Lords Sitting of 27 July 1989

Preamble
The House met at eleven of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by The Lord Bishop of Sheffield): The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

University of Surrey: Student Grants
Lord Nugent of Guildford Lord Nugent of Guildford asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will consider assessing Guildford on the same basis as London for the purposes of paying student maintenance grants and discretionary support for students at the University of Surrey.
Viscount Davidson: No, my Lords. The London rate of grant is intended to reflect the exceptional costs incurred by students studying in the capital.
Lord Nugent of Guildford: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for the courtesy of his Answer, but not for its substance. Is he aware that students at Surrey University in Guildford receive some 23 per cent. less per annum in student grant, amounting to about £500 a year, than their neighbours just up the road, and less than 20 miles away at the Royal Holloway College in Egham? That is completely unfair to the students at Surrey University. As my noble friend has some obligation under the new social security arrangements, will he take action to see that no one is worse off under those arrangements?
Viscount Davidson: Yes, my Lords. We recognise that there are areas of the country outside London where living costs are comparatively high. Guildford is just one such area. However, the London rate is currently only payable to students of the University of London, which includes Royal Holloway and Bedford New College in Egham, and to students at other institutions inside the metropolitan police district. A line must be drawn somewhere, and institutions outside it will always contest the decision.
Guildford and Egham may both be in Surrey, but Guildford is a further 10 miles from central London. However, I shall certainly take on board my noble friend's suggestion and draw it to the attention of the Universities Funding Council. I should add that students suffering particular financial hardship after benefit entitlement is withdrawn will be able to apply to their institution for help from the access funds announced in the White Paper on top-up loans.
Lord Peston: My Lords, as someone who still teaches at London University, I certainly do not wish to say anything which would be of disadvantage to London University students. However, would the
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Government be willing to look more carefully at the question of the cost of living differences? The noble Viscount is quite right to say that Guildford is not the only anomalous case; but the existence of more than one anomaly does not mean that there are no longer any anomalies.
Therefore, would it not be a good idea to look more carefully at the differences in the cost of living in many places with a view to making the student grant system slightly more rational and effective?
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, I agree that there is an anomaly here. It is true that the present rules operate to the advantage of certain students of the University of London. However, I can tell the noble Lord that we are currently reviewing those rules but I cannot at the moment encourage hope that the present boundary will be significantly extended.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords. is my noble friend aware that if there is an anomaly in Guildford everyone would wish the situation to be looked into? However, is he also aware that if he widens the London boundary for grants he will be opening a very wide door indeed—and not only for students?
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, I think that my noble friend has underlined the problem.
Lord Nugent of Guildford: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the last words of his answer to me about the possibility of some help from the new access funds is encouraging? I see that it is possible that the Universities Funding Council can make grants to universities in cases of hardship. Is my noble friend also aware that it is quite clear that there is hardship in this particular case? Further, will my noble friend put his considerable influence with the Universities Funding Council in the scales to ask the council to consider the case of the Surrey University very sympathetically?
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, yes. I shall certainly do so. I must say that on the last day of term, so to speak, I am extremely encouraged to know that my noble friend thinks that I have that amount of influence.
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, will the noble Viscount include in his considerations Brunel University, of which I am chancellor, in that it is much closer to London than the university in Guildford?
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, that is one of the problems.

Passport Office
11.5 a.m.
Lord Borthwick Lord Borthwick asked Her Majesty's Government:
What action they propose to take to improve the management of the Passport Office.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Earl Ferrers): My Lords, we intend to give the Passport Office the status of an executive agency. With the computerisation of the passport issuing system, a change to agency status will incorporate private sector experience and will enable staff to concentrate on the primary aim of improving the service to the public.
Lord Borthwick: My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for answering my Question; I am very glad to hear what he said. However, will it mean that we shall have to wait still longer at the Passport Office? I ask that because the original offices have been computerised, but it now takes considerably longer to hand out passports.
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, the whole idea of computerising the passport offices is so that passport applications can be dealt with more expeditiously. However, as always happens when one first incorporates computers one very often runs into teething troubles.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that computerisation is very often used as an excuse for increased inefficiency?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, whether it is increased inefficiency or not will depend upon the particular exercise concerned. However, I can assure my noble friend Lord Boyd-Carpenter that, as the Government have been repeatedly chivied over passport delays, we are spending £7 million in order to prevent the very delays of which your Lordships frequently complain.
Lord Elwyn-Jones: My Lords, can the noble Earl say when the anticipated improvement will take place?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, the whole time.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, can my noble friend the Minister give any assurance that the new organisation will go back to first principles? The passport system centrally in London was devised when very few people required passports. However, they are now required by almost the whole population. Therefore, why should they not be available at every central post office, for example, in any town? Why should their availability be limited to three or four centres, when we have not only computers but also fax machines?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, the availability of passports is not limited to three or four places; there are in fact six passport offices. My noble friend suggested that one should be able to obtain a passport over the post office counter. Of course, one can obtain a British visitor's passport in that way. However, the passport itself is a uniquely important document: it signifies a person's identity and national status. Therefore, I think that other countries would expect passports to be subject to a reasonable standard of government approval. That is why passports have to be dealt with competently.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, is the Minister aware that as a result of the recent difficulties experienced by the Passport Office, and because of correspondence I received, I went on three occasions over a period of a fortnight to visit the office? Of course, it has difficulties. On one day I could see that there were long queues and the next day there was almost no one there. There is a need for better computerisation. Perhaps I may request the Minister to understand that, despite being hard pressed, the staff of the Passport Office have always maintained a high efficiency and commendable courtesy.
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his last observation. What he said does not always come over from the people who are frustrated at delays at the Passport Office.
I was not aware that the noble Lord had been down to the Passport office on three occasions. Perhaps I may tell him that about 80 per cent. of the applications for passports are handled by post. When people want things very quickly they tend to go and queue, and that contributes to the problems. I only hope that the rest of your Lordships who intend to take a holiday this year have already equipped themselves with the appropriate passport.
Baroness Phillips: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the thought of computerisation strikes terror into many of us? In addition, from the private angle, will the staff be enlisted from certain banks in order to improve the efficiency of the Passport Office?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, if the noble Baroness finds that computerisation strikes fear into her, I can assure her that that happens on many occasions when computers are introduced. People are frightened of them. But on the whole they are necessary and improve speed. The noble Baroness shakes her head; but when she sees and uses the new common format passport which is machine readable she will find that it expedites her going through the frontier controls. I am afraid that I have now forgotten the other part of her question. I assume that it was nothing of great moment!
Lord Hutchinson of Lullington: My Lords, would it not solve the problem if passports were abolished within the Common Market? Does not the Minister agree that any criminal can obtain a passport far more easily than going to a post office?
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, I cannot agree with the noble Lord that passports should be abolished and he would not expect me to agree. With regard to the activities of criminals, of course they have methods of obtaining passports, as they have of obtaining other things which they should not have. However, that is no reason for abolishing the passport.

London Regional Transport (No. 2) Bill
Read a third time, and passed.

City of London (Spitalfields Market) Bill
11.12 a.m.
Lord Renwick: My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a third time.
Noble Lords may recall that I moved the Second Reading of the Bill on 3rd April this year. I said then that the Spitalfields fruit and vegetable market, originally created by Royal Charter in 1682, was effectively being strangled by the City's and its own traffic, swamped by its own refuse and working from badly obsolescent buildings.
In the words of the preamble to the Bill:
"The age and condition of Spitalfields market is such that the market fails to meet modern market needs and practices, and the situation of the market is inconvenient for transport facilities and proper regulation".
The purpose of the Bill is to permit the move of the market to a place about four miles away called Temple Mills, at Hackney Marshes. The Bill is only required at all because the charter of 1682 and a body of local legislation dating from 1902 relates to the market at its present location. If the market is to be moved, so must the charter and the local legislation be moved. The Bill does not purport to confer planning permission for anything.
The Corporation of London, which is the freeholder of Spitalfields market, the market authority and the promoters of the Bill have very properly been put to proving the preamble from which I quoted. Here I am delighted to pay tribute to the Select Committee of this House which considered the Bill. The Select Committee comprised the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brightman, its chairman, the noble Viscount, Lord Dunrossil, my noble friend Lord Carnock, the noble Earl, Lord Grey, and the noble Lord, Lord John-Mackie. It sat for 12 days hearing evidence and submissions and visited both the site of the market and the proposed relocation site at Temple Mills. I expect that this was longer than their Lordships had initially thought they would need and they worked with the great thoroughness and care which characterises Select Committees of this House. We are much in their debt.
When I say that the Select Committee was of the unanimous opinion given on 26th June 1989 that the Bill should proceed without amendment, let it not be thought that it was regaled for 12 days by nothing other than submissions and persuasion from the City Corporation. That is made very clear from the meticulous special report which the Select Committee has issued. The Bill was attacked on a number of grounds but emerged unscathed.
I shall mention just two matters arising from the committee proceedings. First, the petition of the community group called the Campaign to Save Spitalfields from the Developers in reality invited the Select Committee to refuse or reverse a planning permission for the redevelopment of Spitalfields after the market had potentially moved. The London Borough of Tower Hamlets had granted that permission long before there was a Bill.
Secondly, I know that the Select Committee was greatly concerned about increasing the volume of
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traffic, however slightly, on the busy A.106 trunk road which serves the new site. It sought evidence from the Department of Transport before coming to its unanimous conclusion in favour of the Bill as it stood.
When I moved the Second Reading, I presented this House with a case to be proved. I believe that I return today with that case examined and proved, right down to the detail of the two minor drafting amendments about market rights and obligations at the new site made by the unopposed committee. I believe that we look forward to seeing a market fit for the 21st century which this Bill offers.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a third time.—(Lord Renwick.)
11.15 a.m.
Lord Brightman: My Lords, at Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, was greatly concerned with the effect which the proposed move of the market might have on the Spitalfields community. I agree that this aspect is of vital importance. As it says in its special report, the committee was impressed by the sincerity and commitment of those residents and business people who desire to keep the market at Spitalfields.
Perhaps I may first say a few words about the present condition of the market. It is out of date. It was built for the horse and cart and now has to contend with the juggernaut lorry. There is intense traffic congestion within the market and traffic congestion outside it. Parking facilities are inadequate, with only 160 spaces for off-street parking when something like 1,600 are needed. The area available for manoeuvring, loading and unloading is totally inadequate. Basements under some of the internal roadways are in danger of collapse under the weight of traffic. Drainage and toilet facilities are quite inadequate. Forklift trucks are difficult to operate owing to congestion and inappropriate road levels. Perimeter warehouses are of the wrong height for modern working methods. Rubbish abounds during working hours; the place cannot be kept clean owing to the congestion. When the rubbish consists, as it does, of rotting vegetables and fruit and broken crates, it is dangerous rubbish.
The market buildings cannot realistically be pulled down and rebuilt. The committee was told that that would disrupt the market for some four to five years and successfully kill it.
Perhaps I may take up a moment of your Lordships' time by reading a little of what four residents in Commercial Street have said. Commercial Street runs alongside the market and is part of the inner London ring road. I quote:
"The market is too small for the huge juggernaut refrigerated lorries to even go in; so during the day, when they double and treble park on Commercial Street, they cause traffic jams stretching for miles. At night they park right under our windows for hours with their fridges on.
There is nowhere for the stalls to throw away: heir rotting fruit and vegetables, so they dump it in the gutter outside our houses and there it sits, mountains of rotting fruit. The rubbish is not cleared away until early evening and by that time it has been scattered by tramps, is covered in flies and smells so bad it permeates through and makes the whole house smell.

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The cars belonging to market customers clog up all the surrounding streets; they park on the pavements, so sometimes you can't even walk through …The forklift trucks also make life a misery as they try to operate in small shops, and break up paving stones making it dangerous to walk.
We feel that if the market was moved and the area redeveloped it would be a very nice place indeed to live".
The local authority is the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It has approved the move. Before doing so, it conducted what was described as the fullest consultation it had ever undertaken. Its conclusion was:
"It is clear that the majority of local residents and businesses would not object to the market moving".
Those objecting to the move criticise the plans for redeveloping the site on the ground that the redevelopment will not alleviate the basic problems of the area—unemployment and shortage of low cost housing. These are planning matters. It is territory which rightly belongs to the elected representatives of Tower Hamlets and their planning officers, and not to the Select Committee. The committee felt that it ought not to trespass on planning matters. This was the message spelt out by your Lordships' House when considering the report of the Joint Committee on Private Bill Procedure.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, before the noble and learned Lord leaves that point, I wonder whether he will elaborate a little on the terms of reference which the Select Committee perceived for itself. As I understand it, the Select Committee in another place concerned itself with planning matters and went so far as to make amendments which affected the Section 52 agreement. Is there a difference between the procedure of this House and that of another place on the proper remit of Select Committees? If not, why does there appear to be a difference between your Lordships' Select Committee and the Select Committee of another place?
Lord Brightman: My Lords, I am not able to say why another Select Committee may have taken a different line on planning matters.
During the debate on Private Bill procedure the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede said:
"I am told that the promoters of the Spitalfields Bill, currently before your Lordships' House, have behaved immaculately in that they have obtained all the necessary planning consents before coming to Parliament for just that section of the Bill that requires your Lordships' approval".—[Official Report,17/5/89; col. 1204.]
If the proper course is for the promoter of a Bill to seek planning consents before the Bill is introduced into this House, I respectfully suggest that it must follow that it would be wrong for this House to re-examine planning matters and therefore act as a court of appeal from the planning authorities. That is the view which the committee took. I respectfully submit that it is the right view.
At the Second Reading of the Bill the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, said:
"The onus must be on the promoters of the Bill to convince your Lordships in your Select Committee that this Bill, to which there has been such wide objection and which will have so dramatic an effect on the community in which the market is at present situated, is on balance justified. The objections which
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have been made to the Bill are serious objections which deserve to be treated seriously".—[Official Report, 3/4/89; col. 972.]
The committee sat for 12 days. It heard 19 witnesses. The transcripts of arguments and evidence considered by the committee run to well over 600 closely typed pages, plus numerous documentary exhibits. After considering that volume of material, the committee was unanimous that the onus to which the noble Lord referred was discharged and that the market move was justified.
I should like to turn briefly to the new site at Temple Mills, which has everything in its favour subject to only one qualification. The site is two and a half times the area of the existing market. It will have more than 1,600 off-street parking spaces compared with the 160 spaces in the existing market. It will have proper refuse disposal facilities. The only qualification is that vehicles coming to the market and departing by the northern route will add to the existing traffic congestion in the Leyton area, until such time as the projected M.11 link road is operative. That was a matter of great concern to the committee. It would not be practical to defer the opening of the new market until the road was built. Market traders could not be expected to commit themselves to a move at an unknown future date; nor could the development consortium building the market be expected to commit itself to a development which would be sterilised until an unknown future date.
The alternatives, as the committee saw them, were the rejection of the Bill or acceptance of a temporary increase in traffic congestion. The committee formed the view that the Bill should be allowed to proceed because, first, the London Borough of Waltham Forest, the relevant local authority, approved—planning permission has been given—and, secondly, because the road affected is a trunk road and is therefore under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Transport. The Ministry of Transport approved. The committee considered that it ought not to override the decisions of the local authority and in this case also the Ministry of Transport, those being the bodies entrusted by Parliament to decide such planning matters.
In conclusion, I should like to quote a sentence from the special report. It is the final sentence of paragraph 13:
"At the same time the Committee wish to express and emphasise the further view that it is, in their opinion, highly desirable that the M.11 link road should be completed at the earliest practicable opportunity in order to relieve the existing traffic congestion and its aggravation as a result of the relocation of the market".
It is the hope of the committee that those in government concerned with the road system will be able to effect what the committee consider to be so important. There is nothing more I need say. I ask your Lordships to support the conclusion of the committee and grant the Bill a Third Reading.
11.30 a.m.
Lord-John Mackie: My Lords, I must apologise that my name is not on the list of speakers. However, I met our chairman yesterday, who urged me to say a few words in his support. I told him I would be

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saying a few words, but not necessarily in his support. However, I wish to pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord: he did a first-class job in keeping everyone in order. I was particularly impressed with the way he dealt with counsel who was answering a simple question with a 10 minute speech. Halfway through the speech, our chairman stopped him and said, "What you are saying 'Mr. Smith' is 'yes'".
The Select Committee spent the first week or five or six days taking evidence. As our chairman said, we were flooded with briefs, photographs, plans, graphs and goodness knows what. The stack of stuff I have is quite tremendous. It is a big job to consider everything and try to arrive at decisions. Then we went to see the sites. I cannot add anything to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brightman, has said about the condition of Spitalfields, except that I think a complete lack of discipline has been allowed to creep in as regards parking and rubbish. The whole running of the place has been allowed to go downhill.
There is, of course, a very strong case for moving the market because of the structure of the site and various other matters. However, I am not sure that there is sufficient enthusiasm as regards looking into whether it would be better to have a smaller and more efficient market on the site. After all, the vegetable trade is changing very rapidly. Supermarkets and hypermarkets are being built all over the country. They buy direct and do not go through a market. A lot of the witnesses admitted that that process was cutting down the business of markets. One has only to go to Nine Elms to see how many empty stalls there are there which were thought to be needed at the time of the move from Covent Garden.
I wished to make the point that perhaps we do not need such a big market as the one that is planned for Temple Mills. However, the land is available and there it is. The value of the site at Liverpool Street must be tremendous. I think that had a fair amount of influence on the pressure to move. That is my own opinion, but one would have to be pretty naive not to believe that. We went to see the new site at Temple Mills. I was quite surprised to find it all beautifully levelled, fenced, gated and ready to be built on. All the plans had been drawn up for buildings and so on and passed by the local council. Arrangements had even been made so that the plans could be altered to suit some stall holders who thought the catering stalls should be higher.
The roadway approach system has been agreed with the Ministry of Transport and quite a lot of thought had been given to the traffic problem that will arise through Leytonstone and Leyton. I am glad our chairman emphasised the point that we all made which is that the M.11 link is very important to the area because of the enormous increase in traffic that will result from the new market site. I think the figure that has been given is something like 130 to 150 extra lorries, all concentrated between two and three in the morning and then up to eight and nine o'clock later on. That is going to make a tremendous difference to the residential built-up roadways through Leytonstone.
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It was amazing how many topics we had to discuss, whether we liked it or not. Our chairman tried to keep matters in order on the planning side, but the people of Leytonstone maintained that noise was the chief factor. Consequently, the question arose of double glazing in certain areas to prevent the noise. We learnt that double glazing is of two kinds; one simply insulates, while the other insulates and prevents noise. The two kinds are totally different. If one happens to have a bow window and one fits the double glazing which keeps out noise—it has to be placed at least four to six inches back from the window—it increases the size of the window. We spent quite a long time discussing the problem of whether the promoters should pay to add another six inches to the curtains of the good citizens of Leytonstone and Leyton. I thought that was quite an amusing issue to have to deal with.
I am not quite sure of my ground on this next point that I wish to make. However, as I said to our chairman, I believe that we were almost in the position of being presented with a fait accompli. The site was ready and all the plans were drawn up, including the plans for the redevelopment of the Spitalfields site, though I noticed in the recently issued press notice that they have been altered a little bit. I was not quite sure why the committee was sitting. The plans were presented to us already drawn up.
As regards the wealth of evidence we received on the plans and everything else, I think: quite frankly that all the people who made out their case—that is all on paper in the evidence—should have done so before a public inquiry. If the evidence had been heard by a public inquiry, the whole matter would have been much more satisfactory. Nevertheless, we heard the evidence, and it is in writing for anybody who wishes to read it, as our chairman very ably pointed out.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brightman, for his very clear exposition of the conclusions of the Select Committee, and to the noble and learned Lord and all the Members of the Select Committee for the devoted work which they clearly put into preparing this report. I wish to refer to a number of items. The first is the issue which the noble and learned Lord spent some time discussing: the traffic congestion at Temple Mills and the difficulty that will exist until the M.11 extension is open. Secondly, I wish to deal with the issue of the remit of the Select Committee, that is whether it is proper, in the words of the noble and learned Lord, to act as a court of appeal against the decisions of planning committees. Finally, I shall deal with the question of the status of this House at Third Reading in considering the report of a Select Committee of this kind.
On the planning issue, I share the concerns of my noble friend Lord John-Mackie. I was chairman of the north-east area board of the Greater London Council from 1973 to 1974. That was the board responsible for transport and planning matters. What was then called the Leytonstone bypass, or the M.11 extension, was then a very active plan. It was

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well advanced in the planning process, and had been waiting for some time for its place in the Ministry of Transport's capital expenditure programmes. That was more than 15 years ago and the road is still not built. Despite the very proper urging of the Select Committee that it should be built as soon as possible, it is not easy to imagine how a greater sense of priority is going to be given to it simply because of the institution of the new market at Temple Mills. As is evident, these things take a very long time. I fear that the traffic congestion and the damage to the amenities of the inhabitants of Leytonstone will continue for a long time. That is a point of great regret.
I have been urged by the Campaign to Save Spitalfields from the Developers to table an amendment or even to oppose the Third Reading on those grounds alone. I did not feel it was proper to do either of those things, but I feel it is proper to draw the attention of the House to the likelihood that this serious situation,—it is worse than a nuisance for those involved—will continue for a long time.
On the matter of the remit of the Select Committee, I am bound to say that I agree with the Select Committee and its chairman. If planning consents have been given at both ends so to speak—that is, by both the departing and the receiving borough—it is difficult to see how your Lordships' House should seek, through a Select Committee, to overturn those planning consents.
That may seem inconsistent in a sense, because not only I but also the noble Lords, Lord Jay and Lord Elton, referred in the Select Committee to the social problems in Spitalfields. Inevitably those social problems—the availability of suitable employment for local people and the availability of low cost housing in contrast with what is inevitably largely a commercial development—still exist.
The residents, traders and community organisations who from the start expressed dismay at the proposals and who presented their evidence to the Select Committee feel as strongly now as they did then. They feel that, through the actions of the local planning committees, with which they disagree, and the inability of the House—according to the interpretation of the noble and learned Lord—to take into account detailed planning matters, they have been brushed on one side. I do not believe for one moment that that was the intention of the Select Committee. I know that the Select Committee took their views seriously and gave them a good hearing. However, it is a major problem.
While we still have the Private Bill procedure, while we are required to go through it, and while issues such as market closures require the Private Bill procedure, there is a danger that local people will lose out both ways. If it were purely a planning matter there would have to be extensive public inquiries with extensive rights of representation and finally a decision by the Secretary of State. The disadvantage of the public inquiry procedure is that the Secretary of State can only say yes or no in toto. The advantage of the Private Bill procedure here is
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that it is possible, as has happened in this case, for a Private Bill to be amended by decision of either House of Parliament. The disadvantage of the Private Bill procedure from the residents and community orgainsations' point of view is that where planning permission has been achieved a large part of their objections cannot properly be considered by the Select Committee.
I came to the conclusion that it would be wrong for me to put down a further amendment to the Bill at this stage. It would be wrong for me to oppose the Third Reading although I still have the very grave doubts about the development that I had at the beginning and also the doubts that were expressed by my noble friend Lord John-Mackie. After all, this is a development which is pushed only partly by concern for the environment and in the interests of the traders. It is also pushed very heavily by the redevelopment value of the site which will be vacated. In my view the redevelopment value of the site has been allowed to crowd out the interests of many thousands of local people who would prefer, despite all the inconvenience which has been so graphically described, to keep the market there and to keep the community in the middle of it.
The only precedent of which I am aware for this House overturning at Third Reading a report of a Select Committee is the case of the Swanage Marina Bill. On that occasion it was done on a close vote because distinct new evidence was presented at Third Reading which was not available to the Select Committee; namely, the evidence of a town poll at Swanage. I do not believe that such new evidence has been produced here. Therefore, although in many ways I am not happy with the conclusion that has been reached, I do not believe that it would be right for this House to seek to overturn the Bill.
I repeat my thanks to the Select Committee for its very thorough investigation.
11.44 a.m.
Lord Elton: My Lords, I rise merely to say that I am sure that the noble Lord is absolutely right not to seek to overturn the decision of the committee, which sat with enormous thoroughness for 12 days. I believe that we are right to repose confidence in the findings of the committee and in the intentions of the City of London. I believe that at Second Reading we expressed all the guidance which should be given on the matter of the redevelopment and I can only refer noble Lords to that guidance.
11.45 a.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (The Earl of Arran): My Lords, it may be convenient if at this point I intervene very briefly to reiterate the Government's position on this Bill.
The Government have considered the content of this Private Bill and have no objection in principle to the proposals in it. Neither the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which has general responsibility for wholesale markets, nor the Department of the Environment, have any outstanding points. In line with convention, the Government are taking a neutral stance on the Bill.

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It is, of course, for the promoters to persuade Parliament that the powers they are seeking are justified. The Bill has been opposed in both Houses but has been allowed to proceed unamended. In particular the Select Committee of your Lordships' House considered the evidence very carefully and concluded that the Bill should proceed unamended, subject to the undertaking given.
Accordingly, we hope that the Bill will be allowed to pass.
11.46 a.m.
Lord Renwick: My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his comments, most of which follow what he said at Second Reading.
At long last, after many years of planning and the uncertainties of the property market, the availability of the new site at Temple Mills for the Spitalfields Market, presents an opportunity to move the market. I believe, from the very telling evidence produced by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brightman, that we are all agreed that such an opportunity, if it is not taken now, might not occur again with the result that Spitalfields would slowly grind into the ground. I cannot believe that container lorries will get any smaller and there is certainly no sign of there being any more room for them in that area, with the add on effect of congestion. I believe that the area will now become a thriving commercial area, with many amenities for the local people.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, for putting so clearly the position in relation to the Select Committee procedure as against the planning procedure. The noble Lord, Lord John-Mackie, quite rightly drew attention to the fact that the elected representatives of the two borough councils involved gave due consideration to the evidence in giving their permissions before the Corporation of London moved the Bill.
All that has now to be done is for me to renew my thanks to the Select Committee and its chairman for the work that they did.
On Question, Bill read a third time.
Lord Renwick: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Renwick.)
On Question, Bill passed, and returned to the Commons with amendments.

Barony of Grey of Codnor
11.48 a.m.
Lord Wilberforce Lord Wilberforce rose to move, That the report of the Committee for Privileges be agreed to (HL Paper 59).
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, I have the honour to present to your Lordships the Report of the Committee for Privileges in this matter and in due course to move that it be accepted by your Lordships.
As noble Lords know, the case concerns the Barony of Grey of Codnor arising out of a petition from
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Mr. Charles Legh Shuldham Cornwall-Legh that the abeyance of this barony be terminated in his favour. The report of the committee is submitted in House of Lords Paper 59, a pleasantly but rather deceptively slim volume, but is accompanied by a supplementary volume numbered 59/1 which contains a more detailed report of the proceedings of the committee, part of which your Lordships may find rather good reading.
As noble Lords will see, the report itself contains eight recommendations which I shall draw to your Lordships' attention, accompanied by a learned opinion from my noble and learned friend Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, which will apprise your Lordships of the difficulties of what would otherwise appear to be a simple case. I feel that a little explanation—not in the nature of lecture, I hope—is necessary in this case for two reasons. First, there has not been a case of abeyance brought before this House for 50 years, and not all of your Lordships were present at that time. Secondly, the case itself is a little unusual, if not startling.
The abeyance itself has lasted for 493 years, which is not a record. There has been found a case of 547 years, but one must agree that, even by the standards of your Lordships' House, 493 years is rather a long time. Moreover, the present petitioner, Mr. Cornwall-Legh, has himself claimed only one twelfth part of the dignity, which again gives one pause for thought.
That makes it necessary to make it clear to your Lordships that this is a case—a rather exceptional case—of a barony by writ which is a peculiar type of peerage. Originally it was the primary source of peerage because peerages by letters patent, of which there are quite a number of representatives in this House, came in only in the 14th century.
Some noble Lords may not be familiar with the distinctive features of a barony by writ. There are two. First, as to origin, there is no document which describes the nature of the barony by writ or its tenure. The barony by writ arises, as one would think, from a writ of summons from the sovereign to attend Parliament, followed by, and this is very important, attendance in a Parliament—a properly constituted Parliament—by the person summoned. The necessity for personal attendance, on top of the issue of a writ, was, it appears, invented by that great lawyer, Lord Coke, in the 17th century. No one has been able to find out what he based it on, but it was obviously good sense because otherwise the House would have been deluged by people who claimed that writs had been issued. The necessity for sitting was obviously a sensible way of keeping down the numbers. At any rate, the necessity of sitting pursuant to a writ has been accepted ever since then. Noble Lords will see that that has an important bearing on the recommendations in this case.
So much for origin. Then one comes to the matter of descent. If one has a peerage by letters patent, as most of your Lordships do, the patent describes the nature of the descent as to heirs male, to heirs female, for life. It is there in the document. One does not have to look any further. But in the case of a peerage by writ of summons, there is no document and descent therefore depends on the common law

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and goes to heirs general. That brings about the situation of abeyance. It often happens that, if the holder of a barony dies without male heir and with only females succeeding him—daughters or aunts or collaterals—the females take as co-heiresses, no one of them being entitled to the barony. It is what is called impartible. Three co-heiresses have it, but no one has it in preference to the other. It is in abeyance until that situation is terminated. That situation remains until the abeyance is terminated, either through all the shares becoming reunited in one person or by the discretion of the sovereign.
There is one other point about the descent; namely, that co-heiresses take equally. There is no seniority and no primogeniture. The older has no preference over the younger, and the younger no preference over the older. There are cases in the books where abeyances have been terminated not in favour of the older of the co-heiresses but in favour of the middle one or of the younger one.
A peerage is in abeyance not having been amalgamated in the person of one single heir. What happens next, if one wishes to terminate it, is that a person—one of the co-heirs—puts in a petition to the Crown asking for termination in his favour. The Crown normally takes the advice of one of the Law Officers, the Attorney-General, who reports on the matter. He can either recommend acceptance or rejection of the claim or that the matter be referred to the House of Lords. That makes the important point that references to the House of Lords are facultative or optional. The House of Lords has no right to be consulted, although it often is. It is entirely in the discretion of the sovereign through the Attorney-General. When it comes to the House of Lords, the task of the House of Lords is strictly limited. It is to establish the facts, and it is for the establishment of the facts that the matter is referred to the Committee for Privileges.
I should refer your Lordships to the reference in this case in order that you may see the limitations on the duties of the House on this occasion. The reference in this case is in the following words:
"if His Majesty"—
I think that was King Edward VIII—
"being moved upon this Petition is graciously pleased to refer the same to the right honourable the House of Peers to examine the allegations thereof as to what relates to the Petitioners' title therein mentioned and to inform His Majesty how the same shall appear to their Lordships".
That was dated 3rd November 1936 and was signed "John Simon". That is the reference on which noble Lords are now called to act.
On the facts being found by the Committee for Privileges, if accepted by this House, the matter then goes to the Sovereign. It is then in the Sovereign's discretion to decide about the termination. The Sovereign may decide either not to determine at all or to determine it in favour of any one of the co-heirs. Unfortunately, it is not a matter for your Lordships. It is a matter for Her Majesty on, no doubt, taking appropriate advice.
I should mention two other points that arise out of the dates that I have given. Your Lordships may
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know that this House has previously been very concerned about the number of these abeyance claims, often dating a long way back to the misty past, which have come up and given rise to a great deal of inquiry and difficulty. So in 1926 the House established a Select Committee under the chairmanship of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Sumner, a distinguished Lord of Appeal, to inquire into the matter. The Sumner Committee produced an interesting and learned report, going into the whole history of these abeyances and peerages, and submitted a number of resolutions for presentation to His Majesty, King George V. That was done by an address presented to His Majesty which His Majesty accepted. His Majesty retains an ultimate discretion, but nevertheless the recommendations are those of the Sumner Committee and are normally thought to govern each case.
There are two important points contained in the recommendations. First, no abeyance should be considered which is longer in date than 100 years. Secondly, no claim should be entertained unless the claimant lays claim to at least one third of the dignity. Your Lordships will see at a glance that that particular petition would have fallen foul on both counts; it is much more than 100 years and much less than one third of a dignity
What happened was that the matter was referred by His Majesty to the Attorney-General, Sir Thomas Inskip, in July 1928. He gave a long advice and produced a report examining a number of the facts which was very valuable to us. He took the point that, as the claimant, who was then the present petitioner's father, had submitted his claim before the Sumner Address was presented to the Sovereign, he should not be bound by the limitations in those recommendations. Therefore, despite the fact that he was outside the recommendations, his petition should be admitted.
However, the father did not proceed with his claim. He died in 1934. The petition was then revived by his son, the present petitioner, in 1936. The succeeding Attorney-General, Sir Donald Somervell, then took the matter under advisement and, one may think rather benevolently, decided that the son should have the benefit of the relaxation of the rules granted to the father and therefore that the son's petition too should be allowed in, notwithstanding the Sumner recommendations.
So on that the present reference was made to the House of Lords. Your Lordships' committee took the view that, the reference having been made, whatever we might think about it, we were bound by the reference, called upon to act under the reference and must do our duty under the reference. One must of course add that no similar claim could now be made with any hope of success because clearly it would be excluded by the Sumner principles.
The second point is also rather startling. Your Lordships will notice that the reference by Sir John Simon to this House was as long ago as 1936. Of course one expects that peerage claims should proceed at a somewhat dignified and leisurely pace; but 53 years is by all standards a little slow. When I had the honour of being nominated as chairman

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of your Lordships' committee in June this year I thought that we had better look into this matter. I asked for the file and a very bulky file was obtained from the administrative offices of this House.
It appeared that the present claimant had submitted to the office claims for prolongations. adjournments and extensions of time on a number of occasions during that period. They had been granted on account of World War II, because of his public duties, in view of the expense etc. At any rate extensions were given from 1936 going very nearly up to the present time.
On that, and at any rate without the disapproval of the Solicitor-General, your Lordships' committee took the view that it would not be right to blame the petitioner for this delay or to exclude him from the doors of the committee on that account. So we entertained the claim.
I come at last to the report. The committee made a very careful inquiry into this matter. Matters were put before it in the form of 105 propositions, each of which was supported by detailed evidence. That evidence extended into a great number of documents, comprising I believe 1,000 pages (although that figure could be a little misleading because one should not double count both the mediaeval Latin and the translations). At any rate there were a great number of pages in a great number of documents of great interest, as well as heraldic evidence, tombstones and so on which had to be looked at.
All that was very carefully checked by the Crown through the Treasury Solicitor's office and carefully analysed for us by the Solicitor-General. We had the benefit of some very learned evidence from Mr. Woodcock, the Somerset Herald. On the basis of that, these recommendations were put forward.
Perhaps your Lordships would be good enough to look at them. I can dispose of them fairly quickly. The first is:
"That the Barony of Grey of Codnor is an ancient Barony in fee".
There is no doubt about that.
The second recommendation requires a moment of attention because it states that it was proved by the sitting of Richard de Grey in Parliament on 17th December 1397 that the Barony of Grey was vested in the aforesaid Richard de Grey in the reign of Richard II. The case as originally put forward was that an ancestor of Richard de Grey in 1298 had first been summoned to Parliament. That is undoubtedly the case. Each of the three so-called "Lord Barons of Grey" were summoned to Parliament but your Lordships' committee was not able to find any evidence that they actually sat in Parliament. Indeed, the petition of the petitioner does not allege that they sat in Parliament. Your Lordships will appreciate the difficulty of establishing that a certain man did sit in a particular parliament and that that parliament was a properly constituted one.
However, we were perfectly satisfied—and your Lordships will find it analysed in detail in the opinion of my noble and learned friend—that Richard de Grey, the 4th baron, did sit pursuant to a writ in 1397; and with the consent of the petitioner
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himself, and with the approval of the Solicitor-General, your Lordships' committee decided that the right date to take was 1397 rather than the earlier date of 1298. That of course is of some importance from the point of view of precedence, because it would be a matter of considerable hesitation before your Lordships were inclined to displace a number of well established baronies in due order of precedence. One clearly should not do so without very definite evidence. Therefore we did not feel that it was right to date the barony earlier than 1397.
As to descent, this matter is really fairly simple in presentation although it took a lot of time to investigate. Your committee found that there were three co-heiresses of the last baron who died without legitimate, although not altogether without illegitimate, issue. They seem to have been very estimable people incidentally and were very well provided for by the baron at the time.
On page vi of the report your Lordships will find a short summary of the heirs. This is taken from my noble and learned friend's opinion and there are detailed pedigrees of course to be found in the report of the proceedings. There are three ladies: Lucy, Eleanor and Elizabeth. One of the main points that troubled the committee was whether any of those three or all of them ever existed.
It is clear that Elizabeth existed. However there was some doubt about the existence of Lucy and Eleanor. Your Lordships' committee came to the conclusion, mainly on the strength of a document of Henry VIII and some valuable heraldic evidence that satisfied us, that both Lucy and Eleanor existed as co-heiresses as well as Elizabeth.
Your Lordships will then see under Lucy the name of Thomas Cornwall—that is the descent through which the present petitioner claims; the other co-heirs claim through the other branches. Under Eleanor the present 7th Earl of Bradford claims as a co-heir. Under Elizabeth, as your Lordships will see in a moment, there is something of a problem.
Under paragraph (iii) in the resolutions, your Lordships will see the finding that the barony fell into abeyance between the heirs and co-heirs of the three paternal aunts Lucy, Eleanor and Elizabeth Zouche. Paragraph (iv) deals with the representatives and co-heirs of Lucy and those persons are listed. There are detailed pedigrees of those persons should your Lordships wish to consult them.
But your Lordships should notice the last words, which read:
"and the heirs, if any, of Mary, younger daughter of the 11th Lord Zouche".
That is a case in which inquiries ran into the sands. We were not able to find out whether Mary, daughter of the 11th Lord Zouche, had any heirs and therefore that has to be left uncertain.
Paragraph (v) is a clear case. The descent is clearly traced from Eleanor Newport down to the 7th Earl of Bradford, who now sits in this House.
Paragraph (vi) deals with the case of Elizabeth. We were able to find that she had issue but we were not able to discover whether any descendants of such issue now exist.
So this is quite in accordance with practice and the petitioner is required to satisfy the committee that all proper and possible inquiries have been made with a view to tracing these particular classes of issue. The committee is entitled to find that such proper inquiries have been made, and investigations conducted, and to put forward its report on that basis. That is what we have done.
Finally, we come to the conclusion that the barony is in abeyance before the aforesaid representatives and co-heirs and the heirs of the said Elizabeth Zouche; it comes to the total of 12 people; and finally, that the Barony of Grey is at Her Majesty's disposal.
As I have already made clear to your Lordships, it is now a matter for Her Majesty to decide in Her discretion what to do with the barony. The facts have been found by the committee. If your Lordships consider that the committee has done its job and has achieved the task referred to it by the Home Secretary in 1936, your Lordships may think fit to agree with this report. I beg to move that your Lordships accept the report.
Moved, That the Report of the Committee for Privileges be agreed to (HL Paper 9).—(Lord Wilberforce.)
12.11 p.m.
Lord Mowbray and Stourton: My Lords, having heard the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, I am amazed at my temerity in daring to put my name down to speak after him.
This morning we are witnessing the final stage of the appeal to the Crown to determine the abeyance of the ancient Barony of Grey of Codnor in favour of the petitioner, Mr. Charles Cornwall-Legh. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, in his splendid oration on the mediaeval period, and his most detailed explanations, has put us all heavily in his debt. I should perhaps mention that two of my peerages are of the kind known as by writ—which he so well described—and my third peerage, Stourton, is by letters patent. I am therefore an animal of both types. As he pointed out to us, it is now 83 years since the petitioner's father began what was to become this very long case, and, as has been said, 493 years since this peerage was last in existence.
It will probably be the last such case to be allowed, since in 1927, as the noble and learned Lord told us, it was recommended that no petition for the determination of an abeyance should be entertained if it had subsisted for more than 100 years. But an exception was made for this particular barony as it had got into the pipeline, so to speak, just in time. The last case previous to this dealing with such a long abeyance was of course the ancient Barony of Strabolgi called out in 1916 in favour of the grandfather of the present distinguished holder of the title, himself a member of the Committee for Privileges whose report we are now discussing.
I find it interesting that the last Lord Grey of Codnor left a widow on his death in 1496—Katherine, who was sister to my direct male
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ancestor, Edward 6th Lord Stourton, and she enjoyed her Grey jointure until her death in 1521. Another point of interest for me about the Greys of Codnor is the fact that they were responsible for bringing the Carmelites to this country and settled them on their estates at Aylesford in Kent, where the priory of their foundation continues to flourish--very remarkably still with Carmelites.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, played a leading part in the Committee for Privileges and possibly it is the first time that a Scots legal brain has been found in a Law Lord dealing with an English peerage case. I found his broad sweep of inquiry most refreshing.
The finalisation of this case will give great pleasure to one whom I consider one of the greatest genealogists and heralds; namely, Sir Anthony Wagner, now clarenceux king of arms, a former distinguished Garter. It was he who was in charge of the research in this case from 1936 until 1983, when illness forced him to hand over the completion of the works still remaining to be done to Mr. Thomas Woodcock, Somerset Herald. It was Mr. Woodcock who was able to overcome one of the last difficulties by a piece of heraldic evidence—found, curiously enough, owing to the compiling of a new index of heraldic arms in the college by Sir Anthony in his time. It is amusing to think that it is only 140 years ago that Disraeli produced his Sybil where he invented Mr. Hatton, the famous peerage lawyer of the Inner Temple, who explained to a client, "If you wish to be Lord X, I will undertake to make you so and will give you precedence over every peer in the roll except three (and I made them) and it will not cost you a paltry £20,000 or £30,000".
The days of the Mr. Hattons have long gone and it is refreshing to see the result of such long labour and research rewarded by such a succinct report to this House. I congratulate the noble and learned chairman and all the other members of the Committee for Privileges.
12.17 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, my name is not on the list but I have been told that I may speak briefly with your Lordships' leave. I wish to say very little other than to thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, not only for moving this Motion but also for the way that he moved it. It was a truly great personal privilege to be able to serve under his chairmanship. I think that your Lordships would wish a word of tribute to be paid to the noble and learned Lord not only for his industry in sorting out a mass of complex material—the noble and learned Lord referred to a bulky file; there were many bulky files with family trees, and so forth—but also his expertise in having sorted out before we sat all the salient issues. Without that, this hearing could have taken several weeks instead of a matter of days.
A word of gratitude is due to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, for his most detailed and erudite opinion with which all members of the committee agreed. I suppose one may end with a word of congratulations to my noble friend Lord Mowbray and Stourton, who remains premier Baron, albeit by a whisker.
12.18 p.m.
Earl Ferrers: My Lords, my name is not on the list either. The only reason I seek to make a very short intervention is not because the Government have any views on this—they do not—but simply to thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, and his committee for what they have done. My noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway said that he found it a great privilege to serve under the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce. I found it an enormous privilege to listen to the noble and learned Lord. His speech contained history, genealogy, and documents in Latin. It was fascinating. We are deeply grateful to him.
The noble and learned Lord said that he did not wish to divest himself of a lecture. Had anyone put his speech into such a category—nobody did and nobody would—I can assure him that it would have been a very acceptable lecture.
12.19 p.m.
Lord Wilberforce: My Lords, I need say nothing more in closing except to remedy an omission. I notice that the report does not contain the names of the Committee for Privileges set up by your Lordships. Your Lordships should know that it consisted of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, with his great experience as a Law Officer; the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, to whom reference has been made, who was associated with these matters personally; the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway; and my noble and learned friend Lord Jauncey, of Tullichettle. I am grateful to them for all the support they gave and the kind words that have been said.
I should like to add our gratitude to the staff of the Judicial Office, who showed great efficiency in printing all these documents and making them accessible to your Lordships, thus enabling this matter, which only started its way in the committee in June 1989, to reach its final stage just before the end of the Session. That may console us a little for the long period which elapsed before then. I commend the Motion.
On Question, Motion agreed to, the resolution and judgment to be laid before Her Majesty by the Lords with white staves.

Equality of Pensions Benefits: ECC Report
12.20 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale Lord Allen of Abbeydale rose to move, That this House takes note of the Report of the European Communities Committee on Equal Treatment for Men and Women in Pensions and Other Benefits (10th Report, 1988–89, HL Paper 51).
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I should like to begin by congratulating the Minister on his appointment and to say that we look forward to his initial speech in his new capacity. I should not like to let the opportunity pass without saying a word of appreciation for the contribution which the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has made to our
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deliberations of this nature. I wish him well in his new appointment.
We are discussing today a report from your Lordships' Select Committee on the European Communities. Increasing interest is being taken in Parliament's response to proposed legislation emanating from the European Commission, but singularly little is said in public about your Lordships' contribution. Indeed a leader in The Times on this topic a day or two ago remained quite silent on that aspect. I make no special claim for the report we are considering today, but it is one of a whole series of detailed reports on proposals coming from Brussels, a good many of which have been debated, I think to good advantage, in your Lordships' House. I find it a little sad I hat the whole exercise is better known and more highly valued in Brussels than it appears to be in Wapping, or wherever newspapers now come from.
The topics covered by the report are not perhaps calculated to turn it into a bestseller, but they are topics of considerable importance which could affect the lives of a great many people. It is a somewhat complicated subject, so we thought it appropriate on this occasion to include in the published report the material on which we were commenting which had come from Brussels together with supporting information on various kinds. I hope that that has been of some help.
I should like to thank the members of the sub-committee and also our witnesses, especially perhaps the witnesses from Brussels. They bore out the comments that had been made on previous occasions that the officials who come to us from the European Commission to help our inquiries are hardworking people of the highest quality. The sub-committee was particularly fortunate in having Sir Alec Atkinson as its specialist adviser. As always we have been most efficiently served by our clerk.
The text of the draft directive is not in anything like its final form. The Commission will taking account of comments from other countries as well as from the UK. Perhaps the Minister will be able to tell us a little more about future prospects. My understanding is that during the Spanish presidency an attempt to produce a revised draft rather petered out. As France is one of the countries which sees especial difficulties, the topic may not feature among the highest priorities in the months of the French presidency.
Whatever the immediate prospects, the subjects raised by the report and the directive will not go away. It seemed to us most desirable that early progress should be made, as I shall seek to explain. Although the report makes various criticisms, we welcomed the proposal (as did most of our witnesses) as a further step to eliminating discrimination from the social security schemes of the member states. It is admittedly not easy to adapt a scheme such as that in the UK. which has its origin in a society in which the breadwinner is expected to be the man, but the effort must be made here as elsewhere.
There have been two relevant directives before this: one in 1979, dealing with statutory schemes and one in 1986, dealing with occupational schemes.

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The implementation of that second directive has recently been concerning us in what is now the Social Security Act. This third draft directive, dealing as it does with both statutory and occupational schemes, was intended by the Commission to fill in all the gaps and to complete the whole exercise. We for our part came to think that to regard this as the final provision was a vain hope, but I shall come to that a bit later.
The Commission witnesses explained that the directive was aimed at three main topics: survivors' benefits, family benefits and pension ages. As regards the first, survivors' benefits, Article 4 would require that widowers should become eligible for benefits on the same basis as widows. It seemed to us that that aim was justifiable with changing employment patterns, but there would be problems. In particular there would be difficulties about reproducing for widowers the pension which a childless widow can receive if she is 45 or more and might not find it easy to re-enter the labour market, when the widower of that age would usually be able simply to carry on working.
In the light of the risk that equal treatment might in the end result in a worsening of the position for widows, we thought that this was one area where a substantial period of years should be allowed for implementation.
In relation to the second topic, child benefit, the draft provides that parents living together should be given an option as to which of them should receive it. Our evidence was pretty well unanimous that the arrangements in this country, whereby the mother has the prior claim, were better and that we should not be obliged to change those arrangements. It seemed to us that this was one area where it was eminently justifiable to treat the two sexes differently. I hope I am right in thinking that the Commission is prepared to abandon this proposal.
The third topic, pension ages, is I suppose the most important of all the issues raised by the directive. I shall not attempt to rehearse the arguments or to speculate on the possible impact of such factors as the abolition of the earnings rule and the coming decline in the numbers of young people, but I shall content myself with stating the Committee's conclusion. Its conclusion is that there should be a decade of retirement where both men and women could choose their retirement age between 60 and 70. A pivotal age of 63 should be chosen. Those retiring at 63 would receive the equivalent of the current rate of full pension. Those retiring earlier would receive a smaller pension and those retiring later a larger one. As many women now expect to retire at 60, we thought it essential that the change should be phased in over a period of years and that women aged 50 or more when the legislation took effect should be able to keep their present rights.
I know that not everyone will agree with our conclusion. For example, the TUC would still like to see a common retirement age of 60 as in France. We are also conscious of the fact that the change would cost money; we are told some £700 million a year. I can only hope that that estimate is rather
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more accurate than the recent remarkable statistical invention of the Department of Social Security in quite another context.
But whether or not our conclusion is acceptable, it is essential that there should be an early decision. We pressed the then Minister, Mr. Peter Lloyd, about the matter. He accepted the desirability of reaching a conclusion but the most that he would say was that although the department would not have the report of the inevitable OPCS survey until 1991—and as we all know the department can never move without an OPCS survey—that did not mean that the Government would not come to earlier a conclusion. I hope that today the Minister will be able to go a little further than the double negative. The decision is certainly crucial for a whole variety of reasons.
There is a fourth aspect of the Commission's evidence upon which I must touch even though it did not relate to any mandatory requirement in the draft directive. I am referring to its hope that the directive will encourage greater individualisation in the sense that people should come to depend on their own individual entitlement and not on benefits derived from their spouse's insurance.
With the breakup of so many marriages one can see the force of that. This country took a step down that road when the married women's option to pay reduced national insurance contributions was taken away some years ago. But it was difficult to see how we could go much further down the road and, for example, put at risk of being left without adequate cover married women who are widowed after spending many years outside paid employment.
We were not greatly reassured by what we heard of experience in Denmark after it had, in effect, done away with derived benefits. I appreciate that there are cases of derived benefits which are not derived from a spouse. However, the point I have been making appears to me to be the most important.
There is the consideration that occupational schemes can hardly hope to make satisfactory provisions for survivors except by way of rights derived from someone who has been a member of the scheme. Indeed, the relationship between statutory and occupational schemes is in places somewhat blurred in the directive. Some employers, especially the big multi-national companies, can probably manage whatever the local state provision may be. But the CBI told us that many companies here fit their schemes into the state scheme and for their part the Government have been making something of a show of emphasising the increasing relationship between public and private schemes.
One particular problem which greatly exercised the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, during the passage of the Social Security Bill, was the fact that some companies, such as Marks and Spencer, which have a retirement age of 60 give an additional bridging pension to their male pensioners who, unlike the women, must wait until the age of 65 for their state pension. We go along with the Government's view that the Commission is likely to confirm that under the last directive that is not permissible. However, we express the hope that if that is so the new directive

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will be amended in order to legalise what appears to us to be a perfectly sensible practice and which will be needed until the state pension ages are made the same. Perhaps the Minister will be able to tell the House whether a letter has been sent to Brussels and whether a reply has been received.
So much for the four main points raised by the directive and the witnesses from the Commission. There are two other particular areas on which the directive is silent but which in our view cannot be put on one side in perpetuity. The first relates to indirect discrimination. By "indirect discrimination" I mean a situation which on the face of it is neutral but which in practice means that one sex is treated more favourably than the other. We have a definition or indirect discrimination in three of our Acts of Parliament.
The outstanding example in the present context is the position of part-time workers. If they are excluded and given no rights the argument is that that amounts to indirect discrimination because by far the majority of those concerned are women. In its present form the directive makes no attempt to deal with part-timers, nor does it attempt to define "indirect discrimination". We believe that somehow specific provisions ought to be made.
Then there is the baffling problem as regards private occupational schemes and the fact that in their calculations the actuaries take into account that as a generalisation women live longer than men. It is sometimes put that our arrangements ensure that women are poorer far longer. The previous directive about occupational schemes allowed different treatment for men and women taking account of actuarial factors but the present directive is silent on that issue.
I shall certainly not go into the problem today. I recently chaired a whole day's seminar between representatives of the actuaries and the Equal Opportunities Commission. I can fairly claim to have a lively appreciation of the complications involved. However, I call attention to the problem as one requiring further thought. Appendix 5 of our report refers to it and the fact that the issue remains unresolved is one reason why we cannot regard the present directive as saying the last word.
Lastly, there is the timetable. The Commission believes that these matters have been under discussion for so long that it is not unreasonable to fix three years from the final approval of the directive as the period in which legislation should be passed and brought into effect. However, in questioning, it conceded that that might be a shade optimistic. For our part we believed that it would be right to aim at enacting legislation within three years or a little longer but then to allow a considerable time for implementation, particularly, for example, as regards equal retirement age and survivors' benefits. The Government may take a different view but we await the Minister's reply on that and other issues with great interest
After looking at the list of speakers I know that we can first look forward to some interesting contributions. Although I have spoken for so long I have only lightly covered the ground. However, I
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hope that I have said enough to start of the debate. I beg to move.
Moved, That this House takes note of the Report of the European Communities Committee on Equal Treatment for Men and Women in Pensions and Other Benefits (10th Report, 1988–89, HL Paper 51). (Lord Allen of Abbeydale.)
12.40 p.m.
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, I should like to join with the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Henley, on the new responsibilities which he has taken on. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Allen, for his very comprehensive introduction of this report and also for the way in which he steered the committee, of which I was privileged to be a member, through this very complicated and difficult subject.
As he said, the report is concerned with a third directive on equal opportunities in social security—a draft directive intended to fill the gaps left by the other two directives. Like the noble Lord, Lord Allen, while warmly welcoming the draft directive I very much doubt whether it will succeed in filling those gaps and completing the process of equality between the sexes in social security.
The draft directive raises some fundamental issues and, as the noble Lord indicated, leaves out three very important areas. First, it does not deal with part-time workers of whom there are an increasing number in the UK. The committee has recommended that part-time work should be included. That is an issue to which I should like to return later. Secondly, the draft directive covers both direct and indirect discrimination but fails to define indirect discrimination. A common definition of indirect discrimination, understood and applied throughout the Community, is in my view essential if we are to achieve equality in that important and complicated area.
The recommendation made by the committee that definition should be included in the directive is even more necessary now in the light of the fact that the draft directive on the burden of proof, which contained a definition acceptable to the committee and which would have applied across the board to all directives, has been blocked by the Council of Ministers. I hope that the Government will feel able to reconsider their position in relation to that in the light of the report by your Lordships' committee.
Thirdly, the directive does not deal with the problems raised by actuarial sex-based data. The 1986 directive covered the area of occupational pensions but specifically excluded actuarial considerations. That decision was made by the Council of Ministers despite the advice of the European Commission, which advised that unequal pensions for equal contributions calculated on sex-based actuarial data could be contrary to the equal pay provisions under Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome. However, in the light of the Council of Ministers' decision, the Commission thought it inappropriate at this time to return to the subject under this directive.

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Your Lordships' committee has taken a different view and has recommended that the Community should mount a further investigation into the practical implications of abolishing those exceptions. I should have thought that that was the least we could do. My view is that this nettle should be grasped as there cannot be equality or social equity if men and women have to live on different pensions for equal contributions. The fact that on average women live longer than men does not lessen the needs of individual women pensioners, nor does it relieve the state from having the responsibility of supplementing those pensions if they are inadequate.
The longer this issue is left unresolved, the more litigation will be resorted to. Already in 1986 the European Court of Justice ruled in the Bilka case that occupational pensions paid under a voluntary contributory pension scheme were "pay" as that term is defined in Article 119. Rather than chip away at the problem through the court's interpretations, surely it would be far better to include now a provision bringing in sex-based data to the provisions of legislation.
Those are the omissions which have not yet been resolved by the draft directive. As I say, however, included in the directive are, as we are already aware from the introduction of the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, some very fundamental issues. I should like to deal with two of those. The first is the question of derived benefits; that is, benefits to a spouse or a dependant accruing from another's contributions. The main recipients here are wives deriving benefits from husband's contributions. The draft directive favours individual benefits, although it provides for some flexibility to member states to choose between the two or to phase out derived benefits provided that whatever is proposed applies equally to both sexes.
I support the principle of individual benefits. I believe that it is right and necessary that each person should build up their own entitlements to both social security and pensions. Nevertheless, it will cause some problems and we have to treat this matter with care. However, the abolition of the married woman's right to opt out of national insurance and the introduction of the SERPS scheme were moves in the right direction. Some continuation of that sort of provision instead of, as we have recently had, a move backwards from those provisions would be going in the right direction.
I agree with the Commission in its explanatory memorandum that there is some insecurity created by the increasing breakdown of marriage. That creates very great insecurity, usually for women. There are also different family patterns emerging. All of those point to the necessity of women becoming self-supporting.
However, there are some difficult problems, as the noble Lord has indicated, which need to be resolved. Women who have relied upon or grown up in the expectation of benefiting from their husband's contributions must be protected, particularly in the short term. Therefore, a phase-in period would be necessary and, as the committee believes, a phase-in
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period of some considerable time. For example, we were told in evidence from the DSS that the consequences of women opting out of paying their own national insurance contributions will not disappear before 2020. Therefore, clearly there has to be a considerable bridging period.
There is also the question of part-time workers to which I should now like to return. This is largely a problem concerning women as regards the build-up of entitlement. Women who work part-time may not only not contribute to social security but could be prevented from doing so by the rules. The Bilka case and subsequent legislation has ensured that part-time workers have a right to be included in occupational pension schemes; but in 1983, according to the Government Actuary's report, some 2 million workers were ineligible for pension scheme membership because they worked part-time. There will still be problems arising from that situation for some considerable time. Moreover, many women in low pay are excluded from the state scheme by the lower earnings limit. In 1984, the latest year for which figures were available to the committee, some 2·75 million women were so excluded.
Women who leave the labour force for purposes of family formation or other family commitments, or even men who leave the labour force for domestic responsibilities, are covered by the home responsibilities protection, but women who work part-time or on a temporary basis and who might move up and down the lower earnings limit are in a very precarious position and have difficulty in maintaining their rights. Further to that, there is no incentive to increase pay above a certain point because once that point has been reached a person is obliged to pay national insurance on the full earnings and not just on the earnings above the limit. Such a person would find that, on coming into the scope of paying national insurance contributions, the take-home pay has dropped considerably. Therefore we must find an alternative method that covers all workers. The domestic commitments of women need to be examined also in terms of occupational pensions; otherwise there can be no financial independence for women on retirement in their own right.
The second area that I wish to comment upon is the equalisation of the pension age. Here your committee welcomed the fact that the draft directive is quite firm. While leaving it to individual countries to fix their own pension age or flexible age, the same conditions must apply equally to both sexes. As the noble Lord indicated, your Lordships' Committee recommended that there should be a decade of retirement between the ages of 60 and 70 where individuals can choose the date most suitable to them but that the pivotal age should be 63.
We recognise the difficulties here. Some of our witnesses recommended a pivotal age of 60; others 65. We also recommend and state in paragraphs 92(1) and 97 that there will be some financial implications. However, there are changes taking place which I feel make it difficult to forecast accurately what the financial cost will be. For example, the prospective abolition of the earnings rule is one of the new factors that has to be taken

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into account. The different patterns of retirement which are emerging is another.
According to evidence from the Equal Opportunities Commission the economic activity rate of men between the ages of 60 and 64 was 53.4 per cent. in 1986 compared with over 85 per cent. in 1975. That is a considerable fall, which indicates a clearly changing pattern. On the other hand, some women have made it quite clear through the cases that they have pursued to the courts that they want the right to be able to continue working after the age of 60. The committee would not want to see women forced to continue working beyond 60 because their pension is inadequate but it wants both women and men—here the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Allen, about bridging pensions for men is important—to have an equal right to chose and to make that choice an effective one.
Therefore, the committee believes that the time has come for an early announcement by the Government of their proposals on the pension age. We know that for some considerable time there has been agreement on the principle of equalising the pension age, but your Lordships' committee would now like to know from the Government what their actual proposals are. If I may say so, irrespective of what might happen to this directive, that recommendation from your Lordships' committee, as well as some of the others, could be acted upon independently by this Government.
12.56 p.m.
Lord Seebohm: My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, on presenting the report so clearly and well. My own comments, which will be brief, are from the point of view of someone who has had to operate pension schemes in the past rather than someone on Sub-Committee C of the Select Committee.
The fact that people are living longer and that the number of those living in retirement seems to be ever increasing as a proportion of those in work means that the provision of pensions is becoming more and more a social problem as well as a financial problem. I say it is a social problem because a comfortable and secure standard of life for the ageing is accepted as a national policy; financial, because it is immensely expensive and will become an increasing burden on those still in work and therefore on the rate of tax.
The first point I wish to make is that state pensions and occupational pensions are quite separate problems. I know that they interact, but they are separate and should be dealt with in separate ways. The former is in fact a universal safety net and the latter is a form of top-up of considerable flexibility and variety. I start by looking at the state pension system. As the report clearly points out, the present arrangements are by no means equal between men and women. As the CBI stated in its evidence to the committee, it is high time that the Government came out clearly that they are committed to the principle of achieving a common state pension for men and women.
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The question of bridging between the ages of 60 and 65 affects many companies for the simple reason that many more people of both sexes are retiring at 60 and therefore women have the advantage of five years of having a larger income than men. That is what one normally calls discrimination in reverse. In Barclays Bank, and in many others, an advance pension is paid to men aged 60 to 65 and this will presumably be impossible to do if this directive becomes a regulation.
The committee came down on the age of 63 for both men and women, and that would incur a manageable increase in costs. The worry here is that too many men will take advantage of that and the labour force could be reduced at a time when there will undoubtably be skilled labour shortages. However, the recent government decision to allow earnings to continue without pension deduction will have the opposite effect and encourage employees to remain longer in work.
This new dispensation encourages the idea of a retirement decade in which people can have their pension entitlement increased each year of deferment. This form of flexibility could be of considerable social benefit, particularly for those who married late and have family responsibility. It would not add to the financial burden on the state. On the whole, therefore, I agree with the committee's recommendation as regards state pensions, although considerable flexibility will be needed as to its full implementation over time.
I now come to occupational pension schemes. Broadly speaking, I believe that interference from Brussels is highly undesirable apart from the general principle that they must not offend basic equal opportunities concepts. I very much agree that the directive is badly drawn up, lacks definitions and does not make it clear in many places whether it is talking about state or private pension schemes. At best some guidelines might be acceptable, but businesses must be able to frame pension schemes appropriate to their earnings and general terms of service.
I say "earnings" because during a period of high inflation which took place early in this decade, and particularly in the decade before, pension funds became completely insolvent. In fact, if your company was making adequate profit it could perhaps put the matter right. In one case concerning my particular bank we had to add 27·5 per cent. to the salary bill in order to keep the pension fund solvent. So from the point of view of business, the position is very much more complicated than one might think by sitting in Brussels.
Mr. Langham of Unilever pointed out that most companies have already modified their schemes to meet many of the points made in the directive. I saw hints in the evidence. He said that he took a rather relaxed attitude to the whole subject. In the case of Barclays Bank the same applies. For instance, the bank already grants widowers pensions and includes all those part-time workers who do more than 14 hours a week. The time factor on implementation that has been mentioned is another very important aspect. Mr. Langham said that the scheme will take

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three years to get ready, but many more years before full implementation.
As concerns having a retirement decade, difficulties will arise among the higher echelons because of the necessity to plan ahead for succession. For the more clerical grades in the bank, for instance, this concept is probably quite acceptable; but in the 1990s it is desirable for the demographic reasons that I have mentioned. As regards part-timers, I believe all those above a minimum income or number of hours worked should be included in the pension scheme. Experience in my own business so far shows that where the pension scheme is non-contributory staff will naturally join, but where it is contributory very few part-timers opt to join as they prefer money in hand. Inquiries having been made in the bank, it is extraordinary how few part-timers were interested at all in pensions. Many of them are also short-timers in terms of years and their pensions would be trivial.
To sum up, I believe that guidelines should be issued and they will be useful. Certainly, regulations as regards equal opportunities should be made. I am quite certain that there must be considerable flexibility in the implementation of all these matters. I support the Motion.
1.3 p.m.
Baroness Phillips: My Lords, I am the first speaker in this debate who was not a Member of the committee. I congratulate it on preparing this very comprehensive report, but I am not sure that I should congratulate the Minister. I once had the task of having to answer questions concerning pensions. Therefore I wish him good luck in his office. It is not the office that one enjoys most of all.
I was recently at a women's conference at which a worthy civil servant attempted to explain why women could not receive certain pensions. He was practically howled down. I suggest that attempting to explain the logic of the pension system is not the most popular role because it has no logic. Anyone who has ever tried to work through how a pension is collected knows that the system has no logic.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, that we must be very careful never to regard pensioners as a social problem. Quite recently a book was published which made reference to the grey generation. The book more or less implied that the grey generation will have a stranglehold on young people entering the pension scheme. The next provision to be introduced will be voluntary euthanasia and possibly compulsory euthanasia because pensioners are a charge on the state. We created that pensioner as a charge on the state because we have forced people to retire at a certain age simply because the retirement age was declared a long time ago.
I shall use my few minutes to sound my drum and say that we discriminate on the ground of age. This directive is a small move in the right direction although it has yet to be approved. A fixed state pensionage has very little relevance in today's pattern of retirement. When the retirement age was first introduced many years ago workers were played
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out at 60. They worked 12 hours a day and six days a week. They had very poor food and they certainly did not have modern medicines which have made spectacular advances. In all probability the workers were played out at 40 but they had to struggle on.
I have done a lot of work in connection with pre-retirement courses. At these courses there are many people who are absolutely fit, healthy, and mentally and physically right. We are saying to them that they have to retire. Many of them do not want to retire partly because they feel that they still have something to give. However, we force them to retire and then we say to them that they are a charge on the state. This state of affairs stems from a most curious idea the basis of which is that we base everything either on sex or on age. People are people. If an employer wishes to employ someone, he employs the best person to do the job if he has any sense.
When I introduced my Bill on age discrimination, I said that if gorillas can do the job better I suspect that we would employ gorillas. At least they would not answer back. There is no doubt that we have based the whole structure on the most complicated arrangements so that when people claim their pensions they find that they have to sort through a form to decide whether they are eligible for this, that, or something else. One day we shall produce a human being of the right sex, the right age, the right colour and at the right time in order to collect the maximum from the state, wherever he lives.
I support the idea of a flexible retirement system. It is a slight move in the right direction. There never was any real logic in women retiring at the age of 60 and men at 65. There is certainly no logic for a woman as a housewife or homemaker to claim through her husband, still on retirement pension, as a dependant. This particularly irritates women. The assumption is that because they have not worked in paid employment they have not worked. In fact they have made a great contribution to society and they merit a full pension. That is one of the more ridiculous aspects of the whole pension system.
I am delighted that many people of my generation, when looking around for a second mate—one is hopeful to any age, I suppose, and preferably one would wish for a younger mate because he or she will outlive you—sensibly do not marry because they can continue to claim separate retirement pensions whereas collectively they would get less. It is a totally ridiculous system which human beings usually find some way round. This directive is a start in the right direction for a flexible retirement system. I like the fact that the report states that the pension should be equal. I am not enamoured of the decade of retirement, but I suppose it is the only method by which this system can be brought into being. I imagine that employers will make a meal of it even if the Government do not.
All these systems cost a lot of money to operate. If there is not simplicity of administration there is need for a much larger staff. The great advantage of the child benefit system when it was first introduced was that it was paid to everybody who had children. I can remember the arguments against that—that some rich people would get it—but I pointed out

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then as I have pointed out many times that there is no danger of anyone getting too much money out of the state. It is all tied up. There is even the rule that one cannot get two state benefits. This was raised in connection with widows who happened to want to collect the maternity allowance. Although they were mothers as well as widows they could have only one benefit. The state has it all tied up. Simplicity of payment is the first rule for any sensible arrangement. It is unbelievable how complicated it has become. I often think that Lord Beveridge must turn in his grave. His was a simple concept which has been made unduly complicated.
The report goes on to say that demographic and other factors make it desirable to give people further encouragement to remain in employment. That is splendid. I could not endorse any statement more, but that must not be allowed to cloud the idea. We still have to look at age discrimination, because that can change. When there is a war, suddenly the poor weak women who are supposedly incapable of physical labour can drive lorries because there are no men to do it. The same applies to the question of age. If there is a shortage of young people, one has to have the older ones. As I have said before, suddenly the dear old 50s are the best thing since sliced bread. Long may that continue, but we do not know that it will continue. How can we forecast how many people are going to be born? We do not know. We are not even sure how many people are going to die, so we certainly cannot work out how many people are going to be born. So the demography can change, and we must have all this in legislation.
Age must never be used any more than sex or race as a reason for doing or not doing something. Human beings are people with all their own feelings, dignities and capabilities. That is how they should be considered. It sounds so simple but we have made it complicated.
There is the interesting matter of the new Ministers. The Prime Minister is creeping towards that terrible age when she should be forced to retire, but of course Prime Ministers never retire; they make everybody else retire. What were the qualities of the new Ministers according to the newspapers? It was not that they are highly intelligent, not that they are going to be capable of doing the job, but that they are young and bring in a breath of fresh air. I have encountered breaths of fresh air. I recall a certain council from which somebody was asked to resign because he was too old and fresh blood was needed. The fresh blood turned out to be a man five years older! That could be a way of bringing in fresh blood, but it is all nonsense.
If we are to move into the next century with common sense, do not let us take three years on a matter such as this and then produce nothing. People are people and that is how they should always be considered, whether we are talking about employment, retirement, or our general contribution to the community.
1.15 p.m.
Lord Hunter of Newington: My Lords, I too should like to congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Allen and
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Lord Henley, who sit confident to reply to not the easiest debate in the world.
Miss Joan Brown, giving evidence to the committee, concluded her comments by saying:
"The goals are worth pursuing with vigour, but now that we have reached a most difficult part of the path to equal treatment we should proceed with the greatest caution lest the cure be worse than the disease".
The committee is clear in its mind that the objective of equal pension age for men and women should be pursued in this country. Of course a substantial difference in life expectancy is long-standing and universal. In recent years some changes have occurred because of medical improvements, elimination of infectious diseases and matters of that kind which affect both sexes. Smoking raises an interesting situation because in personal pensions the companies have had no difficulty in introducing special rates for smokers and ignoring the sex differential. It is obvious that no person taking out a private policy would be prepared to pay to subsidise men or women who were smokers.
Other geographical and occupational variations exist, but the most important factor is that it is not often clear what the real causes of differentials are, and often insurance companies do no: know what factors to rate for. Neither do the policy holders know how their prospects compare with the general average. There are exceptions. I have mentioned smoking; another exception is the risk of accident.
It has been said that unequal pension ages create a variety of anomalies, some of which disadvantage men and some of which disadvantage women. From the point of view of the acquisition of an adequate income for retirement, women's lower retirement age gives disadvantages under the present United Kingdom system which is based on a flat rate national insurance penion plus a second pension from SERPS or an occupational scheme, or a personal pension. But because the national insurance pension is so low it is the second pension which can free the elderly from the need to claim means-tested benefit in retirement to cover basic needs. Its level will depend on the number of years of contribution and on the wage on which it is based.
Raising women's age to 65 for the national insurance pension has been seen as politically difficult. Not all women would welcome that. There is a clear trend towards earlier retirement for men, but equalisation by lowering men's pension age to 60 is seen as far too costly. Both the Equal Opportunities Commission and the House of Commons Social Services Committee have suggested a compromise age of 63, with transitional provisions for those coming up to the present pension age and who have planned their retirement accordingly. The Government have seen this as too costly and point out that the only possible nil cost change would be to equalise at 64½ years. The Government offered an alternative in 1985 but that produced more problems than it solved. The suggestion was for more flexible retirement through a retirement decade.
Not only are there complications of the kind that one has referred to but there are further complications in relation to Europe in the differences existing between various countries.

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There are five member states where pension ages are not the same and where there will be a huge financial problem in trying to align them. The Government Actuary has clearly stated that unisex rates and conditions can be offered only by giving up other advantages in personal pensions. The loss is freedom of choice. Another loss is that some minority groups, particularly single men, do rather badly out of the deal.
One comes to personal rather than derived rights. If we are to move from derived to personal rights, before the move has begun it is essential to address the factors which still prevent women, in particular married women, from acquiring personal rights. Of those, the two most important are low paid part-time work and the income support roles. Women who work for wages below the lower limit of national insurance contributions do not acquire rights to national insurance even if they work regularly for a number of years. Wages at this level clearly cannot tolerate even the lowest rate of national insurance deductions of 5 per cent.
On the other hand, while neither the employee nor the employer are making contributions to the National Insurance Fund, it is difficult to propose that, in spite of this, benefits should be paid. It may be necessary to consider the introduction of a very low contribution rate, perhaps 1 per cent., for very low earners in order to give them a place in the national insurance scheme and the rights to benefit even at a reduced rate.
It seems likely that at some stage women will wish to extend their hours and increase their wages and therefore their contribution liability. They could then have full rates for work absence and build on the contribution years so that they acquire pension rights. Some means need to be found to overcome the exclusion of these women from the opportunity of building up future rights; and, indeed, the same applies to any man in the same position.
1.21 p.m.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, speaking as I do almost at the end of the debate, I can probably dispense with some of the remarks I intended to make. However, I should like to begin by congratulating the Minister on his promotion and paying tribute to his predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale. He took much flack from this side of the House and no doubt the new Minister will take just as much—hopefully. We try to be constructive and we know that he will try to be helpful, but I congratulate him all the same.
I should also like to congratulate the noble Lord who introduced the debate and who also steered the matter through the committee. I pay tribute to all the committee members and to all the people who gave evidence. The committee has done a tremendous job in producing a report which is as comprehensive and constructive as this one.
I must say that I am a little saddened at the timing of the debate, coming, as it does, right at the very end of the Session; indeed, the last day before the Summer Recess. It comes before us following a
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welter of Bills and everyone is punch drunk after having discussed, read and considered those matters. Therefore, it has been a most difficult task for us. I must confess that I have not finished my detailed study of this report for those reasons. We need more time and this is not the best time for such a debate. It would have been much better had it been tabled during prime time in the Session because it is a matter of great importance.
As I said, I think that the Committee did a great job in bringing together so many views, many of which were critical but most of which were constructive. That is another aspect which stands out from the debate: although members of the committee made some criticisms, they also added something constructive and at least tried to put on record something of their experience. Indeed, most of them have a record of years and years of experience in such matters. The result has been the production of the report which we have before us.
The report is a very comprehensive review of the current attitudes to many of the questions raised in the draft directive. The noble Lord who opened the debate summarised the provisions of that directive and, for me at any rate, made it much more readily understandable in view of the fact that I have not been able to study the document as deeply as I should have liked.
I happen to have been involved for many years one way or another with the provision of pensions, the retirement age, the adequacy of the pension, the discrimination against men and many other aspects as regards retirement. For the past 15 to 20 years I have been closely connected with Age Concern and its work in this field. I supported the evidence given by Age Concern to the committee, which naturally I read at an early stage.
Having said that, I welcome the draft for all the reasons which have been stated by previous speakers. However, I must say that I am not opposed to the necessary legislation—social security Bills and so on—being handled by the Government of the United Kingdom. But I am a little worried that this may follow the usual procedure; in other words, there is a danger so far as I am concerned that if this Government, or any other UK government, follow the pattern of the last 10 years, they will say, "We will deal with this on a nil-cost basis". That is the big danger. If there is an attempt to deal with the matter on a nil-cost basis, it will make an already grim situation in many fields of social service in this country even worse. Therefore we must guard against that possibility.
I support the cautionary note entered by Mr. Jacques. He was one of the TUC witnesses. His evidence is reported on page 71 of the report and I thought that what he said was also apposite:
"past experience has shown us that they"—
that is, the Government—
"are very reluctant to take steps in this direction. Thus far, much of UK equality law has come about due to events in the European Parliament and the European Court. It appears far more likely at this stage, therefore, that any positive action will emanate from the European Commission, as it has in the past".
I think that he was wise to enter that precautionary note, because nothing here of any real moment has

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really happened, unless it has been forced upon us by a directive from Europe; for example, a court case which has gone against the Government, whereupon things have changed. Indeed, as regards legislation just passed, a great chunk of that was a direct result of a European Court case and European directives. Therefore I agree with Mr. Jacques from the TUC. With his views I include my own precautionary note as regards nil-cost arrangements.
I have also been closely concerned with many organisations which are worried about the position of carers. I think that that aspect comes out in many of the comments made by witnesses. This is a particular concern which we all have for family carers who are looking after elderly parents. A recent OPCS survey reported on informal carers. It found that nearly two-thirds of those who devote a significant amount of time to caring for others are women. That of course is a fact already known to us and the figure is probably more than two-thirds by now. Nevertheless, it is a huge percentage. That is likely to reduce, or completely shut out, their opportunity to work and earn money and thereby to qualify for the various benefits.
A caring situation should be covered by a general statement in Article 2. It is not covered specifically enough for most of us. It should be covered and it should be reaffirmed in other articles where appropriate. That factor should be borne in mind whenever we discuss any of these directives. For example, it has been suggested that member states may look to equalise pension receipt on the basis of contribution years, which must be identical for both sexes. That should be accompanied by a clause which requires protection for years spent bringing up children or caring for chronically sick or disabled dependants. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, touched upon that aspect of the matter. Moreover, similar provisions should be included in other clauses in the directive.
As I said, in the past I supported many campaigns. This is not a new issue. I am reminded of the Philips Report.
Baroness Phillips: That is nothing to do with me!
Lord Stallard: It is nothing to do with my noble friend, thank goodness otherwise I should have to scrap my quote. However, that committee was set up 30 years ago. It produced a report which contained some ominous warnings about the growing burden of caring for the elderly. But that comment could have been made 30 days ago because the same kind of findings emerge from bureaucrats who are now involved in such situations. The majority of members of the committee proposed that the pension age for men should be ultimately raised to 68 years of age and for women to 63 years.
In those days, I was actively campaigning for a reduction in the men's retirement to the age of 60. I have not budged on that issue; but I hope that not many people are following the recommendations of the Philips Report. I am still in the same position as I was all those years ago. I support the campaigns and I support the proposition that the retirement age should be equalised to 60 years.
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Following the comments made so far in this debate, I think it can be said that there are a number of new circumstances to be considered. For example, the increase in occupational pension schemes, with the many different age qualifications; the early retirement schemes; the early redundancy schemes; the increased unemployment; the increased part-time working; and the abolition of the earnings rule. The latter is a brand new factor and has never been discussed in any report. However, it certainly merits a little discussion in this instance.
A number of other countries have moved in the direction of flexibility. We face a completely different set of circumstances, which means that we should not wait for years to make the decisions but should make them fairly soon. The point was wrapped up neatly by Age Concern, which said:
"Age Concern would like to see the introduction of a flexible retirement system, creating for example a wide band between 60 and 70, with entitlement of the state pension at age 60 for men and women, and with legislative safeguards precluding the dismissal of employees on grounds of age up to the higher end of the scale. We also see a need for the introduction and encouragement of schemes for gradual retirement, and for investigation into the possibility of half-work, half-pension schemes for people wishing to opt for part-time employment before retirement without loss of income".
That is a perfectly constructive proposition and proposal which could be included in any submissions we make on this draft directive.
Whenever we have mentioned this issue before we have been told of the colossal cost that would be involved. I first raised the matter almost in my first month as a Member of the other place and I was told about the colossal cost. It was estimated to be millions of pounds in those days. Now the cost would be billions of pounds. If it had been accepted then it would not be so expensive now. There will always be a cost. That is recognised by everyone. A great deal of work has been done on this issue by the Campaign for Equal State Pension Ages. It also produced a report which is well worth reading.
It estimates the first year costs as £3.4 billion. That is not a great deal of money for the end product when compared with other expenditure. It can be argued that the actual costs will be lower as not all men aged over 60 would draw a pension and cease to work. Many would carry on working if 60 was the age at which they could draw the pension. Many more will be entitled to do it because of the abolition of the earnings rule. I say that the estimate is excessive because these new factors were not taken into account.
If this report receives the publicity which it thoroughly deserves, the whole question will be opened up for public debate. I for one look forward to further participation in that debate.
Lord Monson: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down perhaps I may put one question to him. He favours a common retirement age of 60. Let us suppose that the average life expectancy for both men and women increases by five years over the next 50 years, which on past patterns may be something of an underestimate. Would he still then be in favour of the retirement age being as low as 60?
Lord Stallard: My Lords, I might not be here then. One would have to look at the new circumstances. I have not based my view on equality of age on the premise of the noble Lord. I am not basing it on the fact that there will be a shorter or longer life expectancy. It is a question of justice. It was never based on that to begin with. I am basing it on justice in the present circumstances. Given a completely new set of circumstances, I would not be totally inflexible. In fact I have stressed that I am for flexibility in this issue as in many others.
1.34 p.m.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Henley, on his promotion to this present position. With the agreeable inconsistency of your Lordships' House, we wish him the very best of luck and we intend to give him a very bad time. I should also like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, on the brilliant lucidity with which he explained this report. On the face of it, it looks a relatively simple matter but it is simple only to those who have not tried to understand it. It is full of complex and difficult issues which will have to be thought through and worked out very carefully indeed if we are to achieve the results which we all want to achieve.
I should like to start by taking up one or two of the omissions in the draft directive. I start with the omission of adequate references to part-time work. In the past part-time work has been seen as a collection of low-paid ghetto jobs for women whom it is hoped will not be there very long. Part-time work is completely changing its character. It is important that our social security system should recognise the way in which part-time work is changing in character and the way in which it is highly desirable that it should. If we are to believe the obvious evidence of trends and the writings of some of the best informed people, the labour market of the future will require that a great many people, both men and women, at a variety of levels, not merely at the level of an unskilled job (which was previously the area in which part-time work was undertaken) will take on part-time work. This will have economic and certain social benefits.
Part-time work will not be acceptable unless it is seen to be on all fours with full-time work pro rata for time spent. That means that all the benefits which go with full-time work should be available to people in part-time work. It is a pity that this draft directive has not come to grips with the implications of the changing nature of part-time work, the people who are going to do it and the desirability in the labour market that it should be established as a desirable form of employment with all the advantages attached of the jobs which previously could be done only on a full-time basis.
I should like also to take up the issue of the failure to include an adequate definition of indirect discrimination. In this country—I have never explored the matter elsewhere—I find that after 14 years there is still an extraordinary misunderstanding about the nature of indirect discrimination. Most people think that it is a
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particularly devious and underhand form of discrimination. On the contrary, it is a discrimination in which a great many people indulge but without knowing that they are doing it. That makes it far more dangerous and far more difficult to deal with. On the whole, in this country, and for all I know, also in the other countries of the Community, straight, direct, really open, blatant discrimination occurs very rarely. It has to a large extent been eliminated. But indirect discrimination is rampant. Unless we recognise it and get a good definition applicable throughout the Community, attempts to halt discrimination will not go far. I hope that in discussing this draft directive the Government will make the point that this is much the most important aspect of discrimination and that we need to understand exactly what it means and how we are to interpret it.
That said there are in this draft directive a number of issues which one welcomes. I much welcome the individualisation of benefits. This is one of the areas as regards which the objective is easy to welcome, but one must at the same time accept the complexity and difficulty of moving to its full implementation. What is behind this is a fundamental social change. It is true that not only here but in most other countries the man has for centuries been the head of the household and the breadwinner. That is changing. It is no longer the case for a whole variety of reasons into which I shall not go today and of which I think most people are fully aware.
This is a huge change. The dependence of the woman on her husband for maintenance and provision for old age is passing. The divorce rate is one element of the situation but it is only one of a number of reasons why this is happening. Therefore we need to move towards the individualisation of benefits, the ability for individual women—married, single, divorced or whatever their marital status may be—to build up their own rights and to be able to be certain that they have financial resources, whatever changes may take place in their marital status.
We are moving slowly in that direction. We need to explore fully and in depth what all the problems are and how we can best cope with them. That is something which I should have thought could be done with great advantage in collaboration with our partners in Europe, to see how this can be worked out in the best possible way. As regards application throughout the Community, the fact that we start from somewhat different bases does not make it any easier.
Secondly, like the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, and other speakers—but I think that she was the most emphatic—I greatly welcome the suggestion of flexible retirement ages. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Stallard, for the life of me I cannot see why we should encourage people to retire at the age of 60. The demographic figures speak for themselves, with the great increase in the number of people in the older age groups. I suppose that most of us—but certainly not the noble Lord, Lord Henley—have a bias towards old age in your Lordships' House. I do not think that that blinds us to the facts of the situation which are that today a great many people

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can and like to carry on working. They do not wish to be discriminated against on grounds of age. Some people want to retire earlier for a whole variety of reasons, not least because in many jobs a retirement from full-time employment is particularly attractive if people have a number of other interests or money-earning activities which they can develop if they retire early. But if they leave it till the formal retirement age, it is too late for them to take up those activities.
This is a highly desirable way of handling retirement. I suppose what most of us wanted when we neared retirement and what most of us in your Lordships' House have been fortunate enough to have is gradual retirement (It does not seem to be very gradual as regards your Lordships' House.) By that I do not mean carrying on working full time; I mean carrying on being usefully, and preferably profitably employed—which does not always apply in your Lordships' House—after formal retirement has taken place. That is what I see as the pattern for the future.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for allowing me to intervene. I think that she misquoted me, or I hope so. I certainly did not think that people should retire at 60. I am in favour of a flexibility in retirement, but the pivotal age should be 60. The basic pension should be payable at 60. There should be an adequate pension at 60 for those who need it or require it or who must retire. But for the rest of us I agree entirely with the noble Baroness.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, I am glad to have that explanation from the noble Lord, Lord Stallard, and I apologise if I misunderstood him. However, I disagree with him in that full retirement pensions for everybody at 60 at what would be an acceptable and adequate pension would be pretty costly. I believe that the retirement pensions, like retirement age, should be graduated. Personally—and this is purely a personal view—I would drop the flexibility to a point lower than 60. For quite a lot of people, I believe that a small pension at 55, with the opportunity to earn money in other ways, might be very acceptable. If people go on working for a much longer period, their pensions should be correspondingly enhanced.
However, flexibility is undoubtedly the key and it is a very good thing indeed that this is proposed. Personally I go along with the suggestion that the pivotal age for what we regard as a full pension should be 63, but that is a matter for discussion. We need to look at the figures very carefully indeed before we finally decide what is exactly the right age and exactly the right amount of money that can be guaranteed at different stages.
I should like to stress only one other point. We in this country—I think with some justice—have been seen by at any rate some of our partners in the Community as dragging our feet in the face of suggestions coming from the Community. We are seen as resisting changes, making it difficult, particularly in the field of equal opportunities, where our development and changes in equal opportunities
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have come all too often only because we have been taken to the European Court. We have then been forced to make changes. It would have been very much more satisfactory if we had made: them before. The delay has not been for any want of pressure put on the Government by many speakers on this side of the House and indeed from some on the Government Back Benches.
Given that 1992 is just around the corner—despite the resistance in high quarters to the acceptance of some of the social policies coming from Brussels—would not the following be highly desirable? Instead of the Government waiting for directives to come from Europe and then fighting, inch by inch, against the proposed changes, the Government themselves should think about ways in which these issues could be advanced, taking the initiative in Brussels. In that way some of the directives would come as a result of the previous thinking and input from this country. We should be seer as taking an active role in promoting equal opportunities rather than taking a role in which we fight against them and then reluctantly have to agree to conform.
I have now spoken for 12 minutes. I very much hope that the Government will accept the major recommendations and will take initiatives on the omissions to which your Lordships have drawn attention.
1.47 p.m.
Baroness Turner of Camden: My Lords, at the risk of sounding repetitive may I also from these Benches welcome the noble Lord, Lord Henley, to his new post. We wish to say, as others have said this morning, how much we on these Benches appreciated the unfailing courtesy with which the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, dealt with the often critical and hostile comments on social security from this side of the House.
I welcome the report of the Select Committee. I myself was a member, along with my noble friend Lady Lockwood, who has already spoken in the debate, and other Members of your Lordships' House. I should also like to thank cur chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, for the comprehensive way in which he has dealt with a detailed and to some degree difficult report.
I commend the report, not only because of its conclusions, which I hope the House will find entirely acceptable, but because of the nature of the report itself, which brings together a large amount of evidence on what is admittedly a tricky and difficult subject. Of course it ought not to be a tricky and difficult subject because nowadays everybody is in favour of equal treatment of men and women and opposes sex discrimination. It is difficult and tricky because of what we have inherited from the past when there was a very different perception of work patterns and family life.
The Committee has had to have regard, in compiling the report, to the expectations that already exist. Some of them are based on past experience. In particular, we must be careful in endeavouring to secure formal equality that we do not end up actually worsening conditions for the vulnerable people

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whom we wish to help. Nevertheless, I welcome the draft directive which I regard—as did the committee—as evidence of the European Commission's continuing commitment to the elimination of sex discrimination throughout the Community. There are some particular problems for us in the UK, largely arising from the way in which we have traditionally made provision. In my view these are dealt with very well in the report.
Probably the most difficult issue facing us is the equalisation of state pension ages. No one wants to continue with a system in which women may retire on full state pension five years earlier than men. The ages in the state system were set many years ago when family patterns and expectations were entirely different. Far fewer women went to work outside the home, except of course during the exceptional conditions of wartime. It was quite normal for female employment to cease upon marriage.
The five-year difference was originally thought of because in general men married women five years younger than themselves and it was felt that in this way married people would qualify for retirement pensions together. However, as we all know—this has been referred to many times in the debate—things have changed. One in three marriages now ends in divorce. Most women expect to continue in employment outside the home after marriage, returning to work after a break for child care. This is now officially encouraged, as we have seen from the Government's White Paper Employment in the 1990s. The earlier retirement age is by no means an unalloyed blessing for women. However, it is true, judging from the report, that some of the organisations seen by the committee believe it to be so.
The Marshall judgment, when a woman succeeded before the European Court in establishing that she had the right to continue in employment until age 65 if a man had that right in the same employment, led to some rethinking about pension provision. Some women, particularly those in interesting and satisfying work, wanted to emulate Miss Marshall and stay on after age 60. They also wanted the opportunity to earn more pension to cover those extra years, although that was not provided for in the legislation introduced in the wake of the Marshall judgment. At the same time, some pension schemes introduced a common retirement age of 60 for both sexes. In order to make this acceptable to male employees who would have to wait until age 65 for a full state pension, such schemes introduced bridging pensions for men until age 65. This, as we know, has been held to be contrary to the directive. Indeed, during the debate on the recent social security legislation in this House, amendments to try to protect bridging pensions were opposed by the Government on the grounds that the directive would render them illegal.
It will be seen from the report that the committee regards it as anomalous that by seeking to offset inequality between the sexes in the state scheme, occupational schemes should themselves be made vulnerable to the charge of unequal treatment. The committee recommends that such schemes should
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be allowed to pay bridging pensions until the pension ages of men and women are equalised in the state scheme, and that the directive should be amended to include the necessary transitional provisions. Surely this is sensible, and surely this is something which the Government should take on board.
The problem is of course the failure to introduce equal ages in the state pension scheme a great deal earlier. The Occupational Pensions Board recommended equalisation as long ago as 1976, identifying this as one of the main causes of inequality in pension provision. While everyone now appears to be in favour of doing something, there has not been agreement on the methods to be adopted. The TUC and EOC wanted to equalise at age 60, as will be seen from the report, although both accept that there will be substantial costs involved. However, others have drawn attention to demographic considerations. In today's debate we have heard a great deal about that, notably from my noble friend Lady Phillips.
It now appears that while a few years ago older workers were being persuaded to take early retirement, often when they really did not want to do so, it is now being discovered that their skills are needed. Lowering the male retirement are to 60 is felt by some to run counter to the present trend, which is to retain those with skills in the workforce.
The committee's report is absolutely clear, and commendably so in my opinion. The Government must grasp the nettle. Pension ages must be equalised. The committee favours the idea of a decade of retirement, between the ages of 60 and 70, when men and women may choose when they want to retire. In such a system there has of course to be a pivotal age at which the full state pension would become payable. The committee believes this should be 63, and sets out its reasons for this belief. Clearly this is a compromise between the various submissions that were made, but it represents a way forward which I hope will commend itself to the House and upon which I hope the Government will act. It is accepted that this will cost money—around £700 million in a full year—and of course there must be protection for those whose expectation is different. Transitional arrangements must be made. Those are also referred to in the report.
Another particularly difficult area for the UK is the matter of derived benefits. This is also dealt with in the paragraph of the report dealing with the individualisation of benefits. Clearly in a situation of marriage breakdown, derived benefits are vulnerable. However, derived benefits are a common feature of provision in the UK. As is pointed out in the report, one effect of the operation of the directive would be the abolition of the married woman's pension payable on the husband's contributions. Provision for women in this category would have to be made until well into the next century—that is, transitional provision.
Clearly the committee is right to say that the whole matter of derived benefits must be re-examined by the European Commission. There is evidence that in Denmark, for example—this has already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale—where there has been a switch away

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from derived benefits, considerable hardship has resulted with large firms now making ad hoc provision to overcome this hardship.
As regards family benefits, I am sure that everyone in this House will welcome the view of the committee that child benefit should continue to be paid to the mother. Everyone making representations on this subject felt the same way although the EOC could, it is true, see some difficulty in that. It suggested that it might be paid to the parent with the care of the child.
I particularly welcome the committee's comments about part-timers. This is a growth area of employment. That is more the cause in the UK than anywhere else in the Community. Part-time employees are mostly women. For obvious reasons many find it easier to combine work outside the home with domestic responsibilities. The committee found that many employers were uncertain about their obligations to part-timers, and in particular whether or not they should be included in pension schemes. Many of the better schemes now offer membership to part-timers, usually at reduced rates. This is surely a development to be welcomed, as is the committee's recommendation that Draft Article 2(a) should be expanded to include part-time workers.
Despite the difficulties, the committee recommends that survivor's benefits, if paid, should ultimately be made available to men and women on equal terms. This is surely right, given the changing family circumstances to which reference has been made by most speakers in this debate. If, as the report says, it becomes the norm for couples to be dependent on the earnings of both partners for most of their lives, then equal survivor's benefits make sense.
Finally, I wish to say how much I agree with what has been said in the debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, on the issue of indirect discrimination. Clearly there has to be some definition which is acceptable throughout the Community as to what constitutes indirect discrimination. I agree absolutely that that is the kind of discrimination that takes place without people realising that they are indulging in it. It would be helpful to everyone, and would certainly assist very much the cause of equality throughout the Community, if there were to be further work on this matter and if eventually a definition were drawn up that was acceptable throughout the Community.
I commend the report to your Lordships' House. It is clearly the product of much careful thought and follows consideration of representations made by a wider range of organisations and individuals. In particular, I wish to emphasise again the importance of equalising pension state ages as that is the root cause of many of our past difficulties and anomalies. I now think the time has come for the Government to take action to end this outdated provision.
2 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Social Security (Lord Henley): My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord
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Allen, and other noble Lords and noble Baronesses for their very kind words directed both towards myself on starting in this post, and towards my noble friend Lord Skelmersdale, who has left this office. I hope I shall be able to follow in his footsteps. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Allen, and congratulate him and his committee on producing this report.
Noble Lords alleged considerable lack of interest in the press with regard to the Select Committee's reports on European legislation. I can assure the noble Lord that Her Majesty's Government take them very seriously. The committee's report will play a major part in helping us to Formulate our approach to these issues.
Like the committee, I consider that the central issues covered by this draft directive are of significant importance to our social security system. This third directive builds on the two earlier ones—Directive 79/7 covering state social security systems and Directive 86/378 covering occupational schemes. Each of those earlier directives allowed for specific exceptions from the application of equal treatment between men and women.
The draft third directive seeks to end all those various exclusions and "complete" the process of equal treatment for men and women in both state social security systems and occupational schemes. It is thus of special significance, since its effects could have a direct impact on every man, woman and child in this country.
However, a word or two of caution may be helpful lest we rush headlong into trying to complete the process of equal treatment in social security. The Government agree wholeheartedly with the committee in voicing their strong reservations about a number of aspects in the draft directive. Total equality implanted into social security systems in advance of similar equality in social and economic patterns can be mischievous and damaging.
I should like to illustrate this point with a straightforward example which will be familiar to your Lordships. The draft of the directive which the committee considered would have required that the principle of equal treatment should be applied to the payment of child benefit. However desirable the principle of equality may be, there is a strong tradition in this country, which has been reaffirmed by both Houses of Parliament, that child benefit should in the first instance be paid to the mother. There are provisions which enable the mother and father to agree jointly that the benefit may be paid to the father, but that is a second stage extension of choice.
The Government have consistently opposed this rote application of the principles of equal treatment to the payability of child benefit. It is with considerable gratification that I noted that the committee has agreed with that position in its conclusion in paragraph 115 of the report. I can assure the House that the Government would have had no intention whatsoever of giving agreement to any piece of Community legislation which did not preserve the continuing payment of child benefit to the mother.

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I am pleased to be able to inform your Lordships that subsequent negotiations have produced a change on this issue. The United Kingdom and the majority of member states insisted on the change. As a result, the latest draft text now permits each member state to decide on matters of payability of child benefit, providing the conditions for eligibility conform to the principles of equal treatment.
Perhaps I should add at this stage that, while the noble Lord, Lord Allen, and his European Communities Committee were considering this draft directive, the outgoing Spanish Presidency instituted a flurry of continued negotiations. These resulted in a number of redrafted versions of the text. However, these negotiations were by no means sufficient to enable member states to give unanimous agreement to the directive. Consequently, while it was an item on the agenda for the Council of Ministers in Luxembourg last month, the issue was referred back for continuing discussions under the new French Presidency.
This draft directive has as its aim the completion of the process of equal treatment in social security and thus touches on matters of considerable significance and importance. Later in the year the Government will be responding in detail to all the points raised in the House. As I have said, I can assure your Lordships that, in the current deliberations on the directive, the Committee's report will play a major part in helping the Government to formulate our approach to the issues.
The Government's overall view can be summarised quite simply. Because this draft covers issues of fundamental importance, we do not wish to be rushed into judgment. We do not desire to conclude negotiations until we are completely satisfied with the legal soundness of the provisions. We must be as sure as we can be that the judgments of the European Court between the adoption of a directive and the date for its implementation will not radically transform the requirements placed upon us from our initial understandings. We do not accept that the time is ripe for all the issues under discussion to be finalised.
Two major issues are covered by this directive. The noble Lord, Lord Allen, mentioned a third: child benefit, about which I have already spoken. I shall therefore concentrate on the issues of the equalisation of survivors' benefits and the equalisation of pension age, which were touched upon by every speaker.
In the conclusion in paragraph 114 the Committee consider that: "Eventually, men and women should have to be provided with survivors' benefits on the same terms, but Member States should be allowed at least 15 years to achieve this provision".
As the House will be well aware, the 1986 Directive 86/378, on equal treatment in occupational schemes, followed its 1979 state scheme predecessor in specifically incorporating a derogation in respect of survivors' benefits. That is why the equal treatment requirements in Schedule 5 to the Social Security Act which received Royal Assent last week similarly did not extend to survivors' benefits.
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That is not to say that we consider provision of widowers' pensions in occupational schemes as a matter of low priority. The 1986 Social Security Act made it a condition for an occupational pension scheme to be used for contracting out of the State Earnings Related Scheme (SERPS) that it should provide a widowers' pension at a guaranteed minimum on the same basis as required for widows. The new contracted-out money purchase schemes and appropriate personal pension schemes are also each required to provide widowers' pensions.
This year's Act, although taking account of the derogation in the 1986 directive, made certain specific reforms in respect of widowers' pensions. Occupational schemes will, from 1st October this year, for the first time be under a statutory obligation to preserve and revalue the rights of widowers' pensions accruing to women who leave an employment. Equally, women who leave their pension scheme before the scheme's normal pension age may, from 1st October, choose to commute part of their pension to provide for their widower.
The noble Lord, Lord Seebohm, among other noble Lords, mentioned the issue of bridging pensions and the Select Committee's recommendation in paragraph 19 that the directive should be amended to allow occcupational schemes to pay bridging pensions to men to compensate for the lack of state pension during any period when women of the same age were entitled to state pension. Transitional pension provision would no longer be applicable once the state pensionable ages of men and women had been equalised.
The House will recall that we had a full debate on the issue when we discussed the amendments of my noble friend Lord Mottistone at both Committee and Report stages of the Social Security Bill. I can assure the House that we shall be writing very soon to the Commission to seek clarification of Directive 86/378, as my noble friend Lord Skelmersdale announced during our debate at the Report stage of the Bill. My noble friend also undertook to consider whether, should the opportunity arise, we must negotiate an amendment to the draft directive to permit bridging pensions to continue. Like my noble friend, I cannot hold out much hope of success.
Turning from the provisions in occupational and private schemes to the question of the provision for widowers' pensions within the state social security scheme, I have to say that the Government have serious reservations as to whether the provision of survivors' benefits for men within the state scheme equivalent to those existing for women could sensibly be justified. Such benefits would be expensive, costing at the moment some £200 million a year.
I need not remind the House that the Government have undertaken a programme to restructure the social security system to provide better targeting of benefits towards those who need them most. The provision of a universal insurance benefit for widowers on a par with those provided for widows would represent poor targeting. The available evidence indicates that widowers are more likely to be in full-time work than widows and to have higher earnings than widows and are less likely to have

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dependent children. The Government consider that it would be poor value for money to introduce a universal insurance benefit for widowers. Consequently, however persuasive the theoretical arguments may be for equal treatment for men and women following the death of their spouse, the practicalities of the situation would seem to rule that out for the foreseeable future.
The Select Committee has recognised the problems and argued that member states should have at least 15 years to bring about equality. The Government do not think it right to agree to a proposal where it is doubtful whether there will be a justifiable practical case (as against a theoretical case) for change within two decades. As a consequence, the Government have made it clear to the Commission that, having reflected on the issue, we consider that equalisation of survivors' benefits within the state social security system should be entirely removed from the directive. That is not to say that we shall not continue to reflect on the position and keep it under review. But we do not want to be forced by a directive into something that we may decide against.
It follows that the Government consider that the Third Directive is too ambitious and not suited to the times. It should thus be retitled so that it seeks to "continue the process of equalisation" rather than "complete" it. In that, we are in full agreement with the committee's conclusion in paragraph 121.
That brings me to the second major issue, which was mentioned by every noble Lord who spoke; namely, the equalisation of pension age. In paragraph 116, the committee has made a series of bold recommendations.
The question of equalising state pension age has been a live issue for a considerable number of years in this country. The case for an equal pension age is well recognised, but there are major issues to be considered, notably the direction of change and the practicalities involved in moving to a changed and equalised position. The Government have highlighted that issue on a number of occasions, most recently in the 1985 White Paper on the Reform of Social Security.
The committee has favoured a decade of retirement with full pension becoming payable at age 63 for both men and women, while recognising that women at present aged 50 or more would need to have their position protected. While equalising at the age of 60 would undeniably place very considerable additional burdens on the working population, equalising at the age of 63 would add substantial extra costs to the large sums already spent on state pensions. In addition, a decade of retirement might also add significant complication to pension arrangements. To date, no satisfactory solutions have been found to those problems.
Moreover, as the pattern of economic activity in the country develops and as the demographic trends into the next century emerge, so the relative and absolute costs of options for change are likely to alter. A further factor is the aspirations, expectations and plans made for retirement of the working population, especially those approaching retirement.
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As a consequence, the Government consider that further estimates of costs and consequences, based on the latest information and projections, should be made to provide a benchmark for public discussion. Revised financial costings are therefore currently being undertaken with that end in view. Once they have been completed, they should provide a surer basis for appraisal of options.
I am in no doubt that we would all agree that any decision on equalisation of pension ages or the creation of a decade of retirement would need to be based on the best and most up-to-date estimates of costs and effects. Any change in pension age could have an effect on millions of people, of whom many will already be approaching retirement and will have made plans appropriate to their circumstances. Not only must reasonable expectations be respected, but time needs to be allowed to enable people to respond to changed needs and to enable occupational schemes to make adjustments in good time. Until an informed decision can be made, and has been the subject of debate, it would not be responsible to reach conclusions as to likely outcomes.
Those member states which do not already have equal pension ages for men and women jointly face problems of when and how to equalise. Further negotiations will undoubtedly help to clarify the outcome of these problems and the timescale for change. Given the need to protect the aspirations and expectations of those currently approaching retirement, it is hard to envisage any actual change in state pension age for those retiring in this century.
The draft directive and the committee's report touch on other significant issues and I should like to bring the House up to date on some more recent developments and, in so doing, respond also to some of the points which have been made in our debate. First, I can tell your Lordships that we have apparently been successful in a number of important respects. For example, in the latest working text, the period required for legislation in Article 14 has been increased from three to six years. We regard this as important so that any necessary legislation is not rushed but can be introduced with full consideration and consultation.
The noble Lord, Lord Allen, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Lockwood and Lady Seear, spoke of derived entitlements and individualisation of benefits. Again, I can assure the House that in the latest working text of the directive reference to derived entitlements has been omitted altogether. In its report the committee concluded that, providing that derived rights were not withdrawn altogether, there was no objection to reference to them being progressively replaced by individualised entitlements.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, raised the question of the application of the judgment of the European Court of Justice in the case of Kaufhaus v. Karin Weber von Hartz. The full effect of that judgment is by no means clear. The question of whether Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome applies to occupational scheme benefits is at issue in two cases that are currently before the European Court

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of Justice. One is the case of Barber v. Guardian Royal Exchange and the other is Clarke v. Cray Precision Engineering.
The noble Lord, Lord Allen, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, raised the issue of calculating pensions on sex-based actuarial considerations. It seems fairly clear that actuarial considerations of differences between the sexes are a legitimate factor for any insurance type of transaction. There is an empirical difference between the life expectancy of men and of women at specific ages, as is clearly indicated by the table supplied by the Government Actuary and shown on page 89.
However, it is also clear that there are other factors which could be introduced—for example, whether or not the individual is a smoker. Equally it would be a simple matter to eliminate actuarial differences providing that the will to do so was there and that the resulting disadvantage to men was accepted by all.
The experience of the state of Montana, which I believe the Select Committee studied, as well as the other illustrations cited by the Government Actuary, indicate that the general effect of operating unisex calculations is that the rate for women is applied universally. It remains an open question whether or not that is desirable or necessary.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Lockwood and Lady Seear, argued that part-time workers should be brought within the scope of this directive. The Select Committee concluded the same. Article 2(a) specifies the groups in the working population who would be covered by the directive. The pattern of part-time work varies widely between various member states. Given that it did not prove possible for member states to reach agreement in 1982 on this issue, I have to say that it would seem most likely that the problems of definition and coverage would be magnified were an attempt made to include part-time workers in this directive. As to the question of the proper place for a definition of indirect discrimination, it remains the view of the Government that agreement on the definition of a part-time worker would more usefully be left to another instrument.
In conclusion, I should like to thank the Select Committee for its thoughtful and constructive report. It is informing the thinking of the Government on the issues, as I said before and as I trust will be apparent when our formal response is published in the autumn. Some of the issues involved are not easy. Many practical difficulties lie in the path of the purist quest for complete equality of treatment between men and women. My view is that the Select Committee have trod this path with clarity and common sense. I have no doubt that, as further negotiations are progressed in Brussels, this report will provide an invaluable source of information and observation with which to progress continuing negotiations.
2.20 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, I shall not detain your Lordships for very long. I do not propose
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to traverse all the ground again. However, it is worth saying that from the contributions made to the debate it looks as though among the variety of issues raised by the draft directive there are four which attract particular attention. They relate to part-timers, individualisation, indirect discrimination and pension ages. On indirect discrimination, as I understand it, the Commission has not yet given up the struggle for including something in the burden of proof directive, which would, if implemented, apply to this directive in due course.
I have listened with care to what the Minister has said. I am glad that he confirmed my impression that the Commission had given up its efforts to deal with child benefit on the basis set out in the draft directive. Although I shall read with great care what he has said, I must confess to some slight feelings of disappointment. It is not a unique experience in listening to a Minister from his department answering one of these debates, but there it is.
I am sorry that the Government have not yet written to the Commission about the point on the Social Security Bill that concerned the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, and others, about bridging pensions. I hope that we shall be informed when some information is available.
I include among my disappointments what I understood the Minister to say about survivors' benefits and pension ages. I cannot claim to have taken it all in but it sounded distinctly like some of the pieces that I used to write when I was a civil servant when I had not the slightest idea what to do and could only write something which I hoped would put off the decision to some distant date in the future. I may be doing the Minister an injustice. I shall certainly read what he has said.
Although he said with perfect propriety that these were complicated matters involving expense and the interests of a great many people, and that it was necessary to move with caution, I hope that he does not overdo that. I should like to see the Government taking a rather greater initiative in coping with the problems that are involoved in the directive.
I rub in the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, made. There are a number of issues here on which action ought to be taken by the Government quite apart from what happens to the directive. They are matters that are of great interest and importance. That leads me also to this reflection. I find it rather sad and disappointing that there was not a single Tory speaker in this debate. Looking at the Benches opposite, during a considerable part of the debate, one found it difficult to believe that that great party takes a great interest in social matters which affect many millions of people in this country.
Having said that, I should like to thank all those who have taken part in the debate, which I found of great interest. I can only say that it is not the end of the story and that there are issues to which we shall be returning in due course. I commend the Motion standing in my name.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1989
2.25 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Lord Skelmersdale)The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Lord Skelmersdale) rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 15th June be approved.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the order reforms the law in Northern Ireland relating to the investigation and detection of crime, and revises the law on evidence. It is substantially in line with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which, as the House will recall, was based on recommendations in the report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, and in the Criminal Law Revision Committee's eleventh report. Those recommendations are also valid for Northern Ireland, where the general criminal law has much in common with England and Wales. The Government therefore consider it appropriate to introduce measures similar to those already adopted under what has come to be called the PACE legislation. Because of these similarities, I shall only highlight the main provisions of the order.
Part II gives the police powers to stop and search persons and vehicles, on reasonable suspicion, for stolen goods, prohibited articles or offensive weapons. But these powers are subject to a number of safeguards which will ensure that they are only used where and to the extent necessary.
Part III deals with police powers to enter and search premises, and seize and retain property. Under Article 10, the police may apply to a justice of the peace for a warrant to search for material which is relevant evidence of an offence. But if they require access to certain categories of material held in confidence, they must apply instead to a county court judge in accordance with Article 11 and Schedule 1. However, for Northern Ireland there is an additional ground in Schedule 1 on which the police may base an application for a search warrant other than for a production order. Protecting sources of sensitive information, for example, in cases involving complex and serious fraud is clearly important. The provision will give the police a further opportunity to satisfy the court that a warrant is necessary in order to avoid prejudicing that investigation or others.
It does not give the police an unfettered power to obtain a search warrant; nor does it guarantee that they will always get one. It does, however, give them the opportunity to extend their inquiries into related cases. It is important to recognise that the process will still be subject to judicial control and that the decision to grant a warrant will rest with a county court judge.
Part IV of the order restructures and clarifies the law on arrest. As with England and Wales, the more serious common law offences will become arrestable offences; and the police will have a new general power of arrest for use in circumstances where any one of five specified arrest conditions is satisfied. These provisions will put the law on arrest on to a more rational basis.
I shall now describe two of the most important features of the new arrangements covering the detention of suspects in custody. First, a suspect who is likely to be detained for longer than six hours must be taken to a designated police station, where he will come under the protection of a custody officer independent of the investigation who will be responsible for the suspect's welfare and for protecting his rights.
Secondly, the need for a suspect's detention will be subject to a series of progressively more demanding reviews initially involving police officers also independent of the investigation and, at a later stage, the courts. This review system will ensure that no one is detained for longer than necessary.
To complement these arrangements, Article 57 gives a suspect the right to have someone informed of his arrest; and Article 59 gives him the right to consult a solicitor privately at any time. The custody officer must ensure that the suspect is aware of these rights and how they may be exercised. However, the rights may be delayed for up to 36 hours if they are likely to prejudice police investigations; but any delay must be authorised by a senior police officer and only in respect of a serious arrestable offence.
Article 60 provides for the tape-recording of interviews with suspects; and pilot schemes will shortly be in place to test the necessary arrangements. My right honourabe friend the Secretary of State has already explained in another place that there would be very real difficulties in interrogation and intelligence if the arrangements applied to interviews with suspected terrorists.
Because of the serious risks involved and in line with the practice already adopted in England and Wales, the tape-recording of interviews will not extend to terrorist cases.
Articles 62 and 63 of the order incorporate the existing law under which the police in Northern Ireland can take body samples. Your Lordships will recall that for Northern Ireland, a swab taken from a suspect's mouth has been defined as a non-intimate sample and may therefore be taken without the suspect's consent.
In this context, there are four important matters to which I should like to direct your Lordship's attention. First, the integrity of the mouth-swab test has already been established by the Northern Ireland forensic science laboratory.
Secondly, a senior police officer may authorise the taking of a sample only where he believes it will confirm or disprove the suspect's involvement; so in the absence of any material at the scene of a crime which may be analysed for DNA, there would be no lawful basis for the authorisation because there would be nothing with which to match a sample from the suspect.
Thirdly, there are detailed arrangements already in place which provide for the destruction of data associated with DNA testing. Finally, these powers have aleady been approved by Parliament, and the Government consider that their retention is both necessary and justified.
Part VII of the order deals with the codes of practice, which will provide detailed rules and

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guidance to the police on the exercise of their powers. This order deals with the powers of the police under the general criminal law and its codes of practice have similar application. However, the Government have recently announced their intention to issue guidance on the exercise of all emergency powers in Northern Ireland, including those available to both the police and the army. This guidance will supplement the statutory rights which are already in place for persons arrested or detained under the emergency law.
We now come to Parts VIII and IX of the order which deal with evidence. In such a technical area of the criminal law I do not intend to describe each article in detail. In general terms our purpose is to clarify and broaden the nature of what may be admitted as evidence in court while continuing to ensure the fairness of criminal proceedings.
Article 81, which makes provision in Northern Ireland for live television link evidence, has generated the most interest. Widespread support has been given to the application of these facilities to child witnesses in Northern Ireland. Criticism has however been levied against the inclusion of witnesses who will not give evidence otherwise through fear and to a lesser extent against the enabling powers to extend the provisions to apply to witnesses giving evidence from outside the Province.
The application to witnesses in fear in Northern Ireland is specifically intended to encourage more witnesses to give direct oral evidence through the prospect of avoidance of the possibility of in-court intimidation or trauma. It is the clear intention that the live television link equipment which will be open to use by both defence and prosecution witnesses will replicate as far as possible normal courtroom conditions and will permit the demeanour of witnesses to be observed by the court. Within Northern Ireland, where intimidation of witnesses is a prevalent phenomenon especially with its relatively small community, any measure which, subject to the discretion of the courts, increases the chances that justice will be done can only be welcomed. As the general laws governing the admissibility of oral evidence and perjury will apply to evidence given through live television links the rights of defendants will continue to be safeguarded.
We intend to monitor and assess the operation of the use of the facilities by witnesses within Northern Ireland before giving consideration to the extension of the general application of the article to witnesses giving evidence outside the Province. The extension to apply the use of live TV facilities in Northern Ireland to all witnesses outside the United Kingdom, which in common with Section 32 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 follows the recommendation of the committee chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, was already sanctioned by Parliament through the provisions of Section 168 of the 1988 Act. Article 81(4)(a)(ii) simply makes provision in a slightly different form and my honourable friend the Secretary of State will exercise these powers only whenever it becomes practical and feasible to do so.
Finally, I should like to mention Article 82, which places a responsibility on the police authorities in consultation with the chief constable to make appropriate arrangements for obtaining the views of the community on policing. That is particularly important in Northern Ireland where it is vital to promote a wider understanding between the police and the public. The police authority and the chief constable have already taken steps to develop new consultative arrangements and I would encourage all responsible public representatives in Northern Ireland to come forward with their support.
This order represents a considerable step forward and I commend it to the House.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 15th June be approved.—(Lord Skelmersdale.)
Lord Prys-Davies: My Lords, on behalf of these Benches and in particular on behalf of my noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton and my noble friend Lord Underhill, who was the principal spokesman on Northern Ireland affairs until a few years ago, I should like to express our appreciation for the work of the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, at the Northern Ireland Office. He was a man generous of spirit and he was genuinely interested in the well-being of the people of Ulster. Throughout the five years he was at the Northern Ireland Office he spared no effort to ensure that the concerns of these Benches were always fully accommodated. I should like to place our appreciation on record. Of course we wish the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, well in his new role and we know from our experience of him that he will bring a sense of fairness and conscientiousness to his office.
I thank the noble Lord for summarising the order. He explained that it is substantially in line with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which operates in England and Wales. The Minister then went on to claim that the criminal law in Northern Ireland has much in common with the criminal law in England and Wales. Of course that is right but, nevertheless, we do well to remember that there are important distinguishing features of the criminal law in Northern Ireland.
There are at least three such differences and I think they should be mentioned. First, the suspect's right of silence has been substantially abolished in Northern Ireland by the criminal evidence order which was introduced last October. Another important difference is that Northern Ireland has its own emergency provisions Act to deal with suspected terrorists. The third important difference is that, apart from the scheduled offences, crime is seen to be on a much smaller scale in Northern Ireland than in England and Wales. I am not aware that the police in Northern Ireland have requested this legislation.
When one reads the speeches of Ministers, one feels that inadequate attention may have been paid to those distinguishing features. The order extends the powers of the police—and I think we must be clear about that. When a government introduce legislation which extends the powers of the police, it is the duty of the opposition to consider whether

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the legislation achieves a sensible and overall balance between crime control and the protection of the rights of the citizen—innocent suspect or accused.
Therefore, I want briefly to concentrate on four areas. First, I come to Articles 57 and 59. We welcome the thrust of those two articles. Article 57 gives an arrested person the right to have someone informed that he has been arrested. Article 59 gives an arrested person the right to consult a solicitor; but both rights are qualified. They are to be exercised as soon as practicable except to the extent that delay is permitted in the circumstances which are spelt out in the articles. Those circumstances are identical in both articles. We say that those circumstances leave enormous discretion to the police. That is what we find a little worrying.
I referred earlier to the criminal evidence order introduced last October. Given that a suspect's silence can be used by the prosecution in Northern Ireland as corroborating evidence, it is important that the arrested person should have access to a solicitor's advice with the minimum of delay. I have read the terms of the fairly lengthy caution which is now being administered by the police in Northern Ireland. I doubt very much whether its full significance will be grasped by the suspect when it is administered. Can the Minister tell the House whether the department is satisfied, in the absence of a duty solicitor scheme such as we have in England and Wales, that a solicitor will be promptly available to give advice at the police station when it is requested? That surely must be an important requirement.
Of course we are anxious that Articles 57 and 59 work fairly and effectively, but again I should be grateful if the Minister in his reply can tell the House whether the department intends to monitor the working of those two articles and in fact Articles 36 and 37. We see a positive advantage in monitoring. I understand from the Minister that the department will be monitoring the operation of some articles in this order. If there is to be monitoring of Articles 57 and 59, who is to do that? Who is to monitor Articles 36 and 37? Will it be left to the police to monitor the police, or will there be an independent element in the monitoring procedure?
My second area of interest is the provision for evidence to be given through television links. As the Minister explained, this is provided for in Article 81. The scope of this article is wider than the relevant section in the 1984 Act. It is wider because it provides for such evidence to be given by a witness in Northern Ireland who claims that he will not give evidence through fear. I appreciate that the leave of the court will have to be obtained before video linked evidence can be used, but can the Minister tell the House what criteria will have to be satisfied before the court will grant such leave? We trust that the criteria will not be so wide that in practice it will be given on request. On the same point, when the prosecution applies for leave of the court to take evidence through television links, will the defendant have an opportunity to oppose the application?
The third area of interest is the tape-recording of interviews with suspects held at the police station
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which is provided for in Article 60. We welcome this article. I shall be grateful if the Minister can give an indication when the department anticipates that it will be in force throughout Northern Ireland. There is one slight concern which arises out of the fact that the article applies to interviews conducted at the police station.
I refer again to the 1988 order. What will happen to the questions and answers that take place before the interview at the police station commences? I assume that for the time being at least the questions and answers exchanged when a suspect is stopped on the road or when he is on the way to the police station will still be admissible. I noticed that yesterday the Guardian advocated that,
"As these pre-taped questions undermine the tapes, they should be stopped".
I wonder whether the Minister is in a position to comment on that wise observation. Before I leave the subject of the tape-recording of interviews I should be grateful if the Minister could explain more fully to the House why an interview with a person suspected of an act of terrorism is not to be tape-recorded? The Minister referred the House to the Statement made in the Commons by his right honourable friend either yesterday or the day before. As I recall it, he did not advance reasons for not tape-recording the interviews with a person suspected of an act of terrorism. I understand and accept the assertion, but I do not understand the reasons on which the assertion is based.
I do not propose to raise any questions on Article 62 which deals with intimate samples. I wish to have an opportunity of reading further the Minister's explanation for that article before I aim any questions about it. We welcome Article 82 which provides for arrangements for obtaining the views of the community on policing. The Minister touched on this. We believe this to be an extremely important article because it is a means of achieving better policing. The article itself contains fine words. Can the Minister tell us how the police intend to conduct this dialogue with the community and to be appraised of community feeling?
Does the department intend that it should undertake research in order to understand how people perceive the role of the police in their community? If the department intends to undertake research who will fund it? Will it be funded by the police or by the department? It will be helpful if the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, can take this matter a little futher today. We welcome the order. It will certainly help the police. If the safeguards which are in the order are working effectively and fairly we believe that it will also help the citizen and the community.
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, I wish to join the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, to his new responsibilities. Secondly, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, that the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, when the Minister for Northern Ireland, went to immense trouble to be of as much help to the House as possible. We wish him well for the future.

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As the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, indicated when he moved the order, basically it replicates a number of provisions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. That Act was based on the report of the Royal Commission on criminal procedure. In those far-off days it was thought to be a good idea to have a Royal Commission or a committee of inquiry before introducing substantive legislation. However, partly because the matter was so carefully considered by an eminent Royal Commission I think that the Act has gone through rather well.
At the time it was introduced, and indeed after its enactment, it was said by some that it was a monstrous engine of repression and represented a fundamental attack on civil liberties. There were demands that it should be repealed. Yet now, some years later, I think it is recognised that by and large it was a sensible amendment of the law which in many respects substantially strengthens the rights of criminal defendants. That is why I did not find myself in total agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, when he drew attention to the undoubted fact that crime in Northern Ireland, other than terrorist crime, has not followed the pattern of England and Wales. That is a fortunate development, but it does not seem to me to be right to say that simply because non-terrorist crime in Northern Ireland has not risen as it has in England and Wales therefore an order of this sort is not necessarily desirable. I think it is. For instance, there is now a regime in police stations in England and Wales which both protects the interest of the criminal defendant and ensures that there is a wholly professional approach by the police. In those circumstances I think it is desirable that these provisions should be extended to Northern Ireland.
However, there are a few matters which I should like to raise which cause me some considerable concern. First, this is a massive order. It contains 90 articles and seven schedules, and not all of them relate directly to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. It provides for major changes in the system of criminal justice in Northern Ireland. In the Commons they devoted precisely one and a half hours to discussing this huge piece of legislation, and the debate began at about one o'clock in the morning. This House is similarly fairly thinly attended. I wonder what would be the approach if it were suggested that we adopted similar procedures in discussing legislation for England and Wales or for Scotland. That would be regarded as a wholly outrageous suggestion. It seems most unsatisfactory that we are continuing to adopt this approach as regards Northern Ireland.
I believe that we are getting perilously close to legislation by decree. As I have indicated, I think Parliament is failing to discharge its responsibility for looking at Northern Ireland not only in relation to criminal justice matters but others as well.
Perhaps I may now turn to an associated question and a matter which the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, raised; that is, the 1988 Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Order relating to the right of silence. My noble friends are undoubtedly firmly
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opposed to maintaining the present rights of criminal defendants in such matters. I have heretical views on it because when I was at the Home Office I indicated that it was worth looking at the matter again. That remains my position. Therefore, I do not approach the matter as being wholly opposed in principle to what the Government have done, but on that occasion I objected, as I still do, to the manner in which the question had been approached. I do not believe that adequate consideration has been given to such a major change in the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland. Again, it is inconceivable that we would have agreed to a similar approach for England and Wales and for Scotland. There should have been a proper inquiry into these matters.
The Home Secretary, having spoken in the Police Foundation lecture about the need to look again at this question in England and Wales, established a Home Office working party, as one should have been established in Northern Ireland before this proposal was brought forward. The report of the working party was published only a few days ago. It referred to the Northern Ireland position and made a number of recommendations for England and Wales. I shall be interested to hear the Minister's response to the report. The working party was chaired by Mr. Bohan, an exceptionally able Home Office official, who has just retired.
I shall summarise the position in Northern Ireland. A court is enabled to draw whatever inferences appeared proper from the accused's silence in four sets of circumstances: first, if he fails to mention during questioning or on charge any fact on which he later relies in his defence; secondly, if he refuses to be sworn or to answer any questions at his trial; thirdly, if he fails to explain to the police any objects, substances or marks upon him or his clothing or in his possession at the time of his arrest; and, fourthly, if he fails to account for his presence at a particular place when he is arrested. That is the position for Northern Ireland.
I now turn to what the working party recommended for England and Wales. It deals with what it describes as the "ambush defence". We all know what is meant by that. Paragraph 126(ii) says:
"In the Crown court, the prosecution, defence and the trial judge should be able to comment on the defendant's failure to mention a fact on which he subsequently relies in his defence, and the prosecution to cross-examine him about that failure".
That is a summary of the recommendation. It is dealt with more fully in the substance of the report. The Home Secretary is to consider his working party's report. Will the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland also be associated with a review, or a re-review, of this matter? This is the only group of officials to be asked to look into the detail of changing the law on this question.
Given the fact that there was no such review for Northern Ireland before this order was introduced, the least we can ask of the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, is that the Northern Ireland Secretary will have joint discussions with the Home Office on this important question. It is profoundly unsatisfactory that we should have wholly different systems of criminal procedure on the two sides of

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the Irish Sea. If anyone needs to be convinced of the need for a common approach he has only to look at the prevention of terrorism legislation. It was pointed out over a number of years that it was necessary to have one law applying both in Northern Ireland and in Great Britain. That is self-evidently desirable. We should like some indication from the Minister that there will be discussions between the Northern Ireland Office and the Home Office on this question which will undoubtedly be able to take into account what has happened in Northern Ireland since the 1988 order was approved.
Finally, I turn to the question of resources. I think that all of us who know the situation in Northern Ieland, who go there from time and who are involved in any part of the criminal justice system would agree that it is right on such an occasion to pay tribute once again to the magnificent work done by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, where men's lives and the lives of their families are constantly at risk.
However, having said that, one must accept that this force is under heavier pressure than any other police force in the United Kingdom. Moreover, that was especially true last year as regards terrorist operations. The then Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Sir John Hermon, indicated that he was having to make substantial reductions in his traffic divisions because of the pressures on the rest of the force. He was doing so in an area of the United Kingdom which has the highest number of road deaths and road injuries. That fact gives some indication of the problems facing the RUC in carrying out its normal police duties.
If we turn now to look at the order to which the noble Lord has asked the House to agree, it will be seen that there is a similar approach—and I have indicated that I have no objection to that—to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 in terms of what I would describe as what goes on in the police station; in other words, Parts V and VI of the order which regulate the detention of suspects and safeguard their rights.
In a substantial number of police stations, as the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, indicated in his speech, custody officers will have to be appointed and they must be of the rank of sergeant. Perhaps I may give noble Lords some illustration of what is involved in this respect. I was discussing this matter with a chief constable only this week. When the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was passed through Parliament, the effect of that legislation was that he had to appoint 22 new sergeants to those posts in order to carry out the responsibilities as custody officers. However, his force is less than a quarter of the size of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the level of crime in that part of England and Wales is miniscule compared with what is happening in Northern Ireland.
In such a situation, what extra resources will be provided for the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary? I very much hope—and I am sure that the noble Lord will understand this point—that he will not simply tell me what the increase in numbers in the RUC has been over the past few years. We know that there has been a significant
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increase in that respect, and quite rightly so. But this is a new responsibility; we are talking about experienced officers who must be appointed to carry out new responsibilities. I should like the Minister to give me some clear indication of precisely how many officers will be provided for the Chief Constable. Moreover, what overall variation will there be in the establishment of the RUC.
There is another reason why I think it is appropriate to mention this matter. When the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was passed by both Houses of Parliament, this same responsibility was passed on to police forces in England and Wales. There was a gross underestimate of the resource implications. It seems to me that in the light of that that it is even more necessary for the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, to reassure us that we shall not have a similar experience in Northern Ireland. In my view, that would be wholly unacceptable, given the character of the problems faced by the RUC.
As I indicated, we on these Benches regard this order as desirable and we think that it should be carried through. But, as I have also indicated, we are increasingly concerned about the way in which Northern Ireland legislation is being, considered by both Houses of Parliament. I think that the matter should be discussed through the usual channels at the earliest possible date.
3 p.m.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, I should like to join both noble Lords in expressing the appreciation we all felt for the great consideration and courtesy which was always shown to us by the noble Lord, Lord Lyell. I should also like to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, to what may be described as a hot seat.
The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, referred to the times of day at which Northern Ireland matters are usually debated. They come in the small hours of the morning, in the dinner hour or at a time like this, on the last day of term. It is scandalous that that should be the case when matters of such great importance are being raised.
However, I am afraid that it is not because of the usual channels arranging these debates at such times but due to the unhappy fact that people in Britain, whether inside or outside the Palace of Westminster, are simply not interested in Northern Ireland. They will not come to the debates. Any of these debates could be held at 3 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon after Question Time and the House would empty within five minutes. There would be no bigger attendance than at this moment; in fact it is rather good now for a Northern Ireland debate.
One point was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, on which I seek further information. It is the taking of samples of saliva from a suspect. As he mentioned, that is considered a non-intimate procedure and it can thus be done with a considerable degree of informality. The noble Lord indicated that these saliva samples are of no use for DNA analysis because there would be no other sample with which to compare them. That was what I understood him to say.

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My first point is that, if that is the case, what is the point of taking the samples? We do not want the sample of saliva just to put into our art collection. We want it in order to be able to identify a person. Surely it is the case that there are or may be other samples for use in DNA analysis. If at some future date samples of blood or semen are found near the scene of a crime, they can be subjected to DNA analysis, and by comparison with the array of samples of saliva that have already been analysed, this informal, non-intimate search could result in the possibility of identifying someone from samples of other substances found on the scene of the crime.
I raise this point partly because I did not understand what the noble Lord said and also to show that even a non-intimate search of this kind can have very serious repercussions for the suspect—perhaps innocent—whose sample is taken.
3.9 p.m.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, I am most grateful to all the noble Lords who have spoken on this very important order. The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, referred to its thickness and contents and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, will excuse me for having summarised only what I regarded as the main points. Not surprisingly, I have been asked several questions.
It is important to realise that, although I welcome the comments of all noble Lords, the debate is about this particular order, not about the working group on the right of silence or the Criminal Evidence Order 1988. However, I have noted and will undertake that my right honourable and honourable friends will note the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Harris. However, I can tell the noble Lord as regards the report of the working group on the right to silence that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has yet to consider this. There is of course constant interaction between departments on this side of the water and departments in the Province. The Home Secretary will take account of experience in Northern Ireland.
I wish to take up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, early in his speech. The right to silence has emphatically not been abolished. If someone wishes to remain silent, he can continue to do so. However, if he does, the court may draw such inferences from the silence as it believes proper. Putting an interpretation on silence is entirely a matter for the courts.
As regards the delay of access to legal advice, the same situation pertains as in Great Britain. The delay would only be authorised by senior police in cases of serious arrestable offences, as I said earlier. The courts in England, in stated cases, have confirmed the strict limitation on police discretion to delay. Only on very rare occasions will a delay be lawful. It is for the courts to say whether a delay is lawful. So there is quite a safeguard in that.
The noble Lord is also interested in the subject of tape-recording. That will be introduced as soon as the pilot schemes, which I mentioned earlier, have been evaluated and facilities are in place.
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Tape-recording of interviews outside police stations would be impractical. Exactly the same arrangements will apply as in England and Wales.
As I said earlier, interviews with suspected terrorists will not be tape-recorded. I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, that the reference to a speech made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State was not to the speech that he made two days ago, but to the speech made on 8th November 1988. My right honourable friend did not feel that it was appropriate to repeat himself the other day. As the noble Lord will know, it is already the practice in England and Wales that interviews with suspected terrorists are not tape-recorded. We see no reason to adopt a different position in Northern Ireland with the real risk that intelligence would not be forthcoming and that suspects may not wish to have anything that is said put on tape because of the danger of their co-operation being recognised by fellow terrorists.
However, there is an even more important reason for this which I trust I have got right; that is, that the prevention of terrorism legislation is a reserve power, whereas the police and criminal evidence legislation is not. Therefore, it would not be appropriate to amend the prevention of terrorism legislation through an order such as this.
We certainly intend that the court rules made under Article 81 will require advance notice to the other party in a case who may as a consequence make representations to the court on the use of live television link facilities. Article 81 is, I believe, sufficiently widely drawn to include not only those witnesses who may be subject to intimidation from the defendant or his associates but also a range of circumstances in both terrorist and non-terrorist cases. The provision may, for example, be used in certain trials involving charges of rape or assault on the elderly where the victim will not otherwise give evidence through fear of doing so in the presence of the defendant.
At one point the noble Lord, Lord Prys-Davies, sailed close to talking about duty solicitors. I anticipate that that is what he meant. At present there is no statutory duty solicitor scheme in operation. However, the Law Society of Northern Ireland provides a voluntary duty solicitor service at both Belfast and Craigavon Magistrates' Courts. Efforts by the Law Society to set up similar schemes elsewhere in Nothern Ireland have not met with success. Although initially both the Belfast and Craigavon schemes provides in-court and 24-hour on-call cover, the in-court system at Craigavon has ceased because of a lack of demand. The answer to the noble Lord is that the will is there but the service is not always there in practice.
Both noble Lords recognised that it is vital to ensure effective arrangements for consultation between the police and public and to secure public co-operation in preventing crime. Article 82, to which they referred, provides a statutory framework for that, and the Government will do all they can to help achieve that laudable aim. Who will do the monitoring? The answer is the police authority for Northern Ireland in the first instance, but I take note of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Harris.

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I note too the very strong representations put to me by the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, about legislative procedures. I have already questioned some of those for myself. I for one appreciate the difficulties posed by unamendable Orders in Council. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has repeatedly offered to talk about those issues with all interested parties and to consider constructive suggestions, which would have to be weighed against the vast volume of legislation on this side of the water which your Lordships regularly complain about. Did the noble Lord wish to interrupt me?
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, I wished to say that some of us might be perfectly prepared to accept less legislation on this side of the Irish channel in return for sensible and proper discussion of legislation for Northern Ireland.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, that is fair comment but it could be that the proof of the pudding may at some stage be in the eating.
Lastly, the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken, asked about DNA tests. I too was very confused before I investigated this matter yesterday. Saliva does not produce a DNA test. An oral sample is taken from the lining of the gums. In any event, as I said earlier, it will be illegal to take such tests if there is no body fluid or other sample at the scene of the crime with which to compare it. We are not trying to compare one mouth swab with another mouth swab, but to use such samples as evidence either to prove a connection with a crime or to disprove a connection with a crime. I hope that that helps the noble Lord.
I believe that I have mentioned most of the points that noble Lords wanted me to answer, except for the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about resources, which I also regard as very important. The resources for PACE are already taken into account in settling the finances for the current financial year for the inestimable work of the Royal Ulster Constabulary—and I agree with the noble Lord on that point—which is conducted in extremely difficult circumstances. It might help him to know that there is a total grant of approximately £450 million for the police authority. Specific PACE-related figures are not yet available, but, when they become available, I shall of course inform the House.
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, I do not wish to take advantage of the noble Lord because I realise that he has only just moved into the Northern Ireland Office, but I should be grateful if he would write to me on this question. The issue with which I am particularly concerned is the precise number of sergeants who will be added to the establishment of the RUC. I should be glad if he would deal with that matter in correspondence.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, I was listening to the noble Lord when he spoke and took the point that it was men probably rather more than cash in which he was interested. I shall certainly follow up that point.
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I am extremely grateful to all three noble Lords who mentioned the valuable work that my predecessor, my noble friend Lord Lyell, put into his job with the local people in Northern Ireland, especially on the agricultural front where he was a very popular Minister and was able to put across in his own inimitable way points that others found rather more difficulty in circulating around the Province. I shall certainly point out to him the comments of the three noble Lords on his work which, I believe, was valued not only in this House but also in the Province. My one regret in accepting this appointment is that I had to follow my noble friend who is also a personal friend.
The order represents a balanced package of measures which not only equips the police with modern and effective powers to deal with crime, but also safeguards and protects the rights of individuals and, in particular, of suspects in custody. It will therefore provide for more effective enforcement of the law and in a way which can command the confidence of the public. That will enhance the relationship between the police and the community which is so crucial to effective policing in Northern Ireland and to the development and maintenance of a peaceful and settled society there.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps I may take the question of the saliva test a little further, as it is not unimportant. If I am wrong in thinking that saliva could be used for the purposes of DNA analysis, perhaps I may ask for what purposes the saliva samples will be used. Surely they could be compared only with other samples of saliva. Surely it must seldom happen that someone leaves a sample of saliva at the scene of a crime which would then have to be taken and compared with the saliva taken in the course of a test. The noble Lord said that he had looked up the question of DNA analysis yesterday, but, if he does not have the answer and there is not sufficient time to obtain it, I hope that he will write to me because I am rather mystified as to what the samples will be used for.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, with the leave of the House perhaps I may just say that I thought that I had answered the noble Lord's point i n my response to noble Lords' questions on the order. I reiterate that it is not a saliva sample; it is a gum lining sample which provides the DNA. That must be compared with another sample taken from the scene of the crime to either prove or disprove the connection. That is the whole objective. I hope that I have now been able to convince and answer the noble Lord.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) (Amendment) Regulations 1989
3.24 p.m.
Lord Skelmersdale Lord Skelmersdale rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 6th July be approved.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland

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(Amendment) regulations complete the process of aligning the local government and parliamentary franchise by providing that the arrangements that apply to the registration of parliamentary electors, which are contained in the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations, will also apply to the registration of local electors, subject to certain mainly technical amendments set out in Schedule 2.
I should be delighted to answer questions on this order but for the moment I think it would be appropriate for me to commend it to the House. I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 6th July be approved.—(Lord Skelmersdale.)
Lord Prys-Davies: My Lords, I have looked at this instrument and it is to be welcomed. I have no questions to ask the Minister.
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, we too welcome the order.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Community Charge Benefits (General) Regulations 1989
3.25 p.m.
Lord Henley Lord Henley rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 21st July be approved [27th Report from the Joint Committee].
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the three sets of regulations that are before your Lordships today-1 intend to speak to all three together—have a common thread. They all relate to the provision of social security benefits. They do, however, relate to two distinct aspects of benefit provision which, with the permission of the House, I intend to deal with separately. I should like to take first the community charge benefits regulations and then come on to the two sets of regulations dealing with the provision of benefits for the unemployed.
The community charge benefits regulations are an integral part of the community charge arrangements and they will ensure that the amount of community charge that people have to pay will be related to their ability to pay it. They will apply throughout Great Britain, and will replace the regulations currently in force in Scotland.
The community charge benefit scheme will be operated by levying authorities in Scotland and by charging authorities in England and Wales in accordance with the rules laid down in these regulations. The maximum rebate will be 80 per cent. of the amount that a person has to pay. This will mean that all charge payers have to pay at least 20 per cent. of the charge in the same way that all ratepayers now have to pay at least 20 per cent. of their rates. The Government are firmly of the view that everybody should be as aware of the cost of local authority services as they are of the benefits. The maximum rebate will be available automatically
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to everybody who is getting income support, and also to those people on equivalent incomes. People with incomes above their income support levels may be entitled to a rebate of less than 80 per cent. and the amount that they will get will depend upon three factors: their financial resources; their personal circumstances; and the amount of community charge they have to pay.
The way in which a claimant's rebate will be calculated will follow very closely the way in which rate rebate is calculated now. I trust that your Lordships will welcome the 15 per cent. taper, which is significantly more generous than the 20 per cent. taper now used in the rebating of rates.
Apart from that more generous taper, our objective in formulating the community charge benefit regulations has been to maintain alignment with the housing benefit regulations wherever practicable. This will make the arrangements easy for claimants to understand, and will also be helpful to the local authorities that will be administering the scheme. It will also maintain the overall simplification and alignment of the income-related benefits that we achieved in the 1988 reforms.
In commending these regulations to your Lordships, I should like to make clear the extent of our consultation since the autumn of 1987 with the local authority associations, and to express our gratitude for their co-operation. We have consulted formally with the associations and also with the Social Security Advisory Committee. The comments we received were helpful and constructive and a large number of them have been incorporated in the regulations that are now before us.
I turn now to the regulations dealing with the unemployed. Most of the provisions in these regulations stem from the powers taken in the 1989 Act. The matter is complicated by the need for two sets of regulations: one for unemployment benefit (the Social Security (Unemployment, Sickness and Invalidity Benefit) Amendment No. 2 Regulations 1989); the other for income support (the Income Support (General) Amendment No. 2 Regulations 1989).
I think I should first point out to the House a very small misprint—a printed error in the published version of the income support amendment regulations. This was corrected in the version laid before the House but the copies that noble Lords have are wrong. In Regulation 6, new regulation 10A(3), the word "recorded" which appears in the fourth line of that paragraph should read "regarded". I apologise for that error and trust that it has not caused too much confusion.
The two areas which gave rise to most concern were the introduction of the new, actively seeking work condition and the new permitted period, which limits the time when an individual may, without a risk to his benefit, decline employment outside his usual occupation. We have repeatedly said that employment service staff will interpret these new provisions in the same fair and sensitive way in which they deal with the existing rules and regulations.
These regulations say that an unemployed person must, in any week, take those steps which are reasonable in his case and which offer him his best prospect of employment. That we feel is not unreasonable. However, to ensure that the test is applied in a sensitive and fair way we have laid down certain things which we think form a vital part of the picture. First, we have given examples of matters to which the adjudication officer should have regard in deciding what was reasonable in an individual claimant's case. Some of these are obvious: for example the claimant's skills, qualifications, abilities or any physical or mental limitations.
Similarly, he should have regard to how long he has been unemployed, his work experience, what jobs are available and where they are, and what he had done already to seek work. Others may be less obvious, but are nonetheless important. One example, which came out of our discussions in Committee, is the effect on job search if a claimant is homeless. The Committee discussions have also led us to specify that regard should be had to time spent on particularly worthwhile activities—for example, service as part-time fireman, lifeboatman or emergency workers, or attending outward bound or guide dog training courses.
Lastly, another group for whom concern was expressed in Committee was those spending time on vocational training or study, on voluntary work or in an employment or training programme. None of these activities will absolve the individual claimant totally from the need to seek work. We believe it wrong to do so since unemployment benefits are to support individuals seeking to return to the labour market. Nonetheless, all these factors can be weighed in considering either the amount of time which is spent in looking for work or the actual steps which the invividual claimant could be expected to undertake.
The regulations give examples of the types of step which a person may take. As we explained at an earlier stage, the list of examples is not exhaustive or exclusive. It is up to the individual claimant to decide how best to go about securing employment in his chosen field. The list suggests the most common ways of seeking work but any other equally or more meritorious steps will be taken into account.
A claimant will be expected to seek work every week. Currently most claimants attend the benefit office fornightly and that will not change.
There will be a number of circumstances in which an individual claimant may be deemed to be actively seeking work for the week. These include the first and last weeks of unemployment, when it may be unreasonable to expect a person to meet the condition.
During Committee there was a great deal of debate about replacing "refusal of suitable employment" with the concept of "refusing employment without good cause". The Act has removed the concept of the employment service having to prove that employment refused by a claimant was in fact "suitable". The onus will now be on the claimant to show that he had good cause for turning down
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employment. We think that this is a much needed change. But as it is a change we also feel that it is right for Parliament to lay down guidelines for deciding good cause so that claimants have an understanding of what to expect.
The concept of having good cause is not a new one. Current legislation allows a person to escape disqualification for unemployment benefit for turning down or failing to follow up an opportunity of employment if the adjudication officer decides that he had good cause. The adjudication authorities have built up a considerable body of case law but currently there is no guidance in regulations as to the meaning of "good cause".
The regulations before the House now specifically require the adjudication authorities 10 consider, in relation to a failure to follow up any job opportunity, whether the particular employment would be likely to cause serious harm to the claimant's health or whether it would subject him to excessive physical or mental stress. Other matters which the adjudication authorities will be required to consider will include any sincerely-held religious or conscientious objections which the claimant may have to undertaking particular work and certain domestic circumstances which might make it unreasonable for him to accept a particular vacancy. The regulations provide that a person will not generally be able to show good cause unless his journey to work or training would take at least an hour.
A person who turns down a job on pay grounds will not be able to show good cause outside what the legislation calls the "permitted period" at the start of his claim if the job opportunity has been notified to him by the employment service.
The new Social Security Act provides for a permitted period at the start of a claim which allows a person up to 13 weeks in which to find work in his usual occupation, while avoiding disqualification for not accepting other employment. The regulations define how the permitted period is to be calculated. They also list the factors which will be taken into account by the adjudicating authorities when determining the length of that period. It will only be necessary to determine a permitted period formally where a person has refused work and the question of a benefit penalty arises. We do not think it appropriate to decide all cases in advance of any refusal because for most claimants it will never become an issue. The regulations ensure that, when a decision is sought, the adjudication officer will take account of the person's skills, qualifications and work experience.
The final point on this part of the regulations concerns "trial periods". This is a new concept which has been widely welcomed. It quite rightly recognises the concerns that affect people who have been out of work for some time. The regulations define the claimants who will have a right to benefit from this provision. The provision enables a person to escape a benefit sanction if he gives up a job from the sixth week up to the twelfth week of a trial period. This will apply to claimants who have neither worked nor been in full-time education throughout the 26 weeks before the day on which the new job starts.
The new Social Security Act changed the period in which a person who had received his full 312 days of unemployment benefit can requalify for a further period of benefit. The legislation enables the regulations to provide for an extension of the period in special circumstances. We have defined those as one which would, for reasons beyond his control, prevent the claimant from working.
There are a number of smaller issues that the regulations address. I will explain our intentions briefly for the benefit of those noble Lords who find many of the regulations somewhat impenetrable.
In order to deal with the problem of inconsistency between payments, called payments in lieu of notice and payments of compensation, the regulations will provide for the definition of all payments that are to be taken into account and the period that benefit may be affected. We are not seeking here to introduce a new restriction on the payment of benefit. Our purpose is to provide for uniformity of treatment.
We have always attempted to prevent abuse of the benefit system by claimants who break their unemployment benefit claim towards the end of their 312 days of benefit purely for the purpose of avoiding the requirement to requalify. The current regulations, however, provide too wide a definition of our intentions and, unfortunately, penalise some people whom we never intended to be caught. The new regulations make our intentions much clearer.
We have taken this opportunity as promised in December last year, to remove the additional qualifying conditions for seasonal workers claiming unemployment benefit. In future seasonal workers will be subject to the same conditions as all other claimants.
We have also provided for the addition of personal pensions to all references to occupational pensions. This reflects the fact that the new Social Security Act provides for personal pensions received by unemployment benefit claimants to be taken into account in deciding the level of benefit in exactly the same manner as occupational pensions.
The third set of regulations reflect the changes to unemployment benefit as they relate to the payment of income support. What I have said about the changes in the unemployment benefit amendment applies equally to the income support amendments.
These three sets of regulations represent a number of different changes to the provision of benefit. On the unemployment issues I hope that all noble Lords opposite will recognise that we have reflected in the regulations many of the concerns they voiced during the passage of the Social Security Bill through this House. The Committee discussions had considerable influence on the detailed provisions. I know that some will believe that we have not gone far enough to meet the needs or wishes of one group or another; but we have considered in great detail all the issues that were raised. We have declined to take them up only where to do so would have undermined our policy intention. I commend these regulations to the House.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 21st July be approved [27th Report from the Joint Committee].—(Lord Henley.)
3.45 p.m.
Baroness Jeger: My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord will not be bored if I add my congratulations on his appointment. I warn him that not often shall I be congratulating him. In fact, it would serve him right if today I went through every regulation in great detail. There are pages of them. But because these are his baptismal days I shall spare him.
However, I hope that the noble Lord will convey to those in authority that this House strongly objects to these regulations being laid only on 21st July and passed in the other place last night. I speak not only for Members on this side of the House. Now on the last day before the Recess we are presented with matters of great detail and concern. They are complex regulations and, in the noble Lord's words, they are often "impenetrable". Some are to come into force on 11th August and others on 9th October. That is not the way in which a responsible Government should deal with difficult matters or treat this House or the other place. We cannot amend the regulations; we can do nothing about them. The growing habit of government by regulation is pernicious. The fact that detailed regulations that affect thousands of our people are treated in such a cavalier fashion shows the style and pattern of this Government.
I hope that the Government will do their best to make the regulations better known to the public than they have been known to this House or the other place. It cost the Government £7 million in advertising to try to encourage people to claim family credit. I cannot think how much it will cost to enable people to understand most of these regulations.
I must refer first to the community charge. I am sure that the noble Lord did not intend to mislead the House but he said that people would be able to claim help up to amaximum of 80 per cent. in paying the fixed community charge. That is not the case. An average charge will be fixed and the 80 per cent. help will be based on that average charge throughout the country. Therefore, if someone lives in a high-charging borough they certainly will not receive 80 per cent. of their bill.
That point was made by the Social Advisory Committee because it was also most concerned. It estimated that the compensation, which represented 20 per cent. of the average community charge, means that claimants in Britain must pay much more. It thought that that was not a good idea. It stated that the amount represented an average amount and that the shortfall could be as much as 72p per week for some people in London. Can the noble Lord tell the House or write to me giving the average community charge? It is misleading to talk about percentages of an unknown charge. However, the advice of the Social Security Advisory Committee was turned down. The reason the Government gave was that everybody should feel some responsibility towards the finances of the local authority. However, that is a contradiction because people are being made to feel responsible for the average community charge throughout the country. Therefore, in some places it will be more and in some less.

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The Government also told the committee that it would help people to accept their local liabilities. I know that that is their main argument but it does not carry me very far. A person may have recently moved into a high spending borough or he may be a young person who has never had a vote and will have to wait three years until he has a vote. There may be many people who did not vote for the local authority in charge. I do not believe that any local authority gets away with a 100 per cent. vote. Therefore, it seems to me to be basically unfair.
It is too late to get this matter right but I believe that Ministers should stop talking about these percentages as if they were percentages based on the actual bill which a person receives from his local council, because in many cases it will be quite different.
I should also like to ask the Minister why the regulations seem to be very unkind to people who have been in hospital for a long time. After patients have been in hospital for more than six weeks their benefits decrease, sometimes by as much as £8 or £9 per week. However, I understand that those patients have a continuing liability for the community charge. That seems to me to be very unfair and unkind.
I also think that the regulations are not generous as regards backdating. I mentioned the need for publicity. It will take a long time for these changes to sink in. It may be that some people will not fill in their application forms, which I am sure will be very difficult and horrible, until several weeks after the entitlement began. I hope that that can be looked at again.
Before I leave the community charge, I look forward to hearing from the Minister, if not today then very soon, as to how many people will be worse off and how many better off as a result of all this, taking on board the problem of those people in hospital. I am not talking about people who are permanently in institutions but it is possible to be in hospital for more than six weeks.
On the unemployment and other regulations, I shall not repeat all the debates which we have had because we went into a lot of detail and I am sure that the noble Lord has read those debates. However, it seems to me to be extraordinary that a government can bring in a set of harsh regulations and then tell civil servants to be sensitive. That is a very difficult position in which to put civil servants. They are not supposed to bend rules or make allowances. The noble Lord used the words "sensitive and fair". What might seem sensitive and fair to a civil servant might not seem so to a claimant. Also, there are many different degrees of sensitivity and fairness. If the Government really wanted to be sensitive and fair to the unemployed they would not have brought in such harsh regulations.
I understand that there are reasons from which the Government will not depart regarding people who are wilfully unemployed. On this side, we have never supported wilful unemployment but we have taken the view that the previous legislation gave ample scope for dealing with those avoiding work for no good reason. There are to be appeals, but how long will it take for them to be heard? What will the
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people concerned live on in the meantime? If they win, will they be paid retrospectively? If they lose, what chances will they be given of a restoration of benefit if they take another job? It all seems to us to add up to making life more difficult for the unemployed, especially in areas of high unemployment.
These regulations are bound to create anxiety and insecurity. In many cases that will drive people to take low paid unsuitable jobs and encourage employers to keep wages low, especially for the unskilled. The regulations, like the Act, do not come to terms with the real difficulties of the unemployed. Instead of hope the Government offer threats. We shall monitor these regulations with care and concern.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, I have very little to add to what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Jeger, but I want to stress our great dissatisfaction with having these regulations brought before us so late. The point of regulations is that they deal with broad principles in a great deal of detail; and a great deal of detail needs a great deal of time to be properly absorbed and the implications fully understood. It is unreasonable to expect us to have studied, absorbed and thought about these regulations and then discuss them in this House at such short notice.
Obviously, it is not the fault of the noble Lord who is dealing with these regulations today but I hope he will make it plain to his lords and masters in the department that this is no way 10 expect us to deal properly with what is an important matter. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jeger, said, these regulations in terms of what they mean to ordinary human beings throughout the country are a great deal more important than many of the matters discussed in this House. Although we cannot amend them, alas, I greatly wish that we had time to do a proper job. We certainly do not have time on this occasion.
I make only two points. The noble Lord said that the staffs would deal with great sensitivity, and so on, with claimants. Dealing with great sensitivity with people in difficulties—sometimes people who are awkward to handle and sometimes frightened and ignorant—is not an easy job. It is well known that a great many people in the department who have to deal with difficult casework have not been recruited, trained or paid to do the kind of skilful work suggested by the Minister. I know that I am spitting in the wind in saying that I hope the department will look at the way it trains the people in the department who do face-to-face casework with people who go to the department. Unless they do that, all the talk about sensitivity is, to put it mildly, self-deception because it will not happen.
From what the noble Lord said I certainly do not expect a satisfactory answer to my second point. The noble Lord mentioned the various ways in which the Government have considered the points raised in the discussions on the Bill about the time allowed for people to be excused, if involved in voluntary work and so on, from being available for employment, and how this would affect benefit. Several noble Lords asked how long people were to

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be allowed to find accommodation for children before being disallowed benefit because they were not available for work. The time in the Bill was left at 24 hours. A great many of us thought that that was totally unreasonable in order to make provision for child care.
We had hoped that, in considering the regulations, the Government would give thought to the hope that we expressed that longer than this completely unreasonable 24 hours would be given to people who had to find child care. I have not seen the regulations because of the time limitation. I did not hear the Minister say anything about it. I hope that I am wrong and that consideration has been given to the matter. If it has not, I beg him once again to think about it.
Lord Henley: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her kind remarks. I hope that she will continue to be kind to me but I believe that that might be wishful thinking. I shall try to answer some of the points that have been raised.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, the noble Lord will realise that I have already been kind to him once this morning.
Lord Henley: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that remark. I quite understand that she has already been kind to me once today. She has not been particularly unkind to me since then. No doubt that will happen later in the year when she will find her opportunities.
I shall try to answer some of the points put by both the noble Baronesses, Lady Jeger and Lady Seear. The noble Baroness, Lady Jeger, was worried about publicity. As far as both the unemployment benefit and income support charges are concerned, we feel that these have already attracted widespread press coverage. The employment service has already begun a programme of informing and training its staff, particularly its councillors, about the new provisions. The staff will fully explain the implications to the claimants as they affect each of them individually. The noble Baroness raised the question of 80 per cent.—
Baroness Seear: My Lords, I shall take advantage of the Minister's offer to be disagreeable. It seems a little odd that the information has gone out before the regulations have been put through Parliament. I thought that they had to be approved by Parliament. If they have not been approved, how can they properly give publicity on the regulations?
Lord Henley: My Lords, I believe that the noble Baroness has misunderstood me. Obviously the ideas behind the regulations have been discussed a great deal. I accept that they have not been approved by Parliament. They were discussed in another place yesterday afternoon. I hope that this House will approve them later today.
I return to the question of 80 per cent. I said that the maximum rebate would be 80 per cent. of the amount that the person has to pay. What I said was
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correct. I believe that the noble Baroness misunderstood me. I referred to rebates being available for up to 80 per cent. of the community charge liability. I believe that she is referring to the help that will be provided towards the remaining 20 per cent. through adjustments to income support. That adjustment is not part of these regulations so I did not refer to it.
The maximum rebate for the 80 per cent. is not an average 80 per cent. but 80 per cent. of what is actually there. I hope that the noble Baroness will accept that. She also referred to the backdating provisions. These have been carried over from the housing benefit regulations. A person's claim for a community charge rebate may be backdated for up to 52 weeks where he or she can show good cause for not having claimed earlier. I do not see that as ungenerous.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jeger, referred also to hospital patients. She said that the regulations were unfair to them. People in hospital will continue to be eligible for rebates at exactly the same level as they would be if they were not in hospital. I believe that she must be referring to the change in the level of income support after a person has been in hospital for more than six weeks. Again, that is not part of these regulations. I can assure the noble Baroness that the Government are looking sympathetically at the level of personal allowances for people in hospital.
Baroness Jeger: My Lords, I wish to get this matter right. A person in hospital loses one benefit after six weeks. The Minister has just said that the person will go on paying the same community charge as if he were at home. If he is worse off to the extent of £6 or £7 per week, that seems to be rather hard luck.
Lord Henley: My Lords, the community charge is payable by the individual, not based on the residence. I presume that what they are losing—but I shall have to write to the noble Baroness about this—reflects their saving in living expenses through not being at home. If I have that wrong, I shall certainly correct it.
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, what about their additional expenses of being in hospital?
Lord Henley: My Lords, I think the noble Lord would accept that the savings from being in hospital are greater than the additional expenses of being in hospital. I would certainly think that that is the case.
The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, raised the question of child care and the 24-hour rule. I would remind noble Lords that lone parents receive benefit without the need to be available for work. The 24-hour rule allows people providing services, for example looking after children, to have 24 hours' grace before having to take up work. Additionally, where persons have already secured a job it will not be necessary for them to seek work actively for the last week of their claim. This will allow even more time to make suitable arrangements.
The noble Baroness also raised the question of the Civil Service dealing with claimants in a fair manner.

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We feel that employment staff are faced daily with individuals from all walks of life, with different needs, capabilities and expectations. They are constantly called upon to use their judgment to ensure that the needs of individuals are accommodated yet at the same time the conditions for benefit as laid down by Parliament are complied with. There is no question of them having to bend the rules to achieve that.
This presents a challenge, and our new provisions will on occasions increase demands for them, but I am confident that with the additional training which is to be provided, employment service staff will fully rise to that challenge in their usual way.
I am sure that I have not answered every point put to me by the two noble Baronesses but I hope that I have dealt with most of them. On any that I have failed to deal with I shall certainly write to them when I have read what they said.
I feel that debates in the House when the Bill was going through have contributed greatly to the regulations. I am grateful for all the contributions made by noble Lords during the passage of the Social Security Act through this House, and I am pleased that we have accommodated many of the points that were raised. I see the noble Baroness looks somewhat doubtful.
I commend these regulations to the House.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Income Support (General) Amendment No. 2 Regulations 1989
Lord Henley: My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 21st July be approved [27th Report from the Joint Committee.]—(Lord Henley.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Social Security (Unemployment, Sickness and Invalidity Benefit) Amendment No. 2 Regulations 1989
Lord Henley: My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 21st July be approved [27th Report from the Joint Committee].—(Lord Henley.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Black Country Development Corporation (Vesting of Land) (Central Electricity Generating Board) Order 1989
Black Country Development Corporation (Vesting of Land) (British Railways Board) Order 1989
Bristol Development Corporation (Vesting of Land) (British Railways Board) Order 1989
The Earl of Arran The Earl of Arran rose to move, That the orders laid before the House on 22nd June, 14th June and 23rd June be approved [25th and 26th Reports from the Joint Committee].
The noble Earl said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motions in my name. I hope your Lordships will agree that it would be to the convenience of the House if I move all the Motions which appear in my name on the Order Paper.
There are three orders before your Lordships' House today which between them will vest some 12·65 hectares of publicly owned land in the Black Country and Bristol Development Corporations. Your Lordships had an opportunity to debate 11 other UDC vesting orders a couple of weeks ago. On that occasion I explained that urban development corporations are set up under the provisions of Part XVI of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 to secure the regeneration of their designated areas.
Among the powers bestowed on the corporations to assist them in their task are the powers to acquire, manage and dispose of land and other property. With the land in their control they are able to assemble sites for redevelopment, reclaim derelict and polluted land and service sites to make them attractive to potential investors.
One of the ways in which UDCs may acquire land is by means of orders, such as these, made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State under Section 141 of the 1980 Act. Under this section my right honourable friend may vest in a corporation land held by local auhorities, statutory undertakers and other public bodies.
These three orders were declared hybrid when they were laid, and so were subject to a 14-day petitioning period under Standing Order 216 of this House. I am glad to say that no petitions were received against two of these orders. A holding petition was lodged against the Black Country Development Corporation (Vesting of Land) (British Railways Board) Order 1989, but was quickly withdrawn following further negotiations between the corporation and British Rail.
The two Black Country orders will vest some 3·03 hectares in four plots from Britsh Rail and two plots totalling 6·32 hectares from the Central Electricity Generating Board. The British Rail sites will be developed comprehensively in association with neighbouring plots; of the CEGB sites, one will be used for public open space, and the other for essential infrastructure.
The Bristol Development Corporation (Vesting of Land) (British Railways Board) Order 1989 contains two sites together totalling some 3·3 hectares. One of the sites forms a disused railway embankment in the south of the urban development area; the other, an underused site close to the city centre and the railway station, offers a major development opportunity.
I do not wish to detain your Lordships for too long so close to the start of the Summer recess. At our previous vesting order debate a fortnight ago, the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, stated that his side of the House recognised the important part that is being played by development corporations. I hope that the same view will prevail today.
If your Lordships approve these Motions, the Black Country orders will come into effect tomorrow; the Bristol order has not yet been considered by another place, and must now wait until after the Summer Recess. I commend each of the orders to the House.
Moved, That the orders laid before the House on 22nd June, 14th June and 23rd June be approved [25th and 26th Reports from the Joint Committed].—(The Earl of Arran.)
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, Members on this side of the House wish to take the opportunity to congratulate the Minister who I believe will be taking on major responsibilities in another department, perhaps as well as continuing his interest in this particular department. However, as is the fashion today, it is hail and farewell. I do not know, but this may well be a valedictory opportunity for the Minister. Nevertheless, I congratulate him on what I sense to be a promotion, which is well deserved.
The Minister has been kind enough to give a brief history of the genesis of the urban development corporations. I recall this issue very well because in another place I served on the committee concerned with the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980. It was a traumatic experience because it was on that occasion that the Minister in charge of the Bill, Mr. Tom King, sprang on members of the committee the concept of urban development corporations. Moreover, in the same Bill we also had the concept of the enterprise zones.
As the record will show, Members on my side of the House vigorously opposed not the concept—which is designed to regenerate disused land and make a better co-ordinated use of resources—but the undemocratic nature of the management control and guidance of the urban development corporation. Indeed, we continue to object to that aspect.
Of course, we have the opportunity to look at the record of what has been achieved over the past eight or nine years. Interestingly enough, living in London and being a London local authority man, the one in which I take the greatest interest is the London Docklands Development Corporation which, together with Merseyside Development Corporation, was given life in that Bill. Subsequently, of course we have the others.
The Minister and his colleagues will need to take carefully on board the fact that under a future Labour Government, which may not be far away, the whole raison d'être of urban development corporations will be looked at closely. We have always strongly objected to the fact that the local authorities within
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whose areas the urban development corporations sit, play scant part in the activities of the corporations. Despite what has been achieved by the London Docklands Development Corporation—I acknowledge that a great deal has been achieved—the voice of local people has been frozen out. The best way for local people to have their voice articulated is through their local councillors.
Before we move on from these matters, can the Minister say to what extent the local councillors in the areas of the Black Country Development Corporation and the Bristol Development Corporation have been invited to serve on those corporations. There may be an injection of capital; there is certainly in the first instance a considerable injection of government capital and there is also an injection of private capital. Private capital is invested wholly because of the private sector's assessment of getting a good return. We know that a great many people have made a bomb and have become rich through the London Docklands Development Corporation. I refer to building companies and to others in similar businesses.
What we want in the development corporations is a partnership. What we do not have is a partnership between local people, local councils and the corporations. There may well be a partnership between government and big business. There is little partnership between government and small business. One of the bitter complaints in the London Docklands has been the extent to which the little people have been frozen out, not only in respect of businesses but also in respect of housing. The cost of housing is astronomical.
This is not an occasion on which to cavil at what the Minister says about the transfer from one form of public ownership to another of 12-6 hectares, which is a tiny piece of land. To the extent that it will help the urban development corporation better to do its work, we have no complaints. However, I want to stress that we are not at all happy with the fact that local councils are being given little opportunity to influence what is going on. A Labour Government will be looking to see how we can alter the arrangements. Can the Minister give an indication of the extent to which local people, especially councillors, will be represented on these bodies?
4.15 p.m.
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Lord's warm congratulations on my appointment to the Ministry of Defence. I should like to say at the same time what an interesting and happy time I have had at the Department of the Environment. I shall never relinquish my interest in the department.
I am not altogether surprised by the noble Lord's line of criticism about what he calls the unaccountability of and the lack of democracy in the urban development corporations. They are, of course, accountable to Parliament via my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. There are many opportunities for their actions to be considered, both in your Lordships' House and in

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another place, where there have already been six hours of debate for this year's round of vesting orders.
I should also say that most board members have strong links with their UDC area and my right honourable friend has appointed local councillors to the board of each corporation to ensure that there are people with special knowledge on the board. Many UDC procedures were based on the precedent of the new towns established by the post-war Labour Government. Those board members were all appointed by the Secretary of State.
More specifically this afternoon I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Graham, that as regards the Black Country and Bristol there are four councillors on the board of the Black Country Development Corporation and three on the Bristol Development Corporation, including the deputy chairman. I hope that I have answered the questions of the noble Lord, Lord Graham. I commend the orders to the House.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I am grateful to him for his helpfulness in the matter. However, he merely confirms what we think is a wrong situation. Everyone who serves on these bodies is a place-man or woman whose position is in the gift of the Secretary of State. The Minister tells us that councillors are put there by the Secretary of State. I say that in London the councillors of Greenwich, Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Newham are entitled to feel that they know best which men or women are entitled to represent their areas.
Because the people whom the Minister appoints are local councillors they will know a great deal about the area. However, they carry the confidence of the Secretary of State and not necessarily the confidence of the local people and the local council. It is all of a piece with what the Government are doing in so many fields. They arrogantly believe that they know best and that they are better able to judge the mood of the local people than the local people themselves. I give the Minister and his colleagues warning that when Labour gets into power that omission will be put right.
On Question, Motions agreed to.

Environmental Bodies: Restructuring
4.18 p.m.
Baroness Nicol Baroness Nicol rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether the Nature Conservancy Council or the Countryside Commission were consulted about the proposals to restructure them in Scotland and Wales; and if they were consulted when that consultation took place, what form it took and what were the topics covered.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, before I begin perhaps I may welcome the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham. I am sure that in view of his great experience his contribution will raise the level of our debate and I look forward to it very much indeed.
The Question which I have asked today arises from statements made by way of Written Answers on 11th July by the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment in this House and by the Secretaries of State for Wales and Scotland. Subsequent press reports and press releases from a number of organisations indicate that the decision to dismember the Nature Conservancy Council and the Countryside Commission had been taken without consultation with the two bodies concerned and that they had merely been informed of the decision shortly before publication. If in his reply the Minister confirms those reports, I look forward to hearing his explanation of why this surprising method of decision-making was employed.
The Minister must by now be very much aware of the widespread dismay and anxiety among conservation bodies about the proposed changes and their anger at the lack of consultation. The Royal Society for Nature Conservation which speaks for 48 wildlife trusts is appalled by the proposals which it feels will seriously weaken the whole of nature conservation in Great Britain. The RSNC gives examples of cross-border sites which will give problems if the split occurs.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds opposes the fragmentation of the United Kingdom approach to wildlife conservation and habitat protection and asks how the Government are to be advised on international issues and obligations. The Ramblers Association is concerned that access and conservation policy-making should not be devolved. The Council for the Protection of Rural England is alarmed by the effect on staff morale of the way the affair has been handled. It too fears the loss of international prestige. The views of the Nature Conservancy Council itself and of the Countryside Commission have been well publicised. There are many more examples, but I shall not list them all today.
It seems at best inefficient and at worst insulting to make major changes of the kind proposed without seeking the advice and opinion of those actually doing the work. Without their expertise and guidance, even in matters of detail the Government are quite likely to get it wrong. The way in which this affair has been handled suggests that the proposals have more to do with silencing an inconvenient conservation voice than with reorganising the forces of conservation more effectively.
The Nature Conservancy Council has dared to give honest opinions, for example on certain provisions in the Water Act, and it is now to pay the price. At a time when active steps are being taken to improve international co-operation to protect wildlife and to combat pollution, it seems odd to consider splitting our United Kingdom organisations into even smaller units without compelling reasons for doing so.
Have the Government considered the importance of interntional leverage? Does it not weigh with the Government that in an area subject to many important international agreements such as the Berne and Bonn conventions, the birds directive,

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the RAMSAR convention and others, and with the likelihood of a Community directive on flora and fauna habitat protection, there should be a strong voice in the United Kingdom to speak on these things? We enjoy some influence in Europe on conservation matters and the Nature Conservancy Council has earned a high reputation. Have the Government considered whether that influence will be weakened by these proposals? Are the Government aware that Wales is expecting to have a direct voice in Europe under the new proposals? I am sure that Scotland is too. This emerged in my discussions with those in Wales who are dealing with nature conservation.
There may well be persuasive arguments in favour of amalgamating the functions of the Countryside Commission and the Nature Conservancy Council. Many of us have discussed that possibility and have seen some merit in it. It is a view shared by some non-government organisations, but careful consideration would need to be given to drafting the terms of reference of the new organisation to ensure a proper balance of responsibilities. It is certainly not an exercise to be blundered into without proper thought and consultation.
The proposed arrangements are a hotch-potch, showing every sign of being a reaction to political and vested interest pressures rather than an intelligent attempt to improve what is admittedly an imperfect situation. The suggestion of combined bodies in Wales and Scotland, while continuing separate organisations in England, is a recipe for confusion. I can readily understand the warmth of some practitioners in Wales and Scotland towards what looks like an opportunity to achieve a more responsive national body within which to work. However, I wonder how much of that natural wish for greater autonomy is a reaction against the defects of the present situation rather than because of inherent difficulties of a Great Britain-wide system. I think they would be very wise to see exactly what is on offer before their full approval.
The Scottish Wildlife and Countryside Link, speaking for 12 organisations, has expressed anxiety about a weakening of conservation in Scotland. That body is concerned at the lack of justification given so far for such a move. It suggests that the Scottish consultation paper, published after the decision was announced, is bereft of substance. England and Wales have not had a consultation paper at all, with or without substance.
The arrangements for research after dismemberment will be crucial. In another place on 21st July, Mrs. Bottomley, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, said:
"The Government fully accept that the work of the three successor bodies must be underpinned by rigorous science, using data and expertise that the council has built up over the past 40 years. We shall, therefore, ensure that provision is made for the Government to maintain a Great Britain overview and that each body has access to adequate scientific advice on a Great Britain basis where this is desirable.
"We are ready to discuss how best this might be done".—[Official Report, Commons 21/7/89; col. 709]
Following those encouraging words the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State went on to enlarge on the options that she mentioned. As I read it, they do not include the option of in-house research. Perhaps that should be a matter of close consideration by the proposed new bodies before they commit themselves.
The Glamorgan Wildlife Trust questions whether finance will be available to give Wales the facilities it can presently obtain from Cheltenham and Peterborough. It points out that unless the present base of the Nature Conservancy Council is safeguarded wildlife conservation will be seriously weakened. I know that the Nature Conservancy Council in Wales confidently expects, in addition to having its own voice in Europe, to have its own in-house research.
I have not done justice to the many letters I have received from concerned organisations. I hope that in the autumn, at not too late a date, we can have a better opportunity to discuss in full the implications of what is proposed. Obviously there must now be a rational debate to decide where nature conservation in Britain goes from here.
I have some questions to put to the Minister along those lines. Can he tell us what kind of consultation is envisaged? Will there be consultation papers for England and Wales? One hopes for a better quality than that offered to Scotland. Will non-governmental organisations seriously be involved and their possible relationship with future statutory bodies explored? Might the Secretary of State give serious consideration to the idea of a sensible merger of the two English bodies with the possibility of their having responsibility for a United Kingdom overview?
The aim for all of us must be to do our best for nature conservation in the United Kingdom. What could have been a constructive redeployment of resources has got off to a very bad start. With a more sensible and flexible approach from here on much could still be achieved. However, the work of the Nature Conservancy Council has already been in limbo for some considerable time while it undertook an exercise on the future of its national nature reserves. We are now faced with a long pause before this legislation comes into force. I feel that there is some urgency required in laying down the lines along which the Government are thinking to give us all a chance to discuss realistically what is proposed. I hope that we may have satisfactory answers to my questions.
4.28 p.m.
Lord Lewis of Newnham: My Lords, first of all perhaps I may take the opportunity of thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Nicol, for her kind words. I am also grateful to her for organising an opportunity for me to speak on this occasion in this Session. If I add the word "just", that describes the situation in which I find myself.
My contacts with the Nature Conservancy Council have been primarily through my position as chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Therefore I shall address

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myself primarily to those aspects which are scientific in origin. If your Lordships will forgive me, they may be even more parochial and concerned with studies that have been associated with that group of people.
I should like to start by saying that I am sure that the House will reflect on the necessity for this country to be concerned with problems involved with environments and with general conservation. If we accept that, it naturally follows that any change that is to occur in the structure of an institution concerned with that aspect will be of primary interest to the House. I must admit a certain failing inasmuch as I cannot quite work out exactly what is involved in those changes other than that change seems to be the air and mode of operation.
I have followed closely the debates in this Chamber and have noted with great interest the sensitivity of the House towards problems of the environment. I note in particular that it recognises the complexity that is often associated both with the collection and interpretation of data, with the possibility of other than an objective view being taken of data of that nature. It is therefore of considerable importance to recognise that any problem in ecology is rarely simple and that, when we deal with problems of that nature, we inevitably end up with a complex and seriously debatable issue in many instances.
The importance to me of the Nature Conservancy Council is that it was originally founded in 1949 and had its roots in the NC itself. It was spawned from that organisation in 1973 so it has the equivalent of about 40 years experience of the environment. That is an extremely important point to recognise in anything that we do with the organisation. It has certainly been internationally accepted as an authority. Those of us who, I am sure, visit various parts of the world will often find reference made to the excellent work done by the NCC. It plays a pivotal role in many discussions on the environment.
It was in that respect that I and my colleagues in the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, when we addressed the problem of the release of genetically engineered organisms, had necessity to appeal to the organisation for help. Clearly anything that involves the release of an organism must involve a consideration of the ecological viability of that creature. In many instances, we found that the NCC were the people—in some instances, the only people—who could offer us serious advice on the issues.
It is for that reason that it finds itself a member of the RELEASE Committee which is a sub-committee of the ACGM and plays an important role in discussions on the environmental viability of release of those organisms. It is for that reason that the commission suggested in its recommendations that the NCC should be very much involved in any consideration of the release of genetically engineered organisms.
I may perhaps be pre-judging the issue because this has not yet been formulated, but, if it becomes the way in which we shall consider the release of genetically engineered organisms, I maintain that it would be a serious blow to the thoroughness with which proposed releases are assessed, and hence to
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the safety of the environment if the expertise currently available through the NCC were put in jeopardy by the proposal to split it into three parts. I should be grateful if the Minister would tell us what arrangements are proposed to ensure that the new bodies will be able to play as full and effective a part in such discussions as the one body does at present.
A related role that is already carried out by the NCC is that of advising on the release of exotics into the country as a whole. I merely remind noble Lords of the classic rabbit in Australia story to make one recognise the importance of that type of advice. Animals or creatures do not respect political boundaries. They are far more sensitive to ecological boundaries. One of my concerns would simply be how this problem will be dealt with when once again we split this community into three different sections.
Of course any problem in pollution or environmental study is very much more easy to detect than to predict. As a scientist I should love to be able to inform the House that the facility to predict is extremely well developed. Unfortunately, as I have already stated, ecological problems are extremely complex. Their very nature involves a whole variety of steps being taken. For instance, I recall that the myxomatosis problem with the destruction of the rabbit had a consequential effect on the green woodpecker. I shall not go through that chain of logic but I defy anybody to have been able to predict the correlation. For those noble Lords who want to know the answer, perhaps I may recommend reading the commission's last report. It is given in Chapter 4.
Equally well I believe that it is important to recognise that this country has been blessed with a variety of organisations that have spent many years inspecting the flora and fauna. Such amateur organisations are extremely useful as a mechanism for monitoring the general position over so many different aspects of environmental problems.
Perhaps I may just refer back to the problem of genetically engineered organisms. Once it reaches the stage of being a commercial rather than a research operation, the importance of monitoring will become extremely sensitive. I remind the House of the classic story of DDT and its relationship to birds of prey and the weight of their eggs. These were discoveries that came very much from the amateur approach to this problem.
Even accepting all the excellence that we find here—and in this respect I genuinely believe that this country is unique in having this great and useful body of people—there is no substitute for a systematic and continuing assessment which is only possible from a professional organisation. To my mind one of the many virtues of the NCC is that it is able not only to correlate the facts but to present them in a uniform manner—and I must emphasise that that in itself is a very important aspect of any problem. It makes the information available not only to people in this country but as a general contribution to the whole range of environmental studies.
Finally, I should like to turn to the fact that the NCC advises the Minister and the Government on

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international aspects of pollution. I feel that that will be extremely difficult to do if there is a three-headed rather than a one-headed situation. I recognise that many of my problems may not be real but imaginary. I hope and sincerely believe that in the long run the NCC will become an important factor within the general ambit of environmental studies. I hope that we shall find a very satisfactory solution to what at the moment I find to be a very worrying problem.
4.34 p.m.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, I am today especially fortunate since it falls to me to have the very great pleasure on behalf of the whole House of thanking and congratulating a maiden speaker in this Chamber. It is not just a pleasure but a particular privilege because we have heard today a maiden speech of the highest quality and calibre, which I think bodes well for our House. It was the kind of speech which we are entitled to expect and indeed have learned to expect from a Fellow of the Royal Society. We know what to expect from a Fellow of the Royal Society because, as the noble Lord will presently discover, our Benches are festooned with them. But we are not in fact full of immediate past presidents of the Royal Society of Chemistry, nor do we have many former professors of chemistry from my own university, the University of Manchester, or indeed boys from Barrow Grammar School, which I am delighted to tell the noble Lord I shall be visiting tomorrow.
It is customary on these occasions to say that we look forward to hearing the noble Lord on many occasions in the future. I should like to go a little further. I do not look forward; I insist that we shall hear the noble Lord on many matters in the future. Indeed, I have made a list of matters of extreme importance scientifically upon which the Government are in the greatest possible need of the noble Lord's advice. The calibre of the noble Lord was evidenced by the fact that in making an entirely non-controversial speech he made it utterly clear that he has certain scientific misgivings about proposals to do with a scientific organisation.
The Nature Conservancy Council is a scientific body, not just a collection of welly-booted Greens. It is a scientific body with an immense amount of expertise developed over many years which is held in the highest possible repute not only all over Britain but in Europe and the rest of the world. As the noble Lord suggested, it would be disastrous if that regard where weakened in any way. On behalf of the House I should like to say how privileged we are to have the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham, with us and how much we look forward to his taking a further part in our discussions, including those on this matter, because we shall have to have many bites at this cherry before it is finally swallowed.
Perhaps I may give a brief apology on behalf of my noble friend Lord Ross of Newport, who would have liked to be here. He would have liked to say, as chairman of Wildlife Link, that he was wholly opposed to the proposals we are discussing. I must now make my own speech and not that of my noble friend Lord Ross of Newport.
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Let me at once thank the noble Baroness, Lady Nicol, for having introduced this subject. So often at Question Time the noble Baroness has raised matters of immense importance. Very often they are issues that have been initiated by the Nature Conservancy Council, on which it has seemed to us that the Government have been been somewhat dilitory in taking action. The noble Baroness has done us such a service on many occasions. On this occasion she has opened the batting on a subject with which we shall deal often in the future.
The subject is very complex, with many strands to it. I shall endeavour to deal with them one by one. I agreed with every word that the noble Baroness said about the manner in which this decision has been arrived at. I shall not discuss that now. I agree with what she said. I prefer to concentrate my remarks on what is proposed.
The first strand is the question of merger between the Countryside Commission and the Nature Conservancy Council. That is not a new idea. It has been thought about very often, and indeed was proposed by one previous Secretary of State who later had second and in my view wiser thoughts. During the years when I had the privilege and honour of being chairman of the Countryside Commission, we worked very closely indeed with the Nature Conservancy Council. That was at the time when Professor Fred Holliday was the chairman of the Nature Conservancy Council. I had a very close working relationship with him, as indeed did the Country Commission's officers with the officers of the Nature Conservancy Council.
At one stage when the Nature Conservancy Council was required to vacate its very expensive premises in London, we offered it a share of John Dower House in Cheltenham where we had spare capacity, in the hope that it would move in and join us in the physical and geographical sense so that we could share overheads and infrastructure and so save money. It did not find that possible but I mention that to show that the Countryside Commission always wishes to work very closely with the Nature Conservancy Council.
Let us pause a little and think about mergers. It is not at the moment proposed to merge the Nature Conservancy Council and the Countryside Commission, though there are mergers contained in these proposals. I have always had doubts because I think that there are conflicts in the statutory duties of the two bodies. If we look at the statutory duties of the Countryside Commission, it has the duty to advise the Government on matters to do with the preservation of the natural beauty of the countryside; and the Government have a statutory duty to seek the Countryside Commission's advice before they take certain steps. Unfortunately, they do not have a statutory duty to heed the advice; but at least they have to seek it.
One of the main statutory duties of the Countryside Commission which is enshrined in the legislation is to promote access to the countryside for open air recreational activity. That is an immensely important part of the Countryside Commission's work in Scotland and Wales and indeed in England. The Nature Conservancy Council's statutory duties

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are similar: to advise the Government on various matters. But it means that on many occasions the Nature Conservancy Council's statutory duties are to keep people out of the countryside to preserve flora and fauna. There is an innate conflict there in which a merger between the two could cause possible difficulties. I have always thought that it was better to keep them marginally separate.
I now move onto the other aspect of this matter which is the proposal to dismember the Nature Conservancy Council into three component parts. I know that much has been said about this by many people. Many of my honourable friends in another place have been inclined to welcome it almost in Scotland and I am afraid that rather too many people have shared the view expressed from this Bench on a number of occasions by my noble friend Lord Grimond, who has amused us greatly by describing the Nature Conservancy Council as a collection of bowler-hatted bureaucrats who march off to the Highlands and Islands to tell crofters how to do their business. It is not like that. The Nature Conservancy Council is a scientific body, with a wealth of scientific knowledge built up over a long period. While I am bound to accept that its officers have had a great deal of scientific training, they appear not always to have had a great deal of training in diplomacy. They may have erred occasionally in the way in which they have given advice to crofters about the duties which are likely to be imposed on those who are lucky enough to live on a site of special scientific interest. Sometimes they have not put that advice in the kind of terms in which it is wholly acceptable to the Scottish people.
There are people in Scotland who believe that by merging or dismembering the Nature Conservancy Council and having a separate body for Scotland and merging that with the Countryside Commission for Scotland, which has always been separate—there is a separate Countryside Commission for Scotland with magnificent headquarters at Redgorton near Perth—they would get rid of a layer of bureaucracy so that there would be fewer of these bowler-hatted bureaucrats coming from England to tell the Scots how to do their work.
It is not as simple as that. I hope that my honourable friends in another place who take that view will think again. I hope that others will think very carefully, because the two functions of the two bodies are different.
The Countryside Commission for Scotland has different duties from that for England and Wales, as it now is, because there are no national parks in Scotland. The general view is taken that the whole of Scotland is a national park. Much of the work of the Countryside Commission of which, as I have said, I have had he honour to be chairman, deals with very sensitive areas such as the national parks in England and Wales (of which noble Lords know there are many) and other designated areas such as the areas of outstanding natural beauty, the heritage coasts and places like that.
The two bodies are marginally different. In this matter of dismembership there is the question of Wales. Hitherto the Countryside Commission has always had a Committee for Wales which has been
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given as much autonomy as possible and has its own headquarters in Newtown. Its officers have had very close links with the Welsh Office but the Countryside Commission for England and Wales as it now is has the statutory duty to report to the Secretary of State for the Environment and also to the Secretary of State for Wales.
I am told by colleagues in your Lordships' House from all parties who have great experience of Wales that they have a great fear that once the Committee for Wales is separated and becomes a Countryside Commission for Wales in its own right, reporting to and wholly dependent upon the Welsh Office, there is a real danger that that body will become a creature of the Welsh Office and its powers in some way will be reduced. I believe that those fears are soundly based. I should like them to be thought about carefully.
At the moment the Committee for Wales operates separately with a great deal of autonomy from its own headquarters in Newtown. Because it is part of a larger body which has a statutory duty to report to government and to the Secretary of State for the Environment in particular, the Welsh committee has been given a degree of independence 1hat perhaps it would not have under the new status. When in my day the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, was the Secretary of State for Wales he gave the Committee for Wales and the Countryside Commission all the assistance that he could as did the earlier Secretaries of State. The anxieties which have been expressed to me are real and should be considered.
Dismembership of a scientific body—which is the Nature Conservancy Council—will not strengthen it; it will be in danger of being weakened. Its advice is necessary to the country as a whole, to Europe and to the world. The world seeks the advice of that scientific body on many occasions. I should not like to see any steps being taken which are likely to weaken its influence.
Similarly, I should not like to see a merger with what remains of the Countryside Commission for England. I hope that at the end of the debate the noble Lord will be able to tell us that there is no overall intention to merge the Countryside Commission with the Nature Conservancy Council. The idea may be attractive because there will be only one body with fewer officers. However, fundamentally the two bodies have different jobs to carry out. If one body has the statutory duty to promote access to the countryside and the other body has the statutory duty of keeping people out of parts of the countryside, I am not sure that the same outfit can carry out the two jobs.
In the past a better case could have been made out for merging the Nature Conservancy Council with the Forestry Commission. Had that been so it might be that the Forestry Commission would have behaved differently. A most distinguished forester, who happens to be the father-in-law of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, once told me that the extraordinary habit of single species, even-age planting with total clearance felling is practised by only two groups of people; the Prussians and the Forestry Commission. That is an interesting point.

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The Forestry Commission has learnt a great deal possibly from the independent influence of the Nature Conservancy Council. Therefore there has been a great increase in the planting of broadleaved species and a movement away from the regimented blocks of sitka spruce marching across the Highlands and through the Lake District. Had the Nature Conservancy Council's advice been thought about a little more in relation to conifer forests planted in the flow country of Caithness, Sutherland and Wales, the situation may be a little better.
We shall have many bites at the cherry. The proposals will require legislation so we shall have further opportunities to look at them. While I am interested in some of them I am not happy about them. I am sure that they must be thought about most carefully before they are finalised.
It was an immense pleasure to hear a maiden speech of truly wonderful proportions. It gave me great encouragement for the future of this subject. We heard from a persuasive noble Lord with scientific knowledge of the subject of unequalled proportions so perhaps in the fullness of time our advice will be heard.
4.53 p.m.
Lord Craigton: My Lords, I should also like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham, on his maiden speech. All conservationists in this House will feel that he will fill a niche with technical knowledge and support which we have not had previously. We welcome him to the House and congratulate him on joining us.
I should like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Nicol, for giving us an opportunity to discuss this important issue. I should like to tell the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, that although he will disagree with what I am about to say, I think that he will come to believe that what I say is correct.
As regards Scotland, I know that the right decision is to create a purely Scottish organisation to care for its land and wildlife. Looking back over my nine years as MP for Govan—I fought three elections and the largest majority was 373—five years as Under-Secretary of State in another place, and five years as Minister of State in your Lordships' House, I cannot remember any substantial Scottish branch of an English-run undertaking that was a success. The English do not fully appreciate that Scotland is a separate country. It is the Secretary of State for Scotland who matters and not the English department Minister. Anyone who has worked, as I have, in a Scottish department with administrative responsibilities knows that his department is equal and not subservient to his English counterpart, nor does he follow English policies unless in his opinion they suit Scotland.
We conservationists have for many years been gravely worried about the apparent inability of the Scottish authorities to nurture and protect their wild life. I attend the trustees' meetings of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. Many times over the years we have discussed Scotland's apparent inability to
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do what was needed. We have spent money but we have never had anything really worth while to be happy about.
So concerned was I that, as my contribution to the dilemma, this time last year I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland responsible —because the Secretary of State could not come—to talk to my all-party conservation group of both Houses of Parliament under the title "The Importance of Scotland to European Conservation". I asked him to extol the unique nature of the terrain and wildlife of Scotland not only for the United Kingdom but for Europe as a whole. I hoped to instil into all concerned more pride and awareness of Scotland's heritage.
Of course the right solution is the proposal now before us. We should have thought of that ourselves. The new combination of local direction and control for the Scottish countryside and wildlife in the interests of the United Kingdom and Europe will put new life and energy into the Scots, who can at last run their own show. This proposal for Scotland outweighs other disadvantages.
I would have been worried if the proposal had been to combine the English Countryside Commission and the Nature Conservancy Council. There is so much dedication and expertise in those two directing headquarters that much would have been lost. However, for the NCC, the bulk of the planning ahead and the vital technical information at Peterborough must remain undisturbed. Much of the NCC's field of advice and responsibility is nationwide and international. It is nonsense to suggest that what it does and has done for 40 years, as the noble Lord said, can now better be done by a government department.
The advisory committee for England was an afterthought. The Bill leading to the Nature Conservancy Act 1973 established committees for Wales and Scotland. The intention then was that for England the NCC would make its own arrangements. I wish now that I had not done it, but it was I who suggested an English council on Second Reading on 12th April 1973. On 8th May in Committee I moved and withdrew an amendment which was approved on Report on 5th June. All that is needed is to merge the English office with Peterborough's other activites, as was the original intention.
The changes—and there must be changes—need only be minor and with goodwill the problems will be solved. However, whatever they may be, they may be justified by the major change that at long last, in the interests of the United Kingdom and Europe, Scotland can take responsibility for her own conservation.
5 p.m.
Baroness David: My Lords, that was a very strong speech from the noble Lord and I can agree with only half of it, as will become apparent as I speak.
There can seldom have been such a united cry of outrage as there has been on Mr. Ridley's proposal to dismember the main statutory body for nature conservation in Britain. It is not only the decision to break up the NCC which has raised the fury of

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conservation bodies but the manner of announcement: in Written Answers to planted Questions, with no consultation whatever with the council or its chairman, Sir William Wilkinson.
The failure to consult is the latest of several lines of evidence of the low regard in which the council is held by the ex-Secretary of State and the shabby treatment it has received from him. There has been behind-the-scenes direction from him on its stance over field sports in general and shooting rights in protected areas in particular. There was an interesting and convincing article on this in the Oberserver last Sunday by Geoffrey Lean and Callum Macrae, headed,
"How Ridley Conserved His Killing Fields".
There has been pressure to privatise those national nature reserves owned by the NCC when the council believes that ownership is the only sure means of being able to achieve management wholly directed to the nature conservation aims. An example of how things can go badly wrong when others retain ownership is the Gualin nature reserve. There a magnificent valley and mountain area in Sutherland is being turned into the semblance of a tank-training area. The nature reserve agreement terms do not allow the NCC to prevent the owners using tracked vehicles to ferry fishermen back and forth.
There is the present embargo on the declaration of new nature reserves and failure to make a single conservation order during the past year. There has been a shortfall in DoE funding of the NCC of 5 per cent. in real terms, as publicised by the chairman at the launch of the annual report last November. This was disputed by the DoE but the council has already had to implement cuts in its programmes and in the funding of voluntary bodies.
There is reference in Mr. Ridley's statements to present arrangements being "inefficient" and "insensitive". I hope the Minister can explain what exactly is meant by those terms when he replies. One source of inefficiency known to the NCC can easily be cured; that is, to stop the DoE and others in central government from continually interfering in the NCC's running of its affairs. The Directorate of Rural Affairs in the DoE acts as minder to both the NCC and the Countryside Commission. In the past few years the NCC has had a Rayner scrutiny, a Pliatzski review and currently a Rogers examination on efficiency, added to which there are continuous staff inspections by a team of DoE and NCC staffing inspectors. This kind of peering over the NCC's shoulder is a continuous drag on the business of getting on with is proper job.
In 1973 the NCC went through the trauma of the splitting off of its research (left in NERC as the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology) and transfer to the DoE. Apart from the upheaval and demoralisation for many of the staff, headquarters officers were completely diverted from normal work by the endless consultations, the working out of the small print in legislation and so on. Little real conservation was done for at least a year and the publication of the Nature Conservation Review was delayed for three to four years. The proposed three-way split will involve still more complex legislation over allocation
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of staff and properties and will surely cause, at best, a marking of time until it is all over, predicted to be not until April 1991 at the earliest.
The word "insensitive" is a key one. One suspects that it expresses the resentment and complaint, especially in Scotland, that the NCC has ridden roughshod over the proper and rightful wishes of people on the ground to benefit from development of their own resources. It may well be, as the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, said, that there have been some tactless actions which were perhaps not at all diplomatic by some of the officers. However, the main purpose of the new proposals is no doubt to tame the NCC by putting it under the control of the Scottish Office, which is so beholden to the Scottish establishment of landowners, farmers, foresters, developers and entrepreneurs. The Scottish Office intends to take charge of the SSSI and NNR designations, and we can be sure that there will be less opposition from the NCC Scotland to many schemes which will be damaging to nature conservation.
There will of course be emollient reassurances of the familiar sort, but the indications of what is to come are in the past actions and words of those who will be in control. The Scottish Office has an abysmal record of non-support for nature conservation whenever it has been placed in the seat of judgment on conflicting issues. Both Mr. Younger and Mr. Rifkind have sided with the developers, either giving an outright thumbs down or, at best, a poor compromise over threats to important sites.
I shall cite some examples. In relation to afforestation on Mindork Moss and Arran Northern Mountains (both SSSIs) planting was approved after call-in by the Secretary of State. In the flow country there was a compromise deal with a four-zone presumption for forestry, ranging from against to strongly favoured. The NCC may be allowed to schedule about 50 per cent. of the internationally important bogs. Fifty per cent. afforestation at Creag Meagairdh was supported despite that being the only unplanted area left in a 20-mile stretch of hill from Glen Spean to Laggan Bridge.
As regards industrial development, there was support for peat extraction on Duich Moss in Islay to keep the whisky distillery working. An alternative source was only accepted after the EC threatened legal action. On Morrich More, another SSSI, and an important sand dune system in Easter Ross, a steel pipe construction site was approved. A ski tow extension into the Caenlochan nature reserve was approved in spite of NCC objections. Since then a reasoned opinion has been received from the EC saying that the intrusion should be removed.
So it is not surprising that conservationists are alarmed at what is likely to happen if the proposed change goes through. Scottish Wildlife Link, which represents all voluntary conservation bodies in Scotland, is unequivocal. It states:
"The Scottish Office's record of ignoring the advice of the NCC gives little hope that Scotland's precious wildlife and countryside heritage will be in safe hands, especially if the new combined quango has a reduced staff and status".
Professor Duncan Poore, a former head of Nature Conservancy, and a Scot, said that the idea was

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complete madness. There is every justification for believing that the dismantling of the NCC as set out by Mr. Rifkind in a wretched four-page consultation document (published only in Scotland) has not been thoroughly thought through.
One suspects that the Welsh scheme was added in an attempt to make the proposal appear to have a devolutionary aspect. The Welsh section of this new wildlife conservation service is likely to be the smallest of the three country units and with that it may be under-resourced and ineffective.
The noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham, whom I congratulate very much for his excellent maiden speech, referred to the scientific achievements and the quality of the science done at the NCC. The science base will suffer especially from any carve-up since its efficiency and effectiveness depend on building a common base of information, free from any artificial barriers of geography. It is essential that problems can be studied countrywide in order to have the best chance of understanding them, for many of the most serious problems are common to England, Scotland and Wales. Some of them are international.
Acid rain falls all over Britain and we have to understand its pattern. We also export it to continental Europe. The global warming will affect the whole world. We need to put up an integrated UK programme of monitoring and prediction. I suggest that there can be good reasons for a debate on whether the NCC and the Countryside Commission could benefit from greater integration. But that debate should be conducted over a period of time and there should be full consultation with all the people and organisations involved.
I believe that all of us here are dismayed and horrified by what has been done. I hope the Minister will convey to his new Secretary of State the feelings that have been expressed here today and encourage a fresh look at the situation. It is not too late for that to be done.
5.8 p.m.
Lord Renton: My Lords, my name is not on the list of speakers, but I hope that I may have your Lordships' indulgence to speak for a very short time. I understand that the changes the Government intend to make will require an Act of Parliament. Meanwhile, I believe that we should regard this as a consultation period of which I hope the Government will take good note. The changes that they propose are controversial and in my opinion they are not generally welcomed. If they are a sop to Scottish and Welsh nationalism, that of itself it not a good reason. I speak as one with a foot on each side of the Border. I am kind of Anglo-Scottish migrant at different times of the year.
I hope that the Government will use this as an opportunity for not legislating in the next Session. They have said that they do not wish to legislate so much. This is a subject that they can well leave out to advantage.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, of which I should explain I am a humble honorary life
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member, is the largest single environmental protection body in this country. I would remind my noble friends on the Front Bench that the thousands of members of that society represent a great many votes. May I ask whether they have been consulted? Have the leading people in the RSPB been consulted? If not, why not, and will they be?
The noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham, whose maiden speech we so much valued, pointed out that nature ignores political boundaries. Experience with the National Conservancy Council has indeed shown the advantage of being able to deal with wildlife problems and other ecological issues on a United Kingdom basis, on a national scale. Let nobody think that this is a mere frivolous example. It is a very vivid example. The Greenland whitefront—one of the rarest and most protected of all the members of the goose family—does not just come to Scotland to migrate; it comes to Wales, to parts of England and to Northern Ireland too. For us to have a policy for protecting such species on a purely Welsh or nationalist scale would be ridiculous.
Also, surely it is important that as a member of the European Community the United Kingdom should speak with one voice. It is no good disintegrating the advice what we give to Europe. I hope that the Government will abandon that idea.
If I may say so to the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, the Countryside Commission has done very fine work in enabling the people of this country to enjoy access to our countryside on a much wider scale than used to be the case. But their statutory function is quite different from the purpose of the Nature Conservancy Council, which is to give serious, independent, scientific advice, and fearlessly to point out to the Countryside Commission if necessary—I use the vernacular expression—"You can't do that there 'ere". It is only advice that they can give; they have no final word, no veto; but that advice is very good and valuable, and needs to be given independently and not as a part of a conglomeration.
I have welcomed the change of heart (especially that of the Prime Minister herself), and the improvement in the Government's attitude towards environmental matters. Indeed, they have gone international on the subject. I wish them luck, because matters of the kind which we are discussing this afternoon are a test of the validity of the Government's commitment to preserving our environment. I should point out in conclusion that our environment is extremely vulnerable in our modern industrial society and in our country, parts of which are so heavily overpopulated.
5.14 p.m.
Lord Airedale: My Lords, perhaps I may intervene at this point to say but a few words about the wording of this Question which refers to, "proposals to restructure". I wonder where the word "restructure" comes from and why we need it. We have been building and rebuilding ever since the Anglo-Saxons taught us that word. There are those who prefer Latin derivations, such as, construct and reconstruct; therefore why do we need to restructure? It is a word

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with no counterpart. There is no verb to the word "structure" so why do we need the verb to restructure?
Perhaps we can get rid of this silly word and go back to reconstruction. That word has been quite good enough for everyone up until now.
5.15 p.m.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, first, I must say that we on these Benches wish to pay a very warm and generous tribute to my noble friend Lady Nicol for seizing the chance—literally at the very last hour—to present this House, and a great many people outside the House, with an opportunity to give the Minister and his colleagues something, yet again, to think about during the Summer Recess.
I certainly take very kindly the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Renton, that if we are serious about our democracy then this is part of the continuing consultation process. In the nature of these debates, we know in actual fact that decisions are not taken and votes are not struck. Nevertheless, we very much hope that the manner in which my noble friend Lady Nichol presented a most powerful case—indeed, she did so knowledgeably, sensibly and reasonably—will have been noted by the Minister.
Secondly, we are enormously indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham, for one of the most outstanding maiden speeches I have had the privilege to hear during my short time in this House. His speech was so apt, so knowledgeable and, if I may say so, so positive. Many maiden speeches seem to box all around the matter under discussion and one wonders at the end of the day whether it was simply a pleasantry. But the noble Lord, Lord Lewis, has taken the opportunity and nailed his flag to this particular mast. Therefore we look forward very much to hearing more from the noble Lord on this and many other subjects in the future.
As someone who is passionately interested in the subject, but who is not remotely as well-qualified as I believe every other speaker who has spoken in the debate to be—I profess I am lower in the batting order in that respect—the key word which strikes me is not "restructure"; it is the word "consult". I do not think as parliamentarians that we can quibble with the Government's right to decide that they wish to see changes made, especially so far as concerns public money and public responsibility. It is only right and proper that they should do so. However, as we know, "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it".
I listened with appreciation to the statement that this is not in fact a new concept. However, we are looking at this concept in 1989 with a whole panoply of environmental issues—they are not all issues that we have been suddenly faced with, although some of them are—which we now recognise need to be grappled with. I appreciate, again, the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Renton. He said that we do not want to arouse the suspicion that there is some sop to nationalism as part of the nexus of the matter.
I must say to the Minister that there is a strong suspicion in some respects, whether the "p" is large
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or small, that politics is playing a part in the matter. That is not a surprising charge as regards a government who, of course, are a political body. But we do not want to think that here is an attempt to give Scotland the feeling that for many reasons, other than the ostensible ones, it is in the interests of the Government politically to move in the way in which they have.
Sadly, I believe that the Government have gone about the matter in the wrong way. I think that the case has been made with considerable force. I listened with great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Craigton, who certainly gave as good as he got—not that he got very much from the point of view of personal attack or abuse. However, on the argument side he was very strong. I do not say that there is no case to be made for the changes the Government propose to make.
However, I have received from organisations which I respect and which have helped me over the years with environmental matters such as the Wildlife and Countryside Bill, the Local Government and Planning Bill and the Water Bill expressions of grave disquiet about the proposals. I refer to bodies such as the Ramblers Association, the RSPB, the Countryside Commission and so on.
In the light of the likely reaction to the proposals, why did the Minister decide not to engage even in the most tenuous of consultations with the groups who will be affected by them? It cannot be that the Minister is afraid of an argument. The noble Lord who is to reply is certainly not afraid. The Secretary of State who has just gone to another department would not be afraid of an argument. The Minister must tell us why in such a cack-handed way the department has decided that this is the best way to make friends and influence people.
We are a small country. We are part of a large continent. That continent is a small part of a large world. It is no good talking in terms of managing environmental challenge on the basis of a border between England and Wales. We are small enough not to subdivide or to divide what we already have. I listened with great attention and appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, who speaks with special knowledge of these matters. He told us about these power struggles between the groups. We are all mature people. The people who are affected—the chairman, the committees and the range of people, most of them volunteers, who are drawn in—are all adults. They are committed and experienced and deserve to be treated better.
In an excellent speech the noble Baroness, Lady David, said that the way in which such people were treated was symptomatic of the low regard in which they were held by the Secretary of State. I honestly believe that the Minister has an opportunity to smooth down a great many feathers. This issue will run and run in many ways.
When the noble Lord comes to reply perhaps he will deal with one or two points that have exercised my mind. It is quite clear that people in Scotland who take an interest believe that this will be to their benefit. We have to ask how many people in the country take an interest. What consultation took place with the Welsh Office in order to get the

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view of Wales on this matter? We know that the practitioners, the people at the coal face, feel assuaged. Can the Minister say to what extent the Welsh Office and the Secretary of State for Wales were consulted, and what were his views on these matters? Were views canvassed, even outside a formal consultation process, to get some reaction?
On the Front Bench with me today is my noble friend Lord Williams, who is president of the Council for the Protection of Rural Wales. He speaks with considerable knowledge and without presumption on these matters. He has told me that there is a very strong suspicion among his colleagues on that body and others as to precisely what the Minister seeks to achieve. If my noble friend Lady White, who takes a very keen interest in these matters, had been here, she would certainly have expressed those views.
What can we try to do? I do not wish to weary the House by repeating for the third or fourth time how outraged the other bodies are by what has happened. When one looks at the statement made by the Minister on 11th July, I think that those bodies are entitled to be very angry indeed. Mr Ridley said on that occasion that there were increasing feelings that those arrangements—that is, the current arrangements—were inefficient, insensitive and meant that conservation issues in both Scotland and Wales were determined with too little regard for the particular requirements in those countries.
Where is the evidence? Who are the people who have said that? I believe that the Minister is entitled to defend the former Secretary of State and give us chapter and verse as to where the evidence came from. There are other bodies which have spoken in similar tones of outrage.
We need the Minister to tell us where we go from here. A number of Members of the House have reminded us that legislation will be required to give effect to these changes. I noted very carefully what the noble Lord, Lord Renton, said—in effect that no changes were desirable. However, if changes are to be forthcoming, then they need to be put in the form of a statute so that we can examine them.
The Minister and his colleagues would recoup a great deal of their authority on these matters if during the next stages they took consultation seriously. We all know that the intention of the Government has been trailed very heavily to produce what has been called a "green" Bill in the next Session of Parliament. Within that "green" Bill there will be matters—I see the eyebrows of the noble Lord, Lord Denham, rise with surprise. It is not very often that I can tell him something, especially on these subjects. Perhaps this will not be in the next Session, but the Government have rested very heavily on their stand on environmental matters on the basis that they will produce a "green" Bill. In that Bill there are certain to be chapters which deal with these subjects.
Perhaps I may ask the Minister to respond to a suggestion. When the House was dealing with the copyright Bill and the Consumer Protection Bill there was wide consultation among groups of people
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who knew what they were talking about before the Bill appeared. They were able to make sure that as far as possible it contained the elements which would satisfy most of the people who would be vocal on the matter.
Can the Minister tell us whether that kind of suggestion would be examined sympathetically by him and his colleagues? Unless the Government decide to take people with them, they will find them standing against them. It is nonsense for the Government to say that they wish to protect our environment and do many things when the people who are affected believe that the true purport of what is being done is not to strengthen environmental and ecological protection but to weaken it. People deserve to be treated as senior, adult and committed. What the Minister has done has certainly been the reverse.
5.30 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment (Lord Hesketh): My Lords, I share the sentiments and concern which have been expressed on all sides today about the need to preserve and enhance the proud reputation which the United Kingdom has earned as a pioneer in understanding and conserving wildlife and beautiful landscapes. Before going another inch in the progress of your Lordships' debate this afternoon, I wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham, on an elegant and erudite contribution to your Lordships' debate
That is all the more so when one considers that there are many who might have thought it would be worth while waiting until the next Session rather than attending on what could be assumed to be an empty afternoon. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Nicol, ensured that it would not be an empty afternoon and your Lordships' debate has been greatly enhanced by the maiden speech of the noble Lord. We were all grateful and privileged to be present to hear it.
The proposals which the Government have put forward for reorganising the conservation agencies are designed to streamline the work of the NCC and the Countryside Commission so that over the next decade we shall be in a position to respond to the increasing need for conservation initiatives in a way which respects the separate needs of different parts of the Kingdom.
I was surprised to hear these modest proposals being assailed in some parts of the House with emotive language such as the "dismemberment" of the Nature Conservancy Council. I am afraid there have been some misrepresentations in the English media, accusing the Government of various crimes, including rural vandalism. I refer to the English media because the reactions in Scotland and Wales have in many ways been supportive, as the noble Lord, Lord Craigton, pointed out to your Lordships' House. In Scotland the chairman of the NCC's own advisory committee has written to Ministers stating that:
"the new arrangements have my wholehearted support, provided that the new agency is properly staffed and funded".

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A number of other existing members of the NCC have told my colleagues that they echo these views. When our proposals have been fully digested, I believe that the whole council will come to accept the views expressed by the chairman of the influential voluntary body in Scotland, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, who stated in a recent letter to The Scotsman that they:
"could turn out to be the most effective and imaginative in our generation".
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord will also allow me to tell the House that in that same letter, the trust also stated:
"while Scotland undeniably has problems which do not apply south of the Border, we are an integral part of the UK with many cross-border links with both statutory and voluntary sides of nature conservation. It is important therefore that formal liaison is kept with England, Wales and Westminster".
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, we have in no way proposed that there will cease to be liaison. I thoroughly concur with the reputation which both the NCC and the Countryside Commission for England and Wales have acquired among conservationists for the high standard of their work over the years. How has this reputation come about? The Government's role in providing the right conditions for their work to flourish has been a help. We have done this in two main ways, through legislation and increased resources.
Many noble Lords will not need me to remind them about the Wildlife and Countryside Act which your Lordships' House passed in 1981 after long debate in this Chamber. The Act marked a sea-change in conservation. It provided the most comprehensive protection for wildlife habitats and individual species ever seen in this country. The Act stands comparison with the statutory framework of every other country in Europe and beyond, not just because of what it lays down but because of the thoroughness which has been shown in implementing the concepts and strategies it contains.
The Act has many provisions to summarise. However, I wish to mention those which created the network of new style SSSIs. SSSIs designated by the Nature Conservancy Council now cover more than 7 per cent. of the land surface of Great Britain. That should rise still further as the programme is completed; and completed it will be by the NCC and by its successor bodies. The success it has brought is also undeniable. As the NCC has reported, not a single SSSI notified under the 1981 Act has been destroyed in the past three years. A very few—but still more than we would wish—have been damaged, but the overall record for a small and densely populated island is surely a matter of pride.
None of the NCC's achievements—which go far beyond SSSIs—or those of the Countryside Commission would have been remotely possible without the resources which the Government provided to implement the Wildlife and Countryside Act. In 1979–80 government grant aid to the NCC and the Countryside Commission came to a total of £13 million. This year the NCC alone will receive some £40 million, and the Countryside Commission a further £22 million. That is a total of approximately
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£62 million. Virtually all the agency spending—99 per cent.—is provided out of government grant-in-aid. I know that there has been criticism of tighter resources this year, as the noble Baroness, Lady David, pointed out, but the overall record shows that we have increased our grant aid to the two agencies by some 134 per cent. in real terms since 1979–80.
During this decade both agencies have been transformed by their expanded duties and resources. That is particularly true of the NCC. When the council's precursor, the old Nature Conservancy, was orginally set up in 1949, it was designed to be a small research council. It was perfectly sensible that it should cover the whole of Great Britain. In 1955 it employed just 125 people. Numbers rose during the 1950s and 1960s but even in 1973, when it was amicably divorced from the NERC under the Nature Conservancy Council Act, it was intended that the NCC should employ only about 350 staff. Today the NCC has more than 1,100 staff, many of whom are deployed on the new duties given to the council under the 1981 Act.
Furthermore, the absolute size of the NCC is only part of the story. Even more significant is the fact that it has to carry out many of its functions—designating and monitoring SSSIs, negotiating management agreements, planning marine nature reserves—in areas of the country which have very different circumstances and needs. If conservation is to work it must be based on consent—active consent by the myriad landowners, farmers and voluntary bodies and individuals who are in a position to look after wildlife and landscape. The consent must be willingly and preferably enthusiastically given. Obtaining it means that the statutory agencies have to tailor and present their policies to fit the local context. Imposing them from on high simply will not work. Where this has been tried—in the Flow Country and Islay to name two examples—the effect is entirely counter-productive to conservation and a new start has had to be made.
The NCC already has country headquarters in Edinburgh, Bangor and Peterborough, and a devolved regional structure below that, implying that there is no problem. The Government questions this. Under current legislation, there is little scope for the NCC to delegate any major decisions from Peterborough. And even if it could, there will always be the impression in Scotland and Wales that an alien body, out of touch with local feelings, is attempting to impose a straitjacket on the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and the great upland areas of Wales, labelled indelibly "Made in England". Quite often the position in Scotland, and in Wales has been reached where scientifically valid arguments for a strict conservation policy have been obscured by a chorus of protest about the origin of those arguments and the manner of their presentation.
Our proposals to create separate agencies in England, Scotland and Wales will establish much clearer lines of responsibility and accountability for nature conservation. They will improve the sensitivity and efficiency with which the agencies carry out their functions, and provide opportunities

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to find further ways of carrying forward the cause of conservation with the support of the whole community, and not just committed conservationists, important though they are. They will also remove the anachronism whereby the Secretary of State for the environment is involved in the detailed implementation of nature conservation policies in Scotland and Wales through sponsorship of a Great Britain-wide body. The Secretaries of State for Scotland and Wales already exercise considerable powers in their countries, such as the making of nature conservation orders and the designation of marine nature reserves. It is only logical that they should be able to exercise them in partnership with agencies specifically attuned to the needs of Scotland and Wales, in the same way as we already organise built heritage.
I shall now say more about the position in both Scotland and Wales, where our proposals will have the further benefit of requiring integration between the work currently carried out by the NCC and the Countryside Commission. Our proposals have been fully set out in the consultative paper entitled Scotland's Natural Heritage published on 11th July. This details the special qualities and directory of Scottish wildlife and landscape, and I shall not repeat the arguments today, especially as they have been so well received by Scottish opinion. I have already mentioned the support they have received from the chairmen of the NCC's Scottish Committee and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. To these must be added endorsements from the chairman of the Countryside Commission for Scotland, Mr. Roger Carr, and the convenor of the Scottish Landowners' Federation.
Let there be no doubt that our proposals in Scotland do not in any way represent a dilution of nature conservation or of the science base on which it depends; rather the contrary is the case. We have developed proposals which best suit the different circumstances in Britain.
I now turn to the position in Wales. There too there will be a single, new body with responsibility for the functions at present discharged by the Nature Conservancy Council and the Countryside Commission. Although both bodies at present have a committee for Wales, they are purely advisory whereas we propose that the new body should have full executive powers and its own grant-in-aid from the Welsh Office. It will be responsible to the Secretary of State for Wales for carrying out all the appropriate conservation and countryside activities in Wales under the relevant legislation.
Although Wales has much in common with England, it is nevertheless a separate nation with its own culture and language. Wales is particularly rich in upland habitats which are often remote and have become the home of many rare species of flora and fauna. The same areas are also among the most beautiful parts of Wales and attract millions of walkers, tourists and holidaymakers during the course of the year. Wales also has three of the 10 national parks in England and Wales—two in the uplands (Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia) and the unique Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.
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In the lowlands, the farms tend to be much smaller than in England and a high proportion of the traditional hedgerows and other field boundaries have survived. Another important distinguishing factor is that nearly 80 per cent. of Wales has been designated an EC less favoured area. All of those special factors can be better covered by a body based in Wales, attuned to Welsh needs. Once again, our proposals have been welcomed by the majority of opinion in the Principality who see the benefit and opportunities for conservation.
I should now like to deal with two related areas where there is genuine concern—the position of existing NCC employees and the organisation's science base. When we announced the proposals, we rightly paid tribute to the achievements of NCC's existing staff who are carrying forward conservation in many different spheres. They set high standards for themselves. Many carry on their work in their own time. They are dedicated professionals. The Government want their skills and enthusiasm to be harnessed by the successor bodies.
Whenever the Government change structures in the public sector, we are asked to give assurances about the future employment of staff. That is always difficult because the new bodies will be employers in their own right and must eventually take responsibility for their own staff. However, I can say that the Government intend to ensure that all members of the NCC's staff employed by the council at the date of transfer are offered employment in the new organiltion on terms and conditions no less favourable than those that they have at present. That applies not only to staff in the regions and existing country HQs, but also to those in the Great Britain HQ in Peterborough, including scientists and other specialists.
That brings me on to the second area of concern to which the noble Lord, Lord Lewis of Newnham, drew our attention; namely, the NCC's science base. First, I should define what I mean by that concept. I define it as the scientific expertise and data held in all parts of the organisation. It does not reside exclusively in the chief scientist's directorate in Peterborough. The whole of the NCC's work is very properly underpinned by science. That must continue, but it is far from the case that all of that work requires unified organisational arrangements across the whole of Great Britain.
There are scientists employed at every level in the organisation. There are some specialisms, based mainly but not exclusively in Peterborough, which it would be difficult or uneconomic to duplicate in each of the successor bodies. There are also some functions where the need exists to take a GB or UK-wide view. We expect that the relevant expertise, including staff, and data will be utilised via co-operative arrangements between the successor bodies to enable that view to be formed and, where appropriate, for the Government to be able to obtain advice on that basis.
We are very ready to discuss those matters in detail with the NCC and other relevant interests before deciding how best to meet the needs of conservation. If necessary, the legislation will

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provide for such co-operation. The point here is that perfectly satisfactory arrangements are available within the organisational framework that the Government intend. It would be wrong to allow the understandable but mistaken concerns that have been expressed to overshadow the very real gains in conservation where it matters—on the ground—that we are determined shall flow from the new bodies.
Having said all that about the science base, I want to re-emphasise that the NCC is not a research council and already commissions most of its scientific work from other bodies such as the Natural Environment Research Council and universities. The NCC has been aware for several years that as much research work as possible is subject to competitive tender and is contracted out where appropriate. We intend to continue to apply that policy to the successor bodies.
I should like to say a few words about international issues which many noble Lords have mentioned during the debate. There appears to be a widespread belief that because wildlife crosses political boundaries, and this point was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lewis, the NCC has to be a GB body.
In fact, the priority for the conservation agencies is to ensure that wildlife is effectively protected at grass roots level in local communities, and in co-operation with voluntary bodies like the county trusts. Where advice is needed at international (and national) level, we shall make arrangements for the new agencies to provide it, and for the Government to act on it, whether in Brussels, or in the various international wildlife conventions to which the UK is party, such a CITES and Ramsar, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Nicol, drew your Lordships' attention.
We believe that there is a strong case for the reforms that the Government have put forward. I shall of course ensure that my colleagues take note of the concerns which so many of your Lordships have expressed this afternoon, bearing in mind the wealth of experience for which your Lordships' House is noted on all matters affecting wildlife and the countryside. It will be most valuable as we frame our legislative proposals in the coming months.
Perhaps I may end by saying that discussions are now taking place. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Graham, that the Welsh Office was fully consulted about the details of organisation to ensure the best way to carry forward the Government's wishes and, as many noble Lords pointed out from all sides of the House, there will be a full opportunity to debate these matters in both Houses when the Government submit legislative proposals in due course.
As the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, drew to your Lordships' attention, this is the very first and simple bite of not one but many cherries. Finally, let me say that I shall use the opportunity of the Recess of your Lordships' House to investigate the connection between Prussians and the Forestry Commission.
Baroness Nicol: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I asked whether there would be
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consultation documents for England and Wales and I do not think that the answer was among the great amount of information that he gave.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, currently consultations are taking place between the NCC and the department. We believe that those will then spread to other interested bodies such as the RSPB and so on during the autumn. I shall have to inquire about the discussion documents and in due course write to the noble Baroness, if I may.

Adjournment
5.47 p.m.
Lord Denham: My Lords, in moving the temporary adjournment of the House I think that this would be the most appropriate time to express our gratitude to all those who serve the House in any capacity whatever for their work during what I hope will prove to have been a quite extraordinary Session. In particular it must be right to recognise the extra efforts that many have had to make in order to be here day after day despite the present transport difficulties. On behalf of my noble friends on this side of the House I should also like to wish your Lordships in all other parts of the House as well as all the staff everywhere in the building a very good Summer Recess.
I beg to move that the House do now adjourn until 9 p.m.
Moved, That the House do now adjourn until 9 p.m.—(Lord Denham.)
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede: My Lords, I should like to join with the noble Lord the Government Chief Whip in expressing our thanks to all those who serve the House in whatever capacity. A special vote of thanks is due to those members of the staff of the House who, because of where they live, have had to sleep overnight in some part of the Palace of Westminster in what are perhaps not the most luxurious of conditions. Camping out in the Cholmondeley Room and elsewhere on occasion can be quite an adventure but that becomes distinctly uncomfortable when it is a weekly routine. I think that we owe a special vote of thanks to those members of staff who have had to sleep here during that period.
It has been a long hot summer, as the noble Lord the Government Chief Whip said. I think we have got through it in reasonably good temper. We have had no all-night sittings, though we sat until 5 a.m. on one occasion.
I should also like to say a special word of thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Ampthill, who has made matters more enjoyable and more pleasant for many Members of your Lordships' House with his unswerving devotion in ensuring, despite obstacles of all kinds, that a new dining facility should be opened. For a long time that has been known as the NDF. It is now called the Barry Room. It is something that I know your Lordships have appreciated.

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The Opposition feel that we have made worthwhile improvements to various pieces of legislation that the Government have brought forward. We should have liked to make more improvements to that legislation. We are sorry that another place did not always agree with what your Lordships proposed.
It remains for me to wish your Lordships a restful Recess to enable noble Lords to return invigorated in the autumn so that we continue our scrutiny and revision of legislation.
Lord Tordoff: My Lords, perhaps I may join the two noble Lords in the thanks that they have expressed to the staff in all parts of the House. Indeed, the number of people who, during the nights before and after the transport strikes, have been sleeping within the building have given service beyond the call of duty. In that category we must also remember members of the Chief Whip's own staff, to whom we are grateful. We are grateful to the Chief Whip for his benign and cheerful countenance throughout this period, knowing full well that he is a man who never becomes irritated even by people on the other side of the House.
It has been a trying Session. I am sure we all agree that we are glad to be away to the country or to our holidays wherever they may be taking place. At 9 p.m. no doubt the Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill will be rapidly dispatched. It is a temptation at that stage to move against it, and to find that there are not enough people to get it through, and the Government would not have any money during the summer. But we shall certainly resist that temptation.
I pay tribute to the Clerks of the House, and the Hansard writers in particular. I remember that recently we had to adjourn the House during pleasure on five occasions one night, finishing at 1.20 in the morning. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, and I were filling in time by what can only be described as a filibuster. One then remembered that there was a need for Hansard writers to take down our perhaps not altogether serious remarks. Indeed, the Editor of Hansard herself was down here undertaking that task. We are eternally grateful to them not only for the work that they do in the House but for the work that is done in committees, both by the scribes and by the clerks in those committees.
With all those remarks, I am sure that everybody will agree that we are very well served in this House by all the staff. I hope that all noble Lords on all sides of the House will have a refreshing and welcome break during the summer.
Baroness Hylton-Foster: My Lords, the Cross-Bench Peers are very happy to be associated with the expressions of thanks that have already been expressed. We are very happy to endorse the congratulations and thanks to our Cross-Bench Refreshment Committee chairman. We especially wish to mention those who refused to be defeated by the rail and other transport strikes and who, despite all the frustrations that must have been aggravated by this hot and very humid weather, were
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always there to do their jobs and always there to help us, smiling and with good will. We on the Cross-Benches wish all Peers and staff a trouble-free and very happy Recess with their families.
On Question, Motion agreed to.
[The Sitting was suspended from 5.55 to 9 p.m.]

Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill
9 p.m.
Brought from the Commons endorsed with the certificate from the Speaker that the Bill is a Money Bill; read a first time; then, Standing Order 44 having been suspended, Bill read a second time; Committee negatived; Bill read a third time and passed.
Viscount Long: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now adjourn during pleasure until 9.10 p.m.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
[The Sitting was suspended from 9.5 to 9.10 p.m.]

Royal Assent
9.10 p.m.
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

Appropriation Act,

Finance Act,

Pesticides (Fees and Enforcement) Act,

Representation of the People Act,

Electricity Act,

Dangerous Dogs Act,

Human Organ Transplants Act,

Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Act,

Extradition Act,

Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act,

Continental Shelf Act,

Associated British Ports (Hull) Act,

London Regional Tansport (No. 2) Act,

Hayle Harbour Act,

Queen Mary and Westfield College Act.

Continental Shelf Bill [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons earlier this day agreed to.
Extradition Bill [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons earlier this day agreed to.
Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons earlier this day agreed to.
Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Bill
Returned from the Commons earlier this day with the amendments agreed to.
Hayle Harbour Bill [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons earlier this day agreed to with amendments; the amendments considered and agreed to.

Queen Mary and Westfield College Bill [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons earlier this day agreed to with amendments; the amendments considered and agreed to.
House adjourned for the Summer Recess at twelve minutes past nine o'clock, until Monday, 9th October next.