Lords Sitting of 13 December 1989

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Bradford.
Lord Acton—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

East Timor: Policy
Lord Hatch of Lusby Lord Hatch of Lusby asked Her Majesty's Government:
What is their policy concerning East Timor.
Lord Reay: My Lords, our policy is to support the role of the United Nations Secretary General in encouraging a bilateral settlement between Portugal and Indonesia over East Timor. Such a settlement should take fully into account the interests of the people of East Timor.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, will the Minister affirm that this Government stand by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution No. 1514 of 1960 asserting the right of self-determination to all peoples? If so, will the British Government take the initiative in urging the United Nations to hold a plebiscite in East Timor so that the people there can decide what their future should be?
Lord Reay: No, my Lords. In 1982 the United Nations Secretary General was asked to promote talks between Portugal and Indonesia with a view to reaching a bilateral settlement. We support that process and believe it is the right way forward. We believe that it is the most realistic policy to pursue and in that we are supported by the majority of our European Community partners.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, is it not the case that since 1975 a cruel but forgotten war has been waged in East Timor at the instance, mainly, of Indonesia and that over 100,000 people have been killed in that war? Further, is it not the case that Her Majesty's Government have been selling arms to Indonesia; and against the background of what the noble Lord said in his initial reply is that not inconsistent? Can he say whether it is the policy of Her Majesty's Government to sell arms in those circumstances? Will the Government use the offices of the United Nations to see whether or not this war can be brought to a just end and self-determination given to the people of East Timor?
Lord Reay: My Lords, with regard to the question about arms, arms are sold to assist Indonesia's legitimate external needs. We do not include items likely to be used for internal repression. We are concerned about infringements of human rights wherever they occur, including Indonesia. The Indonesian Government have been made aware of
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our concerns, including those relating to recent incidents.
Lord Rea: My Lords, as a member of the IPU-sponsored delegation of parliamentarians from Britain who were allowed a fleeting visit to East Timor in March this year, I ask one or two quick supplementary questions—or perhaps one. Is the Minister aware that the delegation was supposed to meet Bishop Belo, the head of the Catholic Church in East Timor, but that when we arrived he was not available for us to visit? Is he concerned for the safety of Bishop Belo, who is sometimes outspoken in his criticism of the Indonesian authorities with regard to human rights, particularly in view of the violent dispersal of a group of supporters outside his house on 4th November this year?
Can he comment on the EC's point made to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights last month that the human rights situation in East Timor is still far from good, especially as regards not allowing access for recognised human rights groups like Amnesty International to visit East Timor?
Lord Reay: My Lords, I was aware that the noble Lord was a member of the delegation which visited East Timor last March. Our understanding is that most members of the delegation found conditions rather better than they had expected. The noble Lord will remember that the delegation was allowed to visit Bekora prison immediately it asked to do so and was allowed access to prisoners without Indonesian officials being present.
The incident on 4th November outside the house of Bishop Belo is a matter of concern to us and to the European Community and we shall continue to watch the situation.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, I apologise for rising again, but can the noble Lord say how the Government are able to ensure that the arms sold to the Government of Indonesia are not used in the war against the people of East Timor?
Lord Reay: My Lords, all I can say is that we have no evidence that military items sold to Indonesia have been used in East Timor.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, the noble Lord answered no to my first supplementary question. Do I understand that to mean that the Government do not accept Resolution 1514 of the United Nations General Assembly asserting the right of all peoples to self-determination? How are the Government attempting to put that resolution into effect if all they are concerned about is negotiations between Portugal and Indonesia? Is it not the right of the people of East Timor to decide their own future? Will the Government insist through the United Nations that that is carried out?
Lord Reay: My Lords, the talks between Portugal and Indonesia which we hope will lead to a bilateral settlement are taking place under the aegis of the Secretary General of the United Nations. He was requested by the United Nations to do exactly that.

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I have no doubt that any agreement reached under his auspices is bound to take proper account of the interests of the people of East Timor.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, the noble Lord must make the Government's position clear. Do they accept the United Nations resolution of 1960 asserting the right of self-determination? The first answer the Minister gave was no. I cannot believe that the British Government do not accept that resolution.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I answered no when the noble Lord asked whether we would take any initiatives other than those I have mentioned. At the moment we are not taking any initiative except to encourage the process, leading, we hope, to a bilateral settlement under the auspices of the United Nations.

Fish Stocks: Conservation Methods
2.45 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Croy Lord Campbell of Croy asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether conservation of endangered sea fish stocks can be carried out by methods which do not involve the wasteful return to the sea of quantities of dead fish which have been caught and killed in nets.
The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Sanderson of Bowden): My Lords, I agree that discarding fish is wasteful. We are working with the fishing industry to develop technical conservation measures which minimise the number of undersized fish which are caught in nets and then have to be discarded.
Lord Campbell of Croy: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that Answer, and I recognise the difficulties. But cannot human ingenuity devise some improvements in the system so that boats do not have to dump fish of high quality, of species which are scarce and in demand? For example, could there not be better co-ordination among all concerned when a quota is approaching completion?
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, I recognise my noble friend's concern. However, in a mixed fishery of various species, as we have in the North Sea, the issues involved are complex. We need to be sure that whatever measures are introduced are effective and free from major disadvantages. A consultation paper was issued to the industry on 14th November and further discussions were held on 7th December. We hope shortly to be in a position to approach the European Commission with agreed proposals.
Lord Mason of Barnsley: My Lords, is the Minister aware that a major problem is the use of nylon monofilament gill nets? These large nets break, sink into the sea and become ghost nets for years, catching fish, diving seabirds and seals. If the Government
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were prepared to ban their use they could advance conservation and also curb pollution of the seas caused by dead and rotting fish in the nets.
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, we are dealing with two separate issues here. As the noble Lord will know only too well, we are dealing with the problem of monofilament nets as it relates to inshore fisheries and the difficulties caused particularly in the area south of Barra and north of Northern Ireland. The question we must address regarding white fish stocks is how to prevent discards, which are large. To that end we have several measures, including further consideration of square mesh as opposed to diamond mesh and a reduction in the number of meshes around the cod ends. These measures have been produced by my department in co-operation with the Scottish Fishermen's Federation to get round a difficult question and to try to bring about effective conservation.
Lord Carmichael of Kelvingrove: My Lords, the whole House will agree that this is a difficult problem and that everyone is looking for a solution. I am pleased that the Minister has been in close touch with the Scottish Fishermen's Federation. Has he given thought to the federation's suggestion concerning the type of gear carried on fishing boats, which if illegally used can frustrate any progress on net size? Has he considered the federation's suggestion that there should be only one net per boat? Is he aware that industrial fishing vessels using small nets frequently collect immature fish? Is he sure that the by-catch of 10 per cent. is enforced rigidly, and is it not perhaps too high?
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his support of one of the measures in the consultation paper which was indeed suggested by the Scottish Fishermen's Federation. I am in almost daily touch with the federation on these matters. The prohibition of the carriage of both the 90 millimetre net and the 70 millimetre net on board the same ship is a matter we are addressing. I have to point out and warn the noble Lord that there are difficulties in this matter; in particular, difficulties with some of our European partners. It is absolutely no good going ahead with conservation measures that are not agreed with Brussels as well.
Regarding the other matters, the answer is: yes, there are problems with industrial fishing; but, as the noble Lord will recognise, there is also a considerable amount of financial gain involved not just to other countries but also to Britain. Therefore we must move carefully if we wish to curb that particular fishery.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, is the Minister satisfied that our partners, especially the Danes who are very competent at industrial fishing, are sticking to the by-limits of 10 per cent., or are they in fact sticking to the agreement made some years ago?
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, in answering the noble Lord, I should say that we do our very best to ensure that enforcement is effective. As he will no doubt recall, the very famous case

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concerning a Danish fisherman who was not entirely in charge of his own vessel in Stornoway has been dealt with by my enforcement department.
Lord Campbell of Croy: My Lords, has not the matter become even more urgent in the past few days because of the alarming new proposals put forward by the EC Commission for severe reductions in the quotas, especially as regards haddock and cod?
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, the short answer to that question is yes. Indeed, Her Majesty's Government, along with many other member states, have made quite clear to the Commission that the proposals which have come forward from the Fisheries Commissioner, and their timing, are wholly unacceptable at this stage.

Rover Group Disposal
2.51 p.m.
Lord Dean of Beswick Lord Dean of Beswick asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they have received any approach from the European Commission for repayment of the recently revealed £38 million given to British Aerospace in the Rover transaction.
The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Trefgarne): My Lords, discussions are taking place between officials of the DTI and the European Commission, but no conclusions have yet been reached.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that Answer. However, as time has moved on, is it not quite apparent that this sweetener which was given to the group could in fact be only one sweetener in a basket of many? Can the noble Lord tell us whether other sweeteners were offered and taken up? If that is so, why was your Lordships' House not told about this on previous occasions when the matter was raised?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I can assure the noble Lord that we have been scrupulous in observing the proprieties and have made the necessary disclosures through the Estimates and other reporting procedures.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords, before probing the matter in this House, should we not wait for the report of the official committee which was set up in another place which has the power to get to all of the facts? We would then be probing on the facts and not on guesswork.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I have some sympathy with the point just made by my noble friend. However, it is not for me to set down the Questions on the Order Paper.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, were not the two original Statements of 13th and 14th July 1988 made in this House? Therefore, is there not a burden on this Chamber to ensure that these Statements
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were not in any way misleading? Further, would it not be true to say that this case would not be re-opened by the Commission if the Commission had given its full approval to the terms of the deal at the time it was struck? If the Commission had done so, there would be no question of re-opening the matter as regards the conditions of the transaction.
Moreover, is it not the case that on 13th July 1988 the then Secretary of State announced that the European Commission had that morning decided the outline terms upon which it would be willing to close its state aid procedure? He then went further on the following day and said:
"As I informed the House yesterday, the Commission has approved the final terms of the acquisition after certain changes in the structure and scale of the March agreement".—[Official Report, 14/7/88; col. 981.]
How could the Commission approve the final terms if it did not know them? Further, if the Commission did not know them—as has recently been revealed—was that statement true, misleading or false?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, perhaps may answer just two of those supplementary questions put to me by the noble Lord. He raised first the point about reporting to Parliamenent. Detailed financial matters are always reported to Parliament through the medium of Estimates; and, as the noble Lord will be aware, these are not normally laid in this House.
To turn to the question about the European Commission, we had reached agreement with the Commission when these additional items became necessary. We took the view that they were consistent with the Commission's terms as they did not affect the competitiveness of Rover Group production and therefore disclosures were not necessary. Any question of re-opening the procedure would have jeopardised the deal.
That last point is rather important. I should remind your Lordships that the Rover Group had lost some £3,000 million in the period leading up to the deal being concluded by my noble friend. Moreover, the group was in prospect of having to make a further £1,000 million or £2,000 million of investment which it did not remotely have. Therefore, I am certain that the Government at the time, in the form of my noble friend, were quite right to see to it that the Rover Group passed into the private sector.
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, would my noble friend not agree that the department which I had the honour to head during this particular time demonstrated a commitment to 1992 and to the European Community which is unmatched by any other department or by any other government within the European Community? Will he further agree that as part of my responsibilities as Secretary of State I had to take into account not only the claims of Brussels but also the claims of 40,000 people who worked for Rover, and their families; the 50,000 people who work for the distributors, and their families; and the many tens of thousands of people who work for the suppliers of Rover?

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Moreover, will my noble friend also agree that over the years of this decade we have done more to remove the causes of unemployment in this country than any other government in the past?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I readily pay tribute to my noble friend's enthusiasm for these matters when he was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Indeed, since I joined the department in a more junior capacity I have been running hard to keep up with him.
Lord Barnett: My Lords, can the Minister explain why further payments would have jeopardised the deal if these had nothing to do with the deal because it had already been settled?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, had the matter been re-opened with the European Commission, I have no doubt that it would have taken some time to conclude further discussions. The fact of the matter is that British Aerospace was highly dubious about entering into the deal. I have a feeling—indeed, I think that it was the view at the time, and it was the right one—that the company would have walked away.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, I must repeat my question: on what basis was it stated that the Commission had approved the final terms of the acquisition?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, the Commission had concluded the application made at that time by my noble friend's department. It had agreed the outline of the arrangements which were in place. The details which were subsequently discussed did not affect the outline.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, is there not a much deeper principle involved here? According to the published correspondence between the chairman of British Aerospace and the Secretary of State, there was a deliberate attempt to withhold information and thereby deceive Parliament.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I am afraid I must tell the noble Lord that that is quite incorrect; there was never any question of misleading Parliament.
Noble Lords: Withdraw!
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, if that is the case, why was it that in the correspondence offers were made as to different methods of withholding this information from Parliament? There was a time when deceiving Parliament was a cause for resignation. Therefore, has parliamentary and political morality sunk so low in the past 25 years that this is no longer the case?
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I do not believe that the noble Lord has studied with his usual care the correspondence to which he refers. However, if he does so he will find that he is mistaken.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: My Lords, perhaps I may appeal to the Leader of the House in this matter. Am I not right in thinking that if biting and offensive remarks are made it is in order to move that the Standing Order relating to such remarks be read by the Clerk?
The Lord Privy Seal (Lord Belstead): My Lords, I believe that my noble and learned friend is right, but on this occasion we should do well to move on to the next business.

Local Government Structure
3 p.m.
Lord Hooson Lord Hooson asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will, as a matter of urgency, look at the structure of local government to determine whether there is now a case for a national system of single tier local government based largely on the district councils.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment (Lord Hesketh): My Lords, we do not intend to commission a study of the structure of local government. As my honourable friend the Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities recently told the Association of County Councils centenary conference,
"We certainly have no intention of embarking on any major re-organisation of the structure of local government".
Lord Hooson: My Lords, does the Minister agree that it is now generally recognised that the 1972 reforms were a mistake and that much of local government is now administered over too large an area and by authorities that are too remote?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, it is fair to say that the Government have introduced a number of reforms since 1979. I can only draw to the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, the words of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State who said that as a pragmatist he believed that another reorganisation was something that we needed like a hole in the head, and that reorganisation is not on the agenda.
Lord Wallace of Coslany: My Lords, will the Minister explain why, after government action, local government in London is entirely different from that of the rest of the country?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, to an extent the local government of London has always been different from that of the rest of the country.
Lord Bottomley: My Lords, does the Minister agree that the proposal about local government made by the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, is one of the wisest for a long time? I urge him to press his colleagues seriously to consider the matter. As one who served on a district council for 20 years, I can speak with some knowledge and authority. I would go so far as to say that the ratepayers under that system received a better service than they have ever received.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, all I believe that it would be fair to say is that a considerable element of reform has taken place during the past decade. Many in local government—and this was particularly so when I was at the Guildhall last night—are happy to consider the prospect of calm waters and a peaceful future ahead.
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, is the Minister aware that while there is a great deal to be said for district councils, they are unsuitable for functions such as governing London? One of the great defects that we have instituted by what the Minister calls "reform" is that the capital has no body which is responsible for it as a whole. Will he therefore look again at that question? Since the Tory Government abolished the late-lamented London County Council, have we not been without a body responsible for London as a whole? That need is noticed by every citizen of London every day that we live.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: My Lords, I did not notice it this morning.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, the Question on the Order Paper goes rather wider than the capital. I suggest that the Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, concerns the possibility of introducing a single tier of local government. We believe that for the average man in the street, albeit on the Clapham omnibus, the county is still something with which he identifies more closely than any other part of local government.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, do the calm waters and peaceful future to which the Minister just referred include the provision of community care?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, that question goes rather wider than the Question that lies on the Order Paper.
Lord Monkswell: My Lords, we shall all have been interested in the Minister's response when he said that everyone, including the passenger on the Clapham omnibus, appreciates the benefits of the county council. When is it proposed to reintroduce the metropolitan county councils, which include the GLC and the large metropolitan counties that existed before the 1985 Act?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am sure that when the noble Lord comes to read the Official Report he will see that my answer was couched in terms of the suggestion that the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, might have been referring to a single tier of government.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, the competition for the ministerial under-statement of 1989 is still open. The Minister has made a valiant attempt to close it with the statement that a number of reforms have been made over the past 10 years. Does he agree that all those reforms have tended to weaken local government in favour of central government? Does he agree that the reform that is required—although we do not dissent from the view of the noble Lord, Lord Hooson—is to give local
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government wider powers and greater relevance to people's lives?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I believe that government should provide a form of institution with the least possible inconvenience to the public, which is an approach slightly different from that taken by the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh.

Business
3.4 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 Lord, Lord Parry, and the noble Earl, Lord Perth. On the principle that the mover is allowed approximately 15 minutes and that the Minister should rise to reply not less than 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the debate, in the case of the noble Lord's debate the number of speakers is such that it is not necessary to propose a formal time limit, but I am sure that noble Lords will ensure that their speeches conform to a length in the spirit of these short debates. In that of the noble Earl, it means that all other speeches should be limited to a maximum of nine minutes.

Personal Bills: Select Committee
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Aberdare): My Lords, I beg to move the first Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That a Select Committee on Personal Bills be appointed, to which all Petitions for Personal Bills shall stand referred, and that as proposed by the Committee of Selection the Lords following, with the Chairman of Committees, be named of the Committee: —

Airedale, L.

Campbell of Alloway, L.

David, B.

Murton of Lindisfarne, L.

Templeman, L.

Wilberforce, L.

—(The Chairman of Committees.)

On Question, Motion agreed.

Statutory Instruments: Select Committee
The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I beg to move the second Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That a Select Committee of seven Lords be appointed to join with a Committee appointed by the Commons to consider—
(1) Every instrument which is laid before each House of Parliament and upon which proceedings may be or might have been taken in either House of

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Parliament, in pursuance of an Act of Parliament; being

(a) a statutory instrument, or a draft of a statutory instrument;

(b) a scheme, or an amendment of a scheme, or draft thereof, requiring approval by statutory instrument;

(c) any other instrument (whether or not in draft), where the proceedings in pursuance of an Act of Parliament are proceedings by way of an affirmative resolution; or

(d) an order subject to special parliamentary procedure;

but excluding any Order in Council or draft Order in Council made or proposed to be made under paragraph 1 of Schedule 1 to the Northern Ireland Act 1974.
(2) Every general statutory instrument not within the foregoing classes, and not required to be laid before or to be subject to proceedings in the Commons only, but not including Measures under the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919 and instruments made under such Measures;
with a view to determining whether the special attention of the House should be drawn to it on any of the following grounds—

(i) that it imposes a charge on the public revenues or contains provisions requiring payment to be made to the Exchequer or any government department or to any local or public authority in consideration of any licence or consent or of any services to be rendered, or prescribes the amount of any such charge or payments;

(ii) that it is made in pursuance of any enactment containing specific provisions excluding it from challenge in the courts, either at all times or after the expiration of a specific period;

(iii) that it purports to have retrospective effect where the parent statute confers no express authority so to provide;

(iv) that there appears to have been unjustifiable delay in its publication or in the laying of it before Parliament;

(v) that there appears to have been unjustifiable delay in sending a notification under the proviso to subsection (1) of section 4 of the Statutory Instruments Act 1946, where an instrument has come into operation before it has been laid before Parliament;

(vi) that there appears to be a doubt whether it is intra vires or that it appears to make some unusual or unexpected use of the powers conferred by the statute under which it is made;

(vii) that for any special reasons its form or purport call for elucidation;

(viii) that its drafting appears to be defective; or

on any other ground which does not impinge on its merits or on the policy behind it, and to report their decision with the reasons thereof in any particular case.
That the Lords following, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, be named of the Committee:

Airedale, L.

Ashbourne, L.

Blatch, B.

Boston of Faversham L.

Brooks of Tremorfa, L.

Oxfuird, V.

Shaughnessy, L.

That two be the quorum of the Committee.
That the Committee have power to agree with the Committee appointed by the Commons in the appointment of a Chairman.
That the Committee have power to appoint one or more Sub-Committees severally to join with any Sub-Committee or Sub-Committees appointed by the Committee appointed by the Commons; and to refer to such Sub-Committee or Sub-Committees any of the matters referred to the Committee.
That it be an instruction to the Committee that they do not consider any instrument which is directed by Act of Parliament to be laid before and to be subject to proceedings in the Commons only; and that the Committee do not join with the Committee appointed by the Commons in considering any such instrument.
That it be a further instruction to the Committee that, before reporting that the special attention of the House be drawn to any instrument, the Committee do afford to any Government department concerned therewith an opportunity of furnishing orally or in writing to them or to any Sub-Committee of the Committee such explanations as the department think fit.
That the Joint Committee have leave to report from time to time.
That the Committee do meet with the Committee appointed by the Commons on Tuesday 19th December at a quarter-past four o'clock.—(The Chairman of Committees.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Rural and Suburban Communities: Change
3.5 p.m.
Lord Parry Lord Parry rose to call attention to the post-war changes in the rural and suburban communities of Britain; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in the hurly-burly politics of Wales at any time over the past 40, 30 or 20 years, it would hardly have been thought likely that I should be rising in your Lordships' House at this time to put forward the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. Yet here I am. It would have been thought less likely that I should have been citing in aid the Financial Times, which I have with me because last Friday, almost anticipating the discussion that I hoped we might have in the Chamber, it produced a supplement which I consider to be important and basic to that discussion.
The supplement was headed by an article by Bridget Bloom. I know that many of your Lordships

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will have read it. In the course of the next 15 minutes, I shall attempt to summarise part of it so that it can be read into Hansard and be a part of our record. I am grateful to the noble Lords who have put down their names to take part in the debate and to those who are in the Chamber. I am especially looking forward to the speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester who has been in touch with me about some of the concerns that we share.
In the article, the Financial Times claimed that there was nothing short of an industrial revolution in reverse taking place in the rural areas of Great Britain. That is an interesting concept in itself because if a revolution is an explosion of energy then we should at some time expect to see an implosion of return force. It has been a mighty long time coming as the industrial areas and the industrial cities have sucked out of the rural areas some of the brightest and best of their talents and their resources. Bridget Bloom quoted Professor Hall of Reading University who a couple of years ago said that a profound decentralisation of the population was taking place on a large spatial scale. He went on to define two areas in Britain that were obtaining some benefit out of the commercial and industrial changes that have taken place over the past 30 or 40 years.
Most of us are used to referring to the golden triangle and its importance and the benefits to the people who live within it. Professor Hall referred to the golden belt and the golden horn and suggested that developments were taking place along the motorways which were to the real benefit of the small communities and some of the older towns and rural communities that were sited within them. None of us will quarrel with that. We have a similar example along the M4 which is only history repeating itself, because when Isambard Kingdom Brunel pushed the Great Western Railway westward from London there happened by accident the development of small commercial and industrial villages which became small towns and communities.
In the article to which I have drawn attention Professor Howard Newby of Essex University is mentioned. He now heads the Economic and Social Research Council. He declared in a ringing phrase,
"for the first time since the industrial revolution, technological change is allowing rural areas to compete on an equal basis with towns and cities for employment".
The professor went on to say:
"The most obvious sign in the countryside itself of the new rural revolution is, without doubt, the spread of 'development'".
It is interesting that throughout the article the word "development" is always put in inverted commas. The article goes on to describe "development" as:
"a proliferation of new houses, housing estates, new roads and motorways, superstores and business parks which you will see … on a drive northwards from London into East Anglia—through Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, past provincial centres such as Ipswich, Norwich and Cambridge and around a score or two of once sleepy market towns such as Woodbridge, Diss, Wymondham or King's Lynn".
The professor says:
"The same phenomenon can be observed westwards from London, beyond the Home Counties. Professor Hall defines the Golden Belt as embracing Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Oxfordshire
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and Northamptonshire, as well as Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. The Golden Horn, he argues, stretches from the Isle of Wight to Lincolnshire and takes in Hampshire and West Sussex too".
That means that either accidentally or on purpose there has been a spreading of the benefits of the industrial commercial society at precisely the time when the heart of our great cities has been emptying. When we found in the gracious Speech from the Throne the other day the Government's reference to bringing in legislation to restore the depradation and decay that has gone on in the inner cities, it seemed to some of us that that should be extended to the towns and villages—the urban and rural areas with which we are familiar in England and Wales.
There are two critical reasons, the experts say, why this movement is taking place. One is the communications revolution, the revolution in the art and state of technology which makes it possible for individuals to run their enterprises from rural settings now just as easily as they once did from the centre of cities—in fact more easily. All of us have been sad and have examined the problem from time to time, but this has coincided with the decline of agriculture as the basic underpinning of the economy of the rural areas.
The problems faced in agriculture have themselves strangely enough given new opportunities in the sense that new uses have had to be found for land. New employment has had to be found for people, usually based on the land. The challenge has been to people to move out into the rural areas.
The continuing loss of jobs in agriculture has meant that any job that can be created in rural areas is vital. I am glad that there is agreement on this; it is difficult to be sure how many jobs have been created in the rural areas because of the strategies, the devices used by successive governments. I shall come back to that in a moment.
In the three years to last January, for example, under the new unemployment statistical analysis it is possible to point out that there was a decline in unemployment in some of those areas that I have listed, such as Norfolk, Suffolk, Devon and Dorset, and even in Cleveland there was a falling off. However, I totally agree with the article in the Financial Times; there is a downside to these developments. I keep saying that I agree with the Financial Times. In Welsh politics we used to say that The Times was as much behind the Tories as the Tories were behind the times. That was one of our endearing little quips in our arguments.
Today I am happy to say that I agree with the Financial Times in many of the points that are made in the article, particularly that there is a downside to the developments. All the bodies such as the Rural Development Board and the Rural Development Council and others which are concerned realise that the downside weighs very heavily on the future and the prospects of the rural community. Village schools are still closing and for 15 per cent. of the rural population without use of a car, access to medical facilities, shopping and other services is difficult. There are pockets of real poverty persisting.
I wish to invite noble Lords in a sense to come with me on another journey, the one which I take

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when my duties here are ended every week. We go out of Paddington westward on the splendid 125 train. The first part of the journey is comfortable and we live in the style to which we have increasingly grown accustomed. As we head westwards, it is possible to be very comfortable on the train. But the further west we go, the less efficient the service becomes.
That is true of the economy of Great Britain: the further out one moves from the centre, the more difficult are the living conditions for people. Noble Lords may wish to come all the way with me and leave the trunk route at Swansea—most people leave it at Port Talbot because they come to London using their company car or their personal vehicle and park at Port Talbot. That is what I did on Tuesday; I am not dodging the issue. People avoid getting off the train at Swansea and climbing into a dilapidated DMU unit or a utility springer train, finding themselves almost as part of some Hogarth cartoon of medieval discomfort as they rock westwards to the place where I grew up.
I shall tell noble Lords a word or two about the town from which I came. At the turn of the century its population was rising towards 9,000. Its population today is something less than 3,000. That reflects the drain, the blood loss, the energy loss of the rural areas of Britain that has happened throughout our lifetime. The most melancholy thing we had to do was to go to the railway station which we had in Nayland in the blissful days before Lord Beeching. We had to go there and see our friends off to find work in the industrial conurbations.
Noble Lords might come to the conclusion that everything is fine in Great Britain and that such things do not go on any more, but they do. It is just that we are too far away to notice. If we are looking for a real villain in this perhaps we should look at the preoccupation that we have had with the centralisation of resources when we might have been far better had we localised them and kept them safely based in the community.
The population of the town which I know was about 3,000. As various events have occurred, such as the closure of the naval dockyard, trained and educated personnel have moved away and enriched other communities as they depleted our own. The Trinity House service base for the whole of Wales closed down. The fish market closed down and the fishing fleet moved away. All the time it was a story of decisions being taken outside the community but which affected the community. That community had no means of representing itself against the decisions taken to its disadvantage.
I am anxious to insist in our debate today that we do not become smug when some of the policies work effectively and some of the areas benefit, and we do not assume that there is a universal benefit and that life in Great Britain, as we move towards 1990, is comfortable and easy for everybody. In many ways it is more difficult for people living in a small country town today than it was in the days of my childhood. There are fewer services. We have five chapels without a resident minister. Two churches which
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once had a vicar and two curates are now staffed by one vicar. We have support services on the private side which have closed down. There are support services on the public side starved of funding.
I know that the Minister is a reasonable and intelligent man but it would be quite wrong if, when he rises to speak in the debate, he were to lead the House into an easy assumption that everything that has been done in the past 10 years has been absolutely marvellous and that what we need is more of the same. I was chairman of the Wales Tourist Board when the change of government occurred. I must say that I used to prefer it when I was sitting on the other side of the Chamber looking this way. The incoming Government immediately carried out an analysis of all quangos and boards in order to see which should be swept away. The word "quango", incidentally, was a term of abuse. What I find fascinating is that, 10 years on, many of these boards are strengthened. They have greater powers than they have ever had and the present Government boast of the successes that they have achieved. However, when Professor Beryl examined the Wales Tourist Board, he found it to be cost effective and doing a good job. I was chairman at the time. I shall quote from the annual report of the Wales Tourist Board, which shows one effective contribution to the economy of the rural areas of Wales. It states:
"Total revenue from staying visitors in Wales in 1988 is therefore estimated … to be in the order of £740 million, an increase of some 6 per cent. on 1987 … Wales will have earned at least £375 million from day visitors, giving a total revenue figure of about £1,115 million, at current prices, during 1988".
I am now into the final minute allotted to me so I cannot talk about demography. However, I can give a reminder concerning a quotation from another article in The Times that:
"the lush fields and country lanes of rural Britain sometimes conceal social problems of a very similar nature to those of the inner cities, where poverty is more immediately visible. A study two years ago by the Anglican diocese of Hereford—the most rural in the Church of England—which drew on an unpublished Department of the Environment investigation of five rural areas concluded that 25 per cent. of all households in the sample areas were living in or on the margins of poverty".
Perhaps we shall hear something more about that. I rest my case. I beg to move for Papers.
3.22 p.m.
Lord Addington: My Lords, I wish to thank the noble Lord, Lord Parry, for bringing this matter to the attention of your Lordships. When considering this question I had to think long and hard about the changes that have occurred since the last war. I must admit that I am at something of a disadvantage in this respect as I have not seen as many of those years as other noble Lords.
The noble Lord, Lord Parry, referred specifically to the problems of Wales and mid-Wales. I shall concentrate my remarks more upon the other side of the country, the East Coast, for the simple reason that it is an area of which I have far greater experience. One of the main problems that occurs in our rural society is that housing in part of the areas referred to as the "golden triangle" or the "golden horn" is rapidly becoming too expensive for anyone who is not on a good salary. Spiralling prices

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have been noticeable in places such as Norfolk and Suffolk and have resulted in many people being priced out of the market. As house prices have risen so sharply, those who have land to build on or who already have houses are not renting them but selling them. Renting does not give a realistic return on their capital assets.
If we are to tackle this problem, we must do something to make sure that more housing is available, especially for those on low incomes. The stock of local authority dwellings has not been as high as many people feel it should be. Indeed the introduction of the right to buy has meant that much local authority housing stock has been removed from the rented sector. Even if that local authority housing stock is initially sold cheaply to local authority tenants, it does not remain at that cheap price but immediately rises on resale to the prices level demanded in the private sector. Often such dwellings are resold very quickly. We must do something to create a situation whereby local authorities, housing contractors or others are given an incentive, or are directed to find an incentive, to provide rented accommodation which stays in the rented sector.
I do not pretend to be an expert in this field but I am only saying that one must allow local authorities to build new houses while still taking into account such factors as green belts. Local authorities must ensure that such houses remain within the rented sector. This is a problem and central government must at least encourage local authorities in this regard.
Moving on from the housing problem, I wish to draw the attention of your Lordships to the problem of rural transport and the effect that it has on the rural community. The noble Lord, Lord Parry, referred to the golden areas in our society. They are golden areas if one can afford to buy a house there and to run a car. If one has a family and one member of that family has to stay at home to look after the others, two cars are needed in rural areas, for the simple reason that the local bus services are not good enough. There are no two ways about it, in rural areas one needs a car to get about, particularly if one lives in a small village, a hamlet or an isolated house.
Since the deregulation of buses in 1986, there has been a marked decline in bus services after an initial expansion period when competition first came about. This is not surprising. New bus services were set up and companies tried to make money out of new routes, but often they found there was simply not enough demand to justify keeping large, expensive buses running. It is true to say that in suburban communities the same problem occurs, though the distances involved may be less and people who live in urban suburbs tend to be slightly better off and to be car owners. However, although it may be of a lesser magnitude, the same problem arises.
I took the liberty of looking at the Beeching Report, which I discovered was printed in the year of my birth. Beeching suggested that local transport systems should be integrated. He suggested all-encompassing bus services to fit in with the remaining train services. I was alarmed to discover the number of local train stations that have been scrapped although they stand on still existing lines.
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We now have a bus service which does not cover anywhere near the same number of stops as 26 years ago. We do not have the interconnected train services which used to exist which meant that one could always get to a main station in order to travel on somewhere else, and there are no bus services to take up the slack.
After deregulation there was a subsidy of 5p per mile of travel. This subsidy has decreased to 1p per mile for rural areas and will be phased out in April next year. There is also some talk of getting rid of the subsidy on fuel, as the National Audit Office claims that it is too unspecific. The subsidy is effectively worth £135 million. Private companies have found out that they cannot justify providing services to small rural communities, especially the more dispersed rural communities where there may be only one household or person in a village who needs the bus service as everyone else may be a car owner or may own two cars. Thus, the result is that everyone needs a car.
This is a circular situation which forces anyone who is on a low income out of such rural communities. But, once that has occurred, where shall we find a workforce for the less well paid jobs? If there is a growth in light industry, what will happen to those people who work on the shop floor? It is worth pointing out that even the most hi-tech office needs someone to clean it. Someone will have to look after the office furniture, for example. Unless one is prepared to pay a very high wage one must be dependent upon the local community.
Effectively, we are pricing out much of the local community. We are saying that people must have an income of x in order to live in the rural community, because with less one will be totally isolated. The village of Fakenham in Norfolk has only two buses each morning to Norwich, which is the nearest city, and two or three buses returning in the evening. In addition, there are a couple of buses in the middle of the day. The Education Act 1944 required local authorities to provide school buses and many people are dependent upon the school bus service.
Thus people are increasingly isolated. Old-age pensioners are increasingly hard hit. They may be too old to drive a car even if they can afford one. The young in our rural communities are often totally isolated. It must be a miserable existence for a 15 year-old living in a small farmworker's cottage who cannot even visit friends after school hours. People wonder why there are problems with vandalism and hooliganism in rural areas. I suggest that pure boredom may be a factor.
One can expand that and point to small villages which have only one bus every market day to take people into the local market town. One can build up the scenario, building up more circles, all leading to the fact that one has to be rich to live in the countryside; and if one is not rich one does not live in the countryside.
I should like to draw some conclusions. Unless the Government are prepared at least to encourage local authorities and property developers, and indeed the transport industry as a whole, to cater for the less well off we shall find that the yuppie idea that one is nobody if one does not have a salary of x thousand

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pounds a year, own one's home and have two cars will become a reality with very strong roots and a reality which we cannot possibly escape.
3.32 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Worcester: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Parry, for initiating the debate. It raises important human issues about housing, work, the quality of life and the need to maintain valid communities. Having been brought up in the Danelaw I cannot emulate his Celtic eloquence, but I shall try to contribute from my experience of rural communities. I want to say how much I admire the patent sincerity of the noble Lord in telling us about the East of England.
The subject is of particular interest to bishops because we spend much time looking for the best way to serve rural communities in a time of rapid change and with a diminishing number of clergy. Indeed, we are always hopeful that noble Lords in this House will encourage their sons, grandsons, nephews and godsons to opt for ordination rather than going into banking or a similar career. We also find that the drift to the country tends to cream off those who would be natural leaders in urban communities. The problem arrises in that direction as well.
As some of your Lordships will know, there is at present an archbishop's commission, chaired by a Member of this House, looking into rural issues. The competition that will come from the European Community will undoubtedly intensify agriculture in the quality lands, thereby possibly leaving the uplands, the hill country and pastoral counties to deteriorate. I hope that the Government will monitor the situation so that there is no deterioration.
However, change is inevitable in any living entity. Rural and urban communites change because they are shaped by the people who live in them—from forest to arable and back to forest again for hunting parks; from strip fields and common land to enclosures and back to the near prairies that we have at present for large machinery. That will continue. The countryside is bound to change. We are now talking about setting aside land and extensification of land in order to avoid building up more and more surpluses.
Since agriculture has been and probably always will be the main rural industry it is bound to affect village communities. The challenge to achieve self-sufficiency in food has produced a slimmed down, highly mechanised industry. I am told that 300,000 people have left farming since 1946 and there are one-third fewer farms. In addition, 9,000 people—which works out at about 20 people a day—are leaving the industry every year. I am told that there will soon be a labour famine in agriculture. Agricultural colleges are not up to strength, and the county of Dorset is training more hairdressers than agriculturists. That is probably a digression, but I hope that that fact will not be overlooked.
Already noble Lords who have spoken have mentioned what derives from changed agricultural fortunes—redundant farm buildings, empty farm
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cottages, school rolls falling to the point of closure, village shops no longer able to pay their way, and family businesses such as those of blacksmith, joiner, wheelwright and even tailor disappearing. Into the vacuum have come those from over-large towns and cities seeking space and fresh air. As a result, villages are tending to become dormitories for commuters or settlements for the wealthy retired. The young and those who work on the land, as we have already heard, cannot afford property at present prices.
Yet I should add here that not all changes are bad. The villages of yesteryear were often much inbred. People tended to live imprisoned lives with no focus beyond the parish pump. The new influx into the villages has undoubtedly brought new life to rural communities. Furthermore, the new general awareness of rural needs and the value of balanced communities is itself an advance.
Of course change is permanent. There are various attitudes towards it that can be struck. One can try to succeed where Canute failed and reverse the tide. One can be an ostrich, an attitude which I am afraid is sometimes taken by Church people who say, "Change? I see no change", and take refuge in nostaligic dreams about the picture postcard village. One can think that any change is progress and be a futurist. There is nothing special about trying to live in the future. It is just as unrealistic as trying to live in the past. On the other hand, one can study the changes and influences and even harness them with an eye to preferred options. In some ways we ought to be glad that the countryside is changing because one can only steer a moving vehicle.
It may be that the old method of unveiling a master county structure plan was too cumbersome. From central government we look for strategic thinking, strategic planning and aid. We certainly need those. National countryside planning guidelines are preferable to the detailed monolith of a structure plan which can gather dust. The Country Landowners' Association has asked that such guidelines should be concerned with the protection of good land, provision for rural housing, transport, light industry, conservation and leisure. It is good that the recent government White Paper has called for frequently updated statements of country policies, even including district and parochial needs, for thus local people are able to take responsibility for the kind of community that they want.
However, there is a limit to the way in which central planners can shape the countryside. I have much sympathy. I realise how needed new village projects are. People need a place to live and, when they go there, they need services. Yet the danger of trying to build a village ab initio is that, in spite of intentions to the contrary, it becomes a rural housing estate without a soul. I should prefer to see selected bigger villages enlarged, given a secondary school, a doctor's surgery, a resident parson and a policeman, with revived local shops and some light industry. Such major villages could serve a series of satellite villages or hamlets. They would focus development and be an antidote to ribbon development and diffuse, sporadic housing.
When I was rector of a group of 12 rural parishes on the Lincolnshire Wolds and drove my own

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35-seater parish bus, I was also on a government inquiry into rural transport. We were so often defeated by the scattered, very small settlements that we were trying to link. We were also hampered by inflexible rules for the operation of coach services. So it is good that a certain deregulation and flexibility now obtains. It may interest noble Lords to know that a rural transport adviser has been operating as an experiment in the Evesham and Leominster areas. The brief has been to investigate needs and to advise individuals and groups on all transport matters. It has proved successful, but sadly the post is now in jeopardy because of lack of permanent funding. We must face up to the fact that transport in the country requires subsidy. This is not luxury; it is necessity.
I mentioned the relationship between gathered communities and the proper provision of transport. That indicates a further urgent need; namely, to view the countryside as a whole. A single government department for agricultural and rural affairs is needed.
It has been argued before in your Lordships' House that low-cost housing is a primary need if villages are not to become mere dormitories where people who live in careers and not places sleep the night. In the county of Hereford and Worcester, 60 per cent. of the incomes outside cities and towns fall between £80 and £160 a week, including overtime. Such incomes are inadequate to buy the houses which are available locally. House prices in the county have risen by 30 per cent. over the last two years—the second highest rise in the whole country. Many of the council houses have been sold and local authorities can spend only 20 per cent. of their house income on replacement. They should have more money to spend on the replacement of stock.
Rural housing associations, which play such a key part in that, also require further resources. I understand that at present the Housing Corporation spends only 2 per cent. of its funds on rural schemes, although 20 per cent. of English people live in the country. I am glad that my own diocese, along with other rural dioceses, is seeking to release parcels of glebe land for Section 52 agreements. However, we need to be reassured that such low-cost housing will not be on the open market a second time round. If the properties are rented, we need assistance in making the rents approachable.
In this whole debate, I believe that it is important not to lose sight of why we want to retain mixed communities of human scale in the countryside and in the country towns. Why do we want them to be mixed as to age, work, income and experience? To begin with, we want to forfend rural deprivation, which is real though often hidden. It is far less well advertised than its urban counterpart. If one lives down a long lane, has five children, is perhaps a single parent family with no car, one lives in a rural slum.
Furthermore, surely we want communities in which a cross-section of the people can be known and valued. We want communities where people are aware of the past and ready to engage with the present and the future. We want people to be able
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to exercise that mutual care and neighbourliness which was so well known in those communities of old. We want communities which are deeply aware of their natural environment and which can keep the economy and the ecology together. But if we are to have those communities and if they are not to disappear from sight, there must be strategic thinking and resources from central government. Such communities are an antidote to trends which would divide and compartmentalise our nation. They enable us to see work and leisure—indeed, life—as a whole.
3.45 p.m.
Lord Broadbridge: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Parry, on this afternoon enabling us to discuss rural and suburban communities. We are importantly, but so often, invited to discuss inner cities—their decay, unemployment and transport problems—that it is refreshing to escape to the rural suburbs, although their position today is perhaps hardly pure sunshine either.
Increasingly, as this century has moved forward, planning and building design have been more and more on people's minds. This afternoon we are invited to call attention to post-war changes in rural and suburban communities. Since I believe that the way those areas are planned and what their buildings look like have been major impacts on their present shape, it is about those that I wish to speak. I believe that this takes up one of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Parry, in his opening speech: namely, that it is development which is on everyone's mind when they speak of the post-war situation in rural suburbs and in suburbia.
I suppose that the hey-day of suburbia was the Metroland portrayed so memorably by John Betjeman early in his life—a time when the Metropolitan Line had just been opened and suburbia was a leafy arcadian paradise. Since then, development and planning have arrived. Some cities, like Siena, have had effective planning control since about 1250, but, although we had building regulations in Queen Anne's reign, large-scale planning in both town and country is a 20th century development in Britain.
Because we have a growing population, an increasingly mobile population and, according to the Government, an increasingly wealthier population, planning control of post-war rural and suburban Britain is surely here to stay. We should all ask ourselves what policy, in either direct control or at least guidelines, Her Majesty's Government believe should be exercised in planning terms to influence what should be permissible on the grounds of land use and in the design of buildings or their aesthetics. This I see as, at one end of the spectrum, relationships with the general environment—one might say the landscape—and, at the other, with specific buildings, including everything in between and, as has already been mentioned, the increasing occurrence of villages which are soulless and have no central locus such as public houses, churches and other principal features of the past.
I should like to congratulate the Government on their constructive attitude to strategic and land use

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planning; for example, in the issuing of guidelines or more detailed, strict instructions in such crucial fields as the use of green belt land, the conversion of agricultural land to industrial or domestic use, the general allowability of the alteration of land use by afforestation or deforestation, and whether a new village or even a town may be constructed in a certain area. I note with satisfaction that the Secretary of State for the Environment, for the second time recently dismissed with costs against the developer—that is the important point—a development proposal appeal which went right against clearly expressed government policies.
This general land use planning is all to do with making a positive contribution to the local environment as it concerns, for example, design, scale, density and access—almost the view from one's window. Land use planning control is difficult because the British public are naturally conservative and, to exaggerate in order to illustrate the point, tend to take the view, "If it's new, I don't like it". This view is obviously unrealistic because we are both a growing and a shifting population, and alteration cannot be avoided. Indeed it would be a gross dereliction of duty to take a sentimental view of the landscape and to try and preserve it unaltered.
There are well-known safeguards such as planning inquiries and referrals to the Secretary of State. There is an analogy here between planning control and modern views on the proper role of medicine, which is that prevention is better than cure. It is better to know people's views on the multi-faceted aspects of good design and get the planning control guidelines right from the start than to be insensitive or uninformed about these and to have to resort to endless public inquiries. It is upon the aesthetics, or what it is going to look like, that so many of these inquiries and referrals are made.
Since art is in the eye of the beholder, there will never be a total consensus of opinion on good design. How often in Islington—not exactly a suburb or a rural area, admittedly—am I faced with the statement, "nobody consulted us", only to be told that the development proposals fall within the planning guidelines and that such consultation is not needed or would give rise to unacceptable delays.
I should like to move now more specifically to good design translated into good individual buildings. There are others more qualified than I to go into the more arcane aspects of the meaning of the word "aesthetics". My dictionary says of aesthetics,
"Belonging to the appreciation of beauty, having or showing such appreciation, artisitic, tasteful, the branch of philosophy dealing with the principles of beauty and tastefulness".
"Good design translated into good buildings must be the aim of everyone involved in the development process. The end product should be buildings which are well designed for their purpose and their surroundings". Those words are not in fact mine, but those of a draft DoE circular of several years ago—it is undated—called "Draft Circular on Good Design and Development Control". It seems to hit the subject of this debate right on the nose, and was apparently generally welcomed by the RIBA; but it
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never saw the light of day by being rendered into the form of an official policy circular. I have today given the Minister who is to reply notice and a copy of the quote. Now I ask him formally what happened to it, and why was it shelved? Perhaps, in the well-worn phrase of this House, he will be kind enough to write to me.
Good design cannot be achieved by control and regulations only. Good design is essentially the responsibility of the developer and his designer. Too detailed control can restrict innovation and impede creativity. But surely the way to improve the standard of building design is to improve the standard of "the designer".
While I congratulate the Government on their attitude to strategic and land use planning, I should like to ask them why they have done little to improve the quality of building designers. I believe that in France, for example, a building design may not be proposed by anyone who has not had it prepared by someone qualified in design. This is not the case in the United Kingdom where, to be blunt, some proposals are put forward and accepted for alterations to, for example, buildings in conservation areas and villages by people who cannot even draw. Your Lordships would not seek medical advice from a quack; so why do we get so much building design from quacks? If there is a shortage of architects or otherwise qualified designers, what proposals do the Government have to remedy it and encourage more men and women to follow such a career?
While the constructive use of planning control can facilitate good design and prevent thoroughly bad proposals, there are other methods by which planning authorities can encourage better standards. They can set a good example themselves in their own undertakings by employing able staff or carefully selected consultants. Architectural competitions encourage the obtaining of high quality design on important sites, whether the developer is or is not an authority, and importantly foster public interest in good design—witness the National Gallery extension.
Authorities can establish awards for good design and mount exhibitions to illustrate environmental objectives and development opportunities—particularly in conversion or rehabilitation, which is important in rural communities—carefully considering representations from the interest and often considerable knowledge of national and local groups concerned for the environment and conservation. The Secretary of State, in the exercise of his planning functions, may seek to promote architectural competitions. It is by a somewhat analagous Victorian equivalent that we have the glorious building in which we are now sitting.
Recent circulars from the Government to planning authorities have advised them not to interfere too much in the aesthetics of individual buildings except in conservation areas. General planning control should be concerned with the relationship to all neighbouring development; the main criteria being scale, density and height, access, layout, landscaping where possible, materials, provision for car parking and service vehicles, traffic generation, noise and atmospheric pollution.

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Planning authorities from the Government down should make it clear what their standards and criteria are, both generally and specifically; and help developers to see more clearly how better design can contribute to the success of their proposed development and the future of the area in which it will be built. A balance has to be struck between the essential elements of control and the conditions in which good design can flourish. It must flourish; after all, the public can largely avoid the work of other creative people such as artists and musicians if they do not look at their pictures and do not go to their concerts. But they cannot avoid buildings.
In conclusion, I believe that buildings should be warm and friendly, inviting, stimulating and uplifting. The designer cannot divorce himself from social concerns. This applies particularly to rural areas, although, perhaps the pith of what I have been saying is rather more suburban and high density than other speakers who have spoken particularly about the situation in rural communities. In the words of that eminent architectural internationalist, Walter Gropius,
"The satisfaction of the human soul"
should be the aim of good design whether rural or suburban.
To that I say, "Hear, hear!".
3.58 p.m.
Lord John-Mackie: My Lords, I apologise to your Lordships for coming in and extending this debate by a few minutes but there are a number of points I should like to make. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the right reverend Prelate made a point which I feel I must take up.
The first point concerns small industries in the countryside. I have two examples in our village where there are two industries. One is a small printer's business with six full-time and four part-time people. The owner wanted to retire. He sold the business to another printer who was to carry on, and he himself made arrangements to move elsewhere. He had actually moved when the other printer who had bought the business could not find the money or something happened and a developer jumped in, bought it and is now applying for permission to build houses.
The other example is at the other end of the village where there is a carpenter whose main business was making palettes. I know that palettes are not beautiful things stacked up 60 high in the countryside and near housing, but nevertheless he employed quite a few people. Pressure from the neighbours to have him moved was quite strong. So he said, "All right, if I can find a developer who will give me the money to develop land for housing then I will move". In fact that has just happened and he has moved. So there are two industries in the village of Nazeing where that has happened in the past year. That trend is happening quite a lot and it is serious. A village is dead if there is no work in it. When it is purely a commuter village it is a very bad thing indeed.
I must declare an interest at this point. There is one partial solution to the problem. It could help if there were to be a little more leniency in allowing
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redundant farm buildings to be let for small industries. However, in order to do that there is an appalling amount of bureaucracy to get through. Most county councils insist that one has a tenant, knows his occupation and has everthing arranged before one asks for planning permission. When that is done one asks for planning permission. I may say that I have done that twice and on both occasions that tenant that I had in mind could not wait. So as I had no tenant the proposal had to be dropped.
I believe that I saw the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, in his seat a few moments ago. His rural commission does a tremendous job in trying to get together councils, farmers and tenants in order to solve these difficulties. I know that they have been solved in many cases. But there is a considerable slowing down in making use of what are in many cases very good but redundant farm buildings. I should like to appeal to the Government on that score. I believe that they are now a little more lenient than they were two or three years ago. Nonetheless if one is in a green belt area it is quite difficult.
The right reverend Prelate mentioned extensive farming. I could spend a long time on this subject. I should however just like to say that during our debate on the Queen's Speech and the subject of the rural environment and the rural areas, the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, made a very strong point about how the Government planned to use extensive farming or set-aside or whatever to reduce food production. Shortly after that debate I went home and found my wife weeping in front of the television set. She was watching the terrible famine in Ethiopia. I believe that we must think very carefully about the reduction of food production in the world today and not only in regard to the areas which are given publicity. There are 800 million people on a starvation diet and 400 million of those people are in fact starving. I believe that we should be very careful about reducing food production.
Perhaps I may now broach the subject of housing in the countryside. The noble Lord is quite right. There is no doubt about it: there will be a shortage of farm workers because the increased efficiency and mechanisation, among other things, that have taken hold of farming in the past 40 years have been quite fantastic. The figures quoted are quite right. Large numbers of people have left and are still leaving the industry. That makes a tremendous difference to the villages.
What worries me is what is happening to the houses. On the farm in Scotland which I used to farm and which my son now works there were a couple of quite nice but redundant farm cottages. They were sold by the landlord to a developer who turned them into one house which was far beyond anything that a local person could afford. That is happening quite a lot in country areas particularly near big towns or if the property is near a station. I do not know how one solves that problem. It is very tempting for a farmer to achieve the prices that are possible but it reduces the number of ordinary houses for ordinary people. I should like to see something done to stop that happening.
I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, also made the point that he would like to see that

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stopped. I do not know what can be done but I should like just to make that point.
4.3 p.m.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Parry has done well to raise this very important subject in your Lordships' House this afternoon. It is particularly well that it should be done in this House, which is perhaps better known as the Westminster branch of the Country Landowners' Association rather than the Westminster branch of the agricultural section of the Transport and General Workers' Union. The noble Lord has done particularly well to draw attention in such a vivid speech to the advantages and disadvantages of decentralisation and their effect on suburban and rural communities. He has done well to draw such a high quality of speeches, though perhaps a small quantity, from other noble Lords. It is interesting to note that the question of suburban and rural communities attracts so many fewer speakers to a debate in your Lordships' House than does the subject of museums and works of art. I wonder whether there is any moral to be drawn from that.
In particular I valued the speech made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester who reminded us that the very real problems that we see in our countryside and suburban areas (though particularly in our countryside) are not new. They should not be contrasted with some golden age of agricultural communities in the past. We can look at both fictional and historical references for that. Selecting drastically, I recall in the early part of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford the very grim description of appalling, subservient conditions endured by rural labourers in the mid-19th century under their landlords in north Oxfordshire. I recall of course even more vividly the biting history of J. L. and Barbara Hammond's description of the condition of life of the rural labourers in the early part of the 19th century. So if anyone believes that things have become worse in the 20th century and somehow we should be looking back to a golden age, he should certainly think again. Nevertheless, rural poverty and rural deprivation is still a very real question.
The Church of England's report on rural poverty notes that 25 per cent. of people in rural areas are living at or near the margin of poverty. Of course the great majority of those people are elderly. They suffer not only from lack of financial resources but from lack of many other resources necessary to a decent life, to which I propose to refer in a moment.
My role from these Benches is to consider the political implications of a Motion of this kind, what sort of policy changes are appropriate and what is wrong with the policy that we are adopting at the moment. It is quite clear that our policies to protect the rural economy and the quality of life in rural areas are not working. A number of noble Lords have made extremely valuable points about the policy implications of the situation as they see it. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, referred to the question of rural transport and its decline. Quite rightly, he pointed to the effect of the 1986 Transport Act which
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produced a temporary boom in more innovative and flexible transport but with a long-term decline in such a way that things are very much worse than they were previously. For the first but not the last time I say that that is the effect of allowing unbridled market forces into the provision of basic public services.
The right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, made very effective references to the whole question of planning and county structure plans. I know that at the moment planning is unpopular. People have the idea that planning means stopping people from doing things. I hope that the House will take the view that that is not the case, particularly when talking about county structure plans. It is in county structure plans, and it could be in regional structure plans if that were the appropriate tier of local government, that proper protection has to be given for the provision of housing for those in need, for the provision of transport, services and employment where necessary.
The previous Secretary of State for the Environment, Mr. Nicholas Ridley, indicated an intention to cut out county structure plans and to turn that responsibility over to the district councils. I should be delighted if, perhaps not by positive statement but by implication, the present Secretary of State has abandoned that intention. It would have been extremely damaging and I hope that that proposal will never be revived.
My noble friend Lord Parry referred to the whole question of communications—not just transport but other forms of communication. Again I make a political point; namely, that the privatisation of our basic public services has led to a threat to the supply at a fair price of water, electricity and gas to our rural communities. I make the point that it is only pressure, particularly from this House—and it does this House credit—that has prevented the Government from allowing market forces to be untrammelled and has deliberately protected rural areas from over-charging for those basic public services.
The point has been made about the necessity for affordable housing in rural areas. Noble Lords who took part in the debates on the two major housing Bills which were enacted during the past two years will recall that it was pressure on the Government from this House which went some way—in our view, nothing like far enough—towards protecting the need for rural communities to have rented housing at a price that they could afford. As the right reverend Prelate reminded us, it also went some way towards preventing the resale of existing rented housing stock. We have not gone anything like far enough. The situation is most unsatisfactory and the role of public housing, particularly in rural areas, will have to be restored and will be restored under the next Labour government. But at least it was your Lordships who saw the problems because of your knowledge of rural areas and because of the great and evident threat in the Government's proposals.
Reference has also been made to other forms of social services; for example, rural schools and the provision of sub-post offices, village shops and

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health centres and health facilities accessible to people living in rural areas. In all of those social services the trend towards the dominance of market forces, which is the characteristic of this Government, has over the past 10 years led to a diminution in the quality of services which are essential for a civilised life in rural areas.
There are areas as regards which the Government can congratulate themselves. I also wish that the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, were still in his seat. It is undoubtedly true that the Rural Development Commission, being the amalgamation of the Development Commission and CoSIRA, has shown the way for active and benevolent intervention in rural areas. The 27 rural development areas which have been declared since 1984 have produced in broad terms—although not in every single area—an increase in population and a decrease in unemployment during that period. That showns not only that the Rural Development Commission is doing a good job but that the principle of intervention through rural development areas is worthwhile and should be extended. That applies to the provision of workshops and small business grants as well as to the other activities of the commission.
My noble friend Lord John-Mackie and other noble Lords referred to the role of farming in rural communities. It must be accepted that, in employment terms, farming is no longer the dominant employer. I was shocked to learn that more hairdressers than agriculturalists are now being trained in Dorset. One way in which farming could provide a particularly benevolent influence in rural areas would be if it were thought of as part of the process of conservation. Training in farming should be combined with training in conservation. The major demands which will face this country in conserving our natural habitat and environment should be made part of the responsibilities of the farming community. Its members live there and know what it is about and they have an interest in preserving our countryside—at any rate, they frequently proclaim an interest in doing so. Therefore, let us ask the farming community to put its money where its mouth is and contribute towards the conservation of our countryside.
There are many areas in which Government policy could contribute to a better quality of life in our rural and suburban communities, if only they did not feel ideologically constrained from doing so. The contrast that we must make is between the Government's policies in general—which have a curious combination of reliance on market forces and reliance on direct regulation and rule from Whitehall—and the more liberal and democratic policies—and I beg pardon to the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, for using those two words in a non-partisan sense—
Baroness Seear: My Lords, it is interesting to note that when the noble Lord needs words to describe something which is really good, they are the words that he finds.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, it is not usual to use the word "socialism" from this Dispatch Box, although I have done so when I have felt
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particularly impassioned about a subject. However, I am delighted to know that on this occasion my words find favour with the noble Baroness.
The contrast that we must make is between the Government's reliance on market forces and Whitehall rule and a more flexible and democratic way of running things which I proclaim to be the policy of the Labour Party. In our recent policy statement we undertook a very substantial review of the relationship between central and local government. It resulted in proposals for regional policies and regional government which would largely bring back to people living in rural areas—because many of the regions would have larger rural components than the country as a whole—and would largely overcome the ideological difficulties, to put it at its mildest, which the Government now have in dealing with the problems of the rural economy.
We can look at the future at its worst in the recent words of the Town and Country Planning Association. It spoke of the prospects of our countryside becoming a sterile food factory; a noisy fun palace; a concrete jungle; the preserve of the affluent; and a decaying museum piece. We believe that the policies that this country should adopt towards rural areas should be dedicated to nullifying that prediction and those possibilities. They should be directed towards preserving and increasing a healthy and flourishing countryside.
4.17 p.m.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, we do not often bracket together rural and suburban communities. Traditionally we think of rural communities as declining and suburban communities as expanding. But increasingly rural areas are now showing signs of prosperity and growth, despite the decline of employment in agriculture and other primary industries.
The closing remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, were filled with a prophetic view of the future which was one of gloom. As a countryman, it is not one that I recognise in the future that I see ahead.
It is important that full and effective use is made of available land in existing urban and suburban areas, and planning authorities have a responsibility to encourage this. But it should not be at the expense of often precious areas of open space, nor should it render these areas as a whole less pleasant places in which to live.
Essentially it is a matter of achieving the right balance between development in the suburbs, in the cities and in the countryside. There is a a lot of vacant and recycled land in urban areas whose use for housing would be beneficial. To take the South-East as an example, over half of all development there is on such land. But it would be self-defeating to allow residential areas to deteriorate.
Whenever extensive areas of new housing are built there will be the need to ensure that a full range of services is available. This, too, is dealt with through

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the planning system and by ensuring that the developers meet a fair share of the costs.
Our overall aim is to maintain a thriving countryside through a sensible balance between farming, conservation, recreation, employment creation and the needs of rural communities. Our twin objectives—to achieve a healthy rural economy and an attractive rural environment—reinforce each other. Our policies provide a framework for achieving these objectives.
The Government's main task is to guide and encourage others. We want to encourage the enterprise of all those who live and work in rural communities and to see increasing activity by the private and voluntary sectors. We are also anxious to see that the best posssible use is made of limited public funds, by making full use of opportunities to influence others and by concentrating activities in areas with the greatest needs. But we do not hesitate to take direct action where it is necessary.
In many rural areas the efforts of all concerned have been rewarded. The population of the rural areas of Britain increased by 10 per cent. between 1971 and 1981. Employment and economic activity have become more diversified and in many areas the unemployment rate is now well below the national average. But there are still many rural communities with problems, often related to their remoteness from the main areas of economic activity or to a rapid decline in employment in traditional industries, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, pointed out to your Lordships' House. Other rural communities suffer from the problems of success, with shortages of low-cost housing and strong pressures for extensive new development.
We have taken many steps to help deal with these problems. The farming and rural enterprise package that my department, with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and other colleagues launched two years ago set out the steps that we were taking to encourage a flourishing rural economy sensitive to the wider needs of rural areas. We have achieved a great deal since then.
The Government sponsor specialist agencies to do much of the work in implementing their policies for rural communities. In England, the Rural Development Commission, which is sponsored by my department, is the Government's main agency for diversifying rural enterprise. In Wales, similar tasks are undertaken primarily by the Development Board for Rural Wales and the Welsh Development Agency. In Scotland, the Scottish Development Agency and the Highlands and Islands Development Board fulfil broadly similar functions.
These agencies have a star-studded list of achievements to their credit. Most importantly, they get people and organisations in the private voluntary and public sectors to work together to deal effectively with rural problems. Increasingly the agencies are making more efficient use of their resources by targeting their activities on areas of the greatest need. For example, in October the chairman of the Development Board for Rural Wales launched a special rural action programme which targets resources on the less prosperous areas.
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It is important that development in rural areas respects the environment. We also have important specialist agencies to protect landscape and wildlife. We shall be bringing legislation forward to your Lordships' House in the new year to recognise them and make them more effective.
The private sector has the most important role in ensuring that rural communities do well in the long term. Private sector involvement in rural areas helps them to thrive and to sustain essential rural services. The Government are keen to encourage that.
As the noble Lord, Lord Parry, said, the development of tourism provides a good example of that. Tourism is already a significant and well-established industry in a number of rural areas. Visitors to the countryside spent around £3.2 billion in 1986. If trends established over the last 15 years continue, tourist expenditure in the countryside could increase by around 60 per cent. in real terms by the end of the century. The Government are playing their part and assistance is available for tourism in areas of special need. In Wales, I know that the national tourist board, of which the noble Lord was formerly chairman, is presently running a rural tourism drive aimed at improving the quality and range of tourist facilities and services in the Principality. With regard to the noble Lord's remark, I say only that to review a quango is not to deny its excellence.
Some government agencies have also developed partnership schemes to stimulate other types of private sector activity. The Scottish Development Agency, for example, has a scheme called PRIDE. A revised version of similar schemes in Wales, known as DRIVE, was launched on 1st September.
Voluntary organisations also play a vital role in encouraging rural economic and social development, and the Government are anxious to work closely with them. Central government funding of the voluntary sector has risen by about 92 per cent. in real terms over the last decade and in 1988–89 it was some £2.1 billion. Voluntary organisations such as the rural community councils frequently help rural communities to analyse problems and find a way forward. They help to deliver services, provide advice, encourage enterprise and provide a link between authorities and the rural community.
We are today issuing a new edition of Planning Policy Guidance Note 7: Rural Enterprise and Development. It will remind local authorities of the need for a balanced approach to proposals that may help the rural economy but may also affect the rural environment. It will re-emphasise the importance of sensitive planning in special areas, such as national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, which the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, drew to the attention of your Lordships' House.
Our efforts to develop a thriving rural economy sometimes need to be supported by special action to maintain or enhance the provision of particular services. I should like to take this opportunity to summarise briefly for your Lordships what we are doing in this matter already. In July 1988 we announced our rural housing initiative which, for the first time, set out a specific policy on low-cost housing in smaller villages. The right reverend

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Prelate drew your Lordships' attention to the question of whether or not the Government monitored change. This policy is based on the fact that the Government have monitored change and thus changed policy.
We have greatly increased the public funds available to the Housing Corporation, so enabling it to establish a special rural programme aimed at expanding the role of housing associations in villages with a population of under 1,000. By 1992–93, this will be providing some 1,500 houses a year for rent and 350 for low-cost sale. Also, following the extensive debate in your Lordships' House on last Session's Local Government and Housing Bill, to which the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, drew the attention of noble Lords, we are introducing a scheme in some rural areas whereby housing associations can repurchase former shared ownership dwellings when the occupier moves on.
We are also taking steps to help and encourage landowners and developers to provide new houses at prices or rents that local people can afford. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord John-Mackie, drew this point most succinctly to your Lordships' attention this afternoon.
In February 1989 we announced changes to planning rules whereby local planning authorities may exceptionally release small pockets of land for low-cost schemes to meet local needs. Rural areas will also benefit from the encouragement we have given to investment in the private rented sector.
The right reverend Prelate drew your Lordships' attention to the possibility of the development of new village communities and gave his own preference as the expansion of small villages into larger and better serviced villages. The only thing of which I can assure the right reverend Prelate is that whichever route is chosen the amount of protest, I suspect, will be similar. The right reverend Prelate also drew attention to the Archbishop's commission on rural areas. We welcome the setting up of the Archbiship's commission and the work which it has undertaken. The department will be most interested to hear the result of the commission's work when it reports to Synod in November 1990.
The noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, drew attention to the different system in France, and I have to say—because it is with regard to the design and the quality of design—that if I was standing in any other part of your Lordships' House than the Dispatch Box, speaking on behalf of the Government, I, too, might have some rather stronger views on this subject. But I would draw to the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, the fact, with the basis of a stronger concept to the view of design in France, that Mr. I. M. Pei's little pyramid in the Tuileries has not resulted exactly in consensus and happiness by the consumers of that great country, in terms of the pleasure it has provided.
The Government recognise that small schools in rural areas do an excellent job. However, they may reach a point where even disproportionate resources cannot compensate for their size. Where alternative schools are readily accessible and there are surplus
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places in the area, rationalisation may be the answer. But we realise that many small village schools have to be retained, because of the geographical isolation of the communities they serve, especially where the alternative schools available would necessitate unacceptably long journeys to schools for young children.
Deregulation under the Transport Act 1985, to which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, referred, has opened up the way for operators to provide bus services in rural areas on a commercial basis, and local authorities have powers to subsidise the running of services not provided by operators commercially. As a result of this, new rural services have been provided in many areas. The Transport Act 1985 also introduced the Rural Transport Development Fund to assist the provision of rural bus services in England. The Rural Transport Development Fund is run by the Rural Development Commission, with up to £1 million a year available from Department of Transport grants for up to 50 per cent. of each innovative rural transport scheme, and these are available to a maxim um of some £25,000. Seventy-five grants totalling £693,000 were offered in 1987–88.
I was pleased to see that the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, referred glowingly to the Rural Development Commission funds towards innovative information and advice projects in rural areas. I know that sometimes the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, insinuates that this Government operate like a libertarian party in the western part of America. However, I assure him that they do not believe in that concept as he sometimes insinuates they may do.
The Rural Development Commission has achieved a great deal in a vast range of activities to improve rural services but we are not complacent. Government departments and their agencies monitor the position to identify problems and to see what action can be taken. The Rural Development Commission expects to publish no less than three new research reports on rural services early in the new year. A report on the provision of basic utilities will review the availability of mains electricity, water and sewerage in rural England. It will assess the deficiencies in provision and comment on how they might be overcome. A study on rural sub-post offices will review the impact of the Post Office's part-time community post office contract for smaller sub-post offices. A report on village services will assess the overall position on the availability of rural services and take a look at the future.
The Government are optimistic but not complacent about the future of rural communities. However, we believe that there are enthusiastic and enterprising people living within the rural community and the Government are committed to their future. They are taking care to see that they develop their full potential for the benefit of the whole community.
4.31 p.m.
Lord Parry: My Lords, we have had a good little debate. I am grateful to the Minister for his last

1327
sentence and, indeed, for much of what he said. He did not push what he had to say, despite his natural partisan pride, into complacency, and I am very grateful for that. I am also grateful to other noble Lords who have taken part in the debate.
On the issue of unemployment in rural areas, since I mentioned the improvements which have taken place within the golden triangle, I should have said that in the latest list of unemployment statistics there are 10 places where unemployment is over 9 per cent. in the rural areas, and there are several places where it is very much higher than that.
As I accepted the discipline of the Chief Whip to within 60 seconds, I did not have the opportunity to pay my tribute to the development board for rural Wales and its predecessor for the work which they have done or to mention the strategy for the future which is called "Strategy for the 1990s" launched by that development board. I was grateful to the Minister for mentioning that. Some of us remember the effect on Wales of the Labour Party's document Wales—The Way Ahead and some of this latest strategy is based on that. I see a former Secretary of State for Wales joining in with a smile late in the debate. I thank all noble Lords and beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Museums and Galleries: Current Problems
4.38 p.m.
The Earl of Perth The Earl of Perth rose to call attention to the state of museums and galleries and to matters of concern to them, including treasure trove and the export of works of art; and to move for Papers.
The noble Earl said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. It is still, although only just, "Museums Year" which lasts throughout 1989. Further, it is the centenary of the formation of the Museums Association. It is therefore very appropriate that we should debate museums and galleries together. I am sure that all your Lordships will join in wishing the Museums Association another century of great activity and help.
When I tabled my Motion, I was not sure how other noble Lords who are expert on this subject would view it. However, when I look at the galaxy of talent which is to speak, I am very comforted. I know that the debate will be splendid and I thank all those who are to take part.
It would be invidious to mention names, except for one—our maiden speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Walpole. He has told me something of the line he is going to take and how he intends to avoid being too controversial. I said to him that it is quite right to do that when making a maiden speech on political matters, but on a subject such as the one we are discussing today, however controversial he wants to be the better.
When I look at the position of the museums and galleries of this country in general, the first matter which strikes me is that over the past few years local
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museums and provincial museums have relatively improved their status and position. Of course, if I say "relatively" one asks: relative to what? In that respect, the national museums and galleries have shown a decline. Do not misunderstand me, my Lords. Part of that decline is their own deliberate choice; that is, they have built up out-stations throughout the country and they and the National Heritage have often ensured that great works of art go to the provinces rather than stay only in London and Edinburgh. That is a course of action which I am sure is to be applauded. It means that the country as a whole is taking more and more interest in what I call the general artistic background of the country, particularly what is happening in their own localities. The individuals and the local councils responsible for that growth are to be congratulated.
I said that there was a relative decline of the national museums and galleries. I hope that I shall not be misunderstood when I say that because, of course, they are, and must remain, the centres of excellence and learning in this country, recognised as the equal of any in the world. They are museums and galleries enjoyed by visitors from all over the world.
Indeed, quite recently, the Government recognised that fact. They gave £40 million grant to improve the structure and to help with necessary repairs to the national museums. I know that all your Lordships will be grateful for that. I do not wish to appear churlish but I wish that it had been the £100 million suggested when the question arose of the Thyssen collection. However, we must be thankful for small mercies. If that sum could be increased in the next year or two, then the basic worries of the national museums would disappear. We should know at least that they were structurally sound and in a position to safeguard and conserve what is so important: our greatest national treasures.
I have received a letter from the noble Lord, Lord Molson, regretting that he is not able to be here today; his health does not permit it. The letter states how anxious he is that the money should be spent with care and points out that the galleries have not been accustomed to this task because it has been done by the PSA. Of course, that has changed but the noble Lord believes that the five museums which receive most of this money should look to the Museums Association or others to help them to ensure that it is well spent.
The grant for acquisitions by museums is pitifully small. I think I am right in saying that the grant for all the national museums would not be enough to buy the Canova, a subject of which we are all aware at the present time. It certainly could not buy a top class French impressionist work. However, with the help of the National Heritage in particular, the museums and galleries have shown great initiative. Something of great importance happened recently. I may or may not have my facts right, but I think it was the National Gallery and the National Gallery of Wales which together bought a Claude. It will be displayed for some time in one place and for some time in the other. That may well be a good example to follow, but I must issue a word of warning

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Pictures are fragile. We must be careful that this does not become too general a practice.
I said that the national museums and galleries have had their worries removed to some degree. But money is at the heart of everything, and the heroic efforts of their sponsors and friends are not enough. I favour charges, but I know that this is a controversial issue. I have suggested as a compromise that in the winter there should be no charges but that in summer, when many visitors come, there should be charges. Everyone would understand that.
My Motion mentions two specific points; the export of works of art and treasure trove. I should like to draw the House's attention to the 35th annual report of the Reviewing Committee for the Export of Works of Art. It is well worth reading. It is entertainingly written and full of good material. One general matter in the report filled me with dismay. In the past five years the committee has managed to stop the export of eminent objects valued at £19 million, but objects valued at £80 million have gone abroad. In other words, only one-fifth of those important objects have been saved for this country. Ten years ago the ratio was 50:50. There is a lesson here which the Government should take seriously to heart.
Despite that, the report says that the committee is comforted by the success of the "in lieu" provision—noble Lords will know what I mean by that—and by the fact that the douceur has encouraged many people to come to private arrangements with the national museums or other public museums. It points out, however, that with the changes in taxation the douceur is now worth only 10 per cent. instead of 15 per cent. I fear what the result of this will be. People may say that it is not worth doing for 10 per cent. I ask the Government to take a special look at this point and to increase the douceur to 40 per cent, approximately the same level as before.
As I read and re-read the report, I come more and more to the conclusion that the work of the committee is creaking. I shall explain what I have in mind. The Waverley criteria remain the best that we could have but beyond that there are serious deficiencies. I refer in particular to the "indefinite stop". Most noble Lords will know about the indefinite stop, but I cite again the example of the Canova. We have just learnt that the Minister for the Arts has stopped its export for another four months. During those four months there may be a successful appeal. It will then be open for the owner to say that he will not accept the £7 million. What will happen then? All the money will have to be returned to the donors who were so generous. The owner may be in a position in 18 months to ask for another export licence.
What can one do? One cannot warm up cold meat. It may not be possible to raise the money a second time. The cost may be very much higher. The owner may say that the work of art is more valuable because it has the imprimatur of the reviewing committee. We are in a mess on this issue. I beg the Government to do what they have been asked to do and which they undertook to do 18 months ago. I ask them somehow to ensure that this indefinite stop
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procedure is allowed a second time. It used to happen. This is a matter of the greatest importance. If they do not, they will have to take the blame for what happens to the Canova.
I must be careful with the time that is available to me and so I shall not go over the other weakenings set out in the report. I suggest, however, that the Reviewing Committee for the Export of Works of Art should form a special working party made up partly of its members and partly of people from outside. They should study the various deficiencies in the present system and report to the Government. I suggest that such a working party should do this because it knows the position so well.
The delays in regard to treasure trove have been even worse. Three years ago I asked a Question in which I said that this should be a matter of urgent study. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, agreed and said that he would take the matter on. We were all much encouraged. The noble Lord left that post and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, took it on. He was equally enthusiastic, and after 18 months, with a certain amount of prodding, he gave all kinds of assurances. He asked us to be a little more patient and he said that it would happen soon. Eighteen months have gone by and nothing has happened. This cannot be allowed to wait. Many noble Lords will have read in the newspapers of what has happened in the meantime. Treasures such as the Icklingham bronzes have been slipping away. People are advertising in Australia and America the kind of things that have been taken out. I beg the Government to think about this.
I have a specific recommendation to make. We do not have the same problem in Scotland because we operate not only treasure trove but also what is known as bona vacantia. Under this system of law, if someone dies intestate and has no relations, his estate goes to the Crown. We in Scotland have the two principles side by side. Why cannot England and Wales do the same? I am sure that the matter is very complicated and difficult. Indeed, it must be if, after three years, it is still unresolved. However, here is something which is working in Scotland. If it were implemented here it would ensure that the opportunity will be there to save those items which are not gold or silver but which are of immense importance to the country.
I shall give one last example. The Coppergate Helm was discovered in Yorkshire. It was found by a worker. He reported it to the authorities, although it was not of gold or silver. However, it was immensely important and perhaps the most important helm ever discovered in this country. The worker was given a derisory reward by York City Council. But if we had the bona vacantia system in place the worker would have been given the right figure, according to the worth of the discovery. In any event, he would have done exactly what he did do, but others might have been encouraged to do likewise.
I believe that many people, including the great majority of those who use metal detectors, would welcome such a move. If the Government say that they will do something very quickly, that is fine. However, if not, please let them adopt this solution. I beg to move for Papers.
4.51 p.m.
Earl Haig: My Lords, it is a pleasure to be able to say a few words in this short debate initiated by my noble friend Lord Perth. As a past chairman of the reviewing committee, he is an authority on the export of works of art. Decisions on these matters are geared to current values which then affect what a gallery or a museum can afford to buy.
The Motion mentions "treasure trove" and to me that is an interesting subject, especially as I live on top of a Roman camp. However, it is a subject of concern to museums of antiquities. My concern is with galleries. It relates to my interest in the visual arts. There is some separation between antiquities and galleries. I am a little apprehensive when galleries start adding artefacts to their collections to stand beside or in front of paintings or sculptures.
The National Gallery of Scotland is small in size and filled—thanks, in part, to the noble Duke the Duke of Sutherland—with works of very high quality. Recently the gallery has undergone a refurbishment exercise with many of the walls being covered in a dark claret colour which is alien to the paintings of the Dutch and of the Flemish schools and to those of Turner. However, the addition of furniture and clocks has helped to humanise the gallery.
But perhaps the trustees should guard against treating the building as a gentleman's palazzo rather than a gallery, the charm of which is due to its size and the uncluttered display of its works. In fairness to Mr. Tim Clifford, the gallery's imaginative and genial director, I should say that my comments are subjective and that they come from the descendant of a long line of austere Scots, some of them Quakers. As to the future, I hope that future expansion will be provided by the proposed Museum of Scotland which will be able to cater for any overflow of the Scottish paintings.
New acquisitions are of concern to all galleries and museums. Those of us who travel through Western Europe are able to enjoy wonderful galleries and collections. We must do all we can to compete with them, if for no other reason than to increase the cultural inheritance available to visitors both from home and from overseas.
My noble friend mentioned the overseas visitors and the great temptation there is to introduce charges at any rate during the summer months. The Government must realise that an increase in the size of purchase grants is long overdue. Opportunities for acquisitions come regularly and galleries should be able to take advantage of them, especially when they are right for their particular gallery. A recent example of this was the help given by the Heritage Memorial Fund to assist the purchase of the Alan Ramsay portrait of Sir Hew Dalrymple for the Portrait Gallery.
As my noble friend said, the Government's record as regards buildings and their fabric has been good. Throughout the country they are helping to restore the fabric of galleries and museums. In Edinburgh they have made a generous allocation of £2.5 million for air conditioning and other improvment to the Royal Scottish Academy. Due to the fact that the building belongs to the National Gallery, that money
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has been passed on to the academy by the trustees. No strings have been attached on the way and the Royal Scottish Academy's rights and privileges will be respected and preserved.
Perhaps I may touch upon the plight of the non-national museums, especially the Scottish Maritime Museum, the Scottish Mining Museum and the Summerlee Complex, which record our recent industrial past for the benefit of future generations. The work is shared by several other museums throughout Scotland, These museums perform a national role, as instanced by the prefix in several cases of "Scottish". Their importance was emphasised when the Miles Report was published on behalf of the Museums and Galleries Commission in 1986. I should like to quote a few sentences from the report. They read as follows:
"What has been facing us in the last two or three decades is the rapid decline and disappearance of established and mainly heavy industries. An awareness of this fundamental change has led to a desire to preserve and record relics of industry as inherently admirable achievements".
The report goes on to describe the few sources of funding available mainly from the Manpower Services Commission, from the Museums' Council, from the national museums and from local authorities. Since then the role of the Manpower Services Commission has changed to employment training and therefore that source of funding has dried up. The two national museums in Edinburgh which have industrial sections need all their resources for their own departments. Moreover, local authority funding will not materialise without a lead from government.
At present the non-national museums are left without any revenue funding from the Government to pay for the staff needed to preserve for future generations a record of Scotland's recent industrial past, which is in fact the history of the whole of the central belt. Recent efforts to persuade the Scottish Office to recognise the worsening situation have been to no avail. I earnestly hope that the Government will see their way to making some effort to fill a gap which is gaping open.
Finally, perhaps I may touch upon the choice of trustees and museum staff. If they are knowledgeable and have the right qualifications, the institutions will thrive and exude self-confidence and happiness. However, too much emphasis can be given to the business side of the matter. I am a little worried when I hear that the directorship of the Museum of Wales has gone to a businessman and that the deputy directorship of the Tate Gallery has gone to a merchant banker. In Scotland, the chairman of the National Gallery is a merchant banker, Mr. Angus Grossart; moreover one trustee, Dr. Begg, is an accountant, while another, Sir Norman MacFarlane, is head of Guinness.
While the energies and abilities of such people must be acknowledged, as well as their discrimination in works of art, they have been chosen for their powers as businessmen and not as aesthetes or scholars. Therefore the chairman must rely heavily upon the director for aesthetic advice. These few comments are offered without wishing to minimise the splendid way in which the national galleries are run.
4.58 p.m.
Lord Grimond: My Lords, I shall start by thanking the noble Earl, Lord Perth, for introducing the debate and for the excellent speech he made in so doing. I should also like to say what an honour it is to follow a real live artist in a debate. Indeed, it is most rare as we are mostly "slippered Pantaloons" who look at such matters from a theoretical point of view.
I sometimes wince when I hear talk of saving our heritage. No one is going to tear up very valuable pictures; nor will they smash up any furniture. Too often, our heritage appears to consist of Dutch, French and Italian pictures, French furniture and German porcelain, much of which has arrived in this country purely fortuitously because people bought it on the grand tour.
Our first priority should be to save buildings and their contents in the place for which they were designed, and gardens and landscapes. I am glad to be able to say that the capacity of trustees and directors is ameliorating. When I first entered the other place the controversy over the Lane pictures was raging. Being an innocent character from the North, I assumed that art being a civilising influence there would be give and take about the future of those pictures and that everyone would behave in a civilised manner. Far from it. I found that the directors of English galleries behaved like cats squabbling over a piece of fish. That position has improved.
We must also hope that architects have improved, although that hope may be frustrated. My conclusion is that the first priority should be the national trusts. They do more than anyone else to preserve our heritage. Let no one say that it is unnecessary. Look at the fate of George Square in Edinburgh. That was a charming form of architecture unique in Europe, but it was not well known, expensive or grand. It was ruthlessly pulled down by the University of Edinburgh and a hideous building was put in its place.
I should like to congratulate the National Heritage Memorial Fund, whose chairman I see preening himself in his place. It seems to be on the right lines. It made a mistake by buying an expensive Picasso, but in general it does not seem to have been overtaken by the folie de grandeur. It has a variety of valuable smaller treasures. The art world has become big business. We now know that Sotheby's does not only set big prices; it lends the money. I suppose that that is legitimate, but it seems odd.
The first thing that I think should be done is that governments should get together. There should be some international agreement on exempting works of art from taxation. Secondly, few works of art should be refused an export licence. If they are, it should be a complete refusal. Their export should be forbidden. If those articles are of priceless value to the country and the heritage their retention should not depend upon whether a gallery can raise the amount of money needed to keep them.
I also put in a plea for some generosity among the major galleries of the world. I am not especially keen to return the Elgin Marbles but I should not passionately oppose it. I should like to see some of
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the dozen and dozen of Canalettos in this country returned to Venice. To see two or three along the Grand Canal would be a great pleasure. As tourism spreads around the world many more people would probably see them than now do.
I should not be averse to returning some altar pieces to appropriate churches. I am not sure about putting renaissance altar pieces into Gothic churches, but they would look extremely well in the right church.
Those who run our galleries should appoint as trustees not just the rich and the great but artists and suchlike. There are some artists among trustees but the tendency is to appoint people who may be able to raise money. Although artists' taste is not always impeccable, they have a big part to play in preserving art. I should like galleries to be far more adventurous and buy modern art and art by living artists. It is rather horrifying to find that nearly all the great masterpieces in the Tate were given to it. The number of pictures that the Tate bought before they became popular and well known is very small. One has looked in vain for five or 10 years for any Scottish pictures. Now that they are worth £500,000 each the Tate is only too anxious to have them.
The great crime of the art world is to keep pictures in cellars. It is far worse than many things for which people are gaoled for years. I should be extremely reluctant to put more and more pictures into our galleries if they cannot hang them. Incidentally, I do not much favour big galleries. My favourite is the Maurishui's at The Hague, which is comparatively small.
I come now to the National Gallery for Scotland. There is a great deal of anxiety in Scotland because it has now closed some of its rooms. I am glad to be able to say that the Director has assured me that they are closed for one or two hours a day only. If anyone wants to see the pictures he will open the rooms. Furthermore, unlike most foreign galleries, it is not closed for the whole afternoon or on one day a week. Although it is a great pity that any of our national galleries should be closed, the position is not yet disastrous. The director believes that it will worsen because as civil servants' pay goes up the cost of attendants goes up. That is something over which he has no control. As the pictures are not insured he is bound to keep a fairly high level of attendants in the various galleries. I beg the Government to take that matter seriously. If more galleries are similarly affected or if the closures become longer I hope that they will make the funds available. They have, as has been said, done a good deal about the fabric of galleries, but they have not so far been generous over the running costs.
It is apparent, if one looks at the Scottish position, which I believe is duplicated elsewhere, that there may be demands to keep necessary pieces of our heritage. The annual grant to galleries will not cover that demand. There should be a reserve fund. We are deeply indebted to the noble Duke, the Duke of Sutherland. The glory and core of the Scottish National Gallery are the Sutherland pictures. If he wished to sell them he might get £80 million or £100 million. He has forgone the interest on that money for perhaps 70 or 80 years. He may be generous

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enough to go on for ever but he might need to sell one for some reason and the gallery's annual grant would not look at it. The Government were prepared to put up 100 million for the Thyssen pictures because they thought that they were prestigious. If they were prepared to do that, they should be prepared to put up a large sum for objects which are incomparably more important to this country. We should express our deep gratitude to the noble Duke, the Duke of Sutherland, and others like him who have not followed the enterprise culture which we are told by the Government is so important to us. They have values which are other than merely monetary.
5.8 p.m.
Lord Walpole: My Lords, perhaps I may thank my noble friend Lord Perth for initiating the debate which gives me an opportunity to address the House for the first time on a subject close to my heart. When people mention museums and galleries it is almost inevitable that the first matter that arises is fine art. I am glad that my noble friend mentioned the subject of treasure trove because that is the side upon which I intend to hang my plea to the Government. I wish to talk about archaeology rather than fine art. My noble friend's remarks about treasure trove arise, and become more urgent, as a result of metal detectors and their use by unscrupulous people. Over a period of time such machines are becoming more powerful, more sophisticated and more discerning; in other words, we can find out what something is very much more easily. In unscrupulous hands the metal detector is a dangerous tool.
I know that there are responsible users who restrict the use of metal detectors to a code of practice that their association has brought out, but that code of practice does not have the force of law. Metal detectors are also useful for sweeping lines of road improvements after other methods of archaeological detection have been tried. We have recently used metal detectors on my estate before planting a wood for set-aside. I am relieved to say that we found nothing but 20th century agricultural artefacts.
Unfortunately, more unscrupulous users have raided archaeological sites during the course of excavation. That is at the worst end of the scale. They have also removed objects from sites of archaeology awaiting excavation. Some people have merely "done over" fields, of which there are many in my part of the world, simply because things have been found there before. Coins and such objects that have been found are in no way reported and without any record of their exact location and archaeological layer they are useless to the archaeologist, even if valuable to the finder. The recent removal of the bronzes which the noble Earl, Lord Perth, mentioned from Icklingham in Suffolk is a case in point. What appeared in a New York gallery may have been beautiful and valuable, but that is all. Those bronzes tell no story.
Therefore I was hoping that the Government might introduce legislation to license metal detectors and make some form of law to support the voluntary
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code of practice which I gather the more responsible people use. I also understand that the chairman of English Heritage, the noble Lord, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, has announced that his organisation is evaluating jamming machines so that metal detectors can be discouraged over a small area.
Turning to scheduled ancient monuments, I had hoped that the Environment Protection Bill from the Department of the Environment, foreshadowed in the Queen's Speech and now published, would contain further legislation to protect scheduled monuments. It is well known that the Department of the Environment and Norfolk County Council are worried about the lack of protection of monuments. Considerable correspondence and topic papers have passed between them.
In a nutshell, what is felt in Norfolk is that the Ancient Monuments (Class Consents) Order 1981 should be rescinded for Class 1 because it permits the destruction of monuments by ploughing and other agricultural practices. Proof of damage is needed in this case and the only way of finding out whether damage has been done to an earthen monument is by excavation which leads to further damage. It is a defence, in an attempted prosecution for damage to ancient monuments, for people to say that they were not aware that the monuments were scheduled. There are no enforcement powers to reinstate monuments which have been damaged without consent.
As was suggested by the last speaker, by contrast legislation protecting ancient buildings is far more powerful. The remedies suggested would be to revoke Class 1 of the Ancient Monuments (Class Consents) Order and to make it an offence to disturb an ancient monument unless it was part of an approved management regime and make powers to reinstate emergency repair or compulsorily to purchase such a monument. That would be the case with a listed building under the Town and Country Planning Act 1971. We should extend such powers on scheduled monuments to local authorities so that they could carry them out under that law.
By the time the Environment Protection Bill has passed into law and bearing in mind the Wildlife and Countryside Act, as well as various other pieces of protective legislation which the Government have brought forward in the past few years, archaeological remains have fared extremely badly. A "water soldier", which is a small aquatic plant floating in a dyke in the Norfolk Broads, has more protection than many long barrows.
Further, perhaps I may say a brief word about rescue archaeology. I think it is now accepted that developers need to pay for rescue work. Perhaps I may take two examples from what has happened in Norwich. Anglia Television has put forward a considerable amount of money for this with the extension of its television studios. With the Castle Mall shopping precinct in the centre of Norwich, the developers have put forward no less than £600,000 for the excavation of an important early Norman and medieval castle precinct.
The recent discovery of the Shakespearian theatre south of the Thames has drawn attention to the scale

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of the problems and put forward some solutions. However, when the Government themselves or a government department are the developers, it is not quite the same. Again, perhaps I may quote examples from a Norfolk County Council paper on two or three developments by government bodies. One is by the Department of Transport, the Norwich southern bypass. The paper says:
"This will cut through an area which is archaeologically one of the richest and most important in Norfolk. It will be close to the prehistoric Henge Monument at Arminghall, and the Roman town of Venta Icenorum. The archaeological programme for a watching brief and for detailed investigation … [could] cost around £144,000".
It says, regarding the Dickleburgh bypass on the A.140 trunk road, that field patterns in this country are often assumed to be medieval or later. The framework of the hedgerow system in that area, being either side of the Roman road from Caistor St. Edmund through Scole to Colcheser, is likely to be Iron Age in origin. It is a unique opportunity to look at a landscape from this early period. That would cost some £30,000.
I am sorry that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor is not here because his department has equal problems at King's Lynn in the development of the new Crown Courts. They are being built on an extremely important medieval site at Austin Street, next to St. Nicholas Chapel. The site is of medieval tenements, close to the medieval shoreline. Archaeological investigations on this site alone would cost some £129,000. The problem is that the Government do not pay for archaeological investigations in these cases; nor are sums included for archaeological investigations or rescue archaeology in cost-benefit analysis.
As I understand it, the Government insist that rescue archaeology should be through English Heritage. English Heritage has received, according to my knowledge, an extra £.100,000 for this purpose. Norfolk is only one-fifteenth of the area of England and Wales and f100,000 could go on one project alone in Norfolk.
In summary, archaeology is not always a fully understood science and the benefits of its work and interpretation are often underrated. For that reason, I urge the Government themselves to lead in rescue archaeology and to pass legislation that will protect our achaeological heritage from greed, ignorance and other pressures lest our heritage and our understanding of it and ourselves be lost forever.
5.20 p.m.
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu: My Lords, it is a great pleasure for me to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, on behalf of the whole House, on his excellent and well informed maiden speech. He certainly chose a subject which he knows well because he was at one time chairman of the south east area museum service and also a very able chairman of the East Anglian Tourist Board. I am sure that we look forward to hearing him take part in debates in your Lordships' House, especially when he speaks on subjects which he knows so well.
The debate today is certainly timely for two good reasons. First, it suitably marks the end of Museums
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Year, which was so designated as 1989 marks the centenary of the Museums Association. Secondly, the year has happily culminated in the Minister for the Arts winning extra funds from the Treasury for the national museums whose needs were desperate because of neglect over many years of their basic structures. However, it is rather ironic and salutary that the year also ends with yet more instances of great works of art leaving this country, either by legal or illegal means. That includes archaeological artefacts.
As chairman of English Heritage, I wish to express views on those two issues. The principal interests of English Heritage are the preservation and presentation of English historic buildings and monuments. But, just as importantly, English Heritage is the statutory adviser on heritage matters to the Secretary of State for the Environment. I have to say therefore that English Heritage was extremely disappointed with the recent decisions by the Secretary of State not to take legal action in relation to the removal from Woburn of "the Three Graces" by Canova without listed building consent. English Heritage is concerned that neither the local planning authorities nor the Department of the Environment have chosen to exercise their statutory powers in spite of the advice they obtained.
There is no doubt in our minds that fixtures and fittings, of which works of art such as "the Three Graces" are a prime example, which form part of an architectural ensemble, or statues designed at the time to fit formal historic gardens, are an integral part of a historic building. We submit that the listed building was constructed to display the Canova statue, and hence its removal removes the reason for the building. Therefore listed building consent was and is required for its removal. As a result of this decision, there is now growing public concern over the removal and ultimate inevitable export of many similar objects.
Although it is the view of English Heritage that legislation is more than adequate, clearly its application is not. There is no doubt that there are many misunderstandings about the law relating to fixtures and fittings in listed buildings, and as regards precisely what objects may be covered by listed building control. It is clearly in the public interest and that of private owners that the law should be clarified and new guidelines issued. English Heritage is therefore taking the initiative. I have convened a meeting of all interested parties, both public and private, at the end of January to discuss the issues. I hope that in the long run agreed guidelines may prove beneficial to all concerned as no one wants to see an ever increasing flood of objects leaving the country.
I understand that in a statement my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment welcomed this initiative. He acknowledged at the same time that the legal advice he received was that "the Three Graces" would normally be considered as part of the listed building. Nevertheless, there are many owners who feel strongly that such objects are chattels and in many cases the proceeds from their sale are often devoted to desperately needed repairs to historic buildings. I

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sympathise with these objectives, but perhaps I may remind owners that listed building control does not necessarily prevent any changes, if there are good reasons for them. It does, however, ensure that there is proper public debate of the issues when listed building consent is sought.
I turn now to the illicit removal of artefacts from archaeological sites. This is perhaps an even more difficult subject. We cannot hope to protect every site in the country from treasure hunters. Nonetheless, we are considering whether we can pinpoint the most important sites at risk rather more narrowly to assess the possibility of extending better protection to them. As the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, said, we are also looking into the possibility of further research into electronic devices, although there are limitations on their use. I must say, however, that for as long as there exists a market, particularly overseas, for this kind of object, it will continue to be difficult to protect our sites. Perhaps the time has come to look again at the advantages which ratification of the 1970 Unesco convention might bring. I ask the Government to consider that again.
I shall now return to the general subject of museums. I very much welcome the new realism which is apparent, particularly in national museums. This is especially evident with the long overdue introduction of admission charges at the Science Museum and other museums. I hope that charges will soon be made compulsory at the Victoria and Albert Museum. As one of the last nations in the world to cling to what I consider to be the outmoded Victorian ethic of free museums, it seems strange to me that the last people who are ever consulted about the desirability of charging are the public. However, when they are asked—especially overseas visitors—they overwhelmingly think that charges are justified.
It is also claimed that attendance figures fall dramatically when charges are made. However, the figures when admission was free were, to say the least, fanciful, and sometimes almost imaginary. One cannot therefore say that figures have fallen 40 per cent. from a figure which never existed to begin with. I do not suggest for one moment that charging alone will solve the financial problems of the national museums. However, I wish to remind the House that there are over 1,000 independent museums in this country, all of which have to charge to survive and many of which are in the forefront of innovation of museum techniques and presentation and which regularly appear as winners in the Museum of the Year awards. The debate this evening is not about them, and perhaps there is a lesson to be learned there.
5.26 p.m.
The Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair: My Lords, we have talked a great deal about money for the arts. I shall talk entirely about museums and galleries. These should be kept in the manner to which they should be accustomed. However, this requires vision and prescience as well as money.
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It was something like 18 years ago that this House debated the introduction of admission charges for museums. Lord Clark of "Civilisation" fame made a speech giving cogent reasons for not adopting that practice. I too am opposed to admission charges. I know it is courtesy to declare one's interest in this House. I have a rather grubby card. It is grubby from more than 30 years of use. It is my membership card of the International Association of Art Critics and it gives me free entry to every museum and gallery in the world. Presumably, if charges were introduced here I would obtain free entry to British museums and galleries also.
As your Lordships will know, our galleries and museums are filled in the summer by many young foreigners, avid for opportunities to look at great works of art free of charge. Collectively, as tourists, they inject money into this country. Would museum charges discourage them and decrease their numbers? Certainly we know that even the voluntary charge at the Victoria and Albert has resulted in a considerable reduction in visitors.
Patronage of the arts has the unfortunate reputation of being considered elitist. It is considered that only a small percentage of people are regular aficionados. I shall give the annual attendance figures for the four major London galleries and museums. The British Museum has 4 million visitors, the National Gallery 3 million, the Tate Gallery 1.75 million and the Victoria and Albert 1.7 million. As I have already said, the figure for the Victoria and Albert Museum is way down on the figures that existed before the voluntary charge was introduced. Those figures add up to about 10.5 million visitors. I should have thought that compares quite favourably with attendance at football matches, cricket matches, and even with the television viewing of snooker. I do not believe that one can say that 10.5 million people are an elitest bunch, even though many of those are the foreigners aforementioned and people like myself who go more than once.
I suppose that an argument could be made that if that many visitors were asked for a donation, even voluntarily, that would raise significant revenue. However, I imagine that after administrative costs the sum raised would pay for about one square foot of a Van Gogh. The national museums should be funded with much more money than at present, and museum charges, objected to by most museum people, are not the answer.
All civilisations are remembered for their arts before all else. Successive governments should be trustees for future millenia and must consider the judgment of history if they fail to supply the wherewithal. At present the national museums have trustees. They have been selected for their knowledge and judgment in the visual arts. Yet when a really important work is destined for export they are not trusted and must go cap in hand to the Treasury for money. That seems to me to be an extremely top-heavy and cumbersome way of trying to keep artistic works in this country.
I have nothing more to say except to give this awful warning to the Government. In the 1890s the banker Gustave Caillebotte, who was himself a very fine painter, died leaving what was unquestionably

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the greatest collection of impressionist paintings to the Louvre. The Louvre took a handful. The rest were sold to America. Anyone thinking that the Americans scoop up all Europe's art would be mistaken in that particular case; it was just that the French did not want them. That, I hope, is an awful warning to the Government to look to the future. They should fund the buying and keeping of all the great works in this country before any suggestion of export licences has to be considered.
5.32 p.m.
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster: My Lords, I should like first to apologise to your Lordships and to the noble Earl, Lord Perth, for not being here when the debate began. I am afraid that my excuse is the vagaries of air traffic. My aeroplane back from the Continent was the best part of an hour late in arriving.
The two previous speakers have both referred to admission charges at the national museums. One of them was for and the other was against. The trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum are somewhere between those two positions. We have been very concerned over the past year or more about the relative decline in our grant for running costs as against the increase in those running costs, particularly this year when the running costs grant went up by just 3 per cent. and our salaries and wages, fixed centrally by the Treasury, rose by 10 per cent. In that context one is bound to look at every possible means of covering one's costs. We have again reviewed the possibility of compulsory charges for entry.
The grant that we have received for 1990–91, at 13.7 per cent., has greatly relieved our immediate anxieties. It is by no means excessive for our needs against the pattern of previous years but at least, provided that wages and salaries do not go up by too much next year, it should enable us to survive for another year without having to cut back our activities. For that relief we are indeed grateful. It has also meant that we have decided not to introduce compulsory admission charges, although that matter is kept under review.
The voluntary donation system that we have now was introduced to provide the museum with enough money to enable it to reopen on Fridays, cost constraints having compelled it some years ago to close on Fridays. We are now open every day. That was also a welcome relief to us.
So far as we can judge, we do not believe that the introduction of compulsory charges would be a panacea for our ills given that one would want to grant certain exemptions and reductions for children, students, old people, and so on. There might also perhaps be a free day. The additional revenue that we would receive would not be tremendous, but nonetheless that is an option that in certain circumstances we would have to and would consider. For the moment, however, we continue as we are.
While speaking about money I should also reflect that the grant for next year for our buildings at the V&A will enable us to keep our building programme
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going. It will also enable us to start work on the adaptation of the Royal College of Art building which is reverting to the V&A next year. So far that is good news. We are at least able to keep pace with our problems.
The other matter to which I should like to refer is that which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Montagu, just now; namely, the export of works of art. The system that we have had in this country is creaking under the strain. From where I view it that strain is related very much to the fact that the V&A, the national museum of art and design, simply does not have the purchase funds to enable it to offer to purchase many of the works that are stopped by the reviewing committee in case they can be purchased by one of the national museums and galleries for the nation.
The Woburn Canova, to which the noble Lord, Lord Montagu, referred, is a case in point. I have already told the Minister for the Arts that the V&G, as the custodian of the national collection of historic sculptures, would be very happy to take responsibility for the Woburn Canova. The V&A would be happy to house it while its original home at Woburn cannot take it, and, if it was decided that it could eventually go back to Woburn, to be responsible for its care and conservation there.
However, the price tag on the Woburn Canova is such that if the V&A were to try to buy it out of its funds we should purchase nothing else for seven years. That is not a price that we can possibly pay. It is not possible for us to acquire an object of that magnitude, in the sense of price, unless we can get help from outside. Outside in that context and for that kind of sum of money means not a private appeal to sponsors but an appeal to the Government for a Treasury grant, perhaps from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. I am glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Charteris of Amisfield, is due to speak later in the debate. Perhaps he will comment on the matter.
I wonder whether the time may have come when, rather than leave such matters to the initiative of individual national museums and galleries, that is a responsibility which the National Heritage Memorial Fund should take on. Where export licences are suspended the National Heritage Memorial Fund should decide, with whatever expert advice it wishes to take, whether the object should be acquired for the nation. If so, it should arrange for funds to be made available and deposit the object for custody with whichever institution it thinks most appropriate. I doubt whether the noble Lord, Lord Charteris, will thank me for that suggestion.
I should like to make only one other brief point; namely, that the restructuring at the Victoria and Albert Museum which was discussed in a debate in this House in March is going ahead nicely. The organisation is now virtually in place, the senior appointments have nearly all been made and the museum is, I am glad to be able to say, beginning to settle down. It is likely to be a better place as a result. I was glad to see a letter in the Independent this week which suggested that at least one visitor to the museum already felt that that was happening.
5.40 p.m.
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, the law of treasure trove has its origins in Anglo-Saxon times when it was a kind of fiscal policy to recover bullion for the Crown and to discourage hoarding or secreting of wealth. By today's standards it is an anachronism and some strange legal assumptions are required on the part of a coroner in order to arrive at a conclusion. Objects discovered in the ground are classed as treasure trove only if they have no known owner, which is fair enough, but also if it can be established that the original owner hid them with a view to their eventual recovery. Your Lordships will not be surprised that this is a matter which cannot always be decided sensibly after several hundreds or even thousands of years, and the legal presumptions for doing so hardly bear even a scintilla of common sense.
Perhaps even more importantly, only gold or silver objects may qualify as treasure trove. Thus, many other antiquities, some of great importance to archaeologists—or others which, in many well-known cases, are of great intrinsic value and should be reckoned as national treasures—are, nonetheless, for all practical purposes, unprotected, except by the inadequate law of trespass or the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act. In passing, one might note the unique Romano-Celtic bronzes from a known site at Icklingham in Suffolk which were stolen from a Norfolk landowner and exported to the United States where they have recently surfaced to be hawked around in an unedifying way. They were not covered by the law of treasure trove.
However, the law does not give adequate protection even to gold and silver. There have been several cases where that has been clearly shown. Wanborough, near Guildford in Surrey, with which the Surrey Archaeological Society and, incidentally, my wife were concerned, is perhaps a classic example. Initially, a few Iron Age and Roman coins were found and the coroner's court was informed. Unfortunately, in the proceedings, the location of the site was given in open court. Thieves raided the site by night, removing large quantities of soil for processing. In spite of commendable police activity, an estimated £2 million worth of coins were removed, many of which later turned up in the European markets. I need not dwell on the anxiety and distress caused to the householder and his neighbours.
The point about that incident is that although the police prosecuted for theft several of those who physically removed or handled the coins, almost all the prosecutions failed. That was largely due to technicalities in the treasure trove law, in particular the vexed question of whether or not the coins had been buried with a view to recovery. It was then argued that the precise gold and silver content of the coins had not been determined. Lastly, there is the fact that a decision of a coroner's court is not legally binding in a criminal court.
Changes in the existing law are needed which would, first, widen the scope of items which could be treated as treasure trove. Secondly, they would
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remove some of the frankly ridiculous legal requirements—for example, as I have already mentioned, whether or not the goods were originally hidden with an intent to recover them. The world-famous Sutton Hoo burial treasure may serve to illustrate that. Since it did not fit into the law's eccentric mould, it might have been sold piecemeal but for the generosity of the landowner, Mrs. Pretty, who saved it for the nation. Thirdly, such alterations to existing legislation should try to make certain that if archaeologically important finds slip through the loose mesh of the net they are not simply sold off by the finders without museums and others having a statutory opportunity to record and assess them, and to purchase them at a fair valuation if that is thought appropriate.
None of the proposals affect the landowner's rights. In 1982 a Bill passed through all its stages and failed only because it ran out of time. Along the way, the objection which the Government raised was concerned with landowners' rights. I understand that such objections have now largely been overcome.
In February 1988 the Department of the Environment issued a consultation paper and gathered evidence on the matter. It is understood that the department believes there is no hurry to resolve the issue. If that is so, it is an opinion held only by the department, not by the informed public, many of whom maintain that it will soon be too late.
Some speakers may rightly press for the Government to ratify the 1970 UNESCO convention on the illicit import, export and transfer of cultural property. But that can only be valid if we ourselves have a viable law concerning our antiquities, which we do not as yet have.
Finally, we should note that our legal provisions covering portable antiquities are way behind those of most European countries and simply do not compare with those we gave our erstwhile colonies. Frankly, I suggest that, after initiating enormous and, in some cases, dubious social and other major changes, the Government should now use their time in tidying up what they might consider to be smaller but nevertheless important issues.
5.48 p.m.
Lord Simon of Glaisdale: My Lords, over the decades, those of us who are interested in fostering and promoting the arts and our culture have owed much to my noble friend Lord Perth. Today, he has again put us in his debt, both by his Motion and by the speech which he made in initiating the debate. When I first met him in this connection, I was in the anomalous and barely supportable position of being a Treasury Minister with responsibility for art galleries and museums.
I naturally tend to have a somewhat periclean approach to the problem; namely, wishing to foster the arts with due regard to economy. It is on that basis that I venture to ask certain questions of the Minister of which I gave him notice through the Lord Privy Seal. First, can he tell us what is the totality of public funding of the arts? I find it very difficult to estimate with so many different sources; in particular I have no idea what the in lieu scheme

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is worth and what the douceur appendage is worth. If he could give us those figures and compare them with a decade ago I believe that we shall be much enlightened.
The second point that I want to make is that I agree strongly with my noble friend Lord Perth and the noble Lord, Lord Montagu, that we should seriously consider admission charges. We should consider them not as though there was a complete dichotomy between free admissions and charges. My noble friend suggested that one way of reconciling these two was to have part of the year free and part charged. My noble friend Lord Armstrong mentioned another way; namely, one weekend day free, one midweek day free and the rest charged, but perhaps one day more highly charged than the others.
We should remember that my noble friend Lord Armstrong reminded us that the admission charges at the V & A were designed to provide for—and were successful in achieving—the opening of the museum on an extra week day. When the matter was debated on a Bill promoted by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Putney, I had the feeling that the Government favoured admission charges but wished to preserve the freedom of choice of the trustees. That seems entirely reasonable, but if so would not the Government be justified in saying: "Here is our grant"—desirably a bit higher than at present—"we will maintain it in line with inflation, but in addition to that we will match revenue from admission charges pound for pound." That would make the trustees consider the matter afresh and seriously.
The third matter I wish to raise—taking it purely as an example—is "the Three Graces", the Canova. I leave aside the question of listed building controls to which the noble Lord, Lord Montagu, referred, and also the rather disquieting report that there is an intermediary in the Cayman Islands which may frustrate every endeavour, I suggest that the advance of a large sum such as that mentioned may well be disinflationary. Retirement of debt is ultimately disinflationary and the Government have done nobly in that respect. It is immediately somewhat disinflationary in that the proceeds are unlikely to be wholly or mainly spent on consumer goods imported from abroad. The same thing could be said—could it not?—of a great work of art particularly if the payment were coupled with a stipulation that the proceeds should be used for conservation of the fabric and other contents of the place from which it came.
I ask the Minister: is that compatible with the Waverley scheme? If not, should not the Waverley scheme be altered in order to provide for it? That brings me to my last point: how far is the Waverley scheme consistent with our obligations to the single European market in 1992? How far is the extremely restrictive scheme of the French consistent with their obligations to the single European market? If the French scheme, as I think, is clearly not consistent, what are the Government doing to put that right?
5.55 p.m.
Lord Charteris of Amisfield: My Lords, I too am extremely grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Perth, for initiating this debate. I hope that he will forgive me
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if I correct one thing that he said. He spoke of a painting by Claude which had been shared by the National Gallery and the National Gallery of Wales. It was not a painting by Claude; it was a painting by Poussin, "The Finding of Moses". The National Heritage Memorial Fund contributed £2 million towards its purchase because we thought it a very good idea that the two galleries should share.
The National Heritage Memorial Fund is keenly interested in the question of export controls. I have no doubt that, from our point of view, it would be more convenient if we were much more vicious about it and did not allow anything to be exported. I am not in favour of that. I believe wherever possible there should be a flow of works of art between countries. What we have to do is become a great deal richer than we are: then works of art will flow into this country instead of out of it. It is absolutely essential that the present system—which I approve of—should be made what we all thought it was and provide for an indefinite stop. We have heard a lot about Canova. If we raise £7 million for that, it is not much good if the chap then says, "I am not going to have it".
I should like to add that I am also not in favour of creating a list of 100 or so prime objects. Somebody says, "We will draw up a list and we will never have those exported." That is a bad idea, first, because nobody will agree on what the list should contain. Secondly, if by some great stretch of diplomacy the list is agreed by everybody, the first thing that will happen is that something will turn up which everybody wants to stop being exported and it will not be on the list. So let us not have any of that nonsense.
If the system is to work as it is meant to, it is essential that museums, galleries and the National Heritage Memorial Fund should be adequately supplied with funds. I am a great optimist. During the 10 years that I have had the honour to be chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund we have been treated marvellously by the Government. They have never let us down. The Minister for the Arts has said that the matter of funding for museums and galleries and for the National Heritage Memorial Fund is being considered. I await with optimism the outcome of that consideration. I am full of hope.
It is very important that the National Heritage Memorial Fund should have plenty of money. Apart from helping to buy things, it gives us a very strong position from which to bargain with other people. Noble Lords will be pleased to hear that we have just pulled off a bit of a coup. I do not know whether noble Lords have heard of the Trumbull papers, which are the Downshire archive. Noble Lords will be glad to know that they have been withdrawn from sale and we can take it that they will remain in toto in this country in perpetuity.
On the funding of the National Heritage Memorial Fund—I know that the Government will be generous—there is one thing we must watch. The Government must not be tempted to give us a huge sum of money and say, "Now you have all that. You

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will now be a central purchasing agency for museums and galleries." Museums and galleries must be given adequate funding.
There are two reasons why I say that we must not be made a central purchasing agency. First, unless museums and galleries can buy their own items they become fossils. It is therefore very important that they should be able to make purchases. Secondly, looking after movable heritage—museum objects—is only half the function of the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Some would say that much the more important half is dealing with wilderness, mountains, bats, birds, bees, and, above all, country houses and their contents. So please, my Lords, do not make us a central purchasing fund; and please do not be seduced by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong. The noble Lord was absolutely right to say that I should be very cross with him; I am absolutely furious! We shall make it up—but his is a bad idea and should not be followed.
Another reason why the National Heritage Memorial Fund cannot be a central purchasing agency is that we are not a milch cow. We are either a safety net or a fire engine. We are there to deal with emergencies, not with ordinary run of the mill business.
The National Heritage Memorial Fund is a memorial fund. We have not forgotten what happened to our predecessor, the National Land Fund. It started in 1944–45 with £50 million. It had £60 million left in 1956. The Government said that it was too much and clawed back the original £50 million. That was a bad way to treat a memorial fund.
The trustees of the National Heritage Memorial Fund will resist any such thing happening again. We have come to the conclusion that we should keep a reserve fund that we shall not invade by commitment unless we have a positive guarantee that we are able to restore the invasion as well as continue with our ordinary work.
That is all I wish to say—except what fun we shall all have with the Canova. I do not know how the cookie will crumble, but it will be fun.
6.4 p.m.
Lord Gibson: My Lords, I am sure that everyone will agree that it has been a very interesting debate for which we are primarily indebted to the noble Earl, Lord Perth. It is not always a pleasure to be placed at the end of the debate for the obvious reason that what one wishes to say has often been pre-empted by other speakers. Nevertheless, on this occasion it is a particular pleasure for me because I follow the noble Lord, Lord Charteris. I can therefore say that in my judgment the best work in the field of the arts that Parliament has done for as long as I can remember was the creation of that fund. Not only is the fund a very good idea but as chairman of it the noble Lord has conducted it extremely well.
Having spent five years in the middle 'seventies dishing out public funds through the Arts Council I am full of admiration for anyone who is doing that to the extent that the noble Lord, Lord Charteris,
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has done and who can escape criticism. It requires a dexterity, tact, wisdom, firmness and imagination which are not generally present in large quantities in most people. The noble Lord has all those qualities and we ought to be grateful to him. He has made a great success of the fund. The only criticism that I have heard of it was made by the noble Lord, Lord Grimond, this afternoon in relation to the Picasso.
The other gratitude that I wish to express is, oddly enough, to the Minister, Mr. Luce, who has recently secured—in a climate which is not normally favourable to a great deal of government expenditure—extra funds for the arts which will enable a number of good things to happen and to which the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, referred.
I hate having to whinge, in particular when a Minister has scored a success such as he has recently. However, it would be wrong not to face realistically the problems with which, in spite of these funds, museums still have to contend. If one talks to almost any museum director or trustee about the problems of museums they will almost without exception say that their main problem is the maintenance of the fabric of their buildings; and that neglect over the years has caused the problem now to become so enormous.
I was recently talking to the director of the Tate. He applauded the Government's intention to put the buildings right over the next 10 years. But he pointed out that this year the extra £800,000 towards buildings, even if upgraded for inflation over the next five years, would produce only about £5 million. The estimate is that about £12.5 million is needed just to remedy the worst defects, now, of that not very large establishment. The chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum has already spoken to us this afternoon about the position of his museum. I spoke also to the director of the museum. The noble Lord will correct me if I am wrong. However, I understood from her that there is need for about £100 million, of which half is to remedy past neglect. One cannot spend such money over a short period. But looking over a lengthy period, that is the sum required to put right what has not been done. That does not apply under this Government in particular. It goes back much further. I hope that it is not a political matter but a national matter in the broadest sense. It is one that must be attended to. We are talking only about basic maintenance: heating, wiring and drains, for heaven's sake, which have an effect on conservation.
Lastly, I hope that any noble Lord who has not done so will read this admirable book by Sir David Wilson on the British Museum. Anyone who is interested in our museums should read it. It is quite first class. One may not agree with all that it says. Many noble Lords may not agree with it on the subject of charges. Sir David is very much opposed to those. However, it explains how the museum works, what it does and what its problems are in an extremely concise manner and with great imagination. I greatly enjoyed it. I commend it to your Lordships.
He states that they need £20 million by 1996 in order to bring the building up to normal good

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housekeeping standards, and that it will be extremely difficult to raise the extra money needed simply to strengthen the floors. It is therefore a very serious matter. I am sure that the Government are attending to it. They have made a start but it is no more than that.
That leads me to my main point. It is absolutely right to encourage museums to look to the private sector for funds, but only on this basis: that the Government are responsible for the basic purposes of the museums. Those consist of maintaining the fabric, keeping the objects that we have within the fabric in a proper state of preservation and presenting them to the public, and ensuring that the museums have enough skilled staff to achieve that objective and to keep the galleries open.
On this last point, staff costs are now 90 per cent. of running costs. Staff salaries are determined by the Treasury scales. It seems quite self-evident that the Government should fund their own awards. If that is not done it presents the museums with a very serious problem and galleries have to close through shortage of staff. If the Government will look after what I shall call the basics then it is reasonable for the museums to approach the private sector generally, as they are doing, for acquisitions. They are much helped by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and the Government have made special grants. They have shown willingness to do so in what some of us may have thought was the mistaken case of the Thyssen; it was mistaken only in the context of our other needs.
However, it is essential when talking about the need for money for maintenance that we do not give the impression that we are letting the Government off the hook on acquisitions. We must continue to have the money needed to make acquisitions because museums and nations die if they stop adding to their wealth in this respect. But whatever happens, the first priority is the preservation of the fabric and the objects that we already have.
In money terms, purchase grants have remained the same since about 1980. They now buy only about 57 per cent. in RPI terms. In "art object" terms it is an average of about 25 per cent. In many cases it is about 10 per cent. and in a few it is far less than that. However, the museums have done well in their approach to the private sector.
A few days ago I read of a case in the Financial Times. In spite of my connection with it, perhaps I may call it a normally reliable newspaper. The articles told of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich having restored and refurbished the Queen's House, Inigo Jones's first building, with £5 million from the Government, corporations and charities. But it is now to close from October to April in order to allow corporations to use it for conferences, entertaining, and so forth. It is hoped that that will raise £200,000 a year for the museum. To close the museum to the public for six months a year is a high price to pay for such sponsorship. I hope that that will be carefully weighed by museums which go out for private patronage.
When I was chairman of the National Trust I was pressed by the British Tourist Authority to open
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houses during the winter because there was such a demand from tourists who come here throughout the year. We tried to do so, but conservation is a hindrance. One wants objects, particularly textiles, to have a rest during part of the year. They will not have a rest if they are entertaining business clients and conferences.
My time is up so I cannot talk about the stop on the exports of works of art as I had wished. However, I understand that there is a flaw in the present system which the Government are examining. The noble Earl, Lord Perth, referred to the problem and therefore there is no need for me to describe it further. I hope that the Minister will be able to indicate what is in the Government's mind in respect of that matter.
6.13 p.m.
Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge: My Lords, I also thank the noble Earl, Lord Perth. I complain that we should instead have had three debates: one on museums and galleries; one on the export of works of art; and one on the protection of monuments. The latter was so admirably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, in his maiden speech and supported by my noble friend Lord Hartworth. They are three quite separate subjects and I shall do my best to say something about the first at least. If I have any time left I shall continue.
I share the congratulations which have been offered to the Minister for having found, as he told us, £180 million for the repairs and maintenance of museums and galleries during the next three years. That is a jolly good start. Three things must be done of which that is only one. However, that would have been cheaper if action had been taken earlier, as everyone has always known. The trouble is that the Minister was up against the old Treasury slogan: "Never buy something today if you can pay more for it tomorrow". The money will not now go so far even in real terms. Nevertheless, it is important that such action should be taken.
I am afraid that there are many backlogs lurking around. The noble Lord, Lord Gibson, has outlined a horrifying backlog at the Tate. I was surprised to find that when the National Maritime Museum became independent the backlog was £19 million, and it was pointed out that the museum could not take that on. I believe that £19 million for one of the most glorious buildings in England is an absolute disgrace. However, it is not all down to this Government but 10 years is quite a good slice.
The other two aspects have been talked of a good deal; they are running costs and purchase grants. I shall follow other speakers in saying a word or two about both subjects. Several examples have already been given. The noble Lord, Lord Gibson, quoted Sir David Wilson's excellent booklet on the British Museum. It includes one rather frightening sentence. He states:
"It is impossible to get away from the fact that museum salaries have been underfunded for years and that the practice must now cease or museums must change their character completely".
He goes on to explain how labour-intensive they are. He states that in 1981 the vote for general

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administrative expenditure amounted to £1 million over the museum's salary bill. In 1989 it was £1 million under the salary bill.
I shall not continue with the subject because various noble Lords have made clear the difficulty. However, it is fundamental. For example, this year the Tate Gallery's grant was raised by 7 per cent. but the costs increased by 12 per cent. That is a decrease of 5 per cent. plus inflation. The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, told us the same about the V&A, so the picture is not wonderful.
Several noble Lords have spoken about the purchase grants and I should like to run through them quickly. Since 1979 the grant in real terms is down 30 per cent. for the British Museum; 20 per cent. for the National Gallery; 10 per cent. for the National Portrait Gallery; and 25 per cent. for the Tate Gallery. One would have thought that the grants would have risen at least a little, but there you are!
I now wish to turn to the awkward cases of two of our most prominent museums; the Fitzwilliam and the Ashmolean at Cambridge and Oxford respectively. Indirectly and without any particular wish to do so, Government policy has made their future more insecure than any of the other great institutions. They have no access to the Museums and Galleries Commission for funds and are entirely dependent on their respective universities. In turn, those universities are dependent on what used to be called the UGC which has been severely cut by the Government. I do not speak for all universities, although it is true for most—but these two cannot spare much money for their museums because they wish to concentrate on preserving the job for which they exist—that is, direct education, in its simple sense; and research.
As a result Dr. Jaffe tells me that this year his purchase grant was cut from £8,700 to £2,600. That is absolutely dreadful because it means that he can do more or less nothing. Both museums must close. The Ashmolean is considering the temporary institution of charges but is anxious not to do so. I do not know what the answer is but it is certain that it is not what is now happening.
Two noble Lords have mentioned "whingeing". Those of us who love and wish to support our priceless museums and galleries are sometimes accused of that disagreeable habit. It seems to me that anyone who does not whinge a bit, faced with the problems I have just described, needs his head examined.
I have only a couple of minutes available for the fascinating subject of the export of works of art. My view is perfectly clear. I believe that the present system is about the best you can get—with faults, of course, which can be gradually altered. I believe that every museum and institution should have a purchase grant, and a much larger one that it has at the moment. I regard the National Heritage Memorial Fund as the most important government instrument—though it is not governed by the Government, thank goodness!—of paying large sums which no purchase grant, looking to the future, can itself expect to have. So I am perfectly happy about this situation as it is.
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I agree with those noble Lords who have said that they want an indefinite stop, and disagree with those who say that they do not. But an indefinite stop should mean that you have a list, and articles on that list are referred to the export committee to see whether or not they think it should be an indefinite stop. If you did that, my Lords, I think you would get the best of both worlds.
I should like to make one point about 1992. There was a very good debate at a seminar of the National Arts Collection Fund, where M. Perrissich of Brussels originally said the only big change will be that there are no Customs barriers. The director of the National Gallery made rather a good point. He said that there are very few works of art of the very top level. We usually know where they are likely to go, if they do go, and he did not think that the absence of the Customs barriers would be very important. I thought that was an interesting point. I am sure that we should fight to preserve our present arrangements and not feel it necessary to change.
I have one final remark to make if I have time to do so. If the Government are anxious, as they always are, to increase the amount of private support and decrease the amount of public support, it seems to me high time that they looked again at the American taxation system. It would enormously increase the amount given, though it would somewhat decrease the amount of tax. But people hate paying taxes and like to be generous. On that note, I congratulate the noble Earl on initiating this debate.
6.23 p.m.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, I too should like to express my thanks to the noble Earl, Lord Perth, for letting us have the opportunity again to discuss the arts in this House. It is probably the one occasion when we are all on the side of the angels. We are all agreed, wherever we happen to sit in the House; and there is not a great deal of bite in the debate except towards the Government, whichever government it may be.
I should also like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, on his extremely interesting and well-informed speech. It reminded me, as did the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, that in 1979, before the election, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Bill was in the midst of coming to fruition and I was the Minister responsible for it. With the help of the Council for British Archaeology and other bodies, I was trying to get into that Bill something to deal with the possibility of introducing legislation to protect portable antiquities.
The reason we did not make it was lack of time. My department was sure that we would not have time for the consultation period, which is another reason—the noble Lord, Lord Hesketh, should not always listen to the department—and that legislation would come along very soon. Of course it did not, and as the noble Earl, Lord Perth, said, we are now in 1989 and there has been nothing done about this area. That is the only point I want to make on that aspect.
I should also like to congratulate the Minister for the Arts—it would be rather churlish not to do

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so—on his successful negotiations with the Treasury, since we all know how difficult that is. That was also pointed out by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, this evening. But I am afraid that it works the same, whichever government are in power. There is something about the Treasury which puts a grip and a stop, almost an indefinite stop, on many of the things that we should like to do and to see money spent on. The Minister pulled off a very good coup on behalf of the museums and galleries.
But—I am afraid that there is a "but" here—almost all the extra money will go to the museums and galleries in London. While the new settlement is good news in South Kensington it is very bad news in Southampton, Southend, South Shields, Leeds, Hull and Glasgow if one is looking at the regional museums outside London. That is because in the next financial year only £10.5 million will go to the regional museums. The figure of £2,830,000 for seven English area museums is a 3 per cent. increase, which really means a cut in real terms next year. So the regional museums are not doing very well out of this; in fact, they are doing very badly.
I often feel—I say it with great respect because I am probably an offender myself here—that we are inclined to concentrate around South Kensington when we are talking in these debates about museums and galleries. Further, the pressure on funding also means that the help of the Museums and Galleries Commission to non-national museums through the capital grants scheme will be cut from £350,000 to £300,000 next year.
A great deal has been said about the national museums purchase grant, with all of which I agree. I particularly agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Charteris, that this should not be a central funding and it must be left to museums; but they must have more money. As has been said, and as was reiterated at the art awards sponsorship ceremony at the National Theatre the other day by Sir Simon Hornby, the chairman, unless the Government give adequate support and are seen to be giving basic support to museums and galleries and all the arts it will not be easy to get sponsors to come along. That is because they want to top it up but do not necessarily want to have to give the basic part of the support.
The freezing of purchase grants since 1985 is quite horrendous, because prices have rocketed to stratospheric heights. The last arts sales index shows that in 1988–89 the increase in purchase prices over 1987–88—this is taken from auction figures—is 82 per cent. So how on earth can the museums afford, out of the money they have, to make purchases that mean anything worth while? The Minister's recent announcement of grant to the local museums purchase fund of £1 million over three years will do very little among so many potential recipients now that we have something like 2,000 museums in England alone.
Several noble Lords have touched on the question of charges. I had not intended to mention that subject, but since it has come up and I have strong views on it I should like to align myself with those who are against charges. That is not just for political
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or even moral reasons. First, I believe that the public should have free access to museums and galleries as they have throughout history, and that it should be possible for people to visit occasionally for 10 minutes or quarter of an hour and not feel that, as they are paying, it is not worth their financial while, unless they stay for a couple of hours.
Secondly—and I believe that this is mentioned in Sir David Wilson's book which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Gibson, and my noble friend Lord Donaldson—if charges are made, it will cost £16 for each visitor because of the extra time taken and the extra staff needed. That is what is happening at the Natural History Museum. To process people through the British Museum without charges costs £6 per visitor. Therefore, before the trustees of the museums make a decision to charge, they should take into consideration the way the attendance figures fall. That happened at the V&A. I hope that they will also take into account that at is not cost effective to do something which in any event I believe is basically wrong.
I agree with everything which has been said about the Canova statue. I only add that if that had happened during the time I was the Minister responsible for the heritage, I would certainly have listed the statue. I did not find the reasons for the Government not listing it very convincing. They are honest enough to say that there is no legal reason why it should not be listed; but they then bring in the point that it had been moved once, and been on exhibition. I believe that is a bad reason for not listing an item. The temple was built for it. I do not say that everything within a building should be automatically listed, even if it is of great value. Each case must be looked at individually. However, this seems to me a case that if ever something should be listed, this is it. I hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Montagu, gets together with his working party, he will try to draw a distinction between these different areas.
I was very interested in what the noble Earl, Lord Haig, said about the composition of boards of trustees and some of the recent appointments made by the museums. I very much agree with him. The problem is that museums realise that there have been a great many changes; that there has been the introduction of new technology; and there is also the expansion of people. I feel that many of them have gone overboard on this: they feel that there must be a certain number of businessmen in order to deal with those matters. With great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, the position at the V&A was that the trustees were mostly businessmen and industrialists, and it was hard to find an art historian among them. There must be a mixture of museum people and businessmen; but there must not be too many on one side.
That brings me briefly to my last point—that is, the importance of training and career structure in museums. Sir John Hale, as chairman of a working party on museum professional training and career structure, brought out a report in 1987. I gather that that is now being taken up. The Government have given a grant of £100,000 (which will not go very far) until the next financial year. I am sorry that I

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did not give the Minister notice of this matter, but I should be grateful if he can tell me when that is likely to begin, what will be the financial situation and if he can give any more information about it.
I understand the organisation was set up in June and has been given industrial body status. It is charged with setting up proper museum career structures. That does not mean a dilution of scholarship in the museums. That would be entirely contrary to what I and most of us want from museums. However, it is important that curatorial experts and other staff in descending order from that have managerial and presentation training. That is something which could have a very exciting future and be of tremendous value to our museums and galleries because we have rather acted on the basis that the skill needed was a skill in a particular field, but skills were not needed for running the museum, financing, presentation—and what may be a small point but which is one of the bees in my bonnet—proper labelling.
6.38 p.m.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am grateful, as are other noble Lords, to the noble Earl, Lord Perth, for providing your Lordships' House with the opportunity to have such a wide-ranging debate. Before I say another word, I should like to take this opportunity of congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, on his excellent maiden speech and the firm views expressed in it. That carries on a great tradition. I had the privilege at Hampton Court yesterday, of viewing the King's Staircase and seeing various paintings described by Horace Walpole in a different age,
"as ill as if he had spoiled it out of principle".
That was his view of what is now considered a great work of art.
As your Lordships will appreciate, the matters which we have been debating span the responsibilities of my right honourable friends the Minister for the Arts and the Secretary of State for the Environment. While arts and heritage are rightly seen by many people as a seamless robe, I propose, with your Lordships' leave, to divide my response broadly into two categories, starting with matters to do with the national museums and galleries, exports, acceptance in lieu and related arts topics, and then moving on to deal with archaeology and the built heritage. The noble Earl will therefore forgive me if I respond to his various remarks at different points in my speech.
My right honourable friend the Minister for the Arts is to be congratulated on his three-year settlement to 1993 announced in November. The increases that he announced demonstrate the Government's commitment to the arts and heritage, and will do a great deal to strengthen the partnership between public and private sectors in this area.
Over the three years 1990–91 to 1992–93 this settlement gives an increase of 24 per cent. to the arts budget as a whole and 27 per cent. to our national museums and galleries. Within these sums provision for the building and maintenance
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programme of the national museums and galleries has been given special emphasis. Over the next three years some £180 million of central government funds have been allocated for this purpose.
My right honourable friend, in his speech to the centenary conference of the Museums Association at York in September, declared as one of his key aims to get the buildings into first class shape over the next decade, and committed the Government to playing a leading part in this great national task. This is a commitment of major importance for our great museums and galleries and must be the right priority.
The Minister is looking to the private sector to play its part whenever possible, in particular with the refurbishment of galleries where it is being so helpful. However, even on the basic fabric there has been an immediate and generous response. In November the property company MEPC came forward with a £1 million gift for the structural repair and maintenance of Sir John Soane's Museum. The Government are providing a matching contribution of £1 million. I am confident that further responses of this kind will be forthcoming.
I recognise the concern expressed in this debate that no increase has been made in the purchase grants of the national museums and galleries. My right honourable friend the Minister looked at this very carefully in the light of the priority concerns put to him by institutions. He concluded that for the time being all available increases for the national museums and galleries should be allocated to building and maintenance and to the care and presentation of their collections. He has invited the institutions to look again at their programmes and overall resources to see if there is scope for increasing the sums available for purchases. That is the position for the national galleries.
For the local museums and galleries, the November announcement provided for an increase of £1 million over the three-year period in the local museum purchase grant fund. This may well be able to help the university museums, to which the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge, referred, with the Ashmolean particularly in mind.
I also welcome your Lordships' appreciation of the fine work done by the National Heritage Memorial Fund under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Charteris of Amisfield. Noble Lords have asked the Government to commit more resources to the fund. I can give an assurance that we are looking at its future requirements for 1991–92 onwards. The fund has an excellent and consistent record of protecting our heritage. We wish that to continue undiminished in the future. This is in addition to the acceptance of the in lieu scheme and private treaty sales, which are making a contribution to the preservation and public display of works of art in this country. In the meantime, noble Lords have highlighted cases of immediate concern, given the restrictions on funds for the purchase of works of art.
The Canova statue, mentioned by nearly every noble Lord, has been described by many as one of the most important artistic and national treasures. The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works

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of Art gave it a rare "star" to highlight this and to indicate that every effort to save it for the nation must be made. My right honourable friend announced yesterday that the Government are prepared to extend the deferral of an export licence decision for another three months. He will be looking to many organisations, both public and private, to raise the £7·6 million needed to purchase it. Reference has also been made to the "the Three Graces" statue in connection with listed building controls. I propose to refer to that in a few minutes' time.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, asked whether, if the Canova were to be bought for the nation, it would be possible to attach strings to the purchase money; for instance, requiring it to be spent on the maintenance of the fabric of Woburn Abbey. In fact, he asked whether such a principle could not apply more generally to private treaty sales. I have to say that such an arrangement is not possible under the law as it stands, nor would my right honourable friend and I consider it appropriate to fetter vendors in this way. In any case, it could not apply to the Canova, because that would not be a private treaty sale.
I was as pleased—as I am sure were other noble Lords—when the noble Lord, Lord Charteris, was able to inform the House that there had been a successful conclusion to the acquisition of the Trumbull archive for the nation.
I turn now to the various issues raised in relation to our export controls on works of art and other collectors' items. I begin by praising the work of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art. This committee of experts, under the chairmanship of Jonathan Scott, a highly respected author of a standard work on Piranesi, is supplemented for each case by three independent experts in that particular field. Consequently, it goes about its task with a professionalism that is second to none.
But the noble Earl, Lord Perth, has drawn attention to several problems in the export field. He is most concerned about the need to find a replacement for the "indefinite stop", to which both he and many other noble Lords referred. My right honourable friend shares this concern. In a debate in another place on 15th June he announced his commitment to finding a solution to this problem, and I hope that it will be resolved in the near future.
The question of valuations was raised. Doubts were expressed as to whether the Government were being adequately advised. I can give the House an assurance that we are satisfied that in all cases involving the expenditure of public money we have access to advisers who are acutely aware of their responsibilities in this regard. We owe the expert advisers in our national institutions—and here I include Scotland and Wales—a very great debt for their work.
The reviewing committee has always been concerned to see that a fair market price is agreed between the parties. This can be a straightforward matter, but in other cases—I include such pictures as the Turner which was mentioned—it is necessary to have an independent arbiter to settle any dispute. Likewise, the National Heritage Memorial Fund
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takes its duties on price very seriously; so too does the Museums and Galleries Commission when advising Ministers with responsibility for the heritage on acceptance in lieu cases. We have considered the suggestion to establish a permanent panel of valuers, but we believe that our present system of drawing on experts as and when required is the most effective.
There was considerable criticism that the price of the Turner seascape "Folkestone" was not published at the time of the announcement of the Minister's recommendation to defer a decision on the export licence application. My right honourable friend shared this concern and consequently announced that in future, if an object is placed under a deferral, following consideration by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, the price will be published. It is hoped that this change will help public collections in their fund raising, especially where they launch a public appeal.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, and the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, raised the question of 1992. We are actively working up proposals which may form the basis of an export regime post-1992. This will protect our heritage while at the same time enabling the market to operate freely and protecting the rights of owners. The issue which will face all European Community member states is the disappearance of national Customs controls. We hope to find a formula that is acceptable to all of us in the Community.
Noble Lords have raised the issue of the management restructuring at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a subject which was debated in this House in March of this year. The Government continue to have every confidence in the director and trustees of the museum, and believe that decisions on the museum's management structure are very much a matter for them. I understand, however, that the proposals for restructuring, approved by the trustees in principle last January, have now been worked out in detail in consultation with staff. The main objectives of the new structure are: to strengthen scholarship and research; to improve public services and access; and to strengthen the education service. The new structure will therefore enable the museum to discharge all of its responsibilities more effectively. It was great news to hear the confidence of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, in the success of the plan he has led through.
I now turn to matters within the field of responsibility of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. The noble Earl, Lord Perth, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, spoke about the problems of unreported archaeological finds and the adequacy and scope of the law of treasure trove. This matter was also drawn to your Lordships' attention by the noble Lord, Lord Walpole. As many noble Lords will be aware, my department and the Welsh Office issued a joint consultation paper in February 1988 seeking views on how far the present arrangements for reporting and recording of archaeological finds posed a problem, and if so what should be done about it. The review sought to address the arrangements for finds falling outside the definition of treasure trove and was not specifically

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concerned with the workings of the law of treasure trove, as the noble Viscount suggested. The noble Earl will, I believe, be aware that my department received more than 100 responses to the paper and that the Welsh Office received about 20. These came from a wide range of respondents—local authority interests, landowning interests, metal detecting groups, museum and archaeological bodies and a number of private individuals.
We have been most impressed by the thought and care which has gone into the preparation of many of these responses, and it has not been easy to reach an answer which balances all of the different views expressed. Part of the problem lies in the increasing professionalism of the 20th century archaeologist. Nineteenth century and earlier antiquarians made sporadic finds without worrying unduly about the precise context of the stratigraphy. And many metal detectorists are following in the tradition of that enthusiastic amateur. Although their activities may fall some way short of the highest scholarly standards, that might be a problem best dealt with by education, and it would be unduly cumbersome to set up a bureaucratic machinery to deal with it.
Noble Lords mentioned the two specific cases of Icklingham and Wanborough, both of which show that the real problem lies with deliberate looting for commercial gain of objects of artistic or archaeological value which could add considerably to the knowledge of our past. These cases also highlight the difficulties involved in protecting sites, even when they are statutorily scheduled, and of policing any system.
The noble Earl suggested that the solution might be to follow the practice north of the border where the law requires that all newly discovered ancient objects, whether hidden or lost, belong to the Crown. This would ensure that all valuable archaeological finds are reported. The noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, made a similar suggestion—that the scope for treasure trove should be extended to objects other than those of gold and silver, and that the test of deliberate concealment should no longer apply.
There are doubtless, as always, very good reasons why the law is different in Scotland, and indeed these proposals were considered very carefully in the context of our review. The conclusion we came to was that they would go too far. There is a valid public interest in some archaeological finds, but not all; and there is a valid public interest in the knowledge represented by those finds, but not to the extent of requiring nationalisation of finds in England and Wales.
We do believe, however, that there is a good case for strengthening the law in England and Wales in ways which stop short of those more drastic proposals. I am happy to tell the House that my right honourable friend is minded to seek, after the usual consultations, a suitable legislative opportunity to amend the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 to strengthen controls over finds from scheduled sites; that is, to make it an offence to remove any finds from the site of a scheduled monument, whether or not they were discovered by
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means of a metal detector. He also intends to promote improvements in the administration procedures not involving legislation and dealing with non-scheduled sites—one such option being a code of practice.
I referred earlier to Canova's statue, "the Three Graces", and a number of noble Lords have referred to my right honourable friend's decision—of which I informed the House in a Written Answer on 7th December—not to take enforcement action under listed building legislation to seek the return of the statue to Woburn Abbey.
The controversy surrounding this statue illustrates some of the difficulties of the listed building legislation. I am sure that noble Lords on all sides of the House would agree that the system of listed buildings of special architectural or historic interest, and of controlling works to such buildings, is a keystone of our system of protecting the heritage. But we need equally to make sure that our controls strike the right balance between providing appropriate protection without imposing unreasonable constraints. The problem becomes particularly acute when the point at issue relates to items which many people would consider to be chattels.
Buildings under the listed building legislation include any object or structure which is "fixed" to the building. Whether any particular item is considered to be fixed and so part of the listed building, will depend on the facts of the case. As noble Lords will be aware, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State took the view, based on legal advice, that the statue, "the Three Graces", should be treated as part of the listed building; and since no listed building consent was sought for its removal, it was open to either the local authority or to the Secretary of State to use enforcement action to seek the return of the statue.
However, enforcement action—whether taken by the local authority, or the Secretary of State—is a discretionary power. Each case must be looked at on the facts, and in the case of "the Three Graces", both the local authority and the Secretary of State, after careful consideration, decided, for the reasons given, not to take enforcement action. It is important to recognise that the decision was taken on the particular merits of the case.
The listed building provisions in the planning Acts go back to the 1940s, and were designed to protect buildings, including many non-structural features which contribute to their special interest as buildings. Features which are objects of intrinsic beauty and value in their own right and which physically may be capable of being detached from a building may nevertheless, as in the case of "the Three Graces", be found to be part of the building which is listed and thus subject to listed building controls. It is not unknown, however, for there to be differing advice on whether such objects are, or are not, fixed to a listed building and thus within or without controls.
Of course, we are not talking merely about the past. We are also talking about the present and the future. Fanciful though it may sound, it is in principle perfectly possible for a contemporary

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collection of sculpture to be caught if it is fixed to a building which is subsequently listed. At a stroke the owner could find the value of his collection reduced to nothing or, at any rate, a matter of considerable speculation and uncertainty.
Let us consider the position of the owners of a valuable object—like a statue, or some other work of art—on which inheritance tax has been paid. What happens if that object is subsequently listed? Is the tax to be refunded and index-linked.
The position of trustees is even more invidious. Similarly, with insurance. If an object which has previously been insured in its own right is subsequently determined to be part of the fabric of the house, what happens to the policy? Alternatively, could insurers refuse to provide separate cover for objects which are fixtures in law?
These, and many other questions, are questions which we would like to explore; and that is why my right honourable friend considers that the whole issue of controls over moveable fixtures in listed buildings needs examination, and why he has proposed to consult widely with interested persons before giving any guidance and before considering whether there is a case for amending the legislation.
I am aware that there is a wide range of opinion on this issue and we shall naturally be paying very careful attention to all the views that are expressed, from every viewpoint, in response to this consultation. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State said in announcing his decision that he very much welcomes the decision of the noble Lord, Lord Montagu, to call a meeting next month of expert and interested parties to discuss the issues raised by "the Three Graces" and other recent cases. The House will have noted with interest what the noble Lord had to say this afternoon. The results of this initiative will, I am sure, provide a most valuable input to my right honourable friend's review of the matter and will open the way for further consultation.
I should emphasise to your Lordships that this review is not something which has been forced upon us. Quite the reverse. Well before "the Three Graces" became a matter of public controversy, my right honourable friend, other honourable friends and myself became increasingly convinced that there was a problem with many ramifications which needed to be tackled head on. That is why we have taken this initiative. Work is now in hand on a consultative document which my right honourable friend aims to issue within the next two months or so.
I should like in conclusion to respond to the remarks made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, about the difficulty of estimating the totality of public moneys that go into the arts and heritage, and the various categories in which they fall.
Your Lordships will not, of course, expect me to reel off detailed figures here—I am advised that there are problems in constructing a consistent run of figures over more than a few years—not least because of the various changes to the range of heritage activities and responsibilities which the Government have funded over the past 10 years
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and which make year-on-year funding comparisons misleading. For example, in 1984 English Heritage was established; in 1986 the GLC's historic buildings responsibilities transferred to English Heritage. However, I can give the House a broad indication which I believe points to a very satisfactory achievement by Her Majesty's Government since May 1979.
In 1979–80 central government funding for the arts and heritage in England was about £190 million in cash terms. In the current financial year this total will have risen to some £560 million—a real-terms increase of over 40 per cent. During the 10-year period the heritage share of the total has risen from 18 per cent. to 22 per cent. If the noble and learned Lord is agreeable, I will write to him with a more detailed analysis, which I hope can also bring in the other parts of the United Kingdom.
Lord Simon of Glaisdale: My Lords, I am much obliged to the Minister for his kind offer.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I think that noble Lords will agree that a 40 per cent. real-terms increase is no mean achievement. However, I quite accept the point made by noble Lords as regards specific areas, especially the price of art itself which has risen considerably faster than that. We believe that the basic underlying trend demonstrates—that is, if demonstration is required—that the Government care about the arts and about our heritage. Moreover, contrary to the impression which is sometimes given, the Government have not starved them of funds.
I hope that my remarks will have brought to the notice of the House the concern that my right honourable friends share to see that this trend continues and, in particular, my right honourable friend the Minister's desire to be flexible over the question of how national museums and galleries deploy their resources.
I conclude by thanking the noble Earl, Lord Perth, for providing us with the opportunity to discuss this most important matter today.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, before the Minister sits down I wonder whether he remembers that I did in fact ask him several questions about the Museum Training Institute. However, if he does not have the information now perhaps he will undertake to write to me on the matter. I merely make this request because he made no mention of the matter in his reply.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I do not have the figures available but I shall of course write to the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, on that point tomorrow morning.
7 p.m.
The Earl of Perth: My Lords, I have two minutes left. The noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, was correct. We should have had three debates. I thank all your Lordships who have taken part in the debate. They managed most skilfully to keep within their time limits and made invaluable contributions with regard to the arts and the Department of the

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Environment. I am sure that we are all grateful to the Minister for his speech. He gave us two things which, while perhaps not being 100 per cent. what I wanted, are most encouraging. One relates to the indefinite stop. Something will happen in the near future. I hope that will be that Canova goes one way or the other. In other words, the Government have three months in which to think about the near future. It will be a disaster if they do not mean to take enforcement action.
We were lucky to hear the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, on the subject of treasure trove about which they know so much. It is great to know that legislation is on the way after three years. Let us hope that the Government can find an early slot. We shall look at the legislation carefully and perhaps make it better than is proposed. I again wish to thank everyone, especially the Minister for his excellent winding up speech. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Tibet
7.1 p.m.
Viscount Mersey Viscount Mersey rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether, in circumstances where the Dalai Lama is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, they will make representations to the Government of China to secure a modification of their behaviour towards the people of Tibet.
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to raise the subject of China and Tibet. In doing so, I hope that the Government and I will be on common ground in at least two respects: first, that the Dalai Lama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize; and, secondly, that the Chinese record on human rights in Tibet is probably getting worse and certainly not getting better.
I appreciate that the substantive part of my Question as to whether the Government,
"will make representations to the Government of China to secure a modification of their behaviour towards the people of Tibet",
is difficult for them to answer. For instance, the Chinese foreign ministry regarded the Nobel Prize award last Sunday as a gross interference in Chinese internal affairs. The Chinese Ambassador to Norway boycotted the ceremony. The Chinese are sensitive about Tibet. If the result of my Question is to make the Chinese even tougher with the Tibetans than they have been hitherto, then it were better not asked. The Government in their answer must tread a diplomatic tightrope.
My Question falls naturally into four parts: first, how peaceful are the Tibetans?; secondly, how acquisitive are the Chinese?; thirdly, what right has China to be there?; and, fourthly, irrespective of their right to be there, what is their record on human rights?
I have spent a month in ethnic Tibet; that is, in Ladakh, a province of Kashmir. Thence comes my knowledge of the peaceful nature of the Tibetan people. I should perhaps say the Tantrist Buddist people because the Tibetans were a warrior race before the coming of the Buddha. They could scarcely
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be contained by the caliph in the west or the Emperor of China in the east; but that was long ago. Contrast that with the atmosphere on the north Tibetan plain in the first half of the century when all the animals and birds were tame. They had no reason to fear man as man would not harm them. The Tibetans would not take life of any sort.
In Ladakh we found peace, happiness and the most active religion that I have come across anywhere in the world. There were prayer flags, prayer wheels, chortens, stupas, and mani walls by the hundred. Indeed, I am relieved that I have not been to the Chinese part of Tibet as it would be sad to see those religious symbols destroyed and desecrated. Above all, we saw temples at Phuktal, Bardun, Mune, Kasar, Lingshet and Lamayaru. In them were many monks—a fifth of the population, I believe. The monks often showed us their libraries and they would usually point out a set of holy books and tell us that they had been saved and smuggled out of Chinese Tibet. Finally, in Leh we came across the Dalai Lama preaching to the multitude. The Dalai Lama believes that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Tibetan people and not to him because, as he puts it, he is,
"No one special: just a simple monk".
It is nevertheless worth quoting what that simple monk said about the Tianamen Square massacre. He said:
"I do not believe the demonstrations were in vain, because the spirit of freedom was rekindled among the Chinese people and China cannot escape the impact of this spirit of freedom sweeping many parts of the world. The brave students and their supporters showed the Chinese leadership and the world the human face of that Great Nation of China".
Surely my noble friend will agree that a simple monk who can describe the awful Peking massacre in such charitable terms is a worthy recipient of the Nobel prize for peace.
I turn now to the acquisitive nature of the Chinese. I believe that my noble friend will also agree that the Chinese are exploiting Tibetan resources. They are mining gold, bauxite, copper, zinc and uranium and transporting them eastward. Surely my noble friend will also agree that the most serious resource that the Chinese are tapping is timber: the sub-tropical forest of eastern Tibet. That might have as serious an effect on the Indian sub-continent as does the destruction of the Amazon rain forest on South America, and indeed perhaps on the world with the now threatened greenhouse effect.
The Tibetan rivers flowing eastwards are log-jammed. In addition, 200 trucks an hour have been counted driving out of Tibet along the main road to Chengdu in China. Following deforestation, there is soil erosion and flooding. Sichuan was flooded in 1981. Yunnan was flooded last spring. The deforestation along the Brahmaputra could well have caused the several floods that have devastated Bangladesh in recent years. Altogether China is losing 2·5 million hectares of forest cover each year, and that includes forest from the so-called Tibetan autonomous region.
That leads me to my third question: what right have the Chinese to be in Tibet? A treaty was made in 823 AD between the wise rulers of China and the

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wise rulers of Tibet. It is carved on a pillar in front of the Joh Khang, Lhasa Tibet's holiest shrine. It states:
"Tibetans will live happily in the great land of Tibet and the Chinese will live happily in the great land of China".
For hundreds of years after that treaty the Tibetans produced the spiritual head of China in return for which the Chinese provided the Tibetans with the occasional army to repel, for instance, an invasion by the Ghurkas.
For the first half of this century Tibet was truly independent and we recognised it as such. We made treaties with Tibet in 1904, 1908 and 1913. In the Second World War the Americans asked whether they could fly over Tibet to supply China, but the Tibetans refused as they wished to remain neutral. All that spells out loudly and clearly that Tibet is an independent nation by right and in fact. However, the Chinese place a different interpretation on those matters and my noble friend will not therefore find the question easy to field. When the Chinese speak of autonomy, for instance, there are 17 different words for "autonomy" in Mandarin, each with a slightly different meaning. The word "suzerainty" is equally unclear.
A famous Dalai Lama gave presents to a Chinese emperor. Those presents were interpreted by the Chinese as a type of levy or tax. In Chinese eyes they made Tibet subservient to China. It will interest my noble friend to learn that George III also gave presents to China in 1793. That caused the Chinese to regard the British also as a nation subservient to China. For all I know, the Chinese may also regard the United Kingdom as a Chinese autonomous region.
The huge difference between us and the Tibetans is that the Chinese have not invaded us. Our most reverend Primates have not had to flee the country and our right reverend Prelates are not being tortured. Our human rights are respected. It is those facts that make the issue of whether China has any right to be in Tibet of academic interest only. What is far more important is surely that even if China had every right to be in Tibet for the past 4,000 years the Chinese would still not have the right to torture monks. They would not have the right to destroy monasteries. They would not have the right to sentence nuns to hard labour and they would not have the right to arrest, as they did only last Sunday, five school children for counter-revolutionary activities.
The abuse of basic human rights in Tibet is continuing and worsening. I have here the latest issue of the Tibetan News Update. I only need read the headings to make my point. On page 3 we find, "Demonstrations and arrests continue". On page 7 it says, "Tibetan faces death sentence". On page 8 it says, "Over 400 jailed, 80 sentenced". On page 9 it describes new torture techniques; on page 14, "China starts anti-religious campaign".
I wish to read another two excerpts because my noble friend will then see why I am asking this Unstarred Question. The first excerpt comes from the Nobel citation for the Dalai Lama:
"The Nobel Committee wants to emphasise the fact that the Dalai Lama in his struggle for the liberation of Tibet consistently
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has opposed the use of violence. He has instead advocated peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people.
The Dalai Lama has developed his philosophy of peace from a great reverence for all things living and upon the concept of universal responsibility embracing all mankind as well as nature".
The second excerpt comes from a report from Lhasa in that same newsletter:
"Officials are using a new technique to extract confessions from prisoners, involving placing an iron rod in the prisoner's mouth and then tying it to his or her arms tied high up behind the back. The weight of the arms pulls on the mouth until the victim collapses on the floor. He or she is then constantly revived by being doused with cold water".
My noble friend must be as appalled by this as we all are.
Perhaps I may now make two practical requests. First, will he ask our right honourable friend the Prime Minister whether she will meet the Dalai Lama as she has met other Nobel prizewinners, Lech Walesa and Desmond Tutu? Such a meeting would be a simple mark of respect for a great and peaceful man. It would not be political—it would be the wrong forum for politics. The right forum for that would surely be the General Assembly of the United Nations. Were it possible to find there a solution that would please the Tibetans, it would incidentally give an enormous boost in confidence to Hong Kong.
Perhaps a simple reaffirmation of the 1959 declaration would do the trick. That calls for, "The Cessation of Practices which deprive the Tibetan Peoples of their fundamental human rights and freedom, including their right to self-determination". So my second request is: can my noble friend prevail upon our right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary to bring something of this kind about at the United Nations?
All around us we see new freedoms: in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Only in one place are matters getting worse; that place is Tibet. Yet that courageous man, the Dalai Lama, does not seem depressed. In an interview with Jonathan Mirsky of the Observer he said, about China:
"We have a saying: A fire becomes brightest and hottest just before it dies"
Let us hope that Chinese repression in Tibet is indeed in its death throes. Meanwhile, I wish to thank everyone in advance for taking part in this debate. I look forward to their contributions and in particular to my noble friend's reply.
7.14 p.m.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, perhaps I may declare an interest as president of the Tibet:Society and president of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Tibet. But far beyond that, I think that all of us would wish to thank the noble Viscount for not only a courageous but I thought a brilliant presentation of the Tibetan case. He could not have timed his presentation to your Lordships' House better than now, so soon after his Holiness the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize.
He referred to human rights. I can confirm what he said and add to it from the visit that I paid last year to Tibet. I reported on it in Beijing. I think that China's deplorable human rights record in Tibet

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ought to be condemned throughout the world and certainly must be condemned by the British Government, as the noble Viscount said, and by members of the European Community.
When I was in Lhasa, I was able to talk to many Tibetan people who told me of the misery of the circumstances under which they lived, not just poverty, living at a much lower standard of living than the Chinese who outnumbered them in terms of population. They told me of the abuse of human rights and the tortures to which they were subjected. I was shown some of the signs on the bodies of people who had been literally tortured. I knew very well that people were taken away almost every night that I was there. They were taken away, often never to appear again until their relatives were invited to identify the bodies at the mortuary. This was a terrible situation in which the people of Tibet—fine, courageous people—had been forced into a situation of fear and oppression.
I was there just a few weeks after a big demonstration on 5th March 1988. I was told by the Tibetans that there had been 10,000 people on the streets of Lhasa, and I was told how many had died. These were ordinary demonstrators and people simply viewing the demonstration, who had been shot by the police. I presented this case to the authorities and the Chinese said, "No, it was just a handful of troublemakers".
Within three days of that having been said to me, it was confirmed that there had been 10,000 people on the streets of Lhasa in peaceful protest against what was happening. It was mainly nuns and monks who suffered and died simply because they believed in human rights. They dared to say that they were as much entitled to independence as people in any other part of the world.
I saw many of the monasteries that had been razed to the ground during the cultural revolution. I saw the masses of Chinese troops armed and driving around in armoured vehicles, creating terror among the people of Lhasa. It was a sad situation. I reported as fully as I could in the report which I presented not only back in London but to the Chinese.
Matters have got worse. People continued to demonstrate. They demonstrated on the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights and within a few minutes of some people raising banners which said, "Human rights", they were shot merely for standing up for principles which all of us here would be proud to support. Since 8th March 1989, following the succession of demonstrations, but before the events that brought China to life, Lhasa has been under martial law. There followed a series of peaceful demonstrations in which more troops were brought in to make quite certain that nothing happened and that everything was peaceful, as they claimed. The Chinese claim that it is peaceful in Tibet, but I am afraid that it is the peace of the grave.
The noble Viscount said this, and I believe that while the winds of change seem to have blown through the countries of eastern Europe into Africa, through Namibia where there has been a great move
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towards self-determination, within China and China's possession—the colonial territory of Tibet—things have moved from bad to worse. The noble Viscount spoke movingly of the Dalai Lama. I feel very honoured to know the Dalai Lama well and to consider him as a friend. He is immensely popular in Tibet. Any Tibetan who has an opportunity of speaking quietly in one's ear, or just of demonstrating with postcards how he feels, will show that he sees the Dalai Lama as one who will not only be his spiritual leader but one who will eventually, one way or another, lead the Tibetans to the right of freedom which is denied to them but which is proudly possessed by people in so many other parts of the world.
Not only is the Dalai Lama a statesman, but he is a modern man and realistic in his approach. The proposals that he made in his five-point peace plan were ones that could be the basis of any serious negotiations, if the Chinese were prepared to negotiate. Particularly since the announcement of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama travels throughout the world. Wherever he goes he is treated with the respect that he deserves. He has been received by royalty, prime ministers, foreign ministers and presidents. I have been with him on some of those occasions. However, there is one place where he is not well received and that is in Britain. I feel ashamed that this is so. However, that was the situation before the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize, and perhaps things will now change. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that that is the case when he replies.
When the Dalai Lama came to this country in April last year no Minister would see him. Ministers insisted that no official from the Foreign Office should see him, and they said that he could not be allowed in the country if he were going to make any kind of political statement. I believe that was a direct snub to the Dalai Lama. After all, our Foreign Office has received all kinds of people. The Foreign Office has received representatives of the PLO. Those people are not always known for their peaceful approach. The Foreign Office has also received representatives of the African National Congress. As I understand it, those people are not tied to peace. On the other hand, the Dalai Lama is a man of absolute peace, and he condemns in his own country acts of violence. I shall quote another paragraph from the speech made by the Dalai Lama when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He said that he accepted the prize:
"on behalf of the 6 million Tibetan people, my brave countrymen and women inside Tibet, who have suffered and continue to suffer so much. They confront a calculated and systematic strategy aimed at the destruction of their national and cultural identities. The prize reaffirms our conviction that with truth, courage and determination as our weapons, Tibet will be liberated".
I endorse those words. I should be proud to save them and use them myself. I submit that Britain should play a much more active role in seeking a peaceful solution to the grim situation which we all know, and which the Foreign Office knows, exists in Tibet. After all, as we were reminded by the noble Viscount, Britain has a long, historical link with Tibet. It has basically been one of recognising Tibet

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as an independent country. As the noble Viscount said, in 1904 we signed a treaty with Tibet, and in 1914 the two countries signed trade and boundary agreements. The Tibetans have always looked to Britain because they think that here we shall understand their situation. I am afraid that has simply not been so.
To be absolutely fair, I should say that the British Government have carried out some actions. The British Government protested to China at the excesses at the time of the demonstrations in Lhasa. They protested at the imposition of martial law. They said that there was oppression by the Chinese and they have acted with the other 11 members of the Community in calling on China to change its policies. Britain has also spoken out in favour of opening talks between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese authorities. It would be a natural continuation of that concern for the British Government to take some positive initiative. As the noble Viscount said, the issue must come to the United Nations again. We recognise that the United Nations has already passed three resolutions in years past calling for a change of circumstances in Tibet. The time has come for that to happen again. The time has come for Britain to take a new initiative, together with the other members of the Community, in order to persuade China that it should be part of the modern world. After all, what exists in Tibet is not just a form of colonialism but a form of apartheid. There is no doubt that the people of Tibet are treated as second class citizens in their own country.
Now the Government have an opportunity to act. The Dalai Lama has been recognised as one of the great men of this world and of this generation. It would be generous for the Government to applaud and congratulate the Dalai Lama on what he has stood for and the way in which he has acted. I hope that the Government will invite him to London. That is perhaps the best thing to do. I hope they will invite him to London so that perhaps Her Majesty the Queen, but certainly the Prime Minister, can say how proud we are to have known and to have been linked with a person of that quality.
The new situation that the Nobel Peace Prize has brought about gives the British Government, as the noble Viscount said, an opportunity to take an initiative which would perhaps enable the people of Tibet, who so much revere the Dalai Lama and who share with him the joy in the receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, to have not only hope for their own future, which they already have as they are a determined people, but also hope that Britain might see where its own interests lie. The thought that our policies over Tibet could be dictated from Beijing is one that is deplorable and must be condemned in all parts of the House. I again thank the noble Viscount for raising this issue on the floor of the House. I hope we shall obtain a positive response from the Minister.
7.27 p.m.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, I too wish to congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Mersey, on his forceful and effective presentation. I also wish to thank the noble
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Lord, Lord Ennals, for his consistent and permanent advocacy of the cause of the Tibetans which he espouses with so much skill and effectiveness in this House and outside in his role as president of the organisation that he mentioned. We are very grateful to him for keeping the cause of the 'Tibetans alive when it has not been fashionable.
We are also grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Mersey, for giving us this opportunity of discussing the matter on what is an appropriate occasion. Not only is it a few days after the award to the Dalai Lama, as has been mentioned, but also it is very close to the anniversary of the events outside the Joh Khang when, as the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, has just reminded us, unarmed, peaceful demonstrators were shot. Among those people was a monk who walked out into the middle of the square raising a flag. A Chinese policeman coming from the opposite end of the square levelled his pistol and shot the monk between the eyes, just because he raised the flag. Then carnage was unleashed around the square at all the demonstrators and anyone who happened to be standing there. I spoke to a Dutch girl who was shot through the shoulder. The bullet went straight through her chest and came out through her back. She was very nearly killed and doctors told her that she was extraordinarily fortunate to survive. Many others of course did not survive and they lay dead in the square after that horrible event of a year ago.
We have also been reminded by the noble Viscount, Lord Mersey, and by the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, of the events in Tianamen Square which opened the eyes of the world to how the Chinese behave, not to subject peoples but to their own citizens. I attended a meeting of the Westminster group of the United Nations Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland yesterday evening. The meeting was addressed by Kate Adie. She brought to life again those horrible events when the students were massacred in Tianamen Square with the aid of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and heavy machine guns. The troops embarked on an absolute orgy of killing before the horrified gaze of the whole world. We all saw on our television screens those peaceful, unarmed demonstrators being crushed beneath the tracks of military vehicles and mown down by gunfire. The millions of ordinary Chinese people who had dreamt of democracy and freedom and who had seemed to be on the way to attaining it through a peaceful development similar to that which has occurred in other parts of the world woke up to a nightmare of savage communist repression.
Because we have been used to thinking of China as an ally in the Cold War and because the free world so much wanted to believe that economic reforms in the People's Republic would lead to political liberalisation, we were taken by surprise. However, it had been predicted. The former honorary secretary to the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, Roberta Cohen, wrote in her study The People's Republic of China: the human rights exception in some detail as to why China had been exempted from the human rights scrutiny which we apply to all other autocracies. Those were a lack of hard information; the huge number of victims in the People's Republic; reverence for China's ancient civilisation;

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the desire for normalisation of relations; the belief that China's sensitivity to criticism—which has been mentioned—meant that any reference to human rights' violations would make matters worse; the absence of any human rights lobby in China itself; and, in particular in the case of the UK, the fear that we could jeopardise the peaceful transition of sovereignty over Hong Kong.
Ms Cohen predicted that many non-governmental organisations would continue to focus on those countries in Asia to which they could send missions and trial observers, engage in debate with the government, work with local dissidents and more easily spur change.
As a corollary to that myopia the outside world has for many years chosen to ignore the plight of the Tibetans, whose sufferings have been even more dreadful than those of the Chinese people themselves. In addition to savagely repressing any signs of peaceful dissent by individuals and groups, the Chinese occupation forces have unleashed a programme of ethnocide, to use Leo Kuper's term. They are deliberately and systematically trying to extinguish Tibetan culture, language and religion and to overwhelm the Tibetan people in their own land by huge avalanches of Han Chinese immigrants.
In March, following peaceful demonstrations by Tibetans, the Chinese police and military killed at least 30 people in Lhasa and wounded several hundred using automatic weapons. Then all foreigners were expelled from the territory, which was sealed off from the outside world. But we know from accounts by refugees and just a few travellers that since then many Tibetans have been summarily executed, that over 1,000 have been detained without trial and severe torture has been inflicted on many of them, as the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, mentioned, including monks and nuns. The Chinese have nevertheless achieved their objective of minimising the criticisms of their Tibet policies in the media of the free world because journalists have been denied free access to the territory.
Since the international community turned its back on Tibet, the people have continued to assert their identity and the Chinese aggressors have continued to commit further crimes against the Tibetan people. On 30th November—as the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, mentioned—five Tibetans were sentenced to between 17 and 19 years imprisonment for demanding independence for their country. I should like to read to your Lordships how Lhasa Radio, controlled by the occupation forces, reported the sentencing, which was said to have been handed down not in a courtroom but at a mass rally:
"The crimes committed by Ngawang Punchung and other criminals demonstrates that so-called human rights, freedoms and democracy played up by separatists both at home and abroad are nothing but a pack of deceitful lies. Deliberately planning to form counter-revolutionary organisations, putting up posters, spreading rumours and collecting information, they frenziedly conducted criminal activities to split the motherland. It is quite apparent that the aim of their crimes was to attempt to separate Tibet from the motherland by exploiting international anti-China forces. The severe punishment imposed on them is richly deserved".
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At least those persons received some form of trial, apparently. That is more than can be said for many other patriots who have been imprisoned. On 4th October six nuns were given three years' hard labour for demonstrating in the Barkhor on 22nd September. On 14th October six nuns were arrested near the Joh Khang temple for chanting slogans in favour of Tibetan independence. Towards the end of October four monks were given three years' hard labour for similar reasons. A fifth man, said to have been identified as the ringleader, was remanded pending a trial which would lead to heavier sentencing.
According to Dr. Blake Kerr, who interviewed 25 Tibetan refugees, the torture of prisoners is routine. The new kinds of torture inflicted on detainees have been referred to. Dr. Kerr heard accounts of people being beaten with a variety of weapons; being hung for hours by their wrists, ankles or thumbs; immersed in very cold water; and attacked by guard dogs. Nuns are subjected to sexual torture, including the use of electric cattle prods inserted into their vaginas. John Gittings wrote an account in the Guardian of 8th November of the torture of women protesters; while Tom Aston, another British journalist, described the use of a new and more sophisticated electric baton with four elements instead of the previous two.
Why is the coverage in Britain of those atrocities so sparse? If any one of them had occurred in South Africa or the Soviet Union one could just imagine the furore, and rightly so. Yet when they happen every week in Tibet there is virtual silence. One cannot help thinking that the principled stand taken by His Holiness the Dalai Lama on using only peaceful means of securing change has tended to reduce the coverage of the problem in the outside world.
Television in particular reports acts of violence while ignoring peaceful arguments, thus encouraging the use of violence as a means of securing political change. We are treated to pictures of bomb craters in Bogota or Lisburn but we do not hear the voice of the Dalai Lama gently appealing to the world community to act so that his people's agony might be brought to an end. I did not see any reference at all in television programmes on Sunday to the speech which the Dalai Lama made on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. I am ashamed that we should cut him out of our screens in that way. I believe that the producers who made those decisions should think again about the way in which they concentrate on violence while ignoring the peaceful advocates of change.
In 1987 when Vanya Kewley was trying to interest the commissioning editors of the BBC and independent TV companies in pursuing the stories of genocide which were brought by refugees from Tibet, she was told that it was not news. "It's not exactly screaming off the world's headlines, darling" was one reaction. As the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, has mentioned, the Palestinians get coverage becaues some of them let off bombs at airports. The Sikh extremists are reported because they blew up an Air India jet, killing all the passengers. The Tibetans are ignored because they follow the Buddha's doctrine of non-violence, compassion and loving kindness.

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What is even more deplorable—as has been said by both noble Lords who have spoken so far—is that our Government should turn their backs on the Dalai Lama himself. His Holiness has been received by the United States Congress, the European Parliament and many other heads of government and parliaments, as the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, has reminded us. There is no doubt whatsoever that he commands the loyalty, respect and love of his own people. He has been feted by the authorities in Norway as the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet when he comes here the British Government do their best to silence him and pretend that he does not exist.
Yet they can forget the murder committed by the Chinese authorities very quickly, as we see from the visit of two United States officials to Beijing over the weekend. I believe that that was misguided. I think that it was also misguided of our own Government to send a Foreign Office official to Beijing. That visit has not been officially announced but I should like to ask the noble Lord who is to reply whether it is true that a Foreign Office official has clandestinely been to Beijing and if so why it was thought necessary to do so in such a furtive and underhand way.
The Government maintain that more can be done to ameliorate the sufferings of the Tibetan people by quiet diplomacy than by open criticism. They also say that open criticism of China's policy is counter-productive because it elicits a furious reaction on the other side which injures the process of dialogue. The corollary of that is that we must ignore the Dalai Lama and the threats that the Chinese have made against the Norwegians show what may happen if we do not. The Norwegians have been courageous enough to stand up to those threats and ignore them. But could the plight of the Tibetans be any worse than it is already? Can China do any harm to the free world if we stand up collectively to her strident bullying? The Chinese economy is in a desperate plight, thanks to the mismanagement of economic reforms and the regression to communist central planning which is being abandoned as a certain recipe for stagnation throughout the whole of the Soviet bloc. The Chinese need Western technology and management, while there is nothing that we need from them.
The most remarkable characteristic of the Tibetan scene is that, as Chinese attempts to eradicate the language, religion and culture of the Tibetan people have intensified, so has the sense of national identity of the people. Thus, in spite of the brutal reaction of the authorities in Lhasa to any manifestation of Tibetan nationalism, there are still many individuals and groups who are prepared to endure long periods of imprisonment and torture as the price of declaring their beliefs. They raise the Tibetan flag, shout independence slogans and recently have even distributed an independent manifesto. They assert their right to self-determination which they are supposed to have under Article 1 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of which the United Kingdom is a signatory.
The policy of successive British governments has been to regard Tibet as autonomous while
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recognising the special position of the Chinese authorities there. That special position historically reflected the ancient compact, which has already been mentioned, between the Mongol emperors and the Dalai Lama, under which spiritual advice was given in return for military protection. That relationship continued by mutual agreement after those factors no longer existed; but, for all practical purposes, it came to an end when the Manchu dynasty was overthrown in the revolution of 1911. At that point Tibet had achieved de facto independence, as we recognised implicitly by entering into treaties with Tibet without the approval of the Chinese, as has been mentioned.
Can a nation which has already achieved its sovereignty revert to dependence on a foreign state? That is apparently so, according to the Government. I want to quote one sentence from a letter which I received from the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara. I told him that I would mention it, but I am sorry that he is not in his place to hear me do so. It presumably reflects the Government's policy. The noble Lord said:
"while the principle of self-determination is accepted, the UN and the international community have left undefined the criteria by which any particular claim could be justified. Ultimately it has to be resolved on the political level".
In other words, if morality points one way and expediency another, the latter must always prevail. I would propose, as an alternative to that policy, that the United Kingdom should say how claims to self-determination are to be evaluated, and I would suggest some rules for consideration. Incidentally, contrary to the Minister's assertion, the United Nations has not been totally silent on the matter. A number of resolutions in the General Assembly have always upheld the,
"right of peoples under colonial and alien domination to self-determination".
Although the decolonisation committee has confined its attention to territories which were formerly dependencies of European powers, nothing in the wording of the resolutions imposed such a constraint. It would be absurd to demand the exercise of a particular right only in the case of persons whose oppressors hailed from one particular corner of the globe. Alien domination is practised in Africa and Asia by powers indigenous to their own continents and it is time that we turned our attention to those cases.
Where peoples are under colonial and alien domination, they try to make their claim for self-determination heard. So the first criterion is that there should be appeals by individuals or organisations to the outside world on behalf of the people in question. For that purpose, clearly there can be no validation of credentials, as there would be in the case of trying to obtain a seat at the United Nations, because that is precisely the question to be determined. But first, and before any democratic test is applied, such as a plebiscite or vote of an assembly elected by universal adult franchise, certain questions would need to be addressed. Two of the most important questions are as follows: are the people distinct from those who govern them,

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ethically, linguistically, in religion and culture, and were they at any time in the past self-governing?
There can be no dispute over those questions in relation to the Tibetans. They are obviously different from the Chinese in every respect. They are ethnically separate; their language is quite different from that of the Chinese; their religion is unique and plays a major role in the lives of the people; and their culture is entirely different from that of the Chinese. They were undoubtedly internally self-governing, to a greater or lesser extent, for centuries, and for 40 years Tibet was an independent state. If it is argued, as the Chinese do, that Tibet was a dependency of the Chinese emperors, the Tibetans are entitled to the same rights of self-determination as any other former colony.
After the last war, the world passed through an age of decolonisation, now virtually complete. That brought to an end the empires of the European powers with the sole exception of the Soviet Union. We are now entering a new era in which other empires crumble and fall. The external territories of the Soviet Union have become independent overnight and many of the republics of the Soviet Union are starting to break away. In Western Asia, Armenians and Kurds are asserting their separate identity. In Africa the empire created by the Amhara in the 19th century is disintegrating and the white masters of South Africa are preparing to yield power. China cannot be the only major power on earth to dominate other peoples and to be immune from international criticism for her conduct. As a former imperial power, we should advise the authorities in Beijing that one cannot rule another people indefinitely against their will and that violence and repression merely stiffen their resolve. As a famous son of Ireland told us 74 years ago, and as a Tibetan might say to the Chinese today:
"Life springs from death, and from the graves of patriotic men and women spring living nations".
7.47 p.m.
Lord Willoughby de Broke: My Lords, I share the hope of my noble friend Lord Mersey and of the noble Lords, Lord Ennals and Lord Avebury, that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama will provide an opportunity for review of government policy towards China and Tibet. I ask the Government to study more closely the activities of the governing power in what is in theory the autonomous region of Tibet, whichever of the 17 definitions of my noble friend Lord Mersey we choose to use.
The Tibetans feel that they are in danger of becoming a disregarded minority in their own country. They feel swamped by the huge numbers of Chinese settlers which have, by some estimates, reached some 7.5 million people against the native Tibetan population of 6 million. The infrastructure to support those incomers is seen not as a benefit to Tibet but rather as a threat to its autonomy and culture. Most school exams are in Chinese. Most jobs require a knowledge of Chinese. University places require a knowledge of English, which is not
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taught in Tibet. Hence, large numbers of Tibetan children are sent to China for their secondary education, losing their Tibetan identity.
Beyond that, Tibetans bitterly resent the restrictions upon religious worship and teaching. The persecution of those who objected to those restraints led to the disturbances of the last three years, culminating in the declaration of martial law in March this year. As has been amply demonstrated in the debate, there has since been more than enough evidence to show that there are serious and continuing breaches of human rights taking place in Tibet today. I recently had an opportunity to look at some transcripts of interviews with ex-prisoners and they make chilling reading—a catalogue of beatings, torture, starvation and detention without trial, all contrary to guarantees enshrined in the Chinese constitution.
We are privileged to live in a free country and we rightly condemn abuses of power and abuses of human rights wherever they occur, be it in South Africa, the Soviet Union or South America. I trust that we will continue strongly to condemn these same abuses when they occur in Tibet, for, as the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, correctly pointed out, the Tibetans see us as their particular hope—the Western power with which they have historically had the closest links.
I therefore hope that Her Majesty's Government may be willing to meet the Dalai Lama in his capacity as Nobel prizewinner with a view to establishing constructive dialogue between China and Tibet. I hope that they will be encouraged by these words taken from the address of the chairman of the Peace Prize Committee at the award ceremony:
"It would be difficult to cite an historical example of a minority's struggle to secure its rights in which a more conciliatory attitude has been adopted than in the case of the Dalai Lama".
Without some progress the prospect of Tibet is grim. The Dalai Lama has steadfastly preached non-violence, but there is an increasingly militant movement among young Tibetans who have never known a free Tibet. Without a rapprochement of some sort there is nothing more certain than that the cycle of repression, violence and further repression will continue to its sad conclusion.
7.51 p.m.
Lord Grimond: My Lords, we have listened to four most impressive speeches on the need to develop a new policy towards China. I particularly want to thank the noble Viscount, Lord Mersey, for raising this vital matter, and for the way in which he deployed the case against China and in favour of Tibet. We have also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, at first hand of some of the horrors which have been occurring, and also from my noble friend Lord Avebury, who has a long record of defending human rights.
I have no desire to repeat what the noble Lords have said, but I want to take up one thing which the noble Viscount, Lord Mersey, said. He quite reasonably said that he thought that the Government might argue that they would only make things worse if they took up a stern attitude against China. That

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is an argument which, if they use it, will be disastrous. We have been through this; it is appeasement. It is all very well to smile on the Government Front Bench, but we have not been smiling since we appeased Hitler; we have not been smiling since we appeased Stalin; and we will not be smiling if we appease China. It never works. It has never worked in history and it will not work now.
There is in my mind—and I think in the minds of many people—a fear that this Government will bring shame upon this country and shame upon it for the sake of what they believe will be the solution for Hong Kong. At the back of this situation lies their attitude over Hong Kong and their determination that, whatever happens to the poorer people of the area, the capital that they invested in Hong Kong will be saved. It is to my mind a most ignoble attitude, and I trust that we shall be told that it is not so.
The case has clearly been made out that genocide—that overworked word—is being practised against the Tibetans. It has clearly been shown that the Chinese Government have deported large quantities of children to China and that they have settled large quantities of Chinese in Tibet. Martial law has been in force and atrocities—vouched for by the noble Lords, Lord Ennals and Lord Avebury—have been committed. There is, therefore, no case, as has been said, for appeasing China.
We must ask the Government to be quite clear about certain matters. Have they represented to the Chinese Government that their conduct is not only against human rights but against the law of nations of practically all time? The Tibetans are an exceedingly peaceful people. It cannot be alleged that the Chinese are in any way threatened by Tibet. Have the Government represented at the United Nations that that organisation might take steps in this situation?
That is my first question. My next question is why are they supplying arms to China? My third question is whether they will make it quite clear that their policy is not to appease China at all costs and in all situations, because that is what it appears to be. If we do not get much clearer answers on these matters now than we have done, it will be quite apparent to this country that in our name and the name of this country, the Government are prepared to perpetrate any despicable act to ensure, as they think—though they will fail—that the capital invested in Hong Kong may be preserved.
7.55 p.m.
Baroness Elles: My Lords, in expressing my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Mersey not only for tabling this Unstarred Question but for the eloquent way in which he presented the case on Tibet, we could not have had a better introduction to this very difficult problem. It also gives those of us here in this House tonight an opportunity to congratulate His Holiness most warmly on his award of the Nobel Peace Prize. It should be noted that both the King of Norway and the Norwegian Prime Minister attended. Indeed, it may be asked who else
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must meet the Dalai Lama before our own Prime Minister is prepared to meet him? The Pope met him and received him in the Vatican in 1988. Other great and distinguished presidents around the world have received him. The speeches that he has made have been tabled as formal resolutions both in Congress and the Senate of the United States. One begins to wonder what it is that is stopping our own Government—which is known for its defence of liberty; known for its defence of human rights; known for its despair of violation of human rights wherever they might be. We have a fine record, and I think we should be looking at this to see what more can be done for the Tibetans.
Let us remember that this award was given just 50 years after his country was invaded; 40 years since the Dalai Lama left his country with several thousand fellow Tibetans—years during which he has not ceased to struggle for the freedom of his people and his country; but with a weapon unknown to any other freedom fighter, that of non-violence. That has been rigorously observed even while his people were being oppressed by martial law. His own personal suffering was visible. When anybody met him one knew what was happening to his own people.
What political opportunities are open to the Dalai Lama to pursue? In June 1988 he addressed a large number of Members of the European Parliament and others in the Parliament in Strasbourg. There were over 300 people there. Apparently it was the biggest press conference ever held and for the first time the speaker—the Dalai Lama—had massive applause, which I am told had never happened before. These were people from 12 member states. All political parties were represented at that press conference.
The Dalai Lama chose Strasbourg as a symbol of reconciliation. It is a centre which, after the last war, represented the agreement between the Germans and the French not to fight each other any more. It was a symbolic choice of his. He offered to the Chinese Government the retention of rights over defence and foreign policy, subject to the Tibetans being autonomous in their internal affairs. That was a very generous and brave offer. Although there was an indication that the Chinese Government would meet the Dalai Lama for talks in a place of his choosing—he suggested Geneva—nothing has happened. It should be said that this offer to negotiate was not necessarily approved by the people of Tibet, suffering and dying for the cause of Tibetan independence. It was a courageous proposal; but since there has been no response can that offer still lie on the table? That will be a matter for the Dalai Lama and his people to decide.
It is not only the people who are suffering. My noble friend Lord Mersey touched on that. Graphic reports of the change in the landscape by massive deforestation are being received. If any evidence was needed it is the silting up and breaking of the banks of the Brahmaputra and Irriwaddy rivers which rise in the mountains of Tibet as well as the Yangtse and the Meekong. Indeed, there was a proposal published in yesterday's Financial Times which might be undertaken by the UN and other agencies to deal with the floods which occur in Bangladesh.

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However, no shoring up along the lower reaches of these rivers will stem the floods unless a massive replantation programme is started in Tibet and the ceasing of the chopping down of forests. That is an aspect with which I believe not only the United Kingdom should be involved, with its new greeener than green colours for world safety, but one on which the Twelve member states of the European Community should offer a constructive programme to the Chinese Government in order to stop this catastrophe influencing, as it does, vast areas of Bangladesh which the European Community is being asked every year to assist.
That is surely a practical proposal. The European Community should be pressing the United Nations environmental programme to look at the problem with detachment and to ask what we should be doing to stop this flooding. Without dealing with the situation in Tibet—and I am speaking of the environmental rather than political issue—there will be no solution to the problem.
The proposal of the Dalai Lama—that Tibet could become an area of environmental safety, the world's largest nature reserve and a zone of peace which would in no way harm the Chinese—should surely not be neglected or derided. The critical geographical position of Tibet would be guaranteed as a neutral area with the Chinese having military and foreign policy decisions.
Many of us have been to China and have been the recipients of hospitality. Although not many noble Lords have touched on this point, many in this House will have received hospitality from the Chinese, and our admiration of the cultural and scientific achievements of the Chinese people over the centuries has increased. The events in Eastern Europe have shown—and other noble Lords have referred to this point—that it is possible to have a peaceful evolution to new and more successful forms of democracy and economic policy. It is time that China too recognises that in a world which attaches such importance to human rights and their protection it should review its policies and contribute to an area of greater peace and stability.
I believe that it is worthwhile reminding the Government of General Eisenhower's famous saying: history has shown that it is never the weak who preserve freedom but only the strong. That is the message for Her Majesty's Government.
8.2 p.m.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, a very important and poignant subject is before us this evening. We are very grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Mersey, for bringing it before us, and for giving us an opportunity to express our very deep admiration to His Holiness the Dalai Lama on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and for all the work that he did to earn the prize. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, I should like to seize the opportunity to offer my congratulations.
The noble Viscount, my noble friend and many other speakers have presented a very comprehensive picture of the situation in Tibet, and of the position vis-à-vis China and of Her Majesty's Government's
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policy both towards Tibet and China. I should merely like to highlight some of what has been said and to touch on two other aspects of this very troubling situation.
First, the situation within Tibet gives rise to many worries, as has been shown in the debate. The noble Viscount, Lord Mersey, has described environmental problems. I should like to say a word about the state of deprivation shown by some statistics that I have from UNICEF. These show that in Tibet the figures for child mortality are 100 children per 1,000 births, compared with 36 per 1,000 in China—that is three times greater. The illiteracy level in Tibet is 73 per cent. compared with 31 per cent. in China. Again the figure is three times greater. UNICEF is also worried about the total lack of mother and child health facilities in many parts of Tibet. It gives cause for great anxiety. One asks oneself how this has been allowed to happen.
Apart from the concern about the standard of life of the people in Tibet, universal concern has been expressed in this House this evening and from many different areas about the violation of human rights. As so often, Amnesty International has brought us some very truthful reports of what is happening there—of arrests, torture and executions since the imposition of martial law in Lhasa on 7th March. The situation has been described in very poignant terms by many speakers today. Some terrible examples have been given of the violation of human rights, of torture, of imprisonment and of police brutality.
Can the Minister tell the House what representations Her Majesty's Government have made to the Chinese Government with respect to these continued human rights violations? Can he also state whether he has received any indication from the Chinese Government about a possible lifting of martial law in Tibet.
The point has been put very strongly today. Surely we must be consistent in our view and in our reaction towards violation of human rights wherever they may occur. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has made very clear that we express our outrage at the violation of human rights in many areas of the world, but how is it that we have not expressed it in relation to Tibet? Surely there should always be condemnation of imprisonment of political prisoners and of all the torture and brutality that have been described today.
That leads to my second point—this country's relations with the great nation of China. It has been described in very great detail. We all know that good relations with that country are vital to Great Britain. We have a very common interest which other countries do not have. We share an interest and concern for the future of Hong Kong, as the noble Lord, Lord Grimond, said. However, our rightful preoccupation about the continued wellbeing of the people of that colony should not intrude on our policies relating to other territories in that part of the world. Ultimately Hong Kong's future will depend so much on the Hong Kong people. Our responsibilities to them should not disqualify us from making our views about Tibet known to China.

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The noble Lord, Lord Grimond, devoted his entire speech to making that point very clear. We know that China is very sensitive to criticism. Without any disrespect, I could compare the country to a very neurotic woman who says, "If you blame me for anything, I shall have a nervous breakdown". However, other countries have taken a more definite line regarding China's action towards the people of Tibet, notably Canada, Costa Rica, Norway and Holland. West Germany has indicated that it believes there should be dialogue between China and Tibet. It is quite clear that they may well move towards persuasion for that to happen.
Another reason for such dialogue is in order that both sides of the story should be told. Both China's intentions in Tibet and the desires of the people would then be disclosed. As we in this country know only too well, and as the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, has said, every unstable situation is a breeding ground for terrorism. Without dialogue with Tibet the danger of an escalation of terrorism—either from some other source or from a militant movement of young people growing impatient in Tibet—might well arise.
My last point relates to Britain's position vis-á-vis the Dalai Lama. As every speaker has said, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has earned worldwide respect for his long, painstaking, non-violent campaign for the liberation of his country. In this uncertain world, where violence and conflict are so close to the surface in so many situations in so many countries, should we not all unreservedly recognise and applaud the dedicated work for peace that His Holiness has been pursuing for so long? Is it not a fact that Her Majesty's Government say that they are in favour of the use of peaceful means to resolve the difficulties of the world? Therefore, why do they turn their face away from the one world leader who, at every level of his life and thought, stands for peace? My noble friend Lord Ennals has asked the Minister that question in unequivocal terms.
The Dalai Lama's speech to the European Parliament was one example. His reception was described by the noble Baroness, Lady Elles. His reputation at an international level could not be higher. That was reflected by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. Therefore why will we not honour him also? Why will not even our press reflect the enormous and well-deserved honour that has been given to His Holiness the Dalai Lama?
Merely because I find them totally relevant to the kind of person that the Dalai Lama clearly is, I should like to quote lines from a poem written by a 7th century Indian poet. I should like to do so not only because they are beautiful but because they are absolutely true. The Indian poet said:
"Not by a radiant jewel, not by the sun nor by fire, but by conciliation alone is dispelled the darkness born of enmity".
In our heart of hearts we all know that conciliation is the only path towards creating better understanding, tolerance and peace. That is what the Dalai Lama stands for. By supporting his stand for non-violence we shall give way to the whole concept of resolving international disagreements through
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peaceful negotiation rather than through armed conflict and violence.
8.12 p.m.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Mersey for raising the question of Tibet. It is a matter of importance to a considerable body of opinion in the UK and he introduced it in a most powerful, interesting and restrained speech. Our main concern in recent months has been to respond to the tragic events of 3rd and 4th June in Peking. But we acknowledge the continuing problems in Tibet and it is right that your Lordships should consider Her Majesty's Government's response to the situation.
Perhaps I may refer first to the person of the Dalai Lama, who earlier this week received in Oslo the Nobel Peace Prize. Her Majesty's Government have always recognised the Dalai Lama in his role as a distinguished spiritual leader, dedicated to the cause of peace. He is welcome to visit this country, and has done so on many occasions. His Holiness enjoys the reverence of the Tibetan people, and has won widespread international renown for his consistent advocacy of a non-violent solution to the problems of Tibet. The award to him of this year's Nobel Prize is the ultimate confirmation of the high respect in which he is held internationally.
Even before the award of the peace prize to the Dalai Lama, Her Majesty's Government were taking seriously the very understandable public concern in this country about the human rights situation in Tibet. Both in public and in private, on many occasions the Government have made very clear to the Chinese authorities that they share this. When the Chinese Government imposed martial law in Lhasa in March this year, we joined our European partners in expressing our dismay at the loss of life and violence there and our hope that exceptional measures would not be unnecessarily extended.
We shall continue to make our views known. But we shall do so in a careful and considered fashion, one that we believe will be the most effective in securing an actual improvement in the Chinese authorities' human rights performance in Tibet. We should certainly wish to avoid any action or statement that might exacerbate the situation or lead to any escalation of violence.
We have no clear picture of precisely what is happening in Tibet. The imposition of martial law and of travel restrictions in that remote and isolated part of the world has made the task of monitoring the situation difficult. It is inevitable that information from different, often partisan, sources will tend to exaggerate one or other aspect of the situation. That abuses of human rights have occurred in Tibet is beyond doubt but the extent is unclear. Moreover, when discussing Tibet I think that it would be unwise to take just one view and see the contribution of the Chinese towards Tibet in a purely negative light. Over the past few years the Chinese authorities have substantially increased development aid to Tibet with the aim of making it economically self-sufficient. These policies have remained unchanged despite the demonstrations. In

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recent years the Chinese have also shown greater sensitivity to Tibet's special needs and traditions; for example, in permitting a higher level of religious activity and encouraging the use and teaching of the Tibetan language.
It is encouraging that the Chinese chose to invite three Members of another place—the Members for Christchurch, Harrow East and Cornwall, South East—to visit Tibet in October. Their visit also provided the opportunity for a member of the British Embassy to accompany them to Tibet. He reported that, despite the heavy military presence, the economy of Lhasa and the surrounding area appeared to be thriving and that the atmosphere was generally relaxed. Some may consider that Chinese efforts to modernise Tibet have not been very relevant or effective. But it must be acknowledged that the Chinese have invested a great deal of effort in a genuine attempt to improve conditions in the region.
Baroness Elles: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. Will he ask the British diplomat who visited Tibet how many Tibetans benefited from the improved economic efforts of China? We know from our sources—I believe that many noble Lords in all parts of the House can confirm it—that very little money goes to help the people of Tibet who are becoming second-rate citizens.
Lord Reay: My Lords, my noble friend has made her point. Perhaps I may continue and then take up the points raised by noble Lords during the course of the debate
Lord Avebury: My Lords, in view of what the Minister said about being careful to evaluate partisan evidence, is he aware that the three Members of another place who went to Tibet were led by Mr. Robert Adley, who is a well-known advocate and friend of the Chinese People's Republic? He has never voiced a single word of criticism of them and actually made remarks favourable to the Chinese action in Tianamen Square.
Lord Reay: My Lords, at the moment I do not wish to go further into that question.
We must consider our response to the situation in Tibet in the light of the events that took place in Peking on 3rd and 4th June. Those horrible events, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, called them, created a heightened level of concern about human rights in China generally. Following the brutal repression of peaceful demonstrators in Peking, we and our partners in the European Community took a series of measures intended to bring home to the Chinese authorities the degree of shock and outrage that their actions had precipitated. We have emphasised that respect for human rights is an essential part of the pursuit of the policy of reform and openness which we and other countries in the West have sought to support and encourage.
I turn to some of the points raised by noble Lords. My noble friend Lord Mersey and almost every other
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noble Lord raised the question of why we could not receive the Dalai Lama. As I said earlier, the Dalai Lama is welcome to visit this country. However, he is regarded by some as being the leader of the Tibetan government in exile, which is not recognised by any government and with which successive British governments have had no dealings. For this reason we continue to be of the view that a meeting with Ministers would be open to misinterpretation.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, that is disgraceful!
Lord Reay: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and perhaps others, referred to the Dalai Lama having been received by other foreign governments. But we know of no European or other Western leaders who have met the Dalai Lama, except for a few in a strictly private capacity.
My noble friend Lady Elles raised the question of what the Dalai Lama said in his speech at Strasbourg. That is something which we consider is a matter for the Dalai Lama and the Chinese Government. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and my noble friend Lord Mersey also raised the question of self-determination for the Tibetan people. We believe that all peoples have the right to self-determination, but that this right can be exercised in several different ways. We do not believe that independence for Tibet is a realistic proposal and it would be no service to the Tibetans to encourage them to seek independence.
My noble friend Lord Mersey referred to the first part of this century, when he said we had made treaties with Tibet. But even then the special position of China was recognised, and we did not deal with Tibet as an independent state.
Viscount Mersey: My Lords, one of those treaties was a tripartite agreement between China, ourselves and the Tibetans. Tibet was most certainly an independent state in our eyes at the start of this century.
Lord Reay: My Lords, that is not the conclusion that I draw. But this is a historical matter and I dare say that further debate on it should be pursued in another forum. My noble friend Lord Mersey and the noble Lord, Lord Ennals, told some harrowing and moving stories about the ill-treatment of prisoners and others. My noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke also referred to that matter. It is unfortunately the case that the detention of prisoners without trial, the physical abuse of them and stories about them are common throughout China. To the extent that allegations of torture are true, of course we condemn them. It would be unrealistic to suppose that Chinese treatment of prisoners in Tibet is better than elsewhere in China.
The noble Lord, Lord Averbury, and my noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke raised the matter of damage done to the Tibetan culture. The Government regret damage that has been done to the Tibetan culture in the past. The Chinese Government have themselves acknowledged that serious mistakes were made in Tibet, particularly during the cultural revolution. We understand that

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China's nationality policies, adopted in 1979, encouraged minority races to maintain traditions. The Chinese Government have commissioned the restoration of more than 500 monasteries and temples in Tibet which were destroyed in the cultural revolution in the last few years.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, six thousand were destroyed.
Lord Reay: My Lords, after the March demonstrations, the Chinese affirmed that they would not change their policies of promoting economic and cultural development in Tibet, while preserving freedom of religion and respecting local customs. The noble Lord, Lord Grimond, asked about the selling of arms to China. In fact, one of the measures which was imposed by the United Kingdom in conjunction with our European colleagues in June was an embargo on the trade in arms and that policy remains in force.
Lord Willoughy de Broke: My Lords, I believe that there was a sale, if not of arms certainly of related equipment, to wit radar, sanctioned in September. I wonder whether my noble friend is in a position to confirm that or otherwise in spite of the agreement in June signed by the European Council in Madrid.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am afraid that I am not in a position to confirm that or otherwise. But I can assure my noble friend that I shall look into it.
The noble Lord, Lord Grimond, raised the situation of Hong Kong as being an explanation for the alleged special treatment that China was receiving on human rights. We believe it is clearly important, in highlighting our obligations to the people of Hong Kong and our commitment to the implementation of the 1984 joint declaration, that we maintain an atmosphere in our relations with China in which a working dialogue can continue. But this has not prevented us from making clear our concern about human rights in Tibet and in China generally, nor in conjunction with our European Community colleagues in taking concrete steps to bring home these concerns. My noble friend Lady Elles—
Lord Ennals: My Lords, can the Minister give some example of a concrete step that has been taken?
Lord Reay: My Lords, these are measures as the embargo on arms sales and other measures which were included when the European Community made its demarche to the Chinese Government.
My noble friend Lady Elles raised the important environmental problems of flooding, deforestation and so on. These are very important issues indeed which are extremely relevant today; and we shall consider the points that she has raised.
It is our intention that the Chinese should realise that if they wish to enjoy our continued wholehearted support for the modernisation of China, they will need to take account of international concern and show a greater understanding of the need for respect for human rights in China as a whole, including Tibet. At the same time, it is not our intention to
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isolate China but rather to encourage it back to the forward looking path it has until recently been following.
In this context, despite all that has happened in the past few months both in Peking and in Lhasa, we continue to believe that the best way forward in Tibet is for constructive dialogue between the Chinese authorities and the Tibetans themselves, including the Dalai Lama. Both the Chinese authorities and the Dalai Lama have accepted the value in principle of such a dialogue, although they have so far been unable to agree on terms. It is unfortunate that the events of June in Peking may have cast a shadow over the prospects for an early start to the talks. We shall however continue to do what we can to encourage the Chinese Government in this dialogue, which we believe offers the most promising prospect for solving the problems of Tibet.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, before the Minister sits down, did I really hear him aright? Did he say that if the Nobel Peace Prize winner, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, should come to London, as the noble Lord the Minister said he had every right to do, he will not be received by a British Minister? Did the noble Lord really say that?
Lord Reay: Yes, my Lords. I did. I am afraid that is the case.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I wonder whether he could answer the question that I put to him. It was whether there was any indication from the Chinese Government that they may lift martial law in Tibet.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I have no information about that, I am afraid, at the present time.

Greater Manchester (Light Rapid Transit System) Bill [H.L.]
Great Yarmouth Port Authority Bill [H.L.]
Happisburgh Lighthouse Bill [H.L.]
London Local Authorities (No. 2) Bill [H.L.]
Presented, read a first time, read a second time pro forma, and reported from the Committees.

Heathrow Express Railway Bill [H.L.]
Presented, read a first time, read a. second time pro forma, and committed to a Select Committee.
River Tees Barrage and Crossing Bill [H.L.]
Presented, read a first time, read a second time pro forma, and committed to an Unopposed Bill Committee.

Southampton Rapid Transit Bill [H.L.]
Presented, read a first time, read a second time pro forma, and committed to a Select Committee.
House adjourned at twenty-seven minutes past eight o'clock.