Lords Sitting of 5 December 1990

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Bradford.

GATT: Uruguay Round
Lord Jay Lord Jay asked Her Majesty's Government:
What action they are taking to prevent the collapse of the GATT Uruguay round.
The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Hesketh): My Lords, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry is this week leading the United Kingdom delegation to the ministerial meeting in Brussels called to conclude the Uruguay round of trade negotiations. Working with our Community partners he will certainly be making every effort to encourage participants to take the difficult decisions needed to ensure success and so strengthen the multilateral trading system.
Lord Jay: My Lords, since the extreme agricultural protectionism of the EC is as damaging to this country as it is to world trade, will the Government now make a maximum effort to ensure that more adequate and convincing concessions are made by the EC before it is too late?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord will not expect me to negotiate from the Dispatch Box. However, it is perfectly true that without an agreement on agriculture the round will not succeed. The EC must be prepared to move further if necessary to secure an agreement in the final negotiations.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, is it not an acid test of the economic management of the Community that in the interests of a successful Uruguay round it should be prepared to curb the excessive protectionism in particular of France and Germany?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I hope that my previous answer in part answered my noble friend. However, it is also worth reminding your Lordships' House that the proposed United States demands for a 75 per cent. reduction do not include deficiency payments, which form a substantial part of its funding for its agriculture.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that the wrangling over the GATT talks at present exposes the hypocrisy of claiming that there is any such factor as a free market in world trade? Does he recognise that the subsidies which are being given to farmers in Europe and North America are causing starvation and poverty throughout the third world?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, it is always a pleasure to have the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, placing his finger on
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the pulse of the problem and confirming that which I knew to be true: that the free market is the key to removing the iniquities that exist in our world.
Lord Harmar-Nicholls: My Lords, does one risk being dubbed non-communautaire if one states that the failure of the GATT talks would be more damaging to the world than the disintegration of the Delors proposals arising from the Treaty of Rome?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am sure that, if the noble Lord were to put down a Question on his second point, I or another Minister would be more than happy to answer it.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that the common agricultural policy lies at the root of the problem with regard to Europe? Is he aware that, according to the recent draft budget published by the Community, agricultural expenditure is due to increase by £2.496 billion and that the consequent net burden on the United Kingdom will be an additional £300 million over and above the £2.2 billion already in the Government's expenditure plans? Will he take steps through the Council of Ministers to terminate this ramshackle common agricultural policy?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, it is important to remember that the common agricultural policy is not only a name but that it involves people. If there were further reduction in expenditure on direct aid to food production, the Commission would be committed to increase expenditure with regard to the social dimension. That is particularly true with matters that are environmental or production neutral.
The negotiations are extremely difficult. They go far beyond agriculture. There are problems over services and intellectual property. It is important to remember that a record number of 107 countries, with 5,000 delegates representing those 107, are involved in a very difficult and complex round of which the CAP is only a part.
Lord Boardman: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that, whatever the iniquities of the CAP, it would be unreasonable to expect the British farmer—I stress "British" farmer—to make further sacrifices when operating in an already extremely depressed industry?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, as I pointed out in my previous answer, in order to provide protection on the point that my noble friend makes, the Commission is committed to increases in expenditure even though there is also a commitment to reduce production.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, will the Minister accept that we on these Benches, who have always been the greatest supporters of the Community, have never supported a fortress Europe approach? In these negotiations there are signs of the emergence of fortress Europe, which we greatly deplore. Will the Minister agree that if we cannot achieve our desired settlement some kind of settlement in the Uruguay round is better than total failure?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am sure that on all sides of your Lordships' House there is a desire that we should not have total failure because the consequences

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would be extremely grim. The situation in Brussels is fluid and, as I said earlier, I am sure that the noble Baroness would not expect me to enter into negotiations from the Dispatch Box.
Lord Rees: My Lords, will my noble friend confirm that agriculture has played a predominant part in the present and the two previous GATT rounds? Will he also confirm that there is at least a suspicion that it is used to distract attention from other areas where protectionism is rife and that other countries are advancing claims against the European Community?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, my noble friend is entirely correct. It is fair to say that agriculture has provided a smokescreen over the various other sectors to which I referred earlier. They have not been as extensively aired in the press in this country but they are equally important.
Lord John-Mackie: My Lords, in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, did the Minister say that the free market is the solution to the food situation? If so, I refer him back to the 1926–34 period during which we had a free market in food. If he would care to consult people about what happened, particularly his noble friend Lady Elliot, he would form different ideas about a free market in food.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I was referring to the principle. The noble Lord, Lord Hatch, suggested that this example showed that the free market satisfied nothing. I believe that in asking the question he answered it: that the free market was the route to salvation in the overall picture of the GATT negotiations.
Lord Morris: My Lords, to what extent and for how long have the United States Government been protecting and subsidising their farming interests?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, that is another question which I shall be more than happy to answer if my noble friend tables it.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, will the Minister convey to his right honourable friend who is conducting the negotiations the virtually unanimous desire in this House for success? Furthermore, will he indicate that the Prime Minister is taking an interest? Has the Prime Minister been in touch with Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand in order to obtain some relaxation in the present Community position on agriculture?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that I shall convey his message to my right honourable friend. The Prime Minister is constantly in touch with other leaders within the Community but I cannot say whether he has been in touch this afternoon.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, in view of the meeting between Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand should not the Prime Minister be in touch in order to press the point?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am sure that the Prime Minister is capable of making such a decision on his own.
Lord Jay: My Lords, if all else fails is this not a case, if ever there was one, for the heads of government to get together and not to go away until they have reached a sensible compromise?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, it is important to remember that the negotiations on behalf of the European Community are being conducted by the Commission. The Ministers are behind the Commission and the issues at stake are being discussed. However, we are negotiating as a European Community.

The Gulf: Concessionary Telephone Calls
2.47 p.m.
Lord Stallard Lord Stallard asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will arrange with British Telecom to permit service personnel stationed in the Gulf to make at least one free telephone call to their next of kin during the Christmas period.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (The Earl of Arran): My Lords, in consultation with British Telecom, Mercury and Cable and Wireless, we are giving urgent consideration to the establishment of a welfare telephone link between the Gulf and the UK and Germany. A trial system is currently being tested.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that Answer, though it is not clear. I am sure that thousands of people are glad that something is being done and that the Government are bowing to press and public pressure. Can the Minister give a little more detail, because the press releases from Mercury and British Telecom are not clear? They appear to be hedging about prices, telephone cards, available boxes, reversed charges and below standard charges. What is the position, because my Question asks for a free telephone call to relatives?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, we hope that an easier and more understandable position will be announced by the Ministry of Defence within the next few days. The system that we aim to establish will operate on a telephone card basis. I am pleased to be able to tell your Lordships that the British Legion is aware of the matter and has generously offered to sponsor one free telephone card to all service personnel in the Gulf. Noble Lords will agree that that is a wonderful gesture and will provide a great boost to morale, particularly with Christmas fast approaching.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, the last part of the Minister's answer is well received. However, is he aware that the facility is already available to the majority of the forces of other countries now serving in the area? Why must our people wait? Is red tape holding things up? If so, will the Government cut through it, get on with the job and make the facility available as a matter of urgency?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord that this is an urgent matter and we are giving it serious attention. We are confident that a system will be in operation well before Christmas. The Americans

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tried a free charge call originally but I understand that that has now been changed and that instead there is improved access to telephones. However, American users must pay the current rate. Our charging arrangements have yet to be determined but they will almost certainly be on a concessionary basis rather similar to that existing at present in Northern Ireland where a 50 per cent. subsidy is given.
Lord Shepherd: My Lords, bearing in mind the very heavy burdens which are continually placed on the British Legion, is it really right that we should leave it to the British Legion to provide that essential service at Christmas time to our forces who are on duty on our behalf in Saudi Arabia? Is it right that that should be left to the British Legion with all its present burdens? Should we not bear some part of the cost?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, that is precisely what I said. We are looking at this matter and the probability is that the scheme will be subsidised on a concessionary basis.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, will the noble Earl tell the House whether British Telecom or Cable and Wireless are making any contribution in monetary terms to this project? Is it entirely a matter for the British Legion and possibly a subsidy from the Government? What are British Telecom and Cable and Wireless doing?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, the final details as to who pays what are still being ironed out by the Ministry of Defence. When the details are announced, I am sure that that point will be incorporated.
Lord Mayhew: My Lords, if it is not too wide of the Question on the Order Paper, will the noble Earl also look into broadcasting services for the forces? Members of the parliamentary delegation who recently visited the Gulf thought that that was important and that some heads needed knocking together in this country.
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, there is a slightly tenuous link between the noble Lord's question and the Question on the Order Paper. However, BFPS already uses spare BBC world service short wave frequencies for three 30-minute programmes per day. There are deficiencies in that system which is why we are at present looking at the possibility of increasing the VHF system, which we hope will be in place soon. However, I do not anticipate that that will be much before March.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, will the Minister agree that all sides of the House are very anxious about the welfare and morale of British forces everywhere, and particularly in the Gulf? Will he not agree that the matter of cheap communication is of some urgency, particularly as there are only 15 shopping days to Christmas?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend, but I have tried to make it clear that well before Christmas a system will be in place which British forces will be able to use on a very good concessionary basis.
Lord Glenamara: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that most of the international telecommunications in
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the Gulf countries are owned by Cable and Wireless? Can he not contact his noble friend Lord Young, who no doubt could arrange such a scheme without difficulty?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Young is a splendid man but we are in full command of the situation and can act accordingly and responsibly in a short time.
Lord Orr-Ewing: My Lords, the noble Earl mentioned March as being the earliest date by which broadcasts can be provided in the Gulf. That will be nine months after the invasion. One and a half hours of broadcasting per day is not very much for forces serving in a featureless area without any amusement. Surely in a matter of days, or a week at the most, transportable VHF equipment could be in place so that radio receivers can pick up transmissions in that area. Can that not take place more rapidly?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, there is a target date of 16th December for VHF broadcasting to troops in Eastern Saudi Arabia within a 20 mile radius of Al Jubayl. The March date concerns transmissions to a much wider area.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Young, may well be splendid and the noble Earl and his right honourable friend may well be in command of the situation. However, will the noble Earl take account of the question put by my noble friend Lord Glenamara who is also expert in these matters? Can the Minister not arrange for his right honourable friend to talk to the noble Lord, Lord Young, to see whether better arrangements can be made?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, no system is perfect. If the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition wishes it, then I shall ask my right honourable friend the Secretary of State to speak to my noble friend Lord Young to see whether any improvement can be made to the existing situation.
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, I hesitate to interrupt but we have now spent nearly 18 minutes discussing two Questions. Perhaps I may suggest that the noble Lord, Lord Mason of Barnsley, asks his question and then we move on to the next Question.
Lord Mason of Barnsley: My Lords, can the Minister inform the House of the estimated total cost of providing that facility for the troops if it is borne wholly by Her Majesty's Government?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, the total cost has not yet been calculated but that will be considered when the details are worked out and announced shortly.

Refugee Council: Proposed Reception Centre
2.56 p.m.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs Baroness Ewart-Biggs asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they support the proposals from the Refugee Council and others for a new reception centre for unaccompanied refugee children.
Lord Reay: My Lords, the proposals from the Refugee Council and others for reception and assessment services for unaccompanied refugee children make a useful contribution to consideration of the issues in this complex area. They are being carefully considered. A formal response will be sent as soon as possible.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, in the light of the totally inadequate conditions in which these children are being held—for example, in town halls and unsupported in hotels—does the Minister agree that his Answer lacks a sense of urgency? If the Minister cannot respond to the Refugee Council's proposals, can he tell the House what government initiatives can be put into effect to help those children? Does he also know the official number of unaccompanied refugee children in the UK at present and what resources the Government are giving specifically to help those children in 1990–91?
Lord Reay: My Lords, separate figures for unaccompanied children under the age of 18, identified on arrival, have been kept only since 20th August 1990 when we became aware that this was a significant problem. Thirty-four children have arrived between that date and 26th November.
In response to the first point made by the noble Baroness, I can only repeat what I said in my original Answer; we consider that proposal to be a most useful contribution. We are looking into it and we shall take a decision as soon as we possibly can.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, this problem has a particular urgency with regard to Kurdish refugees from Eastern Turkey. Can the Minister assure the House that every effort is made to reunite children with their relatives who are already in this country?
Lord Reay: My Lords, I take note of the noble Lord's suggestion and I am sure that everything possible is being and will be done.
Baroness Faithfull: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that under the Children Act, homeless children are the responsibility of social services departments? At present those departments in this country are undermanned and can hardly carry out their statutory duties. It is impossible for them to deal with the refugee children as they would like if they had the necessary resources.
Lord Reay: My Lords, my noble friend is right in that she says that the local authorities have a statutory responsibility in that area. The Government appreciate that the arrival from overseas of large groups of unaccompanied children can present local authorities with a problem. That is a matter about which there have been discussions.
Earl Russell: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether the Government have considered the costs, direct and indirect, human and financial, of allowing the situation to continue? Can he say whether the Government regard those costs as acceptable?
Lord Reay: My Lords, apart from considering the specific proposal made by the Refugee Council, the
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Government are urgently reviewing all arrangements relating to those seeking asylum as a result of the sharp increase in the numbers in recent years.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, did not the Refugee Council, under the distinguished chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis, put forward proposals to the Government as long ago as July this year? I believe those proposals were based on guidelines and suggested the setting-up of a new agency funded by government departments. Is it not time that the Government recognised the urgency of the situation and made some constructive response to the proposals? When will the Government reply to the proposals of the Refugee Council?
Lord Reay: My Lords, we accept that this problem needs to be looked at. We are doing so, and shall make our replies as soon as possible.
Lord Richard: My Lords, can the Minister give the level of funding currently provided by the Government specifically towards the care of refugee children for 1988, 1989 and 1990? Can he also tell us the projected figure for 1990–91? Somewhere in the bowels of the ministries in Whitehall are assessments of what the cost will be. I am sure it would be helpful if we had that information.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am willing to undertake to scrutinise the bowels to see whether I can discover the figures requested by the noble Lord.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, in view of the heavy costs to local authorities of maintaining and caring for these children, can the Minister say whether the Government will reimburse local authorities?
Lord Reay: My Lords, the Department of Health had meetings with representatives of local authorities regarding the recent influx of unaccompanied children, in particular from Eritrea. The department is considering whether there is a case for special funding to assist with the cost of providing for those children.

Nineteen Year-Olds in School: Support
3.2 p.m.
Baroness David Baroness David asked Her Majesty's Government:
What financial help is available to allow a 19 year-old student with no financial support from his family to complete a course at school or sixth form college if it is interrupted through illness or other cause.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment (Baroness Blatch): My Lords, local education authorities have discretion to award grants, known as educational maintenance allowances, to young people who choose to remain at school beyond the age limit for compulsory schooling. It is entirely for the local education authority to decide whether it wishes to use them.
Baroness David: My Lords, I expected that Answer. The problem is that local authorities do not have the money to do that at the moment. The Government changed the social security system to deprive these young people of housing benefit and income support.

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Does not the Minister think that these young people who, through no fault of their own, are still in the non-advanced system of education, should be given some form of help? We constantly hear that the Government wish to improve the participation rate of young people in higher education. If they are forced to leave in the middle of taking an A-level course, as some I have known, this situation will not help them.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, the noble Baroness will not be surprised that I disagree with her. Local authorities are responding to the needs of these young people. First, perspective is important. As of January this year, from the most recent Form 7s, as the noble Baroness will be aware, there were 307,140 young people in the 16 to 19 year-old bracket; of that number, 19-pluses accounted for only 1,261. Against that, awards made in 1987 were 1,633 and last year 1,873. The needs of the most vulnerable in that category are being met by local authorities.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the sums available for educational maintenance allowances paid to individual young people are so low that any young person of 19 who is not receiving financial support from his or her parents will be unable to continue a course? Will the Minister agree that, in a situation where we are desperately trying to increase participation rates in full-time education, that is entirely unsatisfactory?
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, the degree to which a young person is helped will be a matter for the local authority assessing the needs of a particular individual. It also needs to be said that a large group of vulnerable young people receive help not only from the local education authority but also from the Department of Social Security. They include children of single parent families; children who may be orphans without an acting parent or guardian; children with severe mental handicap or physical disability which means that they are unlikely to find work within 12 months of leaving school; young people, estranged from their parents or guardians, who may be in physical or moral danger; young people whose parents or guardians are in prison, chronically sick or mentally or physically handicapped; and young people whose parents are prevented from entering or re-entering the country. That accounts for a proportion of those 19-pluses. That must be added to the way in which local authorities consider other needs of local young people.
I believe that the needs of the most vulnerable in that age group are being addressed. Those who are able-bodied and fall outside that category are deemed to be able to see out the school year without financial assistance.
Lord Gisborough: My Lords, can my noble friend say what provision there is for people who are no more than simply late developers?
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, all sorts of people are late developers. If they choose to remain at school beyond the statutory age, they are deemed to be able to be sustained by their families. If they fall into any of the vulnerable categories I mentioned, or find
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themselves severely disadvantaged by staying on at school, the local education authority has the discretion to address their needs.
Baroness David: My Lords, is the Minister aware that it is not always through choice but often through necessity and what has happened previously that these young people are still in the non-advanced system of education? I was glad to hear the figures given. However, I should like to know whether the amount of money local authorities are giving—when they give it—is adequate to provide both housing and maintenance for a young person for the full course of their school year.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, we are speaking of the area of discretion for local authorities. We could spend time discussing the increase in local authority spending over the past decade. The priority given to this area is a matter for the local authority. The particular circumstances addressed by the Question tabled by the noble Baroness, concerning young people of 19-plus who are still at school due to a long-sustained illness, fall into the category for which a local authority could give sympathetic consideration to any application.

Business
3.6 p.m.
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, I should like to say a word about this afternoon's short debates standing in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Holme of Cheltenham and Lord Hampton. As the mover is allowed 15 minutes and the Minister should rise to reply not less than 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the debate, in the case of the first short debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, the number of speakers is such that it is not necessary to propose a formal time limit. But I am sure that noble Lords will agree that it would conform with the spirit of these short debates if they would keep their speeches within the 15 minutes which apply to the mover of the motion. In the care of the short debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, it means that all other speeches should be limited to a maximum of 12 minutes. If any noble Lord should speak at greater length he would do so at the expense of subsequent speakers in the debate.

Shard Bridge Bill Tees and Hartlepool Port Authority Bill
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Aberdare): My Lords, I beg to move the first Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That any Petitions relating to such Bills presented in the last Session shall stand referred to the committees on the Bills in the present Session; and that the last day for the deposit of a Petition against such Bills shall be the day following the day on which the Bills are brought from the Commons—(The Chairman of Committees.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

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

Airedale, L.

Campbell of Alloway, L.

David, B.

Templeman, L.

Thomas of Gwydir, L.

Wilberforce, L.—(The Chairman of Committees.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Bill of Rights
3.9 p.m.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham Lord Holme of Cheltenham rose to call attention to the case for the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into United Kingdom law as a Bill of Rights; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Motion calls for attention to be paid to the case for the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law as a Bill of Rights. It is worth saying that in moving this Motion I feel both some pride and some embarrassment. The pride I feel is that I am a member of the party which has kept the torch alight for this specific issue in this House over many years. I refer to the consistent activities of Lord Wade. Donald Wade brought before your Lordships' House, on no fewer than three occasions, Motions for a Bill of Rights. He was a staunch supporter of this cause and would have been pleased to see how wide is the interest and support that now exists in this country for the proposition that I bring before the House today.
I am also very glad to be able to speak in this Chamber on this subject because in 1985, the last occasion on which your Lordships debated it, a Bill was brought forward by the noble Lord, Lord Broxbourne, with the active involvement of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, and I was able from outside the House, as chairman of the Constitutional Reform Centre and chairman of the rights campaign, to work with them closely on that Bill. It is a particular cause of disappointment and sorrow to me that neither is able to be here today for this debate, as they would have wished to be.
Any embarrassment that I feel is, first, because I am not a lawyer. I am a new Member of the House, which can be remedied by time, but I am not a lawyer and at my time of life I do not expect to be a lawyer. This is a subject which attracts lawyers, as can be seen from the noble Lords who intend to speak today. However,
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I do not believe that, in the end, the issues concerning a Bill of Rights in this country should be monopolised by lawyers. It is a subject on which lay voices should be heard and I am glad that I have this opportunity to be the voice of a layman.
The embarrassment I really feel is on behalf of this country. We are now the only country in the Council of Europe that does not have either a Bill of Rights or a written constitution. I am sure that we shall be told later in the debate that that is our glory, but I do not believe that it is. It is a great weakness of this country that we are the only country that is not prepared to delimit and demarcate the powers of the state, that we are the only country which is not prepared to have the rights of its citizens as a rock on which good government and genuine democracy are founded.
Some people may say that democracy and the demands of democracy are met by the election of Parliament, the House of Commons, and that that is both necessary and a sufficient condition for human rights and freedoms to be reflected. I do not take that view. First, Parliament has been elected by a minority of the electorate. Incidentally, how noteworthy it is that the German election has produced a fair result, conducted on a proportional representation system, in which the government will be based on a majority of the citizens of the Federal Republic.
However, even if we had a genuine majority government in this country, instead of alternating minority governments, we would have to pay heed to the wise words of John Stuart Mill that the rights of minorities are not always respected by the majority, that there are minorities and individuals who need permanent and enduring protection. It is in that spirit that I bring forward the Motion this afternoon.
Although I am pleased as a Member on these Benches to have this opportunity to introduce the Motion, it is worth emphasising that this has not been, either in the country or in this House, primarily a partisan issue. The cross-party support on the occasion of the Broxbourne Bill and the cross-party support shown when that Bill was revived in the other place by Sir Edward Gardner the following year demonstrates that there is interest and support across the party spectrum.
Even more recently than that we have seen interesting expressions of support by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a Right-wing think-tank, for the prospect of incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights, and next week the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank linked with the Labour Party for producing policies for the Left in Britain, is to publish a paper called A British Bill of Rights. That institute is presided over by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone—she is not in the Chamber at the moment—and I am delighted, having been sent an advance copy of the paper, to be able to congratulate her on it and express the hope that the institute will have a benign effect on the formation of Labour Party policy on this important subject. Therefore, there is interest across the political spectrum.
In 1985 we drew particular encouragement from the support of the then Lord Chancellor, recently retired, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, who I am glad to see is here this afternoon.
Many people would go further than the Motion. Many would say, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, said in his Hamlyn lectures, that there should be a written constitution in this country with entrenched rights. My own party holds that view. However, the Motion has much more modest aims. It proposes simply to take the European convention and make it part of British law so that British citizens in British courts may have access to the rights for which at present they have to travel a long, expensive and weary road to Strasbourg. The Motion proposes to domesticate and bring into our domestic laws those rights which at present can only be obtained in Strasbourg. It does not have the profound constitutional implications in terms of the sovereignty of Parliament that a written constitution or a fully entrenched Bill of Rights would have.
It may be worth while recapitulating for your Lordships the history of the European Convention on Human Rights. It was ratified by the Labour Government in 1951 after considerable misgivings. Lord Jowett, who was then the Lord Chancellor, advised the Labour Cabinet against ratification. Interestingly, one of the reasons he gave for advising against ratification was that the consequence would be that,
"we shall have to bring in legislation applying the conditions of the Convention to our domestic law".
He saw clearly that the inevitable consequence of ratification would be that the Motion we are now discussing would become a pressing reality.
The European Convention on Human Rights is not some alien piece of law codification. It represents the classic rights with which we are familiar in this country: the rights that have figured in most international statements of human rights and international conventions to which we are also signatories. The drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights was largely undertaken by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, later Lord Kilmuir. The wording, language and spirit of that convention in many ways reflect the best of the British tradition and approach to rights in our own common law.
Moving on, in 1966 the Government accepted the jurisdiction of the court and accepted the right of individual petition. Since 1966 we have been the most active customers—if I may put it so irreverently—of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. We have had more cases brought before that court than any other country in Europe and we have had more judgments made against us. We are a large European country so to some extent that is understandable.
However, the list of cases does not make altogether happy reading. They include: inadequate safeguards for personal privacy against phone tapping; ill-treatment of suspected terrorists in Northern Ireland; unfair discrimination against British wives of foreign husbands under the immigration rules; and dismissal
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of workers on account of the operation of a closed shop. There is also the famous Sunday Times thalidomide case which rested on freedom of speech.
As I have said, it is possible for a British citizen to seek remedy and justice in the European Court even without incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. However, that process is expensive. It can take up to seven years and the costs in terms of both time and money mean that the remedies available for breaches of human rights are not normally available to ordinary citizens whose rights have been infringed. Thus it is not surprising that in 1977 the Standing Advisory Committee on Human Rights in Northern Ireland recommended that we should incorporate the European convention. Interestingly, that is one of the few issues which unites all parties in Northern Ireland. If there is an issue on which the whole political spectrum is united in Northern Ireland it is that there should be incorporation of the European convention and that that should be available to citizens in Northern Ireland.
In 1978 your Lordships' House established a Select Committee which recommended by an extremely narrow majority—one—the incorporation of the European convention as a British Bill of Rights. We are now 12 years further on and nothing has happened. I wish very briefly to recapitulate the arguments for bringing the convention into our domestic courts. First, I have in a sense already mentioned ease of access and the closeness to remedy. Secondly, there should be in a European convention an openness of texture which would make it possible for future generations gradually to develop and interpret rights in the way that they are in other democracies such as the United States, and be responsive to the changing needs of society. Thirdly and crucially, the convention is to check the exercise of improperly administered power by the Executive and the state.
For most of the time we live in a country in which the intention of government of all kinds, including government agencies and local government, is honourable and administration is fair. But that is not always the case. To paraphrase Lord Acton, power is delightful; absolute power is absolutely delightful. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, has said that too easily in this country we find ourselves with a system which is more properly characterised as an elective dictatorship where there are not limits on the exercise of executive power of the kind that other democracies take for granted.
Finally, I suggest that in many ways the most compelling argument for incorporation of the European convention is that it would have an effect on the democratic system as a whole and on the values by which we conduct our public affairs. Bills framed with a Bill of Rights in mind would be Bills more properly framed. Greater care would be taken by civil servants in the execution of their duties and they would be sensitive to the need not to encroach on the position of the citizen.
Yet at the same time there are powerful arguments which should be acknowledged against a Bill of Rights and even against the incorporation of the European convention. First, doubts are expressed about the judiciary. Some will say, particularly those on the Left, that it should not be for judges to concern themselves with matters which are the exclusive province of elected officials. It is fair to say that the selection and training of the judiciary are areas in which it is possible to imagine that, in a perfect world, there might be improvements. The independence of the British judiciary and the fact that we have the potential for a system of checks and balances is one of the glories of the British system. There is the possibility of checks and balances. British judges have to take the law as they find it. The law which they find does not include this broad, generous tradition of human rights which a European convention would import.
The other argument used is that any Bill of Rights would meet head on the problem of parliamentary sovereignty. I readily acknowledge that is a problem. However, the Motion does not in any way seek to encroach on parliamentary sovereignty. Those who would like a more comprehensive constitutional settlement have to face up to the fact that it would affect parliamentary sovereignty and that we would move to a system of checks and balances in the full constitutional sense. That is not what the Motion says. It says that we should incorporate the European convention.
If Parliament chose to incorporate the European convention as a Bill of Rights, a subsequent Parliament could repeal that Act. As long as the Act was in place it would be incumbent on Parliament expressly to suspend, repeal or amend that Act; otherwise subsequent legislation would be deemed to be in accordance with the Bill of Rights. In fairness, it must be said that those who believe that we should go down that path hope that we shall have a kind of moral entrenchment of the Bill of Rights of the European convention. Over time it would begin to assume the character of something which the citizens respected and which any government would be reluctant to repeal.
There is now a new and urgent imperative for us to consider the incorporation of the convention. It rests on the international developments of the past year or two. In this House on several occasions we have found the opportunity to applaud the changes which have taken place in Eastern and Central Europe over the past year. The drive in those countries towards democracy, though still precarious, has been spectacular. It is interesting that our new partners in Eastern Europe have learnt the hard way that there are no short cuts when you want to set up a system of democracy and human rights. They are not always exactly the same thing, though they are closely connected.
They have learnt the need to enshrine inalienable rights within the law so as to guard against future totalitarian regimes. At the Copenhagen meeting of
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the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe the participating countries, which included Hungary and Czechoslovakia, declared:
"human rights and fundamental freedoms will be guaranteed by law and in accordance with (participating States) obligations under international law".
The conference document commits the signatories to,
"consider acceding to a regional or global international convention concerning the protection of human rights, such as the European Convention on Human Rights".
As a direct result of that conference the Czechs are now in the process of incorporating the European convention into their domestic law. Hungary has already committed itself to incorporation.
The United Kingdom was also a participant in the CSCE Copenhagen conference, but I regret to say that our Government have not followed the example of Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Our Government have taken no steps towards incorporation. Yet on 5th August this year, in Aspen, Colorado, our then Prime Minister called for the creation of a Magna Carta for Europe. She said, in very inspiring words:
"I propose that we should agree on a European Magna Carta to entrench for every European citizen, including those of the Soviet Union, the basic rights which we in the West take for granted. We must enshrine certain freedoms for every individual: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of access to the law and to the market place; freedom to participate in genuinely democratic elections; to own property".
She concluded by saying that there should be,
"freedom from fear of an over-mighty state".
At the conference in Paris held two weeks ago those commitments were repeated and in a sense they were built on. Yet Britain has done nothing to entrench those basic rights in our own domestic law. Britain is now in grievous danger of being accused of double standards. If we continue to urge entrenchment of human rights on other countries, why are we not prepared to take our own medicine?
It is possible that some noble Lords think—they may even say so later in the debate—that Britain has a long tradition of democracy and an excellent record on human rights, but, unlike the states which are only just shaking themselves free from totalitarianism, has no need of such remedies. I hope that I have been able to explain why I believe that is not the case. European law is now creeping and seeping into our judicial system. Would it not be better in the case of European human rights law to face that directly, to welcome it into our domestic law and so enrich our domestic law with it? I should like to see this country become a leader and not a laggard on the question of human rights. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.30 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord for introducing this important subject for debate. It is assuredly not my purpose to extinguish the flames of the torch carried by the noble Lord, only to use that torch to seek to illuminate another corridor of approach. As to embarrassment, my embarrassment on this occasion is that I am a lawyer. I wholly accept that there is no monopoly of lawyers and that the ultimate decisions

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and opinions are the lay decisions taken in your Lordships' House. But that having been said, I do not think we have to worry too much about taking lessons in democracy from Czechoslovakia, Hungary or elsewhere.
Although incorporation of the convention into United Kingdom law as a Bill of Rights is opposed, there are, however, many matters upon which I hope we can all make common cause. A means of resolution must assuredly be found so that effective and appropriate action may be taken by the Government to resolve the problem of the absence of a remedy in the United Kingdom for breach of convention. A means of resolution other than that proposed by the noble Lord, which was not considered by the Select Committee of your Lordships' House set up to report on the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Wade, will be proposed, but tentatively proposed, for your Lordships' consideration.
At the outset, let us clear the decks and let us state the matters on which we can make common cause. First, if United Kingdom rights were to be repatriated, to use the term of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, but not in the sense in which he used it, the vast majority of cases would find a remedy in the United Kingdom, with Strasbourg as a long stop, and this horrifying spate of adverse judgments against the United Kingdom since 1975 would be stemmed. Can we not make common cause on that?
Secondly, the extant system of "ad hoc" domestic legislation —it really is post hoc propter hoc legislation—to give effect to these adverse judgments is wholly unsatisfactory. Surely some form of judicial process must be established to adjudicate here in the United Kingdom on alleged breaches of convention in the light of the relevant body of jurisprudence, with power to afford a remedy within the meaning of Article 50 of the convention, thus depriving the Commission and the Court of Justice of jurisdiction to entertain complaints as to breaches of convention owing to absence of a domestic remedy, which is the present position.
Thirdly, if a Bill of Rights were to be introduced, this would not substantially infringe the sovereignty of Parliament, and the judiciary would be capable of interpreting a Bill of Rights. The arguments for and against a Bill of Rights Act to incorporate the convention into United Kingdom law were fully considered at paragraphs 32 to 34 of the report of the Select Committee of your Lordships' House set up to consider the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Wade, a proposal on which the Select Committee was split right down the middle. The noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, split with the five who dissented on the proposal. That is not exactly the background on which we can all go forward. That is why I am seeking to find another corridor.
The next matter on which surely we can make common cause is that by ratification of the Treaty of Rome and the Single European Act we have accepted the supranational effect of Community law as interpreted by the Court at Luxembourg, which in practice applies the convention and the jurisprudence
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of the Court at Strasbourg. I turn to the last matter on which I am sure we can all make common cause. The time has now come when, as a facet of a new approach to our treaty obligations in Europe, consideration must be given to affording a domestic remedy in the United Kingdom for breaches of the convention.
There are objections to incorporation by direct supraimposition of general application by statute, whether under a Bill of Rights or not. Certain articles of the convention—Articles 8 to 11 in particular—are concerned with political issues which are more properly for Parliament to decide and not the judiciary. Secondly, the form of the convention is not apt for general application by direct and immediate supraimposition by statute.
I shall quote if I may the speech of Lord Elwyn-Jones in the debate on Lord Broxbourne's Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms Bill in December 1985. It was a remarkable speech which I shall always remember and in which, having done his homework as he always did, Lord Elwyn-Jones cited the observations of the noble and learned Lords, Lord Diplock and Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, in support of his views. I shall not weary your Lordships by quoting all of it. It is there for noble Lords to read and most noble Lords have no doubt read it. He said in one sentence that:
"this uncertainty … may well result in a great increase of litigation in our courts if these provisions become part of our law". [Official Report, 10/12/85; col. 190.]
One could argue for ever whether he was right or wrong; but what is unarguable is that if that is the considered opinion of a jurist of such eminence, it would be hazardous to ignore it.
As regards the proposed resolution, in the light of full discussion and debate on the Bill of my noble friend Lord Broxbourne, it is accepted that any attempt to enlarge the process of judicial review would not be appropriate and that my personal attempts in this regard were wholly misconceived. However, it is suggested that there are two viable options, either of which, if implemented, would render incorporation of the convention into United Kingdom law by a Bill of Rights unnecessary. That is the corridor which I would use the noble Lord's torch to illuminate.
We should either set up a special court with plenary jurisdiction to adjudicate on all complaints on alleged breaches of the convention in the light of the relevant body of jurisprudence, to afford declaratory and injunctive relief and to award damages in compensation: thus to afford a full and effective judicial remedy within the meaning of Article 50 of the convention.
On the other hand, we could appoint a commissioner to entertain all such complaints, as was proposed some 20 years ago by Lord Silkin of Dulwich in his Protection of Human Rights Bill which, alas, was counted out in another place. In either event, express statutory provision would be requisite and there should be a right of appeal, but only with leave, direct to the Appellate Committee of your Lordships' House. Of course, the special court would be more satisfactory, but it would also be more expensive.

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This is not the occasion upon which to consider the precise manner in which either institution would discharge its functions so as to afford an effective remedy under a new set of statutory rules or regime. The rectitude of the principle in question, and the machinery for effective operation, could be considered not only by your Lordships today, but also by my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor, the Law Commission or a Select Committee of your Lordships' House.
There is no doubt that the time has come when action must be taken by government. Even if in today's debate your Lordships are not agreed upon the form of the action to be taken, that does not dispose of the essence of the problem; namely, that action must be taken. I beg to move for papers
3.45 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, it is some time since this important issue last had an airing in this House. The noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, has done us a service in raising the issue and doing so in such a persuasive way. In my innocence, I thought that there would be genuine agreement on one point; namely, that if there were to be a Bill of Rights, it would be best achieved by incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights. But I am now not quite so sure on the matter, having also seen an advance copy of the document to which the noble Lord referred. However, that is what the Motion suggests and that is what we are debating today.
The convention is far from perfect. Indeed, it is somewhat inelegant, notwithstanding its provenance. For example, it does not deal with economic, social or cultural rights. But to try to evolve yet another code and drag in the international covenant on civil and political rights when we and so many others are committed to the present convention would cause enormous problems.
Opinions begin to differ when one goes on to consider whether incorporation in our domestic law is the right course. There is certainly a case for doing so. We all believe in human rights; we are signatories to the convention; and, as the noble Lord pointed out, the other signatories embody the substance of the convention either in their written constitution or in their domestic law; and we are unique in looking on the Strasbourg court, slow and underfunded as it is, as in effect a court of first instance. When I had the privilege of chairing the Select Committee of your Lordships' House on this question in 1978 —and when as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, reminded us, I ended up by voting in the minority—I was then persuaded that the arguments against incorporation into our law were stronger on balance. Over the years, I have remained of that opinion, and on the information at present available I remain so. I shall try to illustrate the reason behind that view.
It has long been the practice in this country to legislate in a specific form and entrust to the courts the role of interpreting such legislation. As we all know, the convention proceeds in a totally different way. It
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provides for rights in the most general terms. It also provides for permissible exceptions to these rights—again, in the most general terms. If it were made part of our domestic law, overruling anything previously on the statute book, a number of consequences would follow. It seems to me that in the first place it would introduce a wide-ranging element of uncertainty.
Let us take as an example Article 8 of the convention. The article states that everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. But it goes on to say that there can be interference by a public authority with this right, if necessary, in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or for the protection of the rights and freedom of others. That is quite a list.
No one would know what those very general provisions meant in our law until the courts had laid it down—and it had not been reversed in Strasbourg—on the accident of the cases coming before them. That would apply in areas covered by a number of articles such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, privacy, breach of confidence and contempt, to name but a few. It would be the courts, the unelected judges, and not Parliament who would be saying what those words in the Bill of Rights meant.
It may be said that we have already incurred that uncertainty by subscribing to the convention; but, as a set of principles of domestic law, the convention would have a life of its own and could be invoked all the time in our courts which would have to make decisions, probably without any guidance from the jurisprudence in Strasbourg. Nor would it be a question of giving to our judges a similar role, in relation to the convention, as is played by the judges at Strasbourg.
What the Strasbourg court says in essence, if it finds against us after measuring our domestic law against the yardstick of the convention, is that we have not acted in accordance with the principles enshrined in the relevant article of the convention, and that we had better go away and put things right. That we do, if possible, by administrative actions but if need be by legislation under the ordinary parliamentary procedure, as with telephone tapping or caning in schools.
There may be various ways in which the problem could be met, and there is opportunity under that procedure for thought and consultation as to which of the ways would be best. However, if the convention were part of our domestic law, as I see it, it would fall to the judges to say, there and then in a particular case, what the relevant article meant in our law, since that article would be up-to-date law and would override any previous statutory provision. The judges would have to do that on the spot without being in any way equipped to review possible alternative ways of dealing with the problem. Many of us would find it hard to take that judicial encroachment into matters we have been brought up to believe are for the legislature.

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The noble Lord mentioned entrenchment. I am not a lawyer, but I believe that the legal advice we received on the Select Committee about entrenchment did not match the views that he expressed. However, we might possibly agree that we should be left with a position of moral entrenchment.
The inevitable consequence of any such development would be that the judges would tend to become embroiled in political issues. As the noble Lord said, there are those who believe that the judges are not suitable to be the policy makers on issues such as freedom of thought, conscience and religion, provided for in Article 9. That is not the point that I am making. I am trying to say that they would be considering arguments, and applying criteria, which on any ordinary basis would be regarded as political. One has only to look to the USA to see a supreme court which concerns itself with issues which here would clearly fall to be settled by the legislature. For example, abortion, capital punishment, telephone tapping and compulsory sterilisation for the sub-normal.
The result there is that the political, philosophical and social views of the members, or would-be members, of the court are matters for public debate and scrutiny. It is not a fate which one would wish to see overtaking the judiciary here; but I do not see how it could be altogether avoided if the noble Lord, Lord Holme, were to have his way. I recall that it was that consideration that primarily led the late Lord Diplock (for whom I have the highest regard) to come down against incorporation.
It is on such grounds that I still come down against incorporating the convention into our law and against a Bill of Rights in the form suggested by the noble Lord. My noble friend Lord Lloyd of Hampstead, who is out of the country, has authorised me to say that he shares those views.
There is one final point: there are risks of exaggerating the importance of a decision on this issue, whichever way it goes. Even more important to my mind are the depths of society's commitment to human rights and values, and the vigilance of Parliament, the courts and the press in protecting those rights. A society which is contemptuous of them will not be made virtuous by Act of Parliament. We hear a great deal about the American Bill of Rights; but, after all, it did not provide much of a protection against McCarthyism. Therefore, despite the eloquence and force with which the Motion was moved, I find myself, on balance, on the other side.
3.56 p.m.
Lord Hutchinson of Lullington: My Lords, with this debate, as your Lordships will have already seen, the Chamber is following a well-trodden path. We have had two Bills and the report of the Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Allen. If I may say so, we have never had the case put better than it has been by my noble friend Lord Holme.
I should like to place the matter in the context of recent events. When the Prime Minister stood on the steps at No. 10, he said that he wished to see a Britain at ease with itself. That was a most significant
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statement. It signalled (did it not?) an end to the strident divisiveness of recent years and foresaw a society which, being at ease with itself, is one surely in which the individual feels truly free, and where restraints on freedom are willingly accepted; where those who abuse civil rights are clearly identifiable and accountable. Furthermore, it is a society where information is readily available upon which to bring such abuses to book, and where a citizen's vote will to his knowledge count in the election of his representatives.
The debate points the way therefore for Mr. Major if he means what he says. Today the citizen wants to know what are his civil and political rights; where they are to be found; and how his children are to learn what they are. He wants to know how he can assert those rights, and so he needs access to the law which alone can offer him protection against abuse. We see around us today a profoundly dissatisfied society where people are confused as to what are their rights and where access to law is made less possible year by year.
No matter in what area one works, or in what activity one participates, the ordinary person is frustrated and at odds with the Government. Thatcherism has been obsessed with the concept of authority; with the centralisation of power; and with the paternalism of "we know best-ism". In every Bill that reaches the House, we find clauses removing power from the individual and vesting it in Ministers and civil servants. That culminated in the legal services Green Paper in which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor blatantly aimed to bring the administration of the law itself under the will of the Executive. The noble and learned Lord was finally forced by the House to abandon that aim.
The long list of men overboard from the ship of state, and the unceremonious manner in which the skipper herself was required to walk the plank, would seem to indicate the launch of a new, sounder and more stable Tory vessel. It could be one that could happily take on board at long last the incorporation of the European convention. Why not? The noble Lord, Lord Allen, who is a most distinguished mandarin, set out a number of reasons against incorporation. That does not surprise me. He speaks of the uncertainty of Article 8. The answer is that in over 30 cases which have gone from this country to Strasbourg the European judges have not found the slightest difficulty in coming to a conclusion within the terms of the convention and finding justice for the individual in this country.
The noble Lord said that the convention would have a life of its own in the legal system of this country. When one hears someone as distinguished and experienced as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, saying that there would not be the slightest difficulty so far as he was concerned in incorporating the spirit and the essence of the convention into British common law, one cannot help feeling that one would side with him on the issue.
The noble Lord, Lord Allen, speaks of the encroachment of the judges on Whitehall. He looks upon that with the greatest possible fear. The judges

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would be involved in political decisions, he says. Is not the tapping of phones of ordinary individuals a matter for the courts? What about the "Belgrano"? What about the ABC case? What about the Sunday Telegraph case? What about Spycatcher? What about GCHQ? Are all these matters to be kept out of the courts and away from the judges because they have political overtones? Of course they have political overtones, but far more importantly they affect the civil rights of the individual.
In our complex world of information technology, freedom of the individual can no longer be defined negatively as it was in more leisurely and insular days in this country. "You can do or say anything which is not prohibited by law" is a wholly unworkable and inadequate principle, I suggest, in the face of the torrent of rules and regulations which now govern the behaviour of the citizen. People must now know where they stand. They seek assurance that officials—the police, immigration officers, civil servants, local government officers, politicians; yes, even prison personnel—should be clearly accountable for the power which they wield. Surely it is a sign of political immaturity to continue to cling to the myth of the protection of the absolute power of the elected Chamber to which my noble friend referred, the myth of undiluted parliamentary sovereignty, at the expense of individual justice.
The power race at present is: first past the post, minority rule, an all-powerful executive with a massively powerful Prime Minister, a weakened and undemocratic second Chamber and a denigrated and frustrated local government. That is where we stand today.
The convention sets out—brilliantly, I suggest—the individual rights to which every citizen is entitled in a democracy. That is only his civil and political rights. It provides machinery by which an individual may secure those rights; machinery which is undoubtedly cumbersome and elaborate, but no wonder when it embraces the first unique stride forward under the umbrella of the Council of Europe towards a true international community of civilised states and of course a route which was envisaged as a last resort. Why should our citizens alone compared with those of our powerful neighbours have no first resort to this basic justice in their own country? Why should they have to embark on the long, five-year trek to Strasbourg, supported by lawyers who largely take no fee?
These questions should be put to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor. With the greatest respect to the noble Lord who is to reply to the debate, it is the noble and learned Lord, with his authoritative voice, who is responsible for the judiciary. He has been, I regret, conspicuously reticent on matters of human rights, unlike one of his illustrious predecessors—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham—whom we are happy to see in his place this afternoon.
Perhaps the noble Lord was in communication with his noble and learned friend before this debate. I
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wonder whether he has asked him why a prisoner should have to go to Strasbourg to establish his right to see a lawyer or stop wrongful interference with his correspondence if he is in one of Her Majesty's prisons. Why should a mental patient have to go to Strasbourg in regard to his illegal detention? Why should a newspaper have to go there about an article truly inconvenient to the Government and suppressed? Why should a suspect subjected to inhuman treatment have to do so? Why should a prisoner who is subject to inhuman and degrading treatment have to go there? Why should a homosexual who is subject to discriminatory treatment have to do so? Why should a foreign husband banned from joining his wife in this country have to go there? Why should a juvenile subjected to degrading punishment have to do so? Why should a long-term prisoner kept incarcerated for years on the say-so of a junior Minister have to go there?
I ask the noble Lord also: why should at least 20 other of our fellow citizens have been forced successfully to seek justice in serious matters of principle in Strasbourg rather than here in London? Why has all that been necessary? Why have at least 80 laws and regulations been either repealed or amended as a result of these long journeys to Strasbourg? No doubt the noble Lord will give his answer in due course.
Do the Government believe that our judges alone in Europe are not to be trusted to interpret and uphold the provisions of the convention? Faced with the ever-increasing misuse of power by public bodies and in the absence of incorporation the judges have adapted the common law by a process of judicial review of administrative actions. So on a very limited front they have upheld their historic role of standing between the state and the citizen. For years, in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the judges have been interpreting bills of rights incorporated in Commonwealth constitutions, modelled in almost every case on the European convention itself.
If it is not the unfitness of the judiciary, is it in reality the fear of any independent curb upon executive power? That is a fear so clearly evidenced by Whitehall's distaste for the doctrine of judicial review. Hitherto the Labour Party has wrapped up its reluctance with the populist cry of judicial prejudice and conservatism. However, the views expressed recently by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and the noble Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg—I am happy to see the noble Lord in his place—give one hope that the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, may have seen the light himself and will tell us later in the debate of his party's conversion to the policies of Charter 88 and the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Only on these Benches has the clear principle been consistently spelt out and advanced that, ultimately, protection of human rights and freedoms can only be guaranteed by a tribunal which is wholly independent of the Executive and is free to interpret and to apply the law set out in the convention.
Therefore in the end I am not embarrassed to say that that must be a matter for the lawyers. It is the

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independence, the training and the selection of the judges which will ensure the effectiveness of such a tribunal and the achievement of a Britain which is truly at ease with itself.
4.11 p.m.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, I join in the congratulations offered to the noble Lord, Lord Holme, for bringing us once again round this well-trodden course, but I fear that the noble Lord may be disappointed in two respects. First, he can hardly have assumed that his noble friend Lord Hutchinson of Lullington would seize this occasion to deliver a party political oration on the follies of the Government. However, the other disappointment, which is the more serious for our debates—this relates to the arrangement of our affairs—is that the debate has been arranged for a time of day when none of the noble and learned Lords who sit in their judicial capacity can be present.
As it appears to me that a great deal must turn—the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, mentioned this—on the impact on the judiciary of the proposals put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Holme, I believe the whole House would have profited from the guidance of those who hold and have held high judicial office. In that sense, and with due deference to the ornaments of the two branches of the legal profession who have addressed us or are to address us today, I must say that we lack the guidance that we might have expected and which could easily have been provided if the times of the two debates today had been reversed.
I, like everyone else—this is a well-endowed think-tank —have received and studied the effusion that has come from the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and her friends. It is indeed a gratifying piece of research which those of us who approve or disapprove of the idea of incorporation can only profit from. However, the thing that I found most interesting—the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, must have found this the most disquieting aspect of the paper—is that the authors of the paper admit that there is no great popular clamour for change. There is no clamour coming from outside these walls from the masses of an enraged people. It is coming, let us say, from the intelligentsia. It has always been my belief that the salvation of this country is that the intelligentsia has so little influencia.
The kinds of matters to which the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, has referred and which are mentioned at length in the think-tank paper are matters on which a section at least of thinking people have strong and unexplored views. However, they are also matters on which a great many other people take a wholly opposite view. Some people believe—they are entitled to do so—in the absolute supremacy of individual rights over the public weal as defined by Parliament or by government, but others believe the contrary. The noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, and the authors of the think-tank paper regard the denial of trade union membership to persons working at GCHQ as a moral outrage. Those of us who are very concerned with this country's capacity for collecting intelligence which may be of vital importance to our security and to our relations with our allies take an
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opposite view. We are, I believe, equally entitled to take that view. However, it is assumed by those who hold opposite views to mine that if only a Bill of Rights could be incorporated somehow or other matters would always come out the way they wanted them to be.
The noble Lord, Lord Holme, was undoubtedly right to call our attention to the legislative history of this remarkable document of the European convention. However, at his age the noble Lord would not have had direct memory of the circumstances of the post-war period when this instrument was framed. I doubt whether the late Lord Kilmuir, to whom the noble Lord, Lord Holme, gave credit for much of the authorship of the measure, or his fellow workers at the Council of Europe, really thought they were providing a yardstick which governments, parliaments and judiciaries of democratic countries in the West could live by. What they put on record was what they believed had been the experience of Europe under Nazi rule. They were, in a sense, pledging the countries of Europe to ensure that that did not happen again.
The transformation by the Commission and the court at Strasbourg of that document into something which could make inroads into the domestic lives of people in the initial member countries was, I believe, not forecast at the time. If it had been forecast, it might have led to a somewhat different document. It is undoubtedly desirable that citizens should be protected. Here for once I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, in that I believe there are a great many ways in which our legal system is deficient in protecting the interests of all citizens, particularly because of delays and the limitations on legal aid. The latter matter has frequently been referred to in your Lordships' House. None of those crucial questions seems to me to be likely to be dealt with by some case finding its way to a new supreme court or a new supreme commission, or whatever was charged with the British end of litigation.
There may be arguments about the politicisation of the judiciary. On the whole, I go along with the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, in his remarks on that matter. It has not been answered. Anyone who has followed recent events in the United States will know that that can be a difficult question to answer. Quite apart from that and the added complexity and length of litigation, there is the matter of whether in a parliament which has all too little time for tackling issues of this kind, we are not turning our attention to what is in a way a gesture and away from areas where the legal protection of citizens or particular groups of citizens should be a subject of worry. I say "a gesture" because I am not convinced. That is why there is no popular backing as the authors of the policy report suggest.
I doubt whether Britain's record on questions of human rights is regarded as very poor in the light of the set of cases in which its laws have been found deficient by the European Court. If I were contemplating a brush with an agency of government, with the police or with the courts, on the whole my

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chances of justice would be better in this country than in a number of countries which are signatories to the convention which may well not have a similar list of cases brought against them, possibly because their litigants have not been keen to proceed.
Furthermore, as has been mentioned, there is the question of the cost of taking a case to Strasbourg. However, the cost would not be diminished because, as I understand it, if the convention was incorporated into our law and we had a British court of first instance we could not block a right of appeal so long as we are signatories to the convention. Therefore we would be adding another step, further delay and additional cost for a potential litigant. That is something which those who approve of such a court should consider. It is curious that we should regard it as possible or desirable to treat the genuine problems that exist in such an extraordinarily roundabout way.
No doubt it is true that the late Lord Kilmuir and others from this country played some part in drafting the convention. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, who knows a great deal about the subject, has said, it is not a document which could be adapted naturally to the writing of a statute. The noble Lord did not go so far as to say so, but he may agree that it has the stamp of the civil law rather than of the common law. If the noble Lord, Lord Holme, had suggested not incorporation in British law—which is a very curious concept—but in Scottish law, that would have been a much more plausible case because Scotland is notorious for its interest and affection for Europe. English common law has got along—the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, does not think that it has got along very well, but most people in this country think that it has—on the basis of an existing Bill of Rights (the fruit of our Glorious Revolution), on the basis of Magna Carta and on the basis of the independence of the judiciary, fortified by statute after coming into being as a result of custom.
I refer your Lordships not to another report but to a passage which I read in your Lordships' Library yesterday—I admit that I was not in the Chamber for the New Roads and Street Works Bill. I was reading the memoirs of the Russian dissident Alexander Herzen, who describes two trials in London in the early 1850s. One was the trial of a group of people who had taken part in an illegal duel, and the other of someone accused of complicity in an attempted assassination of the Emperor Napoleon III. He gives a marvellous description of the Lord Justice Campbell, dressed in what he calls a female dressing gown, and a wig which distorted his carriage, and so forth, and the well, beef-fed British jurors. How different it was from what he would have seen at a similar trial on the continent of Europe, on which he had lived. The acquittals or very light sentences delight him. To paraphrase him, he says that though quaint, British justice is still something of which Europe can be proud. That comment might inspire our views on this Motion.
4.25 p.m.
Lord McGregor of Durris: My Lords, almost five years ago to the day your Lordships' House debated this issue in connection with a Bill moved by the noble Lord, Lord Broxbourne. The main arguments on both sides were rehearsed. They have been cogently summarised today by my noble friend Lord Holme of Cheltenham, to whom we are all most grateful for giving us the opportunity for this debate. I have nothing to add to what was said in the debate in 1985 and to much of what has been said today. I shall therefore be brief: my purpose is not to argue but to testify.
I accept the analysis of my noble friend Lord Hutchinson of Lullington of the central arguments deployed by the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale. The European Convention on Human Rights was the product of a change in international law, described by the late Paul Sieghart in his survey of the dramatic development of human rights in the aftermath of Hitler's war as,
"so profound that it can properly be called a revolution. Today, for the first time in history, how a sovereign state treats its own citizens is no longer a matter for its own exclusive determination but a matter of legitimate concern for all other states and their inhabitants".
That revolution was the result of the devastating and shameful experience of Nazism, as the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, said. It was the result of the popular clamour for rights to render impossible experiences such as those of the 1930s.
No wonder the noble Lord, Lord Alexander of Weedon, in 1985, when chairman of the Bar Council, observed:
"The European Convention is a charter for citizens".
The extension and enforcement of the convention for the benefit of some 400 million people inhabitating the states which have adhered to it establishes a common citizenship of rights which many regard as a great watershed in the history of European freedom.
We should never forget the vitality and crusading power inherent in the concept of rights. When we last debated the assimilation of the convention into English law in 1985 I ventured the belief:
"When the convention is seen alongside today's technical potentialities of the electronic media, the outlook for liberty and the enjoyment of rights may be brighter than many of us have feared. Authoritarian governments have been compelled these past 40 years to pay lip-service to human rights, and they will soon lose the power as a result of new technologies to restrict and control what their subjects may listen to and even what they see on their screens".—[Official Report, 10/12/85; col. 186.]
Two recurring themes of the arguments against the assimilation of the European convention into United Kingdom law as a Bill of Rights are, first, that our system requires Parliament in the end to decide. But we did not need M. Delors to tell us of the uniqueness of Parliament, as our final legislature nowadays wears the pallid look of impending superannuation. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone, said a dozen or so years ago in his Richard Dimbleby lecture:

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"The pass has already been sold … By joining the Common Market we have put at risk both the administrative acts of ministers and the provisions of Acts of Parliament."
A second recurring theme of the arguments against assimilating the convention is that it would change the role of our judges. Our courts play no part in interpreting a convention to which we adhere by treaty and which applies equally to British citizens as to those of other member states. The view, again of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, was that assimilation,
"proposes no more than that which European judges are already bound to decide if need be against the British Government and the Parliament of the United Kingdom … is it to be supposed that our own judges are so stupid or so biased that they are not to be allowed to decide these matters for themselves?"
Or, it may be added, the rest of us, who lack immediate access to the remedies provided by the convention which would be given by assimilation.
I prefer to take my chance with the judges in the sure expectation that they will translate the civil law of the convention, to adopt the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, into our common law if only they had the opportunity.
4.33 p.m.
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, if I may, I should like to make a few preliminary observations on a matter which is not before us today. This is the first occasion on which I have preceded the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, when he has not been the Labour Party's spokesman on Home Office affairs. I think it is right, I hope on behalf of the whole House, to refer to the debt that we all owe to the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, for the work he has performed when representing the Labour Party on Home Office issues. Often we have agreed with him; sometimes we have disagreed with him, and at times quite sharply. Nevertheless I think he has done a duty, sometimes on behalf of the whole House, and we owe him a great debt of gratitude.
Several noble Lords: Hear, hear!
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, I turn now to the subject of this debate. My noble friend Lord Holme has dealt with the issues of principle underlying the debate, and I agree with him on the central propositions which he put before the House. The issues I intend to raise this evening cover far narrower territory; namely, the price paid by British litigants before the European Court of Human Rights as a result of the failure of the United Kingdom Government to incorporate the convention into our domestic law.
I accept at once, as I think we all do, that many of the provisions of the convention have no analogy within our own law. There are, for example, few remedies in relation to Article 8, the right to private and family life and correspondence; to Article 10, the right to freedom of expression and to hold, impart and receive opinions and information; and to Article 11, freedom of assembly and freedom of association.
As many Members of the House will be aware, and as I have indicated, the delays involving British
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litigants are substantial. Those engaged in formulating petitions have to follow a long and complicated process; often our domestic law is silent or insufficiently clear and the petitioners have to institute proceedings in British courts before an application can be made to the European Commission. Then, after the delays which are inevitable there, a petitioner can put his case before the European Court of Human Rights, on the assumption of course that he succeeds before the Commission.
I should like, if I may, to give a few examples of the damage done to many of our fellow citizens because of our failure to incorporate the convention in our domestic law, with the consequence that they cannot ask British courts to deal with their grievances under the terms of the convention. I turn first to the case of Messrs. Webster, Young and James. My noble friend Lord Holme made a passing reference to this extremely important case. I suspect it will be within the recollection of a number of your Lordships that in July 1975 the three railway trade unions reached an agreement with British Rail which provided that henceforth membership of one of the three unions would be a condition of employment.
Between February and June 1976 these three men were dismissed because of their failure to join one of the railway unions. A month later, in July, applications were lodged with the European Commission on Human Rights. On six separate occasions between 1978 and 1979 the British Government, through its representatives, asked for extensions of time to present their case. Three years later the European Commission found against the British Government, and after a further year the British Government succeeded in meeting their fourth time-limit. In August 1981 the European Court found against our Government. It therefore took five years for these men to secure justice: three men thrown out of their jobs because of an agreement between the railway unions and British Rail which was wholly inconsistent with our obligations under the European Convention.
I turn now to the second case, that of Mr. Sidney Golder. In October 1969 Mr. Golder was segregated from other prisoners after a disturbance in one of our prisons. It was alleged that he had assaulted a prison officer—a charge not proceeded with because it was eventually discovered that at the time of the alleged assault he had been in another part of the prison under the control of a group of prison officers. However, Mr. Golder believed that he was denied parole because the false information which suggested that he had assaulted a prison officer had been lodged in his file.
Mr. Golder decided to write to his Member of Parliament and the local chief constable, to draw their attention to his version of the events and the ensuing hardships he had been subjected to as a result of this chain of circumstances. However, the prison governor stopped the letters on the grounds that Mr. Golder had failed to raise the subject matter of the letters through the authorised channels, as at that time required by the prison rules. Subsequently he was refused permission to consult a solicitor with a view to

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commencing civil proceedings. Once again this case wound its weary way through, first, the European Commission and subsequently the European Court of Human Rights. The total time involved was five years. That was for a man who had been treated deplorably by representatives of the British state.
I come now to the third and most recent example. It is the case of Messrs. Thynne, Wilson and Gunnell. Those men are non-mandatory life sentence prisoners currently in custody. Mr. Thynne has been in prison for 15 years, Mr. Wilson for 18 years and Mr. Gunnell for 25 years. Both Mr. Wilson and Mr. Gunnell were released for a time but were recalled from their periods of licence. That was one of the issues before the European Court of Human Rights.
Perhaps I may concentrate on the case of Mr. Wilson. He first attempted to assert his rights in the British courts. He failed. Eventually he put his application to the Commission in October 1985. The court gave judgment in October of this year, eight years after he had first raised the issue in the courts. What did the European Court of Human Rights decide with regard to those cases? It held that there had been a clear breach of those men's rights under Article 5(4) of the convention. The court took the same view of this matter as did the Select Committee of your Lordships' House on murder and life imprisonment in a report so far, I fear, ignored by the Government. The court took the view that it was wrong for the Executive by itself to take the ultimate decision as to when to release such prisoners. As the Select Committee stated, and the Court of Human Rights has also said, that decision must be made by a tribunal which has the characteristics of a court of law.
I know that we shall be dealing with that issue when the Criminal Justice Bill comes before this House from another place. But can we really tolerate a situation in which the prisoner to whom I have referred—namely, Mr. Wilson—has had to wait eight years for justice, and all because the European convention is not incorporated in British law? If it had been, there is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Wilson, Mr. Thynne, Mr. Webster, Mr. Young, Mr. Golder and all the others would not have experienced such appalling delays in having their cases considered.
I could give a lengthy list of other cases in which similar deplorable delays have taken place for precisely the same reasons. They are cases involving the rights of mental patients under compulsory confinement, judicial birching in the Isle of Man, and the laws of contempt to which my noble friend referred under which a ban was imposed on an article on thalidomide in the Sunday Times.
We have a situation in which, as my noble friend Lord Hutchinson said, 80 United Kingdom laws and regulations have had to be repealed or amended as a result of proceedings under the convention. Yet still there is this last ditch effort by some to prevent incorporation. Many Members of this House, and many outside it, are convinced that far more must be
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done in this country to buttress the civil rights of our fellow citizens. The first essential step on that road is to incorporate the convention into our domestic law.
4.45 p.m.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, perhaps I may first thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, for the very gracious remarks that he made. I appreciate them.
In thanking the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, perhaps I may say that in the streets of Cheltenham at the moment the cry of human rights is not quite irrelevant. I thank the noble Lord, I believe on behalf of your Lordships, for introducing the Motion in such an eloquent way. The noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, has a vigorous sincerity matched only by the vigour of his speech. He asked me if I would see the light. If on grounds of personal safety I do not wish to tread the road of Damascus at this moment I know that your Lordships will understand.
However, I certainly will revert to what I believe to be my party's view on the subject matter that we have been discussing so interestingly this afternoon. To say that this House, or any part of it, is in favour of human rights and progressing them as much as possible is the equivalent of saying that this House is in favour of justice, goodness and righteousness. There is no section in your Lordships' House or in another place that would not immediately advocate the protection of human rights. The question that your Lordships have to answer, as I see it, is how best to do that. Does one do so by incorporating the convention into our law?
It is a strange but interesting exercise to ask why our country has never been tempted to enter into a written constitution. With his usual eloquence, the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, with his great knowledge of history, referred as though in similar terms to the matter that we were discussing this afternoon, to Magna Charta, and a Bill of Rights, a celebration of which we had last year by way of a tercentenary. Magna Charta of course represents an argument between the barons and the king, not the citizen and the king. The Bill of Rights was a matter between Parliament and the king, not the citizen and the king or the citizen and Parliament.
This afternoon we are considering the question of individual human rights, and the best way of protecting and enforcing them. I revert to this question: why have we not yielded to the temptation, if temptation it be, of a written constitution? Historians have tried to answer that question in modern times. At least one of them came to the conclusion that it was because we have had no really violent change in our history ever since the successful invasion of these shores in 1066. By the grace of God there has been no repetition of that. Of course there had been a brief period of a commonwealth but there was a reversion to the monarchical system—modified as it may have been—which had preceded the commonwealth.

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Because one finds that in the United States and France a violent change was followed by the need for a constitution, those countries have one. When we gave freedom to those who had been in our empire, who were starting an entirely new era in their history with an entirely new system of government, we ensured that they too had a constitution. Before one embodies a written code into our legislation, one has to ensure that it does not have the looseness, the argumentative creation, and the lack of clarity of some constitutions.
That is necessary from the point of view of our tradition. The subject has been raised in the debate but in a way which differed slightly from the way in which I propose to deal with it. If our courts have jurisdiction to interpret a law and to penalise people who break it, it is with our worthwhile tradition that the law is clear, precise and our judges can interpret it easily. Without creating law, they are declaring what already is the law.
The noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, spoke of political connotations. I paraphrase because that may not have been his exact phrase—
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, that was not a phrase that I used.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, I made a note of the phrase that the noble Lord used: it was "political overtones". I am not referring to political overtones but to political decisions. The noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, was right in quoting to your Lordships Article 8 of the convention. At this moment your Lordships must appoint yourselves as judges. In this context you have not to be lawyers in order that you may decide matters. The article states:
"There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right".
The right is to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. The article continues:
"except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society".
Is that a political or judicial decision? If I ask your Lordships as judges to interpret what you feel ought to be in a democratic society, am I asking you for a legal definition or interpretation or for a political answer to a political question? The article continues:
"in the interests of national security, public safety",
and I suppose that there could be evidence of that from the Ministries of Defence and Transport and the Home Office,
"or the economic well-being of the country".
In our adversarial way of conducting proceedings in court, is that an issue that judges should be called upon to decide? Are these not political matters for a political body? Have we not Parliament to deal with them? Is it so wrong that we have the sovereignty of Parliament? We have done pretty well with it so far in regard to the freedom of our subjects, even though there may be gaps. If there are gaps, what is the best way of dealing with the situation—
Lord Hutchinson of Lullington: My Lords, looking at Article 8, is the noble Lord's case that he would prefer the Executive to come to court and say, "That
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is in the interests of national security", and the court would have to accept that; or for the court to decide, "Well, we hear that but is it necessary in a democratic society?"
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, I can answer that question very well. I should hope that, in dealing with national security in a court that is open to the public and to visitors from abroad, we should not have the Ministry of Defence arguing that a matter is in the interests of national security and giving reasons, a counsel for the other party arguing that in his view it is not in the interests of national security and the judge having to decide what is in the interests of national security. I stand by that and by precisely the same argument as regards economic well being.
I answer the argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, by asking the question: what is my party standing for in this matter? Is it that we too are among those who have no regard for the freedom of the subject and human rights? I do not endeavour to enter into a competition, but I believe that my party has been standing up for human rights and those citizens who are not often able to speak for themselves. I am proud of that tradition. I do not deny that other parties have also participated in the fight for freedom and human rights but my party's tradition is very proud.
If, as was said by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, there are cases where human rights are not protected according to the law of our land and we must go to Strasbourg or to a convention to argue the matter, what is Parliament doing by not legislating in the clearest possible terms in regard to such matters? Are we incapable of doing so? With our long history, must we go to Strasbourg for a lesson? There are areas, and we all know them, where there is a gap in our law. My party—
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord. Does he recall that when the Government of which he was a distinguished supporter legislated in the Webster case I warned the House—and I was contradicted from the Woolsack —that there was a breach of the human rights convention at the time the matter was being debated here? We were beaten down.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, I always regret the noble and learned Lord being beaten down. There have been only a few occasions during his lifetime when that has happened. If we were responsible for one of them we made an interesting chapter in his biography.
I was saying that there are gaps in our law in regard to human rights and we on this sidle of the House know of them. There are issues of safeguarding privacy, the security powers in our land and protecting human rights in many directions. We have said that we shall produce a freedom of information Bill. We have said that by legislation we shall protect private rights from intrusion. There are also other areas for consideration. All I ask of your Lordships is to give my party the power to introduce those Bills before you. I know that they will have your Lordships' support.
4.58 p.m.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, for raising what has proved to be a worthwhile topic for debate. He expounded his case with ability, clarity and fairness. We have heard many important contributions. I agree with some of the points made by the noble Lord; in particular that the subject should not be monopolised by lawyers. I hope that in the time available I shall be able to touch on most of the points which noble Lords raised.
The Government are firm believers in and supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights. Let there be no doubt about that. Now that we have just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the opening for signature of the convention, we see that these basic rights have stood the test of time.
Since the UK ratified the convention, there has been debate over the years as to whether we should incorporate its provisions in our domestic law. The Select Committee on a Bill of Rights of your Lordships' House which sat in 1977 and 1978 concluded that in any country, whatever its constitution, the existence or absence of legislation in the nature of a Bill of Rights can in practice play only a minor part in the protection of human rights. The committee also concluded that it had received no evidence that human rights were better protected in countries which had a code of basic rights embodied in their law than they were in the United Kingdom. I see no reason to think that matters have changed in the interim.
Nevertheless, we must recognise that there is criticism of the fact that we have not incorporated the European convention on the grounds that there have been a number of unfavourable judgments against us in Strasbourg. However, that needs to be put in context.
We have heard it said that we compare unfavourably with other countries when the ECHR league table, as it were, is consulted. Statistics in this field can give a false impression; for example, of the 26 court findings of violations by the UK five concerned similar child care cases heard simultaneously. Moreover, there is no distinction between major and minor violations and there have been cases in which the UK has been vindicated in respect of the major issue, although a finding is recorded against us on a minor subsidiary point. I should add also that our record in providing a remedy is a good one and violations have been recorded against us even though we have subsequently changed the law.
In relation to decisions of the court, one has to recognise that the statistics take no account of when a country accepted the right of individual petition. The UK accepted the right of individual petition since 1966, whereas a number of other countries have accepted it much more recently; for example, France and Spain in 1981 and Turkey in 1986. Since, in addition, it can take five or six years for an application to be decided by the court or Committee of Ministers, it is not surprising that fewer violations have been
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found in the case of those countries. We regard as fallacious, therefore, the argument that breaches against the United Kingdom demonstrate the need for incorporation and would argue that we have a good record overall.
It has been suggested that Parliament can no longer adequately protect our citizens and that as government activity increases in complexity, the need for protection is all the greater, but afforded all the less. But we consider incorporation of the convention into domestic law would not bring the advantages claimed.
It is the Government's firm view that imposing on the judges a duty to interpret the convention would add a new and undesirable dimension to their current role. That new role would be to decide broad issues of policy. The more we draw judges into political matters, the more shall we impinge on the constitutional concept of the political neutrality of the judges in terms of the general public's perception of them.
It is worth reminding ourselves that in respect of judicial review, which was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, the grounds of challenge do not extend to the merits of the action under challenge. In judicial review the courts do not seek to substitute their view for that of the Government on such matters as national security and the public interest. The courts are concerned with the procedure whereby the act in question was taken, not the action itself.
I mentioned the judges' role in judicial review simply to emphasise that those who say that requiring them to interpret the convention would introduce no radical change are, in our view, being unduly optimistic.
I do not doubt for one moment that British judges would be far better placed than those in Strasbourg to decide what does and does not comply with the convention in the British context. But that is not the point. The point is that at present judges are charged with interpreting and applying the will of Parliament as set down in precisely drafted statute law. Interpreting the principles set down in the convention would be an entirely different matter, and would involve the weighing of policy issues and conclusions being reached on the basis of the judges' perceptions of the public interest.
As the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, said—and I hope that I have better luck than the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, in finding the exact words which the noble Lord used—judges would tend to become embroiled in political issues and, like the noble Lord, I should find it hard to take the judicial encroachment on our traditional procedures.
The commission and court have tended to construe the various articles in the light of political, social and ethical developments in Europe. This approach has meant that the court and Committee of Ministers have, on occasion, reached decisions which would have been quite unforeseen at the time of our signature and ratification. For example, it was determined in Strasbourg that not only did prisoners

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have a right to marry provided for in the UK, but that they also had a right to marry within prison itself. To meet this judgment, an amendment to our marriage law was necessary and enacted. We have to ask ourselves whether the judiciary in the United Kingdom might not also adopt a similarly dynamic approach, based on political and other considerations, if faced with interpretation of such broadly defined principles.
Another disadvantage of the proposal to incorporate the convention into domestic law is that it would introduce a significant element of uncertainty into the law. Strasbourg, in finding against us, cannot strike down our law. The court and Committee of Ministers create no vacuum and time is given to reflect and make changes, if Parliament agrees.
Incorporation of the convention would be a recipe for muddle and confusion. We might well find ourselves facing a scenario such as this: Parliament passes a law, without reserved provision, which it fully believed to conform to the convention. Next day, or next year, this law could be struck down by a judge who, acting in good faith, took a different view according to his perceptions of the public interest. The judgment would have immediate effect which in turn could have urgent and significant administrative implications. I suggest this would impose an unpredictable burden on Parliament. If, for example, the law concerned entry to the UK, there would be enormous problems attendant thereafter on the operation of entry control procedures while a new law was being prepared.
A number of points were raised to which I should like to refer. I do not believe that I was asked any specific questions although perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, asked me some rhetorical questions.
The noble Lord, Lord Holme, made the point that most other countries have incorporated the provisions of the convention without difficulty. He asked, therefore, why we could not do that. The answer is that we do not have a written constitution although, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Holme, I do not find that to be an embarrassment. Rights exist under common law in this country unless taken away by statute. Thus, an Englishman's home is his castle unless Parliament gives power to the police or others to enter it. To introduce conferred rights into our present system by way of a written constitution could have effects which are not readily apparent. The same problems do not necessarily arise in other countries which have written constitutions and the need to confer rights. Therefore, for them it is far less of a departure from tradition to incorporate the convention.
As regards doing something different from that which other Eastern countries may be about to do, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland would be amazed if they were told that we in this country wished to adapt our traditional practices to fit in with whatever they choose to do now. Surely they are in the position of wanting to learn from us and to select what
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they want from our constitutional arrangements rather than the other way round, now that they have emerged from the dark night of communist tyranny.
My noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway suggested that it may be possible to establish a commission to deal specifically with complaints regarding breaches of human rights. I wonder if we really need that in addition to our domestic courts—leading up to the House of Lords—and the European Commission—leading up to the European Court. All those remedies are available whether or not we incorporate the convention.
I agree with the basic tenor of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale. He referred to the exceptions set out in Article 8 of the convention. I agree that it should not be for the courts to determine matters of public policy or the public interest. As I indicated earlier, I agree that the political arena is not the place for judges.
The noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, said that in his view the independent selection and training of judges is the best guarantee that they will continue to command public respect and confidence, even if we incorporate the convention. I suggest that one only needs to look to the United States to realise that a time may soon come when a judge's political neutrality is something that may be called into question. It is apparent that in the United States the most important criteria for appointment to the Supreme Court are the candidate's social and political views.
I cannot accept the characterisation by the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, of my right honourable friend the former Prime Minister's Government as authoritarian and anti-libertarian. On the contrary, during the terms of office of my right honourable friend the former Prime Minister the Government acted in many areas to strengthen and extend individual liberties. I can give a few examples such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Equal Pay Act 1970, the Data Protection Act 1984. There are also other examples.
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, I obviously misheard what the Minister said. Did he suggest that the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 was the responsibility of the present Administration? That would be mildly surprising, but it may be that I misheard what he said.
Lord Reay: My Lords, it would be plainly incorrect for me to say that. I mentioned the Equal Pay Act and the Data Protection Act. There are others such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Those are not indications or the product of an authoritarian government.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, in 1975 we had a Labour Government.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I stand corrected. However, other examples prove the point I was trying to make.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, perhaps the Minister will accept from this side of the House that we do not intend to propose a ministerial discrimination.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that assurance.

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My noble friend Lord Beloff pointed out that incorporation would not be a panacea, and that as the right of individual petition would remain, litigating matters in British courts first would only add to the length of time it would take for an eventual decision to be reached in Strasbourg.
That brings me to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and others relating to the length of time, which they deplored, before decisions in Strasbourg can be heard. The noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, also referred to the long five-year trek, as he put it, to Strasbourg. I assure noble Lords that discussions are currently taking place in the Council of Europe regarding the splitting up of the Strasbourg machinery. That is something in which we are very much involved.
However, it should not be thought that incorporation will obviate the necessity of providing for the individual right of petition to Strasbourg if applicants are not satisfied by the interpretation which judges in the United Kingdom place on the incorporation provisions. They would still have the right to apply to the Commission and that would lengthen the procedure which exists rather than shorten it.
The noble Lord, Lord Harris, referred to the case of the closed shop. I do not want to comment in any detail on specific cases that he raised, save to say that the Government have further extended individual freedom by giving ordinary trade union members the right to be balloted before industrial action.
The noble Lord, Lord McGregor of Durris, argued that if we accepted the Treaty of Rome provisions as part of our law, we should also accept the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. My answer is that the Treaty of Rome contains specific provisions. Those which have direct application are drafted in specific terms which would leave limited scope for different interpretation. On the other hand, the European convention sets out a set of principles in general terms. That leaves much scope for interpretation, as illustrated by the differences that arise even between the Commission and the court.
I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that I and others who argued in the same way are making a last ditch effort to prevent incorporation. I do not believe it is as imminent as the use of that term implies. There is no evidence that the public seek a written constitution. There is no great clamour for change, as my noble friend Lord Beloff pointed out. Over the years and centuries we have evolved a stable constitutional system second to none. It depends on delicate checks and balances. If the price of incorporation is a threat to the impartial independence of the judiciary and the ordinary working of the legislature, then I submit that that price is too high.
5.15 p.m.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, this has been a very worth while debate, and I shall not detain the House for more than a moment. I do not propose to respond to the many interesting points raised in the course of the debate. However, I should like to thank
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the Minister for the care of his summing-up, as I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, for the cogency of his summing-up. It is interesting how, by different routes, they ended up on the common ground of constitutional conservatism and institutional inertia—I am sure that they will not mind my saying that—and very well done, too.
I should like equally to thank my noble friends Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, Lord McGregor of Durris and Lord Harris of Greenwich for the eloquence of their support, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, for his fated but gallant attempt to find common ground in the House on this issue. I thank also the noble Lord, Lord Allen, for his careful judiciousness on an issue in which in many ways he played a prominent role over the years.
I should like to pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, for the trenchancy of his intervention. He seemed at times to positively prefer the prospect of people rioting in the streets before we contemplated reform. I prefer reform to revolution. I particularly enjoyed his exposition of the virtues of intelligence as compared with the vices of intelligentsia. I found myself wondering whether one needs to have been a vice-chancellor to make distinctions of such subtlety.
The issues of the Bill of Rights and the incorporation of the European Convention will not go away. I believe that this afternoon your Lordships performed a public service in raising those issues again. I beg leave to withdraw the motion.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn.

Land Use
5.18 p.m.
Lord Hampton Lord Hampton rose to call attention to the problems that arise in determining land use in Britain today; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving the Motion standing in my name, there are a number of introductory comments that I need to make. It may be asked whether it is necessary to call attention to a subject so much in the public eye. Last week I had not anticipated that. We debated the Planning and Compensation Bill. Following this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Moran, will be asking a Question regarding the use of land on the site of the battlefield of Naseby.
Land is very precious today, and conflicting demands for its use often require careful consideration. I still clearly have in mind the bitter battle fought some time back as to which side of Okehampton a by-pass should be built. I look forward to hearing the Government's reply from the noble Viscount, Lord Astor. I believe it will be the first time that he has wound up a debate of this sort, just as it is my first time to open one. I gave him notice of a number of questions, and I hope that the House will bear with me if they already know the answers; I believe that the questions can be repeated with value.
I do not seek to be party political. I sincerely believe that my colleagues on these Benches talk very good sense. The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, encouraged me to table this Motion. I am delighted that he, as a former distinguished chairman of the Countryside Commission, will be winding up for the party from these Benches and filling in some of the gaps that I leave. For example, I believe that he will be dealing with national parks. I am also pleased that my noble friend Lord Cobbold will deal with the difficulties concerning planning restrictions.
I should like to emphasise my use in the Motion of the words "in Britain today". In a short debate I wanted to cut out, so far as possible, a return to the disastrous effects of the felling of tropical rain forests and the problems involved in deciding whether or how to exploit the mineral resources of Antarctica. Finally, but by no means least, there is the shattering effect that the world population increase could have on the lives of every human being. We cannot and should not forget those problems; but I seek so far as possible to limit the debate to Britain.
There is also the use of the word "today". The Clerks suggested that I should leave out that word because one cannot determine anything except in the present, and Clerks in your Lordships' House are clever people. However, I asked for the word to be retained in order to emphasise how much more critical and difficult it is to determine present land use than in the time of, say, the Victorians only 100 years ago.
Recently a friend said to me in casual conversation that she believes the present situation of wars, terrorism, disease, population explosion and unwise use of the planet's resources is apocalyptic. A spokesman from Lambeth Palace said he thought that was nonsense. However, I still have a very real unease about the way, nationally, we are treating our homeland and on what we shall hand over to future generations. It is argued with some accuracy that market forces are too often allowed to bring immediate benefits but only at the cost of long-term disadvantage. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have agreed to speak today.
I shall deal first with the countryside. I have been well briefed by the Council for the Protection of Rural England —CPRE—both from London and from Worcestershire, my home county. I have also been briefed by the Country Landowners' Association. It is right to acknowledge the great influence for good that landowners and farmers have had on the countryside in the past. Long may that continue. As the CLA states:
"CLA believes that agriculture and agricultural policies are crucial to the future of rural society and rural land use".
I shall touch on farming, but I must leave that subject largely to the experts at this very critical time both at home and abroad. I live in a farmhouse but, as the lawyers so neatly put it, my land covers a third of an acre or thereabouts, be it more or less. When, after the gales early this year, I was asked if I had lost many trees on my estate, the questioner seemed injured when I replied that I had not many trees to lose! Mainly because of its effect on the countryside, I
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shall also trespass once again on the transport debate because I believe some of what has been said on previous occasions needs repeating.
Finally, I shall turn to the question of whether derelict land in cities and towns should not urgently be considered for use to ease the housing pressure elsewhere. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, will deal with that subject. My noble friend Lord Sandys neatly describes part of the cause of the ceaseless demand for new houses in the countryside as "the gravel drive syndrome". Simply put, many people who in the past were content to live in small terraced houses, with a bicycle at the back, now want a detached house with a gravel drive and parking space for perhaps two or even three cars. Urbanisation follows. I shall seek some alternative to reduce the pressure, while accepting that there is an urgent need for more low-cost housing to keep humbler folk in the countryside.
In Worcestershire, the CPRE is concerned that the Secretary of State did not accept the revised Hereford and Worcester structure plan and has made several amendments which have weakened control on major planning developments. In particular, the Minister imposed an increase of over 5,000 in the number of houses without giving any precise reason. It is felt that the loss of power of the county to plan over a wider area than that of the local authority is worrying. It seems that the new powers of the local authority to consider new villages, and the obligation to plan for more housing than realistically expected, will lead to an irrevocable loss of agricultural land. The CPRE's attitude in Worcestershire is that new villages should be away from green belts—otherwise another urban fringe will be created—and should be of around 500 houses, in keeping with other villages nearby, with easy access to a railway station if at all possible. A further anxiety is that regional authorities will be responsible for, and control, too large an area.
I shall just touch on the reduction in cereal grants to farmers and the array of alternatives to compensate: set-aside, development grants and grants for environmentally sensitive areas. I hope that others with personal knowledge will deal with the effects these will have. As a non-farmer, set-aside seems seriously flawed in that it is entirely negative. In a world where many go hungry, it has always seemed strange to me that our problem today is to avoid producing too much food.
There have been a number of developments in the countryside, often in the name of tourism. Some are undesirable in themselves, though most must have planning permission, but one of the dangers that can arise is that the enterprise goes bust and the buildings are subsequently put to an entirely new use.
There has been a great rush to apply for planning permission to build golf courses—quite a lot in Hereford and Worcester county. There is no objection to them per se, but with club houses, pro's shops, hotels, roads and parking spaces they can greatly change the nature of an area. Caravan sites are an

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eyesore, and noisy pursuits such as clay pigeon shooting and grass track racing can disturb the peace over a wide area.
I now venture to re-examine some of the Government's transport policies because they bear so importantly on what sort of land we live in and, to quote the Prince of Wales, lest we,
"bequeath to our descendants a legacy of ugliness and insensitivity".
The motorists' needs or wants are only part of the problem. My wife and I used to take six hours to drive our children to Devon by the A.38, known then as "the longest lane in Britain". Today, using the M.5, we can cover the distance comfortably in half that time. That is a blessing. However, last year we visited the Wirral Peninsula where my parents lived during the war. I was depressed by the totally changed atmosphere; the vast new roads where, albeit, one could travel at speed on the acres of concrete and tarmac. Sentimentality, perhaps; but I sighed for the country lanes where I cycled happily to the farm where I worked during school holidays.
In a chapter on planning in the Liberal-Democrat Agenda for Environmental Action these words appear:
"We need to plan in order to reduce the use of cars, with the enormous expenditure of energy this involves".
I submit that the price is too high just to travel at speed. Less than two years ago the Government produced a colourful so-called White Paper, Roads for Prosperity, which proudly stated that,
"protecting and enhancing the environment will continue to be a major feature of the Government's road building plans".
The Government then announced a major new road building programme—£12 billion to be spent in 10 years. To critics, the two statements just did not add up. In reply, the CPRE listed at least 17 outstandingly beautiful areas that would suffer. I have with me a recent up-date, with a series of beautiful scenes but accompanied, alas, by the words, "at risk", "sacrificed", "under attack", "vulnerable" and "condemned". The CPRE also pointed out that the forecast of an increase in road traffic by the year 2025 of up to 140 per cent. would mean either, parked, the vehicles would need an extra area the size of Berkshire or, moving, a road from London to Edinburgh 257 lanes wide. Even the Secretary of State could see that this increase would be intolerable.
Now, in the summary of the recent White Paper on the environment, This Common Inheritance, we read on page 19:
"We can drive less, park more responsibly, use public transport more often, and cycle more, when it is safe to do so".
On page 11 it says:
"As travellers we can help by driving less and saving fuel, buying more efficient cars, sharing journeys to work, or using the train or bus if possible".
Therefore, the questions that I should like to put to the noble Viscount are these: first, can he briefly bring the House up to date on whether the policy outlined in Road to Prosperity has been up-dated and, if so, how?
Secondly, will the Government take on board the suggestion made by my noble friend Lady Robson that the use of smaller cars would be advantageous for easier parking with less need for car parks, smaller fuel consumption and less exhaust emissions? A tax incentive would surely make sense. Thirdly, can the Minister say how many civil servants are concerned with road problems and railway problems?
The Government say that they propose to get rid of about 4,000 waste disposal sites by incineration and reclamation. That is excellent, but when will that happen? I now turn to cities and derelict sites. The CPRE highlights in its response to the Department of the Environment's review of derelict land policy, that the Government have been negative about the review group's recommendations for the prevention of dereliction and the problem of dereliction on private land. CPRE estimates that 55 per cent. of derelict land is in private hands. The Government have been very hard on local authorities owning unused land, but what will they do to encourage private owners not to leave land derelict?
Derelict land policy has important links with strategic planning policies that seek to encourage the regeneration of urban areas and protect the countryside. Perhaps I may suggest a way of tackling the problem of land use which needs to be explored more seriously. It is a way of preventing the emergence of derelict and badly used land. It is called land value taxation. The name is familiar to many people and the idea has long been around. I suggest that it is time that we seriously considered its merits.
The land market is crying out for reform; but, despite the dire effects of ridiculous booms and slumps in house prices on the rest of the economy, incredibly it has been overlooked. Land is very inefficiently used with large tracts left idle especially by speculators in cities. Developers sometimes wait for whole areas to degenerate so that they can build large projects which destroy the local community. Land tax encourages organic growth in a community because it becomes uneconomic to leave vacant plots standing for any length of time.
The effective use of available land will result in cities sprawling less which also eases transport problems as people commute less. It takes pressure off the countryside and surrounding cities. It becomes uneconomic not to extend a building to the height which is allowed by planning law so that one-storey shops, as in Tottenham Court Road, will want to make more economic use of their land by building upwards. Although we may like having a low skyline, we have to choose between spoiling more of our countryside or moving upwards a little.
I accept that this is a highly controversial point, but I know that in New York, for example, higher accommodation is higher priced. A land tax works by making owners pay a tax on the value of their land and not on the value of the buildings on it. If it was introduced, other taxes could be diminished in order not to increase the overall tax burden. Land valuation is much easier than buildings-plus-land valuation as two buildings near to one another will vary more in

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price than the land on which they are built. So it would he simpler than the old rates system and could be updated yearly on a computer. The tax should be gradually implemented—that is to say, start at a low percentage rate and be gradually increased. When first brought in, people could estimate the value of their own land which would then be corrected when the valuers made their estimate and a rebate or a supplementary charge made.
A tax on land would provide an incentive to use it in a way which maximises the return that the owner gets on it. For this reason it would encourage building which in turn stimulates the whole economy. More housing and business space would become available so rents might fall. Because of the increased incentive to build it would be necessary for land value taxation to be part of a package with planning law so that buildings did not appear where they were not wanted. We would also have to be sure that the farmers did not suffer as the result of the introduction of this tax.
As I prepared this speech I realised more and more what a vast subject it is and how inexpert I am. It is a subject which is often brought up for discussion in one form or another. It is one which interests and concerns me greatly. I now look forward very much to hearing what other speakers have to say. I beg to move for Papers.
5.35 p.m.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, I wish to thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for bringing this subject forward for general debate today. It is of vital importance, particularly at the present time. I speak primarily as a farmer and agriculturist and it is in that way that I look on the land. The preservation of the countryside depends very much on its use and the use made of the land. That depends not only on agriculture, which still remains the most important element, but on the way in which those who live in urban areas treat the rural areas and how much co-operation can be sustained between those two interests.
As we heard today during Question Time, the GATT negotiations are going on. The noble Lord, Lord John-Mackie, then hinted that I had been deeply concerned and associated with agriculture in the countryside since 1934. That is when I married the Minister of Agriculture. The industry was then at its lowest and most depressed state. It was rather as it is now. Looking back, it is amazing how the industry has recovered. That has been done by its putting itself in order through inventing machinery, the use of power, co-operating with other organisations, and developing selling organisations such as the Milk Marketing Board and the Meat and Livestock Commission, which also were concerned with marketing.
In addition, the mix of urban and rural dwellers began. Homes were built in the villages, transport was improved and people began to use cars. So the rural and industrial world began to get together. That was a long time ago. Today, thousands of people live in the country and work in the towns. That is a good development. But the need to use the land for farming
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and rural activities remains vital. The use of land depends on what it will grow and what the public want.
It is uneconomic for farmers to grow crops which require much artificial manure or crops which are not suitable for our climate. However, much food is wanted and we can produce it better and more economically than elsewhere. I refer to dairy produce, mutton and beef from the hills and less favoured areas and vegetables and fruit of the pick-your-own variety. Underlying all production is the importance of keeping rural amenities to be shared and used by urban dwellers for holidays, weekends, sport, recreation, ramblers, and any amount of general use which fits in with the enthusiasm of the people who call themselves the greens.
These provisions are not easy to achieve; neither are they cheap. To let land go to wilderness costs nothing until you want to restore it to use. It costs enormous sums of money to restore land to the beauty with which it began. The subsidies that come to less favoured areas, which represent about 80 per cent. of the land in Scotland, Wales and northern England, are an investment which pays dividends not only in producing food, which is important, but in preserving rural areas for the pleasure of hundreds of thousands of people living in cities and towns who come to the country at weekends or for holidays and who want to live there. They enjoy it all as much as we do living there.
However, that cannot be done without financial support. Agricultural workers are worth proper wages. One could not pay them if one did not have some help. Farmers must have enough returns to enable them to bring up and educate their families. In the end, all that is shared and everyone benefits. The needs of rural areas bring employment through, for example, village schools, post offices, village shops, pharmaceutical services, doctors and many other amenities.
The demand for low-cost housing today is enormous and shows that people want to live in or near the countryside. Some transport for those who do not like cars is also needed, and village halls, where the community, both urban and rural, can meet and mix are of vital importance. All those things are part of the rural community. They are part of the preservation of land and part of the use of land.
We are discussing a subject which affects not only the land and the farmers but the whole population who come to the rural areas for the reasons I have suggested. It is up to the Government, supported by the farming industry, to see that that continues into the 1990s.
5.40 p.m.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, I am obliged to begin with an apology to the House. I have a long-standing engagement, a meeting in which I shall be in the chair, which was fixed nine months ago. It will me oblige me to leave at 6.30 p.m.; therefore I shall not be here for the conclusion of a fascinating debate. My noble friend Lord Dean who is to reply

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from this Dispatch Box has torn himself away from shadow cabinet but may not be present at the very end of the debate. There is therefore an element of Box and Cox in our representation for which I apologise, particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, who introduced the debate.
There are many aspects of this vast subject on which one would find it tempting to speak. I say straight-away that I shall not speak on the rural aspects with which the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, dealt. In one sense the noble Lord is a century too late in introducing the subject for debate. If we had been debating it in this House 100 years ago we would be doing so not as a matter of interesting political or social policy. Members of your Lordships' House in those days owned most of the land in this country, as David Cannadine, in his wide ranging volume on the British aristocracy, made clear. Between them Members of this House and of another place held something like 70 per cent. of the land and a very high proportion of the wealth, both landed and industrial, although industrial wealth was a more important factor in the House of Commons. In that sense anything noble Lords had to say about the use of land would have been law instantly because your Lordships' ancestors would have had the power to determine what would happen to land in this country; and indeed they did.
As a response, my ancestors and my predecessors in the socialist movement in this century went by a very different slogan. In the words of the old song which we heard in socialist Sunday school, "God gave the land to the people". I still feel very strongly that we have retreated from the principle which ought to be foremost in our minds when we think about land use. Land is for the benefit of society, not primarily for the benefit of individual landowners, and the interests of society as a whole—the interests of all the people—should be the determining factor in deciding how land use should develop.
That, indeed, has been accepted as a non-party political point for many years, since the development of town and country planning in the garden cities in the early years of this century and from the Abercrombie plans of the war years through to the Silkin Town and Country Planning Act of the Attlee government in the 1940s. I am glad to acknowledge that we see it in the Planning and Compensation Bill which the House debated only last week. That accepts the value of structure planning and of the enforcement of effective planning and zoning laws rather than attacking it as some right-wing academics proposed in earlier years. I am pleased that noble Lords will have the opportunity to support structure planning and zoning when we debate this important Bill in Committee after Christmas.
Urban planning is however my main theme. It is clear that there will never be enough land in our urban areas to provide the homes, the space and the jobs that people want; the services ancillary to those jobs, whether retail, wholesale or of another kind; or the
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recreational facilities that are necessary. Not only will there never be enough space: there will always be an excess of demand over supply. The land that is available will almost certainly always be in the wrong place. This will give rise to unnecessary and unpleasant journeys, particularly for those of us who commute to and from our places of work and to and from the places that provide the services necessary for a civilised life.
In an urban environment an important consideration is the quantity of land and, as an extension of that, the value of land. Another consideration is the way in which the different uses of land are interdependent. We must seek to secure that that interdependence is benign rather than malign and that people have the opportunity for a decent life in our cities. Without any disrespect to those who uphold the values of rural life, the vast majority of the people of this country live in cities and towns. It is they who feel most acutely the clash which is inevitable over land use and over the issue of the supply of land.
I turn from the issue of the shortage of urban land to consider its value and how we can secure that such land is used effectively at economic cost to our society. There are some extreme examples of how all governments, but this one in particular, take advantage of the difference in values of land in order to shape the way they want the economy and society to go. The classic example is the roads programme of the Department of Transport. Trunk roads both in urban and rural areas are planned not along the shortest and most convenient route but along the route which costs the least. They are planned on the basis that land which is used for recreational purposes costs nothing. Indeed the Department of Transport is quite open in saying that sometimes recreational land in urban areas not only costs nothing but costs less than nothing.
An example can be found close to where I live. I refer to the part of the North Circular Road which is to be widened at Henley's Corner in Hampstead Garden Suburb. As a child I used to clamber through the tunnel under the old A.1 which carried Mutton Brook. It is now three times as wide as it was then. I think I have lost some of the bravado I had as a child of 10.
It is planned to widen the A.1 even more. And that widening is to be carried out on public open space. It is to be done, the Department of Transport argues, not only because the land has no value but because the capitalised cost of the maintenance which the London borough of Barnet has to carry out is to be held against it. Roads go where they are environmentally least desirable because of the way in which the land is valued. I could give your Lordships many examples, but probably the most offensive is that concerning Ox Leas Wood in south east London where the east London river crossing is to run partly in a cutting rather than in a tunnel. It is an 8,000 year-old wood which provides an easy but not necessarily the most direct route for the crossing. It has been chosen because the wood has no value.

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Professor David Pearce, who has been the environmental adviser to the Secretary of State for the Environment, makes the very point. He has stated that the problem with environmental protection is that the environment itself has no value; sometimes it even has a negative value. It is not true that the environment, or land which is used for environmental purposes, is a free good.
Professor Pearce proposed a series of taxes, many of them admirable, for the control of pollution. I do not dissent from that. However, it is not a solution for our urban land nor for the problem which I have identified. To some extent the solution will have to be the implementation of stronger planning controls. That is what we hope to achieve by way of the Planning and Compensation Bill. But it is also to some extent a matter of openness about land ownership. I welcome the fact that the land register became open only last Monday in England and Wales, thus reviving a tradition which started with the Domesday Book in the 11th century.
However, it is not just a question of planning controls; in the end it is a question of money, but not only money. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, referred to land value taxation. I listened with care to his arguments. I hope he is not thinking that that will be a solution to local government finance. It is clear that it will not be. I am not allowed by my right honourable friend the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer to propose a development land tax, although I should dearly like to do so. It seems to me that that is the only rational solution to the problem. Indeed, my right honourable friend will not allow any of us on these Benches to propose new taxes for very obvious reasons.
It is clear that the taking of private profit from land development causes great distortions in land use and has been the main contributor to the distortion in the development—sometimes unplanned and often very undesirable—of our urban areas over the past 40 or 50 years. What is required is a combination of reform of the value of land together with continuing reform and strengthening of the planning process. The debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, has been of enormous value. I am most grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to comment on the issues involved.
5.53 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Bradford: My Lords, I greatly welcome this debate and I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for introducing it. The more I have reflected upon it, the more complex and urgent the issues seem to be. Gone are the days when Mark Twain could say to someone asking for sound advice concerning investment that they should:
"buy land, because they aren't making any more of it".
Every day we see new parcels of land becoming available for development through the closure of mills, mines and long-established factories.
Given that we are living in a time of considerable change, there can be few places which demonstrate this fact more vividly than my diocese of Bradford.
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Not only am I concerned with the industrial city of Bradford—facing as it does all manner of problems and possibilities—but the diocese also stretches north through the incredibly beautiful countryside of the Yorkshire Dales, where we are confronted with a whole host of other issues relating to our use of land.
It is in the Book of Proverbs that vie find the verse:
"He who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment".
I fear that we are often in the world of fantasy when speaking about land. The problem is that one man's fantasy is very often another man's employment, and the hopes of one group of people are the fears of another.
Like many northern cities, the city of Bradford is coming to terms with the decline of its major industry and is looking for new ways to diversify and develop. It is essential that it should maintain its industrial base. I am conscious of the large number of people who look to it for employment and for a market for their goods and services.
It is essential that cities such as Bradford have a coherent and comprehensive economic strategy. I am persuaded that the availability of land is a crucial factor in any such strategy. I speak as a theologian and therefore my ignorance of such matters will no doubt reveal itself. But surely what is needed is some form of land bank; that is, areas which have been designated and developed for industrial use, with roads and services already in place, and which are ready to welcome the would-be developer. At a casual glance, the figures of land available for development in the city seem reasonable. However, closer scrutiny reveals that much of it is fragmented and tied to various owners and intentions. There is little use in any such list of available land if there is not, alongside it, information about ownership and intention.
I am also aware of the conflict of interests that can occur on the edges of our cities with regard to green belt policies. I know of industrial interest in an area on the edge of our city which would bring, a thousand jobs to the community. It is within two miles of a large housing estate —where I spent two days last week—where there is a very high level of unemployment. However, the desired site is in the green belt—though such a description hardly gives a true picture of the space.
How do we reconcile the conflicting demands for employment (bringing with it dignity and purpose) with the equally important need for preventing undisciplined urban sprawl? In the age of the motor car, and in situations of industrial decay on the one hand and the new possibilities on the other, it seems to me that we need to look again at our use of land—not in order to shut out our open spaces, but in order to ensure that the people in our communities can live with self-respect, and earn a living for themselves and their families, and that the general economic climate within the community thrives.
I fear that potential investors may well be turned away from some of our cities because we have not fine-tuned our strategies to be sensitive to the

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multidimensional needs of the community. Therefore, I see a real need for industry, land and transport to be considered together. I am concerned that employment should be available within our cities, for I am only too aware of the real distress and hardship that prolonged unemployment can bring to our communities.
I move north through my diocese and find that there are problems relating to land use in almost every village. What is appropriate development in rural areas? What is the balance between the farmer and the conservationist; between the rural image and the need for employment; and between essential housing for local people and luxury developments for the retired, the commuter or those wanting second homes? In my diocese there are number of buildings which are no longer needed. They are former hospitals or schools which are set in lovely countryside. What should they now be used for? I know of a whole range of enterprising schemes that have been explored, all of which have failed for one reason or another to obtain the necessary planning permission.
A recent report said:
"It is apparent that beneath the surface of an idyllic illusion the social and economic fabric which sustains the Dales is in serious decline—loss of employment opportunity, lack of training, migration of labour, poor earning potential, lack of housing, loss of diversity in industry, lack of employable workers, degradation of communities and lack of social services are some of the issues to be faced".
Hill farmers are under special pressure at the moment because their subsidies are being threatened. We need to realise that any major changes would have a serious effect on our rural communities, because in the Yorkshire Dales sheep farming has an unbroken tradition stretching back to the monks of the 12th century. It is a way of life which has shaped the character of the area. I doubt whether they would agree with the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, that people in the cities have needs of greater urgency.
Many people—the tourists who flock to the region —may be aware only of the lack of car parking space or toilet facilities, but I can assure the House that behind such apparent inconveniences there are vociferous interest groups.
I am also aware that within agriculture we need to be thinking on a European level. That dimension may need also to be fed into the discussions about land use that are taking place in many quarters.
I am conscious that I have approached the subject very much from a local perspective. The use that we may make of our land is something with which I am confronted every day, but I believe that what I have been saying has also a much wider perspective. I have tried to suggest that we need to be people-centred, for if we exclude people and impoverish them by our failure to use land creatively, we are building up a store of trouble for ourselves. Failure to provide appropriate housing and employment is a sad form of impoverishment and exclusion.
There is also a bottom line beyond that which concerns our stewardship not merely of the land but,
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more than that, of the earth and the created order. If we continue to plunder the planet at the rate we are doing at the moment, before long it will be unable to sustain us. I have heard of people saying such things being written off as incurable romantics, but nothing could be further from the truth. The romantics are those who believe that we can just carry on, and that "everything will turn out all right in the end". All the evidence suggests that it will not be so.
I have only to look around my diocese to see that enormous problems are raised by our use of land. Just a few moments of reflection reveal some major areas of confusion and contradiction. If that is true in one small diocese, then how much more true must it be for our nation as a whole. I look forward therefore to more work being done on the subject, for it is sorely needed.
6.2 p.m.
Lord Walpole: My Lords, I too should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for giving me the opportunity to speak. I wish to take his statement literally and talk about problems arising from determining land use. I should like to speak about a specific planning application and to try to draw some conclusions from it. I make it clear to the Minister that I am not asking him to answer any questions about the application. I shall speak about why things happen and what we hope might happen in the future.
Of all applications in rural areas, most developments are, one way or another, at least reversible. There is one that is irreversible—mineral extraction. Whatever happens when minerals are extracted, there is a fundamental and inevitable change to the landscape. That may be why such applications are dealt with by the county council with advice from the district council, rather than is the case for most other planning applications where the procedure is the other way around.
I had the privilege—it seems now many years ago —to be chairman of the county of Norfolk planning and transportation committee. It was my responsibility to take the county structure plan through its first public examination. I admit that my knowledge of planning laws has become a little rusty. Whatever the shortcomings of that structure plan, with its updates and recent submission it is probably one of the greenest structure plans in the country. It is one of which I am proud. It states:
"In controlling the scale and location of all development, the County and District Councils will seek to protect and conserve the quality and character of the countryside and the landscape setting of towns and villages".
The application that was before the county earlier this year was to extract 1.67 million tonnes of sand and gravel from 44 acres of good, grade two and grade three agricultural land to the south of Holt in north Norfolk over 16 to 20 years. That extraction is to be to a depth of 26 feet and would involve at least 38 lorry movements per day on C-class and unclassified roads.
Holt is a pleasant country town some four miles from the sea. It is a heritage coast to the north, and the land between the sea and the town is an area of outstanding natural beauty. The town itself is a

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conservation area. To the south of the town is a relief road—it can hardly be called a bypass—built on an old railway line which leaves a section of the town, including the police station, the fire station and some 100 dwellings separated from the rest of the town. To the south is a country park, owned and run by the district council, which attracts 60,000 visitors per year. South east of the country park is the Holt Lowes SSSI.
To the west and south of the town runs the River Glaven whose valley has been designated a rural conservation area. Such an area is one to which the district council must not just afford protection but must positively enhance. Within that rural conservation area, and separated from the country park by a mere B-class road, is the application site. Permission to develop it was refused in 1960. There is no proven need for gravel in the area. There are 10 active sites within 25 kilometres of the proposed site, one of which is in the hands of the proposed developer.
There is 10 years' worth of sand and gravel available in the locality. The county council has granted consent so that in the county as a whole some 13 years' worth of sand and gravel is available. Objections to the site were received from the district council (in its advisory capacity), the town council and the parish councils of the neighbouring parishes through which the lorries would inevitably pass. There has been an objection from the Holt Society. The Countryside Commission said that it was concerned, as were the Nature Conservancy Council and the Norfolk Naturist Trust, about the hydrological implications for the SSSI which borders the site. There were but two letters of support, one of which was from a haulage contractor. There were 112 letters from local residents and a petition containing 1,729 signatures was received by the county council.
The main issues were highway safety; the loss of amenity, due to dust, noise and dirt and so forth; loss of enjoyment of the country park; the impact on wildlife; intrusion and damage to the landscape; and danger to children because of the proximity of the town. The planning committee decided to make a visit. This was obviously in a blaze of publicity, after which there were additional comments from the Norfolk Society which is the county branch of the CPRE, the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalist and various further letters from parish councils nearby. A letter was sent by the developer to each member of the committee personally.
The matter was put to the committee earlier last month, on 2nd November, with a firm recommendation from the officers to refuse the application on the grounds that the site was in a rural conservation area; it was too close to the town and would be detrimental to the country park and the enjoyment and peace thereof. The committee passed the application by eight votes to six, across party lines and denied that it was contrary to its policy.
When the district council advertised certain amendments because the area was in a rural conservation area, there were many more objections.
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When I put my name down to speak in this debate the county council had not met. It met again last Friday and changed its mind.
That is not planning; it is awful. No doubt the saga will continue and there will be an appeal. The whole affair is symptomatic of the extreme pressures put on planning departments and committees, especially if they change their minds (albeit correctly) at the last minute. It would undoubtedly lead to a legal challenge with all the expense that that involves. Somehow it should be avoided.
Perhaps we could identify certain applications—such as where the county and district disagree—on which the Secretary of State could ask for a cooling off period. In theory, last Thursday the development company could have been issued with permission to remove 1.67 million tonnes of sand and gravel and nothing could have stopped them.
Does the Minister think that a cooling off period is possible in conditions such as when the county and district councils disagree? If a decision is contrary to the new county structure plans and the new district area plans when they are in place, there should be a strong case—whether the application is approved or refused—for the Secretary of State to examine it. After all, the position last Thursday was that the Secretary of State, in theory anyway, did not even know that such an application existed. So how could he call it in? If it had been agreed, I can see no way in which, if the county agreed that it was not contrary to its policy, the Secretary of State could call it in.
Perhaps the Minister will advise me also on this. I see nothing in the Planning and Compensation Bill which is before the House which will alleviate the situation. The calling in of such an application by the Secretary of State would still be democratic, especially if a local inquiry is held. Or would it?
6.14 p.m.
Lord Cobbold: My Lords, I too wish to thank my noble friend Lord Hampton for initiating the debate on this important subject. In supporting him, I should first mention that I am an active member of the Historic Houses Association and also the owner of a historic property in the home counties that is open to the public.
I wish to raise only two issues, the first of which concerns our villages and was touched upon by my noble friend. Villages are an important part of the fabric of this country, but their character is changing. The existence over many years of very strict planning laws, particularly in the metropolitan green belt but also in other parts of the country, has forced up house prices to the extent that the children of the traditional inhabitants of our villages cannot afford to live there when they grow up. They are forced to move into the towns and cities.
Village houses are acquired by commuters or, if they are further afield, as second homes for city dwellers, people who generally have less connection with the countryside. This cannot be described as the free market at work because it is not a free market, it is a fallout from strict planning control and land use

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policies. Longstanding family connections and links with the land are broken. The character of the village changes and diversity of population is reduced.
I know that various ideas have been suggested to deal with the problem, but so far without much success. A scheme is needed that permits limited low-cost housing to be built in villages which would be available only to those who can demonstrate a particular residential or family connection with the area.
I do not advocate uniform council estates. Too many of these already mar the appearance of our villages. Any such building should blend into the existing surroundings, using traditional building materials. Good design is paramount, but new ideas and imagination will be necessary if the cost of the accommodation is to be kept low. It seems to me illogical that villages which have been living organisms and part of our history for so long should be frozen for all time at this moment in history because of the inflexibility of our planning legislation. I hope that the noble Viscount will be able to give us the Government's view on this important topic.
The second point I wish to raise directly concerns the preservation of the heritage. I believe that special consideration should be given to planning applications for development that are sensible in character, where the benefit of the development (the development gain) is irrevocably linked to the endowment of a maintenance fund or private charitable trust that has been established for the restoration and preservation of a historic property. This might apply to any heritage property that has been designated as of outstanding interest.
It so happens that the heritage property for which I am responsible owes its survival to such an arrangement, thanks to the far-sightedness of the local authority involved. The council accepted the argument that the restoration of the heritage property represented very special circumstances which justified the granting of planning permission for two small residential developments, provided that the proceeds of the sale were used to endow a private charitable trust whose principal object was the maintenance and preservation of the property. The chairman of the district council, the mayor of the local town and the chairman of the parish council are all trustees. This arrangement has worked extremely well. In mentioning it in this debate I venture to suggest that the precedent might be accepted as a policy principle to be applied in other similar circumstances. I know that it would be welcomed by all those who face the enormous liability of maintaining our national heritage.
6.18 p.m.
Baroness Sharpies: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for initiating this debate, which has covered a wide range of subjects. Without being impertinent, perhaps I may express my thanks
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to the right reverend Prelate for his contribution, which covered a vast subject succinctly. I found it most interesting.
I have one special concern: the gap that there appears to me to be between those of us who have always lived in the country and people who have recently moved from towns and cities, especially now that the green issue is to the forefront of everyone's mind.
Some people fail to appreciate that the countryside has to be managed. Fencing is needed to keep livestock in rather than to keep walkers out and some areas need to be sprayed at times to control weeds. Some dead or dying trees will need to be felled. However, those who manage the countryside are often criticised for undertaking such measures. Some twitchers complain if one fells a tree that has been used by a certain bird. I am sure noble Lords know that a twitcher is a bird watcher. Some trees are felled to enable more light to enter the woodland. This encourages wildlife and it allows nettles to flourish. Nettles are good for butterflies. However, these measures are often not understood by city dwellers. They complain about nettles and the fact that they cannot walk through mud.
Those who manage woodlands try to allow light to enter them but seek to leave enough cover for badger and deer to shelter in. Badger and deer abound in Dorset and Wiltshire. Even more important for woodland management is the planting or replanting of trees. I am a very small landowner but I have planted some 600 oak and cherry trees in the past three years. My neighbour, however, prefers softwoods. Again, one has to explain to visitors the need for shelters to protect trees from predation by deer. I agree that the shelters are rather ugly but they are necessary.
Those noble Lords who listen to "The Archers" will be familiar with the character of Mrs. Snell. There are many such characters around. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will encourage a better understanding between town and country dwellers, perhaps with the aid of an ongoing campaign. Such a campaign is needed to explain the problems which face landowners who do not always receive the encouragement that they deserve.
6.22 p.m.
Lord Broadbridge: My Lords, the compass of this debate is wide and I am glad of that. It admits discussion of both the general and the particular of land use on every scale from a national park to the public conveniences that have already been mentioned by the right reverend Prelate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, first, on securing this debate on an important subject and, secondly, on not being tempted to narrow his terms of reference.
The total problem of land use is the sum of many individual cases—we heard reference to one particular case just now —but the generality of the matter is surely the fact that Britain's boundaries are rigid and not elastic. Also, apart from a demand for change of use within established areas there is a continual demand—this is more serious—for change of use and

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a change in the national ratio of what might be called undeveloped land to developed land, whether in town or country.
I believe the pressure to gobble up undeveloped land comes —I am trying to think analytically—mainly from the combined pressures of domestic use, industrial and commercial use and roads. At one end of the age spectrum young people, especially newly weds, no longer in the main start by sharing the family home but rather expect one of their own. That is commonly a new home for mortgage reasons. Such a home requires new land. At the other end of the spectrum, many older retired people expect to live in a house that is specially constructed for the elderly, often on small estate developments. That too requires new land. With an ever-increasing incidence of house ownership, those of middle age increasingly want a house rather than a flat. That requires yet more land.
In industry and commerce current statistics show that the level of new company formation far exceeds that of bankruptcy and liquidation. Those new companies prefer in the main to operate from premises on new light industrial estates because older declining manufacturing industry sites are inappropriate and are costly to modify. Therefore they remain derelict. Such industrial estates take up new land.
In answer to a question asked some two weeks ago in your Lordships' House it was stated that of some 13 million people in employment, some 8 million work in service industries. That figure is rising. Service industries commonly require offices so the figure for net total office demand steadily rises. To meet this demand new land must be acquired or—this is often controversial—existing and familiar buildings must be modified.
The increased mobility of a car-owning society, and indeed the expectations of those who do not own a car, means that mainly new land is taken up for roads and motorways. This matter is right on the doorstep of noble Lords at the moment. To use the terms of naval gunnery, this debate is bracketed, yesterday and tomorrow, by the Committee stage of the New Roads and Street Works Bill. The first part of that Bill inaugurates the injection of private sector money into road building to increase the net number of roads built.
Yesterday it was announced that the M.25 is to become four and partly five lane. That involves taking up more land. As an aside, I urge better public transport and less emphasis on new roads which are a self-fulfilling traffic producing prophecy. The driving force for the problem of land use by roads is largely a national trend towards increased leisure time. For those in towns and cities a change is as good as a rest. That change is usually taken by getting away from it all to somewhere different and preferably open.
At this point I wish to change tack from the use of new land to problems that arise from the change of use of established land. Most of us, especially after we have taken a trip elsewhere, are reassured in some mysterious way by the familiarity of our local landscape when we return home. However, that
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reassurance is eroded if our local landscape, whether village, town or city, keeps changing. The development use of countryside erodes the refreshment afforded to city dwellers by a change of view and atmosphere. When it happens in our home area, whether in city, town or suburbs, it erodes the confidence we all obtain from a feeling of continuity engendered by the sight of a familiar scene when we return home. However, we must not Forget the many country dwellers who live in the country mainly because they like it. New land use alters and takes away from their natural resource, thus devaluing their perception of the quality of their own lives.
In a real world most policy, whether national or local, can only hope to satisfy most of the people most of the time. There are some 60 million individuals in Britain. Each has an individual priority list. Some people are sedentary, some athletic; some have children while some do not. Some are brutal while some are aesthetic. Land use therefore has to suit a spectrum from the nostalgia merchants at one end to the followers of an unfettered free market at the other. However, a clearly indicated centre of gravity is a strong national characteristic of conservatism along with suspicion of the new and the unknown. Consequently most of us prefer only gradual change.
All the land uses that I mentioned in my opening remarks involve relatively abrupt change. We have a deep feeling that cities are changing faster and faster and that the countryside is disappearing. If pressed into a corner, we might admit that a motorway can be beautiful and that a new building can be stimulating, but our deep-seated intuition still leads us to believe that the momentum of land use is damaging amenity and making Britain unrecognisable.
I believe that government policy in this complex field is directed to endeavouring to give the greatest satisfaction to the greatest number. At present we organise things in such a way that the Government issue regular guideline planning policy notes which are in fact mandatory and include land use. County authorities are obliged to construct and issue structure plans for their areas which indicate in fair detail the designated use of all land within their area of authority.
The majority of land use proposals pass through peacefully but if there is sufficient opposition—this may of course include opposition from a county authority—a public inquiry may be held before an inspector. Ultimately the Secretary of State may arbitrate personally. That is now the position for county authorities but since the abolition of the metropolitan authorities there are no parallel structure plans corresponding to their former areas of jurisdiction overall. Rather, each sub-area within the former metropolitan authority issues a new measure which is called a unitary plan. Therefore there are 33 borough unitary plans for London. Alas, those are not co-ordinated with each other. That is a grave shortcoming. However, I understand that the three principal political parties managed to agree a unitary plan for London as a whole last year but Secretary of

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State Ridley refused to accept it. Can the noble Lord who is to reply say whether there is any further news on an agreed unitary plan for London as a whole?
The problems that arise in determining land use may first be addressed by any interested party by seeking to inform, lobby or otherwise harass the DoE about views held. Thus we may seek to influence the departmental guidelines which together with local dialogue crucially influence the construction of structure and unitary plans. All land use is designated in some detail and while an unwelcome development may be appealed successfully the likelihood is that it may never even get on to the drawing board if an initial chink of a possibility does not exist in a structure or unitary plan. Lobbying town or county hall planning departments and councillors is the other means by which we may seek to influence land use policy.
So much for strategy. In terms of tactics a main plank to ensure satisfaction in most land use must surely be to make better use, or indeed in many cases some use at all, of what is already held under development so that we do not encroach on free land. There are perhaps two categories of developed land —that in current but perhaps inefficient use and that which is effectively derelict. We may be able to capitalise on the former—current but inefficient use —either by rebuilding more efficiently within current building lines or, more controversially, by building higher on the same site, or both. Depending on the scale, due attention may have to be paid to the halo effect on such aspects as public and private transport provision, shopping facilities, and so forth.
By far the most hopeful zone for improvement is the bringing back into use of land which is effectively derelict, sometimes having been derelict since the last war. One thinks of the huge Coin Street site on the South Bank where development is now at last under way but which lay derelict for 40 years. Such land is often held on a temporary licence for uses such as car parking, a common excuse being that the local authority is safeguarding it for some grand future development which it seems never to be able to afford. I live next to one such site in the republic of Islington, as we lovingly call it.
In other cases land tenure is by public, quasi-public or commercial bodies. For example, British Rail has vast landholdings arising from past operations when the network was much larger and goods traffic much greater. It clings on to the land grimly, only releasing a little here or there to balance its finances. Why? Is it lost in dreams of a past that will probably never return?
Our island may be sceptred but it gets no bigger. A legislative carrot and stick is long overdue to release our enormous stocks of derelict land for new uses. I should like to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have any proposals—whether called incentives or penalties—for making that happen. For example, do they envisage some form of derelict land tax of the type already mentioned? If not, what do they propose?
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Finally, of the land uses that I mentioned in opening, only new roads will not benefit greatly from land use gained from any of the measures that I have just mentioned. However, I question again the implicit assumption that Britain needs more and yet more new roads. They only encourage more vehicles of all types whose occupants or loads would be far better catered for by spending funds already allocated for road building either on improving public transport and a return of some freight to rail or canal, or, at worst but with minimum use of land, upgrading existing roads as has so successfully been done in recent years with the A.l.
In his poem "Jerusalem" Blake, referred to England's green and pleasant land. The green and pleasant part is shrinking like ice melting in the sun. As custodians we owe it to future generations to apply a dose of the fridge if they are not to say of us, "They had so much and look what they did with it".
6.34 p.m.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, we should all be deeply grateful to my noble friend Lord Hampton for introducing this debate on a subject which is of very great interest and concern to each and every one of us. As we have already heard from the wide variety of speeches on a number of different aspects of the subject in this short debate, decisions regarding land use affect each and every one of us in all manner of different ways. Therefore it is a very important subject.
When I saw the subject on the Order Paper, I thought that I might be faced with the serried ranks opposite of the Peers who own most of the land in Britain. I make no criticism of the fact that only some of them are here. If that sounds a rather barbed remark I should say at once that I believe that the great landed families in Britain who have handed down their estates from generation to generation have done an extremely good job for us. They have preserved and protected land which might otherwise have become totally despoiled. I do not say that they have always done so from the best possible motives. They have preserved the heather in order to ensure that the grouse remain there. I am not bothered about the grouse, but I am delighted that the heather is still there. For whatever motive, they have preserved the land.
One of my anxieties is that there has been such a shift of ownership of wealth in Britain wealth and land are now in different hands. When I hear of huge estates being bought by snooker players and footballers, I wonder whether they will exert the same degree of energy and care in cherishing their landholdings or whether they will do what their financial advisers tell them to do; namely, to extract every penny out of that land. The noble Lord, Lord Walpole, reminded us that that may mean extracting all the gravel or limestone or whatever mineral happens to be in the land. We are faced with very serious problems.
Land is a resource which in Britain is in extremely short supply. It is also a resource which is under

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increasingly heavy demands. Those are related in part to population. In this country we do not at present suffer from great population growth. The next census will probably show that the population in Britain is more or less stable and that there has been only slight growth. I would go so far as to say that if every pregnancy was a wanted pregnancy at the time of conception our population would probably be declining very slightly. That is a different subject.
We suffer from a maldistribution of population. There is a concentration of population in the South East as a whole and in major conurbations such as those in the East Midlands, West Midlands, North West, North East and the old West Riding of Yorkshire. Great efforts have been made to move some of the population from London and the South East but they have not been very successful. It is the concentration of numbers in the South East which causes the difficulties and with which the underground and public transport systems cannot cope. They were not constructed to deal with the numbers which now use them.
I do not believe that any noble Lord has any immediate suggestions as to how we can reduce those numbers at a stroke. We cannot. However, we can perhaps reduce them gradually by providing the right incentives for people to move. The Government have tried o set an example by moving parts of government departments into the regions. The DHSS has extensive offices in Blackpool and its computer division in Newcastle. The Inland Revenue has people all over the country in such places as Bootle in Merseyside.
However, that is not the way to depopulate areas such as London. Regionalisation is not achieved by shifting the typing pool from the Department of Transport 30 miles up the Thames. One has to shift a handful of people—but important people. If the headquarters of the National Health Service, instead of being in Richmond House as they now are—they were at the Elephant and Castle—were in York, in no time at all the pharmaceutical companies which supply drugs to the National Health Service would also find it wise to have their headquarters in York. The people who build hospitals would find it wise to have a presence in York. Therefore, the Government should shift not whole departments but a few important people. If the decision-takers are moved other people will move with them. That applies not merely to the South-East but to other parts of our country as well if the population becomes too heavily concentrated in small areas.
So there we have it. Land is in increasingly short supply and under constant pressure. Some of your Lordships have dealt with various aspects of this subject and I should like to talk about the recreational use of land; in other words, the use of countryside land. I had the honour some years ago of being chairman of the Countryside Commission, a body which is charged with the responsibility of enhancing the natural beauty of the countryside and also with promoting access to it for informal outdoor recreation. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharpies, has said, rightly, that once one starts doing that, one
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produces conflicts. But there are always conflicts. There is a major conflict between the people who live and work in the countryside and those who seek to use it for informal recreational purposes. Somehow we have to find ways of resolving those conflicts, and I believe those ways can be found.
There is also a conflict in each and every one of us. When people go off for a day, or longer perhaps, to visit one of the national parks most tend to think, when they get there, that there should not be anybody else there. Life is not like that. When I was chairman of the Countryside Commission, I was fortunate enough to visit Hungary and was taken round some of the nature parks there in a vast area. It was a wonderful place and I was taken round by their Minister of Tourism. There was a wonderful information centre and horse-drawn carriages took visitors to the hides to look at the wildlife and so on. I said, "This is marvellous. Can ordinary people come here?" The answer was, "Oh yes, with permits." I hope that the day when people will have to get a permit to visit Exmoor or the Peak District is a very long way off, but I think we should be under no illusions about the kind of pressures under which these sensitive areas of our countryside are placed.
While I was chairman of the Countryside Commission I was visited by the deputy director—I believe that was his title—of the Yellowstone National Park in the United States. That is a vast place, as your Lordships may know. He was telling me about his catering problems and he said that they had to cater for X number of people a year. Of course I know that they do a great deal for their visitors and provide all sorts of things: they are not for people who just happen to visit. However, I had to tell him that the figure he quoted was almost exactly the same as the number of people who pour into the Peak National Park on a fine Sunday in August—and he thought he had problems!
This is the difficulty. People now need to spread leisure time. I remember that when we were debating the Shops Bill some time ago I said it was a pity that Sunday was not a moveable feast, and I asked why was everybody's day out on the same day of the week. Perhaps it might be helpful if the rest day for people could be a variable day. I do not know what the right reverend Prelate would say about that; but if we could do something along those lines to spread the load in some way, that might be helpful.
As things are, people arrive in an area of natural beauty, as I have said, and they think nothing else should be happening. But there is a conflict. These are all people who believe that they should be entitled to all the fruits of the countryside. They want food from the countryside and they want water from the countryside—much of it in the national parks. They want timber; they want minerals like limestone, and so on. They want various other things: they must have those. But they think nothing should be happening when they actually get there themselves into the area.
People must come to terms with the position and we must ask ourselves how we can deal with this. Somehow we must try to spread the load. Some time

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ago a market research survey was carried out by professional people in great detail, and extremely effectively, into the recreational activities of ordinary citizens. After questioning literally thousands of people, it was discovered that rather more than 60 per cent. of ordinary people—nearly two-thirds—opted by choice to spend one day a month in some kind of informal outdoor recreational activity in the countryside—not just a visit to aunty because it was a duty, but a recreational visit. That number is more than the numbers who watch football: it is more than those who take up angling and go fishing. It is a huge number. How can we provide for them? We cannot create new national parks, but we can try to spread the load.
We have tried to do that in this country. I am particularly proud of one project which has developed so well—I think that the right reverend Prelate will know of it—Groundwork. In 1979 the Countryside Commission took a policy decision. The national parks by that time had grown to such an extent that they were largely capable of looking after themselves. Therefore it was decided that the commission should devote more of its energies to trying to create enjoyable countryside amenities close to the homes of the millions who sought them. We had already done that with country parks such as the one in the Wirral which my noble friend knows which attracts many people at weekends who would otherwise pour into Snowdonia. And Snowdon is being worn away. The mountain has to be closed every year while they shovel away all the litter and indeed all the excreta from the mountain. Some of the mountain paths are being worn away. I live near the Langdale Valley and the footpath there is like a main road. The footpath gets wider and wider every year. Somehow we have to spread this load.
Groundwork was an attempt to use the kind of techniques developed by the Countryside Commission, providing footpaths, and having provided them, believing that people will keep to them and rather than walk through cornfields; providing stiles so that people will climb over them rather than breaking down dry-stone walls and so on; providing car parks on the assumption that if there is a car park people on the whole will use it rather than drive into a field and destroy crops. We should apply those techniques to the whole of a freestanding urban area.
The first area that was chosen was St. Helen's at Knowsley. It was an immense success, and as a result of that the then Secretary of State, Mr. Michael Heseltine, extended it. There was a huge meeting at Hey Hall in Lancashire, where we had representatives of all the local authorities in the North-West, Cumbria, Lancashire and Derbyshire. Six new Groundworks were established and now they are all over the country in Wales and various places, establishing greenways, linking the countryside with the urban areas, providing enjoyable countryside close to the homes of the millions who seek it. That is doing at least something towards trying to resolve the conflict with which we are all faced.
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There is so much more to say but I cannot say it all. However, among the occupants of our national parks in areas of outstandingly beautiful countryside is the Ministry of Defence. I am not entirely sure that the Dartmoor National Park is the right place for firing ranges: there are three of them in Dartmoor, one belonging to the Ministry of Defence and the other two being leased to them. The leases are up this year and I hope that some of that kind of activity might stop there and perhaps go on somewhere else. I was taken to the area by General Acland and he said what a wonderful thing it was that the Ministry of Defence had a place in the national park because it had kept it free from this, that and the other. I began to think that perhaps no national park was complete without a Ministry of Defence presence and why had the Lake District not got one?
However, sooner or later the Ministry of Defence and similar bodies must look at the way in which they use land in national parks; and, as other speakers have said, so must other public bodies. Public bodies own an immense amount of land in our national parks and they do not always use it with the care that they should. I will end by saying that land is in short supply and in ever-increasing demand. It must be cherished and protected. At the moment there are too many people without sufficient integration taking place between them. We have seen government department after government department involved in this; and, as the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, has said, there are conflicts over planning decisions, which can differ from one place to another. Everybody agrees that there needs to be some kind of integration. In the fullness of time I should like to see a land-use ministry with overall control, instead of decisions being left to a whole variety of different bodies and departments. As the right reverend Prelate reminded us, I think it was Mark Twain who said:
"Land, yes; they don't make it any more."
That is true: they do not make it any more and as time goes on we shall find that we have less and less of it.
6.49 p.m.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, may I first apologise to the House and to the noble Lord who initiated this very interesting and important debate for not being able to hear his opening speech. The debate, concerning perhaps one of the most valuable commodities that the nation owns, has been extremely worth while. How that commodity is redeveloped is of interest not only to us but also to our children, to their children and to succeeding generations.
The noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, spoke forcefully about the rural community and the support that it needs to retain a cherished and worthwhile identity. She referred to the difficulty that farmers—a vital component of that community—are experiencing and the need to attract new employment to make rural areas self-sufficient and free of the need to appeal for financial support.
I was interested in her remarks regarding the desirability of low cost housing. It is not the first time that the subject has been mentioned in your

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Lordships' House. I do not wish to raise the old issue of the sale of council housing. That policy has been widely accepted. In rural areas, however, the policy has been demonstrated to be shortsighted. I know that Conservative Members in another place receive letters on the issue. There is no way of dealing with the problem because much of the low cost housing in those areas was local authority owned. Irrespective of party, however, we should try to provide some assistance, if necessary financial, to encourage people to provide low cost housing. Otherwise those areas will wither and eventually die.
My noble friend and colleague, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, apologised because he had to leave. He spoke about the use of land and who owned it. He said that at the turn of the century the members in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords owned 70 per cent. of the land. That is a great deal of land. I have always taken the view—perhaps it is a rather ancient one politically—that if anything belongs to the people of a nation it is the land. I believe that in most cases the needs of the community should prevail above the needs of the individual.
One activity that I do not like to see continuing —we were promised that it would end about two years ago—is the persistent and increasing promotion by developers of private Bills in order to bypass planning procedures. I understood that there was a proposed all-party agreement that that procedure would stop. Unfortunately the ex-Prime Minister was the one person who vetoed the agreement. It was a tragic mistake for people to be able to bypass local planning committees. For all their faults, the committees tend to mirror the wishes and aspirations of the people in their areas.
I was interested to hear the speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bradford. I do not know whether he knows this, but for six years I lived at Gildersome near Bradford. I know the area about which he speaks. Perhaps I may pay tribute to the community of Bradford. The city is a phoenix that has risen from the ashes. It was in dire straits some time ago. The mining and woollen industries have been almost savaged out of existence in the past 10 to 20 years. Nevertheless, through the tremendous efforts of the community, progress has been made to make the city as attractive as it is becoming again. I now live on the other side of the Pennines—the enemy in cricket terms—but I visit my friends in Yorkshire quite often. I can pay no higher tribute than to say that the community of Bradford has done an extremely good job.
Bradford still needs help, as do most other big cities. However, the rural areas close to Bradford have an interdependence which needs recognition. The right reverend Prelate did not need to apologise for putting forward a local aspect. Most of us are the products of the locality from which we emerge. I make no apology for it. I take my name from Beswick which was, until slum clearance in the mid-1960s, the most densely populated area in Europe. It was a grid-iron of terraced houses with a mass of people working at factories very few of which were in Beswick but many
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of which were on the periphery. When I was a young boy I recall thinking that it was marvellous on the Friday that we broke up for the annual holiday from school to be taken in a tramcar to Heaton Park. It was the only green I saw in those days.
We have to try to achieve an understanding between people in urban and rural areas. If we are not careful a form of apartheid begins to develop. There is a reluctance in some areas to welcome people from elsewhere. I recall some years ago when Manchester had a massive slum clearance programme. It was intending to buy land in Cheshire. That was opposed by a Member of your Lordships' House—not a member of my party—who won the case. Manchester was unable to build overspill housing in that area. However, the noble Lord did not grumble about having his chemical factory in Manchester which provided him and his family with a lucrative living. That is one issue about which we have to take care.
The noble Lord, Lord Walpole, spoke about the extraction of gravel. That is not a problem relating only to the location about which he spoke. The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, will be aware that there are grave reservations about proposals for extraction in the Peak District which is not a wc rld away from where he and I come from. Such issues have to be handled carefully. People should not be allowed to ravage and rip out just as they wish. We must be careful to balance the desires of the community with the reasonable desires of others.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sharples, spoke briefly about the important subject of tree planting. For my sins, I have planted a few trees in my not too large garden. I do not know what the greenhouse effect means other than that, in simple terms, if one wishes to retain any semblance of our existing world, it is essential to keep planting trees. I suppose that everyone who participates in such action is making a small contribution.
The noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, described how children brought up in rural villages were being forced out because of the diminishing supply of housing that they could afford. Much of that housing is being purchased by city people as second homes. One can well understand the resentment. We should carefully consider the issue and try to build homes so that people can remain in such communities. Otherwise, as I know from what has happened in Yorkshire, once the drift starts and generations move away, they do not return. A community may wither and almost disappear.
The noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, spoke correctly about the changing demands of society on the land. My children, for their own reasons, wished to be independent as quickly as possible. That has meant providing them with somewhere to live. It involves extra space. Let us consider the situation in Liverpool and Manchester. When those cities began their clearance schemes they had to move a quarter of a million people. Those people had to go somewhere. That explains the many overspill estates on the periphery of Manchester and Liverpool. Some people are surprised when I tell them that Manchester is the

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sixth largest city. It was once the second largest city after Birmingham. Leeds now has a quarter of a million more people than Manchester. That is because people have had to move away.
People are trying to understand the desires of others. They are coming together by agreement in preference to compulsory purchase orders, planning applications and the calling in of inspectors and Secretaries of State to referee. If mutual consent can be achieved that is far better.
I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, about the London experience. I shall not digress to talk about the abolition of the GLC. I was originally opposed to the metropolitan counties. As the ex-leader of Manchester City Council I was a unity man. However, I formed the view that they were doing a useful job and taking a strategic look at what was happening. I am sure that some of the delays and instances cited by the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, would have been avoided and decisions would have been reached quicker.
I do not know what Mr. Heseltine has in mind because I have not seen any statements. However, there are rumours in the press that we may be subject to another reorganisation of local government based on unitary authorities. That can mean only one thing: some of the county councils will have to go. I urge caution about resorting to that decision. We must bring into existence organisations that can take an overall look at an issue and achieve agreement without going to court. There is nothing worse for stopping land development than the protracted decision-making that must be undergone in order to resolve a contentious issue. I hope that those issues can be resolved by the setting up of such organisations.
I have spoken for 12 minutes and I have tried to cover some of the points raised. Again I express my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for initiating the debate. The subject is most interesting and will not go away. We must continue to talk about it for a long time. It will grow in importance and will need our constant attention and watchfulness.
7.2 p.m.
Viscount Astor: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for raising the subject of land use. We have heard contributions from noble Lords about a great variety of issues under this broad heading. I believe that the common theme underlying all these contributions has been the need to protect what we value most about our land while finding enough space for all our needs.
Those needs are both diverse and changing. For instance, as economic growth brings new prosperity we are seeing new trends in leisure and more people wanting to use existing facilities. Increased agricultural productivity means that probably for the first time in history we now need less farmland than we used to. The challenge is to respond to these trends in ways that protect and enhance the character of our environment and protect our rural communities.
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It is a central part of the Government's thinking that growth and protection of the environment must go hand in hand. Without growth we should be unable to afford to protect our surroundings; indeed, without regeneration they would fall into sad disrepair. On the other hand, without environmental protection there is a risk that by raising our standard of living we may reduce our quality of life.
The essential mechanism in all this is of course the planning system which has been in more or less its present state since 1947. What do we have to show for this long-standing regulatory regime? The benefits that the planning system has brought are sometimes overlooked so perhaps I may briefly review them. The sprawl of our settlements has been significantly constrained. Since the Second World War the spread of our cities into green fields has been considerably reduced thanks to long-standing green belt policies. On a much smaller scale, ribbon development on roads emanating from villages and small towns has been significantly restricted. Within our towns we have seen the planning system limiting the density of residential development. The designation of conservation areas has preserved the character of some of the more treasured areas of towns, cities and villages.
It is not just a question of planning, though. The Government are taking a very active role in seeing new amenities developed. I am particularly encouraged by the initiative being pursued by the Countryside Commission in co-operation with the Forestry Commission. They are working together to encourage the planting of community forests. Not only will these provide commercial forestry opportunities but they will offer a chance to improve the landscape of the urban fringe, provide new habitats for wildlife and give us new recreation facilities. We are also considering the Countryside Commission's proposal for a new national forest in the Midlands. I could make similar points about our use of grants in agriculture, our promotion of sites of special scientific interest and other wildlife measures, or our initiatives for regeneration in the inner cities. However, I must move on to deal with some of the specific points.
First, I shall briefly review the situation in respect of county structure plans. Our proposals for the future of these plans are set out in detail in the Planning and Compensation Bill to which your Lordships' gave a Second Reading last week. I do not intend to go into great detail about the Bill as much of it was outlined last week and we shall soon discuss the Bill in Committee. I shall summarise some of the important points that have been raised today. We intend to retain structure plans as an essential strategic element in the development plan framework. We also intend to allow counties to adopt their own structure plans in future—that is after due public consultation—rather than have to submit them to the Secretary of State. These proposals have been widely welcomed.
Our decision to retain county structure plans does not of course mean that we want things to carry on unchanged. The present system has been slow and cumbersome. Many plans contain too much detail—detail which ranges well beyond the scope of strategic

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land use policies. Self-adoption of plans by counties will be a major step towards reducing delays. We gave advice earlier this year on what we regard as the proper scope of structure plans—the key strategic issues. That advice will be further strengthened in the implementation of the new legislation. Our proposals for the comprehensive coverage of local plans will help here by ensuring that detailed development control policies are embodied in local plans where they belong rather than in the county structure plan.
Self-adoption of structure plans will not of course mean that counties can simply go their own way. They will be expected to have full regard for national and regional policies. We are currently expanding the coverage of regional planning guidance. Once it is in place counties will be expected to have regard to it in drawing up and revising their structure plans. The Secretary of State will have full and flexible reserve powers to intervene if necessary.
Several noble Lords have argued that the scope of structure plans should be extended to embrace transport, energy use and other broad environmental issues. To the extent that these issues have land use implications it will be appropriate for counties to address them in structure plans. One example would he the interactions between land use settlement patterns and transport patterns and their implication for energy consumption. But there are major problems in using structure plans to go beyond land use to formulate policy on wider resource management issues.
As regards the question of whether structure and local plans should be treated as the primary consideration in planning decisions it is important that we should guard against over-rigidity. It is true that in one sense a development plan is the first material consideration in relation to any planning application, though not the only one. The existing legislation already recognises this and, as the Department of the Environment's recent guidance has emphasised, the Secretary of State will be guided by development plans in his decisions on appeal. But plans cannot be expected to anticipate every need or opportunity for economic development that may arise. One of the strengths of our planning system is that it permits a greater flexibility in the individual case than more rigid zoning systems found in other countries. I believe that it is important that we retain that flexibility but within the context of the considerable weight that needs to be given to the development plan framework.
The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, raised the subject of waste sites. There are 4,000 landfill sites in Britain which take about 90 per cent. of our waste. Landfill is often the best practicable environmental option for the disposal of all but the most difficult and dangerous wastes. Generally speaking, we have adequate landfill resources for the waste that we generate, but the sites are unevenly distributed throughout the country. There is in particular, and unsurprisingly, a shortage in metropolitan areas.
Many noble Lords mentioned housing which is an important point. One of the key aims of the
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Government's policy is that the planning system should continue to make adequate provision for new housing requirements including those of local people. In doing so, full account must be taken of the need to protect the environment in both town and country. We shall shortly be issuing revised planning policy guidance on housing which will reflect not only this Government's commitment to protecting and improving the quality of our environment bu t also the need to ensure that the planning system plays its part in providing the housing which people need.
The revised guidance will incorporate and expand on our planning initiative to encourage the provision of low-cost housing for local needs. Under this initiative, planning authorities may exceptionally grant planning permission for low-cost housing for local needs on land which would not normally be released for residential development. A key element of the initiative is that, before the authority gives planning permission, it must be satisfied that arrangements have been made to ensure that the housing will remain low-cost for the foreseeable future.
The present initiative is tailored to the circumstances of rural areas, as it is in these areas that there is greatest potential for using suitable small plots of agricultural land with relatively low land values. In urban areas the same situation does not apply, as sites which are suitable for low-cost local needs housing are also likely to be suitable for a number of alternative land uses attracting high land values. The department has recently commissioned a research study to assess what progress is being made under the initiative, and to identify any problems being encountered in implementing it.
We recognise that in both urban and rural areas it may be desirable that new housing on a substantial scale should incorporate a reasonable mix of house types to cater for a range of housing requirements. It may therefore be appropriate for local planning authorities to seek to negotiate with developers for the inclusion of a proportion of low-cost housing in a larger development. But policies should be reasonably flexible and should leave room for all other material planning considerations to be taken into account.
I now turn to roads. The Government are spending substantial sums on minimising the environmental impact of new roads. Statutory environmental organisations are consulted from the earliest stages of a scheme's development, when the Landscape Advisory Committee considers a scheme. By-pass schemes themselves improve the local environment by redirecting traffic to more suitable routes. All trunk road schemes are directed to avoid areas of outstanding natural beauty and sites of special scientific interest wherever possible. The Government are committed to ensuring that in National Park areas no new trunk road is built or existing road upgraded unless there is a compelling need which cannot be met by any reasonable alternative means.
The results of joint studies between the Departments of Environment and Transport will be used to issue planning guidance to local authorities.

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The aim is to guide new development to locations which will reduce the need for car journeys and the distance driven, or which permit the choice of energy efficient transport. But the Government do not believe it is appropriate to curtail personal freedom to travel by car. They believe in balanced investment across transport modes, allowing the traveller freedom of choice.
Like other major projects with potentially significant environmental effects, motorway proposals are subject to environmental assessment. An environmental impact statement must be submitted to the planning authority, allowing full analysis of the environmental effects of the proposal. Environmental assessment gives planning authorities, and other public bodies which have environmental responsibilities, a better basis on which to make decisions. For developers, the process should draw their attention at an early stage to the environmental effects of their proposals so that, for example, they can amend their designs or incorporate new measures.
Roads are not just used by cars. They are used by buses, coaches and heavy lorries. Because of the increased demand for all forms of road transport, many UK roads are now heavily congested. Providing more road space will allow greater fuel efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
To reflect those trends, the Government have increased substantially spending on roads. In real terms, capital spending alone is over 60 per cent. higher than in 1978–79. Provision for the next three years is 50 per cent. higher in real terms than provision for the last three. Work is planned to start this year on some 45 motorway and trunk road schemes. Work is under way on a further 74 schemes, at a works cost of over £1·5 billion.
This trunk road programme represents the proposed work to be undertaken and paid for by central government. Work on local roads is the responsibility of local government. Efficient local roads systems are as important for the delivery of goods and services as an adequate strategic network is for the economy as a whole.
The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, mentioned the threat posed to attractive landscapes by that programme. At this early stage of the programme potential routes are drawn broadly. I have every expectation that the eventual routes will minimise adverse environmental impacts of that kind. The road programme and its traffic forecast reflects the Government's basis for action. The programme is not intended to meet all demands. Failure to provide for the extra capacity would be disastrous.
Therefore, we are providing new roads but we are also looking at public transport, particularly in urban areas. The Government are encouraging greater use of public transport by supporting high levels of investment. For example, planned investment in British Rail over the next three years is over £4 billion. The figure for London Regional Transport is up to £3 billion.
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The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, mentioned incentives for smaller cars. I agree with him on his comments about the value of choosing a less polluting means of travel. As regards his comments on incentives, the White Paper clearly stated that the Government would examine the need for fuel and vehicle tax changes to encourage greater economy.
I should mention also that outside urban areas the deregulation of bus services has increased passenger choice and bus mileage. Buses continue to be the main form of public transport and the increased provision of bus lanes and other bus priority measures can bring about advantages in economic terms. Such measures also make bus services more attractive by making the journeys faster and more reliable.
My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport has also been asked to consider light rail schemes for certain areas. He has already approved grant aid to the Manchester Metro and, subject to various assurances from the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority, he hopes that the Sheffield Supertram will be the next light rail system to go ahead.
Perhaps I may deal with some of the other points raised. Like the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, on matters of taxation I must defer to a higher authority; in my case, my right honourable friend the Chancellor.
As regards the question of making good use of urban land, we have had considerable success in that area. In addition to our derelict land reclamation programme, nearly half of all new houses built in England over recent years have been on vacant or recycled land in urban areas. The figures for London and the South-East are even higher—58 per cent.
We have had to strike a balance. Forcing too much new development in urban areas can result in town cramming, something which now concerns many suburban areas. We recently issued draft policy guidance on sport and recreation. That stresses the need to achieve that balance and protect urban open spaces which all communities need for pleasure and recreation. Local authorities must do that through their development plans and effective planning control.
Like all noble Lords I listened with great interest to the noble Lord, Lord Walpole. I am glad that he does not expect me to respond in detail to all the points that he raised. I cannot say very much. I understand that the matter to which he referred is the subject of appeal. Nevertheless, I found it extremely interesting.
Lord Walpole: My Lords, I did not expect the Minister to respond on the application matter. That is the point; he cannot. I suggested that in similar cases there should be a cooling-off period after the decision has been made. I cannot see that anywhere in the legislation, and I was hoping to see it.
Viscount Astor: My Lords, there will be an opportunity to raise those points when we come to the Committee stage of the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, spoke about derelict land. We already spend some £70 million a

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year in England on the derelict land grant. We are currently exploring measures to release more land, including placing more responsibility on those who create dereliction to put it right. The noble Lord also spoke of structure plans in London and other major cities. It is true that there are no structure plans in the main metropolitan areas, as there are in shire counties. However, we have arrangements to ensure that strategic planning issues in those areas are considered as a whole.
The Secretary of State issued strategic planning guidance for all those areas, including London, to provide a framework for unity development plans now being prepared by individual boroughs and districts. Moreover, Part 1 of each unity development plan is expected to address structural issues as they affect each individual borough or district.
The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, spoke of national parks. Perhaps I should remind him that the management of national parks in the first instance is for the Countryside Commission. However, the commission instigated a review of all matters affecting national parks. That will be conducted by a committee chaired by Professor Ron Edwards. The committee is expected to report to the commission in early 1991, and the commission will then make any recommendations to the department. It is for the commission to investigate, for example, proposals for new parks. The Secretary of State will look at any proposals it brings forward sympathetically. I understand that at present the commission is not considering any candidates.
I recognise that the weight of the number of visitors can be a problem. The Countryside Commission and parks authority put tremendous effort into managing the inflow of visitors to ensure that their impact on parks is limited. They also spend a good deal on maintenance. That is a particular problem with long distance footpaths. The introduction of charges is no doubt something that the review committee will be considering. We must wait and see what it recommends. I remind the noble Lord that the very size of the parks will make it extremely difficult to collect charges except in localised areas.
The noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, also mentioned Dartrnoor. The forces use the land within Dartmoor and other parks, and did so long before the parks were created. I know that there are sometimes conflicts between the military and civilian uses. That is inevitable. The Ministry of Defence does its best to limit the impact of its operations on the parks. The Dartrnoor Steering Group, which consists of the MoD, the park authority, the Duchy of Cornwall and other local groups, has done much to help reconcile the various interests on Dartmoor.
The noble Lord, Lord Dean of Beswick, mentioned Private Bills bypassing planning procedures. Following the report of the Joint Committee on Private Bills, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport published last summer proposals for a new order-making procedure to replace Private Bills for most development projects.
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However, initially in the transport field further progress depends on our finding the time for the necessary legislation.
At the beginning of my remarks I said that land use is a wide subject. I attempted to cover as many points raised by noble Lords as possible; I probably have not covered them all. There is a limit to the number of subjects to which one can do justice without taking excessive time. I have no doubt that noble Lords will return to many of these issues at a future time, and I look forward to that.
The Government set out their principles in the Environment White Paper. They are most notably clear commitments to protect our environment through the planning system; conserving our wildlife habitats and extending protected areas of natural beauty. The debate provided a useful opportunity not simply to consider individual matters, but also to look at the great range of actions that are required and that are being undertaken by the Government. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for giving us the opportunity for debate.
7.25 p.m.
Lord Hampton; My Lords, we have had an interesting debate. I thank all noble Lords who took part and raised so many different and important points. The noble Viscount was extremely courteous in answering my questions. He will not be surprised to learn that I am not entirely satisfied by those answers. I do not propose to prolong the proceedings by further analysis. It remains for me to beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Naseby: M.1-A.1 Link Road
7.26 p.m.
Lord Moran Lord Moran rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether, even at this late stage, they will reconsider their decision to route the M.1-A.1 link road across the battlefield of Naseby and will instead adopt the southern route avoiding this historic area.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in rising to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper perhaps I may express my warm thanks to those noble Lords who have agreed to take part in this debate.
It is curious that we in this country pay so little attention to the sites on which some of the great battles of our history have taken place. Of course some of them, like those of the Wars of the Roses, took place so long ago that we no longer know where exactly the fighting took place. But other more recent battles we know about with reasonable accuracy.
Elsewhere battlefields are regarded as a very important part of a nation's heritage. In the United States their Civil War battlefields are beautifully cared for and painstakingly preserved. At Gettysburg a visitor is helped by plaques and markers to understand just what happened. He can stand on the ridge held by Union troops and see precisely where Pickett's charge

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began and ended. The whole scene is clear, vivid and impressive. I believe that it attracts around 1 million visitors a year.
By contrast, we in this country neglect our most important and significant battlefields. It is about one of these, that of Naseby in Northamptonshire, in the very middle of England, that I want to say a few words tonight. I have a personal interest in this because a few years ago I wrote a biography of Thomas Fairfax, who commanded the parliamentary forces—the freshly created New Model Army—on that day, Saturday 14th June 1645. Fairfax, helped by Cromwell, Skippon and Ireton, confronted his sovereign, Charles I, who was supported by the two palatinate princes, Rupert and Maurice. The resulting conflict was the decisive battle of the Civil War and established the supremacy of Parliament. By any reckoning it was one of the most important and significant battles in our history.
It is almost miraculous that the land on which the battle was fought, just north of the village Naseby, has survived for nearly 350 year largely unchanged and unspoilt. School children, those interested in our history or tourists can still see for themselves just where the battle took place. Unhappily, that uniquely historic site is now threatened with destruction by the building of a new motorway, the M.1-A.1 link road.
The argument about where the road should run has been going on since 1972 when the decision to build it was originally taken. The Department of the Environment originally appointed Freeman Fox, consulting engineers, to produce possible corridors for the road. They produced a proposed route south of the village, deliberately avoiding the battlefield to the north. Three months later the two local authorities concerned—Northamptonshire County Council and Daventry District Council—suddenly designated the area through which the southern route would pass as being of high landscape value, ignoring the outstandingly beautiful country north of Naseby, recognised as such by eminent authorities like Dame Sylvia Crowe and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England.
Northamptonshire County Council argued, no doubt for its own good reasons, for a northern route through the battlefield. Letters of protest were published in the press from Dame Veronica Wedgewood, Sir Arthur Bryant and others, and the Society for the Preservation of the Field of the Battle of Naseby was formed. This society has fought valiantly against the plan to wreck the battlefield.
A public consultation exercise took place which showed overwhelming support for saving the battlefield. In August 1975 the then Labour Minister of Transport, Dr. Gilbert, announced:
"At Naseby the Minister considers that whilst all other factors are very evenly balanced the historical significance of the area is of overriding importance and he has therefore decided that the link road should follow the southern alternative past the village".
I am quite sure that that was the right decision.
In 1976, however, things began to go wrong. Freeman Fox was dropped and the scheme was transferred to the responsibility of the county council working with the Department of Transport's eastern road construction unit which maintained that it was not restricted to the Minister's preferred route and would consider any alternative. It also put out misleading information about the effect of a northern route on the battlefield and alleged that bad soil conditions within the southern corridor had forced it to plan instead for a road running north of Naseby.
In 1979 the Conservative Government came to power and in 1982 the new Minister of Transport, Mrs. Chalker, said that circumstances had changed and bad soil conditions had caused the department to abandon a southern route. Some of your Lordships asked for details of that in this House in July 1982, but it emerged that the suggestion that soil conditions in the southern corridor were unsatisfactory was groundless. The department then shifted its ground and claimed that a northern route was cheaper, shorter and less damaging to the landscape, though that was not the view of experts like Dame Sylvia Crowe.
The department next produced exhibits setting out its plans which showed the battle area as a tiny hexagon, little bigger than the size of a football pitch. That was totally misleading because the battle involved about 21,000 men, many of them mounted. The department also suggested, incorrectly, that a southern route would almost touch the village. Throughout the proceedings the Department of Transport appears to have been far from evenhanded, to have given out misleading information and to have constantly attempted to belittle the importance of the battlefield. Indeed, at the inquiry the chairman of the Cromwell Association asked a representative of the Department of Transport a hypothetical question: "Can we assume, for the purposes of argument, that your road would totally destroy the battlefield; what then would be the position?" The reply was, "It would make no difference at all". It is that indifference to the importance of the battlefield that objectors have been struggling against for the past 18 years.
A full inquiry was conducted at which a number of distinguished historians gave detailed evidence. All of them agreed that a road running north of Naseby would do irrevocable damage to the battlefield. The two Ministers at the time, Mr. Peter Bottomley and Mr. Paul Channon, concluded on the basis of the inspector's report that the choice was a hard one. They said that they were in,
"no doubt of the significance that rightly attaches to the site of such an important battle in the history of Parliamentary democracy as a place for visiting, study and interpretation. On the other hand they have to consider the environmental arguments".
They also noted the preferences of the local councils. Their decision was:
"With these considerations in mind the Secretaries of State have decided it is not reasonable that the whole area involved in the battle should be regarded as sacrosanct, as something to be preserved in its present form at all costs. With much

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regret, therefore, they conclude that the Link Road should follow the published route north of the village. They do not believe in any case that the route will have the devastating effect on the battle area as a whole that the objectors evidently fear".
That was the key decision. It is my contention that it was wrong and that the battlefield should be protected.
It is true that the line of the proposed road will not run through the centre of the area where the opposing forces were first drawn up—the area between Mill Hill, where Fairfax and Cromwell drew up the parliamentary forces, and Dust Hill, where King Charles I stood with his troops. However, it will run through the areas where Cromwell's five regiments of horse were drawn up, where Prince Rupert's impetuous charge took place and where the parliamentary infantry were at first driven back. A large four-lane modern road on this alignment, with three massive overbridges across it, will destroy for ever the value and significance of this historic site.
Incidentally, I am surprised that English Heritage has not been more active in seeking to preserve this historic site. I have been told by its chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who unfortunately is unable to take part in this debate tonight, that,
"English Heritage's responsibilities and authority do not cover landscapes as our locus is entirely the man-built environment".
He added:
"Naturally this is an unsatisfactory situation and that is why we are pleased that in the recent Government White Paper on the environment it is suggested that in future battlefields should come under our aegis".
However, the National Heritage Act 1983 states in Section 33(1) (a) that it is the duty of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission—that is, English Heritage—
"to secure the preservation of ancient monuments … situated in England".
Section 33(8) of that Act defines an ancient monument as including any site which in the commission's opinion is of historic interest. I gather that English Heritage regards a site as not including a landscape, but if Naseby is not a site of historic interest, what is? The preservation society cannot understand why English Heritage was not represented at the two public inquiries, does not seem to have made representations about the threat to the battlefield to the inspectors or the Ministers and said in only one letter that,
"It … regrets the disturbance which may be caused to the site of the battle of Naseby".
It has clearly been very damaging that English Heritage has taken the view that it was inappropriate for it to intervene. Had it felt free to do so, we might not have needed this debate tonight. As it is, since the original decision by the two Ministers the plans have been altered in that three large and intrusive overbridges will be constructed on the road to carry side roads across it. This has resulted in a second public inquiry this year in which the society once more argued in favour of a southern route. Throughout the proceedings the society has brought together a
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formidable weight of historic and landscape expertise in support of its position. By contrast, the Department of Transport has been unable to find any historical witness to support its contention.
The society challenged the public inquiry report in the High Court. This challenge failed as the court held that it had no power to overturn the Ministers' decision, but Lord Justice Bingham concluded:
"If the issue before this Court were whether the appellants had established a formidable case for preserving the battlefield as it now stands, I would for my part have no hesitation in concluding that they had".
It is that formidable case that I think should be decisive in this case and not the decision by two Ministers now no longer in the Government that it would be unreasonable to regard the whole area of the battlefield as sacrosanct. The society considered an appeal to the European Court, but that court cannot intervene because the requirement on member governments to make an environmental impact assessment came into force after the decision in this case was taken.
The grim conclusion was that,
"The Commission cannot on the basis of directive 85/337/EEC stop any member state from destroying its environment if it so wishes".
However, we do not need to destroy cur environment or to wreck this unique historic site. The southern route is still available. The cost would be little, if any, more. It would be in a deep cutting; it would not damage the environment more than the northern route and, above all, it would not touch the battlefield.
Since 1985 we have all become more conscious of the need to preserve all aspects of our environment if we possibly can. In their own recent environmental White Paper, This Common Inheritance, the Government say that they are now,
"asking English Heritage and the Countryside Commission to develop their educational programmes, SD as to make the public more aware of how the countryside, and historic landscapes, have evolved. It has invited English Heritage to prepare a register of landscapes and sites (such as battlefields) which have historic significance but where there are no longer any identifiable remains … through this register the Government, local planning authorities and others will be alerted to the significance of these sites when considering development plans and applications for planning permission".
In the light of that, which I welcome, and of the fact that since last week we have a new Prime Minister and new Secretaries of State for Transport and for the Environment, I hope that the Government will be prepared to think again. Why destroy this battlefield when a practicable and reasonable alternative exists? As the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, said in this House last year, to do so would be an appalling example of vandalism.
We live in a small, precious and vulnerable island. We should at the very least preserve the historic sites that we have. The Department of Transport seems utterly insensitive to these things. I think that left to itself it might plan a motorway through the close of Salisbury Cathedral or a roundabout around York Minster. We must look to Ministers to take a more enlightened view. It is not too late to put right a

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grievous mistake. To move the route south of Naseby now and save the battlefield would be welcomed by everyone interested in our national heritage and would earn the Government the thanks of this generation and future generations.
7.40 p.m.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, it must be very rare for an incoming Minister to be presented with an opportunity, by a stroke of the pen, to immortalise himself as the man who saved the reputation of his department. If the right honourable gentleman in another place who has become the Secretary of State for Transport will take the trouble to read the very persuasive case that the noble Lord, Lord Moran, has put before us, and agree to this proposal, he will be able to liquidate the reputation of the Department of Transport as philistinism incarnate.
It is a curious story that we have had put before us. It raises some interesting issues. I have been told by those acquainted with the area, which I am not, that there is no pressing evidence that such a road was ever necessary and that if the inhabitants of the area north and south of the battlefield had pooled their efforts and made a case against such a road they might have been successful. However, that is hypothesis.
What I can say is not hypothetical, having followed the argument and read some of the documents and having seen some of the maps concerned, is that the county council seems to have behaved in an extraordinary way for some elected persons holding planning authority. I am told and I have read that they have now put on the alleged battlefield various markers which do not correspond to the views of the historians who are competent to tell us how the battle was waged. By doing so they have managed to suggest that the battlefield was somewhere else. The road, as the noble Lord, Lord Moran, pointed out, would undoubtedly ruin the battlefield.
On some occasions historic monuments were moved. Temples in Egypt were moved in order to avoid the flooding of the Nile. This would certainly be the first occasion on which a battlefield was moved by a county council in order to enable it to pursue its favourite road project. The noble Viscount who is to reply used to speak on behalf of the Department of Education and Science. It is again extraordinary, as the noble Lord, Lord Moran, pointed out, that a government who have insisted on the central importance of British history in the national curriculum should be indifferent to an event which, as the noble Lord pointed out, played a cardinal role not merely in the development of a war but in the future of our political institutions.
There are extraordinary paradoxes in this and an extraordinary feeling that we have not been told the full story as to why the county council, against the advice of those concerned with education, historians and qualified surveyors, should persist with a project which seems to have no justification at all that it is
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prepared to explain. It is trying to divert attention from the damage to the battlefield by pretending that it happened somewhere else.
The presence in the Chamber this evening of the leading historian of that period, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, obviates my having to say anything more on the subject, and I gladly yield the floor to him.
7.45 p.m.
Earl Russell: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Moran, for introducing this Question. He and the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, have between them put the case so well that they have not left me with much to say. Let us suppose that we have in front of us a proposal to take the original death warrant of Charles I or an original text of Magna Charta and destroy them as part of a project for recycling old paper or even parchment. I think that, quite rightly, your Lordships would express a good deal of indignation.
However, historical evidence does not take only a written form because it may take a physical one. It may be just as valuable and significant in the physical form as it may be in the written. For a while during the 1960s the study of war was somewhat out of fashion. People felt that it was something that they disliked and therefore they did not want to study it very much. But it is a capital mistake to think that it is our job to like or dislike the past. Our job, whether we like it or not, is to understand it.
During the past 20 years there has been a considerable revival of military history associated in particular with King's College, London, which is my own college. That has been very largely concentrated on logistics and money. Unlike modern major generals, military historians do know what is meant by commissariat. Although that has been a very valuable and important trend, it is nevertheless important that there may still be occasions on which the whole course of a war is actually determined in a few minutes on a field of battle.
Historians, like Ministers, are very rightly wary of answering hypothetical questions. So I am not going to say that if King Charles had won the Battle of Naseby he would have won the civil war. I cannot assert with any confidence that he would not have done. There was a moment in the middle of that battle when the parliamentary foot soldiers wavered and were on the verge of breaking and running. It is at least a possibility that if the events of those few minutes had gone the other way the whole course of the war would have been different.
We cannot understand the war without understanding the battle; and we cannot understand the battle without understanding the ground. The great Victorian historians, and S.R. Gardiner in particular, never wrote the history of a battle without walking across the ground covered by the battle itself. That is a good tradition. I have done that on the rare occasions when I have had to write about a battle, which as a parliamentary historian I fortunately do not have to do very often. But you cannot do it if the battlefield has been destroyed.

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We may think that the story is known and that it is not going to change. That is not the case. The historical story does change constantly in response to the asking of further questions. It is not the Battle of Naseby but the Battle of Marston Moor in which the whole story has been changed within our working lifetime by the exercise of aerial photography. That demonstrated that the water course which divided the two sides has moved a considerable distance since the time of the battle. Let us suppose that that battlefield had been destroyed. It would have been quite impossible for that to be discovered. We would have been left with the wrong story with no prospect of ever being able to correct it. It might be the battlefield of Naseby next time, so there is here something that is important not only on heritage grounds for tourists, but also as a serious point of academic study.
I appreciate that the academic interest is only one among many involved in this matter. I agree with the Secretary of State, Mr. Channon, who argued at the time that the academic interest in this matter should not be sacrosanct. In a reasonable political universe, where we are dealing constantly with competing claims, little should be sacrosanct. I think, though, that it is a claim which, other things being equal, deserves a serious hearing. It was my first objective when investigating the subject to try to see whether other things were in fact equal.
I think that Dr. Gilbert in 1975 was right that the other issues were more or less evenly balanced. I accept that there is a case for a road. The carriage of goods from the industrial midlands to the east coast ports is a matter of economic significance. I was prepared to investigate whether the use of the northern or the southern route would make a significant difference either to the cost or the distance involved. Any difference with regard to distance is minimal. Since it depends on quite small points of how the loop of the road is planned, it may be slightly shorter or slightly longer on the southern route; but either way there will be no great difference. There is no strong argument in terms of saving distance.
What was said at the 1984–85 public inquiry seems to be correct in that there is no significant argument on grounds of cost; or at least that seemed to be correct until very recently. We are now told that three massive bridges are needed over the road on the northern route. That must change the financial arithmetic. It must make the northern route more expensive. What we are now being asked to accept is the destruction of a historical site of great importance, not for the sake of an overriding public interest but for the sake of an unnecessary waste of public money. I hope that that can be prevented.
7.53 p.m.
Lord Monson: My Lords, we must all be grateful to my noble friend Lord Moran for initiating a debate on this important subject, and for putting his cast iron case so clearly and so forcefully.
The noble Lord, Lord Beloff, suggested that a new road might not be necessary at all. He may possibly be right. Nevertheless, we must give the Government the
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benefit of the doubt and for the purposes of this debate at any rate start from the assumption that a new road connecting the A.1 with the M.1 is indeed needed, not withstanding the well established maxim that new roads usually generate new traffic beyond their capacity to handle. I should add in parenthesis that any new road connecting with the A.1 will be positively useless and will make matters worse unless the Government act quickly to get rid of the terrible bottleneck near Alconbury, where the M.11 extension, which carries so much heavy lorry traffic from east London and the east coast ports, funnels into the A.1.
But assuming that we agree with the principle of a new road, where is it to go? If a similar debate had taken place two or three years ago, I would not have put down my name to speak. At that time the word "Naseby" simply meant to me yet another Civil War battlefield, many of which almost totally lack either atmosphere or sense of history, at least to those who are not specialists in the subject, possibly because the impact of the late 20th century has destroyed any atmosphere there might formerly have been.
Moreover, the part of England in which Naseby is located is not noted for its remoteness or by and large, for its scenic beauty. However, about 18 months ago my wife and I decided to make a long detour on our way North to see what all the fuss was about. We were immediately completely converted to the point of view put forward by noble Lords who have spoken in the debate so far. Partly perhaps because Naseby is rather isolated and difficult to get to, partly because there are few if any 20th century intrusions, the site is extraordinarily atmospheric, albeit not to the same extent as Culloden, which must surely seem poignant and haunted even to someone with almost no knowledge of the history of the highlands. Nevertheless, Naseby exudes an almost tangible sense of the England of 345 years ago. I strongly urge an alternative route upon the Government, the more so since I am very conscious of the way the once peaceful and in parts still beautiful Oxford canal has been ruined by the M.40 extension from Oxford to Birmingham, even before any traffic other than construction traffic has run along that motorway.
I have a specific question for the Minister who is to reply. A former Conservative Transport Minister, who is not in the Government now and has not been in the Government for several months, made a most extraordinary, even shocking, declaration rather more than a year ago in connection with the Naseby controversy, as it so happened, although he could have made a similar comment about other road "improvement" schemes. The Minister in question was reported as saying in effect that those who persisted in resisting road improvement schemes had blood on their hands, in that every day road improvements that were deemed necessary by the Government were delayed by objections the more likely it was statistically that people would be killed or injured in consequence. Apart from the fact that that was a "guesstimate" with no factual support, it was a shocking thing to say and an appalling example of moral blackmail.

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I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that every individual, if he so chooses, is entitled to object, responsibly and within the law, to bypasses, motorways, outer ring roads, road widening schemes or whatever, and is entitled to do so not only legally but morally, irrespective of whether his or her objections are based on a historical, aesthetic or environmental viewpoint or, slightly less altruistically, stem from what we now call NIMBY—not in my back yard—considerations. It takes a strong man or woman to stand up to moral blackmail applied in the full glare of publicity. If individuals are to be frightened off making legitimate objections to road schemes in this way, one might as well scrap the planning process altogether and automatically rubber stamp every government scheme.
7.58 p.m.
Lord Renton: My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Monson, on one matter because I happen to live only four miles from Alconbury. The congestion on the A.1 is serious at times and we need an A.1-M.1 link. Let no one doubt that.
Having represented Huntingdon in another place for 34 years until 1979, when my right honourable friend the Prime Minister succeeded me as local MP, I too am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Moran, has raised this matter. I know the battlefield of Naseby. It seems to me that an overwhelming case has been made against building a motorway across it. That case has been so well made that I can be brief but I would venture to summarise the matter by saying that the historical, environmental, financial and practical reasons for choosing the southern route are overwhelming. It is to me astonishing that those who were responsible before last week should have made an obviously wrong decision, as has been said.
I found it rather significant to discover that the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, is president of the society for the preservation of this battlefield. It makes one wonder what an outcry there would be, not only in Europe but in this country, if it were decided to build a colossal motorway with three bridges across the battlefield of Waterloo, which the Belgians have done so much to preserve, and have done it so well.
I merely wish to add to what has been said about the historical importance of the battlefield of Naseby and to bring the matter up to date, now that Huntingdon has produced our first leader of the nation since Oliver Cromwell. In passing, I should like to point out that our Prime Minister has a deep sense of history.
Oliver Cromwell would not have become the nation's leader if the New Model Army—which he trained, although Fairfax led the army—had not won the Battle of Naseby in 1645. Both the Parliamentarians and the Royalists had well-trained, efficient and brave armies. Until the Battle of Naseby, the Royalists had been victorious in most of the fighting. However, the Parliamentary Party won an overwhelming victory at Naseby and the war took a decisive turn. Although the war did not end until the
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Battle of Worcester in 1651, Cromwell was never defeated in battle after the battle of Naseby; neither, incidentally, was he defeated in politics.
Towards the end of his life in 1658, Cromwell tried to unite the country as much as he belatedly could, having previously imposed divisive policies upon it. I hope that I am not saying anything irrelevant to the debate when I say that I believe our new Prime Minister will do much to unite the country, just he has already succeeded in uniting the Conservative Party.
Let us hope that what has been said in this debate will add to that unity by the new Secretary of State for Transport and the new Secretary of State for the Environment getting together to reverse the wretched decision to build a four-lane motorway with three bridges right across the middle of the battlefield. As the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said, that will add to its cost. There is no doubting the fact that these bridges will be built right across the middle of the famous battlefield. I have been there, and I can assure your Lordships that that is the case.
There is power to reverse the decision which has already been taken; all that is needed is the will to do so. Therefore, I hope that when my noble friend Lord Davidson responds to the debate, he will not just repeat to the House the departmental advice which he has been given. I earnestly implore him to assure us this evening that he will bring to the attention of both Secretaries of State concerned the very strong arguments which have been put forward by your Lordships this evening for reversing the decision which has so far been made.
8.4 p.m.
Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, this has been a remarkable debate. There have been contributions from distinguished academics and strong representations have been made to the Government from both sides of the House. We have had a fascinating re-run of the civil war and a remarkable, philosophical speech from the noble Earl, Lord Russell, who has a very distinguished academic role in relation to the matters we are discussing.
The whole House is indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Moran, for introducing the debate. His eloquent and factual speech represented a powerful indictment of the decision which has been made. He contrasted the situation—if that decision is upheld—with the practice in other countries. Other noble Lords also mentioned that aspect. The noble Lord takes the view that the Department of Transport has been both indifferent and insensitive to representations made over a long period of time. Those views have been supported by many noble Lords today; they have also been supported by distinguished parliamentarians elsewhere, not least the former Prime Minister, Mr. Heath, Mr. Michael Foot, and many others. I dare say that if other noble Lords could have been present this evening, they would have wished to present the case in a similar way.
Such representations have not only been made from Parliament. They have also been made by the CPRE, by the late Sir John Betjeman and by

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distinguished historians, reflecting the views so eloquently presented tonight by the noble Earl, Lord Russell. Could there be a more powerful and eloquent witness than the former Member of Parliament for the area through which this battlefield passes than the noble Lord, Lord Renton.
Lord Renton: My Lords, I trust that the noble Lord will forgive my intervention. Naseby is not in the Huntingdonshire constituency; it is in a Northamptonshire constituency. However, I happen to know the area of Naseby and I have ridden around the battlefield.
Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, that is good enough for me. Apart from the the main point of issue, one needs to consider also the credibility of the Government's assertions in their White Paper. In my view, an overwhelming case has been made out for the Government to reconsider their decision.
I have no doubt that the noble Viscount, Lord Davidson, can say that this is a stale matter and that the decision has been made and re-made on many occasions. I hope that he will not do that. I hope he will say that, in the light of the very strong case which has been made out, the Government will seriously consider what has been said. As the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, said, there is an overwhelming case for doing so. We have two new Secretaries of State. It could hardly be argued that they will have had time to study the case in all its details, taking into account all the demerits of the Government's case, in the few days since they took office. The noble Lord said rather fetchingly that they now have a chance to immortalise themselves on the issue. They should certainly seize the opportunity. It would be far easier to immortalise themselves in this connection than in any reappraisal of the poll tax or of our decrepit transport system.
On the assumption that a road is required—I believe that it is, and the noble Lord, Lord Renton, who knows the area rather better than most of us has confirmed that fact—the choice is still relatively simple. There is, first, the northern route. I refer to the proposed M.1-A.1 motorway link from Rugby to Huntingdon which would run north of Naseby village. This would undoubtedly destroy the Naseby battlefield. If the Department of Transport under its previous bosses regarded that prospect with indifference, this House does not.
There is also the southern route running through agricultural land. No doubt there would also be an environmental penalty to pay, but this is an area, as I understand it, in which large estates predominate. It may be they that have made the strongest representations to the Government thus far.
Perhaps I may briefly review the history of the decision. As has been said, the original decision was made by Dr John Gilbert, my honourable friend in another place—with whom I served in government—on 7th August 1975 on the basis that while all factors were very evenly balanced, the historical significance of the area was of overriding importance, and he had therefore decided that the link road should follow the southern alternative past the village. That
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decision has been praised on all sides of the House tonight. It was a decision made after extensive local consultation. The consultation demonstrated vividly that local opinion was overwhelmingly in favour of preserving the battlefield and therefore of adopting the southern route. The Government have never shown convincingly, from the time that they began to reconsider the decision, that the considerations applied by Dr. Gilbert were wrong.
It was only a short time after the Government came to office that the decision was reversed. That position, doggedly maintained ever since, rides roughshod over local public opinion. It demonstrates the proposition that is sometimes put forward: our mind is made up, do not confuse us with the facts.
Over the years successive Ministers have maintained the position. I urge the Minister to consider the following points. It was asserted that bad soil conditions within the southern corridor ruled it out. Based on information I have received from the society which has briefed noble Lords, my understanding is that physical investigations have never been undertaken. Perhaps the Minister will respond to that point. Is the assertion right or wrong?
The inspector, Brigadier Morrell, conceded in the report:
"I do not feel qualified to judge the disputed claims of landscape experts".
The evidence given by such experts (in contrast to the lawyers who attended the inquiry) wholly supported the southern link. It did that on environmental grounds alone. Despite that, the inspector's recommendation was, extraordinarily enough, based on landscape issues, and that constituted the basis of the Government's conclusions.
Yet, as was said by the noble Lord, Lord Moran, at the beginning, and as has been repeated by others in the House, no oral evidence on that matter was submitted, rightly or wrongly, by English Heritage. The Department of Education and Science, despite the heritage arguments, said not a word. The department responsible for tourism totally ignored the matter, and ignored incidentally the potential for tourism in the area. It seems that the Government, almost deliberately, neglected to intervene.
I have no doubt—this is what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, when answering questions on the matter on 26th January 1989—that the Government will pray in aid the fact that there has been litigation in the High Court and the Court of Appeal and even the European Court of Justice, and that those court decisions were unable to change the situation. The reasonable explanation for that, as I believe the noble Lord, Lord Renton, as a distinguished lawyer will aver, is that the High Court's remit in such matters is restricted, because all that it could determine was whether the Minister had fulfilled his constitutional duty by holding a public inquiry. That he did.
The noble Lord, Lord Moran, referred to the remarkable observations of Lord Justice Bingham when the matter went to the Court of Appeal. The

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European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said that the environmental impact assessment directive was not in force—it did not come into force until July 1988—and therefore it could not intervene. What the European Court of Justice said was something of an indictment. It said that the Commission could not, on the basis of the environmental impact directive, stop any member state from destroying its environment if it so wished. We hope that the Government will not so wish.
The reasons, stated and unstated—the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, referred to some of the unstated reasons—come to this. First, the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, admitted—it is plain in law, and right—that a Minister can overrule an inspector, but in this instance the Government have chosen not to do so. On 26th January 1989 he said:
"My Lords, possibly, but at this battlefield there are no remains of the battle to see. It looks like an ordinary field, so far as I am aware".—[Official Report, 26/1/89; col. 820.]
The noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, clearly has not visited the site or he would not have said,
"so far as I am aware".
He also said that most battlefields look like ordinary fields. That is true. I have recently been to Yorktown. That looks like an ordinary field. Waterloo also looks like an ordinary field. The Belgians have taken great trouble to preserve the battlefield, as I am well aware from having travelled along that motorway on many occasions. It has been falsely asserted by the Government that all that was at stake was a battlefield little bigger than a football pitch. As the noble Lord, Lord Moran, pointed out, there were 21,000 men mostly on horseback fighting along a front of two miles—some football pitch!
The unstated point is that there are powerful vested interests which have sought to influence and have succeeded in influencing the Government, Northamptonshire County Council, Daventry, landowners, and so on. The Government have put above all the case for road haulage, but it is a bigger case than that.
Why are so many agitated about this issue? The battle fought on 14th June 1645 was the decisive battle of the Civil War, ensuring the supremacy of our Parliament. As my right honourable friend Michael Foot put it in another place, it was one of the birthplaces of parliamentary democracy in the United Kingdom. It is also a pleasant area. It is a pleasant battlefield. It is good to visit because it provides an unspoilt view of the landscape. That is the view of Professor Woolrych, who gave evidence to the public inquiry in 1984. There is tourist potential as there is in relation to other battlefields. There is also considerable educational potential. It is something, as the noble Earl, Lord Russell, has clearly demonstrated today, about which children should know. I am convinced that a visit brings history to life. That is surely a critical matter.
There are environmental considerations which cause grave concern here. There are two routes, almost equal in length, but the northern route would
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have a disastrous impact. The southern route would not. It is more favourably placed. It would not involve nearly as much public expenditure as that relating to the northern route.
If the Government dispute that point, which has been made to them over and over again, let them give comparative figures. I believe that in winding up the debate the noble Viscount should do so. As the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said, the northern route would involve building three massive bridges because the route runs along a high ridge. That does not apply in any way to the southern route.
Even on public expenditure grounds, about which the Government claim to be concerned, they have been demonstrably wrong. I believe that the Government have miscalculated. That is the view of everyone who has spoken in the debate. The Government should change their mind, even at this late stage. Naseby was a decisive battle between Cavaliers and Roundheads and I sincerely hope that it is not the boneheads who will triumph.
8.20 p.m.
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, we have had a fascinating debate which has, more than almost any other that I can remember, brought out the exceptional erudition, knowledge and experience which are features that so distinguish your Lordships' House. Your Lordships may have overrated the influence that I might have with my colleagues. However, I can tell the House that I personally will ensure that the Official Report of this debate will be read by my right honourable friends, the Secretaries of State for Transport and the Environment. Nevertheless, that is as far as my influence extends at this stage, and I shall confidently leave it to my noble friend Lord Renton—who has considerably more influence—not only to send a copy of the Official Report to our right honourable friend the Prime Minister but I dare say to have a cup of coffee with him.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Moran, for giving me the opportunity to set out the Government's reasons for their decision to route the M.1-A.1 link road to the north of the village of Naseby. At this moment it remains the intention of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport to build this much needed link road across the East Midlands on the route already authorised by the made orders. This will take the road north of Naseby. The Department of Transport is already constructing about half the length of the 45-mile road and is pressing on with completion of the statutory procedures for the remaining sections of the road. We expect to start work for the section around Naseby in the summer of 1991.
The merits of competing routes to the south and north of Naseby have been discussed at length over about the past 15 years. The original orders under the Highways Act for the Naseby section were published in draft as long ago as 1982. It is now the time to put intention into practice and build the road.

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My right honourable friends the former Secretaries of State for the Environment and for Transport confirmed the need and fixed the alignment for the whole route of the M.1-A.1 link road in a letter of 6th April 1987 which conveyed their decision. This followed a report by an independent inspector who held a public inquiry between September 1984 and June 1985. That inquiry heard a great deal of detailed evidence and cross-examination, alternative proposals and counter proposals on many issues, including the effect on Naseby battlefield. Overall the inspector found that the case for an M1-A1 link road was overwhelming. At that original inquiry the debate on the route at Naseby and related issues alone took about four weeks.
The inspector concluded that the evidence given by five eminent historians supported the view that the Department of Transport's proposed northern route would cross the battlefield near its southern edge. He said the objectors' alternative southern route put forward by the Society for the Preservation of the Field of Battle of Naseby would have a greater overall impact on the environment. Bearing in mind the minor extent to which the proposed road would encroach upon the battlefield, the inspector was not convinced that the additional effect upon the environment of the objectors' alternative route could be justified. He concluded that the department should not adopt a route to the south of Naseby in preference to the published route north of the village.
I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, that more physical boreholes—that is site investigation—have been carried out to the south of Naseby than to the north. This was reported to the 1984–85 public inquiry. However, I do not believe that this is either the place or the time to re-open that public inquiry.
In coming to a decision my right honourable friends the former Secretaries of State for the Environment and for Transport dealt with the hard choice between preserving the whole battlefield and protecting the sensitive environment south of Naseby. They were in no doubt of the historical significance that rightly attaches to the site of such an important battle. On the other hand, they had to consider all the environmental arguments.
The two affected local authorities—that is Northamptonshire County Council and Daventry District Council—opposed the objector's alternative southern route because among other things it affected the designated area of high landscape value which lies to the south of Naseby. The alternative route would impose more visual intrusion on a greater number of dwellings than the northern route, subject more dwellings to increased noise and have a particularly severe effect on the village of Haselbech where local people were united in opposing the alternative route.
My right honourable friends the former Secretaries of State concluded that it was not reasonable that the whole area of the battle should be regarded as sacrosanct, as something to be preserved in its present form at all costs. That present form, I might add, is unlikely to resemble the countryside of 1645.
Lord Renton: My Lords, it is not far off it.
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, I take my noble friend's point. My right honourable Friends did not believe, in any event, that the road would have such a devastating effect on the battlefield as some fear.
The road would cross near the southern edge of the battlefield at low level. The natural topography north of Naseby village comprises a series of ridges running generally from west to east. The link road will run along a valley formed between two of these. The high ground to the south of the road will then shield it from the village of Naseby and the ridges to the north will shield views of the road from the main area of the civil war fighting.
Not only has the question of the route north of Naseby been thoroughly investigated during the required statutory procedures of highway scheme preparation, but it has also been pursued by the Society for the Preservation of the Field of Battle of Naseby through the High Court in August 1988 and through an Appeal Court in January 1989, as the noble Lord, Lord Moran, told us. On each occasion the validity of the decision of my right honourable friends the former Secretaries of State for the Environment and for Transport has been upheld. An application to this House in March 1989 for leave to appeal was subsequently refused.
Also following the recommendation of the inspector in his report on the 1984–85 public inquiry, my right honourable friends the former Secretaries of State agreed that, in an effort to reduce the effects on local road users, changes should be made to the provisions for minor roads which currently run across the battlefield. These changes (to provide one new bridged crossing and to amend another) were also subject to the rigours of the statutory procedures which involved a second public inquiry held in February 1990.
The route of the main line of the link road was not strictly within the ambit of that inquiry. Nevertheless, the inspector agreed to hear the further submissions of the Society for the Preservation of the Field of Battle of Naseby on that already well rehearsed topic. He concluded, and my right honourable friends the former Secretaries of State for the Environment and for Transport agreed in their decision letter of 22nd October this year, that no new evidence of sufficient clarity or substance had been presented such as to cast doubt on the analysis of the original inspector and the findings of the then Secretaries of State following the 1984–85 inquiries.
Lengthy, detailed, comprehensive and sympathetic consideration has been given to the route of the link road at Naseby. Yet another review now would show that a change of route would achieve nothing but delay because of the fresh statutory procedures which would be required. The need for the scheme was substantiated at the 1984–85 inquiry; this need remains beyond doubt and the growth in traffic in the intervening years makes it all the more urgent. The link road will provide a vital and necessary route between the industry of the Midlands, East Anglia and

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the east coast ports and thence to Europe. It will reduce fatal and other accidents on existing roads running through a large number of communities in the East Midlands and bring them relief from the environmental effects of heavy traffic. To realise these benefits as soon as possible it is right to press ahead to complete at the earliest opportunity the route which exhaustive consideration of all points of view has shown to be the best choice.
Lord Renton: My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, perhaps I may ask this question. Does he have any figures as to the relative costs of the two routes? We should bear in mind that the building of overhead bridges is bound to be an increased cost. On the proposed northern route, there would be three bridges.
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, the quantum of costs on both the northern and southern alignments was put to the 1984–85 inquiry and the southern route was more costly by £1 million. I take the point about the extra cost of the bridges and I shall certainly look into it and let my noble friend know about it.

Clyde Port Authority Bill London Underground (Victoria) Bill Tees and Hartlepool Port Authority Bill Shard Bridge Bill
A message was brought from the Commons that they have considered the Lords Message of 12th November last and have made the following orders:
That the Promoters of the Clyde Port Authority Bill, the London Underground (Victoria) Bill, the Tees and Hartlepool Port Authority Bill and the Shard Bridge Bill may, notwithstanding anything in the Standing Orders or practice of this House, proceed with the Bills, in the present Session; and the Petitions for the Bills shall be deemed to have been deposited and all Standing Orders applicable thereto shall be deemed to have been complied with;
That the Bills shall be presented to the House not later than the seventh day after this day;
That there shall be deposited with each Bill a declaration signed by the agents for the Bill, stating that the Bill is the same, in every respect, as the Bill at the last stage of its proceedings in this House in the last Session;
That each Bill shall be laid upon the Table of the House by one of the Clerks in the Private Bill Office on the next meeting of the House after the day on which the Bill has been presented and, when so laid, shall be read the first, second and third time and shall be recorded in the Journal of this House as having been so read;
That no further fees shall be charged in respect of any proceedings on the Bill in respect of which fees have already been incurred during the last Session.
House adjourned at half past eight