Lords Sitting of 13 March 1991

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

London Transport Buses: Smoking Ban
Lord Harris of High Cross Lord Harris of High Cross asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they support the complete banning of smoking on London Transport buses.
The Minister of State, Department of Transport (Lord Brabazon of Tara): My Lords, the decision is an operational matter for London Transport. It took it on the basis of its assessment of the wishes of its passengers. In public health terms, the benefits of the ban are obvious, and have been welcomed by the Government. It is too early to say whether the ban has had any impact on patronage.
Lord Harris of High Cross: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that somewhat illusive Answer. In a free society, whatever our personal opinions, habits or interests, is it not incumbent upon us all to resist the pressures of lobbies representing minorities against the widely enjoyed activities of other minorities, including huntin', shootin', fishin' and smokin'?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, so far as I am aware London Transport has not banned hunting, shooting or fishing, but the matter is one for London Transport. The Government have certain responsibilities regarding London Transport, but such matters are operational matters for it.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, my noble friend did not mention this point, but does he agree that the ban saves a great deal of cleaning and that many people were unwilling to travel upstairs because of the smoke hazard?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, yes, I understand that that is one of the reasons why London Transport introduced the ban. It will help relieve the overcrowding problems downstairs, because some passengers refused to travel on the upper deck where smoking was allowed.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, have the Government put their own principles into practice by banning smoking in government limousines?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, I do not know how many limousines the Government have. Ministers such as myself do not have a limousine, and smoking has not been banned in them.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that in the enlightened borough of Brighton smoking in corporation buses has been prohibited for some time, to the universal satisfaction of the inhabitants of that enlightened borough, except for that tiny minority which believes it to be a human right to puff noxious fumes into the lungs of innocent people?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, all I can say is that London Transport is a little behind Brighton.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, is it not a fact that London Transport is a monopoly, and that therefore people do not have a proper choice? Can it be right that London Transport's customers who smoke should be denied access to buses unless they agree not to smoke? Does the Minister agree that the stubborn and incompetent London Transport Board would be better employed in giving a decent service to the community in new, unclapped-out buses?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, I do not want to be drawn on the latter part of the noble Lord's question at this point. London Transport carried out research among 2,381 bus passengers in July of last year. Of the 31 per cent. surveyed who smoked, only 58 per cent. smoked on buses. That means that only 18 per cent. of all bus passengers smoke on the buses.
Lord Elton: My Lords, on the contrary, does my noble friend agree that a public monopoly is not just within its rights but within its duty to ban a public nuisance from the service that it supplies?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, that is probably right. As I said, London Transport introduced the ban having carried out a study which indicated that it would be popularly received by the vast majority of passengers. The average bus journey in London takes about 15 minutes, and so I hope that most smokers can manage for that length of time without smoking.
Lord Underhill: My Lords, I accept what the Minister says about it being an operational matter for London Transport. Am I to assume from his reply that the Government accept the principle that everyone has the right to a smoke-free environment at work and in public places? Is not a bus a public place? Although smoking has been banned on London Underground for other reasons, is it not a fact that the ban has been overwhelmingly universally accepted by the public?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, as the noble Lord rightly says, smoking has been banned on the Underground for other reasons —largely safety reasons as a result of various sad events which have taken place over the past few years. This is very much a matter for London Transport. It is in business to try to satisfy its customers and it feels that the ban will have the support of the majority.
Lord Orr-Ewing: My Lords, has my noble friend observed that most Western European countries are anxious to preserve the right of the minority to smoke on public transport when they wish? Has he noticed that smoking has prevented neither Mr. Kinnock nor Mr. Ashdown from rising to the top of the Labour and Liberal parties? Do we really think it necessary that lesser fry should be banned from smoking on the top of buses?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, all I can say is that in future the ban will prevent those two gentlemen whom my noble friend mentioned from rising to the top of the bus!

Alcohol Misuse: Health Warnings
2.44 p.m.
The Viscount of Falkland The Viscount of Falkland asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether, in view of the incidence of alcohol-related illness in the United Kingdom, bottles and cans containing alcoholic beverages should carry health warnings.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Baroness Hooper): My Lords, estimates vary as to the full extent of alcohol misuse and levels of harm, but as a government we are committed to reducing the misuse of alcohol and to getting across the sensible drinking message. However, we are not convinced that health warnings on alcohol containers would achieve this.
The Viscount of Falkland: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that Answer. The reason for my Question on National No-Smoking Day, as I believe it is called, is not fortuitous. The non-smoking lobby has achieved enormous success in drawing attention to the health hazards attached to smoking. However, the health hazards attached to drink have not come home to those who abuse drink. Bearing in mind the amount of illness and the deaths which result from the abuse of drink, does the noble Baroness think that if we do not have a health warning, at least we may have more information on bottles and cans or where people drink or are served drink? That will at least tell them what is safe and what is unsafe.
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, the chief medical officer's view is that all cigarette smoking is injurious to health. However, there is no evidence that alcohol, taken in moderate quantities in appropriate circumstances, leads to harm. My answer to the noble Viscount must be that the problem of alcohol misuse is complex. It would be rather difficult to devise a clear, non-misleading and concise message which would effectively inform consumers about all aspects of the alcohol-related harm.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that many of us would be shocked and horrified at the idea of pinning a health warning on a bottle of Chateau Yquem?
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, I can only agree with my noble friend.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, alcohol abuse results in harm to many people other than the abusers, particularly battered wives, battered children and the people who are beaten up on public transport and in the street. Is it now likely that London Transport will bring in a ban on all drinking in buses?
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, I cannot answer for London Transport. I offer some comfort in that the only countries in the European Community with a lower level of alcohol consumption than this country are Ireland and Greece. The consumption per head in this country is the third lowest in the Community. I agree with the noble Lord that there can be more than health damage as a consequence of drinking to excess.
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There are examples of dangerous and anti-social behaviour following excessive bouts of drinking, as well as transport accidents.
Lord Carter: My Lords, do the Government agree with the evidence from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that the Chancellor could use taxation of alcohol to increase the price and reduce consumption by approximately 18 per cent. without reducing the revenue to the Government? That is, if the duty were related to the level of alcohol in the drink.
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, both we and the Department of Health, in addition to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, are well aware of the relationship between the cost of alcohol and its consumption.
Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, is the Minister aware that this was one of about 50 recommendations in the Home Office report on young people on alcohol and crime? Is she aware that in America warning signs are used that too much alcohol may damage one's health? What harm could such warnings do?
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, we are aware that warnings are required in a number of states in the United States. Some refer to health problems such as the dangers of alcohol consumption during pregnancy or of excess consumption. Others relate to social problems such as drinking and driving, but as yet there has been no evaluation available for us to judge the consequences.
Lord Annan: My Lords, is the noble Baroness aware that the first health warning about smoking was given in 1604 by King James I? He issued, Counterblast against Tobacco. However, over the years, since there were no research facilities available at that time to prove his point, the message was forgotten. On the other hand, the effects of too much alcohol have been widely known ever since the Cyclops lost his eye to Odysseus.
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, that requires no answer.
Lord Rea: My Lords, does not the Minister feel that it would help everyone to achieve that ideal moderate drinking level which many of us consider to be beneficial, if all alcoholic drinks containers stated precisely how much alcohol they contain, either in amount or percentage terms? The same principle could apply in public houses and other catering establishments where drink and food are served together.
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, as part of our sensible drinking message we are trying to educate people in general to understand the number of units which may be consumed safely. They are 14 units per week for women and 21 units per week for men. Those units have been suggested on the advice of medical experts. The Government are using a number of methods to get that message across.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, is the Minister aware that this Question does not reflect Liberal policy, particularly in Scotland?
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, if I was not aware of that fact, I now am.
Lord Orr-Ewing: My Lords, is my noble friend sure that she quoted correct statistics when she told the House that the Irish are among the lowest consumers of alcohol in the European Community? I hope my noble friend can go to Cheltenham this week to confirm those statistics in relation to the Irish as they are not evident.
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, I can only assume that the statistics were founded on drinking in Ireland and not on the drinking of the Irish at Cheltenham.
Lord Whaddon: My Lords, does not the Minister agree that it has been amply demonstrated that any drinking before driving causes accidents? Would the Government at least consider putting a notice on all alcoholic drinks warning that they should not be taken before driving?
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, we are aware that around 1,400 road accidents that occur in this country each year are associated with excess alcohol. There have been various educational campaigns aimed at bringing home the message that people need to restrain their drinking before driving.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, is the Minister convinced by the evidence that the consumption of 14 glasses of alcohol a week makes a woman an alcoholic?
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, 14 units of alcohol a week is the recommended safe level for a woman.
Lord Grimond: My Lords, are the recommendations given regardless of the size of men and women?
Baroness Hooper: Yes, my Lords.

Ice Patrol Ship: Replacement
2.52 p.m.
Lord Shackleton Lord Shackleton asked Her Majesty's Government:
What progress has been made in regard to the programming and design for the replacement of "H MS Endurance" in 1996.
Lord Reay: My Lords, the requirement for a replacement ice patrol ship is being studied. No decisions have yet been taken.
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, am I to deduce from that reply that no progress whatsoever has been made as regards a replacement for "HMS Endurance"? Will the Minister confirm that the existing ship will continue to operate and that there are no proposals to cancel her? Will he bear in mind that on the last occasion the Ministry of Defence cancelled "HMS Endurance", it did so without reference to the Foreign Secretary and despite his protests? Has the Foreign Secretary been consulted on this matter and are any steps being taken to cancel "HMS Endurance" now?
Lord Reay: My Lords, we aim to reach an early decision. "HMS Endurance" is capable of running on into the mid-1990s. The decision must be a government decision and it will be taken in the light of
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all the necessary considerations. There will be full consultation between the government departments with an interest in the matter.
Lord Pym: My Lords, in view of the enormous importance of the Antarctic Continent, the number of nations that have an interest in it and the fact that the Antarctic treaty is likely to come up for review in the fairly near future, does my noble friend accept that the presence and the deployment of "HMS Endurance" and her successors is indispensable as an element of the British contribution to the work in that continent?
Lord Reay: My Lords, my noble friend expresses a point of view which will have to be considered seriously and carefully. It will have to be taken into account. Our aim is to preserve the Antarctic treaty, as it has proved effective over very many years.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, will my noble friend the Minister tell us how many foreign countries have new ships of the same calibre as "HMS Endurance" in the Antarctic?
Lord Reay: My Lords, I do not have that information, but I shall find out and provide it.
Lord Chalfont: My Lords, in considering the future of "HMS Endurance", will the Government take into account the fact that the presence of a surface ship of this kind in the Antarctic is enormously important both in diplomatic terms and in terms of deterring any form of armed adventure by any country in the region? Is my noble friend aware that in that context "HMS Endurance" is probably one of the most cost-effective units in the Royal Navy? Will the Government bear that fact in mind?
Lord Reay: My Lords, the noble Lord expressed concerns which we must take into account in reaching a decision.
Lord Molloy: Many Members of both Houses are deeply interested in this subject. Does the Minister accept that the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, is the best expert in this House or in any other place on "HMS Endurance" and the Antarctic and that he should put forward our views to the Government and report to us on this matter?
Lord Reay: My Lords, a great many noble Lords know a good deal about this subject. However, no one knows more than the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton. I am happy to draw the attention of my right honourable friend to the remarks that have been made.
Lord Wyatt of Weeford: My Lords, will the Minister bear in mind that the withdrawal of "HMS Endurance" just before General Galtieri invaded the Falklands was one of the signals which made him think we did not care if he took such a course of action?
Lord Reay: My Lords, the noble Lord makes a good point. Circumstances have changed considerably, however, since 1982. There is a much larger garrison stationed in the Falkland Islands, with a permanent RAF presence. There is also a full-time

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naval presence, but, above all, there is an air strip capable of taking planes for rapid reinforcement if necessary.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, is the Minister aware that there is a fairly widespread view in the country, and indeed in your Lordships' House, that the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Pym, should not merely be taken into account but should be the firm policies of Her Majesty's Government?
Lord Reay: My Lords, the views will be taken into account and most serious attention will be paid to them.
Lord Lewin: My Lords, while strongly supporting all that has been said, I ask the Minister when he and his colleagues consider the future of "HMS Endurance" not to consider her as just a part of the naval programme and take the easy way out by trading one frigate for a replacement but to consider this as a defence matter and, above all, as a national commitment.
Lord Reay: My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord makes a strong and valid point. We shall certainly take account of it.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, are there not two decisions which face the Government? The first is whether "HMS Endurance" should remain on station performing the duties she presently performs until the mid-1990s. The second decision concerns whether there should be a replacement. Are we not now in difficulties as regards both decisions as we do not know the Government's intentions on either? How soon can we expect a decision on both those matters?
Lord Reay: My Lords, I have nothing further to add to what I have already said. We are studying the requirements for a replacement ship and we aim to reach an early decision.
Earl Jellicoe: My Lords, as someone who was involved with the navy a long time ago, I was very glad to hear my noble friend say he would draw the attention of the Secretary of State for Defence to the views expressed on all sides of the House. The matter has both military and diplomatic significance of a very high order.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am happy to confirm that I shall draw the attention of my right honourable friend to the views that have been expressed.
Lord Greenway: My Lords, in view of the great interest that has been shown in the House today as regards this matter, perhaps the Government might do well to look towards the Soviet Union where a large number of ice breaking cargo ships suitable for conversion are currently becoming surplus in view of the present situation in that country.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am happy to draw the attention of the department to that observation also.
Lord Mottistone: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that "HMS Endurance" has great training
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value? The Royal Navy has little experience of operating in ice and of flying helicopters in the conditions found in the southern ocean. I hope that factor can also be borne in mind.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am sure my noble friend makes an important point that we should take into account.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, is it not the case that this matter has been under consideration by the Government for a long time? What are the reasons for the delay in coming to a conclusion in view of the general opinion in scientific and naval circles that "HMS Endurance" and a replacement are essential in that area if we are to maintain our status and our position there?
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am not sure that it is correct to suggest that the decision should have been taken by now. As I said, "HMS Endurance" is capable of continuing in service into the mid-1990s. We aim to reach a decision soon and beyond that there is nothing more that I can say.
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, in view of the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, and the noble Lord, Lord Callaghan, had hoped to be present perhaps I may ask one more question. Am I to conclude from what the Minister said that the newly appointed captain of "HMS Endurance" may be without a ship this year or next —year that there is a prospect that "HMS Endurance" may be cancelled out of hand in the next two years? Is that a possibility?
Lord Reay: My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot add to what I have said. We are considering requirements for a replacement.
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, does the noble Lord therefore agree that it is a possibility?
Lord Reay: No, my Lords. All I can say is that we are studying requirements for a replacement and hope to be able to reach a decision soon.

Friendly Societies: Legislation
3 p.m.
Viscount Brentford Viscount Brentford asked Her Majesty's Government:
What plans they have for bringing the law relating to friendly societies up to date.
The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Hesketh): My Lords, proposals for a new legislative framework for friendly societies were set out in a Green Paper published last year. Legislation to give effect to those proposals is being prepared and a Bill will be brought forward in a future Session, when the parliamentary timetable permits.
Viscount Brentford: My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for that Answer. Can he confirm that it is the Government's policy to encourage savings by people throughout the country? Does he agree that the friendly societies have always provided a well-tried and excellent method of encouraging

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savings by people of average and modest means and that it is therefore essential that reforming legislation comes before us as soon as possible?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I can safely say that the Government's answer to the two points raised by my noble friend and to his statement is in the affirmative.
Lord Taylor of Gryfe: My Lords, will the survey which is being undertaken in this regard embrace the changed structure of co-operative societies, which are governed under similar legislation, and the mutual insurance societies, some of which are being tempted to become plcs? Will that problem be embraced in the consideration of friendly society legislation?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, the Question on the Order Paper refers to friendly societies. If the noble Lord wishes to put down a Question with regard to co-operative or mutual societies I shall be more than happy .to answer it.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the ceiling on tax-exempt savings for friendly societies is now only £150 a year? Does he agree that that compares very unfavourably with the Government's new savings scheme —the TESSA scheme —which was possibly named after me as one of the nation's great savers? Should not the Government tackle that anomaly in advance of any legislation in view of the delay in bringing in new laws?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, the Government do not consider that it would be appropriate or desirable for friendly societies to be empowered to have deposit-taking subsidiaries as they do not have sufficient expertise or experience in that area.

Business
Viscount Davidson: My Lords, as my noble friend the Chief Whip has been sent on a course today perhaps I may say a word about this afternoon's short debates standing in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady David, and the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. 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 short debate in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady David, the number of speakers is such that it is not necessary to propose a formal time limit. However, I am sure that noble Lords will agree that it would conform with the spirit of these short debates if they kept their speeches within the 15 minutes which apply to the mover of the Motion. In the case of the short debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, all other speeches should be limited to a maximum of 14 minutes. If any noble Lord should speak at greater length he would do so at the expense of subsequent speakers in the debate.

Parents' and Governors' Role in Education
3.4 p.m.
Baroness David Baroness David rose to call attention to the role of parents and governors in education; and to move for Papers.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, five years after the 1986 Education Act this seems a good moment to take stock and consider how the new governing bodies set up under that Act are working.
A year ago we had a short debate on the case for balance on governing bodies. I spoke of the bad practice that had existed in some authorities in which only about a third of schools had their own governors. In some cases the council simply nominated a single governing body to act for all its schools. The 1980 Act required every school to have a parent governor, but it was not until the 1986 Act that the recommendations in my noble friend Lord Taylor's 1977 report, A New Partnership for our Schools, which recommended equal shares for parents, teachers, LEA members and the community, were partially realised. The 1986 Act did not give teachers their quarter of the membership but the greater involvement of parents was assured.
In my speech I shall rely heavily on the excellent National Foundation for Educational Research survey published last November. It was based on a questionnaire returned by 1,000 head teachers, 614 chairmen and 2,686 governors. Just over half of those governors were women. The average governor had served for only two years. That is not surprising as the altered composition meant many changes in membership.
I was pleased to discover that 51 per cent. of governors were aged between 30 and 44. One would guess that many of those were parents. Parents resigned less frequently than LEA and co-opted governors, but unless there are several children in a family going to the same school a parent's life as a governor is not likely to be longer than three years. In a sixth form or tertiary college it can only be two.
The need for home/school partnership has been recognised for over a century but the 1918 Education Act was the first to put anything into law with the formation of the Central Parents' Committee. In 1921 the first official parent teacher association was formed in Arundel School —later St. Christopher's —at Letchworth. In 1956 the National Federation of Parent Teacher Associations was formed. In 1967 the Plowden Report recommended that schools, LEAs and the DES should encourage all parents into a far more active involvement in their children's education.
The value of parental influence is also recognised in many HMI reports. One, The Teaching and Learning of Reading in Primary Schools, published last autumn stated that:
"The quality and extent of parents' support for children's reading have a positive effect on their standards of reading. In just over half the schools where standards were satisfactory or better there was strong parental interest in reading and close co-operation between the home and the school".
Close co-operation is now generally recognised as a necessity, but there are still problems for parents who

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feel nervous about approaching the head and the staff. They find the atmosphere off-putting or perhaps they themselves had a bad experience of education at school. They lack the confidence to come forward. That is what we should be trying to change, and I do not believe that change is happening fast enough. We need to work harder to open up our schools to parents.
Michael Marland, the head of the excellent North Westminster Community School, supported that view in an article in the Guardian last month in which he wrote:
"It is one of the failures of our education system that this needs saying today. The great Matthew Arnold foresaw this before the first compulsory Education Act (1870). He insisted that the education offered must be 'of a kind that will evoke the appreciation of parents'. The Newsom Report, Sir Edward Boyle (Conservative Minister of Education), the Plowden Report and the Taylor Report all echoed this [but nothing happened]".
Michael Marland also quoted a primary school head giving evidence to the Auld Committee in 1976:
"Parents? Don't talk to me about parents. We're the pros in this business".
I hope that we have advanced in 15 years. We should recognise that teachers are the pros and we should not interfere with them in their teaching role, but parents have their rights and their obligations.
For that reason the Labour Party is planning to give parents more rights in relation to their children's education and greater involvement in it. Michael Marland's article reviewed a book entitled Involving Parents by Alastair Macbeth in which he shows how a home/school contract could work and how practical such a scheme could be. The Labour contract aims to establish the parents' rights but also gives them challenges and responsibilities. Parents must be aware from the moment their child enters a school not only of their rights but also of their duties to the child and to the school. My noble friend Lady Blackstone will enlarge on that in her speech.
I should like to mention a few pilot projects already in existence. This week Hackney has opened a parent centre which will enable parents to meet together, seek advice and use resources and will encourage them to be involved in the life of their children's schools. A booklet entitled It's All Happening in Hackney (which I have if anybody would like to see it) is full of excellent suggestions and advice. Humberside has a home school liaison team. Forty-two teachers were appointed to primary schools as part of a much wider strategy to tackle the problem of under-achievement. Community rooms have been established as a base for pre-school work and day-time education for parents. Adult education courses, including study for GCSEs, are encouraged, the spin-off being an obvious demonstration by parents of the importance of education.
The DES has produced Our Changing Schools, a handbook for parents, and its latest leaflet How Is Your Child Doing At School?, which has not yet been circulated to LEAs but is understood to contain suggestions about how children could do better. A survey found that only a quarter of parents recognised a copy of Our Changing Schools. I should like to ask
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the Minister whether in her reply she can tell us the cost of those leaflets and their distribution, and whether the DES intends to do any further research into their effectiveness and the efforts such as Hackney's being made by LEAs to involve parents. Equally, is DES going to update its guide to the law, which is 17 months out of date? Quite a lot has happened since then.
There is evidence that some parent governors are unaware of their role and powers. Joan Sallis (who was a member of Lord Taylor's Committee) has for two years been answering governors' questions in the TES. In an article in January summing up the experience she quoted some rather worrying queries —for example: "I'm only … a parent-governor. Can I speak at meetings?"; "Can I speak about things other than dinners and uniform?"; "Is it true I'm not eligible to interview candidates for a job?". Joan Sallis guesses at some of the reasons behind those questions —perhaps it is the old hands being unwelcoming and off-putting. It seems it is nobody's job to tell governors about rules designed to protect their right to involvement on equal terms. She comments:
"The postbag is full of 'somebody'. Somebody put all that junk on the agenda, and we couldn't discuss anything important. Somebody elected Lady Wofflington or Colonel Fixit to the chair again. Somebody didn't tell us we had to decide how we were going to be represented on the group selecting the new head. Somebody said in the minutes that we were 'a little concerned' when really we were hopping mad".
It is important that the LEA is aware of those feelings and can improve the governors' training. The recent award of DES funding to the National Association of Governors and Managers should improve the standing and understanding of governors. In fairness I have to say that it is clear from the findings of the NFER report in the section on training that almost all governors had been offered places in sessions run by the LEA and about two-thirds had attended such sessions. The training materials provided by the LEAs and the Advisory Centre for Education were the most highly respected, so we should congratulate the LEAs on that.
I come to the vexed question of parental contributions. The evidence is pretty strong that six years ago when the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations conducted a survey into the activities of PTAs, £40 million a year was being contributed to schools, most of which went on luxury items like new mini-buses. A new survey is being conducted, whose findings will not be available until April. However, it seems certain that a great deal more money is being given and much less of it is being spent on luxury items and much more on essential items, such as textbooks and equipment for the national curriculum.
Parents are feeling pressured into contributing to the school budget. In the past they were adamant they would not raise money for items which should be provided by the LEA. Now they feel blackmailed into doing so for fear that otherwise their children's education will suffer.
LMS adds to the confusion. It comes as a shock to parents to discover that schools are being forced to choose between buying the books and employing an

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extra teacher. Mrs. Mountfield in a Directory of Social Change publication entitled State Schools: A Suitable Case for Charity? concludes that between £130 million and £230 million of money and money's worth may be going into state schools from parents, business sponsorship and charitable trusts. Voluntary money comes easiest to schools in relatively wealthy areas, so charitable money may be going to those least in need, thus increasing, rather than reducing, inequity between schools. In the interests of children whose childhood comes only once, charities should do what they can to help the poorest schools and pupils rather than the richest and should draw public attention to the inadequate public provision that has led them to contribute. She says that parents and teachers should be encouraged to channel their activities into home/school activities that develop voluntary community involvement in schools in ways not limited to fund raising, and should take an active part in the encouragement of educational innovation and experiment rather than gap-filling.
I give examples of the unfairness. Highfield School in Letchworth raises about £8,000 a year from parents, but the headmaster, Peter Jackson, does not like it. He says: "I have been here for 25 years. When I see this I am filled with disgust. But we have to go to parents with the message that no government in Westminster is going to give us much more money".
In contrast, Daphne Gould, headmistress of Mulberry Girls' School in Tower Hamlets, says:
"I don't receive any money from parents, and it would be wrong to ask them. Ninety per cent. of our pupils have free dinners and uniform. The level of poverty is considerable. If I was in some leafy glade, or if I had a wonderful building I could let out for weddings, life would be very different".
The NFER report deals adequately and convincingly with the turnover, make-up in age and occupation and training of governors, so I do not want to spend time on that. I simply mention some of the weaknesses found where improvements could be made. There are still far too few governors from ethnic minorities and the blue collar sector. Half the governors who responded said that their level of responsibility was about right, but a significant minority (40 per cent., and 60 per cent. of head teacher governors) believed they had been given too much. I quote from paragraph 5.3.4:
"The areas in which governors were considered to have too much responsibility were (in order of frequency): resource allocation/LMS; appointments/other personnel issues; and the National Curriculum.
Governors and chairs were asked if they had any further comments on the organisation and responsibilities of school governing bodies. The main points made were that governors had too much responsibility, their tasks were too time consuming and that it was difficult to recruit and retain governors".
Some who responded indicated a need for more training on the roles and functions of parent governors. The NFER clearly thought it would be useful to carry out a more detailed analysis of those responses. I would like to ask the Minister whether the DES will be asking for that analysis.
Of course, one does not know whether the results of the survey —which I confess were rather better than I expected —depended on the fact that it was the responsible and the literate who took part. It is
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interesting that 44 per cent. of those responding had a degree or professional institute qualification. The largest single group (39 per cent.) were employed in a school, college or university. One wonders whether the less highly educated responded to the same extent. I have already mentioned satisfaction with the training provided by LEAs. Where more information was requested it related to the local management of schools. When LMS has been established everywhere for two or three years it will be interesting to carry out a similar survey and see the results.
Governors seemed remarkably unaware of schemes whereby expenses could be reimbursed and whether child-minding facilities were offered. Only one-third said they were aware, one-fifth said there were no schemes and two-thirds did not know. There seemed to be ignorance of Section 58 of the 1986 Act, which enables LEAs to pay travelling and subsistence allowances. Her Majesty's Government have still not implemented requests for paid time off for governors to visit schools and carry out their duties, which would enormously enhance their activity and ability to become effective governors. Significant features of the work that governors have to do, such as making staff appointments, cannot be carried out during evening meetings.
If we are to enlist more governors from the ethnic minorities and blue-collar workers, paid time off is important. My final question to the Minister is this: if the Government are serious about greater involvement and choice for parents, are they going to take any action on that point? I beg to move for Papers.
3.20 p.m.
Baroness Young: My Lords, I am sure that we all want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady David, for introducing the debate this afternoon. All noble Lords who take an interest in education are in complete agreement about the importance of both parents and the governors. There is no doubt that every piece of educational research shows that children do better educationally when they have the support of their parents at school and if there is a real partnership between the family and the school. Indeed, the converse is true. In the annual report of the senior chief inspector of schools, in paragraph 46 he says:
"Poor behaviour is most often associated with factors such as lack of depth, interest and pace in the work; ambivalence in establishing and applying standards and codes of behaviour across the school as a whole; a high turnover of teachers; and" —
the most important point —
"a lack of support from parents for the standards sought by the school".
There is no doubt at all that parents want to be able to choose the school which their child attends and that the school in its turn should account to parents for what it is doing. That brings into play the role of governors, teachers and parents, which should be a partnership.
One can see from the records since 1979 how far the Government have legislated to help parents, to give them a far greater freedom of choice and say in what happens in schools and to give far greater powers to

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school governing bodies. I agreed very much with a number of the detailed points and questions put by the noble Baroness, Lady David. I noticed however that it was not until she came to the last paragraph of her speech that she mentioned the word "choice". That is a matter to which parents attach great importance.
The 1980 Education Act gave all parents the right to choose a school for their child and if disappointed to take their case to an appeal. That freedom was later extended to parents who had children with special educational needs. It was further extended by the whole policy of open enrolment, which means that local education authorities can no longer say that places may remain empty in a popular school when there are parents who wish to send their children to it. That policy is already operating in secondary schools and is to be extended to primary schools in 1993.
We have provided more choice in many other ways: by integrating children with special educational needs into the educational system; by preserving the grammar schools; by the establishment of city technology colleges (seven are now open and seven more have a firm starting date); and in particular by the establishment of grant maintained schools. So over a tremendous range parents have been given more choice and, if one considers the changes that have occurred in the role of governors, more opportunity to influence schools.
It was only when I came to consider what I might say in this debate that I realised how great had been the changes since I was a governor of a maintained school when I was in local government. In the first place every school has to have a governing body which consists of parents, others from the local community, governors from the local education authority, teachers and the head teacher. Their duties are extensive and important. Probably what is most important is that they are represented on the selection panel for head teachers and deputies. I am sometimes asked what I think is the most important duty of a governor and I always reply without hesitation that it is the appointment of the head of a school, rapidly followed by the appointment of other senior staff. It is the head of the school who sets the tone and the standards and who is able to recruit the teachers, involve the parents and do all the things that we want.
Besides that, now they have power to spend a sum of money allocated by the local education authority for books, equipment and stationery. They must prepare an annual report for a meeting of all the parents. They may modify a local education authority's policy on the curriculum. They may decide the school policy for subjects such as sex education. They have a general oversight of discipline. They have very great responsibilities indeed. The 1988 Education Reform Act further extended the powers of government by promoting higher standards of education, increasing parental involvement and raising the expectations of what schools should achieve.
The Act did that quite particularly by the delegation of budgets. That makes the role of parents
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and governors much more significant. I was disappointed to hear from the noble Baroness that there are still so many schools which either do not like the delegation or parents who do not understand it. I believe that more than any other reform that will change the way in which teachers and head teachers go about their work. It represents both a challenge and an opportunity. It gives an opportunity for heads to determine the priorities in their school; it gives an opportunity for parents to take part in those decisions in the governing bodies; and now local education authorities will only control certain essential teaching materials.
It represents a very great change of responsibilities. I understand that there may well be new governors on governing bodies who do not know their duties and are somewhat alarmed at the prospect. That is why it is very important that local education authorities should have schemes for training governors, giving them an explanation of their duties and powers and including matters such as allowances, travelling expenses, and so on. The governors have to realise that if they are in any doubt about such things, they must ask. It is no use expecting to be told what they are supposed to say at a meeting of the governing body. They are put on that body to do a very serious job of work and have a great opportunity before them.
But perhaps the biggest extension of parental choice lies in the development of grant maintained schools. It is a development which I greatly welcome. Schools can now opt out of local education authority control, although they remain as maintained schools paid for directly by the Department of Education and Science. A total of 56 have so far done so. It is interesting to note that those schools which have become grant maintained have seen the applications for their schools rise by an average of 40 per cent; they have had no problems in filling staff vacancies and have been able to spend more on the curriculum. Those seem to me to be three very important points which should help parents and reassure them that, when they have a greater control over what the school is doing, standards will rise.
As I said at the beginning, co-operation between parents and school is the key to raising education standards. However, parents need the opportunity to be involved. That is why it is so important that they should be involved in governing bodies. I very much welcome the new development of bringing parents into school not only for parents' evenings but also the setting aside of special rooms, and so on. I am sure that those are helpful developments.
In a primary school that I know of there are regular parents' evenings. Parents are welcome in the school at almost all times to see the work that is being done. However, some schools are still unenthusiastic about this new direction, with greater choice of schools and greater responsibilities for schools. There are heads who are prepared to manage their schools and to take parents into their confidence. I accept that it is not possible to offer choice to all families; there may be only one school within reach. But such choice is

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possible for the vast majority and extending that choice is enough to effect a change in the climate of opinion.
One of the tasks that I have taken on is to become chairman of the Independent Schools Joint Council. I am glad to say that we work closely with the Secondary Heads Association and the National Association of Head Teachers to see whether we can share our management experience. It is important that we consider the issue together to see how best we can arrange it. Perhaps I may ask my noble friend who will reply one question on that point. It is important that teachers coming into schools are trained in that context. It would be helpful to know whether the training institutions have taken that matter on board as a necessary part of the preparation for teaching. If they have not, I believe that they should. We should certainly consider other means of helping teachers on the big management issues which are relatively new to them.
In conclusion, I believe that this is a most important debate. In order to raise standards it is essential that there should be close co-operation between parents and schools, that the governing bodies should work effectively and that the decisions of the school should devolve down to the lowest level —that is, to the school. Those who have children in a school have responsibility not only for the appointment of teachers but for the ethos and discipline of the school and all that it does. That is the best way to raise education standards. I welcome the many steps that the Government have taken to that end. I feel sure that we shall see more in the future.
3.34 p.m.
Lord Addington: My Lords, we on these Benches are not opposed to the local management of schools. Indeed we approve of it. However, we are not totally happy with the current position. We would prefer a stronger linkage between local education authorities, with more pooling of resources and assistance in budgetary exercises. At present the authorities tend to be more directly concerned with the maintenance of school buildings than anything else.
On the role of parents in the education system, attention has not yet been drawn to the fact that parents are fundamental to the education process in or out of the school system. It has been pointed out to me that if children do not know how to ask questions because they have not been taught to do so at home, the teacher might as well pack up and go home. We must encourage parents to become involved in teaching their children how to learn at the very earliest stage, thus encouraging the parents to become involved in the teaching process.
I have heard many horror stories from teachers about children being told by their parents that teachers are the people who will teach manners, and so on. We must encourage parents to be involved from a child's earliest age. Once we have such involvement there is a two-pronged approach to leaving. It is important that we encourage parents to take an active interest in the schooling process, not only in results. If
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parents are concerned only with results of examinations, the child suffers a huge handicap. Parents must have an input throughout the education system.
The issue of parents on governing boards lies at the heart of the debate. I believe that it is what the noble Baroness had in mind when she brought the matter forward for debate. We must encourage such participation. The noble Baroness quoted extensively from the report. I had wished to quote from it myself. However, much of what I would have said is now irrelevant. The report gave a better picture than I had expected, but it highlighted a series of problems that have been manifest in virtually all education arguments.
It tends to be those from a middle-class background who, as parents, give a better input. I believe that 44 per cent. of governors have a professional qualification at degree level or equivalent. A high percentage of those involved in school boards —about 37 per cent. —were involved in the teaching process. Therefore schools with middle-class students have a high calibre of trained professional parent governors involved. We do not seem to be giving enough encouragement or incentives to those who are the traditional non-middle-class, non-participating parents to become involved in the system.
We are also giving governing boards a difficult job to do. The report stated that people were finding considerable difficulty in the amount of paper work and the application of, for example, the accounting process required for budgeting for the national curriculum implementation. The Government should give far greater emphasis to making bursars and finance directors available for school governing bodies. We cannot expect people who are not professionals in this field to be able to manage the problem as well as professionals can.
Approximately one third of all those who have left school governing bodies say that it was because of pressure of work. The same figure applies to natural wastage. I refer to pupils leaving school and people moving away. I suggest that those two issues are closely linked. We must give professional guidance where we can to those bodies. We cannot expect expertise in, for example, accountancy among the majority of those on school governing bodies. We have a good representation of teachers. I speak of the reverse side. People undergo training, but we must give assistance with the managerial process. If we wish to encourage parents to play an increasing part on the school body, they must have the technical assistance so to do.
Many of the points that I would have raised have already been covered by the noble Baroness. I conclude with one further comment. We must ensure that those parents who are elected to the board must have all the assistance that they require. Otherwise the governing bodies in half the schools will fail, because, especially in the inner cities, they do not have the professional pool of parents with sufficient expertise to sit on governing bodies. They do not have a tradition of such involvement. It will lead to less parental involvement if things go badly wrong and if people

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find themselves overworked. Unless one gives those parents the chance to participate at a high level, they will not do so.
3.40 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Guildford: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady David, has rightly called attention to a number of issues on the role of parents and governors arising from the report published by the National Foundation for Educational Research in November last year. Generally I welcome many of the changes that have been made in the role of parents and governors through the recent education Acts. Increased parental involvement is a healthy move away from the earlier pattern of parents' involvement in the management of their children's schools ceasing at the school gate. Although there continues to be a role for parent-teacher associations in our schools these are now complemented by the new and more important responsibilities for parents on governing bodies. The increased involvement of the local community that these changes may bring about is to be welcomed.
Nevertheless, they are major changes which have been undertaken in a short period of time and therefore many new demands are being made upon teaching staff, governors and parents. The new responsibilities require new skills and new relationships between head teachers and governing bodies. With the advent of the local management of schools there is an extra workload on all concerned. We need to be sure that we are providing the fullest support in resources and training. If we do not we may be unable to avoid schools where the parents do not have a high level of professional skills and other resources being unduly disadvantaged.
The noble Baroness, Lady David, is right to call attention to the issue of governor training. I was pleased to note that the report states that 70 per cent. of governors of voluntary schools were satisfied with the training that they were receiving. I am grateful to the Department of Education and Science for its recent approach to the Catholic Education Council and to the General Synod Board of Education with the offer of funding towards the cost of approved governor training in the voluntary sector. In my own diocese of Guildford we have in the past two years created the equivalent of two new full-time posts in large part to assist with training and resourcing of governors in voluntary schools. That is an indication of the demands that the increased responsibilities on governors are making in other directions.
The noble Baroness, Lady David, referred to the difficulties experienced in recruiting and maintaining adequate governors. I wish to underline her comment. Some Church of England voluntary schools are experiencing difficulty with some clergy who find that they cannot adequately discharge their responsibilities as governors in addition to their other full-time responsibilities. That is an indication of the extent of the burden imposed by the new governorship.
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When combined with an increasing desire on the part of the Government to promote grant maintained status, the increased local responsibility, although it is to be welcomed, increasingly leaves in my mind questions about the role of local education authorities. I shall be grateful if the Minister can reassure the House about that matter.
The new arrangements for governing bodies were made in the context of what was anticipated as being a continuing partnership between the vast majority of schools and local and national government. On Monday the Independent reported the Secretary of State for Education as saying that by the end of the next Parliament he hopes that the majority of schools will have opted for grant maintained status as a step towards all schools being grant maintained. He went on to say that this was necessary because LEAs are "making a terrible mess" of their responsibilities in the management of schools. I come from an area where there is an effective, conscientious and consultative education authority which is Conservative controlled. In reply can the Minister say whether her right honourable friend the Secretary of State is implying that all local education authorities have made a terrible mess of their responsibilities?
Our LEA in Surrey is at present involved in a tricky double process of reducing 11,000 surplus places and at the same time changing the age at which pupils transfer from one school to another. This will undoubtedly involve amalgamations of some schools and the closure of others. That is a painful process for teachers, governors and parents, not to mention children. The planning, consultation and decision process is difficult enough at the best of times. It is good in this context to have greater parental involvement and improved governing body responsibility. However, the disadvantage is that it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure an outcome which achieves justice for all children and parents concerned. The risk is that unless we are careful that will limit parental choice. It would be a great help to me to be clear about how the Minister envisages that the overall planning role can be undertaken by an authority other than an LEA. If nearly all schools are to be grant maintained how is an LEA to fulfil that role?
I also have an anxiety about children with special needs. The welcome increased responsibility for local governors inevitably means that they will want to do their best for their own particular school. In some measure they will view themselves as in competition with others. However, in their proper desire to be leaner and more cost effective they must consider the children who have special needs and who as a consequence are more expensive to nurture and educate. Whose responsibility is it to see that such children are properly provided for? Is this a role for the local education authorities and how do they secure it if nearly all the schools are to be grant maintained? I am sure the Minister is aware of an increasing anxiety about the future of local education authorities and that concern is not limited only to those who serve or work on them or are involved in local politics.

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Those of us who believe that in some measure we have a responsibility for an overall pattern of education across the country are anxiously wanting clarification.
I welcome the greater parental involvement and increased responsibilities for governors that the recent Acts have brought. I welcome greater choice for parents. However, those working in education need urgently to have a clearer understanding of the Government's intentions for grant maintained schools and for the role of LEAs in that context. I see LEAs as having a crucial role in the areas that I have mentioned: planning and providing for a proper spread of schools; provision for special needs; and the provision of equality of choice for all parents and not just for some.
It would be a great help if the Government could provide the clarification that I seek.
3.49 p.m.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, it is not a truth universally acknowledged that every bright idea is an invention of the present Government. That is certainly the case in the realm of education and especially so as regards the government of schools. From time to time we need to remind ourselves that school governors existed long before the Education Reform Act. In many cases they did a superb job far from the limelight of the law and the oxygen of publicity. They did so without initiation courses, training schemes, working parties or specialist seminars. School governors are and always have been a necessary part of government in education; and, as my noble friend Lady David said, it was that great and good man, Matthew Arnold, who pointed that out well over a century ago.
Indeed, in so many professional activities it is dangerous to leave everything to the experts. Just as science is too significant to be left to the scientists, just as health is too vital to be controlled by doctors, so education in its broadest sense is far too vital to the human spirit and national economy to be entrusted solely to the tender hands of teachers. I say that as a teacher for nearly 40 years, as a university professor and as a fully paid up member of the Association of University Teachers. On this matter, if on not many others, I know what I am talking about.
The principle of lay participation in education at every level is generally agreed. That is as important in the nursery school as it is in the university. I have seen what a creative contribution lay members make to the government of a university and I am convinced that, mutatis mutandis, the same creative input can be made in nursery education. Indeed, in some ways it is more important there than anywhere else.
It is not only parents who must be encouraged to guide pre-school playgroups and community nurseries and to develop the long-term planning so essential to their survival and success. At that level parents tend to come and go with their children and independent disinterested lay participation must be present to ensure proper continuity and sensible planning. Too little thought has been given to the government of nursery education. In that respect we have a great
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opportunity to foster the positive relations between school and home which will follow the child throughout his school life.
Therefore, in the words of 1066, And All That, school governors are "a good thing". However, at the levels at which they are most active, there is still cause for concern on a wide number of issues. The Education Reform Act can be seen in retrospect to have been obsessed with the question of balance and representation. Perhaps that is not surprising but it is nevertheless regrettable. The Government's terror lest some wild Trotskyian, Marxist, Leninist, fractionalist, deviationist, dogmatist councillor should gain power and become regnant and rampant among the governors of Little Puddlecombe Comprehensive, may have caused them to legislate with too heavy a hand. The result is that perfect balance is now sometimes achieved at the expense of common sense. In order to recruit the right people, we sometimes sacrifice the best people. We can probably all give examples of where it has been necessary to appoint a second-class reluctant lady Labour councillor instead of an absolutely first-class eager and enthusiastic Conservative male person; and, much more commonly, vice versa.
There exist some schools where governors have for many years formed an effective and happy team and who have tacitly agreed to sit somewhat lightly to the new regulations on the grounds that the school is best served that way. I hope that they will not be persecuted and harassed because they may have departed slightly from the purity of the principles of balance as laid down by the commandments of the ERA.
That freedom is important because there is still cause for concern about the turnover of school governors nationwide. Statistics on this matter are not easy to collect or to interpret but it has been reliably estimated that turnover is somewhere between 2.5 per cent. and 10 per cent. Wherever the higher figure can be shown to obtain, there is the need to question. To paraphrase a great dramatist, "to lose 2.5 per cent. of governors may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose 10 per cent. looks like carelessness".
We must think carefully also about the socioeconomic background of our school governors. I hesitate to invoke that outmoded word "class" but even the Minister, Mr. Fallon, is reported as saying:
"I remain concerned that there are not enough 'blue-collar' worker governors. I hope that they, with the support of their employers, will represent a growing proportion of governors in future".
Let us inspect those words more closely and look at the implications of them. Let us consider the prejudices which they all so unsuspectingly reveal. "Blue-collar workers" are hardly a scientifically defined group of our fellow citizens, but we know what Mr. Fallon means. Professional people, businessmen, tycoons, managers and captains of industry wear crisp white collars of the hue favoured by many, if not all, of your Lordships. Blue collars are reserved for the factory worker, the labourer, if he wears a shirt at all, and for the horny-handed sons of

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toil. Blue collars earn less than white collars. In spite of all symbolism, blue collars have an embarrassing tendency to vote red.
Is it surprising then that comparatively few of them are eager to become school governors? Many find it extremely difficult to make ends meet or to retain their grasp on employment or to pay the mortgage. They will be likely to afford a higher priority to balancing their household budget than to the resource allocation procedures of their local school. Shall we blame them for that?
Mr. Fallon is even more nakedly self-revealing if we palpate his subordinate clause. He says:
"I hope that they, with the support of their employers will represent a growing proportion".
How else can those employers provide that support other than by giving paid leave of absence to the blue collar governors to go to see their schools in action during working hours and, where necessary, by paying travelling costs and any other out-of-pocket expenses. That is precisely what the Government have failed to do. They have not publicised opportunities for governors to be reimbursed for all expenses actually and necessarily incurred. Therefore, if the blue collar governor wishes to see children being taught or school sporting activities or to attend training courses, he or she must dig into a personal pocket which may well not be very deep.
If Mr. Fallon wishes the factory workers, the labouring classes or the unemployed to march forward and present themselves for service, he has an easy incentive in his own hands. Let him permit paid time off work at the Government's expense, let him sanction travel costs where appropriate and let him permit claims for genuine out of pocket expenses.
However, I do not imagine that such action is close to the front of the Government's mind. Their preferences, prejudices and predilections are starkly clear in their own publicity. A recent issue of DES News announces proudly that governors and chairs are very well qualified in terms of educational and professional qualifications. In one survey:
"57 per cent. of the chairs and 44 per cent. of the governors held either a degree or a professional institute final qualification. Very few held no formal qualifications".
It went on to announce that:
"about 21 per cent. of the chairs and 18 per cent. of the governors were employed in industry or commerce",
and, most revealingly:
"about 39 per cent. of the governors and 14 per cent. of the chairs were employed in education/training occupations (including teaching)".
Therefore, nearly four out of every 10 school governors in that survey are in teaching or allied occupations. They are people with degrees or professional institute final qualifications. It seems that that is exactly what the Government want.
That may do very well and be properly representative in the lush pastures of the Tory heartlands; but such boards of governors would be of little use in the run-down schools in the inner city areas of the deprived conurbations elsewhere in the
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United Kingdom. The Government must make immediate, sustained and successful efforts to recruit governors who will fairly reflect the society and community which each individual school serves. They must pay expenses and must allow paid time off work. They must shed their blind prejudice that any person with a university degree is, ipso facto, going to be a good governor of a school. I know hundreds of university graduates whom I would not trust to manage the proverbial whelk stall, although some of them would be among the most brilliant graduates. Intellectual ability is not the same as managerial skill. There is no likelihood greater than chance that he or she who has the one will also have the other.
The Government have constantly preached that fact in encouraging young people to set up their own businesses. When it comes to school governors, let them hear their own sermon.
Perhaps I may briefly turn to the role of parents in schools. We all agree that parents have a great part to play in the education of their children. It needs no ghost from the grave to tell us that. Some parents should become school governors; all parents can take part in the educational process. They can read to children; they can take part in school assemblies, play musical instruments, accompany staff on out-of-school visits, demonstrate crafts in the school, help to run school bookshops and, as they always have, they can make sandwiches and serve tea on open days and PTA occasions.
There are also things that parents should not do. They should not allow themselves to be hijacked by underfunded and understaffed head teachers as part-time, unpaid, untrained extra teachers. I know of a school in a Conservative constituency in Derbyshire where the head inveigled parents to go to the school on a regular rota basis to supervise children's reading. They were to hear the children read, correct their mistakes, report their progress and analyse the reasons for difficulties. Not one of the parents concerned was a trained teacher. Some may even have been described as "blue collar" workers. Yet the highly technical skills of teaching children to read were required of them simply because the head master had no staff time for such matters.
God help an autistic or dyslexic child, a slow learner or a child developing any sensory impairment in circumstances like those. Parents are often pulled in to assist in primary schools in other subjects, even mathematics. If, by sheer fortune, one parent happens to be a vicar or a minister, then the head teacher thinks that it is his birthday and he need look no further for teaching in RE.
That is wrong. It is against the best interests of the children and must be sternly discouraged. Similarly, parents must not be used as vigilantes to provide security or enforce discipline. Alas, we live in a society where it is all too often essential for a parent to deliver a child to the school gates in the morning and collect that child every afternoon for fear of sexual molestation, kidnapping or murder. But discipline and good order on the school premises, including the

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playground and the playing fields, must remain the responsibility of the school and the education authority.
The Government are in many ways strangely bereft of ideas in this area. On the other hand, the Labour Party put forward creative and imaginative plans for involving parents effectively in the work of their community's schools. We propose that parents should be invited to join in a formal home and school partnership which would clarify rights and responsibilities and encourage parents to participate in school activities. Similarly, parents and other adults need reliable advice about schools and need it quickly. We propose to introduce education advice centres as a useful and easily available resource. We believe also that local authorities should be encouraged to establish an independent education ombudsman to deal with any complaints unresolved between parents, schools and local education authorities. We want to bring the governing of our schools into the open so that decisions are not made behind closed doors but in open court.
That will bring new ideas, new partnerships and fresh air into the education system, where it is still sorely needed. The issue is important. It is vital for our future. If our children ask for bread, shall we give them a stone?
4.4 p.m.
Baroness Brigstocke: My Lords, I was most impressed by all that was said by the noble Lord, Lord Morris. However, I must confess that I did not understand one or two points. I did not understand his reference to, on the one hand, the poor minority of women, and on the other, the first class male. I am sure I misunderstood. It seems rather curious when, in this debate, I count six women speakers and three men.
Before I embark on what I planned to say perhaps I may comment on what the noble Lord said in regard to the teaching of reading. There is a great need today for children to be listened to and be read to. Mothers do not necessarily possess degrees or qualifications. Parents coming into school can help enormously simply by hearing the children read. The noble Lord perhaps would not approve of what we did at St. Paul's. We sent our sixth formers —not even as good as parents —all over London quietly to help in schools; they were doing as they were told and I hope not causing trouble or muddling people's reading ability.
Lord Addington: My Lords, perhaps the noble Baroness will give way. The noble Lord, Lord Morris, made one valid point regarding children with special learning difficulties such as dyslexia. Teachers often have difficulty spotting the problem. Somebody who is not qualified stands virtually no chance unless he has actually come across it before. That is a valid point and displays what could be a weakness if a school is attempting to cover up with non-qualified staff.
Baroness Brigstocke: My Lords, I take that point. I hope that I made the point that the help would be under the supervision of the teacher. I thank the noble Lord for his comment.
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Today I wish to speak about governors. I should like to advise the noble Baroness, Lady David, that the Labour Party does not have a total monopoly on the participation of parents and the wish to involve parents more. The City technology colleges have been one of the great successes of this Government. One of their main qualifications for entry is that the parents should be committed and state that they are committed to the education of their children until the age of 18.
In the Netherlands a system of parent participation was tried. I am told that it has not been altogether successful. It consists mainly of training mothers to help with reading. In Denmark I am sure that everyone will be delighted to know that the chairman of the governors must be a parent.
Since 1976 when the noble Lord, Lord Callaghan, initiated the great education debate, strenuous efforts have been made to improve the education and training provisions in this country. Reforms have accumulated —GCSE, the national curriculum, BTEC, CPVE—some of which are still at the discussion stage. Questions arise such as whether we should keep A-levels, develop AS-levels or move on to the IB. What of RSA, HNC and HND? I am deliberately using initials to emphasise the confusion and bewilderment of it all. Those of us in the MFLWG —Modern Foreign Languages Working Group —are reduced to referring to it as "mufflewug". As a professional I find it confusing. I have been a student, a teacher, a parent, a head teacher and a school governor. What must it be like for the parents and governors who, quite rightly in my opinion, are now being asked to take a more prominent role in our schools?
It is particularly appropriate that the noble Baroness, Lady David, should initiate this debate on this very day. If we need an example of the confusion and the worrying situation that may exist with lack of co-operation and understanding between governors, parents, staff and pupils, we need only to look at what is happening in the Bishop Llandaff school in Cardiff. The members of the NAS/UWT —National Association of School Masters/Union of Women Teachers —are on strike. The NUT staff members are refusing to teach any class which includes a certain two boys. The school is disrupted and very unhappy.
There was an incident involving three boys molesting, I imagine, a girl. I do not know the exact details of the incident. The headmaster considered it right to suspend and exclude the three boys. He wanted to exclude them permanently. A subcommittee of the governing body considered the matter. It heard evidence from the parents. It decided properly —it was its responsibility so to do —that there should be a limited exclusion and not a permanent one. That limited exclusion finished at half-term. Since then the boys have been taught in the headmaster's study. Again, quite properly, the headmaster was using his responsibility to keep the children separate from the staff who had made it clear by this time that they did not want to teach those children. They thought that the boys should be in another school.

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As I understand it, the governors sent a letter informing the staff what was happening, but that did not matter. The staff were adamant and they went on strike. In my view those boys could have gone to another school. The parents of one of the boys was adamant. It was a pure example of a lack of co-operation and understanding. The governing body exercised its powers in accordance with Section 25 of the Education Act.
How are governors to cope? I referred to the Education Act and saw that governors are responsible for the curriculum in accordance with the policy of the local education authority. There is a special responsibility for sex education or for not giving sex education. The governors have to take note of representations from persons connected with the community —for example, the chief officer of police; and they have to provide parents with information about syllabuses and educational provision. As I have mentioned, they have to consider the reinstatement or otherwise of any pupil who has been excluded by the head teacher.
As we have heard already this afternoon, the governors must have some help, but help and training are not enough. Perhaps they can help with the complex problems of employment, redeployment, redundancy, appointing the head teacher and so on, but there is more to it than that. The way to have avoided the impasse and the great unhappiness for the Bishop Llandaff School would have been if those concerned; namely, the governors, the head teacher, the parents and the staff, had understood and trusted each other more. But how does one give a course in co-operation: how does one legislate for trust?
4.15 p.m.
Lord Taylor of Blackburn: My Lords, as usual, when one reaches this stage in a debate on education, one finds that everything one intended to say has already been said. I prepared quite a long speech concerning the matters which I have been looking back at over the 15 years since my committee was formed and at all the changes that have taken place in that time. I am surprised, when I think how we started with that committee and what were the terms of reference, to find how many of our recommendations have been implemented. The Taylor Committee tried to get away from party politics. In those days there were far more politics in schools in certain areas than there are today. We tried to get away from that situation and to form a partnership for co-operation, understanding and for liaison between parents and local authorities about which the noble Baroness spoke earlier.
That partnership is there, but if one wants Utopia in any organisation one has a long while to wait for it. If it is not attained in schools, it will not be achieved in industry and so on. We simply have to wait for that state of affairs. When the report was published, we had a change of government. I did not expect that the recommendations we put forward would be implemented in the way that they were. According to the latest figures from the DES, about 98 of 140
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recommendations that we made have been enacted. I am grateful to Members on the Government Benches because quite a number of them helped to enact the recommendations that we made. One has to remember that many of these recommendations were made by a committee set up under a Labour Government which were then taken over and implemented by a Conservative Government.
Partnership was our main theme. We chose the title, "a partnership". To me a partnership means working together with equal shares all round. Our main recommendation was that there should be no one body on that committee in a majority, but that there should be equal shares. The Government did not accept that, and they included more parents than we required at the time. I believe the Government are beginning to see that there is not the same need now that they thought there was at that time. That situation is something which the Government have to live with now. We also wanted the right number of teachers, but we did not get the balance right in the Act. We wanted the same number of representatives from the local authority. We did get that right. We also wanted to include the community.
One of the matters that we emphasised and which has been referred to during the course of the debate this afternoon, is the training of governors. We realised how important it was for them to be trained. I repeat what I have said before: we did not want governors to be trained to the standard of Bachelor of Education. We wanted governors to be trained to know what education was about. We wanted them to know the fundamental principles and no more than that. We wanted governors to know their rights, where they could go, what they could do, and how they could advise. We did not want them to run the schools in the sense of being teachers because we want professionals to do that. We wanted the governors to assist and to be part of a partnership with teachers and to work with them.
There is a partnership today in many schools and with the governors in the area where I come from. I am quite happy about that. We wanted to make sure that there were not professional governors; namely, people who were going from one governing body to the next. We wanted people to realise that their responsibility was towards one, two or three particular schools where there is a primary school, a junior school and a secondary school serving a particular community. They could be worked in together. That is what we wanted; but we are still not getting it. When I look at the figures for the whole country, they show that there are people serving on many bodies. I do not know how they do it these days. With agendas being as they are, I find that it is difficult being a governor of one school. I am transgressing a little on this, but one of the things which does frighten governors is the jargon that is used. One hears quotations which mean a lot to people in education. However, a lay person going on a governing body has to ask what certain parts of the agenda mean. I was amazed by the agenda sent to me by one governing body. Three quarters of the agenda seemed to be in a foreign language. To

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someone not involved in education, it would seem to be a completely foreign language. We have to have agendas that governors can understand.
I feel very sorry for the right reverend Prelate and his clergy who cannot find the time to serve on governing bodies. If a clergyman who is attached to a local parish school and whose children attend that school cannot find time to serve on the governing body, how will a layman, who may have to travel across the town, find time? He will find it difficult, too. Those are problems which we have to iron out.
The Education Act 1986 and the Education Reform Act 1988 allow us to do a great deal in schools. Many opportunities are there. I do not want the Government to keep bringing in new ideas. We should try and build on what we have. We should try and get right what we have at the present time. We could be working on areas which are already provided for in those Acts. For example, the Labour Government introduced provisions on the grouping of schools. The Act states that each school shall have its own governing body. However, one finds that in certain cases a group of schools has one governing body. That is quite legal within the Act but it would be better if the provision applied to one particular school rather than a group of schools.
I welcome what is going on with the associations. However, I should like to see more help being given to parent-teacher associations to enable them to form a lobby together. Many people find this difficult because in some cases head teachers do not like parent-teacher associations working together. I should like the Minister to look at this point. Schools should by law have the right to form a parent-teacher association, whether or not the head teacher likes it. Perhaps that point can be considered.
Another thing I should like the Government to consider in more detail than they have in the past is the training of head teachers in management. This is very important. We now have a new type of head teacher. He has to be not only a professional educationist but a good manager. In our teacher training colleges we should be giving teachers more opportunity to learn more about school management and how it can be worked in a simpler way. They should have an opportunity to know what is going on in the world outside. People who have had some previous experience in management should have the opportunity to retrain.
We should allow education to evolve more, in the way it has in the past. We should not keep rushing in to do things. I often use the analogy of digging up the plant to see how it is growing. Let it grow a little bit longer before we lift it up again. Let us leave it a little longer and see how we can help it that way.
4.24 p.m.
Lord Elton: My Lords, I should apologise to your Lordships for extending this debate without notice. The reason for my not having put down my name is that I did not at first realise that I would be able to be
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here this afternoon. It was not until I had heard the opening speech that I realised that this was a debate from which I could scarcely refrain from intervening.
I do so with the sense that I am at least restoring the balance of the debate in two respects. One is the respect referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Brigstocke, who has done something to redress it herself. I refer to the balance between the genders. The other is the balance expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, who has done something else but who is redressing his redressment. I refer to the balance between blue and white collars. As I am today wearing a blue and white striped collar I feel I can speak with some impartiality. I speak also as the chairman of a committee which reported to the Government in January 1989 on the question of discipline in schools, in which it became very evident very early that parents in a number of capacities have a crucial function for the satisfactory performance of any school. That committee was itself of some authority, combining among its members more than 120 years of teaching experience. It also recruited experience from outside in a survey obtaining responses from no fewer than 3,500 practising teachers, representing an 89 per cent. response from 220 primary schools, a 79 per cent. response from 250 secondary schools and 100 interviews in hard-pressed city areas.
A majority of the very many letters that those respondents sent us emphasised that the behaviour of parents had a very strong and often harmful influence on the behaviour of children in schools. I must at this stage say that I learnt very soon in that work that one simply cannot consider a school in a vacuum. This is not a problem on its own. It is not something happening in a discreet area which can disregard all others, but part of a society, part of a community and part of an administrative system—a local government system or a social system. Therefore, it follows that the role of parents who form a portion of that community must be of vital importance if not for the reason that they actually supply the pupils (do they not?) and also supply by far the most powerful influence on the pupils in that school.
There were many preconceptions of which we had to disabuse ourselves and our readers, and possibly the noble Lord, Lord Morris. I am not sure whether I caught him right but earlier in the debate it appeared that there was some expectation that good schools existed in leafy suburbs and bad schools existed in impoverished and neglected inner city areas. We found that the surroundings in those terms were by no means the determining factor in the quality of the school. We found the best examples in the worst areas and the worst examples in the best areas. That was not as a rule of thumb but only on some occasions; and I do not reveal which was which. It was very striking that schools themselves make a difference.
The influence of parents at home was very important in the behaviour of children at school. The behaviour of many, if not all children, is in some respects either in conformity with standards they have had inculcated in them by their parents or in rebellion

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against it. For instance, very often children who were given to becoming involved in and contributing to escalating instances of violence came from homes where the response of parents to bad behaviour on the part of the child was first to shout, then to administer a cuff and then a kick. Equally, children who were in permissive families where no control was exercised did not expect to have to respond to discipline at all. We therefore made recommendations to parents and to those able to influence them—government, LEAs, governors and head teachers—that the way they bring up their children is very important to the way they perform in school and the way the school as a whole performs. The obvious aim was firm and affectionate guidance, a good example and the avoidance of the extremes of discipline.
It is difficult to generalise in a debate such as this. The involvement of parents in schools is of crucial importance and has been recognised as such for a great many years. Noble Lords have themselves recognised it in today's debate. The traditional means of parental involvement was through the parent-teacher association. In that respect I am happy to use the reference to collars by the noble Lord, Lord Morris. If one permits that type of labelling, parent-teacher associations are very often apt to be extremely white-collar gatherings. The refreshment at a PTA is very apt to be wine and cheese, though the refreshment in the community about it as a majority may well be beer and sandwiches. That again demonstrates the necessity for a school to reflect the community which it serves.
The parents should be involved. I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Morris. Perhaps it is a tribute to his delivery that I find myself reverting again and again to his speech. Parent-teacher associations are an important reflection of the interest of parents in their schools, but it is by no means the only or the most effective one. I take issue with the noble Lord, as has my noble friend Lady Brigstocke, on his view of the involvement of parents in the classroom. Schools are not a test tube. They are not a separate experiment. They are part of the whole life of a child. The more that life is integrated, the better; the more interest shown by parents in education, the better and the more it will be respected and enjoyed by the child; and the more the loving attention of parents can be involved in children of the same age group and in their contempories in different social brackets, the better will be the teaching and the more cohesive the society.
As for turning away the expertise of ordained clergy in explaining the meaning of the scriptures, that leaves me with my mouth open. I accept that there are other faiths in this country. It is important to remember that. If the community is to understand the school, which it must if the school is to succeed, the school must communicate with the parents in a language which they understand. I do not only mean not in the flood of acronyms, to which my noble friend referred but in a language such as Urdu or whatever is the
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majority language of the ethnic minority—or, as it may be, the ethnic majority—in the area in which the school exists.
The school exists to serve the community, to raise its standards and to increase the life prospects of the children who go to it. The Government have with great enlightenment involved parents, through the governing bodies, in the actual management of schools. Contributor after contributor to this debate has pointed out the importance and the difficulty of doing that. Perhaps I may again draw on the report, of which a few dusty copies still remain in the Printed Paper Office.
We began our recommendations to governors by saying that if they chose to draw up a written statement of general principles for a school's behaviour policy, which is a very salutary thing to do, they should take account of the principles of good practice identified in the report, as well as the professional advice of the head teacher and chief education officer, and communicate it to the parents. We said that they should obtain regular reports on the standards of behaviour in their schools from their teachers. It is no use going around moaning and saying that children do not behave well. Governors have to reduce that to writing, analyse what is wrong with the behaviour, explain it to their fellow parents, discuss it with the staff and agree a policy to put it right.
We said that the governors' annual reports should contain a section on standards of behaviour and attendance at school. The report also refers to applications for interview and the governors' role in that respect. That is of crucial importance. I was sad to hear the noble Baroness who opened the debate saying that that was regarded with some anxiety and distaste by governors. I hope I understood her correctly. It was at that stage that I decided to come into the debate. If I am wrong, I hope she will not correct me because I shall then have no excuse for staying.
The teaching of children goes on not only in the classroom but throughout the day and is delivered not only in what the teachers say but in what the teachers do. A teacher who settles an argument by shouting at a colleague undermines the school's disciplinary standards. That policy has to be understood by the community of which the school is part. It has to be enforced by teachers who support it, understand it and have the personality to apply it. They must have the patience, the wit, the wisdom, the charity and love to get the children into that community as part of it, not as recipients of something imposed but as members of something being done. Those qualities must be looked for when appointing teachers. It is not an easy matter. The more senior the teacher, as my noble friend Lady Young said, the more critical the appointment. That is why we also recommended that local education authorities should supply, and boards of governors should receive, professional advice on how this should be done.
This is a vast subject. Noble Lords have restirred an enthusiasm which I laid to rest two years ago. I

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conclude, leaving much unsaid, by saying that a school will not succeed unless parents are in a very real sense involved in it, are in sympathy with its objectives, are in support of its teachers in counselling its children and mix in with its activities. If that is in the classroom, in the audience or behind the scenes of the school play, so be it.
The noble Baroness has broached an extremely important subject. Except in one respect, I have hardly touched on government policy. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for speaking at such length. If I have interested them, they can always read the report.
4.37 p.m.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, I very much welcome this debate. I am grateful to my noble friend for introducing it, as for many years I have been in favour of giving greater consideration to the role of parents in the education system as a whole and because the part governors now play has been greatly increased by the Education Reform Act 1988. I shall not say a great deal about governors, as that subject has been well covered by my noble friends Lady David, Lord Morris of Castle Morris and Lord Taylor of Blackburn, as well as other speakers. I want instead to focus mainly on parents.
It is the case that, when one takes into account school holidays, weekends and the length of the school day, which is on average about six hours, children and young people spend only quite a small amount of their time at school compared with the amount of time they spend at home. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, how pupils spend their time at home will inevitably have an enormous influence on them and a direct effect on their attitude to school and their behaviour and achievements at school. If teachers want to get the most out of their pupils they must forge a successful partnership with parents. That is at the centre of everything I want to say and I believe it is accepted by most of the speakers in the debate today.
Children will do better if their parents are involved in their education. They will do better if their parents understand what is happening in respect of their schooling. They will do better if their parents support and encourage them in their efforts to learn at home. The two processes of schooling and learning outside school will benefit from being linked, with each providing an input into the other. Taking seriously the role of parents in the educational system is one of the most important routes to achieving higher standards in our educational system. Moreover, although there are some financial and resource costs to running programmes of parental involvement properly, enhancing the role of parents can be achieved at relatively little cost.
The second reason for examining the role of parents relates to questions of parental rights. Here I must agree very strongly with what the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said about the need for schools to be accountable to parents. Both parents and teachers have rights and obligations and it is very important that they are observed. There is always a tendency for professionals who deal directly with children, whether
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they are doctors, teachers or social workers, to think that they know best. Often they do, but they do not always. Even when they do, it should be part of their responsibility to consult parents, to take their views into account and, above all, to inform them in an open way about their judgments and decisions and to give the reasons that lie behind them: not just to tell the parents, but to give their reasons.
I suspect that the issues we are debating today do not give rise to huge differences of view on different sides of the House. Indeed, the speeches we have heard indicate that there is a fair amount of consensus. The differences are those of emphasis rather than those of a fundamental kind. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, referred to the importance of choice. Choice would be unimportant if all our schools were of high quality. Parents would not mind what school their children went to if all our schools were of high quality, and that is what we must be aiming for.
Choice for all is in any case very hard to achieve because once the good and oversubscribed schools are full, the children who do not manage to get into them have no choice but to go to the less good schools. Also, I cannot accept that grant maintained schools are going to improve the quality of the system as a whole, given how much more they are being allocated in terms of capital than the LEA schools. I have to say that many Tory local authorities are as concerned about this as anyone. I was also somewhat surprised by what the noble Baroness, Lady Brigstocke, said about city technology colleges. She said that they chose the parents who were going to be motivated: in other words, they select the parents. It is the schools who are doing the choosing and not the parents who are choosing the schools. That is what we have always said about CTCs, and what the noble Baroness said has confirmed all our fears.
In our view the Government have focused a little too much on parental choice of school, especially in connection with secondary schools and on parents as managers on governing bodies, and not quite enough on parental involvement in schools. The Labour Party's policy is to increase the participation of all parents in their children's schools and not just the involvement of the few who have the time, the inclination and the energy to serve on governing bodies. But let me say at the outset that the Labour Party strongly endorses the decision to increase the number of parents on school governing bodies. That is one part of the 1988 Act which we welcomed and which we would certainly want to see continued.
It was indeed a Labour government which set up an inquiry on school governing bodies, so ably chaired by my noble friend Lord Taylor of Blackburn. My noble friend has referred to his report and its recommendations in regard to increasing the part played by parents as governors. The report's recommendations were welcomed by the Labour government of the time and it was Labour authorities such as the much-maligned Inner London Education Authority which pioneered parents on governing bodies. Indeed, as a parent with children in a London primary school, I benefited through being able to become one of the very first parent-governors.

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But we now have to go beyond this. As I said, government policy has focused, in our view, rather too much on parents as consumers, as managers and as agents of competition. What is needed is a partnership between all parents and the schools which their children attend. There has been plenty of research now to show that one of the characteristics of really effective schools is a good relationship with parents. Both the major studies of school effects at the primary stage—Barbara Tizard's research on infant schools and Peter Mortimore's research on junior schools—show clearly that those schools with good parent-teacher co-operation and more extensive parental involvement achieve better results than those where relationships are less good and involvement is more limited.
At the secondary stage, the most recent study by David Smith and Sally Tomlinson endorses the primary school findings. What successful schools do is to put emphasis on parents as potentially joint educators with teachers. If I may refer to what my noble friend Lord Morris of Castle Morris said about parents helping in the classroom, I have nothing against parents being involved in helping children to read or indeed doing other things in the classroom. I am very much in favour of that, so long as those parents who cannot do this for one reason or another are not made to feel guilty. I think it is very important that we should take into account the fact that some parents find this difficult because of domestic and other responsibilities. Also, we must be quite sure that parents are not being used as a substitute for the teachers. I think that is perhaps what my noble friend was saying and it may be that the noble Lord, Lord Elton, slightly misunderstood him. I do not think that my noble friend was opposing this altogether.
It is essential to see parents not just as people who might join PTA's and undertake fund raising for their children's schools but as people who are in the best position of all to share with the teachers the work of educating their children. It is in fact wrong, in my view, to rely on parents as fund raisers. To do so means that those schools with plenty of well-off parents who are willing and able to give money will end up with better facilities and more resources than those schools where most parents are too poor to make such contributions. As my noble friend Lady David has said, that will only serve to increase inequality. There is in fact worrying circumstantial evidence, to which she referred, that parents are increasingly being asked to raise funds for essential items of equipment and for textbooks—and both are needed to implement the national curriculum—whereas in the past fund raising tended more to focus on optional extras.
A relatively new concept is now being developed to help formalise proper partnerships between parents and schools which go far beyond PTAs and fund raising. My noble friend Lady David referred briefly to the idea of home-school contracts. These contracts involve the rights and obligations of parents and teachers being clearly set out. It is hoped that they will help those schools which have so far paid insufficient
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attention to parental involvement to start doing so now. We cannot continue just to rely on voluntary co-operation, on parental and professional conscience or on exhortation in our efforts to improve home-school relations.
Old attitudes and prejudices take a long time to die. While I accept that many teachers now recognise the importance of working with parents, there are still a lot of stereotypes around which see apathetic parents and ineffective homes as a serious problem. It is most important that teachers should be trained to recognise the integral role of parents in education and to work to promote it. Very few parents start out being apathetic about their children's education but some may become apathetic because they have relatively little knowledge, and information is withheld from them. They may feel shut out of the process. It is up to teachers to work with parents to ensure that this does not happen. They have a vital part to play in building parents' confidence: sadly, sometimes they undermine it. This is no way to enhance the learning environment of children, especially those from less advantaged backgrounds.
Home-school contracts provide a signed understanding, setting out the rights and obligations of parents and teachers. In other words, they specify the expectations which pupils and parents might reasonably have about schools and which schools might reasonably have about parents and pupils. The Labour Party is now in favour of developing contracts of this kind, as the basis for good parental involvement in all schools. I should be grateful if the Minister, when replying, could give some indication of the Government's view with respect to home-school contracts. If the Government do not favour them, it would be helpful to know by what means they will ensure that poor schools are brought up to the standards of good schools. Clearly, there should be some scope for variation among schools in the precise details of individual contracts. I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Elton, said about the need for diversity in relation to different environments. Governing bodies should have a role in deciding their final shape. However, it would be helpful if HMI were able to provide some guidelines based upon pilot schemes now being tried in a number of LEAs.
Contracts should avoid being paternalistic or sending any message that "the professional knows best" rather than conveying the correct view that there should be equality between equally well-informed partners. As I have said, better information is crucial to achieve what we all want. Parents should have the right to have information about their own child; about the school's performance (taking into account its intake); and schools should publish a short prospectus. The contract should go way beyond the provision of information. In assessing children's progress and in constructing records of achievements, parents' views should be taken into account. They could help construct the record of achievement with the teacher. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Elton, will agree that one part of the record of achievement should be standards of behaviour. I agree with him that parents have a role to play in working that out

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with teachers. The contract should include home-school teaching schemes, especially at the primary stage; for example, by helping parents to become involved in raising their children's reading standards by reading regularly with them at home. It should include homework pacts and allow parents not just to read written reports and records but to be able to comment on them through regular consultations with teachers. Education advice centres are helpful, but the child's own school is the best source of advice.
I shall end by saying a few words about governors. Some anxiety has been expressed on all sides of the House—I was interested in what the noble Baroness, Lady Brigstocke, had to say, with all her experience —that we may be asking too much of our governing bodies with the new arrangements under the 1988 Act. Again, as the right reverend Prelate said, the new responsibilities are large. They cannot be fulfilled adequately without good training. It is somewhat worrying that as many as one third of governors surveyed in the NFER study had not had any training. In the past we may have given governors too little responsibility, but if we go too far in the other direction there is a danger that people will feel unable to give the time involved and cope with the complexities.
There is a continuing role for LEAs in providing expert advice and in monitoring the system. Some of the rather wild proposals that have started to emerge recently suggesting that schools should be entirely responsible for all aspects of their management with no LEA backup and guidance seem to me to be foolhardy. Because the Government are in a mess over the poll tax, some see centrally funded schools and the consequent death of the LEAs as an escape route. That would place a huge burden upon governors and increase administrative and other costs. Schools need LEAs to provide advice and guidance and to monitor their work. I hope that those advocating that policy will think again.
The local management of schools has many advantages, but we should not throw out the baby with the bath water by abandoning the LEAs and their important role. Again I must agree with the comments of the right reverend Prelate on that point. There are many effective and supportive Labour-controlled LEAs. The provision of special needs, to which he referred, is one area of provision where they have excelled.
We need to welcome parents into our schools and not shut them out. Most parents want that and will as a result work constructively in support of teachers. The teachers have nothing to fear. Teachers and parents have an interest in raising the quality of our schools and in improving standards. They need to work together to achieve that aim.
4.55 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment (Baroness Blatch): My Lords, I should like to add my thanks to those already
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expressed to the noble Baroness, Lady David, for introducing the debate and for giving us the opportunity to discuss this important subject.
Parents are their children's first educators and their influence remains crucial throughout childhood. Once children go to school, the parents share with teachers the responsibility for educating them. That is why it is so important that parents should be able, so far as possible, to send their children to the school of their choice. The more open enrolment provisions of the Education Reform Act are designed to ensure that schools admit up to their physical capacity, a point made by my noble friend Lady Young. Those provisions, combined with the pupil-led funding arrangements under schemes of local management of schools, will ensure that schools are more responsive to parental wishes, which will be an important incentive to improve standards.
More open enrolment came into effect for secondary schools from September 1990: the extension of more open enrolment to primary schools will take effect from September 1992. The introduction of grant-maintained schools and the innovatory city technology colleges has enlarged parental choice even further.
The law requires parents to ensure that their children of compulsory school age receive a proper education. That is a critical responsibility. Truancy is a waste of precious human talent and educational resources, and we cannot afford it. If parents fail in their legal duty, then they can be prosecuted; and, when the Children Act is implemented in October, the children of those who fail in that duty may be made the subject of an education supervision order so that local education authorities can take a direct responsibility for ensuring that a proper education is received.
Parents share with schools the responsibility for encouraging and reinforcing good habits of discipline in children. Teachers by themselves cannot be expected to rectify the consequences of all the negative influences on children, least of all the consequences of bad examples often set by parents. High standards of school discipline are vital: without an orderly school atmosphere, effective teaching and learning cannot take place.
Parents can help to motivate their children by taking a keen interest in their children's studies, and giving encouragement and support both to the children and to the school. A key area for parental support is in helping their children learn to read. There has been a welcome change over recent years. When my children went through school there was a noticeable antipathy on the part of teachers to allowing parents to be involved in the process of learning to read. A recent study carried out by Her Majesty's Inspectors of schools found that standards were generally higher among seven-year olds where there was a strong parental interest in reading and close co-operation between home and school. That is why parents are strongly urged to find out about their

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children's reading standards and to participate in helping to improve them. Schools should keep parents well-informed and enlist their co-operation.
Another key area for parents is in showing concern for their children's homework. They need, as far as possible, to provide a quiet place and time for them to work at home and to take an interest in the completion of the work. Children's successful completion of all homework assignments is an important part of their education and the development of good habits of independent study.
We are, of course, conscious that some parents find it difficult to know how best to support and become involved with their children's education. It is rare for parents not to want to do the very best by their children—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone—but not all parents feel comfortable with those matters, or in becoming directly involved with schools. It behoves the schools to act with sensitivity and to adopt a positively welcoming approach. In the more disadvantaged areas special strategies to strengthen home-school links may need to be taken by schools, and under the urban programme we are encouraging such measures.
The Government have been especially concerned to keep parents informed about the changes involved in the national curriculum. Three explanatory leaflets aimed at parents have been distributed, one from the Department of Education and Science and two from the National Curriculum Council. They set out clearly what parents can expect from the national curriculum and how they can help their children benefit from it. All the leaflets are available in the eight most widely spoken ethnic languages, as well as English.
The latest leaflet is part of a wider campaign to help parents understand the new testing and reporting arrangements for seven year-olds. A further leaflet is planned shortly, specifically geared to interpreting the written reports that parents receive. The cost of both leaflets, including design, printing, distribution and ensuring availability through libraries and most main post offices, is not yet clear. It will depend on parental and school response. However, we believe that it will not exceed £500,000. At 10p per copy, we believe that to be good value.
Under regulations introduced last July, schools will be required to give parents an annual written report on their children's achievements. Implementation of the requirements is progressive. This summer reports will be provided on pupils aged five to seven, 11 to 12 and sixth formers. Parents will be well-informed both about their children's studies under the national curriculum and their levels of achievement, judged against a national standard. The reports give teachers an opportunity to make recommendations for parental help to their children. This is one means by which parents and teachers can enter into constructive dialogue and work as partners to build on children's strengths and overcome weaknesses revealed by the tests on the national curriculum.
It is clear from what I have said so far that all parents now have even more opportunities to play an
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active part in their children's education and are increasingly being given the information they need to help them do that effectively. For one group of parents, elected by and representing the full parent body, the scope for making a contribution is even greater. It extends well beyond their own child's progress to issues affecting the success of the school as a whole. I refer to parent governors. There are 75,000 who, together with 200,000 fellow governors, take on real responsibility for key decisions in each school. The role of governors has been one of the themes of our debate today.
It is thankfully difficult to remember the bad old days when governors had at best a ceremonial significance and were at worst a complete irrelevance to school life. Thanks not least to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, and his committee which looked at the issue during the 1970s, we now have governing bodies free from political domination, representing the various partners who have an interest in school education. They have thus been able to give those bodies a real role to play.
This is one of the points on which I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris. He said that there had always been governors and that having them was nothing new. I have to say that before the Taylor Report, there were schools with a chalk line across their playgrounds beyond which parents simply did not go. Sadly, that was predominant in the north and north-west of the country. The noble Baroness, Lady David, and I come from a county for which the Taylor report contained little new. Our county had well-established governing bodies. However, that was not universal across the country.
Baroness Phillips: My Lords, will the noble Baroness give way? I believe that it would be unfortunate if that were left on the record because, both as a teacher and a governor for a long period I found that that was not true of many areas. It may have been peculiar to the eastern counties but it was not true of the London area for over 40 years.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, the point I am making is that in the eastern counties we had pretty enlightened local education authorities which had well-established governing bodies. However, that was not universal across the country. Predominantly in the north-east and north-west of the country, schools had a long way to go in involving the governors and parents in the education of their children. All I am saying is that the Taylor Report was an important piece of work from which governing bodies became universal and well-established right across the country.
It was the 1986 Act which established new style governing bodies with a balanced membership, removing LEA dominance and allowing for those representing parents, the head and other staff and a smaller group of LEA appointees to co-opt the largest single group of governors from the community served by the school. This ensures that local business and others with a close interest in the school and its pupils also have a say in its development.

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These new governing bodies have now been in place for just over two years. They have brought to their task a powerful combination of commitment and ability—all we could have hoped for when we set up the new arrangements. I pay tribute to their efforts and achievements, as others have done today.
Success in recruiting governors is essential because of the important new powers and duties they now bear under the Education Reform Act. Like the board of directors of a company—an analogy no less true for being well-worn—they must set the broad direction for their school. They will establish aims for the curriculum, increasingly have a role in choosing staff and, as they take on their own budgets, will be able to make the central decisions about the allocation of the budget. Such decisions rightly belong with those closest to the school who have the interests of the pupils at heart.
The importance of the right relationship between chairman and chief executive is a lively debating topic in business circles. Schools do not have the option of combining those two roles in one individual. The head may, if he or she wishes, be a governor. Most are, but a head cannot become a chairman. However, the central importance of establishing a good working relationship between the head and the governing body, and in particular the chairman, is as well-recognised in schools as in industry. It is increasingly being addressed through joint training of heads and governors.
The key to success is a clear and shared understanding of the respective roles of professional staff and lay governors, whose wider perspective and commonsense approach is their strength. We do not want governors to become professionals; though we need them to be well-informed and able to debate professional issues effectively. The governors' role needs to be discussed and accepted within each school as a foundation for effective partnership, but it can be helped by good training and outside support, encouraged by central government grants. All LEAs have now put in place arrangements to meet those duties under the 1986 Act.
The point about paid time off was mentioned. Legislation for paid time off would, we believe, be counter productive. Many employers already do this and we hope that others will realise its value for their staff and the community. The NFER survey suggests that most governors who want paid time off receive it.
The Department of Education and Science has also offered direct support. It provides each governor with A Guide to the Law, which is written in a straightforward manner and updated to keep pace with new developments. While materials sent unsolicited to schools are now being strictly limited, we have today produced for governors who want it a briefing booklet on the curriculum which is intended to help them develop confidence in this vital area. We consulted both governors and heads on the draft and I believe that it will help governors to act sensitively but effectively in an area where professional sensitivity is understandable.
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I am clear that governors should not leave the curriculum to the professionals. Offering the right curriculum to its pupils is the reason for a school's existence and governors must establish their curriculum aims. All their other decisions should be taken to further those aims. However, once broad strategies are set, the day-to-day delivery of the curriculum must be the task of the head and professional colleagues.
The noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, referred to blue and white-collar workers. I have always believed that the term was used by the unions, with blue-collar and white-collar unions. There is certainly no attempt whatever on the part of the Government to be patronising about people whom we have labelled blue-collar workers. However, there has been concern from all parts of the Chamber that on our governing bodies we want a true representation of the full gamut of people within an area. That is important.
It is our understanding, under the NFER research, that about half the governors surveyed were women, though only 30 per cent. of the women chaired their governing bodies. It is disappointing to report that the proportion of blue-collar and ethnic minority governors is still low. We hope that the balance will improve. This does not necessarily mean that these groups are not interested in the progress of their children. Many of them are enthusiastic about other activities of the school and belong to the parents' association with which they may feel more comfortable. However, they are inhibited about becoming governors. We have sought to present positive images of black participation in governing bodies in our recruitment literature and in governor training materials which we have sponsored. We shall continue to give this matter further consideration before 1992 when the term of office of the majority of governors will end.
Before I leave the governors' role—to which cannot hope in this brief speech to do full justice—I should like to draw together the two themes of this debate and consider the way in which school governors relate to the parent body. Parent governors play an important part in ensuring that the concerns of parents are taken seriously and that parents understand the reason for governing body decisions. It is for that reason that we continue to hope for a wider spread of representation on governing bodies, so that all sections of the parent body have a voice. But parent governors are full members with collective responsibility across the full range of responsibilities. Their role should not be limited to PR with parents and they should not be seen as providing all the school needs in this respect. Schools and governing bodies need to take relations with parents seriously if productive links are to be established.
Greater home-school understanding will be one way to encourage attendance at governors' annual parents meetings. We have heard today about the lack of success in such meetings, though we know of some very attractive annual reports and have heard of very successful gatherings. Greater budgetary responsibility at school level will, I am sure, increase

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participation. That point was well made by my noble friend Lady Young. Parents will want to hear from and put their views to those taking decisions which affect their child's education; and parents used to greater involvement with their own child's progress will be more confident of expressing their views on wider issues, so playing a part in improving standards not only for their own children but for future generations.
I have—I think quite rightly in view of the matters raised by noble Lords—concentrated on schools; but I must make brief mention of the changes introduced by the Education Reform Act to the composition of the governing bodies of further education colleges. Across the country the number of members on such governing bodies from employment interests has doubled, giving these bodies a significant degree of independence, strengthening the links between colleges and local business and helping to improve colleges' responsiveness to employment needs.
A number of specific points have been made. I shall refer briefly to some of them. My noble friend Lady Young was concerned about what was being done in teacher training to help teachers cope with the issue of home-school links. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science sets criteria for the approval of courses of initial teacher training. Those criteria were issued about a year ago. They state that the training courses should include means of developing and sustaining links with parents. That is a proper part of teacher training courses.
Reference has been made to contracts. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, asked me about the Government's response to contracts. I should be interested to know what the noble Baroness means by contracts. The word "contract" implies a binding promise on behalf of the two parties concerned. One must then think about sanctions if the promises are not kept. What will be the fate of parents who do not keep to the contracts, if we are talking about contracts in that sense? My noble friend Lord Elton addressed this point in the research work he carried out before producing his excellent report. Two years ago the Elton Committee on discipline in schools examined this whole question. The committee concluded that while informal contracts could be useful—I suspect my noble friend would encourage informal contracts, and that is happening in many schools—legal enforceability is a real issue. That prevented the committee from making a recommendation that such contracts should be universally applied.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, to assume that such contracts should be legally enforceable is rather too literal an interpretation of the term "contract". Nothing that I said in my speech implied that. I do not believe that such contracts could or should be enforceable. I believe simply that it is desirable that all schools should have contracts and should operate them as a way of ensuring that both parents and teachers are aware of their rights and obligations.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, I have no difficulty in responding very positively to the idea of an informal
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understanding between parents and schools as to what rights, duties and responsibilities they have. If that is what is meant by the term "contract", I believe both the Elton Committee and the Government would have no difficulty in responding positively to that.
The turnover of governors has been referred to. I know there was a great deal of anxiety on this matter when the new governing bodies were put in place. However, we understand that the turnover in a full year is 10 per cent. We do not believe that is an alarming figure. There is no evidence that turnover is increasing. Indeed, it appears that as the new legislation settles into place the turnover is reducing as governors become more involved and more committed.
The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, is not in his place and therefore I shall merely say that I agree with the points he made about jargon. I believe the most intimidating thing any educationalist can do to prevent people from becoming involved in school governing bodies is to make excessive use of jargon. I also believe that the days are gone when individuals, particularly individual councillors, were governors on large numbers of school governing bodies. That simply cannot be done in today's world.
Compulsory parent-teacher associations were referred to. We would caution against compulsory PTAs. We believe that the downward pressure on schools now is such that PTAs are much more prevalent than they were at one stage. We certainly agree with better management training. I point out to the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, that we are not just talking about better management training for heads. It is our view that management as a module of training is as important to the classroom teacher as it is to the head teacher. We believe it should be a fundamental part of training. Then, when our good teachers emerge as head teachers, they will not need to undergo a new course in management but rather to retrain in management.
The noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, also said that he wished to break open governing bodies and give parents more freedom. No government could have done more to liberate governors and parents than the present one. We have set free schools and their governing bodies. We are even contemplating the possibility of setting whole LEAs free within the state system, if all the schools in an area wish that. I do not believe one can argue for more freedom than that for parents.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford pressed me about grant-maintained schools, their standing within LEAs, and their impact on LEAs. I believe we take too negative a view of grant-maintained schools. I believe it is a good reflection on a local education authority when schools within that authority are sufficiently mature and capable of managing their own affairs to stand alone within the system. I see nothing to preclude a good working relationship between a grant-maintained school and a local education authority. The best example I can give of that is Lincolnshire. That county gives a warm welcome to grant-maintained schools once they have

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received their freedom. Lincolnshire welcomes such schools into the bosom of the family, but for operational purposes the schools stand free.
The Lord Bishop of Guildford: My Lords, I do not have any difficulty with individual grant-maintained schools. However, my point is that the Secretary of State is reported to have said that he wants all schools to become grant-maintained. If that is the case, what is the function and role of an LEA in that context?
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, the right reverend Prelate makes an important point. That specific topic is very much within the scope of the review that is taking place at the moment on the role and future of LEAs. I believe, however, we should be more concerned with good, healthy, mature and independent schools than with maintaining committees and local education authorities. We really need to concern ourselves with what adds value to what is going on in the classroom. That fundamental question will, no doubt, be posed during the course of the review.
A number of noble Lords have mentioned fund raising by parents. Noble Lords said that that activity is increasing and occurs now to a greater extent than in the past. The results from the NFER survey suggest that parents are not making greater financial contributions to their children's education. The median amount of total school-generated income in 1989–90 was £1,320 for primary schools and £3,500 for secondary schools. Both those figures show a small increase on the previous year. That suggests a national figure of under £50,000 which compares with the estimate of the National Committee for Parent Teacher Associations of £40,000 from the survey it carried out in 1985. The figure of parental financial contributions still accounts for less than 0.3 per cent. of the national expenditure on education.
The noble Baroness, Lady David, asked me about updating A Guide to the Law. I am happy to say that that is in the process of being updated. It is important that, as the law changes, the guide is kept up to date. The noble Baroness also asked whether further work on the NFER governor survey is planned. The department has consulted its working group on governor training and information about the case for further analysis of the questionnaires. The working group favours a further survey in due course which asks for more specific information. The department has plans to carry out the survey next year.
Much comment was made on training. The Government's record on the amount of training that has been initiated centrally and the amount of training being carried out in LEAs is good. I join with the noble Baroness, Lady David, in congratulating LEAs on the amount of training that they are carrying out.
In addition to A Guide to the Law, documents such as Planning for School Development, to assist governors and heads with management development, Governing Schools in the 90s: Into Action, a basic introduction to governors' roles and responsibilities, have been produced. In addition, a self-study package has been produced by the local management for schools initiative, as well as school curriculum
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documents and a training package to assist governing bodies in the selection of staff. Having said that, we are conscious of the amount of paper being sent to schools. Even that point is being addressed by my right honourable friend.
In terms of resources for training and government support, grants of £5 million per annum were made in 1989–90 and 1990–91 and £7.1 million will be made available in the coming financial year. This year is the last year of the three-year education support grant programme, but that does not mean an end to central grants to LEAs for school governor training. The circular on grants for education support and training in 1991–92 makes clear that support for that activity area will continue at least until 1993–94 and that the overall level of support is expected to be at least as high as in 1991–92; namely £7.1 million.
Much has been made of the workload of governing bodies. Again, governing bodies do not need to become involved in the professional business of accounting and school management. The head and administrative staff will offer that support. However, they do need to make strategic decisions about their budgets and determine priorities. As I have said, we have supported governor training through central grants of some £17 million pounds over three years, much of which has been spent on local management training. That support will continue.
I am baffled and disappointed by the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady David, and the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, referred time and again to the Government's poor record. They said that the Government were not spending enough and referred to under-funding and under-resourced schools.
Baroness David: My Lords, perhaps I may interrupt to say that I do not think that I referred to under-funding and lack of resources. I may have mentioned it once, but I certainly did not go on about it.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, I believe that I used the word under-funding once and only once.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, in addition to under-funding, which both noble Lords mentioned, they referred to the Government's record in a number of areas. To use her very words, the noble Baroness said that given the Taylor Report and given the Education Act 1944, nothing has happened since. My noble friend and I looked at each other and said that so much has happened since then. The Education Reform Act of 1988 was itself a very substantial leap in that direction.
Baroness David: My Lords, that was the quotation from Michael Marland who mentioned Matthew Arnold; that was the end of what he had to say.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, I take that point. However, on almost any comparison the Government's record is unequalled by that of any previous government.
The Government recognise the vital role that parents and governors play in education. Through our programme of reforms all parents now have far more

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opportunities to play an active part in their children's education than ever before. We have achieved that by offering substantially increased parental choice of school (through more open enrolment, grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges); giving full information to parents on the national curriculum; making sure that parents receive reports on their children's levels of achievement, judged against a national standard; giving parents a much greater voice on school governing bodies (more than a quarter of all governors are parent governors); and under the local management of schools and in the grant-maintained sector parent governors are sharing in crucial decisions on staffing and financing.
In those and other ways the Government are ensuring that parents and governors have the best possible opportunities to play their parts to the full in raising educational standards and helping all children and young people to achieve their potential.
5.24 p.m.
Baroness David: My Lords, I should like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. Everyone had his own individual contribution to make. I was particularly pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Young, spoke. We have so often opposed each other in debates on Bills that it was a great pleasure to hear her speak today. I was also very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Elton, felt compelled to speak unexpectedly and give us the benefit of the experience he gained when writing his report on discipline in schools.
There has been a good deal of general agreement about the importance of parental and community involvement. There was also agreement about the managerial experience which is now needed in schools. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned that bursars would be a great help. Head teachers have a burden to bear and should not have to spend all their time on financial matters instead of on running the school as an education establishment.
I agree with the right reverend Prelate about the role of the LEA. That is very much in question, the more so with grant-maintained schools coming into being. The LEA must be able to monitor and to plan. If it is asked to close schools it makes it much more difficult if the schools immediately try to opt out, retaining all of the places which should be lost.
I was delighted that my noble friend Lord Morris mentioned nursery schools. I had wanted to say something about nursery schools but time did not permit it. I was also glad that special needs were mentioned by the right reverend Prelate. There is anxiety about the situation of children with special needs in an integrated school if there are no governors who know a great deal about special needs because those children may have some difficulty.
I do not have much faith that the annual reports will be a success. I am still a governor of one establishment with 850 pupils. Fifteen parents turned up for the presentation of the annual report. A great deal of work goes into writing it, the governors turn up
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but the parents are not interested. However, they will flock to that evening to find out how their children's education is progressing.
I am surprised that the noble Baroness takes such a cheerful view about paid time off. I believe that we have to think rather more about that subject, particularly in the case of staff appointments. We may not always get the governors we want if they are not well off.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for allowing me to intervene. Local authorities are permitted to pay expenses and some local authorities do so. However, regarding the question of compulsory time off, the NFER survey tells us that that is not a substantial problem.
Baroness David: Not yet, my Lords. I thank the Minister for her intervention.
With those comments I should like to thank all noble Lords again. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Government Statistics: Quality
5.27 p.m.
Lord Donoughue Lord Donoughue rose to call attention to the quality of government statistics; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, we have just enjoyed a debate characterised by a surprising degree of cosy consensus. We now turn to a much spicier and sexier subject. I hope that my noble friends will not be deterred from partisanship by the total absence of any speakers opposite to support the Minister. I am sure that that does not derive from any lack of support for the Government; it probably reflects the classical tradition of education and the almost total lack of social science training opposite.
The subject is of great importance. Statistics are the bricks and mortar of all policy areas which concern government. Through them are assessed the problems which confront government and through them we assess how successful or otherwise governments are in facing those problems. Therefore, the subject we are discussing today is very important.
I should like to open with a firm statement:
"There is no doubt that the quality of UK economic statistics has deteriorated over the last two years".
I can say that with confidence because it should not be disputed from the Government Front Bench. It is a quotation from the opening sentence in the first issue of the bulletin published by the Treasury last summer. That issue carried a preface commending it by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. John Major. Mr. Major was also quoted by the Sunday Times last September as,
"not knowing whether to laugh or cry",
when the balance of payments for the second quarter was revised upwards by nearly £1 billion.
Today we have experienced two more major statistical embarrassments. The first is that the 1990 trade deficit which has been going up is suddenly

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revised down by £2.2 billion. The second is that the Financial Times pointed out today that the February output prices seemed quite incompatible with other official price statistics.
Last May when Mr. Major was Chancellor he brought in a small package of reforms which were very welcome. But the head of the Statistical Service, Sir Jack Hibbert, stated in July that they were,
"unlikely to be sufficient to solve the problem".
In July of last year the Royal Statistical Society described the Major reforms as "incomplete" and published its own devastating critique of the state of government statistics. It referred to the,
"serious erosion of public confidence in UK official statistics".
Last September the Public Accounts Committee reported on the retail prices index and savagely criticised both its collection of data and the construction of the index. It found an "unacceptable" shortfall of 50 per cent. in the number of prices collected and that the sample of towns used was unchanged for 50 years. On the construction of the index, it was unhappy with the treatment of house mortgage costs—a view often expressed in this House.
Many other doubts have been expressed about the quality, the accuracy and the timeliness of our statistics. Last summer's Treasury bulletin identified three main detailed problems. It referred to the,
"lack of coherence between the different measures of GDP … frequent revisions of demand data [and] inconsistency of national and financial accounts".
The Government's own internal review, the Pickford Scrutiny of Economic Statistics, conducted in Whitehall in 1988, identified its own three concerns:
"wide discrepancies" between three measures of GDP;
"large and growing errors and omissions",
in the sector accounts; and "frequent and major revisions" to the statistics. It also concluded that,
"the problems were deep-seated and pervasive, had multiple causes, and had existed for a long time".
There is no question that there is widespread concern about the general quality of official statistics. The Prime Minister has joined in the concern. There is also no doubt that it matters. It is not just a pedantic question for academic number-crunchers, for it has profound implications for policy making. It matters because policy decisions are so often taken on the basis of statistics, and wrong decisions may be taken on the basis of bad statistics.
Worrying examples of that litter the recent history of economic policy. The Government's failure to deal with the upsurge of inflation from 1987 was described by the Governor of the Bank of England as due primarily to bad statistics. In his Durham lecture in April 1990 he explained:
"We put the brake on when the speedometer indicated we were doing 60 mph … when the tachograph was opened, however, it revealed that we had actually been doing 70 mph".
Because of slow and poor policy responses to that situation we have suffered damagingly high inflation and interest rates for three years.
The RPI certainly matters. It matters because if the RPI is artificially high or low, inflation-linked payments—pensions, social security and so forth—will be wrong. Either the Treasury pays out too much or the customer receives too little (as I believe happened with social security payments in 1987).
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Moreover, if the RPI is artificially high, many pay settlements will be based on it, and in due course the artificially high inflation will be converted into high real inflation. That is why the related question of including mortgage interest payments in the RPI is so important.
It means that, perversely, when a government wish to conquer inflation by raising interest rates, the first consequence is to raise the RPI, which in turn increases inflation. Before leaving that point, perhaps I may add that I find it puzzling and very odd that the poll tax is included in the RPI yet I believe that poll tax rebates are not. It is said that Mr. Major has asked for a review of the RPI. Perhaps the Minister can give us a report on the progress of that.
The balance of payments is another area prone to statistical error and revision. I need only remind the House of the experience of the government of the noble Lord, Lord Callaghan, in 1976. The official numbers for the first half of 1976 showed a deteriorating balance and indicated a major deficit for the year. Rapid depreciation of the currency and an autumn sterling crisis followed. After that came the approach to the IMF, to which noble Lords opposite so often nostalgically refer. In fact the final revisions for the first half of 1976 (completed in 1978) showed us always to have been in surplus. It does not matter whether it was a Treasury plot, as some thought, or a statistical cock-up. Major policy decisions were based on bad numbers. So there is no doubt that our provision of statistics is seriously inadequate and that those defects have serious consequences.
I will wish to make some suggestions for reform in the way our statistical service is operated. But first I should like to analyse the reasons for those faults. The defects do not arise on a random basis, simply because it is the nature of numbers to be difficult. It is possible to identify several clear potential explanations, or alleged explanations.
The first alleged explanation I will touch upon only briefly —the wicked fiddling of the numbers by the Government. I am aware that that suggestion will cause such shock and numbed incomprehension on the part of the Minister that he will feel incapable of even responding. I will assist him by disposing of it quickly. There is no evidence or reason to question the integrity of professional statisticians. They are as honest as they have always been. Moreover any manipulation could never be proven. If it happens, it happens through subtle political and departmental pressures which can never be documented. But we should be aware that equally honourable people working in the fields of poverty and unemployment, for example, have alleged that the statistics in those areas are manipulated for political reasons.
I shall not pursue that. But I would say to the Government that if those allegations are sometimes believed, it is because the whole organisation of official statistics is open to suspicion in that professional statisticians are not autonomous and ministers are in charge. The integrity of official statistics must not only exist, as no doubt it does, but also be seen to exist, which is not the case.

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The operational framework is wrong. It was wrong for this Government to put the government statistical service under the Treasury. The Treasury is inevitably the department most sensitive to embarrassing numbers. Few other countries have statistics answerable to a ministry of finance. It is wrong to have statisticians decentralised into departments, appoint-able by, promotable by and answerable to departmental ministers and permanent secretaries. They should be in a separate professional agency. It is wrong to leave departments, and especially the Treasury, with control over statistical publications and the timing of announcements. Because of that lack of autonomy, suspicions will arise even when there are no grounds for them.
This Government are also directly responsible for several other aspects in the deterioration of the statistical service. In particular I refer to the changes introduced after the Rayner review of Whitehall efficiency in the early 1980s. That review had many virtues. Anybody who experienced Whitehall in the 1970s will sympathise with any efficiency review, especially under such distinguished leadership.
But the effects on the statistical service were harmful to its performance. Government statistical service manpower was halved in the decade from 9,000 to 4,200 between 1980 and 1989. Ours is now the smallest official statistical service in the advanced world. Valuable surveys, micro-business surveys and social surveys, were abolished or reduced. If we know less about the building or textile industries, we end up knowing less about the national gross domestic product. Having less form filling is an attractive slogan. But again less information equals less accuracy.
Putting the government statistical service under the Treasury was a mistake to which I have already referred. One additional bad consequence of that—I look forward to listening to any noble Lords who will pick up this point in detail—is that it inevitably means the downgrading of social statistics compared with economic statistics. That is a mistake. Even more important and harmful was the new Rayner doctrine that the government statistical service served only Ministers. That narrow definition of its constituency was quite wrong.
The Government's responsibility for the deterioration in our statistical service is quite clear and serious. Perhaps I may quote last year's report by the Royal Statistical Society. It concludes that:
"In summary, the Government statistical service is seen as starved of many essential supports for the proper exercise of its functions. It suffers from lack of autonomy and control over operational and publication decisions".
Not all the fault lies with the Government. One finds it difficult on this side of the House to say that, but it is true. In recent years external circumstances have made the task of statistical monitoring more difficult. The grey economy is larger and hard to track. Deregulation has a similar effect. For example, the abolition of currency controls makes it harder to monitor financial transactions and especially hard to calculate invisibles—that was probably the main
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factor in today's revision of the trade deficit. I doubt whether we include in the numbers the massive and very welcome expenditure by Arabs on our horseracing industry.
These statistical problems, arising from deregulation, will grow worse after 1992 and what happens in Europe. However, the main responsibility for the inadequacy of our services lies with the Government. It is for the Government to provide the remedies. To me those remedies are clear. They arise logically from the analysis of the defects. The main thrust must be to establish an organisational and operational framework which ensures a quick improvement in the quality of the statistics and in their accuracy and timeliness and that the integrity of the statistics is transparent—not only exists but is seen to exist.
That means institutionally establishing the autonomy of the professional statisticians. There should be, as indeed there is in most advanced countries, a centralised government statistical service, perhaps with departmental satellites in an autonomous agency with control over its own personnel, product and publications, and accountable to Parliament through its head and its sponsoring Minister. I add that it is also important that its head should remain a professional statistician and not be a Whitehall bureaucrat.
It will also add to the autonomy, efficiency and integrity of the statistical service if, as the Royal Society suggested, we have a UK statistics Act giving statutory authority and responsibility to the service, as in most advanced countries, and if we have a statistical commission to recommend improvements to statistical quality and consider complaints about integrity. Such a statistical commission would be a link between the producers and the users, legitimising the product and reporting to Parliament. It certainly means abandoning the Rayner principle that the government statistical service serves only Ministers. The service should serve a wider constituency: Parliament, industry, universities and the general public, who ultimately pay for it.
In conclusion, I assert that our statistical standards are inadequate for our domestic needs and are well below those of most advanced countries, especially our EC partners. I ask the Minister to consider seriously and actively the suggested reforms which have widespread support in the statistical community. Will he also tell us whether the proposed move of the service to a next steps agency is on course for next month and whether it will incorporate these reforms and characteristics?
When the Royal Statistical Society produced its report last July, Mrs. Thatcher, so it is widely alleged, wrote immediately to reject it. Will the Minister now announce that that rejection is, in General Schwarzkopf's phrase, inoperative? Will he replace it by a commitment to urgent and radical action to restore our statistical service to its previous excellence? My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.47 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, I shall let your Lordships into a secret. One of the joys of being a Bishop is that one no longer has to engage in the laborious chore of writing out marriage registers before a wedding. It has to be done in duplicate and woe betide the man who makes a mistake. It might have sweetened the task over the years if I had remembered that I was taking part in a long tradition which saw progress toward the creation of national statistics.
It was Thomas Cromwell—that very useful but very unpleasant man—who as Chancellor to Henry VIII in 1538 ordered that registers of baptisms, weddings and funerals should be kept carefully in all the churches. It was in 1597, by an Act of Queen Elizabeth, that transcripts had to be sent to a diocesan registrar. It was Lord Burghley, Lord Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth, who had the vision to see that they could be used as the foundation for national statistics and something which would be useful to the nation in the years ahead. Along with Lord Burghley, to whom we duly give thanks, we should give thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for offering us an opportunity to think about this very important subject this afternoon.
I believe that statistics are absolutely vital to the health of our national economy and our progress as a nation. They are concerned with truth and a proper picture of society. Adequate statistics are a foundation for democracy. I should like to concentrate for a few moments on social statistics, which have already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. I realise that they form only one part of the field, but I believe that it is a very important part.
In recent years we have had two major Church reports: the Archbishop's Commissions, first, on urban priority areas and then on rural areas. They were efforts to chart the pressures on the quality of life of some of the people in communities who are most disadvantaged in our society. They inevitably relied very heavily on the use of statistics.
However, the attitude of successive governments to statistics is somewhat ambiguous. I claim that consideration of the adequacy of government statistics is a non-party matter. It is well documented that, when one considers the past, governments of whatever colour or complexion have felt strongly tempted to manipulate statistics, or at least to lean on those who have produced them.
The integrity of statistics has already been referred to by the mover of the debate. Perhaps I may quote Sir Claus Moser, former head of the Government Statistical Service. He stated:
"In official statistics and research, nothing is more important than integrity. Once the public start questioning the integrity of government statistics, they are questioning the integrity of the government itself".
I believe that those are wise words. However, it is not simply the integrity of such statistics as are published but their quality and the way in which they are presented and made available to a wider public that is of concern. It has been correctly stated today that it is
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a grave mistake to suppose that government statistics are relevant only to those making government policy. In a democracy they ought to be widely available and easy to understand.
It is not surprising that there are now many voices expressing grave concern about what has been happening to our statistics over the years, not simply under this Government—I emphasise again but under governments of past years. If your Lordships wish to have an example, I quote the words of Muriel Nissel, founding editor of Social Trends. In that useful publication she identified some of the changes that have taken place as,
"stemming not only from different political attitudes, but also from the lack of data resulting from Sir Derek Rayner's report on the Government Statistical Service in 1981 which led to severe cuts particularly in social statistics, and restricted them to what is considered relevant to government".
However, she also stated that,
"the political problem was there back in the seventies. The poverty trap and the decline in living standards (for some) were so glaringly obvious. But when I tried to show the decline, the answer was that there was no satisfactory measure of poverty available".
It is only fair to say that this attempt to lean on the statisticians pre-dates the present Government.
However, matters seem to have become worse. Many of the statistics about which people are most anxious now relate to poverty and inequality in our society. We can be profoundly thankful that since Victorian times an impressive array of evidence has been built up in relation to aspects of our society where social pressures are the greatest. But those statistics have always been produced with some difficulty.
If noble Lords wish to know examples of the ways in which matters have deteriorated in recent years, they do not have to look far. For example, Social Trends—which I believe we agree is a useful publication, as is Regional Trends—used to provide a table showing a link between unemployment and ill health. It no longer appears. There was a standing Royal Commission on the distribution of income and wealth. Many of us concerned with progress in our society towards a healthier and happier community in which resources are widely shared regarded that commission as of great value in past years. It was abolished in 1979.
The general household survey has been curtailed in recent years. The Department of Social Services used to produce statistics on low income families annually. In 1979 that was changed to every two years. It was then replaced with another method of statistics—households below average income. Those who study such matters carefully say that those statistics do not give nearly as accurate a picture of poverty as the former statistics on low income families. There is useful information in both surveys but if one compares the two that is the picture that emerges. The Child Poverty Action Group, for example, claims that it was an attempt to stifle debate about poverty in this country.
The supplementary benefits commission was abolished. There are various views about the work

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that it was doing and the reasons for its abolition. The point that is relevant to our debate is that although the commission used to produce some useful statistics, nothing took the place of the survey of low incomes which used to be published regularly.
I am sure that other speakers in the debate will mention unemployment data, and the fact that there have been a number of changes in their presentation over the years—more than 20, I believe. Those changes have resulted in reduced numbers of unemployed being shown on the registers —and that must be a cause for concern.
Mortality data are absolutely vital to our understanding of society. They indicate death according to social class and occupation. There is less information now from the Registrar General on those important areas.
If one goes back a few years, the Black Report of 1979 on Inequalities in Health Care was never properly published. It had privately to be brought to the public's attention. As a result, all the work that had gone into the study—it was a remarkable picture of inequalities in health care in Britain—was largely wasted. Those are causes for concern which should be addressed.
Mention has been made of the Rayner Report. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, emphasised the importance of keeping down public expenditure. We all know that we cannot have as much money to spend in any field as we should like, and that includes the collection and presentation of statistics. Undoubtedly some good savings were effected. The noble Lord gave one set of figures. I have one example. Government statistical staff in the Department of Employment fell from 1,430 to a mere 314—a reduction of more than 75 per cent.
However, one must ask whether we have suffered as a result of government cuts of that order, some of them doubtless brought in by the introduction of new technology, of which we always need to be aware. At what cost have such cuts been made in the collection and presentation of statistics? The damage may be to the reputation of government. Surely one of the worst errors that has been made in recent years occurred in 1988. It was announced, based on the statistical evidence available, that the poor not only benefited from rising prosperity but had done particularly well. I quote Mr. Nicholas Scott, Social Security Minister, who stated in August 1988:
"This Government has achieved the longest period of sustained high growth and increasing prosperity experienced by this country for half a century and, since 1981, the poorest people in our community have not only shared in this rising prosperity"
—these are the significant words—
"but have actually done better than the population as a whole".
That turned out to be completely and utterly false. The previous figures had been wrong. The poorest tenth saw their income rise by just 2.6 per cent. between 1981 and 1985 after housing costs, whereas
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for society as a whole the figure was 5.4 per cent.—twice as much. The poorest tenth had done half as well.
I give that illustration to show that it may be false economy for government to cut down on the way in which statistics are collected and presented. It seemed at the time to prove the trickle down theory: that if one creates wealth all round inevitably it trickles down to the poorest in society. But that is a theory that has been shot to pieces. Sadly, those statistics led a government minister, who later resigned, to make the absurd claim that poverty in Britain had been abolished—something that I am sure no noble Lord would today wish to claim.
I conclude by adding my voice to that of others in saying that we need an independent body or council to monitor government statistics—a body or council independent of pressures from this or any government in the future. It would ensure that statistics are properly presented, and that they cover the correct areas of national life. Statistics are far too important to be left in the care of certain groups of people, however influential and responsible. They must belong to us all.
6 p.m.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to support my noble friend Lord Donoughue. My contribution will not be on the same intellectual level but I hope to throw a light on certain issues that I believe to be important. When I sit in this Chamber I am always worried when Government Ministers talk about new money. When I speak to people about new money they ask whether I mean those silly little five pence pieces. One feels as though that is the generosity that we are receiving from the Government. I imagine members of the Cabinet sitting around a table and someone saying, "Give them some new money". The person who is granted the new money is handed a big bag of new £5 notes which he is able to dish out. I cannot understand the nomenclature of new money.
I am also worried by the statistics that are thrown at us. When I sit in this Chamber I sometimes think to myself that the Minister went into his department that morning to be told by his adviser, "These are the tables that you must learn today, Minister, so that you can quickly rattle them off". I see that the Minister is nodding his head in agreement. It reminds one of being at school and learning one's tables. That is the picture that is given to us and therefore we cannot really accept the figures.
However, I accept that the Government try to put a good show on the unpalatable figures that they give in this House. Noble Lords can judge them for themselves and it appears that some of the figures that we are given cannot be related to what we see happening on the ground. I am involved with a number of charities and other organisations in Birmingham. Sometimes when I repeat the statistics that have been given in this House people around the table simply laugh and not all are members of my party.

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I am especially interested in housing and I wish to comment on the figures relating to the sale of council houses which has been the most successful of the Government's privatisation programmes. It has generated £18 billion for the Government; that is, 43 per cent. of all privatisation receipts, excluding the figures that were given yesterday for the privatisation of electricity. A great deal of that income has been lost to housing investment. A certain percentage of new money, as the Government call it, is being used, but a greater amount has been lost to housing investment. That has resulted in a substantial increase in homelessness. The Government try to get away from the figures relating to homelessness and now we hear the wonderful word "rooflessness". I regard the use of that word to be peculiarly funny because I have just returned from a long tour of Egypt. I said to one of the guides, "We have visited new housing, but I haven't seen roofs on any of the properties". He said, "We don't need roofs because we have no rainfall". I thought that perhaps the Minister had been to Egypt and could ensure that we have a similar climate. But for a Minister even to use the word "rooflessness" leaves me speechless.
The Government get fed up with being told about homelessness. If I were a government minister I should feel so fed up about it that I should make sure that something was done. The previous DoE minister in another place became so fed up with the homelessness statistics that instead of calling them Local Authorities' Action Under the Homelessness Provisions of the 1985 Housing Act, he changed the title to Households Found Accommodation Under the Homelessness Provisions of the 1985 Housing Act. That was quite wrong because the figures relating to housing provided by local authorities are different from the figures relating to the people whom they accept for homelessness. The local authorities accept people as being homeless but they are not always able to find them accommodation. It was wrong to say that all those who were accepted as homeless were rehoused. The DoE has suddenly decided that it will alter the statistics when social trends are published in the future. Having accepted someone as homeless does not imply that accommodation has been found.
I hope that when the Government give figures from the Housing Corporation they will not show an increase in the number of houses provided by the corporation by including the houses taken into occupation by housing associations. There has merely been a transfer to local authorities because some have made themselves into housing associations. Such a figure would be untrue and would not show any new housing but merely transfers.
I turn to some of the points raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. If one wishes to look at figures and statistics about poverty one merely has to look at the report of the Social Services Committee of another place. Its fourth report is entitled Low Income Statistics and was printed on 25th April 1990. The report asks the Government to provide different statistics. Paragraph 18 states:
"We need to know much more about exactly who the poorest group is. The stated aim of the Government's reform
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of social security in 1988 was to target benefits more precisely on those who needed them. To judge the extent to which those aims are achieved it is necessary to be able to measure, over time, not only the numbers living in poverty relative to the rest of the community, but also the composition of the poorest groups".
We require a fuller development of the statistics that are collected.
Some noble Lords are keen to abolish wage councils. The noble Lord who is particularly keen is not present in the House. It is always argued that if we abolish wage councils we know what will happen; we will get low pay. People argue that low pay equals more jobs but there is no proof that low pay increases employment. One could argue a good case for saying that low wages are a subsidy to the employer. If people are paid low wages they will need housing benefits, income support and all the other benefits that they can obtain.
I shall give an example which may come as a surprise to some noble Lords when they consider the West Midlands. There is a definition which the Government call the "low pay definition", and it is £143.66 for a 30-hour week. It may interest noble Lords to know that 30 per cent. of adult workers in the West Midlands fall within that definition. When one sees that definition, one can appreciate that people are almost on the poverty line although they are in employment.
There is now a new definition for training; namely, the TECs. That is another means of transferring and lessening the amount of government money. Every time there is a new definition or agency, it means that the Government put less money into it. As regards TECS, I should like to put in a plug for those students and those returning to work who suffer from sensory handicaps. The new TECs will have a very serious effect upon sensorily impaired trainees. The Government have always considered central funding to be necessary for the expert training given to sensorily handicapped people and those returning to work after perhaps being blinded or becoming deaf. That training is of a very high calibre. Noble Lords may have seen the exhibition in Central Hall last week which demonstrated the very high standards of training given to the deaf and blind.
As president of the Queen Alexandra College for the Blind in Birmingham, I know of the excellent training which is given. I ask the Minister to look at this matter. There is no need for the Minister to look so horrified because he has been asked to look at only about three matters all afternoon. I know that he will not look at them anyway but that is beside the point. However, I ask the Minister sincerely to look at the training for students and those returning to training so that they can rejoin the employment market. That training has always received national funding but now it has become the responsibility of TECs.
I know that the TECs are run by top businessmen, but they will not be primarily concerned with the long-term training which those people need. When the minister publishes his advertisements for TECs and says that they are run by top businessmen, perhaps he will give the names of those top businessmen so that

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we know who they are. That is especially important for those of us who live in the provinces where we perhaps do not receive the same information.
I believe that the widening gap between rich and poor is not only to do with wages and disillusionment but arises because of the way in which the economy has been run. The statistics do not and cannot possibly show the plunging morale, the lack of aspirations and diminishing opportunities which people have. If we look at the people who are at the bottom of the pile, they are normally low earners or they are living on benefits. They live in poor housing or they are homeless. Often they are in poor health and lack the access to leisure and pleasure which we all enjoy. More often than not their education facilities are not good because they live in inner cities and they have limited employment opportunities. Government statistics do nothing to show that they are helping those people.
6.14 p.m.
Lord McGregor of Durris: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for giving us the opportunity to discuss the statistical services, without which modern government would be impossible. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Fisher of Rednal, and the right reverend Prelate, he has tackled major themes.
I thought that I might prepare for this debate by re-reading a sermon of Benjamin Jowett written after he had read the results of the 1851 census, preached on the text from Matthew:
"The very hairs on thy head are numbered".
However, I felt that a discourse on statistics and faith would be inappropriate. On the eve of the Committee stage of the Child Support Bill it is more appropriate to comment on the official statistics relating to the amount and consequences of breakdown of marriage. That is a very small corner of the vast field of social statistics to which other speakers have already referred.
When the civil judicial statistics were edited by Sir John Macdonell between 1894 and 1921, he provided valuable information about the divorcing population and those litigating their matrimonial problems in the magistrates' courts. However, when the compilation of the statistics was transferred in the 1920s from the Home Office to the newly formed County Court branch of the Lord Chancellor's Office, their content was greatly reduced and the critical introductions disappeared. That remained the condition of the annual volume for the next 40 years. It is a sad reflection that data on divorce first published by Macdonnell in the 1890s were not again published until after the Second World War and then only by the Registrar General.
Thus, demographic interests have secured good, though by no means complete, information about divorce. However, proceedings in magistrates' courts registered the final collapse of large numbers of working-class marriages whose spouses never secured licences from the superior courts to marry again. For years the Home Office published in the criminal statistics a table headed "Certain Other Proceedings" which contained the bare number of applications and
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orders made by magistrates in affiliation and matrimonial proceedings. That same table contained also simple intelligence about orders for the destruction of unsound meat, the removal of dead bodies and the forfeiture of indecent photographs. That is eloquent witness to the official esteem for a civil jurisdiction dealing almost exclusively with working-class marriages.
In 1966, 1967, 1968 and 1974 official committees recommended that the table should be transferred to the civil judicial statistics and its unreliabilities remedied. The Home Office had been told repeatedly that the table was in any event grossly inaccurate.
It was removed without notice or comment from the criminal statistics in 1973, but meanwhile the Lord Chancellor's Office had begun to publish a couple of tables in 1968 in the judicial statistics which were more accurate but not more informative. Those were dropped without explanation after 1978. Therefore, no reader of the judicial statistics was informed. For the next five years, nothing was printed or made available in the official statistics about the matrimonial work of magistrates' courts. In 1984 the Home Office Statistical Bulletin, newly published, gave,
"the first results from a new system for collecting statistics of domestic proceedings in magistrates' courts".
If official information about the number of proceedings and persons involved is inadequate and probably misleading, there is none whatever about their financial results for the spouses and their children either for the summary courts or the superior courts. In a paper on the financial consequences of divorce in 1981, the Law Commission observed,
"One of the most serious difficulties encountered in examining any proposal for law reform in this area is that … very little reliable up-to-date information is in fact available about the operation of the existing law. Even the most basic questions about the extent to which the existing private law imposing financial obligations on spouses does, in reality, provide any significant support for their families cannot be answered. We do not know how much maintenance is in fact ordered to be paid by the courts. Still less do we know in what proportion of cases such payments are actually made, and for what period of time they continue. The lack of such factual information obviously constitutes a formidable handicap to the task of law reform".
Many attempts during the last quarter of a century to persuade the Lord Chancellor's Department and the Home Office to set about the provision of such information have come to little or nothing. I have time to illustrate the seeming uninterest of those departments in securing factual data about their responsibilities by one example only. When the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Bill was in Committee early in 1984 the noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, and I put down an amendment to provide through statistical research on court records,
"a factual basis for analysing the resulting effects of the collapse of marriages upon spouses and children".
The noble and learned Lord then on the Woolsack explained that he had already asked OPCS to conduct a survey that was actually based on some 2,000 divorce decrees of 1984. The report of the findings under the title, The Consequences of Divorce, was actually published at the end of last year. I therefore

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assume that the very informative 242 pages have been languishing in a Whitehall pigeonhole for at least four or five years.
What we now know about maintenance comes from surveys conducted mainly by university departments. The first was done in my own department at Bedford College and published in 1970. It was followed by valuable work in Bristol, Oxford and elsewhere. That explains why the Government's White Paper Children Come First, relies almost wholly not on official and regularly published statistics but on data from ad hoc commissioned surveys.
Oddly enough, the OPCS survey to which I have referred does not appear to have been used in drafting the White Paper of October 1990 which, according to its introduction, relies to a large extent upon,
"some preliminary results … from a study carried out for the DSS,"
by Bradshaw and Millar of York and Bath Universities which,
"it is planned to publish … in the next few months".
In November last year I asked whether I could see a copy and was told that the DSS,
"are to publish early in the New Year".
Early in the New Year I asked again and was told that the study,"
"is unlikely to be published before June 1991".
Last Monday The Times carried a report of an extract from the Bradshaw and Millar survey, put out by the Family Policy Studies Centre. When I inquired how the material had been obtained, I was told that a copy, "had been made available". Yet a further request to the DSS was met by the statement that a decision on release of the material could not yet be taken.
In my opinion it is thoroughly bad practice on the Government's part to rely in an important White Paper leading to immediate legislation upon unpublished survey data which have not been subject even to the scrutiny let alone the assessment of the authors' academic peers. Worse still is the Government's withholding the data from the public and Members of Parliament when the Bill is going through this House and yet leaking them to a private organisation.
Good court records and statistics are essential both for the proper administration of justice and for the compilation of figures relating to the work of the courts in order to provide a measure of their efficiency and information for their proper management. Far more important is that the doing of justice requires knowledge of the results of its own procedures. Legislators, judges, administrators, critics, Parliament and citizens must have knowledge of the social consequences of legal actions without which a democratic society cannot keep its institutions under regular and open scrutiny. Court records and legal statistics cost money. However, it is indispensable expenditure.
I should like to remind the House of a comment made in 1857 taken from a report of the Society for Promoting the Amendment of the Law commenting on the then paucity of judicial statistics. The society said,
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"Such statistics afford the best, if not the only, means of noting the practical working of laws and tribunals, of testing the principles of legal reforms and of estimating the utility of any system of jurisprudence by the testimony of actual fact".
The lack of official statistical information about the actual working and social results of the jurisdictions I mentioned means that an informed public awareness of the issues involved has never developed; there has been no public or parliamentary assessment of the quality of justice with which citizens have been served and no general public opinion upon which the recommendations of the many departmental committees, uniformly ignored by governments, could bite. Neither politicians nor officials cared about the people affected. Therefore, nobody in government troubled to find out what was happening, and those subjected to the jurisdictions have never been able to make their discontents felt.
Too much of our statistical equipment—social, legal and judicial—is inadequate. I have tried briefly to sketch in one explanation of why your Lordships' House will be spending three days in Committee on a piece of legislation at the core of which is plain ignorance about the circumstances with which it is attempting to deal.
6.30 p.m.
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, I welcome my noble friend's Motion and the opportunity that it gives us to discuss the quality of statistics. I agree completely with him when he says that statistics are the "bricks and mortar" of policy-making. That being so, it is essential that their quality is of the highest standard. I shall not follow my noble friend in his penetrating analysis of the statistical system and some of the economic consequences, but rather I want to underline the importance of statistics in the social field.
As well as being about finance and economics and figures in their millions and billions, statistics are about people. Too often we talk about figures and we forget about the people behind them. Yet it is only by the collection and analysis of statistical data that we can better understand the nature and quality of people's lives, their needs and expectations. If the quality and analysis of statistics is faulty, however, then the policies that follow are likely to be deficient. We were given an excellent example by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester when he talked about the miscalculation of statistics with reference to the poorer sections of our community.
The bottom decile of the community to which these statistics refer, represents between 5 million to 6 million people. Therefore, when the Government were under the impression that the standard of living of the bottom decile had risen twice as fast as that of the population as a whole—although it had risen by only half the percentage of the population as a whole—they were basing policies for people on faulty statistics. Therefore, these 5 million to 6 million people were suffering as a consequence of the poor quality not only of the statistics but of their analysis. We must recall that it was as a consequence of the cuts following the Rayner Report in 1981 that the interpretation of statistics and the definitions on which the statistics

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were built were changed. We are talking about the lives of people when we speak about statistics. I shall not say any more about that aspect because it was well covered by the right reverend Prelate.
I wish to concentrate on some areas in which I have had a special interest and to illustrate some of the practical problems that can arise either through a lack of statistics or an inadequate interpretation of them. In his opening remarks my noble friend said that this debate was perhaps going to involve a less sexier subject than the previous one. I wish to speak about gender, which is an area for which I had some responsibility as chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission from 1975 to 1983. The commission was set up under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. The work of the commission is based on gender. It has three main areas of responsibility; first, as a law enforcement agency. Here it needs statistics to illustrate and prove where discrimination exists and the nature of it. That is particularly so in indirect discrimination which is about the disparity in numbers and the proportions who can and who cannot comply with a particular condition or requirement. Obtaining data for this area of the commission's work is a very slow business indeed and sometimes the data is hard to come by at all.
The second area of responsibility is as a promoter of equality between the sexes. In that respect the commission needs access both to statistics and to models in order to assess what are appropriate policies for promoting equality. For example, equal access to employment opportunities for women is hindered by the absence of sufficient data on the need for, and the whole question of, child care provision.
Thirdly, the commission has statutory responsibility for monitoring the impact of government legislation on the sexes. Again, one can give an example of where the lack of data impedes the commission's work. As the commission has pointed out, the availability rules for employment, for example, both minimise in recorded statistics the number of women seeking employment and exclude some women from benefits. So it is quite clear that in all three areas of responsibility the statutory body of the Equal Opportunities Commission relies on comprehensive statistics and access to them.
When the commission was set up it was rightly said time and again that women were invisible. The census statistics were based, and still are, on the head of the household who is usually the male partner. A married woman's social status is derived from her husband's job or profession and not her own unless she happens to be the householder. The position is better than it was in the sense that many government statistics are now produced more frequently on a male-female basis though Treasury models for tax and social security purposes are still based on male patterns of behaviour.
The Equal Opportunities Commission itself, despite its limited budget, makes a major contribution to statistical information through its annual statistical report Women and Men in Britain. Reference has been made to the excellent work of Social Trends. In this respect it is a pity that the work of the Equal
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Opportunities Commission is not better supplemented by Social Trends which is rather sparse in its coverage of gender-related issues. Its wider usage throughout the community could do much to illustrate some of the policy issues in this area.
In preparing for this debate I am led to believe that the problem is not always about the collecting of statistics, as has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McGregor, in another context. The Central Statistical Office collects the majority of its data by gender. The trouble is that much of it is not published, neither is it analysed. Publication and analysis of statistics lead us into the wider area of resources. Continual economies in the statistical service are widely believed to have led to a deterioration in the provision of statistical data—a point which has been stated by previous speakers. Nevertheless, in the modern society, with its high rate of marriage breakdown and the growing incidence of one-parent families, it seems to me that the only sensible way for the future is to treat women as individuals. There must be much more statistical data about women in their own right and not as the dependant or appendage of their husband.
The second area to which I should like to refer briefly is the field of education statistics. The Department of Education and Science collects a considerable number of statistics but the statistics are not always meaningful and they are usually published very late. There are three main publications: Education Statistics for the United Kingdom; the DES Statistics of Education; and the DES Statistical Bulletins. All three are usually published well over a year after the collection of the statistics. Data for the DES 1989 Statistics of Education were collected in January 1989 and were required by July 1989 for the 1990–91 standard spending assessment. Yet the DES did not publish the statistics until November 1990. The 1988 edition of Education Statistics for the United Kingdom was printed in November 1988; and the 1989 edition in December 1989. The 1990 edition was published today, 13th March 1991. It gets later every year.
A further area is that relating to the national curriculum assessment arrangements. Again the DES is very late in setting out its plans for data collection for the seven year-olds who will be assessed in the summer of 1991. In a Written Answer to my noble friend Lady Blackstone on 6th March, the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, stated:
"The precise nature of the information to be requested by the Secretary of State and the nature of its transmission will be settled shortly".—[Official Report, 6/3/91; col. WA72.]
There are now only two weeks before schools commence the standard assessment tasks. It is disgraceful that the Government have not got their act together earlier to enable LEAs to plan for the collection of this data. It is such action by the Government which leads to the poor quality of statistics.
I entirely agree with those previous speakers who referred to the inappropriateness of placing the central statistical services in the Treasury. As the right reverend Prelate has said, we need a much more independent home for them. I agree, too, that the

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service should be geared to the needs of all policy makers and not just to what is perceived by the Government to be their needs. A previous Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Douglas Wass, is very critical of the Government's cuts in statistics. It is his view that the cuts have gone beyond the intention of improving efficiency. He says:
"It is as though the Government sets little store by public information, seeing its role as simply to find out what itself needs to know".
We need a much wider dissemination of our statistics both for a wider contribution to policy making and for monitoring the effects of those policies.
6.45 p.m.
Lord Bridges: My Lords, in spite of the words from the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, in introducing this debate, statistics may not seem a very alluring subject to many of us, but they do have an extremely important place in our national life. They are the foundation of the science of economics and the basis of vital decisions taken by our national authorities, yet they are not very often the subject of informed discussion in Parliament. The Motion tabled by the noble Lord is therefore most welcome. I should explain that I speak neither as a statistician nor as a trained economist but as one who has used statistics in a number of countries over the years.
Since the days of Sir William Petty in the 17th century we have produced many excellent statisticians in this country and we were one of the first nations to produce a reliable series of national accounts. Somehow it seems that the statistical habit has become ingrained in our way of looking at national problems —partly, perhaps, because of our preference for a pragmatic approach to most issues and our wish to know what the facts are before suggesting prescriptions to particular problems and partly because of our experience in the past two generations. The nature of the most important crises which we have faced has made us very much aware of the need for good statistics.
In the great depression of 1929–31 we measured with attention and anxiety the state of the national economy and the number of unemployed. During the Second World War, when every available resource was brought into use, accurate statistics were an essential tool for the War Cabinet. In the post-war years, when we found ourselves desperately short of foreign exchange while still running what was at that time a reserve currency and a sizeable empire, the statistical record of our foreign exchange and the balance of payments was just as vital as it had been during the war. The Central Statistical Office performed its function admirably throughout those difficult times.
However, it now appears that the statistical system is not functioning as well as it once did. I quote two examples. The first concerns the records of our visible trade. The 1990 edition of the Pink Book on the balance of payments, which is the most recent edition, shows 1989 exports fob at £93 billion and imports cif at £117 billion, in rounded figures. I have for some years had doubts about the accuracy of this table, for
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reasons which are explained in the notes in the opening pages of the Pink Book. These show that the figures are calculated on the basis of returns made by importers and exporters; but the basis on which these returns are made is different.
Importers must present their documents before Customs clearance of the goods, whereas exporters, if they use the simplified clearance procedure, may send documents to the Customs within 14 days of shipment. It is stated in the foreword to this publication that:
"There may be rather less accuracy in the valuation of exports than in the valuation of imports".
It is also stated that,
"the margin of error in the estimates for visible trade is probably very small, although probably significant in relation to the visible balance".
I take this official explanation to mean that the percentage figure is small but that the numbers are large.
In the table a figure of more than £1 billion for the year in question—more than 1 per cent.—appears as what is called a "net adjustment for recording exports". It is not clear to me why it is a figure of 1 per cent. It might be 5 per cent. or it might be 10 per cent. But the difficulties are very evident. We have an effective, compulsory figure for recording imports, and a much less water-tight system for recording exports. I suggest that this difference of system must cast some doubt on the reliability of the series. For example, how is it possible to estimate accurately the considerable volume of merchandise which now leaves the country in the personal baggage of a traveller by air or in a car? Yet the figures which we read each month showing a substantial deficit on the nation's visible trade may well be a considerable exaggeration.
More serious, and much better known, are the problems with the balance of payments statistics—a matter already alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. It has attracted more attention because the figures for the balancing item are embarrassingly large. The edition of the Pink Book from which I have already quoted shows a deficit for 1989 in our balance of payments of the enormous figure of £19 billion, with a balancing item of no less than £15 billion. In other words, three-quarters of the deficit is not accounted for.
The foreword acknowledges the problem and tells us of various steps being taken to identify transfers, investments and credits which have somehow escaped the statistical net. We are also reminded that in March 1990 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the present Prime Minister, announced a new programme to accelerate improvements to our statistics. This programme is to include a radical review of the balance of payments figures: and that, indeed, is surely called for. It would be interesting to hear from the Minister how this review is progressing and when we can expect some results. It is clearly unsatisfactory that a major statistical series should be eroded, as this basic series of figures appears to have been in recent years.
On reflection, I suggest that it is hardly surprising that difficulties of this kind should arise. The recording of the movement of goods and payment for

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them, on the scale of 40 years ago, was not perhaps a particularly exacting or complicated task; but a number of factors have now entered the scene to make this a much more difficult exercise. First, there is the rapid growth of the services sector of our economy, operating on an international scale, and the decline of our manufacturing industry. Secondly, there is the round-the-clock global financial trading system in which the City of London plays a large part. These two factors make it difficult to capture the result in statistical terms. I sometimes wonder whether it may be impossible to do so in the complete way which was achieved in the more regulated financial system of the immediate post-war period. Nevertheless, improvement is long overdue and I hope that we shall see this shortly if the Government are not to find the making of basic decisions even more difficult than it normally is.
Meanwhile, I suggest that the two series I have referred to should be treated with some caution. In particular, the balance of payments figures no longer present the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the hard evidence on which the Treasury used to rely. They are as difficult to interpret as the various monetary indices about which there has been so much discussion; but we do need better balance of payments figures as there is really no substitute for them.
My personal suggestion to those involved in the management of our domestic economy is that we might do well to pay more attention to more elementary figures, such as the size of the fiduciary issue and the velocity of currency in circulation. Those figures are much used in less developed countries as being cruder and less sophisticated measurements. They are, nevertheless, measurements in simple terms of what is happening now rather than constructed numbers which emerge in the monetary figures and which may or may not tell you much about what will happen next.
I should like to make one specific suggestion about statistics which I made in the House on 27th February during the debate on an Unstarred Question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs. The debate concerned the situation of children in this country. I referred to the need to publish data to enable us to monitor the situation of children. I speak on this matter as someone involved in the British National Committee of UNICEF. The plan of action adopted by the Children's Summit promoted by UNICEF and held in New York last September contained a fairly precise commitment on this subject to which the participants, including our own Prime Minister, agreed. The Government are no doubt considering how to carry out this suggestion. In the debate to which I referred I suggested that the Government might find it useful in looking at our statistics on children to examine what has been done in the International Child Development Centre in Florence, which is part of the UNICEF organisation and possesses the fullest knowledge of international statistics on this subject. The noble Viscount, Lord
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Astor, in replying to the debate did not mention my suggestion. I hope I may be forgiven for repeating it on this occasion.
To conclude, I believe that our national statistics require some urgent attention and action by the Government. Unlike some noble Lords who spoke earlier in the debate I pay rather more attention to the external circumstances which make the gathering and analysis of statistics more difficult at the present time. Nevertheless, I believe that more needs to be done if we are to have adequate tools for the taking of sound financial decisions and for the information of the public in general.
6.57 p.m.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, emphasised the necessity for the people at large and their representatives to have adequate and, as far as possible, reasonably accurate statistical information about various facets of our society. In a democracy, where the people at large and their representatives are supposed to make judgments as to various aspects of the society in which they live and the actions of governments in dealing with the many problems with which all governments must deal, it is vitally necessary that accurate statistics, accompanied by adequate verbal qualifications of those statistics and verbal titles, should be made available to the public.
I shall not repeat many of the admirable observations made by my noble friend Lord Donoughue in introducing the debate. I should like to give one or two examples where in my view the official statistics have fallen far short of the degree of accuracy in expressing a true and fair view of events, whether economic or social, which is necessary for objective judgments to be made. I give one example which I have had the pleasure of raising before in the House. I refer to unemployment.
According to the official figures for January of this year, unemployment in the United Kingdom was 1,959,747 and as the headline figure, is what appears in the press. I say the "headline" figure, because of course it is not purely the unemployed as such who are dealt with in the figure but also the unemployed-and-eligible-for-benefit—and the two are very different.
As unemployment rose in the early part of the decade an endeavour was made to minimise the figure by changing the description. As is well known, the economists and the Bank of England working party have emphasised that if the figures given in January had been prepared on precisely the same basis as they were before these 29 or 30 changes took place, unemployment at the end of January would have been almost exactly one million more than is in fact disclosed by what purports to be the total number of unemployed in the United Kingdom.
This distortion is bound to create an impression in the population at large. Unemployment has always been a critical political factor in the United Kingdom. In fact, immediately following the war and the publication of the Coalition Government's White

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Paper, anything greater than 3 per cent. unemployment was reckoned to be intolerable. The appropriate policies which were outlined in the Coalition Government's White Paper at the time were designed to keep unemployment within tolerable levels.
So today the number of unemployed in the United Kingdom—and as my noble friend Lady Lockwood said, we are dealing with human individuals and not merely figures—is much greater than it is represented to be by the figures put forward and headlined. Your Lordships may also have been disturbed by a report which appeared in the Guardian on 25th February last to the effect that the Government were contemplating yet further changes in their definition of "unemployment"; and I quote:
"More than half a million people could be removed from the jobless count under a government plan to put the long-term unemployed into temporary work or projects in the community.
"The Chancellor is expected to announce the measures being prepared by Michael Howard, Employment Secretary, in the budget on March 19. The Government has come under increasing pressure to deal with rising unemployment, which will take the jobless total over the 2 million mark next month. This move on the long-term unemployed would reduce it to well below 2 million".
The question I must ask the noble Lord—and I hope he will answer it—is whether there is any truth in the report which appeared in the Guardian and whether such steps are in contemplation. One can only hope that if they are contemplated an appropriate and widespread announcement will be made regarding the effect upon the figures, as distinct from the number of people who are actually out of work.
Further, perhaps I may ask the noble Lord, in view of the census which is due to take place on 21st April next and which will employ temporarily for a period of two to three weeks some 140,000 people, of which about one-quarter are expected to come from the unemployed, whether the temporary distortion of the figures by some 35,000 will Be widely announced when the April figures come to be determined. I refer to the unemployment situation, about which I suggest the Government have been less than frank with the people of the United Kingdom as to the real nature of the number of living human beings who are actually out of work, as distinct from those who are claiming benefit.
The other figure to which I should like to allude has already been mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Manchester, and it concerns the low income statistics published by the Government. It is clear from reading the report of the Commons committee who are dealing with this subject that originally the increase in real income of the bottom tenth of the population, as originally put out by the Government, was 8.4 per cent. whereas in fact ultimately it emerged, after the figure was challenged, as a mere 2.6 per cent.—a gross error in the statistical representation which had profound effects upon the whole attitude of the Government and indeed upon Parliament itself regarding the amount of relief that was required by lower income groups in the country. It led to some 15 million people getting far less in terms of benefit in one form or another than they
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would have received had the correct figure been published. I want to be fair to the Government and must immediately acknowledge that they apologised quite frankly for the error, and they made the appropriate noises and the appropriate explanations to the committee in another place.
I should like to refer to one other item which also illustrates the point that I have been making, and that concerns the retail prices index. That index has a tremendous effect on wage levels in the country, on social security benefits and other things that may be geared to it. It has a very considerable impact on the whole feeling of the country as to how inflation is going. At the end of 1990 the headline rate was 9.3 per cent. or, excluding mortgage interest, something like 9 per cent.
If one looks at the make-up of some of the figures that have found their way into the compilation of the retail prices index, one finds, according to the Public Accounts Committee in another place, that the method of collection of the data concerning increases in the prices of food, household goods, clothing and leisure goods has been left on the basis of a geographical distribution which was set in 1940. It would appear that the coverage of items, which is done presumably on a part-time basis by employees of the Department of Employment, dealt with only half the number of samples (some 200,000) that were originally anticipated. That means that we have figures which tell us that the price of food increased by 6 per cent. in 1990; household goods by 6 per cent.; clothing and footwear by 4.8 per cent.; and leisure goods by 4.0 per cent.
Like many of your Lordships, I do the shopping and I know the prices in the shops. If anybody tells me that the prices of those goods in 1990 increased by anything less than between 10 and 15 per cent., they want their brains examining or their sight tested, because everybody knows that these figures, on the basis of their collection so far, are completely false.
I return to another question by way of illustration only: the figures for the PSBR. It is ancient government folklore that the Labour Government in 1976–77 had to go cap in hand to the IMF to obtain relief. What was not disclosed until the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right honourable Denis Healey, revealed it, was that his own Treasury officials provided him with completely incorrect estimates of the PSBR that in 1976 overestimated it by £4 billion and in 1977 by £3 billion; and that had the correct statistics been available it would have been unnecessary to have gone to the IMF. Indeed, as the Minister is aware, the whole of the debt was repaid within six months.
I pass to one final point within my allotted time and it concerns the statistics likely to become available in the event of the single market coming into operation on 1st January 1993. With the abolition of frontiers, it will be most difficult to collect the figures. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, already has some reservations about the accuracy of our trade figures in the Pink Book, although I venture to suggest that the £15

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billion discrepancy is more likely to come from dealings in capital—90 billion dollars a day crosses the exchanges—than in regard to the figures.
As I understand the position, when the frontiers come down the Commission proposes that 20 per cent. of retailers dealing with trade between us and the Community should be required to make regular returns, and that the rest of the particulars should come from the VAT returns of small traders. Our visible trade deficit with the Community at the moment is £8 billion. I am well aware that there are noble Lords on my right who would be only too happy not to have the figures, because it is embarrassing to have a trade deficit between ourselves and the remainder of the EC countries, but I am sure that most Members of your Lordships' House and the country, apart from the economists, traders and businessmen, would wish to continue to know how our trade on balance with the EC is going. I should like the Minister to give the House an assurance as to whether he considers the measures proposed by the Commission will meet that objective. In the meantime, I believe that it can be agreed by us all that what is required is a statistical service completely independent of the whole machinery of government.
7.13 p.m.
Earl Russell: My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for bringing the subject before the House, but I must instantly disclaim any expertise in discussing it. I discuss it as a worried layman, sometimes rather surprised by the figures that I see before me. In choosing the phrase "Government statistics", the noble Lord chose a phrase which is capable of more than one interpretation. First, it might mean statistics offered by Ministers; secondly, it might mean statistics compiled ad hoc in departments in Whitehall; and, thirdly, it might mean what I believe was his principal intention—a majestic series of official statistics resulting from the work of the Government Statistical Service.
The standards of integrity one might require of those three types of statistics are not identical. One must in fairness allow that Ministers are engaged in the work of advocacy: advocacy of course is subject to its own restrictions. The one which perhaps applies here is the ruling of Lord Justice Darling on the misrepresentation of goods:
"The vendor of rotten fish need not cry 'stinking fish, stinking fish', but he may not cry, 'fresh fish', even though he knows his prospective purchaser cannot smell".
The products of the Government Statistical Service (the official statistics) are a different business. They —if I may be allowed the phrase—should be Caesar's harem: they should be above suspicion. I agree with everything said about integrity by the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Manchester.
A question closely resembling that on our Order Paper was discussed by the fellows of the Royal Statistical Society on 6th December 1989. That discussion is printed in the society's journal for 1990. I read it with considerable interest. I found a deep and
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widespread, but not universal, concern. Concern about this subject has been going on for some time. It was many years ago when Harry Campion was in charge of the Government Statistical Service, when he is said to have received a letter from the Chancellor of the Exchequer saying,
"The figures you have sent me on the balance of payments are not compatible with Government policy. Recalculate".
Fortunately, in those days the Government Statistical Service was not subject to the Treasury. So there is nothing new about there being concern. The question that the Royal Statistical Society was addressing was whether that concern was growing, and whether there was reason for it to grow. That meeting revealed a widespread, deep, but, as I say, not universal, unease. I read that division of opinion, and unlike the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, I felt that I must be deterred from partisanship. I turned to the Englishman's instinctive urge to look for an umpire. I therefore decided to give particular weight to contributions made by fellows of the society who lived outside the British Isles. I found among them a widespread anxiety that there was less confidence in British official statistics than there had been previously. The representative of the International Statistical Institute, for example, observed:
"In my work at the International Statistical Institute (ISI) I come into contact with statisticians throughout the world, and I have been concerned to note a growing unease about British official statistics. This unease focuses on two issues: a lack of independence of the British government statisticians, and a restrictive—even narrow—definition of their role and responsibilities by the statisticians themselves".
I took that for an umpire's verdict.
The other anxiety which was universal among foreign statisticians was over the need for greater autonomy in the British service. It is something that Ministers might find in their own interests to take on board, because at present the final decisions about which statistics are collected are the responsibility of Ministers. Inevitably, Ministers occasionally change statistics in ways which, no doubt coincidentally, happen to be to their own advantage. On such an occasion, because they have acted as judge and party in their own cause, they cannot clear themselves from suspicion, which may well be unjustified. If they allowed a greater degree of autonomy to the service, they would find that they might be able to have changes in the statistics, where there is sometimes a good case for it, without incurring the same lack of confidence.
The other matter which seemed to be causing general concern, which has been mentioned several times tonight, is the Rayner Report, and, in particular, its insistence that statistics should be collected for the benefit of the Government. The interaction between the Rayner principle—that statistics are collected for the benefit of the Government—and the service's lack of autonomy (giving Ministers choice over what statistics are collected) has created a multiplier effect which has compounded the lack of confidence in Government statistics, especially when that has been combined with cuts, described by Sir John Boreham,

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recently in charge of the service, as cuts of 25 per cent. in six years. They must inevitably have served to diminish efficiency by my definition.
We have heard a great deal tonight about the retail prices index. There are two views on it and I was interested to note those which the CBI circulated this month, for example, that there is a case for excluding mortgage interest. The problem here is that we may want two series of statistics. Which are the right statistics depends on the question to which one wishes to know the answer. If we wish to know the underlying rate of inflation, the inclusion of mortgage interest probably does not help. If we wish to know what the old cost of living index was designed to show—what it actually costs to live—then the inclusion of mortgage interest is clearly vital. Here is a case for two series. However, if the Government are left to change the method of calculation in a way which makes the retail prices index look as though it were increasing more slowly than it appeared to before, then they will have again laid themselves open to a suspicion which may be unjustified.
The same point applies to the unemployment figures on which the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington. dwelt. My figures differ from those of the noble Lord because, as he correctly pointed out, he used the headline figures and I am using the seasonally adjusted figures. The seasonally adjusted figures for January 1991 are 1,188,500—that is 6.6 per cent. On the figures calculated by the unemployment unit using the old basis of calculation, the figure came out tentatively at 2,890,800. That is 9.9 per cent. The figure is uncertain, but if I look at a Written Answer given to me by my noble kinsman Lord Henley last October, I can cross-check the figure through the income support figures. The Written Answer showed 1,216,000 people on income support who were not of pensionable age, not in receipt of a disability premium, and not registered unemployed. It seems plausible to suppose that a large number of those were out of work.
Here again, in this case we wish to know two different things. The link between unemployment figures and benefit has been explained. It is a perfectly legitimate link and the changes in detail are set out in the research note prepared by the Library of another place. They are not necessarily iniquitous, in fact some of them even look quite sensible. However, in addition to wishing to know who is eligible for benefit, some of us wish to know how many people are out of work. It is relevant that the Rayner Report, in saying that statistics should be collected for the benefit of government, entirely forgot to include the possibility of their being collected for the benefit of Parliament. After all, we are, at least in theory, still the sovereign body and like to be informed. There is also a vital case for informing members of the public. That case is known in other places as glasnost. I do not believe that I need develop the argument.
Other figures cause a certain amount of surprise when one considers them. For example, I believe that I am able to say without much fear of contradiction that in many places in the public services—and here I must declare my interest as a university teacher—there
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is a sense of loss of money, of complete shortage of money where it is desperately needed. Such a sense of loss has never been encountered before in living memory. At the same time, we are told over and over again of large increases in real terms. So far as I can see from listening to friends, it is the same for those who work for the health service or in schools. My eyes tell me that it is the same when I travel on London Transport.
The Secretary of State for Education recently observed, as quoted in a newspaper on 7th March that today's schools are the best resourced we have ever had. One wonders how such figures are calculated. There is more cause for concern if these figures are true than if they are false. If increases in real terms lead to such a shortage, we have a serious problem which urgently needs to be addressed and debated in this House.
To take one point where the course is clear, in the debate on 27th February to which the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, has referred, the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, gave triumphant figures for increases in real terms in sums spent on school books. However, every noble Lord knows that the price of books has increased a great deal faster than the retail prices index. So an increase in real terms in the sums spent on books may also be a drop in real terms in the number of books bought. Thus quoting these real terms figures diverts us from the need to address a problem which we must on all hands allow to be serious of a cost which is increasing a great deal faster than the retail prices index. We all ought to address this problem.
Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer of the Universities Funding Council wrote only a few days ago to a university principal saying, "As a mathematician, I think I may say without fear of contradiction that there are many ways of calculating an increase in real terms". If the way were chosen by an autonomous service it would command the confidence which, so long as the decision is taken by Ministers, I fear it cannot.
7.26 p.m.
Lord Peston: My Lords, I shall have to be slightly briefer and more disjointed than I hope I would normally be. Some noble Lords feel able to pontificate on statistics but counting up to 14 seems to be beyond them. In thanking my noble friend Lord Donoughue for introducing the debate, I feel it is particularly appropriate to discuss the subject today because we have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the CSO. Although we may criticise it a little today, it has been and is one of the great departments of state and one which has contributed a great deal to the public life of the country.
The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, said or implied that he was not qualified to speak in the debate, but he spoke extremely well. He was perhaps speaking partly as a matter of filial duty because it was to his father, who was Sir Edward Bridges at the time, that Sir Winston Churchill wrote the letter which led to the setting up of a proper and, let me add, independent Central Statistical Office. Sir Winston Churchill said that it was essential to consolidate and make sure that

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agreed figures only were used. The utmost confusion was caused when people argued on different statistical data. He wished all statistics to be concentrated in his own branch. In other words, the original dictum that was laid down then was precisely the point made by my noble friend Lord Donoughue that the decentralisation of the statistical service may not be entirely appropriate for the needs of the Government or Parliament, as has been rightly pointed out, or of the community.
Perhaps I may also echo the remarks made about the Rayner Report. I thought at the time that it was deplorable, but chickens come home to roost. To say that we should collect statistics solely for the needs of the Government is to assume that the Government immediately know what are their needs. What happens is that they discover their needs later on for which they wish they had had statistics, but because of the idiocies I use the word advisedly—of a report like the Rayner Report, they end up without the statistics they wanted, let alone those that the rest of us wanted.
The essential point was made by several noble Lords, certainly my noble friend Lord Bruce of Donington. It is that in a parliamentary democracy it is vital that we all have a proper factual basis for the debates in which we take part. In my view, that is to the advantage of the Government as well as the rest of us. I believe the Rayner Report was misguided. We have suffered considerable costs in our public life as a result of that report.
I am rushing through as rapidly as I can. We are referring to the quality of government statistics. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, referred to the history of statistics in this country. We can go back to Sir William Petty and look through the whole history of statistics. Almost all the initiatives have come from the private sector. As regards social statistics, one has only to think of the Webbs, Rowntree and others. The original statistics of national income, on which people such as I have based almost all our work, were collected by such people as Bowley, Colin Clarke, and Maynard Keynes himself. It was only later that James Mead and Richard Stern produced the first official statistics. In saying how important government statistics are, I do not wish to underestimate the contribution which the private sector has made and which it continues to make today.
The best figures on expectations and intentions are CBI figures. If I really had time to launch an attack, I should launch it on the statistical service of the Department of Education and Science. Many of the best education statistics come from the National Foundation for Educational Research. Many of the best wages and salaries statistics come from Incomes Data Services Limited. We are not just talking about public statistics, but nonetheless those statistics are enormously important.
I wish to put this matter into perspective. I have prepared an enormous number of examples of statistical fallacies concerning the balance of payments, the way national income is calculated and the way government expenditure is calculated.
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However, most of the good points have already been made and I am short of time. I hope that my following point will not be misunderstood. I do not believe that statistics are the only facts that should concern us. In my view excessive respect for quantitative measures can on occasion divert us from qualitative measures. In arguing the importance of quantitative measures, I hope noble Lords do not make the mistake of assuming that qualitative or other more impressionistic data are not important. There is also a danger—I have observed this often in your Lordships' House on the part of inexperienced speakers—of placing excessive reliance on the accuracy of statistics.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, that it is vital to read all the notes in connection with statistics. I realise that it is boring to turn to the back of a book and read the notes. However, my advice to almost everyone who works in the area of statistics is to read the notes rather than just concentrate on the tables.
Wearing my educational hat, I should add that statistical education is not irrelevant to this matter. The noble Earl, Lord Russell, referred to the Royal Statistical Society. In 1990 Professor Peter Moore stated in his presidential address to the society:
"For those whose vocation is statistics and statistical methods, it is not enough to concentrate on communicating with others in terms of coded messages. It is essential that statisticians play a more positive and open role in championing basic numeracy wherever the opportunity occurs, arguing that it provides a powerful means of reinforcing communication and understanding … concern for numeracy and the concept of probability has to be accepted as part and parcel of a liberal education".
I am sure we all agree with that latter point.
I now wish to make a semi-interpretative point as it is often easy to misunderstand this matter. We should try to ascertain whether figures purport to measure what they measure. I refer to the unemployment figures that my noble friend Lord Bruce of Donington mentioned. Do those figures measure the number of claimants? They probably do, but the problem is whether the figures, as measured, correspond to the concepts and ideas that they purport to reflect. One could argue that the unemployment figures do not correspond to those concepts. There is nothing wrong with the unemployment figures except that they do not measure unemployment in the sense in which one would like them to measure it. That is true of a great many other figures.
It is so easy to counter one lot of figures with another lot of figures which give a different impression. My favourite example of this practice occurred last year. My noble friend Lord Bruce asked a question about the ratio of exports to gross domestic product. He claimed that the ratio had gone down. However, the noble Lord, Lord Hesketh—he is a master of this art—produced another set of figures which claimed the ratio had gone up. The point is that both noble Lords were entirely right. My noble friend Lord Bruce of Donington measured the ratio in terms of current prices. I would have done exactly the same. However, the noble Lord, Lord Hesketh—I emphasise he is no mean player of this game—measured the ratio at constant prices. As the relative price of exports to the GDP deflator had changed in the period referred to, the two sets of figures gave entirely

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different impressions. There was nothing wrong with the figures. Both were entirely accurate statistically, but they gave different impressions. One should not, therefore, put one's faith just in figures. One can master figures by all means, but one should look carefully at their background and how they are to be interpreted.
According to my calculations—I hope noble Lords notice that word—I have two minutes left. There are many areas where we could benefit from an improvement in statistics. The area I most wish to emphasise is the prices index to which my noble friend Lord Donoughue and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, referred. I believe the noble Earl, Lord Russell, made a slight mistake as he said there are two views on the prices index. But I hold at least three views. However, the key point is how a method of measurement can distort a policy.
One could argue—I do not claim this is necessarily right—that one way of controlling an excess of consumer expenditure is to raise VAT. However, someone then says that cannot be done, not because of the efficacy of the policy but because VAT goes straight into the retail prices index as measured, and, therefore, in the short term at least, it appears to be inflationary even though according to fundamental economics it is deflationary. That is an example of how a consideration of the index alone can distort policy. I could give many other examples of that. I for one do not believe that good statistics or improved statistics necessarily lead to rational debate. However, I believe that without good statistics rational debate is impossible.
7.37 p.m.
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for initiating today's debate on the quality of government statistics. Later in my speech I shall endeavour to reply to the contributions made by other noble Lords. The closing remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Peston, filled me with a certain sense of trepidation. If the noble Lord has three views on the RPI I fear I shall find it very difficult to satisfy noble Lords if that position is shared broadly across the Chamber.
The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, seeks to draw attention to the problems that have occurred with government statistics in recent years. Inevitably there have been problems. I wish to deal with the reasons for the problems, and the Government's response to them, later. I suggest with great respect that the problems are not as serious as the noble Lord implies. Attention might also be drawn to the lavish tapestry of official statistics produced and published by this Government which are of the highest quality yet receive little publicity.
Attention has been drawn to Social Trends by noble Lords on all sides of the House. I have always felt that that publication is the best read in government. The collection and use of statistics by government in this country has a long and rich history dating back to the Domesday Book of William the Conqueror. In one respect the problem that faces us today is the same as that which faced him: what information is needed to
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enable government to make sensible and effective decisions? Some 900 years later we can also pose the question: how can we collect information in a way that does not impose great burdens on those who have to provide the basic data?
The need for statistics by government has changed dramatically in direct response to social changes in the nation and to the role of government. Government statistics should never be collected simply because it is interesting to do so. There should always be a real need on the part of government for the information.
Governments of all parties in this country have favoured a decentralised statistical organisation with statisticians working in departments alongside their policy and administrative colleagues. We have all recognised the advantages that that brings; for example, being able to predict and respond rapidly to changing policy needs. It also enables cost-effective use of administrative and other information available within the department with which statisticians in a large central bureau would not be familiar. It also avoids the duplication between the central bureau and departments to which highly centralised systems are prone.
Some assume, I believe wrongly, that the United Kingdom is alone in adopting a decentralised statistical system. It is perfectly true that some countries such as the Netherlands and Canada have one single large office which is responsible for all the statistics within that country. However, the Germans have a regional organisation with a central office piecing together the statistics received from regional statistical offices. The United States, like the United Kingdom, has a largely decentralised statistical system. There is no one system which is right for all countries and just because others organise their statistical work in one way does not mean to say that we in the United Kingdom should slavishly follow their example. We believe that the decentralised system provides an extraordinarily cost-effective statistical service for government.
In a decentralised system we have to ensure that departments communicate effectively with one another and to prevent inconsistencies in the figures from different departments. The Central Statistical Office celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. I should like to add to the praise which the noble Lord, Lord Peston, expressed on this its 50th anniversary. It was founded by Winston Churchill to overcome just those problems and to ensure that Ministers had a suitable statistical service to meet their needs.
As always, some will call on the Government to spend more money and to increase the detail and quality of official statistics. The Government, however, have to balance the need for statistics of a given quality against the direct costs to the taxpayer and the indirect costs imposed on those providing the data. It is right to collect high quality statistics when the expense of such quality is justified. It would, however, be a waste of money to collect vast amounts of detailed information when more approximate results would suffice. There will he occasions, such as

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the population census, when a Rolls-Royce service is required, but at other times the statistical equivalent of a Ford Escort is quite satisfactory.
Most statistics used by government are collected, analysed and published by the professional statisticians who, between them, have many years of practical experience. They have strong connections with the wider statistical community, through bodies such as the Royal Statistical Society and the Institute of Statisticians, and are held in high regard by their colleagues outside government. There is regular contact with statisticians from our European Community partners through the Statistical Office of the European Communities, plus active involvement in the work of the United Nations and Commonwealth statistical organisations. That provides a valuable forum for sharing experience and best practice with people who face similar issues and problems.
Despite that body of expertise and experience, statisticians still come in for criticism. That is not new. Albany Fonblanque, who was the head of the statistical division of the Board of Trade in 1847, was also a journalist who ran a newspaper called the Examiner in which it seems he was not always complimentary about the politicians of the day. Disraeli, in a letter to the Lord Derby of the day, wrote:
"The office of the chief of the statistical department held by Fonblanque, an imbecile as a man of business and who passes his official hours in writing libels against us, should be suppressed. It would be a delightful arrangement turning him out. We would save £800 per annum and when we read his abuse about us in the Examiner we would have the satisfaction of knowing that we had done something for the distinction".
I am happy to say that the quality of Government statisticians is much higher today and members of the Government Statistical Service do not need to worry about being turned out of their jobs.
The Government Statistical Service takes seriously the need to produce quality statistics which are reliable and impartial. The Central Statistical Office, as part of its published aims, has a duty:
"to promote public confidence in the integrity and validity of official statistics".
Sir Jack Hibbert, the CSO's director and the head of the Government Statistical Service, also has a general responsibility for the integrity of official statistics throughout government.
Government statistics are collected for a particular purpose but are often of use in other areas both inside and outside government. The Government Statistical Service has never sought a monopoly on the interpretation of the data it collects and is happy for others to take that data and carry out further analyses. The Government Statistical Service is completely open about its methods and aims to provide Parliament and the public with ready access to the same statistical information as is available to the government. In fact, the Government Statistical Service positively encourages academics, for instance, to use its data by providing them to the Economic and Social Research Council data archive at Essex University.
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There are, of course, some constraints in publishing detailed information. It is, for example, important to protect the confidentiality of individuals, companies, and other bodies which provide information. The Government Statistical Service code of practice on the handling of data obtained from statistical inquiries provides guidance on what can and cannot be published in those circumstances.
The Government Statistical Service also adopts the principles set out in a 1985 guidance note from the then head of the Government Statistical Service on practices to safeguard the integrity of the Government Statistical Service. This recommends, for instance, that the publication of statistical information should be clearly separated from policy comment on those statistics. Comments and interpretation from elsewhere should not be passed off as originating from the Government Statistical Service. Often the criticism that the Government Statistical Service receives is about analyses done by others, for which it is not responsible.
Another accusation sometimes made is that the basis of the figures is constantly changed. In the real world we rarely have the luxury of convenient data sources which directly and unequivocally measure the information in which we are interested. The unemployment figures are a good example of that. In those cases associated administrative sources can be a rich source of information which we can use instead. The monthly count of the numbers claiming unemployment-related benefits, for example, is used as the indicator of unemployment trends and provides information on the geographical distribution of unemployment. The unemployment benefit system is primarily concerned, of course, with paying people their benefits. By deriving information from that system very detailed figures are regularly and quickly made available at little extra cost to the taxpayer.
A problem with that approach, however, is that that administrative system, like all administrative systems, is liable to change. To prevent such changes because they are inconvenient for statisticians and users of statistics is simply not realistic. We have to deal with the change and still ensure that the figures produced are not misleading, so two approaches are adopted. First, whenever there is a major change in the administrative system the existing series of figures is recalculated back to 1971 to show what the figures would have been under the current rules. That means that sensible comparisons over time can be made.
The second method is a labour force survey of households, which provides information on those working, the unemployed, and much else besides. The International Labour Organisation's internationally agreed definition of unemployment is used and the survey method is independent of changes to the unemployment benefit system. In March 1990 the Secretary of State for Employment announced the development of the labour force survey to deliver its comprehensive and consistent results quarterly rather than annually as at present. The first results from the enhanced labour force survey are expected in 1992.
Statistical systems need to respond to our rapidly changing world. A problem that will soon face us is

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the collection of European Community trade statistics with the introduction of the European single market after 1992; though I am not sure from the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, concerning the problems that he saw ahead that he was entirely sure whether that would occur. At present, the Customs regulation system is used to providing detailed, high quality statistics. The introduction of the single market will mean the loss of that data source. The Government Statistical Service has played a leading role in the development of an alternative information source linked with the future VAT system which concentrates on information from the significant traders. It may not be quite as accurate as the present system but will still provide the statistics needed by government. I believe the advantages which flow from the single market more than compensate for the small reduction in the quality of the trade statistics.
Developments in the British economy during the 1980's led to well-known difficulties in the national accounts. The Government recognised those problems and initiated an efficiency review of economic statistics, the results of which were published in April 1989. In addition to about 30 detailed statistical recommendations, the report also recommended the re-organisation of the Central Statistical Office, to add parts of DTI statistics, and the retail prices index and Family Expenditure Survey statistical work from the Department of Employment. That re-organisation took place in July 1989 to form an enlarged CSO which now has management control over most of the inputs to the national accounts and has started a significant programme of improvements.
In May 1990 the Chancellor of the Exchequer felt extra developments were needed and gave additional resources to the CSO for improvements to economic statistics. This initiative aims to produce better statistics on the service sector of our economy, to improve the quality of statistics in the company sector and to provide better estimates of the balance of payments. The first fruits of this initiative are already being incorporated in the national accounts and further improvements will be made as they come on stream. The CSO aims to reduce the discrepancies between the three estimates of gross domestic product and to produce better quality early estimates, thereby reducing subsequent revisions.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lockwood, drew your Lordships' attention to problems with regard to gender. The fact is that we expand the social survey and figures concerning gender are constantly in it, but there are also pressures from other groups and interests as to what also should be represented throughout. However, her point is well made and I shall certainly draw it to the attention of the CSO.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester also quoted Social Trends and went on to say that tables had been dropped over the years. Tables have been discontinued but others introduced. I can say to the right reverend Prelate, as I said to the noble Baroness, that it may not be entirely satisfactory
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but there are pressures from every direction for changes in terms of what should be included and what should not.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord McGregor, for his interesting explanation of the history of the provision of judicial matrimonial information. I suppose this is one of the occasions when we cannot expect everything to be collated on every subject.
The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, questioned the way in which trade flows are measured. I hope he was not suggesting that exports should be piled up at the ports waiting to be counted, but I can assure him that the trade figures relating to goods are very accurate. However, as he and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, made clear, data on capital payments are more difficult to collate.
The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, referred to a devastating critique, but I feel that is a slightly selective interpretation of the document which he held in his hand. He also asked about agency and referred to April. I can assure the noble Lord that April was the original date, but I believe it has slipped slightly in order to ensure that the proper disciplines and freedoms will be afforded and will be in place when agency is achieved.
The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, also referred to what he called the Rayner cut-backs. I think it is worth remembering that the professional statistical input of the Government Statistical Service has increased over the period from 566 persons in April 1979 to 599 in April 1988. The noble Lord referred to the influence of the Treasury. Of course, the Treasury has an interest in ascertaining the correct figures so that I am able to answer accurately questions put to me in your Lordships' House.
The noble Earl, Lord Russell, expressed concern about the lack of impartial advice to the Government about the RPI. It is important to remember that the Index Advisory Committee is made up of many groups, including the CBI and TUC, and it was that group which recommended that both a community charge and mortgage interest relief should be included in the RPI figures.
The noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, asked about employment measures which might be announced in the Budget speech. I am sure he will not be surprised when I advise him that he will have to wait until the Chancellor rises to his feet next week. With regard to the noble Lord's remarks about unemployment figures and the census, I assure him that the Department of Employment will indicate the effect of the numbers if the impact is as large as the noble Lord suggested.
I have every confidence that the Government Statistical Service will continue to provide quality statistics as it faces the challenge of the 1990s in the same tradition of high integrity and standards with which it has confronted those challenges in the past.
Earl Russell: Before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps he can give a fuller reply to my noble friend Lord McGregor of Durris. Tomorrow we are debating matters arising from the report which he mentioned.

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The information in that report published in The Times to which my noble friend refers is sharply different on some points from any previous information available to us. Should not this information have been made available to the House before the Committee stage of the Bill?
Lord Hesketh: My Lords, the confines within which I operate are the same as those applying to the rest of your Lordships' House. The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, has to wind up and he has only one minute in which to do it. I had no choice but to go rather quicker than my normal practice due to the constraints of the clock.
Lord Donoughue: My Lords, I wish to thank all noble Lords who have participated in what I believe has been a very satisfactory debate. Inevitably, my introduction was one of skating rather generally round the statistical landscape, but all noble Lords made useful contributions, especially in the sense that they spoke from individual expertise and experience in a whole range of fields: unemployment, poverty, housing, balance of payments, the legal base and social policy. Taken together, the contributions constituted a powerful critique of the present situation in government statistics.
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Aberdare): My Lords, the time allotted for this debate has now elapsed. Does the noble Lord wish to withdraw his Motion?
Lord Donoughue: My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

River Usk Barrage Bill [H.L.]
7.58 p.m.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, the joint promoters of the Bill are the Borough of Newport and the County of Gwent. The purpose of the Bill is,
"to empower Newport Borough Council to construct a barrage across the river Usk; to empower Gwent County Council to construct roads and to carry out highway improvements … to empower the said Councils to carry out other works and to acquire lands; to provide for the control and development of part of the river Usk for amenity and recreation … "
The Bill, and in particular the proposal to build a barrage, is the cornerstone of a much wider scheme to regenerate the centre of Newport town. The scheme is included in a joint economic development strategy by four of the district councils in Gwent.
Newport is a town not only of high unemployment but also of high migration rates. The borough council is concerned to enhance the quality of life for the people who live and work in Newport, so that employers will choose to locate new businesses within the town—thus helping to bring down high levels of unemployment—and ensure that skilled employees will be attracted to work in Newport, and having arrived, will resolve to stay and settle there.
In proposing the scheme, Newport borough were also mindful that current development along the M.4
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corridor is beginning to impinge on the greenfield sites that surround the town. By utilising derelict and underused land in the centre of Newport the council is responding to the pleas of environmentalists who seek to protect from further development areas such as Pentrepoeth and Caerleon. The scheme has the enthusiastic support of the Conservative leader and his group on the Newport County Council, as it has of the controlling party. In their eyes it is a model of urban renewal. They are also satisfied that the scheme can be funded from land sales and that it will impose only a limited and acceptable additional burden on poll tax payers. It is also widely supported by the people of Newport who welcome the council's imaginative proposals to deal with their turbulent river, the Usk, and to clean up and improve acres of unsightly and derelict land in the centre of their town.
Perhaps at this point I may dwell for a moment longer on the River Usk which will be at the centre of debates in support of the Bill or in opposition to it. The Usk has unique properties. Without some knowledge of those it would be difficult for noble Lords to understand what has led the leaders of Newport to consider building a barrage.
The River Usk has a dramatically wide tidal range of 45 feet. It is second only in the world to the St. Lawrence River in its tidal variation. The effect of that tidal range on the town of Newport is considerable. Those who know the town will confirm that. When the tide is out, vast tracts of the river's mudscape are exposed. These rough, unstable swathes of mud and litter do not add aesthetic value to the heart of the town, especially as they also expose raw sewage outlets.
Furthermore, they create somewhat of a chasm between the communities on the eastern and western sides of the town. As a result, the River Usk, far from providing a unifying focus, as do many of the world's most loved and famous rivers, divides the town and its eastern and western communities. But the River Usk's high tidal variation has a more disturbing impact on the town and its communities, for at high tide the Usk poses—and always has posed—a very real threat of flooding. The marshes of Crindau are the main developed area at risk of flooding due to the tide.
Flooding is caused when the tide exceeds a peak of 7.9 metres. In fact that level has been exceeded on four occasions since 1960: namely, in December 1981 when it reached 8.4 metres; in 1985 when it exceeded 7.9 metres; in March 1989 when it was 8.01 metres and in February 1980 when it reached 8.17 metres. The high tide that caused the Towyn floods last February breached the sea defences and caused flooding in Newport and Caerleon. Those extreme tidal peaks have all occurred in the past 10 years.
In addition, flooding due indirectly to the tide—that is, when surface water sewer and foul water overflow is tidelocked and causes overflowing above manhole cover levels occurs on average twice every five years. So the River Usk's turbulence regularly threatens both life and property within Newport. Matters are likely to get worse if, as is widely

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predicted, global warming raises tidal levels and further exacerbates the Usk's already extreme variation.
The Usk river barrage is intended, first, to provide a flexible tidal barrier which will play a vital long-term role in protecting the people of Newport and Caerleon from the effects of high tide levels, including any which may result from the effects of global warming.
Secondly, and as part of the Usk regeneration scheme, the council intends to clean up and enhance the water quality of the river by, among other things, removing the raw sewage outlets. That will certainly be a great benefit for Newport and its tourist industry. Incidentally, that should please not only the citizens of Newport but, as I said, should attract and please Newport's visitors. I refer not only to tourists but also to the River Usk's many hundreds of marine visitors: migrating salmon, sea trout, twaite shad and eels, which will have been deterred in the past by the high concentration of pollution within the River Usk.
Thirdly, the Usk barrage, by maintaining a high level of water at low tides, will revitalise the existing river front and enable housing and industrial and recreational development to be undertaken along the banks of the river. Fourthly, it will enrich the quality of life for the communities of Newport by opening up public access to the river front and thereby restoring the heart to Newport town.
For all those reasons the Usk regeneration scheme has widespread support from the people of Newport who perceive major economic benefits from it. Over £200 million of private investment is expected to be attracted to the Usk river front. There is potential for the creation of over 2,000 jobs in light industry, offices, tourism and leisure, and in construction associated with the various projects. Indeed, throughout the town of Newport an additional 8,000 jobs are likely to be created. There will be extensive river front walks, a new sports complex using the river and the adjacent glebe lands, new recreational facilities, and better road access to the East Usk area. Other areas close to the river front will also benefit. The total economic benefit is expected to generate an increase in regional income of no less than £90 million per annum, of which over one third will benefit neighbouring districts.
But although the scheme enjoys widespread local support, it is opposed strongly by groups further up the Usk valley as evidenced by the number of petitions (22 in all) that have been deposited in opposition to the Bill. One of the major petitioners against the Bill is the National Rivers Authority. The opposition of that authority is justified, given its statutory obligations and role as guardian of the water environment. However, I believe that the NRA is not opposed to barrage schemes per se because in the past it has supported other schemes including the neighbouring Cardiff Bay barrage scheme. I believe that the chairman supported it in a speech in this House.
Clearly the promoters have an obligation to convince the NRA that statutory obligations will be met by their plans to ensure water quality standards
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and that the design for the proposed fish lock facilitates the passage of migratory fish. Newport Borough Council has been more than willing to meet its obligations. In fact it has spent more than two years in close consultation with the NRA and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food as well as with other local fishery interests. It has valued the criticism and advice that it has received from all those bodies.
It is that spirit of co-operation on the part of the promoters which leaves me in no doubt that differences with the NRA will be settled as soon as various tests and surveys have been completed. It is clear also that the NRA in Wales is fully aware of the value attached by the people of Newport to the barrage development, as is indicated by the following letter to the South Wales Argus. It is a letter from Dr. J.H. Stoner, the regional general manager for the NRA in Wales. He says:
"The NRA understands the importance of the barrage development to the local community and is anxious to find a way forward that will provide an adequate level of protection to the river and the life within it".
One of the NRA's major concerns is with fisheries, and rightly so. That concern is echoed by other opponents of the barrage who have grouped together under the banner of a body called the Barrage Action Group. That group circulated a briefing to Peers at the end of last week which, I fear, was misleading in several respects. I say that with the utmost respect. The major anxieties of the group are about the effect that the barrage will have on migrating salmon and the effect of any decline in migrating salmon on the rural tourist based economy of the Usk Valley.
The promoters of the barrage accept that the Usk is one of the major game fishing rivers of Wales. As I understand it, four times as many fish are caught within Newport and its estuary than are caught further up the valley. Newport is therefore clearly concerned to preserve the fishing of the river. The promoters are conscious of the anxieties of fishermen, both those within the town's boundaries and of those further up the valley.
Several designs for a fish pass have been developed over the past two years in consultation with the NRA. On the advice of that authority the promoters are examining the possibility of a fish lock as an alternative to the original proposal. A major advantage of a lock over the original design for a pool and traverse pass is that the fish will not be required to expend energy in ascending the steps of either a ladder or a series of pools. After being attracted to the lock by a strong plume of fresh water they will be carried up by the rising water level of the lock, which will be 10 metres wide and 25 metres long.
To guarantee continuous access there will be two locks of that size rising and falling alternately. Once one set of gates closes, the other will open. When the waters rise to the same levels as the upstream river, the fish will be able to swim on upstream to enrich the economies of the upper Usk Valley. Each river is of course unique and fish passes must be tailor made to suit each new situation.

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The fish lock, although made up of tried, tested and proven elements, will also therefore be unique. As such it is difficult at this stage to quantify its impact. Passage will be possible throughout the tidal cycle. Furthermore, the locks will allow downstream migrants like smolts, kelts and shad to descend gently into a series of pools which, contrary to the assertion of the opponents of the Bill, will have a fall of no more than two metres.
The concept of the lock as a fish pass was originally conceived by Borland and subsequently recommended for use for shad by a Frenchman, M. Larinier, who is an expert on migratory fish. A similar lock to that planned in the Usk is installed in the River Garonne at Golfech, and in 1989 more than 60,000 shad passed over that lock.
There is a fish lock on the Liffey in Ireland at Leixlip and on the Shannon at Ardnachrush, both regarded as successful. A similar fish lock was installed in the Netherlands at Lith-on-the-Maas in 1959–60 and is also considered by experts to be successful. There are at least 17 such locks in Scotland, and one in Wales at Cwm Rheidol. The operational manager at Cwm Rheidol claims his lock as successful. Next Tuesday the promoters are visiting Cwm Rheidol with the NRA to inspect its effectiveness.
The debate about the passage of migratory fish is bound to become emotive, as the promoters plead, on the one hand, for the right to improve employment opportunities and the quality of life of their citizens and, on the other hand, groups from further up the Usk valley fight to defend both a perceived risk to their livelihoods but also a perceived risk to the passage of migratory fish.
It will be important over the following few weeks and months, as we give further consideration to this Bill, to ensure that the debate is conducted in a rational way and on the basis of as much scientific data as are available. Unfortunately current records on salmon numbers in any of our rivers are considered unreliable. There is widespread acknowledgement that numbers have declined, but regrettably there is not a great deal of confidence in records which are based on rod catches only and which do not take into account net catching as well.
An article in the Field late last year highlighted this point. It was entitled "Quest for Salmon Truth". Written by Michael Wigan, it appeared in the November 1990 issue. In his article Mr. Wigan rightly says:
"Current developments continue to make correct salmon statistics vitally important. Most obviously, in a market of dizzy prices for a vulnerable game species, catch statistics determine fishing values. These figures require official, scientifically valid, basic statistics against which they can then be evaluated. There are still too many unknown quantities".
Mr. Wigan goes on to argue:
"Catch statistics have been blatantly manipulated by some timeshare operators; it would not be untrue to say that some private riparian owners have also recognised a financial reward in boosting catches prior to sale. In extreme cases, where river rules have permitted, hordes of rods have swarmed the banks using a paraphernalia of fishing methods
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to inflate catches. Although not technically artificial, the resulting high catch figures do not fairly reflect an expectation of the fishery's yield when utilised in a civilised manner".
It appears that interests are not only served by inflating records of salmon catches. Mr. Wigan shows that,
"just as vendors or lessors of fishing rights might benefit if recorded catches were inflated, so fishing tenants might have a vested interest in having them suppressed. Improved catches, if reported, might be followed by rent increases".
So accurate and reliable records of fish catches, whether they be on the River Usk, or on other rivers, are hard to come by.
However, there are larger matters looming over the salmon world. Mr. Wigan reports:
"an absolute decline in salmon numbers, which was apparent from the 1987–1989 statistics, showing a total North Atlantic salmon catch down in these three years by 2,364 tonnes (from 8,141 tonnes to 5,777 tonnes) which looks as if it is going to be confirmed in 1990. Greenland, the home of the biggest drift-net fishery, is already known to have found that stocks have diminished".
This decline in salmon numbers can be attributed to a number of sources—drift-net fishing and poaching at sea and in estuaries. But perhaps the greatest threat to salmon comes from pollution. Anyone who knows the Usk well knows that its high concentrations of pollution must have deterred, if not killed, many a migrating salmon, sea trout or shad.
The NRA has argued correctly that the passage of migratory fish through the impoundment will mainly be affected by the water quality achieved. While the final results of the promoters' water quality modelling are not yet available—they have been delayed by last year's drought and the absence of rainfall up until December 1990—the studies to date nevertheless demonstrate that the water quality will be good and attractive to fish and the NRA's stringent requirements will be achieved.
If we are to judge correctly the effect of the Usk's currently unacceptable levels of pollution on migrating salmon, it seems to me to be essential that the critical task of monitoring the numbers of salmon in the Usk begin immediately. We need then to undertake tests and measure the effects of an improved water environment on migrating salmon.
As I understand it, a fish pass monitoring programme is being undertaken by the promoters and this will be supervised in conjunction with the National Rivers Authority. The fish monitoring scheme will be for marine and coarse fish, as well as migratory fish such as salmon, sea trout, shad and elvers. Only when such systematic and scientific monitoring is undertaken will it be possible to conduct a rational debate about this issue.
Finally I should like to touch on a point that features both in the briefing prepared by the Barrage Action Group and in instructions to the Committee submitted by the noble Lord, Lord Moran. It is to do with the impact of the Usk Regeneration Scheme on the rural economy of the Usk valley. In its briefing the Barrage Action Group asserts that:
"fishing rights represent a considerable capital asset in the hands of riparian owners, the value of which has been estimated at £3.2 million".

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What is the basis for this estimate which on the face of it looks highly plausible? A representative of Newport Borough Council telephoned the Action Group's PR consultants for further information. He was told that the figures derived from a study being undertaken at Portsmouth polytechnic by a Mr. Hatcher and entitled An economic evaluation of recreational salmon in the UK.
When Mr. Hatcher was approached by a representative of Newport Borough Council he explained that his report had been commissioned by MAFF, that it was not public and that it would not be released until MAFF agreed to do so. He explained that the Barrage Action Group had telephoned some months ago and that he was concerned that the figures he gave them on the telephone could be interpreted to suit their case. He made clear that it was not possible fully to understand the figures without having the full report.
All this indicates that we are dealing in assertion, speculation and unverified data. Such speculation will not help us to arrive at sound and proper conclusions about this Bill. It would be helpful if MAFF would publish the commissioned report so that we could all study its findings and so that the implications can be debated more fully in Committee.
Wales and the town of Newport, together with the rest of the United Kingdom, are now enduring a recession. Nevertheless the people of Newport are endeavouring to invest in their own futures and in the futures of their children by improving employment opportunities in their town. It is my hope that your Lordships will support their attempts to deal constructively with both the current recession, the after-effects of the 1981 recession and the closure of coal mines in Wales.
I hope that we can conduct the debate around this Bill on the understanding that it is being promoted by a community concerned to protect the invaluable flora, fauna and fish of its great river; a community desperately in need of job opportunities and improved life chances; and a community concerned to raise the quality and safety of life in a town that for too long has had to suffer the terrible turbulence of the Usk and its tides. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time. —(Lord Stoddart of Swindon.)
8.23 p.m.
Lord Moran: My Lords, we must be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, for setting out so clearly the objectives of this Private Bill against which 23 petitions have been submitted. It has been helpful to have the explanation because until tonight it was by no means clear what exactly the Usk barrage was intended to achieve. Was it simply to improve the aspect of Newport's waterfront by covering up the so-called unsightly mudflats or was it to attract new investment? The preamble to the Bill states merely that the construction of a barrage:
"would facilitate the development and improvement both of the river and of the areas adjacent thereto".
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It is hard to see how it can improve the river. The petitions suggest that it is likely to do the opposite.
Now that Swansea has a barrage under construction and Cardiff has a barrage project which is being considered in another place I suppose it was inevitable that Newport, though situated on a river with a much more important fishery than those of the Tawe or the Taff, would want one too. Barrages are in vogue and I know of 18 projects at various stages. Whether it is wise to tamper with so many of our rivers which have run freely to the sea for millions of years and to block them with concrete dams is open to question; that is quite apart from the serious environmental problems which that inevitably creates.
Some of the projects are carefully and thoroughly worked out; others are not. I am afraid that this project bears all the signs of having been put together with excessive haste. I wonder why Newport Borough Council is in such a hurry. Clearly, if a local authority wishes to construct a barrage which is a major infrastructure project it ought to recognise that the effects of it on a river are substantial and irreversible. Surely the sensible way to proceed is to have thorough consultations with all the bodies concerned—first and foremost in England and Wales with the National Rivers Authority but also with the Nature Conservation Council, its successor bodies and all the non-governmental organisations concerned—and to modify the plans as necessary to meet their concerns. When all that has been done and when all the details have been taken care of then, but only then, it can put the project to Parliament. It is hoped that we shall come nearer to that in future Sessions when environmental assessments must accompany Bills of this kind as recommended by the Joint Select Committee on Private Bills. Unhappily, that procedure is not yet in force.
As regards this Bill the consultation has been quite inadequate. There may have been a good many meetings but too often the promoters have been unable to answer the questions put to them. The chairman of the Atlantic Salmon Trust, Sir David Nickson, wrote to the Secretary of State for Wales in January stating that:
"There is an overwhelming impression that the project is being driven through with very limited consultation, and less agreement, with official and voluntary bodies".
Happily the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, is present tonight and can tell the House authoritatively of the NRA's position. But I know that for months past the NRA has been trying to obtain details from the promoters but frequently has been unable to do so. The NRA's petition against the Bill makes clear the many points on which it is not satisfied or on which studies and modelling are still proceeding. I shall give your Lordships one such example. At the end of last week I asked an NRA official, who is intimately concerned with the project, what might be the effect on fisheries of a partial intrusion barrage bringing salt water into the impounded lake at certain times, as I understood this project to be. To my astonishment he told me that the promoters were still unable to tell the

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NRA whether they planned a tidal exclusion barrage or a partial intrusion barrage. In other words, they have still not settled the fundamental design.
That is quite extraordinary. Surely it is wrong that your Lordships should be asked to consider a project, the basic principles of which are still being worked out. It is plain enough that the Bill has come to this House prematurely. Parliament should not be treated in this cavalier way. The commonsense course would be for the promoters to withdraw the Bill in order to consult more deeply and widely and to give a great deal more time to proper consideration. If this were a Public Bill we should unhesitatingly reject it. As it is a Private Bill that course is not open to us on Second Reading.
However, the Committee should consider carefully whether the project has been properly thought through with adequate consultation and whether it is fundamentally sound. If the Committee concludes that it is not, it should reject the Bill. It should bear in mind that some petitioners whose interests may be seriously affected are having to spend large sums of money which they may not easily be able to afford in order to brief counsel to appear before the Committee. If the Bill and the project are defective it would be wrong to send the Bill to another place because the petitioners will have to spend more money to protect themselves.
This is one of the first occasions on which a barrage proposal has come to this House since the setting up of the National Rivers Authority. Under the Water Act Parliament gave the NRA the responsibility for safeguarding our rivers. The NRA has been carrying out that duty with vigour and dedication. As part of its duty it has found it necessary to petition against the Bill. Its petition is comprehensive, clear, expert and, I believe, totally unprejudiced. It would be wrong for your Lordships, so soon after the Water Act, to set aside or override the views of the NRA on such a matter. Therefore, unless the NRA can be fully satisfied on all the major points that it has raised we should not allow the Bill to proceed. If the NRA can be satisfied, then clearly the Bill should be amended to ensure that its anxieties are fully met.
I come now to the Instruction standing in my name on the Order Paper. Its object is to ask the committee to consider six points which I believe are highly relevant. However, the committee may not otherwise be able to address some of those points as they are not mentioned in the petitions.
First, the committee should consider whether one really needs to build a barrage to push on the economic development of Newport, an objective which in itself all of us would welcome. I do not believe that the promoters have fully made out an economic case for the barrage, identifying and comparing all the capital and operating costs and benefits. Nor, as I believe is normal in cost benefit analysis, have they compared the proposed project with at least one other option for achieving all or some of its key objectives; for example, an alternative programme for investment designed to stimulate
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development in Newport, not including the barrage but including the construction of the southern link road and other measures such as environmental upgrading along the river corridor. I believe that such an analysis should be required from the promoters so that the committee can determine whether the barrage proposal represents the most cost effective approach.
The report from Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte entitled The Economic Impact of the Usk Barrage does not do that but focuses entirely on the barrage, says little or nothing about costs and makes no attempt to separate out the economic impact of the barrage from the associated proposals.
The second point concerns the likely effect of the Cardiff Bay development on this project and whether the construction of this barrage designed to attract investment in this region is likely to achieve its economic objective. In other words, is there room for another investment-related barrage in South-East Wales? If we are to risk serious environmental damage of the sort feared by the petitioners, the committee should be sure that the planned economic benefits are real and not illusory. In the current economic climate there is not an unlimited supply of new investment.
The third point is what will be the effect of the construction of the barrage on the community charge or whatever may replace it in Gwent and Newport. I am convinced that the costs associated with the barrage will turn out to be far greater than the promoters' estimates. I understand that in its latest budget Newport is already putting 20 per cent. of its community charge towards the barrage.
The reason for the fourth point is to ask the committee to consider the possibility that the European Community's draft municipal waste water directive, on which sub-committee F of which I am a member will shortly be reporting, may lay down that certain waters should be classified as sensitive requiring the removal of nutrients—notably phosphorous and nitrogen—and asks the committee to look into the financial consequences of that.
At present the River Usk is not eutrophic. In other words, it is not enriched by nutrients causing an accelerated growth of algae and plant life so affecting the water quality. However, the impounded lake may become so if the barrage is built. If so, it is likely to be classified as sensitive, which may involve the removal of phosphorous. There is a population of about 195,000 in the Usk Valley above Newport, of whom some 175,000 would be covered by the directive. I am told that phosphate stripping costs very approximately £50 per head in capital costs and £7 per head per annum in operating costs. Those costs would inevitably be put on to the promoters who could therefore face capital costs on this alone of some £8.75 million and running costs of perhaps £1.25 million per year. Clearly the committee should look at that.
The sixth and last point is the impact of the projected barrage on the economy of the Usk Valley and whether, for example, a reduction in the value of its fisheries would adversely affect not only angling clubs and fishery owners but hotels, bed and breakfast

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establishments, tackle shops and fisheries in that area and reduce prosperity, employment opportunities and tourist revenue in that part of rural Wales. I know that many people in the Usk Valley are deeply worried. Some of them, like the Crickhowell Community Council, have written to me. Cosmetic improvements to the surroundings of Newport should not be allowed to damage the livelihood of people living and working higher up the river.
I hope that the House will agree that those questions are pertinent and reasonable and should be gone into by the committee.
Some noble Lords may be surprised that there is nothing in my draft Instruction about conservation or fisheries. The reason for that is simple. I am advised that Erskine May does not allow points to be included in instructions if they are already covered in petitions. The petitions from the NRA, local wildlife trusts and anglers' organisations cover those points.
Conservation aspects certainly should not be neglected. In particular, the committee should satisfy itself that there will be no damage to migratory runs of the rare twaite shad, which are only found in the Usk, Wye or Severn or to populations of otters, dependent as they are on the supply of eels, to fish resident in the estuary and to other forms of bird and plant life. I know that the NCC in Wales is anxious about those matters about which not nearly enough research has yet been done.
Apart from the draft Community directive, there are other aspects of water quality and of the river regime covered in the petitions which the committee should examine carefully. The elimination of the discharges of raw sewage into the river from Newport is not really relevant as that must be dealt with anyway. However, there is the problem of sedimentation—the washing down and deposition of river gravels and silt above any barrage, and the need for the promoters to pay for regular dredging and removal; the management of the river; the possibility of algal blooms; the reduction or stopping of tidal flushing; the question of public health and immersion sports; the question of midges; the effect of introduction of salt water if a partial intrusion barrage is planned; whether the discharge of treated effluent into the impounded lake would create problems; the question of storm water discharges; the prospect of the formation of scum on the lake; the possibility that oxygen levels in the lake may fall and the consequences of this; the problem of debris—dead sheep, supermarket trolleys, pieces of plastic and so on —being brought down from towns and farms higher up in the Usk and how that will be dealt with; and all the points raised in paragraphs 27 to 32 in the petition from the NRA, paragraphs 13 to 15 of the petition from the Welsh Salmon and Trout Anglers Association and paragraph 21 of the petition from the United Usk Fisheries Association.
In the past two years we have all heard of the problem of toxic blue/green algae and of dogs dying after drinking lake water. There are many other problems when the natural river flow is tampered with. The committee needs to satisfy itself that all
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those problems can be satisfactorily surmounted and that the promoters would shoulder the full burden of related costs.
Lastly I come to fisheries. I have no personal interest in the Usk fisheries because the Usk is not my river. However, I have a concern as I work for the maintenance and improvement of fisheries in Wales as chairman of the NRA, Welsh Regions' Regional Fisheries Advisory Committee and as president of the Welsh Salmon and Trout Anglers Association.
At present the Usk is a beautiful as well as an important river with the rare combination of first-class trout fishing and at times good salmon fishing. Its runs of salmon contribute also to a significant commercial fishery in the estuary. I am sure that the committee will want to pay very careful attention to the points raised in paragraphs 17 to 23 of the petition from the NRA and generally in the petitions from the Salmon and Trout Anglers' Association, the Welsh Salmon and Trout Anglers Association, the United Usk Fishermen's Association and a number of others.
The key question is whether the migratory fish—salmon, sea trout, shad, eels and lamprey—will or will not be able to get up and down the river past the barrage. If not, then the population of all those fish in the Usk could be wiped out. To do that simply to achieve the "prettification" of the surroundings of Newport would in my submission be unforgiveable.
Noble Lords will realise that Usk salmon and the other species are threatened by two barrages this one and the proposed Severn barrage on which the NRA has concluded:
"there are very significant problems … yet to be resolved, particularly in respect of fish passage through the barrage".
Although research on that problem is continuing, it is my understanding that we are still no where near finding out how a yard long fish, swimming vigorously against the current but being sucked slowly backwards through a rotating turbine can escape destruction. Mortality could be 100 per cent. there.
Those may be separate projects to your Lordships, but to an incoming Usk salmon there would be extreme hazards of trying to pass through the Severn barrage turbines and then having to face the Newport barrier. The prospect of any fish surviving that double obstruction seems to me remote.
With the Usk Barrage, the incoming fish would have to negotiate an estuary with greatly changed flow patterns. They would have to find the fish path, get through it passing suddenly instead of gradually from salt water to fresh and then find their way through a largely still water artificial lake some 12 miles long in which they may be liable to heavy predation from pike to the river upstream. The problems seem to be enormous and probably insurmountable. Fish passes are not always effective and not only need to be carefully designed but also skilfully operated. Recent radio tracking revealed that even the well-known fish pass at Pitlochry is much less effective than was originally thought and that many fish do not make it past the dam but swim round below it, eventually go back downstream and are seen no more.

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I do not believe that a fish pass has ever been installed and found to be effective in a river with a tidal range of 45 feet or one with anything near that range. We are being asked to take a leap in the dark. I understand that in the discussions now proceeding between the promoters and the NRA, a fishlock, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, is being considered—a modification of the Borland lift as used in parts of Scotland. But Borland lifts are not always effective and no one has ever tried one on a river like the Usk. I understand that the NRA still remains to be convinced that the overall operating regime of such a pass will permit the unimpeded passage of fish. Its petition tells us that any loss of Usk salmon could not easily be made good. Moreover, on many high tides the barrage would be tide-locked, with the water level below higher than that above. During those periods the NRA tells me that water would need to be pumped through the fish pass to attract fish through. The promoters will need to demonstrate to the NRA how much water will need to be pumped and then agree to pay the capital and revenue costs involved, which could be substantial.
There is then the equally serious problem of the downstream passage of salmon kelts, smolts and other migratory fish species, especially shad. I understand that at present it is planned that the fish should pass down through the fish pass or over the top of the sluice gates, or both. At low spring tides passage over the sluice gates would involve the fish falling some 10 metres on to energy dissipating baffles covered by only 1.5 metres of water.
I am aware that today the borough council issued a briefing saying that the statement that fish migrating downstream will have to fall 10 metres over the barrage is "totally incorrect" and that fish pass designs are available to demonstrate that. I have checked and it is true that the fish will not have to fall 10 metres at all stages; they will have to fall less at neap tide. But at low spring tides 10 metres is the correct distance. Do any noble Lords believe that many fish could survive a fall like that, quite apart from the severe stress involved?
In its petition the NRA spoke of the major threat to the existing fisheries in the river and estuary. I suggest that the committee should satisfy itself that that major threat can and will be removed; that if the barrage were to be constructed no damage would be done to the fisheries. It will not be good enough for the NRA, or the committee, to agree to plans which have only a fair chance of succeeding, for once built the barrage cannot be removed. They must be satisfied beyond any doubt that safe passage for migratory fish all the way upstream and also downstream can be assured; that the operation of any fish pass will be effectively operated under NRA supervision; and that full monitoring will be carried out—all of course at the expense of the promoters. If the committee is not satisfied beyond doubt then neither it nor we should allow the Bill to proceed.
The Secretary of State for Wales will need to be satisfied that the design of any fish pass will enable all
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migratory fish to pass safely through a barrage before he gives his provisional approval to it. In that context I shall say a word or two about the attitude of the Government. The Welsh Office has been kept fully informed by the NRA. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, will tell us what the Government's view is. I realise that they usually take a neutral stand on private Bills, but I hope that in due course they will let us have their views. If they do, I hope that they will give their full support to the NRA, bearing in mind the need to preserve the quality of water and the fisheries of this valuable, beautiful and so far unspoilt Welsh river.
I believe that this is a bad Bill and that the case for the barrage is a thin one. It seems to me that we have to balance some possible speculative benefits to Newport, which are not necessarily valid, and the fashionable wish to cover up mudflats against enormous potential damage to a notable tidal river. I am in no doubt that the arguments against the barrage greatly outweigh those for it. However, I am sure that our committee will look into all aspects of it very carefully and without prejudice and that if it is not satisfied it will not hesitate to reject it.
8.45 p.m.
Lord Crickhowell: My Lords, I do not intend to range quite so widely as the noble Lord, Lord Moran. I certainly do not intend to debate tonight the wider merits of the Bill. I rise because it is important that the House should have before it the views of the National Rivers Authority regarding the effects of the Bill.
I have a good deal of personal sympathy with the objectives of the promoters and I understand why they have brought forward a measure of this kind. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, in introducing the Bill quoted a letter from Dr. John Stoner saying that the NRA would be anxious to find a way forward. He spoke of a spirit of compromise. I am certainly prepared on behalf of the NRA to approach the matter in that way. However we are confronted with some formidable difficulties.
Those difficulties were brought out clearly in a letter I received this morning, which many other noble Lords will have received also, from the mayor of the borough of Newport. In the letter he makes a number of assertions. He says that,
"it is not accepted that the barrage will adversely affect the migration of salmon, sea trout, twaite, shad, eels and lamprey".
He goes on to say,
"It is confidently expected that post-barrage both upstream and downstream waters will support at least as good if not better populations of fish than exists at present … The only way in which the rural economy could be affected is if the barrage diminishes the run of migratory fish. This is not considered to be a possibility".
Later in the letter he says that,
"The character of the river upstream of the barrage will remain in its present form".
All those are fairly controversial assertions. I need only quote from one passage of the NRA's petition to illustrate that there is a good deal of room for doubt about them. In paragraph 23 of the petition the NRA says:

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"the Authority apprehends that the Bill poses a major threat to the existing fisheries in the river and estuary and it humbly submits that the Bill should not be allowed to pass unless the Promoters can demonstrate that that threat can be satisfactorily overcome".
I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Moran, that the Bill is premature. I share also his concern that it has been presented without a comprehensive environmental study. The simple fact is that due to the lack of technical information from the promoters about the models that will be required and about which I shall have more to say, the NRA is not in a position to be satisfied that the requisite water quality standards can be achieved.
I propose, as briefly as I can, to go through the main statutory responsibilities of the National Rivers Authority and spell out our concerns in regard to the consequences of the Bill. It is perfectly true that the National Rivers Authority, Welsh Region, has been in discussion for a long time with the barrage promoters, the Newport Borough Council and its consultants. But despite many meetings, the developers have so far failed to satisfy the authority that its statutory interests are fully protected.
First I shall refer to flood defence. The NRA has a statutory duty to undertake a technical audit of the scheme and ensure that the proposed barrage will neither make worse the incidence of flooding in the river upstream nor result in any reduction of the existing flood defence standards. To ensure that that can be achieved the NRA laid down the necessary design criteria. I can confirm that the design criteria required have been incorporated in the barrage design. But the hydrodynamics model produced by the promoters has not been separately validated yet by the NRA. Until that validation has been carried out, the NRA cannot give formal approval to the model.
There is an important outstanding issue referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Moran, about the accumulation of river sediments. That takes place in all reaches of the impoundment. In particular it will take place in the upper reaches where large quantities of river gravels will be expected to accumulate relatively quickly. The effect of the accumulated gravels and sediments on the river channels, the passage of migratory fish and the effect on water quality when they are in the process of being physically removed has not yet been investigated to the satisfaction of the NRA.
I now turn to fisheries. It has been pointed out that the authority has a statutory responsibility to maintain, improve and develop salmon, trout and coarse and eel fisheries. In the Severn and Usk estuaries off Newport the NRA also has sea fisheries responsibilities. The barrage will constitute a major obstruction both to the upstream and downstream passage of migratory fish, including salmon, sea trout, shad, eels and lamprey. Migratory fish, as we have heard, will have to negotiate the barrage itself and also pass through the altered tidal zone downstream and the impounded water upstream.
Although the success of fish passage through these river reaches will be principally determined by the water quality, it is probable that the changes in the flow regimes anticipated as a consequence of the
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barrage will affect migration rates and have adverse consequences both for fish survival and catchability. The promoters have not as yet provided the NRA with the information on water quality or flow regimes necessary to permit the effect on fish migration to be fully assessed.
As the House has already heard, any fish pass design will require the approval of the Secretary of State. Accordingly the NRA has required the promoters to seek such approval for their proposals which must allow fish migration in both an upstream and a downstream direction. The promoters have not yet produced a fish pass design which satisfies the NRA that salmonids and other species will have unobstructed passage through the barrier. We have heard about some of the possible difficulties.
We have heard too about the hazards to salmon going downstream. We have heard views put forward about the possible fall in different states of the tide. I noted the assurances given by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart. But the promoters have not yet indicated to the NRA exactly how these problems will be solved or provided detailed information on the proposed operating regime for the barrage sluices. Comparatively little is known at present about the estuarine and marine fish species that come into the Usk estuary. As the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, has told us, the NRA has asked the promoters to commission a baseline survey to tell us something about the diversity and significance of these species and to give us other information about the present condition of the fishery. Until the results of the survey are known it is not possible to judge the effects of the barrage on the fish populations or whether such effects can be mitigated.
After all the requirements that I have described so far are met, there will remain an element of uncertainty about the future success of fish migration. Therefore the NRA thinks that it is essential that a comprehensive monitoring system is set in hand to determine, among other things, the effectiveness of the measures that are designed to assist the passage of migratory fish and the extent to which the fisheries are affected. So far the promoters have not satisfied the NRA that a monitoring programme can be developed which has the capability of adequately determining the effect of the barrage on the salmon fishery.
Notwithstanding all these measures, there is a real possibility that at the very least there will be detrimental effects on the fisheries. Therefore, the NRA is very concerned as to how any such effects might be mitigated. Once again, I must tell the House that the promoters have not yet demonstrated to the satisfaction of the NRA that effective mitigation measures can be employed to compensate for any effect of the barrage on fish stocks. In the light of all these concerns, and in view of the authority's statutory responsibility to maintain, improve and develop fisheries, it will be clear that we had no alternative but to petition against the Bill until protection of the Usk fisheries is assured.
I wish to say a few words about conservation. Under the Water Act 1989, the NRA assumed the

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responsibility to further conservation in the riverine environment. The major conservation impact of the barrage proposals is on fish species and those fish-eating birds and mammals which feed on migratory fish in the upper reaches of the river. The noble Lord, Lord Moran, referred to that. Unless the promoters have fully addressed the fisheries issues that I have already described, clearly the authority cannot be satisfied that the conservation interests in the river upstream have been adequately protected.
A good deal has been said already about water quality. The NRA has the responsibility to maintain and improve the quality of the aquatic environment. The proposed barrage will result in a fundamental change in the existing water quality regime of the estuary, not necessarily for the worst, because there will be gains and losses. In order to ensure that its responsibilities are complied with, the authority has formulated quality standards to ensure that adequate protection is afforded to the water in the estuary downstream of the barrage and the impounded water behind it both for the total exclusion and partial inclusion scenarios that have been referred to. It is true that there are still alternative options which I understand have not yet been decided on.
There are many interacting processes which will affect water quality. Those processes are very complicated. In order to understand and predict what is likely to be the water quality conditions after the barrage is constructed, computer models are being developed by the promoters. Those who have followed the passage of other Bills will know that those computer models and the interpretation of them give plenty of ground for argument and future disagreement. I suspect that we shall have a great many experts pontificating on the subject from both points of view.
I now wish to make a brief comment about the sedimentation model that is required. We must have it to predict both the sedimentation rates and the effect on the water quality. As I have said, that has not been completed. It is absolutely essential that we should have it. The question of dissolved oxygen in the river is of crucial importance for the well-being of fish and their passage through this part of the river. If the barrage is built, the comparatively still water upstream may well experience lower dissolved oxygen levels because of the reduced mixing and increased residence time behind the barrage. Even when the crude sewage inputs are removed, oxygen demands will still be experienced from the remaining treated sewage effluence, the river and the sea water. Additional demands may also arise from time to time from dying algae in the bottom waters of the impoundment and so on. Therefore the NRA will have to be satisfied that the stipulated dissolved oxygen levels will be maintained at all times.
The mathematical model required to describe and predict these water quality conditions is heavily dependent on the inputs from the hydrodynamics and sedimentation models to which I have already referred. The NRA is responsible for giving consent to all discharges of sewage into the estuary and, as the
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House has already been told, it has insisted that the existing crude sewage discharges above the proposed barrage will have to be removed. The existing treatment of sewage effluent from near Caerteon will continue, but this effluent may require improved treatment. Storm sewage outlets may remain upstream and downstream of the barrage, and so we have to have full hydraulic analysis of the sewage network. Once again I have to say that that work has not yet been presented to the NRA.
That is where we stand. I again confirm that the NRA is not taking up a position against the Bill if its requirements can be met. I repeat my personal sympathy with the objectives in terms of urban social and economic renewal that the promoters have. But it will be clear to noble Lords that the promoters so far have failed to demonstrate on a number of very fundamental issues that the construction of a barrage across the Usk estuary will not adversely affect the statutory responsibilities of the NRA in respect of both the protection of the environment and the uses made of the waters affected by the proposals. For that reason we hope that the committee will pursue very carefully the matters raised in our petition.
9.1 p.m.
Lord Hooson: My Lords, it seems to me to be axiomatic that when promoters seek the approval of Parliament for a Private Bill that is to give them wide statutory powers to achieve certain objectives a very heavy onus lies on the promoters. It seems to me that to describe this Bill as premature is to flatter it. I was absolutely astonished to learn that there has not been a full environmental study of an important scheme of this kind, not only a study of the Usk at Newport and the likely effect of this development, but of the whole of the Usk Valley. Paragraph (a) of the proposed Instruction of the noble Lord, Lord Moran, raises a very important question:
"whether the economic development of Newport and the adjacent areas could be better achieved by other means than building a barrage".
This means considering not only the economy of Newport but all the factors with which we are concerned. It seems to me that barrages are an "in" thing. These days everybody who has a river must have a barrage. There are four major rivers running through Brecon and Radnor: the Taf is to have a barrage, a barrage is in the process of being built on the Towy. It seems to be argued that therefore the Usk must have a barrage. Next there will be a scheme for the Wye, the fourth river, to have a barrage. There is a great deal of nonsense in this attraction of barrages to urban developers. Because a river 12 miles away has one, so we must have one.
Some barrages are justified. They may have a very good economic justification. There may be a very good environmental justification for some barrages. There may be a recreational justification in some circumstances. But if promoters come here seeking a barrage, they have to establish a need. What is the need for this barrage? I ask the question rhetorically.
From the way that the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, moved the Second Reading of the Bill —he lives in England as far away from Newport as I

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do in Wales, but like him I know the Usk Valley very well and I know Newport pretty well too—it appears that the main justification for this part of the scheme is entirely cosmetic. No one can doubt the need and the support that should be engendered for the urban regeneration of Newport. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether the promoters are in a position to establish that a barrage is needed as part of that. It is an essential part that all the disabilities that might flow from a barrage are to be tolerated because of the benefits it will bring.
As all who pass near the estuary of the River Usk at the time of low tide will know, it has a great deal of mud in it and has very high banks. We have heard that it has one of the highest tidal ranges in the world, second only to the St. Lawrence river, I think I heard somebody say. But the Usk has been like that for at least 2,000 years. It seems to be an astonishing proposition that suddenly it must have a barrage and that the economic regeneration of the centre of Newport cannot take place without a barrage. What is the justification for the barrage?
If the Instruction of the noble Lord, Lord Moran, is passed and the committee comes to consider whether the economic development of Newport and the adjacent areas could be better achieved by means other than building a barrage, a great deal of study will be required.
I now move to paragraph (f) of the Instruction because I am not personally concerned about the other matters. It refers to,
"the impact of the proposed barrage on the economy of the Usk Valley".
I know that the honourable Member for Brecon and Radnor, Mr. Richard Livsey, opposes this Bill because he is concerned about the effect on the economy of the Usk Valley. The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, who I know has had to leave for another appointment, referred to the doubts the river authorities feel about this project with regard to fishing. I am told that the value of the riparian ownership of the fishing rights in the Usk Valley is about £3.3 million. I am also told that the estimated benefit annually to the economy of the Usk Valley of anglers using local hotels and farmhouses and having local fishermen help them is about £650,000. To an area where employment facilities are very poor, where there is very little other employment and where the rural economy depends very heavily on bed and breakfast and on the tourist industry, the proposed development poses a serious threat. Those who promote a Bill such as this must satisfy the House, Parliament and any committee not that it might be all right but that things will be all right.
For example, it was said that the fish pass was based on a pass put in the River Garonne in France. The Garonne is a completely different river from the Usk. I was surprised to learn from the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, that members of Newport Borough Council are going to Cwym Rheidol next Tuesday to see the fish pass there. I should have thought that if they were promoting a Bill of this kind they would have seen it at least a year ago so they would know what they were talking about.
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Not only is there an effect on the fisheries and on the economy of the Usk Valley but there is also the effect on the environment. There is a great deal of mud in the Usk. What will happen when the barrage is across the Usk and all that mud is held back? The still lake behind the barrage can hardly be used for recreational purposes because the water quality will not be high enough. I understand that those advising the promoters have advised them of that fact. Why will it not be of sufficient quality? The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, said that there is a good deal of pollution in the River Usk. I understand that there are 11 sewer outlets from which untreated sewage passes into the river. Whose fault is that? If it is suggested that the matter of the 11 outfalls will be corrected and the sewage will be treated, nevertheless to pour treated sewage into a still lake is a serious matter. It will have effects on the oxygen content. It will have effects on the standard of the water.
All these factors lead me to believe that this is not only a premature Bill asking for powers which Parliament should not grant on this kind of information and evidence but also that Newport Borough Council has not thought through the need for a barrage. Every support should be given to Newport for its urban regeneration. But from everything I have read so far and heard in the debate today I should have thought that it has fallen lamentably short of making out a case for the barrage.
9.11 p.m.
Lord Swansea: My Lords, time is getting on and I shall try not to detain your Lordships more than is absolutely necessary. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, has given us a very clear explanation of the intentions of the promoters of the Bill. I frequently have occasion to travel by train to Newport. The river generally seems to be at low tide when I do so. On each occasion I find the vistas of mud banks extremely depressing. I can understand the wish of Newport Borough Council to tidy up that part of the river. From time to time the town is afflicted with disastrous flooding. One can well understand the wish of the council to alleviate that too and reduce the risk of flooding. At the same time it wants to improve the amenities for its residents.
At first I was inclined to give the Bill my support. I am grateful to Newport Borough Council's advisers for briefing me on the subject. Now, however, it is with great regret that I feel obliged to withdraw my support for the Bill. I have to explain to the House that I am a fisherman myself, though to my regret I have never fished the Usk. Most of my fishing has been on the River Wye and its tributaries. It is often frustrating and rarely successful. Last weekend my wife and I went down to Wales and had the opportunity to talk to some of our neighbours, including the noble Lord, Lord Moran, who fish on both the Wye and the Usk. I find that they all vehemently oppose the Bill and are counting on me and on other noble Lords to speak up for them. It is as a result of my conversation with them that I feel obliged to oppose the Bill.
The success or failure of any barrage depends on whether or not it enables the passage of migratory fish

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in both directions. The salmon, along with other species, is a migratory fish which starts its life in a river. At a certain age it goes down to the sea, where it puts on growth on rich feeding grounds in the Davis Strait, off the west coast of Greenland. Then, after three or four years, it returns to the river of its birth. How it finds that river has never been satisfactorily explained, but the fact is that by some means or other it is able to do so. It makes its way to the head-waters of that river or to one of the tributaries, where it spawns.
To get past the barrage, the fish has to find and negotiate the fish pass. There is no guarantee that it will do so: it may fail to find it and return to the sea. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, has told us that the salmon could be attracted to the fish pass by the trapped water which comes through it. At any rate that is the theory, but it is by no means certain. Assuming that the fish has found and negotiated the fish pass, it will then find itself in the lagoon above the barrage in comparatively still water. I say "comparatively still" because although water will be flowing through the lagoon, it will not be flowing at the same rate as in the undammed river. There is a danger that the fish will become disorientated and will not know which way to go.
The curious thing about the salmon is that once it enters the river from the sea it stops feeding entirely and eats nothing at all for as long as it is in the river, which may be several months. As a result, it loses condition at a steady rate, and in spite of that it finally spawns at some time in November or December in the head waters. The process of spawning is in itself very exhausting and it can leave the fish in a very much weakened condition. It is in that extremely weak condition that it has to make its way back down river to the sea. It will be lucky if it manages to find the fish pass and get through it safely. What is more likely to happen is that the fish will jump over the barrage.
The noble Lord, Lord Moran, has told us that the River Usk has a range between high and low tides of as much as 45 feet —the second highest in the world. If, when the fish jumps over the barrage, the tide is out at that moment the fish will be faced with a fall to the water on the seaward side of anything between 30 and 40 feet and of landing on the seaward side into a depth of water of only four or five feet. There will therefore be a grave danger of the fish, already in a very weak state, being stunned and possibly not surviving.
The whole prospect fills me with alarm. The effect on the upstream fisheries which, as the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, has already told us, are a very strong tourist attraction at the moment, could be quite incalculable. The riparian owners are up in arms about it and are strongly opposed to this whole project. Every river is different and the River Usk, like others, is unique. The design of the fish pass is crucial if it is to satisfy the NRA's position.
They have made their position quite clear, and they will not be satisfied with the scheme unless they are satisfied with the design of the fish pass. Whether or not that pass will work no one will know until it is
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completed, and by that time it will probably be too late to do anything about it. In any case it will cost a lot of money. Therefore I feel that Newport Borough Council has not given sufficient thought to the effects of the scheme on the upstream river. They have concentrated mostly on the effect on Newport itself, and on the possible alleviation of flooding and on improving the amenities for their residents; but they have not given enough thought to the consequences further upstream.
It is not the practice of your Lordships' House to refuse a Second Reading to a Private Bill, and if this Bill gets a Second Reading it will go to a Select Committee. However, I can foresee it having a very rough passage through that Committee, and it may take some weeks. I shall not oppose the Motion for the Second Reading but at the same time, considering the possible effects on the general economy of the Usk river, I do not feel that I can honestly support it.
9.18 p.m.
Lord Mancroft: My Lords, I am not an expert on barrages in general, nor indeed on the River Usk in particular, as other speakers this evening are. However, I have become over the years increasingly worried about our ability in this country to achieve in harmony two very important goals in our national life. The first of them is the goal of development: the development of our towns and cities, of our housing needs our industrial needs and recreational facilities and, with them, the road developments that they entail.
The second aim, which is vital to our way of life, is the preservation of our traditional way of life and the conservation of our beautiful little island. There is increasing pressure throughout the whole country, as the same people who demand more houses, more jobs and more roads also require more green and pleasant land to admire and play in. Those two aims seem incompatible, but the ever-increasing task is to find an acceptable balance. Today, we are faced with another ghastly dilemma: are we to permit a much needed development at the risk of destroying the environmental amenities of the River Usk and at the risk of damaging the salmon irreparably—not to mention the other fish or are we to put a stop to the revitalisation of Newport, prevent the cure of an industrial hangover, and condemn the citizens to continue to live with unemployment and negative growth for ever? The answer, I hope, is neither.
Newport Borough Council has gone a long way, although perhaps not yet all the way, in its attempt fully to investigate the destructive elements of its plans. Of course things will not be as they were before, but that has always been so. Over the centuries, Britain and its peoples have had to adapt to meet changing circumstances: the Norman conquerors would not now recognise the country they invaded almost 1,000 years ago. Although the forests and heathlands of old Britain are long gone, our countryside, changed as it is, is still largely the envy of the world.

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I cannot believe that the people of Newport will mourn much the loss of their unsightly mudbanks, themselves caused by the unsightly industrial development of a bygone era. The evidence suggests that the barrage, and all that goes with it, will improve the water quality. Those things are good. The creation of jobs, the building of new houses, the bringing back into use of derelict land, and the reduction of the risk of flooding are also good. However, there is a price to pay. The question that we must ask is whether that price is too high. New roads, including the southern link road, will have to be built, leaving further scars across the land and bringing with them a much heavier weight of traffic.
Areas of wetland are threatened, although at the moment there is a difference of opinion on that issue. Other areas of wetland may eventually be created. Most important of all, there is a danger that the salmon will be unable to adapt to the inevitable changes in the river. That would be a disaster for the salmon and those involved in the salmon fishing industry, principally hoteliers.
I am not yet wholly convinced that the Bill's sponsors have proved their case, but neither have its opponents. The evidence is thin. However, it seems clear that it would be ludicrous were the Bill to fail merely because the fishing lobby and the pro-barrage brigade could find no middle ground. But for that one area, the Bill has struck a good balance—a balance that we should more often seek with such developments. As yet, neither side's argument is lost or won; but on the evidence before us, I believe that we should let the Bill proceed slowly on its way and allow the committee to examine it at greater length than we can tonight.
9.23 p.m.
The Earl of Clanwilliam: My Lords, I must declare an interest in that a member of my family is involved with Newport Borough Council and the promotion of the Bill. I have another interest in that I have friends who live and fish on the Usk. Whether I shall be friends after I have finished my speech is a matter for speculation. However, I have faith in their Christian charity.
Noble Lords on all sides of the House have raised serious objections to the Bill and criticised Newport Borough Council. It is only fair to say of Newport Borough Council that it retained for a considerable time the best hydrological, fishery and accountancy advice available. It has come forward with the Bill having considered the matter to the best of its ability. The fact that the Bill is not acceptable to your Lordships now does not mean that it could not be reformed in Committee in due course. I hope that it will be.
As my noble friend Lord Mancroft has just said, there are two problems. There is the problem of the local environment and that of the fishing lobby. It would be a great pity if they were to clash irrevocably. I fully understand that the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, has a duty and responsibility laid upon him by the National Rivers Authority. He is perfectly right to impose the most stringent rules to ensure that
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he carries out his responsibilities and duties in the proper manner. This also applies to the noble Lord, Lord Moran.
The Bill was ably presented by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart. First, a number of local needs should be dealt with and they have been clearly rehearsed. There is the problem of sewage treatment and increased employment in an area where mining has left a pool of unemployment. There is a need for flood mitigation which has been clearly covered and for general industrial regeneration in Newport. The barrage requires an enhanced environment which will overcome the legacy of industrial waste that makes up the noxious mud banks of the lower river.
The council has taken great trouble to obtain professional advice on all aspects of the Bill and the advice is that the barrier will create a clean, freshwater flowing lake, not one that will be still. It will not suffer from algal infection and that is clearly stated in the advice that the council has been given.
The investment in the development park will largely pay for the treated sewage and provide much needed employment. The environment will obviously be enhanced by the permanent lake. At the moment, raw sewage is evacuated through the river at high speed on the ebb and is returned with equal velocity on the flood. It creates a terrible environment in which the people of Newport live.
It is at this point that the second problem occurs in the shape of the fishing interest. As my noble friend Lord Swansea said, from January to October the salmon which are the main interest of the objectors, return to spawn following the freshwater scent of their birthplace. That they survive the present effluent is a striking demonstration of their native sense and an argument that they will not be deterred, while there is a flow of fresh water, from returning to the source of the river.
The council, I am sure, are much interested in preserving the valuable game fishing interests, an activity that brings large sums to the riparian owners of the river and to the hotel and tourist trade in the area. It is not in the interests of the council or of Gwent, which equally supports the Bill, to damage the industry in any way. They are at great pains to provide evidence and justification of the claims of their advisers. At the moment they have not been able to persuade noble Lords or the NRA of the force of their arguments. Objections refer to the lower oxygenation of the water through a slower flow rate in the lake, it is not a still lake. There is objection to the effect of the barrier as a blocking agent. There is a remarkable description of the hydraulic lift by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, which is 25 metres by 10. It will be in permanent operation and will overcome the problem of the 45 foot range. The fish will not be required to climb 45 feet at any time, nor will they be required to drop 30 feet as was suggested. The maximum drop, I believe, will be 10 feet or 2 metres.
Salinity is another hydrological problem but it is being covered by the experts. There is the possibility of siltage with gravel at the top of the lake. I agree that that has not been fully covered but I hope it will be dealt with in the course of the Committee stage.

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I ask that the submissions should be heard by the Committee, which the professionals have had some difficulty in providing, in view of the two-year drought in the river which has also seriously affected the fishing quality. That matter should be raised in Committee. I hope that the Bill will receive its Second Reading.
9.30 p.m.
Viscount De L'Isle: My Lords, I am grateful to Her Majesty's Government and to the Opposition for allowing me to make a brief speech towards the end of the debate. I must immediately declare an interest in that I am married to a riparian owner. My marriage brought me to Wales for the first time 25 years ago. Before that time I had never visited the Principality. Over 25 years I have learnt to love the incomparable Usk Valley, with its fast flowing stream where salmon have run over millions of years.
Any fast flowing salmon river brings delight not only to fishermen but also to nature lovers and countrymen, for all delight in living waters that are pure enough to allow the annual passage, both up and down river, of that wonderful and beautiful migrant fish. Newport Borough Council proposes a barrage scheme. The purpose of the scheme is not to prevent the occasional flood nuisance. Its principal purpose is cosmetic. I have read the petition of the National Rivers Authority and I listened with great interest and respect to the speech of my noble friend Lord Crickhowell.
Were the Bill to pass into law, it would be too late even to palliate this cruel interference with nature. It is most unlikely, as the NRA petition strongly implies, that investigations, experiments, models and other devices will function to perfection, as all those devices are untried and experimental by admission.
This morning's post brought me a letter from the mayor of Newport. He enclosed a report on the scheme from the borough's point of view. The report expresses great confidence in the scheme. One almost wonders why His Worship the Mayor does not predict great improvements in River Usk salmon stocks. The final paragraph of that report explains more graphically than any other publication what may be expected from the scheme when it states:
"It is not envisaged that the water quality in the Usk would be worse than many other inland waters where water-based recreation takes place. However, it is considered to be sensible not to expose swimmers to the risk of ill-health. Nevertheless, non-contact water recreations, such as rowing etc. is considered to be an acceptable risk".
I hardly think that is a great recommendation as regards salmon.
Recently the NRA has been entrusted by Her Majesty's Government with the responsibility of securing the purity of rivers and the good quality of fishing. The NRA is charged with responsibility for all other aspects of riverine life. I hope that Parliament, and least of all this Chamber, will not add, through its own motion, to that melancholy list of rivers in England and Wales which were once noble salmon rivers but no longer are.
I cannot oppose the Bill on Second Reading, but I am not persuaded that the reasons for the barrage
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scheme are in any way connected with the preservation of this great natural resource. Shortly after the Second World War, Alexander Cordell wrote a book entitled The Rape of a Fair Country. It called attention to the unhappy industrialisation of so much of the beautiful countryside of South Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries. I hope that this House, and Parliament in general, will not earn itself the title of the rapist of a fair river.
9.34 p.m.
Lord Prys-Davies: My Lords, I am very conscious that although I speak from this Dispatch Box this evening I do not voice an official Opposition view of the merits or demerits of the Bill. I speak in a personal capacity and I do not seek to reflect the views of the Labour opposition.
This has been a fascinating debate. The House is divided on the issue. My noble friend Lord Stoddart of Swindon has put forward a Bill as part of a development scheme which is jointly promoted by the two elected authorities which are, at the end of the day, accountable to the people of Newport and Gwent. The twin objectives of the Bill are the environmental and industrial regeneration of a substantial part of the borough of Newport.
Other Members of your Lordships' House have drawn attention to worrying features of the scheme as it stands. They fear that the problems, unless they are resolved, could affect the length of the River Usk and the Usk Valley. So on the one hand we have the voices of the civic leaders of Newport and Gwent, and on the other hand we have the voices of those who are genuinely concerned about the environment. For once the debate is in no way a political debate. The critical question is whether the objectives of the promoters of the scheme and of the objectors can be reconciled.
In fairness to the civic leaders of Newport Borough Council and the Gwent County Council it should be made clear that this is not the first time the council has considered constructing a barrage across the River Usk. That has been a dream of the councillors for some decades. It is not a case of keeping up with Cardiff or Swansea; this is an old dream of the leaders of the council.
I want to thank my noble friend Lord Stoddart of Swindon—whose roots are in the Rhondda valley, and hence his interest in the future of Newport—for presenting the Bill in such a fair manner. He outlined clearly the policy behind the Bill and its main provisions. As I understand it the construction of the barrage across the River Usk at Spittles Point, in combination with the regeneration of the dockland, is seen by the promoters of the Bill as central to the development of Newport. We have heard that it is estimated that the scheme will generate over 2,000 new full-time jobs in Newport by the end of the century. That is a conservative estimate and the figure may be very much higher.
The barrage will help primarily because the mud bank will be permanently submerged under the surface of the impounded waters. It is said that that will create an environment which is attractive to modern industry. We have heard that argument

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canvassed in this Chamber before. It was canvassed when the Cardiff barrage scheme was before the House. It was canvassed when the Laganside development in Belfast was before the House. That is the vision, and it is supported by district councils in Gwent.
I acknowledge that there are reservations. They have been voiced in the Chamber tonight. Twenty-two or 23 petitions have been lodged against the Bill, and I have read them. The petitions take us on a tour of the river Usk and the Usk Valley, from its upper regions and the steep hills of Brecon, along the lowlands, past Rose Cottage in Newbridge on Usk, until eventually the river reaches St. George's Channel where, as we have been told, it has the second largest tidal rise and fall in the world. The Bill could affect a not insignificant part of the heritage of South East Wales. That matters a lot. It matters to the noble Lord, Lord Moran. I see that it matters to Elaine Williams of Rose Cottage, Newbridge on Usk, who has filed a petition in moving terms in her capacity (as she sees it) as "guardian to the river and the wildlife it supports, protecting it for future generations". There is also the substantial petition of the NRA about which the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, has spoken with great authority.
It seems to me there are at least three main anxieties which are pretty widely held. First, there is special difficulty over the design of the fish pass. Will it enable the Atlantic salmon, the sea trout and other migratory fish to travel upstream from and downstream to the sea? Secondly, there is a great deal of anxiety about the quality of the impounded waters. That could affect migratory fish as well as human health. Thirdly, there is anxiety about the long-term effect on the character and ecology of the river and the balance of the wild food chain given our inadequate state of knowledge about the river. Fourthly, the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, has very convincingly developed the point that it could adversely affect the economy of the Usk Valley, not merely to the extent that it depends on salmon and trout fishery.
Some petitioners feel that the barrage will increase the risk of flooding, but my noble friend Lord Stoddart has explained to the House that the joint promoters believe the barrage will reduce that risk. I notice that other petitioners are not opposed to the concept of the barrage as such but are seeking conditions or powers to be incorporated in the Bill to meet their special needs.
I have touched lightly on the salient features. My noble friend Lord Stoddart has indicated that the joint promoters are conscious of the worries that have been voiced, as indeed is acknowledged in at least two of the petitions. My noble friend has also indicated that the joint promoters are very anxious to work in partnership with the objectors to meet their anxieties.
Referring briefly to the Instruction which has been tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moran, it seems to me that the six points raise very relevant considerations, and it is proper that the instruction should go to the Select Committee so it will have an opportunity of examining all relevant issues.
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It is my hope that the Bill will be given a Second Reading and committed to a Select Committee where it can be subjected to detailed, careful examination. It will then be for the Select Committee to advise the House whether in its view the Bill is premature.
9.45 p.m.
Lord Reay: My Lords, I should like to state briefly the Government's views on the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon. It is traditional with Private Bills that the Government take a neutral stance, as the noble Lord, Lord Moran, acknowledged. This Bill is no exception to that tradition. The Government have considered the content of the Bill and have no objection in principle to the powers being sought by Newport Borough Council. However, it is for the promoters to persuade Parliament that the powers that they seek are justified.
I am aware of the concern about the possible environmental effects of the proposed barrage, particularly on migratory fish. Indeed, I could hardly fail to be aware after listening to the debate this evening; in particular the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Moran, my noble friend Lord Crickhowell, the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, and the noble and gallant Viscount.
As we have heard, there are 22 petitions against the Bill in your Lordships' House and the petitioners will have the opportunity to present their objections to the Select Committee. It is up to the committee to examine in detail the issues involved. So far as concerns the instruction which the noble Lord, Lord Moran, will seek to send to the committee, the Government see no difficulty with it and would not wish to stand in your Lordships' way in this matter. I hope that the Bill will be given a Second Reading and allowed to proceed in the usual way to a Select Committee for detailed consideration.
Viscount De L'Isle: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down perhaps I may ask him in regard to the National Rivers Authority, which was so recently instituted, whether the present Government in due course will declare whether or not they support the stance of that authority.
Lord Reay: My Lords, at this stage the Government must remain neutral even though the National Rivers Authority is a government agency. The next stage is to wait to see whether an agreement on some or all of the points in the National Rivers Authority's petition is reached with the promoters.
9.48 p.m.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, whether speaking in favour of the Bill or voicing their concern about it. I am even grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, who believed that to describe the Bill as premature was to flatter it.
It has been a good debate and the contributions that have been made will be invaluable to the voters and, indeed, to the Select Committee which will consider the Bill in detail. Quite clearly at this hour of the evening I cannot deal with all the relevant points which were raised. I should however like to thank the

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noble Lord, Lord Moran, for his intervention. I also thank him for his forthright criticism which was delivered with his usual courtesy. He raised many points of interest which were repeated by other Members of your Lordships' House.
I must tell him that there is no intention on the part of the promoters to override anything that the NRA has to say. Indeed, they are listening, have listened and will continue to listen to the NRA with the utmost respect. They value the advice that they can obtain from the NRA and hope that agreement can be reached. I also assure the noble Lord that the promoters of the Bill—the Newport Borough Council and the Gwent County Council—are just as concerned as he, and indeed everybody, about the fishing. I can assure him that there is no intention to wipe out the fishing. The promotors, particularly Newport Borough Council, do not think that the benefits to Newport are speculative. They sincerely believe that the benefits will be real and essential to Newport's future.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moran, for putting down his Instruction. It is most useful to the House. I believe that it will be most useful also to the committee. We should like to accept it; we shall certainly support it.
I must answer a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hooson. He referred to the fact that there had been no proper environmental assessment. Perhaps I may explain to him that the Newport Borough Council decided to appoint environmental consultants in 1988 to prepare an environmental assessment in accordance with European and UK Government guidelines. That was due to have been completed prior to the depositing of the Bill. However, unfortunately it has been delayed due to the drought conditions. It is expected to be completed within the next three weeks. I am sure that we shall be interested to hear what it says.
The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, again was most helpful. I am grateful to him for understanding the desires of Newport and Gwent to improve the area. Of course the promoters recognise that the NRA has a statutory duty to ensure that the matters he raised are dealt with and the objections are met. I can assure him that the promoters will continue to discuss everything in detail with the National Rivers Authority and try to reach agreement on all points that he raised.
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Perhaps I may quote from the debate on the Cardiff Bay Barrage Bill because I consider it relevant. I was struck by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell. In particular I was impressed by one part of it which was so good that it is worth repeating. I should like to quote from it with the leave of the House. At col. 810 of the Official Report of 23rd February 1989 he said:
"We live in a complex world. There are seldom straightforward answers to man's problems. It is Parliament's job to weigh carefully all the competing considerations and to provide protection so far as is possible against the adverse consequences of any proposed action. But Parliament must also try to identify the greatest good and the wider benefits both for man and for the environment in which he lives. We all want to make a contribution of that kind".
I cannot say better than that. I hope that the House will give the Bill a Second Reading.
On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Select Committee.
Lord Moran Lord Moran rose to move, That it be an Instruction to the Committee to whom the Bill is committed that it pay particular attention—
(a) to whether the economic development of Newport and the adjacent areas could be better achieved by other means than building a barrage; (b) to the prospects of such development in the light of the proposed Cardiff Bay development which may be competing in trying to attract investors; (c) to the effect of the Bill on the community charge in Gwent and Newport; (d) in considering questions of water quality, to the draft EC Municipal Waste Water Treatment Directive (COM (89) 518 final); (e) to the need for a road crossing over the barrage in the light of the possible extension to the south of Newport of the proposed second crossing over the River Severn; and (f) to the impact of the proposed barrage on the economy of the Usk Valley.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Instruction standing in my name on the Order Paper to which I have already spoken.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.

Commercial and Private Bank Bill [H.L.]
Committed to an Unopposed Bill Committee.
House adjourned at six minutes before ten o'clock.