs of the various individuals wanting to go out to work and the needs of the workplace so that it fits in with the children and the parents, ensuring that the children do not suffer and the parents are at ease.
I should like to make two final points. First, by some strange circumstance which I have never understood, in this country we must face the fact that we do not value our children in the way in which they are valued on the Continent. I give two examples. For instance, so valuable do the French consider the relationship between mother and the young child that, where the mother of a child up to the age of two cannot stay at home for financial reasons, she is given an allowance to stay at home to look after her children.
Secondly, there was an EC directive—I served on the Select Committee which considered the directive—which other countries in the EC accepted but this country did not. I say this almost to my shame because I was on the committee. The directive was designed to help both parents at the time children were ill or at the birth of a child. If women are happy to go out to work and if society is to be enriched, we must not sacrifice our children, and the services for the children must meet the needs of both children and parents.
3.18 p.m.
Baroness Phillips: My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness and I concur with everything that she has said.
To prove how impartial I am, I shall repeat a story from a book which was written by one of America's most dynamic business women. I am sorry if noble Lords do not like this but it says: "God made the world and he looked down and he said, 'Good'. Then God made man and he looked down and said, 'That is pretty good, but I can do a little better than that'.", so he created woman.
In a week when some people have been discussing whether or not women should be Ministers in the Church, I believe it is appropriate that we should

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return to a debate in relation to women, for which we are very grateful to the noble Viscount.
I should like to refer to a study which has just been published—I could not get the whole study—by Professor Richard Scase of Kent University. He shows that women still believe that they must make a considered choice between a successful career outside the home and being in the home as a homemaker. For many years I have been in the forefront of the women's movement struggling to achieve equality, as indeed have many of my noble friends. Equality does not mean burning your bra or being called "Madam Chairperson". Equality is something much more definitive. It is the equality of the human being. So I ask myself why, after all these years, should we have to have a debate such as this this afternoon? I noted that the noble Viscount said that men and women are different. All noble Lords know the terrible old French joke—"Thank God for the little difference"! As a teacher, I should like to suggest that there is not the great definable difference between the two sexes that we infer. People divide on their personality and not on their sex and any teacher will tell you that. There are as many intellectual women as there are intellectual men, although you would not think so as the Labour Shadow Cabinet consists of 12 men.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, does the noble Baroness expect anything intellectual from the Labour Shadow Cabinet?
Baroness Phillips: My Lords, I will not answer that question. This is a non-party debate in that sense.
You will find as many intellectual men as intellectual women, and you will find as many stupid men as stupid women. This is a fact of life. The percentages are very interesting if noble Lords actually look at them. There is great play made of the physical difference. It is said that women are not as physically strong as men—what total nonsense! If there was a war tomorrow that would be forgotten because there would be a shortage of men, and women would drive the heavy lorries and lift the loads, and do all the things that men do. I would defy any man who has carried £20-worth of shopping, plus a baby on his back, to say that women are physically weaker than males. That is nonsense.
Of course, emotionally women are much stronger. It is the little boys who weep for their mothers when they go to school, it is not the little girls. It is probably the little boys who weep for their mothers when they get married, it is not the little girls who weep for their fathers. The only real difference (and there is nothing we can do about this, thank God!) is the biological difference. The female produces the children.
I have often stirred up an all-women audience. There are certain things which will stir an audience, and one is to say that the best person to bring up a child is not necessarily the natural mother. When I taught in an infants' school, I saw the real natural mothers, invariably they were single women, but they were loving, they loved children, they understood children. We do not ask mothers to have any training. This is one job where nobody asks if you have had any training. If you applied for a job as a typist and said,
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"I have never handled a typewriter", you would be told to go away and learn. But anyone can perform the most difficult job of bringing up another human being, which is why some people do it so badly. I expect noble Lords to pick up this point.
Children will continue to be born and they need their mother for a period of their lives in a way that cannot be substituted for, and that I accept. There are many important differences from even 50 years ago. As a female it is now possible to choose if you want children, when you want children and how many children you want. I am sure as a Catholic I should not say this, I shall probably have some kind of reprimand from the Pope. I shall always remember my mother, who was a very good Catholic, when I said, "You are not very good, you have only had two children". She said, "The Almighty did not mean me to bring children into the world that I could not support and give a good life". So I felt that she at least knew as much as. the Almighty.
There are some very curious statistics about the average number of children in a family, which is why I am sorry that I am not able to stay for the second debate. In looking up various figures, I learned that at the moment there is an average of 2·14 children to each family, or 1·72—personally, I have never seen 1·72 of a child, but for the purpose of statistics I will agree that they are there. I learned at one of these smart parties, that there is a new breed coming which is called "DINKS"—Double Income, No Kids. Now this breed will probably take the place of the Sloane Rangers. They live mainly in good property and have to have a heavy mortgage and have to live well, so they do not have children.
Quite seriously, we recognise that most families want children—thank Heavens! They want children to love, and to have another human life for which they have some responsibility. I also suspect that given a choice (and this is what it is all about) most women will always prefer to be full-time homemakers, which has to be the most skilful job of all. You have to be wife, mistress, companion, cook, dressmaker—you name it, you have to be everything. It is a very skilful job. But, there is still a large pool of ability and skills among women which is at present being wasted. In our society we waste appallingly, we waste materials, but by Heaven we waste people!
When I attend pre-retirement courses I see people at 60 bright-eyed and bushy tailed who are able to make a contribution to society. What do we do? We put them out to grass, give them a free bus pass and a pat on the head and we say "That's you". It is an appalling waste of talent and skills. This occurs particularly with married women. Let us suppose for argument's sake that a woman is trained to be a biochemist, at which she will be very good and probably gain a first degree. She marries and is then supposed to be a full-time homemaker. She may not be very good at being a homemaker, not every woman is instinctly good at all the skills needed to run a home. Personally, I am not a good cook. I was able to assure my daughter-in-law, who is a good cook, that if my son said to her "You do not cook like my mother", he was paying her a compliment. It is the assumption that every woman is good at this, and every man is good at that, which is not true and is not borne out at all.

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Let us return to the girl who is a biochemist, this is only one example; there are hundreds. It would be much more sensible and more economic if we were to make it possible for her to return to work so that she could have proper support—and I return to the point made by the noble Baroness—so that she can return to her original career, possibly after an interval, or engage in another career.
During Industry Year there were several references to the brain drain, and it was pointed out that in many professions and in commerce we can no longer afford to waste skills. That is what is happening, skills are being wasted. It is a contradiction that there is unemployment, but there is still a shortage of people trained in certain skills. These are the people that can fill the jobs. Part-time work is probably the best way of re-introducing people into the world of industry and commerce and certainly into some professions. After a few years' absence from work and remaining in the home it is very curious that even brilliant women lose their confidence. I have seen this happen many times. You have to bring them back into the world and say, "Yes, you are as good as anybody else". What is needed? First of all, there is a need for employers to take the initiative. I was delighted to hear from the noble Viscount that he has received letters saying just that. Like the noble Viscount, I was going to quote the Nat-West Bank system which is the only one I have heard of. They have a marvellous scheme whereby a woman employee who leaves to have children can be absent for five years and she would be entitled to return—and this is the important point—at the level at which she left the job or rather, as if she had continued. This is one of the reasons why there are not more young men and women in Parliament. Are they going to opt out for two or three years, at the most five years, and then have to go back at a different level than they would have been at had they remained in that industry? This is particularly true of women. The part-timer would fit in well in this particular scheme, and I think Nat-West, with a little discussion, will probably give us the lead.
What else do we want? Sadly, there are not half enough of the facilities needed for the pre-school children. I have been saying this for something like 25 years. There are still some countries which have hardly any facilities at all—I shall not name them—for pre-school children. This is absolutely appalling. It is the children here one is thinking of. The children get the benefit. Even if the mother is a home maker they still get the benefit of the social contact and education.
We have to have a really mass movement of preschool—whatever you call it; good child-minding, if you like, for the smaller ones—care. We have also to look at the employment conditions if we are to have more part-timers with no bars to promotion because you have been a part-timer; no discrimination between full and part-time when you have redundancy. Certainly it is a little unfair that the employer has to pay so much for a part-time worker in comparison to a full-time worker. That deters many employers from using them. These are points that the Government ought to look at.
Basically, I would appeal to the Government to come up with something imaginative. I would only say
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to the Minister, just to cheer him up, that I have appealed to other governments—in fact I was a member of a government and tried to appeal to them—but we still have not taken the message that the colossal waste of talent and skills is there. I appeal to the community in general to see this, but particularly to your Lordships today.
3.32 p.m.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, all noble Baronesses speaking this afternoon must feel a distinct sense of déjà vu. As the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, has said, we seem to have been saying these things for rather a long time. I shall try not to repeat myself or the remarks of those who have already spoken.
We have made progress in relation to women and the opportunities available to women, and in equality between men and women. A great deal has happened. Let us recognise that before we get too depressed. The one overwhelming problem that still remains which we have done little so far to solve is that upon which we focus today—the problem of the return to work of the woman who has had the break to have a family. It is there that we have made the least advance of all in otherwise not too discouraging progress.
I should like today, instead of indulging in exhortation, which is always a danger, to ask what the Government—the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will like this even less than exhortation—are doing as an employer out of all the various suggestions made. I have not given notice of this, so the noble Lord may wish to reply in writing and to put the answers in the Library.
There is no doubt that, in so far as employers up and down the country are concerned, it makes a great difference if they see the Government in their capacity as employer, in the vulgar phrase, putting their money where their mouth is. It is not impressive if the Government are exhorting other people to do things which they themselves are not, to any great extent, doing.
I know that the noble Lord will be able to say that in certain respects the Government are doing something. I hope I shall not be pushing the noble Lord on the defensive, but it would be much more useful—and we want this debate to be useful—if the noble Lord would say quite honestly, "We have attempted this; we have done that; we have not been able to approach other matters", and tell us what they have done, what they hope to do, what has been successful, and what they will experiment with in the future.
This is a serious matter. As other speakers have said, we are wasting a great deal of talent. Good education is expensive, as we all know. There is a great shortage of people in many of the highly-trained occupations, particularly of course in the sciences, maths, physics, and so on. If we were logical—which, of course, we are not—we would either say, "We are going to stop educating our women because we don't make good use of them when we have done it; it is a rotten investment to pour hundreds or thousands of pounds into the education of women and then not to use it", or "We are going to review the whole scene and make sure that we do in fact make the best possible use, taking into

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account all the facets of the problem"—as the noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, said—"from the point of view of the children, from the point of view of the women themselves and their families, and from the point of view of the employer and the economy as a whole".
It is a big question. It requires a penetrating and determined investigation to make sure that we can do better. At the moment we are putting money into education and not getting the return on it that we ought to be getting. Although it is true that you cannot educate a family unless you educate the mother (and that is very important) she does not really need to be a highly-trained physicist, doctor, or whatever may be the expensive profession that she has taken up, to make her a better mother as such. A good general education, yes; but you cannot really justify that expenditure in terms of what it is going to do to her efficiency in running a home and being a mother.
If the central problem today—and I believe it to be so—is the return of women into employment after having children, how can this be made much more effective than it is at present? The first point concerns women who want to come back soon after childbearing, whether this is a good idea or not. The noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, has spoken about this. There are some who passionately feel that this is what they want to do, and there are others who have to do it for economic reasons.
Therefore, we have the whole question of adequate child care. We do not have adequate child care. It seems to me to follow from the investment that we have made in the education of these women that we should put some additional investment into the kind of child care that makes it practical, sensible, and right for them to use their faculties, and their training, without at the same time causing damage to their families.
Would the noble Lord tell us what has happened to the number of child-care places in nursery schools? What have the Government, as an employer, done in terms of the provision of nursery places for people they employ up and down the country and in the public sector generally. This applies to local authorities as well as to government service? I do not suppose for one moment that the noble Lord can give those figures now, but it would be useful to have them.
This is part and parcel of the total approach to getting the best out of our women while at the same time not damaging home or industry. It involves the whole range of child-care facilities, what we have done about them and what we are considering doing about them.
Then there is the question of part-time employment, which figures in the title of the debate. One of the great troubles about part-time employment is that it has been largely ghetto employment. It has been the lower end of employment; the jobs with no clear prospects; the low-paid dogsbody jobs. There are a few exceptions but, by and large, that has been the picture.
This is no good at all. It has always been said, with very few exceptions, that if you are in a position of responsibility, you have to be there full time. I accept that there are some jobs where this is true. I do not
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accept it as an overall generalisation which can be taken for granted without detailed investigation case by case.
I am sure that there are many jobs which, if you were really determined, could be done on a part-time basis or on a shared basis. Much more could be done in sharing jobs, having partnership jobs, and two women doing one job. There are instances where this has been done—and done successfully—in other countries—as well as here—over a long period. We must challenge the idea that responsible jobs can only be done on a full-time or nearly full-time basis. There are cases which could be made out, but the burden of proof should be on showing that it is essential that the job should be full-time and not the other way round. At present it is the other way round.
It would be very interesting to know how many part-time jobs are available to women, or rather are being handled by women at present in the Civil Service, shall we say, from assistant secretary level upwards; indeed, how many women there are from assistant secretary level upwards. I shall not pursue that point at the moment. How many are being done as a part-time job, and how can the Government show that it is not possible for those jobs to be done on a shared or part-time basis? That would be information we should very much like to have.
Will the Government set an example in recognising the value and importance of part-time work by giving, as other speakers have already said, the privileges, opportunities and rights to people in part-time employment that are given to those in full-time employment? The Government's record in reacting to European draft directives on part-time employment has not been encouraging. Will they look again at this and consider whether it is not time that they accepted that part-time employment properly developed should carry the same rights? There should be every encouragement for people to go into part-time employment. That means backing the European directives instead of criticising them at every level.
That also goes for the other directive which would help very much in the development of part-time work for the returning woman, and that is the question of parental leave. It would be for the family to decide whether the father or the mother would take time off. I imagine that normally it will be the person who is the bigger wage-earner who will stay at work while the person who is earning less stays at home. But an increasing number of wives are earning more than their husbands and in those cases particularly there is a great deal to be said for parental leave. Will the Government look again at their attitude towards parental leave, to which they have not given a very enthusiastic welcome?
There are a number of other ways in which assistance can be given to women who want to get back into employment. Reference has already been made to the Nat-West scheme. I was much involved in the scheme in the days when it was being introduced. It is sad that it has not been copied more widely, although there has been a certain amount of development as a result of it. I am wondering what the Government are doing on similar lines. The essence of the Nat-West scheme is that there is a five-year period during which

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a woman can be away from employment and then get hack at the same level. But a very important point is that during those five years it is part of the obligations of those women to do two weeks each year with the Nat-West. This keeps them in the banking world, they do not lose their contact and they do not feel that they have fallen away from the whole professional area in which they were employed. That has been shown to be a very important element.
For some reason I have never had the opportunity of having this period at home, but I did a study many years ago for the OECD on this very question in 11 countries. I found that in every single country I was told—it cannot have been a conspiracy between them all—that when women stay at home they lose their nerve; they believe they can never again compete with the glossy girls coming up behind them. I do not know what men do to their wives when they keep them at home, but they have this disastrous effect on them, or perhaps it is the uninterrupted conversation of two year-olds which I can imagine is a little daunting after a while. Be that as it may, this is the effect apparently.
The two weeks back each year means that women can keep their contacts and their confidence. Are the Government doing this in the Civil Service? If not, will they please consider doing it? While we are on that point, I have for long thought that we made a mistake in this country in having the period for maternity absence with rights for reinstatement at only six months. Six months is the worst period possible not only for the woman but also for the employer. No employer can make a satisfactory arrangement to cover six months; nobody from outside wants to take on a job for six months. The French have already been referred to. They have a period of two years which enables the woman at home to establish how she will cope. It is also possible for the employer to put someone in for a period of two years and to move them in the ordinary process of moving people from one job to another. Six months is an impossible time.
I think it would be well worth while. Although at first sight it may seem as if two years is less convenient for the employer than six months, it might well be found on inquiry that a great many would prefer two years rather than six months, which is neither one thing nor the other. It is a period neither short enough to manage without anybody nor long enough to put in a proper substitute. It is well worth looking at that again.
There are other ways in which we can make use of the talent of women who have been trained and who are taking seriously their responsibilities as parents, and we all want them to do that. There is the whole area of working from home. I know there are many women who do not like the idea of working from home. Part of the charm of the job is getting away from home, but that does not apply to all of them. It so happens that only yesterday evening I had a long communication from that very remarkable organisation, F International, about which many noble Lords will probably know, run by Mrs. Steve Shirley. It has developed to a very wide extent the idea of people with computers in their homes making good incomes working from home, able to control their hours, taking on more or less work according to what
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suits them. This needs encouragement, resources and support.
For those women for whom such a skill is appropriate, it can be an excellent solution to the problem of combining earning and working with being in their homes and looking after them. Is there no work in the government sector which could be done on this basis, as the Government use more and more statistical procedures for one thing or another? Is there not a possibility of a government version of F International?
I have probably given the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, enough to answer this afternoon and I hope he will be able to do so.
3.49 p.m.
Baroness Platt of Writtle: My Lords, I am very pleased that the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, has been able to initiate this important debate to highlight the wastage of qualified women through the lack of good, well remunerated arrangements for part-time work. If a qualified woman gives up work altogether for any protracted length of time after the birth of her children, she will lose touch with her expertise in whatever her specialist field of work. In 1984-85 women formed over 40 per cent. of the full-time undergraduate population in our universities, which has risen from about 28 per cent. 20 years ago, and the numbers will continue to rise in the future. Already in 1986 women formed 46 per cent. of the Institute of Personnel Management, about 25 per cent. of the membership of the British Medical Association and 15 per cent. of the Law Society.
Already women form nearly half the entrants to medical school. Even the percentage of women first year undergraduates in my profession of engineering has risen due to the Women Into Science and Engineering Campaign, we think, from 9 per cent. in 1983 to 11 per cent. in 1985.
All the pressures the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, mentioned as being a matter of concern now will become more serious and indeed lead to a crisis in terms of the shortage skills by the end of the century if nothing is done. Employers need to make well-publicised arrangements to enable women to keep in touch with their professions as soon as possible after childbirth to avoid this crisis. Time is running out. In 1981 there were 900,000 18 year-olds; in 1995 there will be 600,000 a dramatic drop of one-third. Already there are serious skill shortages in information technology, electrical and electronic engineering, maths and physics teaching and in many other fields. The WISE Campaign in 1984, initiated by the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Engineering Council, is gradually changing the picture, but it is a slow process.
I was making a film with Central Television to attract 12 to 13 year-old girls into these fields of work. A young woman engineer with an ONC, working for an HNC and intending to go on for a degree—all part-time study outside working hours showing the high level of motivation that all employers seek—asked, "What happens to all my qualifications if I marry and have a baby?".
The Engineering Council, of which I am a member, set up a working party under the chairmanship of a

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senior industrialist to gather together a wide variety of good practice to enable young women engineers and technicians to bridge the career break successfully and to continue up the career ladder. Apart from the sheer waste of talent if this is not done—it costs between £14.000 and £20,000 to educate and train a woman engineer—no one can afford to lose that investment either publicly or privately. As Sir Francis Tombs, our chairman, said:
"The aim of the engineering Council is to encourage pace-setters in our manufacturing, process and construction industries to give a lead which others will follow. Those employers who have developed successful career break schemes have found it has given them a competitive cutting edge in the attraction and retention of the most able staff in a highly competitive market place".
The report is not prescriptive but it gives a wide variety of ideas on how to bridge the career break successfully to the mutual convenience of the employer and employee. The sort of schemes that have proved successful include the availability of part-time work in a variety of ways—flexitime, jobsharing, re-entry and reservist schemes—which allow much longer breaks of up to five years when the employer arranges to supply the women with up-to-date information regularly and she works part-time for a minimum of a fortnight a year with the mutual intention that she should return to her previous status or its equivalent on a full-time basis at the end of that time.
As has been mentioned before this afternoon, these latest schemes have been pioneered by the high street banks and have now clearly proved their practicality. Other commercial firms are following that lead, notably Boots the Chemist, which is experiencing a shortage of pharmacists. Nationally women on average need a career break of under four years for each child and under seven years overall. Clearly there will be a need to consider after that school holidays and after-school arrangements, but those can often be overcome either privately or through local authority play schemes.
The Engineering Council has now prepared a video based on our report which will be available in April to our 170 industrial affiliates. We hope that many will initiate schemes as a result. Already Marconi has a scheme and great interest is being shown by Ove Arup, British Gas, Plessey and the Electricity Council with a view to formulating schemes of their own. I recommend anyone interested to obtain a copy of the report and later the video from the Engineering Council. It is packed full of valuable ideas relevant to other professions.
The Institute of Housing has also published an informative booklet on the subject and allows temporary retired membership to its members during a career break, a great boon to professional women who may not be earning and who may find it difficult to keep up their professional subscriptions against the competing demands of children's food and clothing.
With the onset of new technology, offsite working becomes more and more feasible. Mrs. Steve Shirley, managing director of F International, gave a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts only a few weeks ago which will soon be published in our journal, showing how she has built up her highly successful computer software company on the basis of a mainly part-time home-
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based workforce of several hundred women. ICL too has a well-established career break scheme for its workforce including offsite working. Rank Xerox has set up a network scheme of offsite workers designed to dissolve the boundaries between full-time, part-time and women's work.
We are only at the beginning of this new forward looking type of development which will benefit both employers and employees alike. In setting them up it is important never to regard part-time or offsite workers as second class, but to see them as the valuable resource that they are and accord them similar benefits, conditions of service, availability of promotion and training, and holiday entitlements and pension arrangements on a proportional basis with full-time workers, so that they can foresee their smooth return to full-time work later on. That will do a great deal to boost company loyalty and good longterm employer/employee relationships for the future.
The DHSS has become extremely concerned about its staff wastage. The nursing service has, I understand. a complete turnover every 10 years. Nurses cost in the region of £ 10,000 to train. Three quarters of a million women work in the NHS, so Tony Newton, the Minister of State, has set up a working party in cooperation with the Equal Opportunities Commission to consider personnel policies and practices needed in the NHS to provide equality of opportunity in employment and in particular to make recommendations of the management of the career break. As he says:
"The DHSS needs to retain their staff and encourage those well trained women who have left the service to come back".
The Board of Inland Revenue in its annual report said:
"The cartoonist still tends to show the Inland Revenue official as a middle aged man in a pin-striped suit. In reality she is more likely to be a woman in her twenties".
Increasingly it recruits graduates. The training of higher grade tax officers costs £7,500 and inspectors between £20,000 and £40,000. As a result the Inland Revenue has become sensitive to higher rates of wastage.
The department has given a good deal of thought to means of widening the employment and career opportunities for women so they can combine a career with domestic responsibilities. It has developed schemes allowing flexible working hours and now a comprehensive one allowing staff at all levels to work part-time, including job sharing, with the minimum of restrictions. No one could describe the Inland Revenue as a soft organisation. Financial considerations are strong, but nevertheless, as it says in the conclusion to its annual report, the success of the department depends to a large measure on its staff of 70,000 individuals and fostering their diverse talents. irrespective of age, sex and educational qualifications.
That is what the Inland Revenue seeks to do for good sound commercial reasons, and many others need to copy it. The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, mentioned the Civil Service. I had the privilege last night of speaking at Sunningdale to newly appointed equal opportunities policies officers. I am glad to say that other departments are following this sort of lead and developing job sharing and career break schemes of their own. The Government as an employer are

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moving in the right direction, but like the good headmistress on the report, I am bound to say, "Could do better".
As far as job sharing is concerned, that again is a new idea and one that has taken off in a big way. I am glad to say that the Equal Opportunities Commission has 9 per cent. of its staff job sharing. The head of personnel in the Stock Exchange has said that job sharing has enabled it to attract into the job two people of high professional calibre who appear to find their roles stimulating and worthwhile. It cannot be said to be more expensive for the organisation and there are real benefits, not least in terms of the creative energy that has made available to it. That is a very good recommendation for job sharing and it certainly needs to expand.
In the Government's consultative document on the shortage of maths and physics teachers, it is clear from the tables that the wastage of women over the last few years is approximately double that of men—again, people who must cost well over £10,000 to educate and train. I have heard headmasters say, that they would prefer full-timers. If part-timers are tolerated they are probably on scale I. If women return after a break, they will probably be expected to start again at scale I. Is it any wonder that with their scarce skills and talents they go off to use them where they can attract proper remuneration?
Nearly 20 years after the Dainton report on this subject, it is time that the DES and all local education authorities set up working parties, as has the DHSS, to plan proper ways of avoiding this scandalous waste of talent. I understand that the local authorities are investigating what is being done at present with a view to future action, and some, I am pleased to say have already taken action. I heard the other day of ILEA sharing a physics teacher and a music teacher job, which I thought was a very imaginative idea. Such imaginative ideas need universal imitation. We need strong and immediate action by the DES and LEAs to stop this unaffordable loss of qualified women in such a vital field of work, crucial to the future prosperity of our country.
Like the noble Baronesses, Lady Faithfull and Lady Seear, the commission hopes that the draft European directive for parental leave will soon be adopted with the support of the Government. That would again be a great step forward for the benefit of children and parents.
Let me express my gratitude again to the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth. I hope that many employers will read of this debate and make arrangements to suit themselves and their employees to see that this wicked waste of money and talent does not continue and that women can combine a career with responsible family life to their benefit, to the benefit of their families and their employers and for the prosperity of country.
4.2 p.m.
Lord McGregor of Durris: My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Viscount for this Motion, which focuses attention upon the occupational situation of qualified women. They constitute a minority of
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women workers, some two-thirds of whom are unskilled and earn very low wages. Nevertheless, some social factors have influenced all women, skilled and unskilled, and have created a framework within which the problems presented by the Motion may usefully be considered.
Since the early days of industrialism, women have been an indispensable element in the labour force. From 1851 to 1951 they contributed a steady 30 to 32 per cent. of the country's labour force. This proportion, as the noble Baroness, Lady Platt, pointed out, has since risen to 40 per cent. However, within this total, the age and status of the female labour force have changed radically. Up to 1939, some 90 per cent. of women workers were single and working between leaving school and getting married. They withdrew from the labour market upon marriage or during their first pregnancy. Today a sex ratio near unity, more and earlier marriage, small families of consciously conceived children formed in the early years of marriage and a longer expectation of life have fundamentally altered the course and shape of women's lives.
In all ages past, most women married. Many had the maximum number of children that they were physically capable of bearing, given the age at which they married. They reared their children and straightway died. Even as late as 1900, the average English mother had only 10 years to live after her youngest child had reached school-leaving age. Now she looks forward to more than half her active adult life when her family have reached that stage. In all advanced societies, women now enjoy two lives. During the first, the shorter phase, they mainly discharge their maternal role. During the second and longer, they have no direct care for their children, and most are at work outside the home.
Thus demographic and social changes compel most women to adjust to two different periods in one lifetime. It is indeed much harder to be a woman than to he a man in society nowadays.
Highly skilled women engaged in professional occupations face problems that do not afflict their unskilled sisters. Even a relatively short absence from their occupations may result in a catastrophic loss of professional knowledge and skills, as several speakers have already pointed out. Paradoxically, this is a greater danger for the present than it was for past generations. Up to the Second World War, cheap and plentiful domestic service enabled the professional woman to combine her familial and occupational roles. The present pattern of family building reflects both the disappearance of that world and the emergence of a new.
A recent and striking analysis, Fertility Trends in Different Social Classes, by Mr. Barry Werner of the population statistics division of OPCS, shows that great differences in fertility trends between the upper and lower classes have developed in the last 12 years during which—and here I quote one of Mr. Werner's conclusions,
"The fertility rate for women aged 30 and over in social classes 1 and II (that is. among those engaged in professional and administrative occupations) rose by 12% … in contrast for women… in social classes IV and V (that is, those containing the partly skilled and unskilled workers) [the rate] fell by 30%.".

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That was the difference in 1983, when more professional women were having their babies at the age of 30 or over, while the rate at that age among women in unskilled jobs has fallen. By contrast, in 1970 the lowest and highest rates were within 4 per cent. of the average for all classes.
I think it can be argued that we are seeing here a demographic response in the age and timing of family building among professional qualified women which is markedly different from that among other social groups. Thus qualified women are delaying having their babies until the age at which they are professionally qualified and already standing on the lower rungs of the career ladder.
The significance of this change may be illustrated from medicine. In the early 1960s, Professor Margot Jefferys conducted an inquiry into the experience of women in medicine for the Todd Commission on Medical Education. She showed that the general effect of motherhood was to lead inter alia to a substantial initial withdrawal from employment and a desire for part-time work which could not easily be made available because of the inflexible working conditions and inherited attitudes. The survey concluded that:
"much of the work undertaken by junior and middle grade hospital staff [could] be done on a part-time basis … by scheduling … the staffing requirements for out-patients, in-patients, laboratory and casualty services in such a way as to offer regular, part-time work to married women which recognises their child-rearing and domestic responsibilities. If this were done, women would be able to keep abreast of current developments in medicine and would not need the intensive retraining which total withdrawal for a prolonged period inevitably: involves.
I understand that it has been done and that the situation in medicine has been transformed in the last 30 years, and especially since the mid-1970s, because methods of working have been adapted to meet the needs of the dual role performed by women doctors. Such a transformation will be inevitable in a profession in which women now constitute around half of all entrants. But even in this instance empirical information is scanty and statistical data are often non-existent.
I hope that the noble Lord the Minister will feel able to urge upon his friends and colleagues the importance for public awareness and public policy of following up the admirable general study of women and employment which Jean Martin and Ceridwen Roberts undertook for OPCS and the Department of Employment. We need studies of particular occupations—of the law, architecture, commerce, accountancy and the like. Indeed, by the time the noble Lord's department has completed those we may be able to turn to look at the Anglican clergy.
Part-time working is now an indispensable element in the sexual division of labour. Most part-time workers are women and, as a committee of your Lordships' House pointed out in 1982 in its report on voluntary part-time work, many women part-time workers suffer a range of discriminations when their conditions of work and remuneration are compared with those of full-time workers.
The noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, dealt with the case of children with working mothers. I agree wholeheartedly with what she said and would add only that our social arrangements do result in a situation where some mothers—the lone mothers, the one-
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parent families—with very young children are compelled to work when their children are very young if they wish to be independent (as they are urged to be) of the Supplementary Benefit Commission, whereas those mothers with young children who have husbands can have a genuine choice. All the statistical data I know of suggest that, where choice exists, it is responsibly exercised in the sense that the great majority of mothers do themselves take care of their children in the age group mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull.
The noble Baroness was right in emphasising how important it is in this transitional period of the development of the family to meet the requirements of children. If society wishes women to perform two roles, it must meet the consequences. We cannot go on behaving as though women are in the labour market only between leaving school and getting married. The formation of the necessary new attitudes is not, moreover, assisted by the denigration of mothers who choose to look after their children at home. These mothers are sometimes denounced and described as stereotypes which must be got rid of. The balance about which the noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull. spoke, has to be reached not only in matters of policy but in matters of ideology.
I believe that the labour market is at the core of the discontent felt by many women. Their experience in trying to reconcile the claims of marriage, motherhood and work demonstrates a firmly-rooted double standard of occupational morality. Some qualified women enjoy full equality but for most women workers the formal equality of the sexes is mocked in the labour market. That is why we have passed in the last 30 years from emancipation to liberation.
4.17 p.m.
Lord Rochester: My Lords, this debate gives me the opportunity to say a few words about the need to encourage the development of a form of part-time working which can not only provide job opportunities for qualified married women looking after young children but also alleviate unemployment generally. I am referring to the practice known as job sharing, which the noble Baroness, Lady Platt, in particular touched on and on which I should like to speak at rather greater length.
Nearly five years ago your Lordships' Select Committee on Unemployment, of which I was privileged to a be a member, recommended job sharing—or job pairing, as we called it then—for a number of purposes. One was as a relatively inexpensive inducement to people aged over 60 to retire early. But the committee also saw that pairing could be extended to other age groups and could include the sharing of a single job between an experienced person and a trainee or between two half-time workers. Provided that a pairing proposal involved taking on additional labour or was an alternative to redundancy, we recommended that incentives should be given to employers—for example, through adjustments to national insurance contributions—to encourage this form of work.
The Government have since acted on that recommendation in devising a job-splitting scheme as a means of creating more employment opportunities

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and helping businesses to become more flexible. Financial incentives are now provided for employers who create part-time jobs in a number of ways. They can take on in new part-time jobs two people from YTS, from the community programme or indeed from the job training scheme. They can also split an existing full-time job or vacancy into two part-time jobs, on or both of which goes to someone who is unemployed. In such cases employers are eligible for a grant to help meet the costs of administration and training.
I should like to see this form of work encouraged further to benefit not only the qualified married women referred to in the Motion but also men. Among other things, men who are fathers could then, under conditions of high unemployment, and in keeping with current social trends, increasingly take a share in looking after children who are sick. Although there are already opportunities for women to work part time in certain professions—for example, in teaching and in social work—they are often paid on the lowest scale and there is unsufficient scope for their career development and promotion. The potential of able women is therefore not being realised.
At present many mothers are faced with the stark choice of either having to return to full-time work as soon as the statutory period of their maternity leave expires or accepting only part-time employment if they can get it, and that in the knowledge that they are unlikely ever again to be able to resume a full career. Job sharing, not only in the basic grades of a profession but at every stage of a career, provides a way through.
I suggest that it is of potential benefit to both employers and employees in a number of ways. First, the two people who together undertake a single job work co-operatively as a team. Indeed, if as a team they prove to be effective, I see no reason why they should not be considered for promotion on equal terms with one able person working alone. Moreover, people working as a pair are likely to be a strong unit, because mutual support, encouragement and satisfaction are built into their job. Employers stand to gain from the wider and more diverse training, experience and personal skills which they obtain by employing two people rather than one. They benefit also from the additional creativity which comes from two heads being better than one.
Furthermore, because co-operation is clearly essential if job sharing is to be effective, the atmosphere in the work place as a whole is likely to improve under the unifying influence which springs from people working together rather than in competition with one another. Finally of course it goes almost without saying that at a time like the present when job opportunities are scarce, work sharing provides a way of distributing such jobs as are available among more people.
I agree entirely with what the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, said in introducing this debate. that it is deplorable that half the women who graduate in physics are lost to industry and research after starting up a family, and other noble Lords and Baronesses have said much the same. But I hope your Lordships will understand why I have sought to widen the debate by suggesting how both men and women who wish to take part-time work could benefit from the additional
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employment openings which more job sharing would provide.
Accordingly, I should be grateful if the Minister when he comes to reply to the debate would undertake to consider with his advisers in the Manpower Services Commission whether further inducements could be given to employers not so much to offer more part-time employment as to create more jobs which could be shared between two people.
4.25 p.m.
Baroness Turner of Camden: My Lords, I welcome the Motion put down by the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth. It affords an opportunity to talk about a problem that is of increasing concern to women, whether married or unmarried, who need to take time out from full time employment in order to care for a family.
There is no doubt that more flexible working practices would assist women's continuity of employment, reduce the wastage of training, education and skills, and facilitate the more effective use of the talents that women have. There are now almost 5 million part-time workers in the UK. Some of them would choose full time employment if it was available; if working time was reduced, perhaps, and if there were better child care facilities. However, for many women, part-time employment is the preferred option, particularly when their children are young.
But, as an International Labour Office report on white collar workers revealed in 1985, part-time jobs are generally low level jobs—jobs with low status, low pay and not much in the way of prospects. A number of noble Lords have made that point in the debate. There is resistance by employers to providing occupational pension arrangements for part-time employees. There is also resistance sometimes to job sharing schemes even though, in some cases, it would mean getting two highly skilled, experienced people to share the work between them, to their mutual advantage and to the firm's benefit. The noble Lord, Lord Rochester, dealt with that in detail and I do not want to add to what he said.
However, when we look at part-time workers, four out of five are women. And two out of every five women who work are part-timers. More than 50 per cent. of working married women are in part-time employment. The growth in part-time employment, temporary work and fixed term contracts, although it can be cited as evidence of greater flexibility in the labour market, nevertheless expands new forms of insecure employment. Under current employment legislation, employees working less than a 16-hour week have fewer rights regarding dismissal and redendancy. Salaries of part-timers are frequently unrelated to full time salaries, and it is by no means general that they are paid pro rata to the rates of those in full-time employment.
Another area of exploitation is home working to which the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, made some reference. Clearly, in certain areas where technological skills are involved, it can be of great assistance. But there are problems. Obviously, it is a difficult area to unionise. The women—this work is done mainly by women—are often grossly exploited.

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Often, however, home working is the only choice available to many women who cannot leave their homes while their children are young and who must endeavour to earn some money somehow. They are among the most vulnerable members of our workforce, the least regarded and the hardest to protect. Reliable statistics as to the number of home workers arc hard to come by. But, according to a survey conducted by the TUC a couple of years ago, there were about a quarter of a million home workers in the United Kingdom at that time.
A characteristic of this type of work is its isolation. Home workers do not usually receive sick pay or holiday pay. Most home workers are paid by the piece which can mean extreme intensity of work in order to earn even a modest hourly sum. Sometimes the work is carried out in cramped conditions. The University of Bradford home working research project said that 70 per cent. of those involved in its sample worked in a room—a kitchen or living room—used by other members of the family. Many home working tasks involved dust and dirt, glue and sticky tape, bulky materials, sharp instruments and so on, all of which took labour to clear away. There were, it was reported, inadequate health and safety provisions.
There is a case here for the introduction of effective legislation and enforcement arangements to protect homeworkers. This is long overdue. There should be a general duty on those giving out home work to make regular returns to the authorities, giving details of those whom they employ together with information about the work undertaken and the materials and equipment involved. There ought to be adequate inspection and enforcement in order to check on conditions.
There is need for basic rates of pay below which people should not be expected to work. The Wages Act has not helped in this area. As a supporter of minimum wage provision, I believe that this would go some way towards protecting home workers from the grossest kind of exploitation.
When it comes to career breaks, some employers, as already mentioned, have begun to realise that it is in their interests to do something about the waste of talent and training that is involved. There has been reference to the NatWest scheme. I am glad to say that there are other schemes as well. The Midland Bank has a scheme, as does the Royal Insurance group.
These schemes are open to both sexes. In some instances, they provide for breaks of up to five years. During this time, employees keep in touch, undertake refresher courses and are able to re-enter employment at the end of the career break. The idea is that employees with skills should not be lost to the enterprise. Continuity of skills and employment is thus maintained. Women who might otherwise have lost out irreparably on the career ladder are able to resume their careers. The schemes are imaginative and should be applauded. However, they are still very much in the minority.
As several noble Lords have said, it is hardly possible to talk about this subject without referring to child care. The absence of such care in this country is one of the reasons why so many women interrupt careers which might otherwise have been rewarding
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both to the women themselves and to society generally. The 1981 census revealed that the skills of a significant number of highly qualified women were not being used. A 10 per cent. sample showed 5,770 economically inactive females with higher university degrees under retirement age (other than students or sick persons), compared with only 360 men in that category.
Your Lordships' Select Committee on Science and Technology urged that more use should be made of women's technological skills to meet a growing shortfall. However, not only do we have inadequate arrangements for child care but also, even when such arrangements are provided by employers, we sometimes find that they are taxed as a fringe benefit. Objections have been raised before in your Lordships' House, and I do not think it would be appropriate to raise the matter again.
As has already been mentioned, the Government continue, for reasons which escape me, to block the EC directive on parental leave. The amended proposal for an EC Council directive contains very minimal provisions for all wage earners, including staff working in the public sector, to be entitled to parental leave and leave for family reasons. Of the EC member states, seven already make such provisions.
A recent study by the Equal Opportunities Commission demonstrated that the cost of putting the directive into practice in the UK would not be very great. Yet the Government continue to maintain that such matters as these are best determined voluntarily between employers and employees attending to their own priorities, needs and circumstances, rather than by legislation. However, it is clear that most employers will not take steps of this kind until there is a legislative requirement. From their point of view, they believe that they have to be competitive. If there is any cost involved, no matter how small, they prefer to wait until everyone else is bound by legislation before they themselves will put it into operation.
I speak as a union official who has spent a great deal of time arguing with employers on matters of this kind. We have, in some instances, succeeded in getting part-time employees accepted into pension schemes. Recently, in one of the last cases under the sex discrimination legislation heard by the Central Arbitration Committee, we succeeded in winning the argument that a collective agreement was discriminatory because part-time employees, mostly women, were debarred from benefiting in the same way as full-time employees under an assisted mortgage scheme. However, it is not easy to do that. In that particular instance, the employer has already announced his intention to challenge the CAC decision in the courts. It is a continuous battle to improve the lot of part-time workers in this country.
Unless there is a more satisfactory statutory framework for part-time workers, for career breaks and for parental leave arrangements, then those matters will continue to militate against women who wish to maintain their skills and plan their careers to cover both the necessary requirements of maternity and child care and who also wish to make the hest use of their capacities and training.

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I again thank the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, for giving us the opportunity to have this important debate.
4.35 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Lucas of Chilworth): My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this important debate. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, started by saying that she had a feeling that this was more a matter of déjà vu than anything else because so much has changed since the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, last brought this matter to our attention.
Perhaps I may just quarrel with the noble Viscount on his use of the words "brain drain". I think that my noble friend Lady Faithfull made the same point. I do not think for one moment that he is attempting to suggest that the work of a mother in bringing up children is somehow inferior to paid employment outside the home. However, I fear that his use of the words "brain drain" could be misconstrued in that way. Certainly we on this side of your Lordships' House would deplore such misconstruction.
We consider that the woman who chooses—and I emphasise the word "chooses"—to stay at home to bring up her children is in no way part of a brain drain. I echo the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, when she said (although perhaps in a different way) that there can be no more important and demanding work than that of bringing up children to be responsible caring adults. For many, that in itself is sufficient stimulus.
I do not in ally way wish to deny the force of the many points which have been put forward in support of the Motion during our debate. The House appears to be united in recognising the importance of insuring that talent and investment in training do not go to waste. As a country, we simply cannot afford to let that happen.
The figures tell their own story. My noble friend Lady Platt of Writtle mentioned some of the figures. It is true that women how make a crucial contribution to the nations' economic wealth. They represent 43 per cent. of the civilian labour force. Between March 1983 and June 1986, the number of women in full-time employment rose by 320,000 and the number in part-time work rose by 299,000. Sixty per cent. of married women work outside their homes. One of the most impressive statistics is that one in four of the self-employed are now women. Most importantly, more and more women are obtaining professional qualifications.
In welcoming that, and in agreeing with so much of what has been said this afternoon, I urge the House to also look at the wider picture. I again agree with my noble friend Lady Faithfull when she reminded us that we have to get a balance in these matters. When we talk about qualified women today we are discussing only a small part of the employment market; women who are at the upper end, if you like. We must take care that in singling out that one group for special attention, we do not neglect the interests of the far larger numbers of women and indeed men who do not
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have qualifications and who are perhaps also unemployed.
At the same time, the Government are concerned about the effect of skill shortages on the competitiveness of industry. I am sure that we are all aware of the difficulties faced by companies seeking qualified people in many spheres of science, engineering and the new technologies. I agree that we must make full use of the talents and skills available, whether possessed by young or old, men or women, married or single.
I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Rochester, said about the splitting scheme, work-sharing, and so on. I shall read carefully what he said about extending the scheme. I certainly give him an assurance now that we will consider all he said in regard to that extension. We certainly recognise the importance of the re-employment of qualified married women, either full or part time. How then can we best ensure that we tap this valuable resource? The debate this afternoon has produced a number of suggestions and highlighted some of the disadvantages which many women undoubtedly suffer in trying to combine career and family responsibilities.
My noble friend Lady Platt of Writtle spoke of the Engineering Council's training course and video. The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, and many others, spoke of part-time work, job sharing, flexible working hours, temporary work, working from home and other such matters. At this stage I take issue with the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, who said that home workers worked under poor conditions. She referred to the sparseness of information about home workers. I can tell the noble Baroness this afternoon that a major research study of home workers is to be published shortly. An article about that appeared in the most recent Department of Employment Gazette. That study shows that there are many myths about home workers. Overall, home workers are better educated, more likely to be home owners and healthier than average workers. Perhaps at another time we can come back to that issue.
The noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, reminded us that on a strictly practical level only employers can really provide employment opportunities and only women themselves can take advantage of them. However, certainly the Government have a responsibility. That responsibility is to set the parameters by inducing a change in attitudes and fostering the flexible working patterns needed today. We do this directly, and of course we do it largely through the great efforts of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Our aim is to encourage women who want a career—I emphasise, who "want" a career.
We are giving this encouragement in a number of ways, beginning with education and following through into training and retraining. The noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, will, as a teacher, agree with me that one of the problems is to overcome stereotyped attitudes which have limited girls' career horizons. Nowadays in education girls and boys are encouraged to study the same range of subjects, and they have the same opportunities to go on to further education and training. For example, the Government's policy statement Science 5-16 proposes that science should

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have a place in the education of all pupils throughout the years of compulsory schooling. It also encourages positive action to excite the interest of girls in aspects of science which in the past they have perhaps tended to find unappealing.
We are doing a great deal in helping women in training and retraining for employment. At the school level we have supported the Women into Science and Engineering Year and have helped to fund the WISE bus. We have provided 5,000 additional places in higher education for those taking science and engineering subjects. In my department, the Department of Trade and Industry, we have done much to encourage women to acquire skills—systems design skills, and others. The IT Skills Agency, set up by industry as a result of our initiative, is working with others to look at ways in which more women can be encouraged to train and work in IT. We hope to be able to support a study to look into the feasibility of such a campaign. We really hope that many women will take advantage of the opportunities offered by government schemes in training and skills development to obtain those skills that will be useful to industry and which will encourage companies to provide part-time opportunities where needed.
The Manpower Services Commission training is of course available to women, and the MSC actually funds a number of schemes specifically to widen women's opportunities. The MSCs "Wider Opportunities for Women" courses are specially designed for "returners" and include a number of courses for qualified women in new technology and management subjects. The MSC also funds through the Open University the "Women in Technology" scheme. That helps women to update technological skills through home study. All these measures should help women to take even greater advantage of new employment opportunities.
The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, spoke about a return on the investment in education and training of women. I should like to say that, while agreeing with her, even if we perhaps do not show what some people might call a full commercial return I hope the noble Baroness will agree with me that that is no reason for refusing such education and training for women.
We have this afternoon spoken about what employers—the National Westminster Bank, and many others including Boots, Marks and Spencer, ICL—have done in the career break schemes. I am glad to say—and I say this directly to the noble Baroness, Lady Seear—that we in government are doing exactly this for our own staff. A number of departments—and this idea is growing—have a "keeping in touch" scheme which gives people who are temporarily away from their jobs the chance to keep up to date with changes and developments in the department. The scheme runs for five years. In addition, opportunities for part-time work in government departments have also grown. They are continuing to grow, including those at quite senior levels.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, will the noble Lord give an example of that? In the past there was a singular absence of such schemes.
Lord Lucas of Chilworth: My Lords, I will certainly be happy to provide the noble Baroness with examples in detail and set out a schedule, but on a debate of this kind one is mindful of the clock and I have a number of points that have been raised which I must answer. Perhaps I will be able to come back to that point.
I particularly wanted to say this afternoon that I am delighted to be able to announce that we are able to support a specific initiative that will help the return to work of qualified women. The noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, referred to the work of Professor Daphne Jackson of Surrey University. She is of course well known for her work with women returners and has sought our help in mounting a study. This will look at the feasibility of establishing a register of people with qualifications in mathematics, science and engineering who wish to work part-time or short term. The register would then be made available to employers.
We are able to agree to Professor Daphne Jackson's request for assistance and a study will now go ahead. I know that my noble friend Lady Platt will be pleased because that answers the question she posed on what happens to her qualifications when she marries, has children and departs from industry. We are able to agree to that request and I believe that industry, research establishments and the teaching profession will now have opportunities available to them. The real trick of course is to bring together the job vacancies and those seeking the part-time, short-time or shared jobs. The study will look at ways of doing that.
I want to turn quickly to some of the points that were made in the debate. I thank my noble friend Lady Faithfull for the compliment that she paid to the Government in the first part of her speech. My noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, spoke about child care. We aim to have a range of day-care services bringing children full- or part-time day care, child minding, nursery or play groups so that parents can choose the type of day care which meets their own and indeed their children's needs.
There has been a significant increase in England in day care facilities for children under five, since the present Government took office. There are now 54,500 day nursery places compared with 50,000 in 1979, which is a 7 per cent. increase. There are 409,000 places in play groups, which represents an increase of 10 per cent. There has been a 29 per cent. increase in the number of child minding places, and an increase in child minders from 44,000 to 57,000 or nearly 58,000. The proportion of three- and four-year olds who are receiving some form of nursery education is now 22 per cent. compared with 18 per cent. in 1979, while a further 21 per cent., made up mostly of four-year olds, attend infant classes in primary schools. The development of a wide range of choice across the country as a whole has occurred at different rates in different areas, which was one important reason for the under-fives initiative to which the noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, drew attention.
The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, and my noble friend Lady Platt spoke about parental leave. I know that parental leave has often been suggested as a means of special help to working mothers. We fully accept that parental leave, if agreed between employer and

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employee, can be valuable. However, it can only be a temporary solution because, however long it may be, when parental leave ends the needs of the child and the requirements of the job still remain. To impose one form of leave, as the draft European Community directive would have done, would increase employers' costs and administrative burdens and we believe that it would be detrimental to the welfare of working parents and their children.
The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, spoke about the numbers of women who are part-time employees and asked me for some figures. Currently there are nearly 5 million part-time jobs. That is the highest number in the Community. The rise has been from 15·4 per cent. to 22·9 per cent. of total employment. The shift can be attributed mainly to the increased availability of part-time employment in the expanding service industries and to the propensity of industry generally toward the engagement of more part-time staff.
I appreciate the points that have been made on a number of occasions during the debate which set out some of the disadvantages of part-time work. There is a substantial minority of women who leave employment in order to have a child and who find on their return to work that they have to take a part-time job at a lower level if they are to combine paid work with their family commitments. Some women who take up a lower level post may never reach the career level that they first sought nor therefore the salary level of their male counterparts or of women without family responsibilities. However, there is another side to this situation. The need to accept less demanding work is not seen as a disadvantage by all those who are affected. The survey Women in Employment conducted by the Department of Employment showed that many women consciously traded off pay and position against a post with convenient hours and location because in that way they could devote more time to their families.
Interestingly, that same survey showed that women working part-time were more likely to be satisfied with their jobs than women in full-time employment. That brings me to the point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord McGregor of Durris, when he talked about the disadvantage of women having a dual role. The survey pointed out that many married women still have the choice of whether to work full-time, part-time or stay at home looking after their families. The point I wish to make is that of course men do not have that choice.
I should like to conclude by paying a tribute to those employees and other organisations that are participating in the field of work-sharing and part-time work and in developing the combination of work and family. However, I do not think we ought to assume that only married women with children need help of the type discussed this afternoon. Part-time work and other flexible working arrangements can also be helpful to some men and for that matter to single women. It is important to recognise that in recent years the world of work has changed considerably for everyone. Many people now spend their working lives in occupations and under circumstances that were unimaginable a relatively short time ago. Technological advances, world economic pressures
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and social change have all played their part in challenging traditional views of work and working patterns.
A flexible labour market which accommodates the present-day needs of employers and all their employees is a vital part of the changing scene. I am sure that the position of women in particular can be helped by the kind of stimulating and interesting discussion that we have had today and I thank the noble Viscount for initiating this debate.
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, we have had a most useful debate. Every speaker has had something valuable to contribute and most of them spoke from a detailed knowledge which I myself do not possess. I should like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part and particularly I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Platt, because I know that she was on a very well earned holday and came to the House specially to speak in this debate. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Rate Support Grants Bill
Brought from the Commons endorsed with the certificate of the Speaker that the Bill is a Money Bill within the meaning of the Parliament Act 1911; read a first time, and to be printed.

The English Language
4.56 p.m.
Lord Simon of Glaisdale Lord Simon of Glaisdale rose to call attention to the importance of the English language and the case for making it easier to learn; and to move for Papers.
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name.
I am greatly honoured that so many of your Lordships have shown an interest in this important subject and, often at some inconvenience to themselves, have put down their names to speak in this debate. I am particularly gratified and honoured that two speakers have chosen this occasion to make their maiden speeches. The noble Baroness, Lady Strange, is one of those making her maiden speech today and rather mischeviously I suggested that she might adopt the Lallan speech of Robert Burns, but I do not think she has been so beguiled. My noble friend Lord Moore is also making a maiden speech. Your Lordships will remember the title of one of the most important works on linguistics and literary use of this century, which is The king's English. I am sure that your Lordships are looking forward eagerly to both those maiden speeches.
I should like to make a personal plea. I have my hack to the Clock and I cannot pick out the figures on the indicators so I should be grateful if any noble Lord in my vicinity or on the Front Bench will indicate when the figure 10 comes up so that I can bring my observations to an end. I am sure that your Lordships would not like the comparatively meagre time that is left to subsequent speakers to be curtailed.
I took the title of the Motion from a notable article some little time ago by my noble friend Lord Annan when, in the context of education, he indicated that we have two world languages; namely, English and mathematics. This debate is devoted to the former. Some 350 million people speak English as their mother tongue. Another 400 million speak it, not as their mother tongue but generally as their second language. That, of course, is a great advantage to ourselves and to the world. To the world, it gives a means of common communication. Where it is, as in law and administration, a second language, it is a unifying force, as in India, Malaysia and many other places. English commands the richest vocabulary of all world languages. It gives access to literature of great richness, living as well as past.
The advantages to ourselves need no expatiation from me. They are sufficiently marked by the institutions of the British Council and the BBC World Service, about which others of your Lordships will be speaking. Although we are a minority of those who speak English, even as a mother tongue, we have a duty to the English language, partly because it originated here, partly because we can influence by example, though not by precept, and partly because anything we can reasonably do to make it easier to learn is performing a duty to our children.
The other day there were some alarming references to illiteracy—even in this country after 100 years of universal education. I hope that when the noble Baroness replies she will be able to deal with that. We obviously owe a duty to those children in respect of the English language.
We also owe a duty to those who honour and benefit us by learning English as a second language. When considering any improvement, we must do nothing, I venture to suggest, that may cause the break-up of the English language, as Latin, a world language, broke up into French and the other Romance languages.
One topic that I should like to raise before turning to the second part of the Motion is the education of ethnic minorities in this country. In many schools, they constitute the majority of the pupils. Some argue that they should be taught in the dialect or language of their ethnic origin. It is argued that this gives them justifiable pride in their ethnic culture and heritage, and that they learn more easily if taught that way. On the other hand, it seems to me to fail to give such pupils the full advantage of mastery of a world language and their own municipal language, and tends to imprison them in an ethnic and cultural ghetto. I know that your Lordships will be grateful to hear about that matter from the noble Baroness.
The second part of the Motion relates to ease of learning. In many ways, English is an easy language to learn. Heine once said that the ancient Romans, if they had had to learn Latin, would never have had time to conquer the world. We have avoided the type of difficulties that Latin presents and must have presented.
During the long submergence of English by French after the Norman conquest, practically all the inflections which are such a trouble in langages such as Latin and German have been rubbed off to our great advantage: nevertheless, the fact that there is illiteracy
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suggests—quite apart from abundant analytical evidence—that English still presents considerable and in many respects unnecessary difficulties to learning.
I have three objects in opening this debate. The first is to try to identify some of the areas where English is unnecessarily difficult, although that obviously must be selective. Secondly, I wish to suggest how it can be made easier. I must at once confess myself a conservative in this respect. Many people who have studied the matter far more profoundly than I have would go much further. I have arrived, like most of us, at an age where we have learnt to spell. I have up to a point, I suppose; and I have learnt to write. I am too old to start again and learn something new.
Not only am I a conservative in what I urge upon your Lordships. My plea will also be based mainly on economy. Your Lordships may remember the young lady in "Gentlemen prefer Blondes" who said:
"A child that looks like his father is worth money in the bank".
I hope that what I suggest to your Lordships will be worth money in the bank. My third object is to identify, if possible, the means by which any desirable improvement can be brought about easily, painlessly and economically.
It is notorious that the main difficulty in learning English is the divergence between spelling and pronunciation. The examples are numerous. I intend to mention only one or two of the most notorious. The most quoted points the way to ease of improvement. It is, "OUGH" as in "bough" "brought", "cough", "plough", "though", "through", "thorough" and many others. The Americans spell "plough" "plow". We have no difficulty with that. That saves two-thirds, does it not? We could spell "though" as it was spelt in the 18th century—"tho". That is a saving of 50 per cent.
I turn to one respect in which grammar could be improved. The main difficulty in learning English grammar is the irregular verb. A child will say, "He teached me". The other day I received a letter from an import/export agency which said, "We have runned out of stock". I do not suggest for a moment that all irregular verbs could be made regular but there is a great overlap. Take the word "dream", for example. The past tense can either be "dreamt" or "dreamed". Given the choice we should obviously use the regular form.
How do we improve matters? The Americans have again showed the way. Theodore Roosevelt directed that all government writing should be in the new, improved and easier manner. That could be done right away by the Government. The Department of Education and Science and its predecessors have been pretty obstructive in the past in this respect. However, the new Minister seems to have come along with a stick of ginger. I hope that the noble Baroness will tell us something about Professor Kingman's new committee which. I am glad to see, has to report in 12 months.
The final method I would suggest is that we have a language commission like the Law Commission, which has been the great institutional success of my lifetime. My noble and learned friends Lord Gardiner and Lord Elwyn-Jones are entitled to full credit. A language commission could well carry out wide consultations, circulate green papers, and then put

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forward recommendations for making our language easier to learn.
If this debate leads to a greater sense of the value that we have inherited and makes our language easier to learn, I shall be very proud to have initiated it. I beg to move for Papers.
5.14 p.m.
Lord Ardwick: My Lords, it is a philistine aberration of this House to debate a subject of this richness and complexity with the speeches cut to seven minutes. I hope that, if the Procedure Committee cannot do anything about these matters, we may at least develop a self-denying convention that if we see there are already 12 names down in a list for a short debate we go away and forget about it.
In thanking the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for providing us with this subject today, let me say that I was puzzled by his words. When he wrote that there was a case for making it easier to learn, I wondered whether he meant making the English language itself easier to learn or simply making it simpler to learn the English language. Did he want to change the language or the learning situation? Was he wanting to impose on us that monstrous spelling reform which was Bernard Shaw's terminal sick joke? This I have always regarded as being as dangerous as it is ugly.
English is spoken by one seventh of the world population, but it is spoken in many different ways. Some English speakers cannot be understood by others. If we were to spell phonetically, the world's most important language would cease to be universally comprehensible in written form, as it is today. Alternatively, was the noble and learned Lord an enthusiast for basic English, with its minimum vocabulary and simplified syntax, which robs the translation of any novel or essay of all delight?
I am against all such wickedness. Instead I believe that English can be made easier for foreigners—English without tears—by having more highly trained teachers, equipped with better instruction books and the learning cassettes pioneered by Linguaphone. Great work on the English language has been done in recent years by Sir Randolph Quirk and his partners to produce grammars which show foreigners not just what is right and wrong but how the language is used by native English speakers. As anyone knows who has wrestled—linguistically, I mean—with an au pair, we can say, "I am afraid that that is not English", without being able to adduce a rule, because there is none. For our guidance of what is acceptable we can fall back upon instinct. The foreign teacher of English cannot do so. However, he now has Professor Quirk's grammars to help him.
The English language is the native language of 300 million people in the United States in these islands and in some Commonwealth countries. It is the second language in India, large parts of Africa, the Philippines and Ethopia. In many other countries it has to be learned as the main foreign language, for it is the language of science and technology. It is the language of computer science, shipping, aviation and sport. Sixty per cent. of the world's broadcasts and 70 per
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cent. of its correspondence is in English. One half of the world's scientific literature is available in English. It is taught not only by the BBC and the excellent British Council, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, said, but also by the US information agency and "Voice of America".
Many thousands of people all over the world want to learn the language of Shakespeare and Milton, not, I am afraid, to read those great authors but to qualify themselves for a good job. If success eludes some of these students, at least they have the consolation of knowing, to use the brutal words of Britannica,
"because of the laxity of syntax, English is a very easy language to speak poorly".
Nevertheless, English with today's linguistic insights can be well taught and successfully learned. I have met Russians on their first trip to England speaking easily and colloquially on everyday subjects and having a knowledge of our literature and an ability to converse seriously on intellectual matters. A few years ago in China at the University of Xian we had an opportunity to talk to second year students of English. They had never met an English person before. They conversed slowly but elegantly without any of the mistakes that we traditionally associate with the Chinese.
I had precisely the opposite experience at a meeting of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association a few years ago. Some of the Indians, highly intellectual men, whose English, grammar and syntax were impeccable, were almost incomprehensible to us when they addressed the conference. This problem was foreseen 30 years ago when it was realised that Indian teachers of English who had themselves been taught by Indians would be training another generation of Indian teachers of English, with the result that the language would become less and less comprehensible. A rescue operation was manned at Allahabad but the effect seems to have been limited.
I should like to see more teachers specialising not in English literature, not even in English language, but simply in diction. We now know enough scientifically about the spoken language to combat the faults which foreign speakers bring to it from their native language. If the Russians and the Chinese can overcome the problem so brilliantly, so surely can others.
I am the victim of my own self-denying ordinance. I have cut my speech to ribbons, and I have finished in six minutes.
5.20 p.m.
Lord Diamond: My Lords, even in the short time available I should like to thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for raising a matter of such importance as to attract a large list of speakers, including two most distinguished maiden speakers.
The part of the Motion on which I should like to dwell first relates to the importance of the English language. I believe that a spread of English should encourage mutual understanding between states. It could even contribute to the maintenance of peace, and it would certainly provide for cultural and scientific exchanges.
As we have heard, some 750 million people speak English either as their mother tongue or as their second language. I believe that it is because of that fact that we

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rather take things for granted. I know of the good work of the British Council, the BBC, the English Speaking Union and so on, but I still believe that we do not do enough to promote the understanding of the importance of English, especially when we compare ourselves with France.
I should like to direct your Lordships' attention to what has been and what is happening there. Your Lordships will know that as long ago as 1637 the Académie Francaise was established, with the accent on creating and maintaining the purity of the language. In recent years councils and organisations have been brought into being to cover all domestic and international aspects of the French language and to co-ordinate all the work already being done. The councils are composed at a very high level indeed. They are presided over by the President of France and by the Prime Minister, and again they are serviced at a very high level indeed. They are all very active.
It was only last year in Paris that 41 heads of state and heads of governments of French-speaking sovereign countries met to promote consciousness of a common good; that is to say, the French language. I understand that they are meeting again later this year in Quebec. Five continents were represented at that gathering and thus over 100 million people who speak French, two-thirds of whom have French as their mother tongue. President Mitterrand took the chair at that meeting. That indicates the importance which is attached by the French to francophonie.
The Prime Minister of France heads the Commissariat Générale of French Language to support and co-ordinate public and private bodies concerned with the spread and protection of the French language. It has association with no fewer than 85 private agencies, each very active in part of this field. I am indebted to the French Embassy for this information, and I should add that, as one would imagine, the French Embassy is anxious to assist anyone who desires help on aspects of the French language. The administrative general secretary is a gentleman called M. Zinovieff; he is obviously a very good choice because plainly he is a man of letters!
There is also a body concerned with terminology; that is to say, a body for dealing with the worst that technology, science and British jargon can throw at it. Your Lordships should know that in the French law of 1975 all words spoken or written about any goods or services must be in French.
I regard that as the proper level of importance to be given to the use, enrichment and preservation of the French language. By comparison we do less well, except in one respect. We do one thing which the French do not do. We have found an inexpensive and effective method of promoting the use of English—we simply refuse to talk to any foreigner in a language other than our own! However, that is no longer adequate in a highly competitive world.
The first question I ask the Government seriously to consider is what we can do to raise the level of conscious appreciation of the importance of English. Secondly, I ask the Government to consider what to do to protect the purity of our language, especially against the depredations of the Government themselves.
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For example, there is the use of the verb as a noun, as in two official government Statements referring to "sourcing policies" and "sourcing intentions". That has nothing to do with tomatoes whatever. There is the noun used as a verb as in, "rubbishing Select Committees' reports before publication". There is also the plural use of the singular as in "the data is". There is the superfluous pronoun as "to meet with" and other horrid Americanisms. Then there is the otiose prefix "disassociate". I could go on for a long time if the clock would only stop.
I make it clear that I am not against slang in its proper place. Indeed, slick slang can be evidence of a language very much alive. I am saying that this is not the appropriate place for it. I hope that the Government will share my view that your Lordships could have a proper role in this matter: monitoring what is being done elsewhere; through a Select Committee considering the whole problem; or at least trying to maintain a reasonable standard of purity of our language in our own House.
5.27 p.m.
Lord Moore of Wolvercote: My Lords, it is with considerable trepidation that I rise to address your Lordships for the first time, especially as the stopwatch is on. I am told that a noble Lord was once reputed to have said, "I used to have recurring nightmares that I was addressing the House of Lords, and then one day I woke up and I found that I was". My Lords, I know how he felt.
I thought that it might be appropriate for me to make my maiden speech on the Motion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, on the importance of the English language because, during the course of my life, I have been able to see for myself how important English is throughout the world. I suggest that there are three reasons for that. The first is the advantage to Britain herself. There is no doubt that the widespread use of English greatly enhances our prestige and influence and helps us enormously as a trading nation. I have always believed that it was one of the sad post-war developments that, with the loss of the Empire, the British people, in a sense, turned their backs on some of their most splendid achievements, not the least of which was the devolution of an empire into a Commonwealth of independent nations. Partly because of the sensible way in which we governed and the institutions we left, and partly because of the enlightened way in which we brought the colonial territories to independence, Britain is enormously respected in the Commonwealth today, and that is perhaps best illustrated in the use of the English language. I remember Lee Kuan Yew, on coming to power in Singapore nearly 28 years ago, resolving that the best way to counter the chauvinist draw of Communist Peking on his Chinese population was to work towards the replacement of Chinese with English as the main language of the Singapore schools. I believe that that has now almost been achieved, and it is a remarkable tribute both to the English language and to Britain.
It is not only in the Commonwealth that there is a demand for English; it is universal. I was fascinated to find in Algeria, in the heart of Francophone Africa, that there was a great queue of Algerians waiting to

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take English language courses run by the British Council. Having learned English at home, they come to Britain as overseas students and eventually return to their homelands, probably to become friends of Britain for life.
My second point is that, in an age where there have been tremendous advances in communication and the countries of the world have been brought so much closer together, it is desperately important that people should be able to converse without a language barrier. The Commonwealth, with its membership of nearly 50 nations and a quarter of the world's population, is the prime example of this.
One is often asked: "Why does the Commonwealth hold together?" I reply: "First, the Queen, and secondly, the English language". I think that anyone who has attended Commonwealth conferences will agree that they are quite unique, in that all the Heads of Government are able to express opinions, discuss and argue with each other in the freest possible way with a common tongue.
It is not only in Commonwealth meetings that English is so widely used; it is also used in many international meetings, not least in the European Community. A distinguished Commonwealth statesman once told me many years ago that President de Gaulle would never allow Britain into the Common Market because he feared that English would become the language of the Community. How prescient the General was.
My third point concerns the part played by the English language in making available throughout the world the unique contribution of British culture to the history of civilisation. Here I should like to add my own personal tribute to the work of the British Council and the Overseas Service of the BBC. Much that is best about Britain would go by default were it not for the work of these two remarkable British institutions. I have had 40 years' experience of their work and it would be impossible to exaggerate the significance of their contribution both to Britain and to the world. And so, my Lords, I am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for making it possible for me to make my maiden speech on the importance of the English language, for, my Lords, it is indeed important.
5.32 p.m.
Lord McNair: My Lords, it has never before happened to me to find myself sandwiched between two maiden speakers. Of the speech which is to follow I can say only that I look forward to it keenly, as do all noble Lords. But, of the speech to which we have just listened I can say more. It occurs to me, first, that it must be a very long time since your Lordships' House has had an opportunity to welcome a recruit of such immense distinction.
If my researches have not misled me the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Wolvercote, showed at an early age the sort of stuff of which he is made by exchanging the status of a prisoner of war for that of an Oxford rugger blue in a matter of months. There followed other notable athletic achievements, which led him on to a career of what I can only describe as unmitigated
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success; a career of such distinction, both in diplomacy and in service to the Royal Household, that we less worthy Members of this House feel enormously and undeservedly honoured to have him as a colleague. After hearing the noble Lord's maiden speech, with its admirable lucidity, persuasiveness and reasonableness, I am sure all noble Lords will agree that we hope he will find it possible, or will make it possible, to take part in our debates on every suitable occasion.
Now I must turn quickly to the subject of the debate, which was so comprehensively introduced by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale. I have received, as I expect other noble Lords have, excellent briefs both from the British Council and from the BBC External Services, in particular the component known as "English by Radio and Television". I am most grateful to both those splendid organisations, each of which could well deserve a debate on its own. But, sadly, I have concluded that in a time-limited debate such as this it is quite impossible to do justice to those worthy causes. Therefore, I shall try to make one simple point which refers to the second half of the noble and learned Lord's Motion.
I suggest that the best way to make English easier to learn is, paradoxically, to teach Latin. We seem to cope very much more readily with that part of our language which is derived from Anglo-Saxon roots than with the rest. To the best of my recollection, Mrs. Malaprop had very little trouble with Anglo-Saxon, but she was woefully ignorant of Latin. I wonder whether possibly she personified a national characteristic. It is almost as though for one or two millennia we have been unconsciously resisting the linguistic implications and consequences of the Roman and Norman conquests.
In formal education—and how much I dislike much of the jargon of educationists—the problem seems to be this: that they call the age of conceptualisation comes at about 13 or 14 years of age. I take it that conceptualisation means what we would call roughly abstract thought. This becomes, or should become, part of a child's mental equipment shortly before the child has to make those important choices of what to study at 16-plus. At this time the Latinate content of teaching language is increasing all the way. Any child to whom that side of our language is virtually unknown is at a cruel and avoidable disadvantage and underachievement may simply worsen with every year of education which follows. What can be done? I am certainly not suggesting that we should oblige our children or grandchildren to spend hours and hours in the forcible conversion of Herrick into imitation Ovid. It was great fun if you happened to enjoy it. It taught a certain mental verbal agility, but very little else.
I have in mind the teaching of simple Latin; the principal root words, the formation and correct usage of prefixes and suffixes. I am indebted for this idea to an article in the Journal of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers —where else? It is an article written by Adrian Spooner, the head of classics in a comprehensive school.
He mentions an experiment conducted in elementary schools in Indianapolis in 1973. The experimental group was taught simple Latin. The control group was not. It is claimed that within a

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five-month period the experimental group made the following gains over the control group—in five months—a gain of one year in reading and of four months in spelling. There was a gain of between seven and nine months in various forms of mathematics and of five months in science. I must admit to a certain scepticism when confronted with statistics of this sort, but on this occasion I am tempted to accept them because they are what I would have expected.
In conclusion, I would say to teachers: "Whatever you are meant to be teaching, you are teaching English as well all the time, and you will find it so much easier if you have been able to squeeze a little simple Latin into the timetable along the way".
5.39 p.m.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, as all your Lordships will be aware, it is with the greatest diffidence and humility that I stand here in this beautiful and historic Chamber among your noble, learned, reverend, gallant and totally illustrious Lordships. I ask you to bear with me now with the same kindness and indulgence that you have shown me since I was privileged to take my seat, on my birthday, in your Lordships' House.
I hope that you can hear me. I find it very difficult to hear anything except the knocking of my knees and the pounding of heavy butterflies inside me. I feel very honoured and proud to stand here in my noble relative's shoes—although not, of course, literally! As many of your Lordships will know, my noble relative was an eccentric and—dare I say it?—a strange dresser. On one occasion he arrived at London Airport, hailed a taxi and said, "House of Lords". The taxi driver took one look at him and said, "No, my Lord, first I shall drive you to a shoe shop. You cannot enter their Lordships' House in your bedroom slippers".
I am very mindful of the advice of my noble friend Lord Denham, so I shall try not to be like the new minister of the Church of Scotland on preaching his first sermon. Afterwards he asked the elders how it had gone. "It went just fine", said one of them. "It put me in mind of the peace and mercy of God." So the minister was rather relieved and very pleased. And he went home and read his Bible, as Ministers do, and in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Philippians, he read, "The peace of God passeth all understanding". So he went quickly back to the Old Testament, and in the Psalms he read, "The mercy of God endureth for ever". So I shall try and be clear and concise.
My Lords, I feel very privileged to be speaking in the debate initiated by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, who is always so lucid and eloquent, and who has been so kind as to say such nice things about me, for which I thank the noble and learned Lord. I am also privileged to be speaking after such a distinguished and enjoyable maiden speech as that of the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Wolvercote, and thank him very much.
It is a subject which is very close to my heart. Our English language is one of the chief glories of our nation, which reached its finest flower in the beautiful prose of the Authorised Version of the Bible and the King James VI Book of Common Prayer. It is also a living, growing language, and it behoves us all to
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preserve its beauty and excellence while also using it continuously in everyday speech.
From the earliest Anglo-Saxon our language has evolved and grown. The Normans brought in their words of Norman French, though, my Lords, it is a sad social reflection on the Norman Conquest that while my Norman ancestor, Aubrey de Vere, the noble Earl of Oxford, was feasting on roast beef, veal, peaches and wine, my Saxon forebears had to make do with oxtail stew, calves' brains, apples and ale.
Latin, being the language of the Church and also of the law, extended and increased the diversity of our vocabulary, and from time to time more French. Cul-de-sac and cafe are now as English as le pullover and le weekend are French. In the day of empire words like posh and tiffin, kedgeree and juggernaut, became part of the English language.
Words and phrases from all over the country continue to enrich our language. I have heard your Lordships described in the good old northern term as gradely lot". May I add to that our own Scottish Lallans? When I came here I knew that your Lordships were weel-kent, and kenspeckle. Now I have found that you are all couthy as well.
Let us by all means simplify our language so that it can spread further, as the noble and learned Lord suggests. But not to the point of absurdity. My Lords, may I give a brief illustration? When my noble relative took his seat he sent us a telegram, with due economy of phrase, saying, "Name now Strange". The Post Office, in their wisdom, decided to curtail this further, so that the message we actually received was, "Nim now String."
Our English language is not like the leaderless Saxons at the Battle of Maldon fighting against impossible odds in a hopeless cause.
"Hi woldon tha ealle othe twega,
lif forlaetan othe leofne gewrecan."
Our English language is not a dead language stuck in a moment of time like a fly in amber—it is a growing, changing, living language.
When I was a little girl much of the globe was coloured a most pleasing shade of pink, and I was proud to feel that I was part of the great British Empire. Now that much of our empire has become independent, there is physically little of the pleasing pink left. But yet, my Lords, what a spiritual benefit is left in the world from our empire—British law and order, our sense of honour and decency, our formality and ceremony, our justice, our parliaments, our monarchy. All, all are shining examples of which we must feel justly proud. But above all there is our English language which has spread and grown until now all over the world it lives undying on the lips of men.
5.46 p.m.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, I am particularly glad that it has fallen upon me to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Strange, upon her maiden speech. She and her family have been friends of mine and my family for many years. It has given me especial pleasure to hear her make such an excellent and entertaining speech, couched, as is suitable to this occasion, in impeccable English, and so beautifully delivered.

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I am sure that her father, her noble relative, whom many of us remember so well, would have been very proud could he have heard her today. I am sure that I speak for the whole House when I say that we shall hope to hear her frequently in the future. And, of course, I should like to add my congratulations to those expressed by the noble Lord, Lord McNair, to the noble Lord, Lord Moore, on his excellent maiden speech.
My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for putting down this Motion today. But I am afraid that I cannot join him in walking down the path towards the simplification of the English language, although I appreciate his reasons for wishing to do so.
We have a beautiful, rich, expressive language which has evolved over many centuries from a wide variety of linguistic sources, with roots thousands of years ago in such far apart places as India and Scandinavia. Invaders of this country, as the noble Baroness, Lady Strange, has said, have brought us the gift of their tongues—although the gift was perhaps not always welcome at the time—and we have absorbed them. And so our language has evolved.
For instance, the verb "to drink" is derived from the German "trinken", and the past participle "drunk" from the German "getrunken". So to change the past participle from "drunk" to "drinked" would be to cut off the word from its ancestry and to deny its descent. I do not think that you can streamline a language by legislation, nor do I think that you should try to.
I am afraid that I take the rather robust view that if foreigners want to come and live in our lovely country and enjoy freedom from persecution and all the other freedoms we enjoy, then they can take the trouble to learn our language, irregular verbs, derivative spelling, variations in pronunciation, exceptions to rules and all. After all, there are plenty of difficulties in other languages—French and German in particular.
But, having said that, we really must put or own house in order. To expect foreigners to learn English when we have ceased either to teach it or learn it properly ourselves is expecting too much. I wonder how many of your Lordships are aware that after 11 years of so-called education costing the taxpayer and ratepayer thousands of millions of pounds, some 75,000 young people are leaving school every year unable to read or write properly or speak the Queen's English. They cannot understand simply written instructions; they cannot write an intelligible letter; they cannot do justice to themselves in an interview; they are virtually unemployable. They are as truly handicapped as the mentally disabled, for English is not just a subject like any other. It is the key to learning almost everything else. Most other subjects can be learnt or even self-taught provided that one can read easily and with comprehension and speak correctly so as to be understood.
Why has this happened? Because, for a generation, grammar has been thrown out of the classroom window. Why? At the behest of a bunch of cranky educationists who decided that the study of spelling and grammar inhibited imagination and creativity while responsible people who should have known better believed them. It will be a hard job to put
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English grammar back into the classroom. Some of the teachers are by now almost as ignorant of it as the pupils. But it must be done, and quickly too. I suggest that crash courses in English grammar and diction for teachers might be the way to start, always provided, of course, that enough grammarians still exist who are prepared to hold them. At the same time I propose that the study of English language and grammar be made compulsory for all pupils up to school-leaving age from Land's End to Shetland.
5.51 p.m.
Lord Shaughnessy: My Lords, I should like to second the congratulations of the noble Lord, Lord McNair, and my noble friend Lady Saltoun to our two maiden speakers on such a splendid initial presentation to your Lordships' House. I am sure all your Lordships hope that we shall hear frequently from both of them in the future.
To take part in a discussion on the English language in your Lordships' House, flanked by perhaps the most distinguished and eloquent practitioners of that language in any assembly in the world, requires a fair degree of courage. But, since English is spoken by more people in North America than on any other continent, perhaps it is appropriate, as suggested to me by my noble and learned friend, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, who initiated this debate with such acumen, that a transatlantic voice should be heard in this debate.
My early education in English was at the hands of, for the most part, graduates of British universities. But following World War Two, I studied journalism at Columbia University in New York and later practised that profession in Canada and the United States. Hence, I am conscious of the differences not only of pronunciation but of idiomatic expression on both sides of the Atlantic.
The English language has been referred to as England's greatest export. During the years of colonial expansion, it was implanted in widely separated parts of the world, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Moore. This means that it has developed and changed in different ways in different regions. Hence one can hear the vernacular of the Highlands in Cape Breton Island of Nova Scotia and the expressions of Ireland in Newfoundland. In Texas, it is all very different and all very robust.
However, I, for one, find nothing distasteful about the wide variety of usage. In fact, I think it demonstrates the flexibility of the language and the continued ability of a great variety of peoples to express themselves in its use. What I find distasteful is the degree of carelessness in the use of language to which we are exposed in the press and on radio and television. This is true not only in this country but throughout the English-speaking world. George Orwell, in a treatise entitled Politics and the English Language, listed a number of elementary rules of style. I shall not weary your Lordships with all of these, but one is, I think, of considerable importance: "Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech you are used to seeing in print".
Today we see in print and hear over the airwaves in English-speaking countries a succession of outworn,

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hackneyed cliches and tired old metaphors. In political articles and broadcasts, one cannot help becoming irritated by the constant use of such terms as "a U-turn" to signify some slight variation in policy by a government. Another weary old cliche is "the banana skin". How many times will an elementary error in judgment by some political party be referred to as "a banana skin"?—I hope not too much longer.
Time and again we hear about "the tip of the iceberg", "the light at the end of the tunnel" and "the end of an era". I suspect, although I cannot be sure, that some of this sloppiness, in the press at least, has been caused in part by the new technology which may have resulted in diminished control by the copy editor leading to more inaccuracies on the printed page.
The latter part of the Motion refers to the case for making English easier to learn. To a large extent, it is in the hands of the press and the electronic media to bring the language to the people—as did the monks of old. I would hope that by more careful attention to the techniques entrusted to them, they will do a better job in discharging that responsibility.
5.58 p.m.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, we have had two very memorable maiden speakers and I should like to begin by congratulating the noble Baroness in particular because I remember how extremely kind her mother was to the young naval airmen, of whom I was one, at Arbroath 45 years ago. The noble Baroness would have been an extremely young girl—a baby in arms, I think. Her mother was so kind to us all and I am happy to see the noble Baroness here in this House and to have had the opportunity too to hear her witty and thoughtful words.
My noble friend Lord Ardwick has already mentioned the difficulties of trying to encompass or encapsulate the English language in six minutes and I will not try. Or do I mean "I shall not try"? I think I probably should. But would that be pedantic, which is worse than being ungrammatical? I think probably it might. Or should I say I think that it probably might? On a day like this we are beset by pitfalls, but what exactly are "pitfalls"? Have I just committed a mixed metaphor? Can we be beset by them? We are in very serious danger if we presume to speak on this occasion.
We are all grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Simon on the Cross-Benches for putting down this Motion today. He wants to make the English language easier. He would like to do away with irregular verbs, or at least to make them much simpler. I suggest that it cannot be done, whatever the Academie Francaise or Teddy Roosevelt may have tried to do in the past. The language is something that slowly evolves and changes, subject to so many strange (there is that word again) external influences often unseen and unknown, subject to slang, American usage, journalists and the terrible potency of TV. We cannot stop this and we should not try. I believe that no one in any country has ever succeeded in imposing improvement. The secret forces at work are too powerful for us to influence them. Irregular verbs will always be with us.
Yet we all picked up the English irregular verbs quite easily, however hard we found the French
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irregular verbs, the Latin irregular verbs and then the Greek irregular verbs which we had to learn by rote. The English irregular verbs presented no difficulty. Perhaps there is a lesson here.
I have watched and listened with fascination and delight as my five-year-old son has learnt the language over the last two or three years. Sean practically never has to be taught. He hears words being used and in some mysterious way he infers what they mean and uses them himself. The noble and learned Lord mentioned how a child may say "teached". Sometimes Sean makes mistakes: he might say to me "Has he brung it?" That is very understandable because he knows the past participle of "sing" is "sung" and he deduces that the past participle of "bring" is "brung", which it very well might be. I only have to say to him "No, Sean, has he 'brought' it," and I never have to tell him again. Surely this is the only way for anyone to learn a langauge, by living with those who speak it, and picking it up from them.
As a former sub-editor—indeed a former chief sub-editor—I know the perennial problems that arise in writing English. Hyphenation, the use of capital initials and italicisation are always difficult problems. Is a word ending in the suffix "-ise", spelt I-S-E or I-Z-E? On all these problems there are often no hard and fast rules and an ad hoc decision must be made for each publication. The use of "which" instead of "that" and the use of "will" instead of "shall" are perhaps the two commonest errors. Yet are we sure they are errors? What is strictly grammatical may not always be what I would call right. Pedantry, I hold, is worse than bad grammar. A husband should be divorced if he comes home and shouts up the stairs "Yoohoo, darling, it is I", and yet he is being perfectly grammatical. I believe that what matters is usage. Usage rules, okay?
I turn for a few seconds to statutes. We all know how terribly difficult statutes are to understand. I have tried a little to improve one or two, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, has helped. I am not against the parliamentary draftsman. My father was a draftsman. He drafted A. P. Herbert's Matrimonial Causes Bill. I know what an extremely difficult task it is. But surely Bills could be made easier for the ordinary person to understand.
At a recent Report stage, I moved an amendment to replace eight lines with one and a half lines which said exactly the same thing. The noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack commented that one never knows what courts will do unless things are rather spelt out for them. That meant spelling out one and a half lines into eight lines. The amendment was finally accepted when the noble and learned Lord put it down at the next stage without saying that it was my amendment. Surely there is not this necessity to spell things out with that kind of elaboration. Surely, the judges, the barristers, the magistrates and even the litigants, are a little more clever than that.
6.6 p.m.
Lord Annan: My Lords, it is characteristic of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, to have chosen such a fascinating subject for our debate tonight. I should like first to congratulate our two maiden speakers not only for what they said but for the charm with which they expressed themselves.

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I want to urge the importance of teaching English in our schools. I hope Sir John Kingman and his committee will not be diverted into talking about the needs of society. We all know what the needs of society are. They ought to concentrate on two things. First. how do we teach children to write clear English?—not imaginative English, not spontaneous English, not regional English but clear English. Second, how do we get these principles and methods across to every language teacher and every training college and make the use of English and the use of mathematics compulsory subjects for every child so long as he or she stays at school?
What do we mean by clear English? Here is an example. I have chosen a passage which is not grotesque jargon. It is grammatical, comprehensible and only 58 words long. Unfortunately, it is damnably boring. Here it is:
"When the brake mechanism was operated, it became clear that there was insufficient pressure in the hydraulic system to make the caliper assembly press the two friction pads together on the disc with the firmness we expected. On examining the oil supply, we found both the quality and the level to be below those specified by the manufacturer.".
That could be better expressed and clearer in 56 words:
"A hydraulic system works the caliper device which presses together the two friction pads on the disc. When we put on the brake, there was insufficient pressure in the system to make the brake grip as firmly as it should. So we examined the oil supply and found the quality and level below the manufacturer's specification.".
How does one train teachers to teach children to make that kind of conversion? Those of us who had Latin grammar beaten into our brains and our behinds at school are too apt to think that one must be taught English grammar to write good English. But children in primary schools are not taught Latin. If one insists on teaching formal grammar the energy of the teachers will be diverted from the skills they are supposed to improve. There is no evidence that teaching formal grammar ever improved language skills. Of course to write good English one must use, in the approved way, existential sentences, non-finite clauses and ellipses and must choose one's complex modalities with taste. But for Heaven's sake do not teach children these frightful terms. One of the best reasons for learning foreign languages is that then you have to learn some grammar and you begin to learn the grammar of your own mother tongue.
It is the teachers not the children who need to be taught grammar, and then they need to be taught how to convey the ideas in grammar to their pupils. It can sometimes be done by means of simple diagrams, and this raises the question: why then was it necessary to set up this new committee and why are we still worried about the problem?
Ten years ago Lord Bullock produced a mammoth report on the subject. He recommended that standards of literacy should be monitored. They are not. Lord Bullock urged that, when teachers are trained, they must all be taught how to teach languages, regardless of their main subject. They are not. Lord Bullock wanted local authorities to receive an earmarked minimum provision for books. They do not. Ten years ago Mrs. Shirley Williams emphasised the importance of English teaching. Only the other day the Secretary
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of State did precisely that in his Arvon speech. Why have all these reports and speeches had so little effect?
To answer that question is to indict the whole of our educational system and convict of wilful neglect those of us like myself who are in it. The first culprits are all those teachers and local councillors who say that children should write and talk as they wish and that to correct them is to impose the snobbish diction of an elite. What a wicked doctrine that is. Such people prevent children from getting a decent job when they grow up and condemn them to be unskilled labourers. Next are the racists, who, of course posing as anti-racists, argue that immigrants from Pakistan and India should be taught at school primarily the languages that they speak at home. Was there ever a better recipe for racial isolationism and hatred?
I have no time to explain why the colleges and institutes of teacher training fall down on the job, but my next culprits are the departments of English at our universities and colleges. One of the men who did most harm to the cause of writing clear English was that influential literary critic F.R. Leavis; and also his disciples, who denigrated that admirable subject, the use of English at A level. Well, not all English dons are Leavisites. Nevertheless, which departments of English take steps to make their pupils express themselves clearly and which departments of History or Economics do that? The dons do not do so, and we are guilty of what Julien Benda called le trahison des clercs.
The last enemy of good English is our elephantine bureaucracy. It is the duty of civil servants in the DES, Her Majesty's Inspectors, and the local education authorities, to implement the Secretary of State's policy. Why do they not do so? The bureaucrats seem to lack the will and knowledge and guts to do it. I hope that the noble Baroness is not going to rebuke me for attacking public servants on the grounds that they cannot reply, because I think it is the duty of the legislators to call the Executive to account.
It is not the fault of successive Secretaries of State that nothing is done. How many more decades of speeches, how many more reports are to be written. before the bureaucrats take action? Until some Permanent Secretary is prepared to give a kick to all those concerned with this matter, nothing will be done. This is the English disease. We dons, we bureaucrats, we are all so skilful in analysing what is wrong. We are perfectly hopeless in setting programmes at all levels of education to put it right. The English disease is the inability to translate what into how. And yet, what higher priority in education at all levels is there than teaching the young how to manipulate numbers and write their mother tongue?
Let us remember this. That bloodthirsty, cruel tyrant Stalin will be remembered in history for many terrible things. However, he will also be remembered for changing Russia from an illiterate society to a literate country. But for that, Russia would have been defeated by Hitler. The Churchillian exhortation should go out from the DES to every local authority, every college, every school: teach clear English—action this day.
6.14 p.m.
The Earl of Cork and Orrery: My Lords, as I expected and I dare say everyone else expected, this

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was bound to be a debate full of treasures. A couple of treasures that merit particular attention are the two maiden speeches that we have heard. I felt enormous pleasure and, if it is not an impertinance to say so, admiration at witnessing the happily somnambulistic experience of the noble Lord who made his maiden speech. He said that he was asleep; he woke up in the middle of it—it was a remarkable tour de force and a tine speech.
As to my noble friend who made the other maiden speech, when she was speaking I realised, not for the first time perhaps, that we had been without a Lord Strange for too long. I felt in some sense in the course of that enchanting speech that the old friend of so many of us, John Strange, had come among us again. I take the greatest pleasure in saying that.
We are talking about the difficulties of English and of how we can make it easier to learn. Who, I wonder, are "we"? Who do we mean by "we" when we talk like this? Are we, the English, or perhaps the British, to set up something like a cross between the Academie Francaise, which is a fairly disastrous body incidentally, and the MCC, briefed to be the governing body of the English language with power to fabricate, formulate and promulgate amendments to the existing rules? If so, who is going to pay the slightest attention to us if we do? English is a far bigger language than that. I need hardly enlarge on that point, which has been made by practically every speaker so far, including pre-eminently the noble and learned Lord who initiated the debate.
English is by far the nearest thing to a global language ever known. For that reason, it is also far from being our own private tongue, to amend, improve and generally mess about with as we like. As to its basic structure, here, if I may, I shall quote from "The Story of English", that remarkable BBC television programmes series by Messrs McCrum, Cran and MacNeil. It was said:
"its global structure is backed up by massive English language training programmes, an international business that in textbooks, language courses, video programmes and video instruction—is worth hundreds of millions of pounds or dollars to the economies of the US and the UK … Dr. Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the OED, has remarked that 'any literate, educated person on the face of the globe is deprived if he does not know English' ''.
That being so, before we set about lightheartedly tinkering with this colossus of a language, we might do worse than to sit in a darkened room for a bit and contemplate the sheer enormousness of what we propose.
I confess that I am a little inclined to shed a tear at the thought of poor foreigners struggling to learn our lingo. We do not, after all, as has been pointed out already, have much trouble with our genders, which I believe are unique in corresponding to sex, while the thing that has no sex—in the biological sense, that is—is neuter. Ships and boats are an exception, certainly so that a man-o'-war called "Rodney" or "Iron Duke" is referred to as "she", but it is permissible to call them "it".
Our adjectives do not have to agree in either gender or number with nouns, which is different from French, where "day" is masculine and "night" feminine; and from German, in which the au pair girl of the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, would be regarded as neuter. As
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for our verbs, those, I think, have been disposed of already and they present very little difficulty.
If we wish to help a foreigner to use our language, we should concentrate first, I suggest, on helping him in his greatest difficulty, which, I think, if I know anything about it, would be not in speaking, in writing or in reading our language but in understanding what we say to him. Am I being insulting in wondering whether any of your Lordships has ever asked the way to the post office in a foreign country—in the local language, of course—and then been defeated by the answer? Thanks to my Russian phrase book, I can ask with some fluency, "What are the main points of interest?" or "Is there a ball at the Palace of Culture?". But as the book does not give the answers, what the hell?
I am able, or so I like to think, to order a meal in a Japanese restaurant. As long as I get it right, all is well, and I am credited with a knowledge of Japanese. But suppose the waiter launches into a series of shrill, staccato questions about what sort of raw fish, or would I like my saki hot or cold. Then I find that all I can think of to say in Japanese is, "Thank you" and "Goodbye", which may cause surprise.
Naturally, the stranger in our midst is similarly at risk. Unless he wishes to say that his four thoughtless daughters have caught thoroughly rough-sounding coughs through eating more sour doughnuts than they should, the chance is probably against his getting into the diphthong-diagraph difficulty that the noble and learned Lord postulated in his speech. Nonetheless, in replying to him we should choose our words with care and there are various tricks of speech of which we should be wary. Quite a small example comes perhaps under the heading of jokey idioms.
Years ago, probably in the time of Sherlock Holmes, the keen-eyed detective would be said to search for clues with a fine-toothed comb. Then somebody frivolously shifted the hyphen and called it a fine tooth-comb. Finally, by natural progression, it lost the adjective altogether and became a tooth-comb. Nowadays there are semi-literate people who believe that there actually exists an instrument called a toothcomb, implying, I suppose, that there are also combs that have no teeth. If one of those people were to tell a Chinaman that such an instrument would be used on his behalf, the Chinaman might be surprised to learn that the British apparently comb their teeth.
We speak of the heritage and set up great bodies to protect and defend it, but I suggest that the greatest part of the whole of our heritage is the language itself. Powerful, flexible, resilient, it has endured for centuries, evolving all the time, sometimes for the better and sometimes not, but almost never in response to deliberate interference. I say "almost never" because I think of the damage that has been done to it by the Church. In the name of making it easier to learn and comprehend (or so I understand) it has knocked the splendour out of its own glorious Liturgy, even to the extent of addressing the Divinity with less ceremony than we in your Lordships' debating Chamber use towards our fellow Peers.
Leave it alone. Let the solecisms that we hear pass with little more than a nod and a wink, because the language will be all right in the end. I beg that it be not interfered with but, above all, interfered with by government or any other statutory body.
6.22 p.m.
Lord Denning: My Lords, when I read the Order Paper today I bethought myself of the great expansion of our English language. It expands with new words continually, many of them from across the Atlantic. Reading the Order Paper, I paused first at the word "AIDS". That is a new one from across the seas and everyone, I hope, understands it by now. Then one sees the words "brain drain". The debate had nothing to do with drains and little to do with brains. Then, again, we come to the "treatment of dyslexia". All these words are rushing into our language and we all ought to know what they mean.
How valuable it is for my noble and learned friend Lord Simon of Glaisdale to draw attention to the importance of language. Language is the vehicle of thought and expression. Whatever you think, whatever you say, you can only do it in words; and whatever subject you deal with—philosophy, politics, law, science and the rest—you can only do it in words.
Language is the vehicle of all thought and all expression; and I would join with others in saying how much—and I am proud of it—we English have done. Of the great gifts the English people have given to the world there are two special ones: the English law and the English language. And of these two the English language is the greater and has had the greatest influence on mankind. Perhaps the comparison with all the other competing languages has never been better expressed than by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his introduction to The Oxford Book of English Prose. This is how he puts it:
"Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic gutteral, capable of being as precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and of captaining all these excellences to its service".
There it is. I would thank not only my noble and learned friend Lord Simon, but also the noble Lord, Lord Moore, who stressed—and I have been overseas and visited many places as he has—the importance of the work done by the British Council and the BBC in expanding our English language and teaching it overseas. I would also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Strange, for showing the beauty, the loveliness and the lightness if I may so describe it, of our language even on an occasion like this.
So, my Lords, I would not dilate on that too much except to point out that we have a vehicle here of clearness, accuracy and beauty, which we should use to the full. But how often it is debased! Often we have had occasion in this House, in the other place and among the judges, to deplore the language used by the draftsmen. Our English language is capable of being clear and intelligible and it should be so used. It is debased in some ways.
Perhaps I may draw attention to another important point which was mentioned by, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Diamond. The European Community is a multilingual society with nine different languages. They are all official, and all decrees, statutes and so on have to be officially in nine different languages. Your Lordships will know how difficult it is to get the exact equivalent when they are translated—we all learnt that at school. As my noble friend said, you cannot get the
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exact equivalent of a word or phrase when the directives and treaties are framed in French. The working language of the European Court of Justice is French. All their discussions are in French and all their judgments and arguments are in French; as are those of other institutions of the European Commission.
That is a problem to be dealt with. It is most important that we should have native-born English translators, going over to the European communites and translating the French or other languages into intelligible English. If your Lordships listen to those simultaneous translators, you will know that they do not get it right. It is not worth listening to them: they do not have the knowledge. Equally, the translations which we have from the French into English give us many problems as to interpretation. So my plea is for the teaching of the English language. Let us spread it world wide in every way we can and let it also spread to the institutions of the European Community.
6.30 p.m.
Lord AiredaleMy Lords, the distinction has been well made between the two categories of learners—on the one hand the child of English-speaking parents learning English almost painlessly at its mother's knee, and, on the other hand, the foreign student learning English as his second language. He, I fear, poor fellow, has a very much harder slog. As to the first category, the child, I will only say that the quality of the instruction given does, of course, vary from case to case. There was the London mother with her family on a long journey by bus. One of the children became restive and said: "Mum, ain't we ever going to get off this bloody bus?" and Mum said: "Now then, how many times have I told you not to say 'ain't'?"
Then we come to the foreign student with his harder slog. Can we help both categories at the same time? I think we can, and I think we can impose some useful self-discipline upon ourselves if we heed the advice of Sir Ernest Gowers and stick to plain words whenever we can.
Some time ago, a Minister of the Crown, the son, I believe, of a university don, speaking from that Dispatch Box there said:
"The dependence of expansion on consumer uptake also puts a question mark over any estimate of job creation.".
I do not know how much that meant to the foreign visitors in the Strangers' Gallery. I doubt whether it has meant very much to your Lordships so far. Let me just read it again:
"The dependence of expansion on consumer uptake also puts a question mark over any estimate of job creation.".
I think what he was saying was that new jobs also depend on people buying more goods, and if he had been speaking off the cuff that is what he would have said. He must have been speaking from a brief.
Another Minister, speaking from another brief, I thought was rathing gilding the lily when he said:
"Restrictions should be swept away in order to lead to new and innovative ideas.".
What does one do to people who write briefs like that? I suppose one might start by introducing them to the works of A. E. Housman. When Housman wrote,
"When first my way to fair
I took Few pence in purse had I
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy",

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he was not writing in monosyllables as a trick. He was instinctively writing good English.
Just the other day, I read with moderate enthusiasm a Written Answer which said that the parliamentary press was,
"utilising the most efficient … methods of production.".
The writer recovered from that in the next sentence when he said that the Press was using the latest method of printing addresses. But he relapsed in the next paragraph when he, "envisaged no problems of waste disposal". That would not have pleased the late Lord Birkett, who, in a presidential address to the English Association, said:
"When I hear of targets and overall targets and global targets, and things being adumbrated or visualised or finalised or, indeed, envisaged, or circumstances eventuating or transpiring, I think of the other aim of this Association to uphold the standards of English writing and speech and I try to act accordingly when it lies in my power.".
In last week's Green Paper on radio, we read:
"Public service broadcasting should provide geographical universality of coverage."
I think they mean that it should be available everywhere. In Guildhall there is a memorial to William Pitt on which Canning had inscribed the words, "He died poor". One of the aldermen took exception to this and said,
"Wouldn't it have been more dignified to say, 'he expired in indigent circumstances' "?
More dignified perhaps, but not more informative to the foreign visitors to Guildhall.
One can go on giving examples of this kind. There was a report in The Times in January of a road official saying that a certain section of the A I was almost 200 per cent. worse than the average. Would it not have been more effective to have divided by 100 and said "nearly twice as bad"?
My time is probably nearly up and I do not want to go on giving examples. If I had one piece of specific advice to give to learners of English, I think I should say: Whatever you do, try always to attach your participles properly. Never find yourself writing anything like this, which appeared in Private Eye:
"Having been effectively vandalised and set on fire, the Diocese of Durham decided to declare the building redundant."
6.37 p.m.
Lord Auckland: My Lords, due to the rapid ending of the last debate and a long-standing business engagement elsewhere in the House, I was unable to hear the opening speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, and I apologise to him for any discourtesy. But I have heard the noble and learned Lord speak in this House on a number of occasions and know the tremendous help he has been and the tremendous contribution he has made towards the Queen's English being spoken and written properly in both Houses of Parliament.
I intervene in this debate because, like many of your Lordships, I have family in the profession of teaching. My elder daughter went to teacher training college in the East Midlands and, for some years before she had a family of her own, taught in a comprehensive school in what I suppose one might call downtown Nottingham, where there were a number of
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nationalities and English was a somewhat fascinating subject on occasions.
Examples have been given of the way that English has been maltreated, and of course our statutes at times are no exception to this. One reads of traumatic experiences and cosmetic situations. What relevance that has to the perfumery industry, I do not know. But we have all these expressions which come from high places, and if they come from such places as the High Court of Parliament, as some expressions do, it is no surprise that our schools at times—as a number of your Lordships have said—are not very well versed in the writing, reading or understanding of our English language.
The Motion of the noble and learned Lord dwells on the case for making English easier to learn. In the late 1930s when I was at school, I remember learning French from the wife of the headmaster, who was herself French. It is out of order to quote a foreign language in your Lordships' House. However, in that class only French could be spoken. It was made clear that, in the 40 minutes of that class, one could not leave it for even the direst needs unless one spoke properly pronounced French.
If one travels in Scandinavia, as I have done several times, and if one is stranded, for example, in Northern Lapland in Finland with a broken-down motor car, a Berlitz phrase book can be very useful. I mention that because my wife and I recently went to hear a Finnish choir in London. They sang "Drink to me only with Thine Eyes" in almost perfect English. I was a chorister at school for a few years and my wife sings with our local choral society. What would happen if I had to sing in Finnish does not bear thinking about.
The problem is that as a nation we are lax in the speaking of English. When we go overseas, we take it for granted that the people of almost every other country speak English. What is worse, the British Broadcasting Corporation now pronounces the capitals of some countries in a most deplorable manner. I sometimes go to Helsinki. I once asked a top person in the BBC: "Where is Hels-i-n-k-i?". He said: "It is the capital of Finland". I said: "The capital of Finand is H-e-lsinki. If a member of the Finnish broadcasting corporation talked about Lon-don, what would you say?". He was rather taken aback. I mention that because we ought to be able at least when we go to other countries to pronounce the basic words which we need in a proper manner even when we cannot speak the language.
There are two persons who always speak or spoke English quite outstandingly. One was the late Stuart Hibbert, whose reading of the news in the 1920s, 1 930s and early 1940s was quite exemplary both in the tone of his voice and in his marvellous English. The other person is Alistair Cooke. He comes from Manchester but his "Letter from America" is a marvellous example of concise English, of saying what one means and of saying briefly what many people would take two hours to say. I believe that there is a message here and that, if nothing else, one hopes the debate will cause English to be spoken in a clearer manner.
6.45 p.m.
Lord Kings Norton: My Lords, let me first add a word of congratulation to what has already been said

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so eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord McNair, and my noble friend Lady Saltoun about the noble Lord, Lord Moore, and the noble Baroness, Lady Strange. I thought that their speeches were quite delightful and I hope that we shall hear them many times in the future.
I do not think that I shall introduce any new ideas into this debate, which has ranged so freely over a wide area and which has been dealt with so thoroughly by my 14 predecessors. However, there are one or two things I want to say and perhaps one or two of the ideas expressed can be looked at a little differently. I shall confine myself to the last part of the Motion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon; I think it would be helpful, particularly to foreigners, if our language could be a little easier to learn.
Foreigners learn our language partly from talking to us and partly from listening to us. Consequently, it is important, as the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, has just said, that we speak our language correctly. Unfortunately, many of us—I might almost say most of us—do not. Even more unfortunately, some of our broadcasters, with large audiences overseas, fall into error. We too often hear "from you and I" and "different than". Too often do we anticipate when we should do no more than expect. Frequently we allege we have an alibi when we have only an excuse.
I was entirely with my noble friend Lady Saltoun when she made her plea for the teaching of grammar in schools. I was going to say the same thing myself. However, I was frightened by my noble friend Lord Annan and I must modify what I was going to say to, "the teaching of English in schools". However, in using the word "grammar" in my original draft, I meant the teaching of the correct use of English words. I do not think that even in the few remaining grammar schools is grammar taught. But I was taught grammar and I benefited from that enormously. I believe it should be a compulsory subject, as are reading, writing and arithmetic, in schools.
At the same time, I believe that more senior students should be taught the merits of conciseness and precision. Today, largely through American influence, we are becoming long-winded. We say, for example, "I am hopeful" instead of, "I hope". I even read the other day in one of my favourite periodicals of an aeroplane that has, "a very high-speed capability", when the writer meant, "it can go very fast". I do not think that we can overestimate the importance of teaching English in our schools.
Our language is always growing. New words find their way into it. I believe that we should be very critical of their acceptance. In that, I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, who introduced this debate so eloquently. I do not know whether he meant to make quite the same suggestion as I wish to make, which is that there should be established a high-powered council for monitoring the growth of English. I am not suggesting that such a council should have mandatory powers. However, it would from time to time pronounce opinions on verbal innovations, and those opinions should be given wide publicity. We might then reject horrors like "disinformation", which, if it means anything at all, means "lies". We might even reduce the use of the verb "to debrief". We have now reached the stage when a person who has
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never been briefed, such as a released Russian dissident, can be debriefed! We already have perfectly appropriate words such as "question", "interrogate" and "examine". We do not need to add to the list a clumsy alternative.
I believe that such an influential council, which may be the sort of body which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, was envisaging, could help to maintain the precision of our language. That objective is vital because, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, has already said, language is the instrument of thought.
Such matters are of importance to the learners of our language with whom the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, is particularly concerned. For the learner, our language has another characteristic which is more important to him than it is to us. That characteristic is our spelling and some of our spelling is very strange. I think that the time has come for some modest reform. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, said, it is absurd that the letters "o-u-g-h" should be capable of so many kinds of pronunciation. It is irrational that "aught" and "ought" should be pronounced the same. Surely "should" and "mould" should rhyme. Could this council, with the monitoring of innovation as its first priority, reform just some of the more outrageous of our spelling inconsistencies as its second term of reference? We do not want revolutionary change, but could it not, from time to time, issue new spellings to be regarded as acceptable alternatives to the time-honoured anachronisms?
For our benefit and to help the learner, we must speak our language correctly. Our broadcasters in particular should speak correctly. Some do, but not all. As I remarked so long ago in the debate we had in November 1979, the BBC once had a Director of the Spoken Word. I think that is a post, both in the BBC and the independent authority, which could well be revived.
This is the third debate that we have had in my time here on the subject of the English language. We had one in November 1979, one in January 1981 and this debate today. It will be a very good thing if from time to time we have such debates and criticise our language in the hope that we can keep its quality as it should be.
6.50 p.m.
Lord Elwyn-Jones: My Lords, I should like to begin by expressing our gratitude to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for so felicitously introducing tonight the subject of English teaching. I also congratulate the noble Lord and the noble Baroness who made two absolutely superb maiden speeches; namely, the noble Lord, Lord Moore, and the noble Baroness, Lady Strange. I suppose it is a mark of the flexibility of our language that although the noble Baroness is the mother of six children nevertheless she can properly be called a maiden speaker on the occasion of this debate.
I began to learn English at the age of five in the Lakefield Elementary School in Llanelli. I hope the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, will forgive me; I know that English is a great language, but so is the Welsh language. Welsh is far older, of course. It is

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the oldest language in Europe, a beautiful language in its poetry and in its literature as the millennia have shown. However, tonight, I gladly praise the English language which I have been trying to learn ever since the age of five.
English has been rightly called our greatest single national asset. Curiously enough, it was rather a late developer. In the 16th century King Charles of Spain is recorded as saying:
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my, horse.".
There is not a mention of English at all. Then, in 1582, Richard Mulcester wrote:
"Our English Tung is of small reach, it stretcheth no further than this island of ours, naie not there over all.".
Only about five million people spoke English then. As we all know, gradually, it encompassed the world. Already by 1602 Samuel Daniel was writing:
"And who, in time, knows whither may be sent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be lent
T'enrich unknowing nations with our stores.".
How prophetic that was. By then, or shortly after, Shakespeare had already written several of his plays.
The English language is difficult but many who speak different tongues have learnt it. It was Arnold Bennett who described the Oxford English Dictionary as the longest sensational serial ever written. However, it is a language that has given an abundance of choice—for the lawyer to be obscure, if it is convenient to be obscure—of flexibility, of subtlety and, indeed, of simplicity. It can be made simple, but it is not easy. Indeed, in the report by Sir Alan Bullock to which the noble Lord, Lord Annan, referred, it was indicated that simplicity of language is very important. The report contains a passage which reads:
"We believe that language acceptance grows incrementally"
Presumably, that means it grows.
"through an interaction of writing, talk, reading and experience, the body of the resulting work forming an organic whole.".
May I say to the noble Lord, Lord Annan, that that was not written by a civil servant but by an academic, if I am not greatly mistaken. However, let me not be provocative on this peaceful linguistic occasion. At any rate, it is not easy, but it can be done.
What I suppose we all tend to forget is that the process of communication is important not only for what is said but perhaps, even more important, for what is understood. The language is admirable if it can be done simply but, as I say, it is not easy. Nor, indeed, is it easy to be brief. I remember on almost my second day as Attorney-General I received a letter from one of the parliamentary draftsmen. I do not know if it was an original observation but it said:
"I am so sorry that this letter is so long. If I had had time I could have made it shorter".
We all sympathise with that.
As the House has learned already, the proposed committee of inquiry, which I welcome, is not the first. Sir Alan Bullock issued a report in 1975, after three years of deliberation. I am sorry to say that it was never discussed in Parliament. I hope that that will not be the fate of the next report. The report concluded:
"The standards of writing, speaking and reading can and should be raised".
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It urged, as we are, I believe, rightly urging today,
"the need for simplification of style".
The report looked, among other things, at the difficulties of spelling, which have been referred to from time to time. It concluded that English shares with French the disadvantage of being among the most complex in its spelling pattern. The majority of the committee remain unconvinced—another term of art we can perhaps do without—by the case for national reform of the system of spelling in English. They thought the issues involved too complex and made no recommendations.
One recommendation which was made—and here I must disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Annan, if he will allow me to do so, and he cannot really stop me—was that every school with pupils whose original language is not English should adopt a positive attitude to their bilingualism and whenever possible help maintain and deepen their knowledge of their mother tongue. The mother tongue is not something to be ashamed of. It should be cherished. It is a product of generations, of decades and sometimes of millennia.
Lord Annan: My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord for allowing me to intervene. I was referring to immigrants to this country. Of course, the noble and learned Lord has the Welsh language in mind, but it is the English who are the immigrants, not the Welsh.
Lord Elwyn-Jones: My Lords, I am glad to hear the noble Lord admit that he is an immigrant. It is not always popularly spoken of in that manner by Welshmen. However, I am not speaking in any sense of an awareness of the greatness, the superior greatness, of the Welsh. Of course, they are as good as anyone else—no better and no worse than that. But I must not allow myself to be distracted. What was said by the Bullock report in regard to that matter is commendable.
I am told that owing to the economy of earlier speakers I have the permission of the Minister to take a little more time than I would normally be allowed, but I will not abuse it. I commend the Plain English Campaign which nominates Golden Bull awards for official gobbledegook. I regret to say, having acknowledged the generosity of the noble Baroness, that this year the award went to the Department of Education and Science for a letter to teachers' pay negotiators which read:
"Burnham Category II/III courses may or may not be advanced and poolable. A Burnham Category course which is not poolable is not poolable only because it is not advanced, i.e. it does not require course approval as an advanced course. It is therefore wrong to describe it as a 'non-poolable advanced (non-designated) course'. Non-poolable courses are non-advanced by definition. I think that the problem you have described probably results from confusion here".
That is indeed a masterpiece. However, lawyers, too, have been known to err and I hope that the House will give me a moment's grace and heed a famous observation of Lord Justice Harman when, as a chancery judge, he made a judgment on an issue which turned on the meaning of "a statutory instrument". He said:
"To reach a conclusion on this matter involved the court in wading through a monstrous legislative morass. staggering from

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stone to stone and ignoring the marsh gas exhaling from the forest of schedules lining the way on each side. I regarded it at one time, I must confess, as a Slough of Despond through which the court would never drag its feet, but I have, by leaping from tussock to tussock as best I might, eventually, pale and exhausted, reached the other side where I find myself, I am glad to say, at the same point as that arrived at with more agility by Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls".
English is a great language and it is great to see it laughed at from time to time, even by lawyers.
7.1 p.m.
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, I rise with some trepidation after—dare I say it?—the tour de force of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, when he made his contribution, apart from remembering the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, on the problems attendant on reading a brief.
However, I welcome the introduction of this debate by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale. The English language is indeed a great treasure and, moreover, one which does not need to be hidden away to preserve its value. We have been reminded of the extent to which English is spoken throughout the world as the mother tongue in English-speaking countries and as a second or foreign language in very many other countries. I am sure that we are all most grateful to the noble and learned Lord for providing this opportunity for a reaffirmation of the importance of the English language.
The debate has also focused attention on the learning of the language, whether it should be made easier and how that can be accomplished. It is some six years since the House last debated this theme and I believe that the debate then addressed the question of whether simplification of the English language would advance the cause of high standards or result in linguistic chaos. On that occasion there were very many views expressed about what constitutes good English, and about the desirability and feasibility of attempts to reform the English language. This afternoon, we have heard many more fresh and intriguing arguments on these themes. It has been a particular pleasure to hear the views of my noble friend, Lady Strange and the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Wolvercote, in their maiden speeches. I too should like to congratulate them both and say how much I look forward to hearing more from them on this and many other themes in the future.
Many noble Lords have argued—and I doubt if any would disagree with them—that improvement in standards of communication in English would be a great benefit. The question is how that improvement can be attained. Some believe that what is required is reform of spelling and grammar so that English can be more easily learned, whether by children or foreigners. We have heard many suggestions as to the types of reform that might be adopted. Gaining agreement to reform and bringing it about—not just in this country but in the whole of the English-speaking world—would be a formidable task, however hard the French have tried to prove that it is possible in their case. Changes in language and in language usage of course take place all the time in a living language but they do so naturally and gradually. I am not convinced that attempts to regulate or direct that process would
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achieve the desired results. Indeed, I am inclined to think that English would not be as universally spoken as it is if it were not that it is already so much more simple and flexible than many other languages.
Even if it were possible to wave a wand and reform or simplify English spelling and grammar across the world, would that be desirable? The richness and subtlety of the English language which has been so vividly and richly illustrated this afternoon are matters of which we are rightly proud, and many people would be sorry to see them lost even in the interests of greater simplicity.
The Government are therefore concentrating their efforts not on trying to change the English language but on trying to improve the way that it is taught. Our aim is that all young people, whatever their ability, should leave school able to use the written and spoken word accurately and effectively. We are also concerned that they should understand how their language works. Over the last 20 years or so schools have progressively ceased to teach the rules of English grammar as my generation was taught them. But if children are to be able to communicate effectively, they need to be able to examine and explain different ways of expressing meaning, thought and feeling through the language they use. The gap that has been left by the decline in formal grammar teaching must be filled. I therefore note with interest the comments on compulsory teaching of grammar that were made so forcibly by the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, in particular.
My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science also regards that as a priority and that is why he has recently established the high level independent committee of inquiry to which reference has already been made, to advise on what pupils should know about the English language. The committee is chaired by Sir John Kingman, Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University, and has a distinguished membership drawn from education, industry and the arts.
The committee has already invited evidence from anyone with views on how English should be taught in schools, and in particular on the needs of society in present-day England as they relate to an individual's ability to communicate in speech and in writing; to the skills of literacy and communication generally needed in a rapidly changing world; and to the training, both initial and in-service, of the country's teachers in relation to those needs. I hope that that responds to the point made so clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Annan. The Committee also asks for information in relation to English language teaching in the primary, middle and secondary phases of schooling.
I am sure that the Kingman Committee will wish to study the views that have been expressed by noble Lords today, which are highly relevant to its concerns. I shall make a point of ensuring that the report of today's debate is drawn to the committee's attention.
The committee of inquiry is one of a number of initiatives aimed at improving the English curriculum in schools and the approaches to teaching. We have taken another important step in establishing criteria for the new GCSE examination in English, which will promote good syllabuses. The School Curriculum Development Committee, which is jointly funded by

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my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science and the local authorities, is sponsoring a project to improve writing skills. The Government are also making available education support grants for innovative work aimed at developing pupils' use of the spoken word. We believe that each of these initiatives will contribute to our overall aim of helping young people to have a better command of their language.
A number of speakers have made reference to the work of the British Council in teaching overseas, and I strongly support what has been said about its valuable work. The British Council plays a very important role in promoting not only the use of the English language but an interest in English literature throughout the world. Indeed, in my own recent experience in South America last year in both Bogota and Quito I found the British Council's energetic and enthusiastic teams increasing their English teaching facilities on what was largely a self-financing basis. It was a very satisfactory and salutary experience. I hope and believe that the council's efforts will continue to bear fruit.
Through its World Service and the programmes which it sells profitably abroad, the BBC performs an ever more important role. I should like to acknowledge the work of other voluntary bodies in this field, especially to name but one, the English Speaking Union.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, asked me about illiteracy. That is a difficult question because adult illiteracy cannot easily be quantified and consequently the available evidence is not always consistent. The National Child Development Study survey of 1981 found that 10 per cent. of the 23 year-olds asked said that they had had reading problems since leaving school. Of those, 3 per cent. said that those problems had made things difficult for them in everyday life. A recent MORI survey of a sample of the population of Rochdale found that 10 per cent. of teenagers asked said that they had some problems with reading, and 16 per cent. had some problems with spelling. Of the adults asked, 7 per cent. had some problems with reading and 13 per cent. had some problems with spelling. The findings of the Department of Education and Science's Assessment of Performance Unit suggest that only a small minority of pupils aged 15 have great difficulty with reading or writing.
Local education authorities and voluntary bodies provide a wide range of learning opportunities for adults who lack basic skills in numeracy and literacy. The Government attempt to stimulate them by further developing adult basic skills provision through funding the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit. Its grant has been increased from some £470,000 in 1980–81 to over £2 million in 1986-87—a fourfold increase in cash terms, and clearly a move in the right direction.
Another aspect of English teaching to which the Government attach importance, and one to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, drew our attention, is ensuring that those members of our ethnic minority communities for whom English is not their mother tongue should be fully fluent in speaking and writing it. We believe that we should respect the pupils' ability to speak their mother tongue and should
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recognise it as an asset. The Department of Education and Science hopes shortly to issue a consultation document on the teaching of ethnic minority languages as an option at secondary level for those who wish it.
However, the prime responsibility of the education system towards ethnic minority pupils is, and I believe must be, to ensure that they have a complete command of English so that they are not disadvantaged in finding jobs or of playing a full part in society. The Government give a great deal of direct assistance to that by means of Section 11 grants to help local education authorities provide extra teachers of English to meet the needs of ethnic minority pupils.
Another topic on which we have had some useful suggestions is that of oral English. We tend to think about people's command of the English language in terms of reading and writing, but there is an equally important dimension which many of your Lordships have demonstrated today—that of speaking. I do not just mean public speaking on occasions such as this, nor am I thinking narrowly of good pronunciation or standard dialect, to which some speakers have referred. I mean it rather in the sense referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, among others. I have in mind the ability to communicate clearly, concisely, accurately and effectively through the spoken word in a wide variety of situations, formal and informal, face-to-face and indirectly, nationally and internationally.
That demands a capacity to adjust content, style, tone and register to meet the needs of the audience and the purpose and nature of the occasion. Careful listening must go hand in hand with effective speaking, as so many have said, but perhaps none so tellingly as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones.
There is clear evidence from the Assessment of Performance Unit and Her Majesty's inspectors that schools do not pay enough attention to developing speaking and listening skills among pupils. A much wider range of oral work; for example, conversation, collaborative discussion, factual reporting, and persuasive argument need to be practised throughout primary and secondary education not only in English lessons but, as again as been said, in mathematics, science, the humanities and other subjects.
The Government will encourage that development through new education support grants to selected local education authorities for "oracy" work, starting next month. The School Curriculum Development Committee has also just decided to launch a major project on oracy this year—I must confess that it is a slightly unfortunate sounding word—and the new GCSE examinations will increasingly assess oral as well as written competence.
The noble Lord, Lord Kings Norton, and others mentioned the possibility of a national language commission to advise on language reform. That interesting suggestion was put forward during the debate in 1981. My noble friend Lady Young replying on that occasion raised a number of doubts. She pointed to the difficulty which the proposed commission would have in coming to an agreement on a reform programme and the even greater difficulty that the commission would have in persuading others that its ideas were right. She referred to the problem of

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a commission based in this country gaining the international acceptance which would be necessary. I believe that to a large extent those points remain valid.
We all have our pet hates as regards the use and misuse of the English language. We have had some interesting examples during the debate. My preoccupation is that collective nouns shall take the singular. I therefore assure your Lordships that I shall try to ensure that the Government gives its attention, in response to the calls from all sides of your Lordships' House, to its duty and responsibility in this matter and particularly in its own use of plain English.
Ultimately, however, standards in the use of English will depend on how greatly they are valued by the nation as a whole. It is essential to stimulate and maintain public interest in the promotion of universal literacy. I believe that the debate has provided a welcome and timely opportunity for this House to play its part in that process. I again thank your Lordships for your many, varied and most entertaining contributions.
7.17 p.m.
Lord Simon of Glaisdale: My Lords, even more than usual, it seems to me that the contributions to this debate have been authoritative, varied and entertain-ing. I should like to thank all your Lordships who have contributed to it and I should like particularly to associate myself with the tributes whch have so rightly been paid to the outstanding maiden speeches with which your Lordships have been favoured.
The only substantive part of my Motion is "for Papers". As any papers I might receive would be full of solecisms, which would offend most of your Lordships, and full of absurd spellings and grammar, which would offend my noble friend Lord Kings Norton and myself, I beg to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Billiards (Abolition of Restrictions) Bill [H.L.]
7.19 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a second time.
I must begin by declaring an interest, in that I am a consultant to the British Amusement Catering Trades Association, one of the bodies which is in favour of the proposals contained in the Bill. This is a modest measure, the drafting of which is perhaps distinguished more by its brevity than by its elegance. As I hope to explain, it would be of great help to considerable numbers of our fellow citizens.
Sections 10 to 14 of the Gaming Act 1845, which this Bill seeks to repeal have been amended to some extent by later statutes. But their essential purpose has remained unimpaired. It is the imposition of a requirement to obtain a licence from the justices for places offering billiards, bagatelle and similar games, and those games include pool and snooker, if the places are open to the public and do not have a formal system of club membership. The requirement does not extend to private members' clubs or to premises having a justices on-licence for the sale of all intoxicants. But
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for premises caught by the Act—and there are rather more than 400 of them it is a particular irritant. There is no provision for renewals. Therefore a fresh application has to be made every year and £8.50 paid for the licence or for its transfer.
The Act requires the premises to close on Sundays, one of the most popular days for these activities, as well as on any day appointed to be kept as a public fast or thanksgiving. The Sunday ban is a particular source of complaint at tourist resorts. It means, for example, that if coin-operated pool tables are to be used they have to be kept in a separate room which can be locked up on Sundays or the whole operation has to be closed down, while oft-times the pub down the road can happily keep going and offer those facilities.
All this has driven me to the conclusion that the licensing requirement as a whole has ceased to have any useful purpose. Perhaps in 1845 the game of billiards was associated with undesirable activities, but that is not true today. Indeed, snooker has acquired a distinction which I think would have astonished our Victorian forebears. I simply cannot see that there is any reason for singling out billiard halls which are open to the public for special treatment which does not apply to many other places of public recreation in England and Wales.
I notice that the Royal Commission on gambling which the noble Lord, Lord Rothschild, chaired, like the previous royal commission which reported in 1951, thought that the 1845 Act provisions had outlived their usefulness and ought to go. The recent edition of Social Trends shows that between 1977 and 1983 participation in snooker, billiards and pool increased by two-thirds. It is true to say that this is an activity in which an increasing number of people are taking part and not just watching. To remove the restrictions in the 1845 Act would put an end to an irritant in an area where there is no suggestion, as far as I am aware, of any undesirable activities; would remove the anomaly between the public billiard hall on the one hand and the members' club and the on-licence premises on the other; and would relieve the justices of one chore which serves no obviously useful purpose.
A number of interested bodies have been consulted, including the local authority associations, the police and the National Council on Gambling. I am not aware that anyone has raised any objection to the removal of this licensing requirement. The Magistrates' Association for its part is all in favour of abolishing these archaic provisions.
This is a short Bill which does not call for lengthy exposition. I think that I can keep to the time laid down for the previous debate. A brief summary of what I have been trying to say is that I am recommending the abandonment of a control which, so it seems to me, has simply ceased to have any justification. I commend the Bill to the House.
Moved, that the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Allen of Abbeydale.)
7.25 p.m.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, I am a little mystified by this Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Allen, has not dispelled my mystification by what he said. Over 50

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years ago when I was a school boy I used to play billiards rather well and enjoyed doing so. A few years later when I went into the Navy no one played billiards because snooker had already taken over, although there was usually a billiard table in the officers' mess, and I came to play snooker rather well.
I have seen the enormous growth in popularity of snooker in this country. It is now the most popular indoor game, with its stars among the best paid sportsmen in the world. But I thought that billiards had died out completely because I never see or hear of it being played, although I realise that it is one of the,
"other games of the like kind".
The noble Lord spoke about it being associated with undesirable activities. I remember in the days when I was playing that skill at billiards was always seen to be a sign of a misspent youth, although I have never been quite sure why that should be so.
When I came to investigate the matter I found that there were over 3,000 snooker clubs in this country which were all very well patronised. The number is growing all the time. But no one plays billiards except for once in a blue moon; it is too eccentric to decide to have a game of billiards. I thought that talking about the,
"public playing of billiards, bagatelle and other games of the like kind,"
was rather like referring to cricket as being, "rounders or other games of the like kind". Rounders is not a game that anyone plays anymore.
As for bagatelle, that has not been played for decades. It is not a game of "like kind" at all. It is played on a small wooden board with little pins stuck in it and set a slant. It could not be less like billiards. A small, hard ball is propelled around the board and ends up in some number or other. The playing of this game was included in the licence which one had to obtain in 1845. but it is no more played now than any of the other games mentioned in the 1845 Act in a different context, such as quoiting and half bowl. I do not know why the need for a licence for bagatelle—which has not been played for decades—has to he included. However, with snooker clubs with membership fees of only £5 or £3 a year it is rather unlikely that there would be any billiard halls open to the public. They are still called billiard halls although no one plays billiards in them. People play snooker or pool but not billiards in billiard halls.
I inquired of the managing director of Riley Leisure, Mr. Gilban, who supplies most of the tables, and of one or two other people in the trade. I was surprised when the noble Lord, Lord Allen, mentioned that some 400 places would be affected, because the figure I was given was fewer than 30. I have certainly never seen one. If we are talking about saving fewer than 30 people, or even 400 people, from paying 16p a week for the right to have a billiard table—which is used for snooker or pool but only rarely for billiards—I do not know why that deserves a Bill at the present time. The gentlemen in the trade to whom I spoke thought that the Bill would make no difference at all. They were prepared to go on record as saying that the billiard licence affects practically nobody and it makes no difference to the people it does affect.
However, in his remarks the noble Lord gave a contrary opinion. I hope that he may be able to go into
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the matter a little more. I think the Bill does no harm whatever. It will save an unknown number of publicly-owned halls having to obtain a licence. I think that the Bill is completely unobjectionable and I do not believe that it is of very extreme constitutional importance.
7.31 p.m.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, I do not think that I shall be able to measure up to the specialised knowledge of the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken, concerning the particular games that we are discussing this evening. However, I was content with the great clarity with which the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, presented his Bill. As he introduced it, I understood exactly what it was intended to do. The noble Lord made it abundantly clear that the changes proposed in his Bill are necessary, even if they do not affect very many groups. Like so many other betting and gaming Bills which have been introduced by Private Members, there does not seem to be anything in the least controversial about this. It will be welcomed by those who run the public halls where the games are played.
However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken, because from my small amount of research and homework it would also seem to me that this Bill will apply to very few organisations, and that the anomaly will be cleared up so that the public halls will he brought into line with private clubs where there is no need for a licence. My research showed me that in many cases people were ignorant and had never heard of a billiard licence. That is where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken. There are people running or supplying snooker halls who were genuinely amazed when they were told about the Bill. It was the first time they had heard that there was any such thing as a billiards licence.
Therefore my conclusion is rather different from that of the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken. I believe we can safely conclude that a Bill which repeals a law, which many people think was abolished last century, can only be welcomed as a very timely measure.
I should like to conclude by asking the Minister once again—I have done this many times before—when the Government will be making their own wide-ranging review of the whole subject of our gaming laws. Private Members' Bills making small changes and adjustments to the Gaming Act seem to occur with enormous regularity. It makes one feel that it is time that the Government grasped the nettle, carried out a review of the whole subject and brought forward their own comprehensive legislation taking in what is wrong, what must be changed and what is out of date. From my understanding of the small change—which is the abandonment of control—I feel that the Bill can only be welcomed. So many small changes have been made that perhaps the Government should look at the whole area and bring forward new legislation.
7.35 p.m.
Lord Beaverbrook: My Lords, I am sure that noble Lords will appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, has given a clear exposition of the case for his Bill. Let me confirm that the Government accept the case for abolition of this form of licensing, and indeed support the Bill.

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When we came to review the Gaming Act 1845 a few years ago we were struck by two points. The first was the clear impression, gained from consultation with interested parties, that the licensing arrangements made under that Act serve no clear purpose. The Association of Chief Police Officers told us that they saw no justification for retaining the restrictive and elaborate licensing arrangements in the 1845 Act. The Magistrates' Association described the provisions as archaic and favoured abolition. We know too that this proposal also enjoys the support of the businesses affected.
The second impression left by our review was that the continuance in force of these provisions was imposing burdens on the businesses involved in providing public billiards and snooker halls and those providing amusements with pool tables. In the period we surveyed, from 1st July 1984 until 30th June 1985, about 104 new applications were received. These applicants and licensees were put to the trouble of making applications and paying a fee. In return for their trouble they were obliged, among other things, to close these facilities every Sunday, potentially one of the busiest days for these leisure activities. As the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, has pointed out, the present legislation does not provide equality in this respect. Most of the clubs which have opened in the snooker boom of recent years are exempt from the requirement to hold a licence and from the restrictions on Sunday opening. Their exemption arises because by and large they hold a liquor licence for the sale of all intoxicants or confine admission to members of the club.
At this stage I should like to respond to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken. The noble Lord mentioned snooker which is of course covered by the description:
"billiards. bagatelle and games of the like kind".
I confirm that our figures show that over 400 premises are licensed. Those include amusement places with pool tables and also some surviving billard halls. We believe that in respect of these premises the 1845 Act, which is still in force, is a burden.
Your Lordships will also be familiar with this Government's drive, led by the enterprise and deregulation unit at the Department of Employment, to cut unnecessary red tape affecting business. Two White Papers, Building Businesses … Not Barriers, and Lifting the Burden, have described the Government's policies and the achievements made so far. The abolition of the licensing of billiards under the 1845 Act appears to be a modest but appropriate step in the direction set down in the White Papers. The noble Lord's Bill will remove one source of irritation felt by business at government regulation as well as one chore for the licensing committees.
I have noted the point that has been made by the noble Baroness about a piecemeal revision of the gaming laws. However, in this instance we take the view that, as there is no immediate prospect of a major Bill on gaming, it would be a pity not to take advantage of opportunities like this to deal with particular issues which can be tackled sensibly on their own.
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I wish the Bill a safe passage through your Lordships' House and on to another place.
7.39 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, I need only to say that it is gratifying to have the support of both the Government and the Opposition. I should like to make two small points on the matters raised by the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken. Under the Act it is a term of the licence that the premises which hold the licence must display a notice saying "licensed for billiards". That is one of the absurdities in that billiards is not one of the games that are played. Snooker and pool are the two great games. Like the noble Lord, I have searched in vain in the provisions to find a reference to a bagatelle table. As the Minister has explained, the numbers are 400 or over which includes, for example, youth clubs which do not have a formal membership, and there are still a few establishments which started life in the north as temperance halls set up in rivalry to public houses.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, I accept completely the figures given both by the Minister and now by the noble Lord. I feel sure that the figure which I was given was the figure for billiard halls which existed as such, and did not include amusement arcades in which there was a pool table.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, I would certainly not claim that the measure was one of extreme constitutional importance, if I heard the words correctly. But I think it is a useful tidying-up measure. My Lords, I commend the Bill to the House.
On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Dyslexia
7.40 p.m.
Lord Ritchie of Dundee Lord Ritchie of Dundee rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they consider that the Education Act 1981 is operating successfully as regards the diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in asking this Question of Her Majesty's Government I am hoping for three things. I hope to hear from the noble Baroness rather more about what is being done by local education authorities to implement the 1981 Education Act than I know already (which is very little). I hope to be able to make a few points myself and I am greatly looking forward to hearing what other noble Lords say on this subject.
I should say that my knowledge of dyslexia is based on many years of teaching dyslexic children. I am not going to weary noble Lords with a long description of the condition of dyslexia, about which I am sure noble Lords already know a good deal, or you would not be interested enough to be here. I would guess that several noble Lords have children, grandchildren, nephews or nieces who have been sufferers and this is the occasion of your interest.
We all know what we are talking about. It is as follows:
"A disorder in children who, despite conventional classroom experience, fail to attain the language skills of reading, writing and spelling commensurate with their intellectual abilities".
That was a definition, made in 1968, from the World Federation of Neurology. I take no exception to that definition, other than I would cut out the words "in children" because I am sure the condition exists in adults.
Noble Lords will know that this condition is also associated with what is called crossed laterality. This does not mean just that you are left-handed, but it possibly means that you combine left-handedness with a dominant right eye, or possibly that you may be left-eyed and use your right hand. If this is happening, you are what is called crossed-lateral and this may coincide with the condition called dyslexia.
An aspect of the condition that fascinates me is this: we are told that the left hemisphere of the brain is the hemisphere which processes language skills. The right hemisphere is concerned more with visuospatial and artistic skills. If there is a slight defect in the left hemisphere, which processes language skills, it may be compensated in the right hemisphere, which is the hemisphere more concerned with spatial, 3D artistic skills, things which can be done with the hands. If this is so, this accounts for the fact that a greater than expected number of dyslexic children are gifted artisti-cally or mechanically and able to do things with their hands. I find that very interesting but it is at the moment only a theory. One can think of Leonardo who was known to have been dyslexic.
I have to say that when I was looking at some sketches a year or two ago by no less a person than David Hockney—sketches for a production of, I think, the "Rake's Progress"—there were some verbal instructions on the sketches and I noted that he was a very poor speller. We know also that the condition is much more common in boys than girls—approximately four to one. We have an idea of the sort of pattern that a child's life may take if the condition is undiagnosed. You have your unhappy, anxious little boy aged eight, and by the time he is 13 or 14 he is beginning to be disruptive in the classroom. He leaves school illiterate, or at best, semi-literate. He drifts into the dole queue, and possibly worse—perhaps into delinquency or even crime. By the time he is in his thirties he may be referred to a psychiatric hospital. All the time you may have a frustrated engineer, medical student or scientist.
I should like to shift the focus briefly to illiteracy generally. The adult literacy and basic skills unit together with the National Children's Bureau undertook a survey in 1981 of 12,500 23 year-old adults, who had all been born in the same week of March in 1958. They were asked whether since leaving school they had experienced any difficulties with English, writing, reading or spelling. Of that number 10 per cent. said that they had. If that sample is extrapolated to the population as a whole it would appear that approximately 3,250,000 adults suffer with some degree of difficulty with English. I should stress that this figure is very approximate because what is meant by literacy or illiteracy is very indeterminate —where does one stop and the other begin?
How is it that this number of children can go through 11 years of schooling and come out having failed to acquire these basic skills? In speaking of this failure and in suggesting reasons for it, I should stress that in order to avoid complication I am not thinking of children whose mother tongue is not English. Among possible causes one can name missed schooling through ill health or other reasons. Other causes could be frequent changes of school, emotional disturbance, cultural deprivation in the home, generally low intelligence or mental handicap. I am not going to include poor teaching among those because on the whole the standard of our primary teaching is extremely high and it is very unlikely that a child will have failed for that reason.
I do not believe that the factors I have named can fully account for this proportion of poor literacy among adults. I am going to suggest that a large number of them are suffering from a degree and a form of dyslexia. Here we have a situation in which a proportion of otherwise able children cannot fulfil their potential, or play their part in modern society because they have failed to acquire the basic skills on which the whole of our literacy system and the whole edifice of our society is based. These unfortunates not only cannot find work but they cannot look for work because they are not able to read advertisements. If they could read them they could not complete the forms or write simple letters of application. Think of the frustration and of the human wastage!
Since 1981 light has been dawning. The Act requires local education authorities to ensure that children with special educational needs receive special educational provision, and this includes dyslexia or, as the pundits prefer to call it, specific learning difficulty. I should say in parenthesis that I believe that there are certain social overtones here. Dyslexia was at one time thought to be a posh complaint. The saying was that if you were working class you were thick; if you were middle-class you were dyslexic. I have also heard that in my part of the world if you go to Maidstone you suffer from specific learning difficulty, but if you go to Tunbridge Wells you can have dyslexia. I leave your Lordships to draw what conclusion you can from that.
My question of the noble Baroness is to ask how this is working out in local authorities throughout the country? From my investigations, it seems to me that it is variable. I think I can boast that in my part of the country, which is East Sussex, it is working well. In the eastern area, which is mine, we have 170 children receiving special help from a team of seven teachers working full time. Children are given a screening test at top infant level in order to pick out specific learning difficulty problems. Teachers of infants are offered special advice and resources, and there has recently been a course for ordinary class teachers on how to recognise and identify these children and how to help them.
The county of Shropshire has produced an impressive consultative paper which classifies a number of special educational needs. There is reference not to dyslexia but to specific learning difficulty—SLD. Everything has to be initials nowadays. The county claims to be making special provision for this group.
There are bad stories. In telling your Lordships one briefly, I am not going to mention the county involved

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because I think that this would be unfair. It may be a one-off instance. In any case I know the difficulties that some education authorities are going through. The parents of a little boy aged five knew that he was troubled by some complaint of this sort. They did some reading and investigating and became convinced in their own minds that some sort of dyslexic problem was bothering him.
The school refused to take any interest. It was not until he was eight that he was given a test by the school psychologist. The result of the test was that he was said to be "below average". If he is below average you do not have to do anything special about him because he can go to a class for less able children, a remedial class, and no special provision has to be made.
However, the parents did not believe this. They took their child to a dyslexia specialist. In fact they took him to two. One was at Aston University, which has been specialising in the subject for many years. This resulted in reports saying that the child was of above average intelligence. The parents went back to the school and to the education authority but got no change out of them.
This went on, and further tests were made. Following one, the child was actually described as being of superior ability in certain aspects. Still nothing was done by the authority. The parents are still struggling. They are long-term unemployed. They have spent over £1,000. At one time their child was out of school for a year after developing school phobia. He is now 10, and still nothing has happened. I believe that the parents are now planning to sell all they have, buy a caravan, and move into a different area where, in their own words, "they understand dyslexia".
That is a bad story, and, of course, there could be many others. I do not suppose that this authority is unduly intransigent. I expect that like others it is overworked, understaffed, and underfunded. But the fact is that a number of authorities are offering what they can provide; they are not offering what the children need. There is a big gap between the two.
As I see it, an urgent necesssity is adequate resourcing to enable local education authorities to put into effect what the 1981 Act demands. It is all very well for us to pass an Act and say this, that and the other are to happen. But if those responsible for putting it into effect cannot afford it, it has not done any good. This is, I believe, the situation in many areas.
The second great need is the training of more specialist teachers. In the county responsible for the sorrowful tale of the little boy, I am sure that there are insufficient skilled teachers, which is one reason for not being able to help. The training of ordinary class teachers to recognise these children when they have them in their classes, I know from personal experience, is a great necessity. Often a child in a class of 25 or 30 is written off as of poor ability and peculiar, without sufficient expert knowledge being there to discover exactly what is wrong.
What we need much more of is an ability to identify and diagnose on the part of the class teacher. The training of teachers at the initial stage is important. I think this is not happening at the moment. It may be
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that the noble Baroness will correct me, but I think that this is not touched on in the initial training of teachers. There have been inset courses in various counties including, as I have said, East Sussex, which help teachers in this way.
Early identification is vital. It is important that parents whose children suffer in this way should know more of their rights under the 1981 Act. One has to bear in mind that the parents of dyslexic children often have a little dyslexia themselves, and they may not be frightfully good at understanding official English. They may not understand what they can do and what recourse they have under the Act to apply to an appeal committee to consider their case and eventually to apply to the Secretary of State. They may not understand what they can do. In my opinion, there is an urgent need for more research into the incidence of specific learning difficulty, or dyslexia, in all schools and also into the causes of the widespread semi-literacy from which we are suffering.
The term dyslexia was coined by an obscure German physician in 1877. I may be doing him an injustice when I say that he was obscure, but you can usually safely say anything that came out of Germany in the 19th century was obscure. He coined the word. It has taken over 100 years for it to achieve something like current parlance.
Thanks to the work of, perhaps notably, the British Dyslexia Association, of which I have the honour to be a vice-president, and of the Dyslexia Institute and of many others who have toiled, worked and fought through many years to bring this into public prominence—and from some of whom I have learned a great deal myself—we now all know what we are talking about. It is now time to take account of it as a substantial factor, possibly even the major factor, in the national problem of functional illiteracy.
8 p.m.
Lord Schon: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, for raising a very important subject. I am most impressed with the comments he made, and he has dealt with most aspects of the subject about which I wanted to speak. I should like to raise a particular question: are there enough teachers to deal with children affected by learning disabilities? I ask this in the light of the fact that in many instances, I have been told, specialist schools have been closed and children affected by learning disabilities have been integrated into general classes. I had some other points to raise but. as I said before, the noble Lord has dealt with them.
Lord Addington: My Lords, I am honoured to be addressing this august and noble assembly and only hope that what I shall say will be of the high standard which your Lordships have come to expect.
When the Education Act 1981 was passed it was hailed by those concerned with problems of dyslexia as a major breakthrough. For the first time, the disability of dyslexia was mentioned. But whatever the cause or nature of the condition, the degree of difficulty should be revealed by assessment and local education authorities had to make appropriate arrangements for meeting individual educational needs.

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Dyslexia comes under the umbrella of special educational needs and approximately 20 per cent. of the school population has special needs of one sort or another. The actual percentage which is dyslexic is a matter of controversy, but a conservative estimate would place it at approximately 5 per cent. needing remediation and a possible further 1 per cent. probably sufficiently bad as to warrant specific individual teaching. Even 5 per cent. of the total school population is a very large number of children.
Under the terms of the 1981 Act a process of assessment called statementing can be applied to all those who have specific educational needs. The process of statementing falls on the stony ground of not having enough trained educational psychologists to see that it is put through. This is primarily due to financial constraints. The problem is increasingly severe when it is brought to mind that up to 10 per cent. of the school population would benefit from statementing.
There are still many teachers who have only a vague idea of what dyslexia is and have very little idea of how to deal with children in their classrooms who can hardly read or write. It is also thought that dyslexia should be exclusively the concern of the remedial or English departments. Dyslexia does not mean that a child is mentally retarded and certainly it does not only affect English lessons. In fact, dyslexic children are quite capable of taking part in ordinary lessons, provided they are not expected to do all the appropriate written work and some concession is made over the amount of reading. Ideally dyslexic children should be spotted in junior school and given appropriate teaching before disruptive behavioural patterns caused by frustration can emerge or they can become withdrawn, which often happens with dyslexic children.
Teachers often fail to realise the constitutional nature of the problem. There are many courses designed to instruct teachers in the areas of special needs. Dyslexia, which is a historically controversial topic, is often neglected and teachers who are supposed to be helping dyslexics may not be sure of what steps to take. The British Dyslexia Association has done sterling work in promoting the cause of dyslexics over the years; its Dyslexia Educational Trust runs courses designed to train teachers from both the public and private sectors on how best to help dyslexics. It is vital that those in the state system should have access to the same sort of specialist knowledge which has all too often been available only in the private sector.
In the past, this lack of specialist knowledge in the public sector has led those parents who could afford it to transfer their children to the private sector. This has led to the saying that middle-class families have a daughter who has spectacles on the end of her nose, braces on her teeth and a son who is dyslexic.
There have been great strides forward in the recognition of this problem since the implementation of the 1981 Act. There is, however, a very long way to go. I speak as one who is acutely dyslexic. I went through the state system. I was so bad that my problems were picked up in kindergarten and I was lucky in never being labelled stupid in junior school. I was also lucky in receiving a great deal of attention
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from educational psychologists and teachers, most of whom tried to help by giving me more of the work I had failed at, failing to appreciate that what I needed was a more structured method of learning.
In secondary school there simply was not the framework to deal with someone of my acute level of difficulty and I presented a great many problems to staff. The answer was found in the end to be to allow me to take part in the appropriate classes where I could make an oral contribution. Examination concessions also had to be sought to allow me to take public examinations; in my case this was an amanuensis. The whole process added several years to my schooling.
There is, however, a lighter side to being dyslexic. I can remember my family being very worried and not a little surprised when they were told by a school doctor that I was as blind as a bat. He conducted a sight test using letters of diminishing size; he had not thought to ask if I could read. On another occasion, an essay which I had laboured long and hard over in junior school was preserved, along with a looking glass, as a perfect example of mirror writing. It was actually indecipherable, with or without a mirror.
It is unfortunate that our society still largely equates literacy with intelligence. The undiagnosed dyslexic child may well find himself labelled stupid, lazy or slow throughout school. He will carry these labels throughout his school career and he will carry a very low self-esteem throughout life. It is hardly surprising to find that there are a great many illiteracy problems among those groups in our society who rebelled against it, such as prison inmates and young offenders.
Dyslexics form a substantial minority in our society, a minority which cuts across all social classes, a minority which cuts across all racial groups. To leave this minority largely undiscovered and untaught is not only a waste of human potential but it may also be expensive to society in terms of the anti-social behaviour their frustration may cause.
8.8 p.m.
Lord Renwick: My Lords, it gives me enormous pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington, following a maiden speech which, as I think your Lordships will agree, expressed very well what the rest of us were going to try and say, I would suggest rather less eloquently. I believe that he found that the medium in which he was happiest was in making an oral contribution. I suggest he remembers that, because many of us, I believe, hope to hear a lot more from him in the future. I also took note of his mention, and I am not quite sure that I heard him aright, of some low esteem. I say here and now that he should forget, from his own point of view, any feeling of low esteem. He has a great deal to be proud of and delivered his maiden speech very well indeed.
I speak as somebody who perhaps is not as dyslexic as he is, but I find myself not being able to use the written symbol as a reference as readily as others of your Lordships in that if I read a note I find I cannot talk. Therefore, the sequencing of my thoughts has to come from my mind rather than from any notes.
I am also very pleased and should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, for introducing this subject on which I made my maiden speech some x-years ago,

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though not nearly as well as the noble Lord, Lord Addington. I am grateful because, as the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, said, he is a vice-president of the British Dyslexia Association and so am I. There are five of us and he and I are two non-executive vice-presidents. I spent five years as the executive chairman of the British Dyslexia Association; so I am delighted to hear the tributes made by the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Ritchie.
I want to add one or two things to what noble Lords have already said and perhaps to put my own questions to my noble friend Lady Hooper who will reply for the Government. With dyslexia, as I have seen it, there are differences in ability. It becomes a disability or a handicap because of people's attitudes towards it. There is a lack of awareness. One of the British Dyslexia Association's main priorities is to bring awareness of the condition of dyslexia to people and to provide information and counselling to those with the condition and the parents of such people.
The British Dyslexia Association is the national body. Our main corporate member is the Dyslexia Institute which runs many of the teaching courses in this country. The Dyslexia Education Trust, the DET, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is a trust of which I am chairman which funds bursaries for teachers to take an in-service training course or courses to enable them to understand more, to recognise a dyslexic in the classroom and to give them the specialist treatment they need. There are various degrees of course, and we are in the process of attempting to obtain validation for the British Dyslexia Association's diploma course. There are RSA courses and so on.
What is most important is to make these courses available to as many people and qualified teachers as want them and to satisfy the demand from teachers. It is true, from the experience we have in the British Dyslexia Association, that teachers wish more and more to be able to recognise in their classrooms one or two people perhaps who are sitting at the back who do not absorb the lessons as presented by the teacher. I believe that teachers used to think that there was something wrong with little Jimmy in the back row, but now they are thinking "What is wrong with my presentation of the lesson? Why is that child not absorbing it?" This is marvellous and we are seeing it throughout the education system. I was going to say that teachers are queuing up. I wish they were and I wish we had the resources to fund all this. I am sure that my noble friend is aware of these courses and of what is going on in this respect.
We have now finished our first year and a half of funding these courses which was a private sector investment. The British Dyslexia Association is firmly agreed that this is a national problem and that it should be within the remit of those people whose statutory duty is to provide education to know what we know. Here, I make an offer to my noble friend which I made to the Department of Education and Science when I was chairman. It worked very well. If the department has any question it needs to ask in the realms of specific learning difficulties or dyslexia—both terminologies are rather self-defeating, but we have to call them something—will it please ask us?
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This has been very successful. We have worked very closely with the Department of Education and Science for the past 10 years at least. I hope, now that the British Dyslexia Association, through its local associations, of which it has between 70 and 75 around the country, will work closely with the local education authorities in the same way and with the same helpful attitude. However, this demands enormous resources.
When I talk about resources, I am conscious that the most important resources are information and knowledge, awareness and understanding. Money can be wasted, but information and awareness are never wasted because they can be presented to the people who need them in a form in which they can accept them. I am making this offer, although I am no longer the executive chairman, because the British Dyslexia Association is in a position to make available an enormous amount of information to education authorities not only of the condition but also an understanding of the teaching methodology which is needed to help these children.
A marvellous thing about dyslexia is that the methodology that has been evolved over the last 15 or 20 years in the Scottish Rights Hospital in Texas—the development work done there is multinational—is a methodology by which all children can benefit. It works beautifully with dyslexic children and it also works with other children. Other means of teaching reading with remedial teachers is of very little value to dyslexic children although it might work with many non-dyslexic non-readers.
All of this leads to another point that I should like to make to my noble friend Lady Hooper. I am being rather unspecific about numbers, and the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, asked how the local education authorities operate. It would be valuable and of enormous help to the British Dyslexia Association to know how to apply its resources, but it would also be of great value to the Government and to the Department of Education and Science. I know that the department has a difficulty in that it is the local education authorities who provide education. But now, after three or four years of operation of the Education Act, there should be a check into how it is operating.
My noble friend may tell us about the House of Commons Select Committee set up to look into the 1981 Education Act: that is, overall. The dyslexic side of it, the subject of this evening's Question, is, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, about 5 per cent. of the school population. The British Dyslexia Association operates on the basis of 4 per cent. for planning purposes. Again we need more research. I believe that, on 4 per cent., those coming into the schooling system every year who will be in need of special educational provision would be of the order of 30,000, to be added to the 300,000 in the school situation at any one time.
The noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, rightly said that we need teachers. When I became chairman of the British Dyslexia Association, I said, fine, it is simple. There were 278,000 teachers in the public sector eight to 10 years ago. I do not know what the figure is now. How does one impress upon them the problem of providing the teachers of the teachers? Why do we not just

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impress that upon the dozen or so teacher trainers—those who train the teachers—so that at least all teachers who come in subsequent years will have an idea what dyslexia is about? As the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, rightly said, teachers go through their teacher training with specific learning difficulties and dyslexia omitted entirely or taking up only half an hour or so in their whole three years of training as a teacher, or whatever the period is.
After Warnock, we tried in 1980 to be instrumental in setting up a unit in the department of education in Southampton University, with privately funded money again. It went on for three years. It could, I believe, have been a model, as Warnock suggested, for putting a positive dyslexia input into teacher training for post-graduate education. (I apologise to your Lordships for my scant knowledge of education, not having been to university.) That was positive. I am only sorry that in 1983–84, for lack of funds, we had to stop that.
I believe that research is and would be interesting but, more than that, it is vital and it would pay great dividends. We are talking of a group of people often with enormous potential. We are talking of a group of people who have a difference of ability about which it is possible to do something positive. One illuminates the minus side and enables the person to contribute enormously to society. I therefore believe, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, that this is an enormous waste and money spent economically would make sense.
I have one other suggestion, and there I shall leave it. The deputy chairman of the Warnock Committee was Mr. George Cook, who, I believe the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, would agree, is another of the vice-presidents of the British Dyslexia Association. He has for a long time suggested to the Government that there is a need for an independent professional advisory body to oversee the implementation of the 1981 Education Act. This was a suggestion of the Warnock Committee. I ask my noble friend to consider that for discussion.
8.25 p.m.
Earl Attlee: My Lords, when my noble friend Lord Addington stood up to make his maiden speech, I crossed my fingers. I remembered back to when I made my maiden speech in your Lordships' House as a dyslexic on dyslexia. I offered up a silent prayer, which went something like this: dear Lord, please let him make a good speech. My Lords, my prayer was answered. My noble friend made, to my mind, a very eloquent—I meant to say eloquent, not elegant, but in fact I felt it was both—speech. When he sat down, I thought, what a wonderful thing, we now have another dyslexic in your Lordships' House who will stand on his feet and preach what we believe.
I believe it is true that whatever your Lordships were discussing from sewers to amphibians, if I made a speech it would include some reference to dyslexia. It is an unfortunate fact that we live with, yet there are still people who do not believe that such a thing as dyslexia exists.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Ritchie of Dundee for introducing the debate and for informing me that I am apparently a "cross lateral". I am not
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sure that I fully appreciate what that is. It might be something like a Cross-Bencher. But I know that my brain is different from a non-dyslexic brain, and I have accepted that for a long time.
My noble friend Lord Ritchie mentioned application forms. It is a funny thing, but I have never yet managed to fill in an application form for anything and get it all right. What I would do without Tippex I honestly do not know.
I should like to mention two things. I was on the professional and executive register, that is, I did not have a job. I took all the tests. When I had finished, I was told there was one more—"We would like you to see our educational psychologist". Like a lamb to the slaughter, I went in and sat down. He started producing Lexicon cards. "Oh, this is an easy test—A, C, X, Y, B—Oh, I mean He said, "Ah, you're dyslexic". I said, "Doc, if you had asked me, I could have told you that". He said, "I went through all your test reports. We can always tell if you are telling the truth. It is obvious that you told the truth, but you made a lot of silly mistakes which a man of your IQ shouldn't make". I thought, "Yes, you're a bright man".
We held a meeting in your Lordships' House of people interested in dyslexia, and I talked to one of the educational psychologists afterwards. He was the first non-dyslexic who seemed to understand. I said to him, "I think that you actually have a glimmer of how my mind works". Indeed, my noble friend Lord Ritchie mentioned this in part. I said, "I am a dyslexic, the first one in the family. I am left-handed, as far as I know the first one in the family. I also suffer from migraine, as far as I know the first one in the family. Is there any correlation?". The expert looked at me and said, "We do not actually know, except that an awful lot of people who are dyslexic are also left-handed and suffer from migraine".
I now live in Hampshire. Across the road from me are very good friends who have a little boy who is dyslexic. On occasions he flies into the most awful tempers; he screams; he picks things up and throws them. His mother is very understanding. I was with her last night and we talked about her son because I said that I should be speaking about dyslexia in your Lordships' House tonight. She is very good and very sympathetic. I was explaining the awful frustration that builds up inside you so that the only thing to do is to hit something or someone or throw something.
Very early on this boy came to me and said, "I understand you suffer from the same thing as I do". I looked at him and said very coldly, "Do you mind? I am older than you and I have had dyslexia longer than you have". He gave a great big grin; and we are friends because with me he knows he is safe. He knows that I understand him: I understand his thought processes.
I said to his mother last night, "It is a very peculiar thing: when you are that age you find there is a great deal in physical contact". I find myself that when I meet him I just ruffle his hair and say "Hi". He will come into my house and come and sit down next to me; he will come and curl up in my armchair. He does that because he knows I am no danger to him and I am the only person he knows, apart from his teachers, who understands what he suffers. And, my Lords, if you are dyslexic you do suffer.

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I should like to ask the noble Baroness the Minister one question. I have read the Education Act 1981 several times, and each time I pick up something different. It is very interesting because they talk about the assessment of children with learning difficulties; but it seems to me the one thing they do not say is that a child with learning difficulties should be assessed by someone who is trained—and I stress the word "trained"—to look for and identify specific learning difficulties. If you get someone who does not understand dyslexia—and there are still many today who do not—they will say "Dyslexia; oh yes, we prefer to us the old-fashioned word and call them `lazy'." There are still teachers and head teachers who say that and believe it. There are doctors who will tell you that dyslexia has to do only with word blindness and not with numerical blindness. Therefore what chance have some of our children got when those who assess them have not been taught how to do it?
The noble Lord, Lord Renwick, mentioned the people who are training others to understand and find out what needs to be done. I am afraid that the Act as it stands is very well-meaning but if a child is dyslexic—and we have talked about figures and from 4 per cent. to 5 per cent. has been mentioned, although I believe the figure is probably far nearer 15 per cent.—what chance has he got unless the assessment is carried out by a trained and qualified person? If the noble Baroness can answer that, I shall be very grateful.
8.35 p.m.
Baroness Vickers: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, because he is so interested in education and has chosen this subject because he is an expert. The debate has been very helpful indeed. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for his maiden speech. It was excellent, well thought out and displayed a sense of humour. I am quite sure that he is going to do very well in this House and I hope that we shall hear him many times in the future. It must have taken a lot of courage to get up, even at this time of night, to talk about himself and about what he knows so well. I am sure we are all very grateful to him for the information he has given us.
The LEAs seem to be having difficulties at the moment. One voluntary organisation offered to sponsor teachers for the BDA diploma course in 1987-88. The local education authority replied that it would not be willing to release teachers for the course for so long a time—that is, one year. It is a lengthy course, but if it is necessary to have such a lengthy course, why cannot the association of teachers allow one of its teachers to go on one of these courses? It is essential, I think.
Dyslexia is not a disease. If you are a dyslexic you have a mind of your own and you can teach it to work. That is why we need teachers to help people in that way. Two noble Lords who spoke tonight have shown that they taught their minds to work and are getting down to things that they will enjoy doing in the future. All dyslexics are individuals. If you go into a room where there is a blind person or a spastic you can usually see that they are different, but a dyslexic looks
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perfectly normal—and indeed they are normal. I understand that every one who has dyslexia is different: it is an individualised trouble.
The learner moves step by step with simple material and the material becomes more and more complex as the teacher goes on. There are primary, essential and scientific ingredients in methods designed to set the dyslexic free to enable him or her to make full use of his or her gifts. But to be able to help them in this way it is essential to have experienced and well trained teachers. Dyslexia is a new disease. It was first written about in the medical journals in 1895 and since then research has been done into many apsects of the problem. It is interesting to note that Napoleon III, Hans Christian Andersen and Albert Einstein were all sufferers from dyslexia.
Today the needs of under-achieving children are not being met. For example, on an adult literacy scheme 60 per cent. came for help and most were adult dyslexics. Most were worried about whether they were going to pass on the trouble to their children: in other words, that history would repeat itself. The only way I can see of helping these people is to ensure that the Education Act 1981 is implemented so that it can help those with difficulties.
Dyslexia affects about 10 per cent. of the population but it is under-diagnosed and under-treated. The problem affects children from all backgrounds. Many people think that it involves only one type of child, but it is bound to involve those from all backgrounds. In Wiltshire the local education authority is setting up a working party and is screening children at the ages of seven and 11 years. Only reading ability is being assessed and the children whose reading age is two years behind their actual age are picked out and looked at in more detail. The rest of the children are left for the ordinary classroom teachers to look after and so they do not get the help that they need and should have.
How can we all help? I think it should be remembered that the dyslexic tires more quickly than a normal person and far greater concentration is needed. A dyslexic can read a passage correctly and yet not get the sense of it. A dyslexic may have difficulty with figures (for example, learning tables), reading music or anything which entails interpreting symbols. Learning foreign languages is usually a problem. A dyslexic is inconsistent in performance. A dyslexic may omit a word or words, or write one twice. A dyslexic suffers from constant nagging uncertainty. A dyslexic cannot take good notes because he cannot listen and write at the same time. When a dyslexic looks away from a book he is reading or a blackboard he is copying from, he may have great difficulty in finding his place again. A dyslexic works slowly because of his difficulties and so is always under pressure of time.
As these children are not getting adequate education in most schools, a number of parents are now saving up and sending them to boarding schools where they are getting good results, but of course parents do not want to be parted from their children. I hope that my noble friend may be able to give some assurance tonight after this short debate that there will be further help in the future.
8.41 p.m.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, it is a great privilege to be able to take part in this debate, and even more a privilege to listen to the speeches which we have heard this evening. This has been the best kind of debate in your Lordships' House. It was introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, in a spirit of inquiry rather than in a spirit of controversy. He has been asking for information from the Government about the implementation of the provisions of the 1981 Act. He has not been doing it in any other sense than of concern for those who suffer from dyslexia.
He has been followed by an enormously impressive series of speakers and I must draw attention particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Addington. It has already been said by the noble Lord, Lord Renwick, that he referred to an oral contribution and he certainly has made an oral contribution of some distinction in this House. The noble Lord, Lord Renwick, also said that he was one of those who did not use the written symbol as a reference. It is another of the admirable aspects of the debate this evening that we have had so many speeches from Members of your Lordships' House who do not speak from notes, and maybe do not do so because they are not able to do so, but who set an example to those who can do so and who far too often do. It has been valuable to have that contribution.
I have also learned a great deal myself. The concept of cross-laterality, to which the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, referred, struck very close home to me. I am left-handed, I have a much stronger right eye than my left eye and I certainly changed schools many times-10 schools before the age of 10 as an evacuee during the war. I do not qualify for one of his criteria. I am certainly the least mechanically gifted of individ-uals, and so that may explain why I have escaped the dyslexia problem.
But it has been of enormous value to me to learn the different circumstances in which dyslexia can be caused and, in particular, the effect it has on those in the schools, because the issue raises matters of public policy. I can do no more than echo the questions which have already been put to the Government. I have no special knowledge on these matters. On the question of the training of teachers, it is surely the case—is it not?—that teacher training is at the moment under continuing scrutiny and review under the CATE system. The question to the Government would be: does the CATE review provide for training in the teaching of dyslexic children?
I think we would also want to know more about the issues of research to which the noble Lord, Lord Renwick, referred. What resources are being put by the Department of Education and Science towards research into dyslexia and, above all, research into the teaching of dyslexics? Quite apart from medical knowledge, there is a lot of pedagogical knowledge which I should have thought was entirely relevant.
It will not be a surprise that I add from this Dispatch Box that the issue of resources is of concern. Local education authorities have found themselves with responsibilities since 1981, or may have recognised responsibilities which they did not recognise before, which have not found any place in educational budgets in the past and, possibly, do not often find a place now
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in educational budgets, or in the calculation of grant related expenditure or of educational block grants, but which deserve attention. It would be helpful if the noble Baroness could indicate in her reply more than just sympathy with that point of view but some positive contribution that her department is willing to make to solving the problem.
If I may also go beyond the educational sphere—in this respect I do not expect the noble Baroness to reply to me now—it so happens that I have spent most of today at the Manpower Services Commission in Sheffield, talking about the problems of disabled people in employment, about the operation of the quota scheme under the 1944 and 1966 Acts and about the operation of the disablement advisory service of the Manpower Services Commission.
Again this will not be in the noble Baroness's brief, but I wonder if in due course she could write to me about whether the disablement provisions under the quota scheme and under the disablement advisory service codes of practice, and the videos which I know have been produced, take account of the needs of the dyslexic in employment.
Whatever progress we make in the education of dyslexic children, we must also make progress in helping employers to understand how important it is to recognise the intellectual and other abilities of those who have reading, numerical and learning difficulties. I am afraid it appears that these will persist throughout life. But they ought not to be a barrier to employment any more than they are a barrier to education, and it ought to be a remit from government as a whole to the Department of Employment and the Manpower Services Commission to see to it that such disabilities are recognised with other more obvious physical disabilities in the way in which government approach the general issue of the disabled.
We have heard about the need to recognise special educational difficulties and to go from that to special educational provision. I think that the Government will have learned a great deal from this evening's contributions—contributions from those who are personally affected, including the noble Lord, Lord Addington. I believe that they have the basis on which to give us a comprehensive and accurate review of the current position under the law. I hope the Government will feel that they have a basis on which to show us the way forward.
8.48 p.m.
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, like other noble Lords, I too welcome the opportunity that this debate gives us to consider the operation of the 1981 Education Act as it affects children with dyslexia. I am grateful to the noble Lord. Lord Ritchie of Dundee, for asking the Question and indeed to all noble Lords for their interesting and well-informed contributions. Indeed, it fits remarkably well with the debate we had a little earlier this afternoon on the importance of the English language and the case for making it easier to learn. We have had a very educational afternoon.
I should also like to add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for his remarks, which are all the more valuable to us in the light of his own difficult experience. I feel sure that we may learn in the future from his performance in your Lordships' House

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that he has many of the compensating abilities to which the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, referred. My noble friend Lady Vickers referred to the many eminent people who have the same compensating abilities. I join those who look forward to hearing him on many more occasions in the future.
The Government do recognise the existence of dyslexia and they consider it vital to the educational welfare of dyslexic children, as it is to all children with disabilities, that their needs should be identified as early as possible. It is also crucial that they receive appropriate provision to meet those needs. To that end, the education of children with dyslexia has been considered by a number of committees established by the Government. Although that may be common knowledge to the people who have contributed to the debate, I think that it is worth a further reference. These committees include the Tizard Committee, which reported as long ago as 1972, and the Bullock and the Warnock Committees.
All these committees advised successive Secretaries of State that there are children with severe and long term difficulties in one or more areas of reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic whose general ability is at least average and for whom distinctive arrange-ments are necessary. These normally take the form of appropriate help in ordinary schools. The term "specific learning difficulties" seems to provide the best description of these children's problems, since it denotes the existence of an established problem for which help is required but does not imply any definite causation or exclusive categorisation. I believe that my noble friend Lord Renwick underlined the importance of this matter since the underlying causes vary from child to child so that an approach that works well in one case does not necessarily do so in another.
I was amused by the illustrations of the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, of the use of the word "dyslexia" and of its perhaps snobbish connotation. The Government recognise, however, that "dyslexia" is the term in the more common use, not least since it is included in the name of the principal voluntary bodies in the field. This is purely a question of semantics; the Government and local education authorities are well aware of the existence of this group of children and their needs.
Perhaps I may say at this stage that I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Renwick for his emphasis upon the co-operation which exists between the Department of Education and Science and the voluntary sector. We regard regular contact with the British Dyslexia Association, which is the umbrella organisation for all local associations, as very valuable to progress.
That said, I must stress at this stage the importance of not labelling children. The Warnock Committee advised strongly that the use of labels should be abolished, since it concentrated far too much on the child's main deficit, thus obscuring both his strength and other possible needs which should be met. It is on this philosophy that the 1981 Education Act is built. As the House knows, this Act abolished the concept of categorising children into one of ten main statutory handicaps. In its place it established the Warnock conception of "special educational need". This
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stresses the importance of looking at all aspects of the child's performance, his strengths as well as his weaknesses, and the help he receives both at home and at school. A child's special educational needs are thus related to his abilities as well as to his disabilities and to the nature of his interaction with his environment.
The aim of the 1981 Act is to require local education authorities to identify all children in their areas who have, or may have, special educational needs. This includes children with dyslexia as well as children with any other form of special educational need. Local education authorities cannot ignore these children any more than they can ignore a blind or physically disabled child.
I recognise the anxiety expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie, that some authorities may perhaps be more assiduous than others or more efficient in their use of resources. However, the Act does not totally rely on the actions of local authorities. It goes further and provides parents with a statutory right to request an assessment of their child's heeds if they are unhappy about his educational progress. The local education authority has to comply with this request unless, in its view, it is unreasonable. Thus any parent of a dyslexic child who believes that his child's needs are not being adequately met in his school may take the initiative by drawing the child to the attention of the authority and asking for an assessment. The same rights of appeal, either against a decision not to make a statement in respect of the child or against the educational provision specified in the statement, apply irrespective of whether the parent or the local education authority initiated the procedure.
It may be helpful if I digress for a moment to explain the Government's view of the operation of the Act in respect of which children should be the subject of statements and which should not. Perhaps it would be helpful to explain what the statement procedure means. If the local authority identifies a child whose needs require the authority to determine that special educational provision be made for him, that child should be given the benefit of a statement. The preparation of the statement involves a multi-professional assessment. It incorporates advice from medical, educational and psychological sources and from other sources, where appropriate. The statement should detail the identified special need provisions required and the steps which the authority proposes to meet those needs. The child who is the subject of a statement must be reviewed annually to ensure that the provision remains appropriate.
In addition, the Act requires that children with statements should have their needs reassessed fully before they reach the age of 144 years. The aim is to advise on the curriculum choice in the final years of schooling and to provide advanced data for other agencies likely to be closely involved with the young person when he or she leaves school.
Section 1 of the Act defines the child who falls within its scope. A child has special educational needs if he has a learning difficulty which calls for special educational provision to be made for him. The section further defines "learning difficulty" by reference to a child who has a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of his age or has a disability which either prevents or hinders him from

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making use of educational facilities of a kind generally provided in schools, within the area of the LEA concerned, for children of his age. In this context, special educational provision is defined as educational provision which is additional to, or otherwise different from, the educational provision made generally for children of his age in schools maintained by the local authority concerned.
Warnock envisaged that up to 20 per cent. of the school population might have special educational needs at some time during their school careers. The Act encompasses all the 20 per cent. but does not require that every child who has, or may have, special educational needs will be the subject of a statement made and maintained under the procedures laid down in Sections 5 and 7 of the Act. This is necessary only in respect of children whose specific educational needs are such as to call for the LEA to determine the provision to be made for them.
Perhaps at this point I can reassure the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, on the question of who carries out assessments. Under the regulations in the Act, it is required that the people making assessments of children are qualified educational psychologists. This means that such persons must be teachers in the first place. Also included must be a qualified medical practitioner and the head teacher. Therefore, the people involved in making the assessment are or certainly should be very well qualified to reach the right decision.
The deciding factors in determining what constitutes additional or otherwise different provision may vary from area to area depending on the range of provision normally available in an authority's schools. The department's Circular 1783 makes it clear that a statement is appropriate for all children who have complex learning difficulties as in all cases where a child is based in a special unit attached to an ordinary school, a special school, a non-maintained special school or an independent school approved for the purpose. On the other hand, formal procedures are not appropriate where ordinary schools provide special educational provisions from their own resources in the form of additional tuition or remedial provision; or, in normal circumstances, where the child attends a reading centre or unit for disruptive pupils. Perhaps that in some way will reassure the noble Lord, Lord Schon, on the point he raised.
Local education authorities are under a duty to make available appropriate provision to meet the needs of all children identified as having special educational needs, irrespective of whether they are the subject of a statement.
Section 1, therefore, in the Government's view provides for two groups of children with special educational needs: the majority, for whom a statement is unnecessary but for whom the LEA and the governors of the school concerned are under a duty to ensure that adequate provision is made and the smaller, more complex group for whom the LEA is under a duty to make and maintain a statement of special educational needs under Section 7 of the Act. This view was recently upheld by the High Court, but that ruling is currently the subject of appeal.
In the light of what I have just said, noble Lords will appreciate that the provisions of the Act provide
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opportunity for both schools and parents to identify any child with dyslexia. Once identified—as many speakers have said, that is the difficult part—the Act also ensures that the LEAs make the necessary provision to meet those needs.
During the course of the debate I have been questioned on what the Government have done to encourage better identification and provision for these children. First, following the Warnock Committee's recommendation, the Government commissioned five major research projects into aspects of dyslexia. One of these was a review of existing research in the field. The remaining four considered the prevalence, identification and teaching needs of groups of children with specific learning difficulties. The findings of these four projects were the subject of a seminar held in the Department of Education and Science in May 1984. All those involved in the field were invited to attend.
Secondly, the Government are concerned to promote better training of teachers for children with special educational needs. Training for teachers of children with special educational needs was one of the priority areas of in-service training supported under the department's grant scheme from 1983-84 to 1985-86 inclusive. Training of teachers of pupils with special educational needs in schools and in further education are both priority areas under the proposed arrangements for funding in-service training due to come into force in April this year.
Again, I believe it was the noble Lord, Lord Schon, who specifically asked about the number of people who have been trained. Apart from the general initial training and in-service training, the number of people trained on government programmes to teach pupils with special educational needs in mainstream schools has increased over the years since the implementation of the 1981 Act in 1983. Although the figures are not, understandably, complete after 1986 the total has reached some 1,183 such teachers.
In addition to the priority areas I have just mentioned, under these new arrangements local education authorities will be able to support courses of their own choosing to meet local needs. These courses will attract 50 per cent. central Government funding. The teaching diploma of the British Dyslexia Association, to which my noble friend Lord Renwick referred, is a good example of what will be eligible to be considered by LEAs for this purpose. I hope that that goes some way towards reassuring the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, about the Government's positive attitude.
These courses are of great assistance to existing teachers. The Government also recognise the importance of including children with special educational needs in courses for initial teacher training. Advice offered to the then Secretary of State in 1984 in the report of the Advisory Committee on the Supply and Education of Teachers (ACSET) recommended that all initial teacher training courses should include elements concerned with special educational needs to be determined by the Secretary of State. That recommendation was accepted and is included in the Government's policy on the future supply and training of teachers set out in the White Paper Better Schools. Therefore, it is now being implemented. While these elements do not

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concentrate exclusively on children with dyslexia, their needs are considered within the broader framework of children with special educational needs.
I was asked some specific questions to which I shall endeavour to respond, at any rate in part. My noble friend Lord Renwick suggested that there should be an advisory body on special education. The recommendation of the Warnock Committee that there should be an advisory body to advise the Secretary of State was, in fact, rejected by the previous Secretary of State. The question has been raised again as a result of the evidence of Professor Klaus Wedell given to the Select Committee of Inquiry on Special Education. Any further consideration by the Government will need to await the findings of the Select Committee.
I believe the noble Lord, Lord Addington, suggested that there were perhaps better opportunities in the private sector. In the past dyslexia institutes have tended to suggest to parents that the needs of their children can best be met in the private sector. While it is true that a number of independent schools offer specific provision for dyslexic children, local education authorities are increasingly improving their own provision. In many areas, like East Sussex, this is being done by means of a peripatetic support team and by in-service training for teachers in the mainstream schools.
All local education authorities are aware of the new arrangements for inset training and under these arrangements the LEAs can, as I said, support courses of their own choosing and they will attract the 50 per cent. government funding.
The noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, specifically asked whether the CATE review covered the training of teachers for dyslexics. I can assure him that the approval of initial courses of teacher training by CATE includes a scrutiny of courses concerning pupils with special educational needs.
I hope that I have been able to respond to the debate in the spirit of all the contributions, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, and have said enough to inform the House that the Government believe that the 1981 Act provides the framework for identifying and meeting the needs of dyslexic children. Our policy on initial and in-service teacher training has not ignored those needs. Of course it is always possible to do more but considerable progress has been made since the Act was implemented in April 1983.
Noble Lords may be aware that the Government have been monitoring implementation of the Act by means of a major research project carried out by the University of London Institute of Education, whose report was presented to the Department of Education and Science on the 31st December last year. A copy of that report will be made available in the Library in your Lordships' House.
As my noble friend Lord Renwick told us, the Select Committee on Education, Science and the Arts in another place has just commenced an inquiry into the needs of special education. I cannot give him very much information on the progress made by the committee since its inquiry has only just started, but the Government intend to review the provisions of the
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Act in the light of both those reports and in the light of the comments made in today's debate.
Once again let me say that I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, for having raised this issue today. I may not have been able to respond to all the points made but if I discover when reading Hansard that I can do so, I shall try to follow them up—in particular a couple of points raised by the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh. The debate has given us a rare opportunity to reflect on the needs of some of our more disadvantaged children, and I thank all the participants for their very helpful contributions.
House adjourned at ten minutes past nine o'clock.