Lords Sitting of 1 February 1995

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

Nuclear Missiles
Lord Jenkins of Putneyasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether Western ballistic missiles were targeted on Moscow; whether this is still the case; if not, what is the present position; and what is known about the targeting of such operational missiles based in the area of the former Soviet Union.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister of Defence (Lord Henley): My Lords, in the early part of 1994 both the United Kingdom and the United States made joint announcements with Russia that each nation's strategic nuclear missiles would be detargeted by 30th May. All three nations later confirmed that that action had been completed. It is not our practice to comment further on matters of targeting.
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for giving the facts as they are at the moment. As the missiles are apparently now detargeted, is it not the case that they cannot be deterring anyone or else they are deterring everyone? So will the Government's practice of referring to those deadly weapons as deterrents now be stopped? Since one assumes that the weapons will now never be used, would it not be a good plan to make them out of marzipan in future?
Lord Henley: My Lords, I am afraid that I do not agree with the noble Lord. Such weapons still provide a useful minimum deterrent for the UK's defences. I shall welcome the day when the noble Lord forms the same view as I do. I accept that the detargeting of our strategic deterrent is obviously unverifiable, just as whether the Russians or the Americans have detargeted theirs is unverifiable. We still believe that it is a worthwhile confidence-building measure.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: My Lords, would it not be admirable if they did deter everyone and continued to do so?
Lord Henley: My Lords, I believe that they do deter most people. I am afraid that they do not deter the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, will the Minister tell the House what progress is being made in decommissioning the ballistic missiles which are apparently rusting away in the former Soviet Union?
Lord Henley: My Lords, that is obviously a matter for the Russian authorities. If we can provide any technical assistance, we are more than happy to do so whenever possible.
Lord Gisborough: My Lords, will my noble friend give some idea of the time-scale for retargeting these missiles should the necessity arise?
Lord Henley: My Lords, I can merely say that they can be retargeted quickly.
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, is it not, however, an extremely expensive way of going on? All these missiles probably prevent our having as many military bands as we might otherwise have. May I suggest to the Minister that in future he has a token missile about the place and spends a little more on military bands?
Lord Henley: My Lords, the Trident programme absorbs something of the order of 2.5 per cent. of our budget, a small proportion for the valuable deterrence it provides.

BR South Eastern Region: Rolling Stock
2.39 p.m.
The Viscount of Falklandasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they accept British Rail's decision that there is no commercial case for taking up their option to purchase more Networker trains for use in the South Eastern Region.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Transport (Viscount Goschen): My Lords, the commercial case is a matter for British Rail. It concluded that there was no commercial case for ordering further trains now on the terms offered last year by ABB Transportation. However, British Rail has indicated that it would want to re-examine the commercial case if an improved offer were received.
The Viscount of Falkland: My Lords, the commuters from Kent will not find that an encouraging Answer. Is the Minister aware that less than a year ago the Minister in another place, Mr. Freeman, welcomed the ordering from the York manufacturers of new rolling stock for the South East, and said that there was a prima facie case for renewing the rolling stock? How can that view have changed so radically within so few months?
Viscount Goschen: My Lords, our policy has not changed. It is still very much our policy to encourage worthwhile deals under the private finance initiative. As I said, BR has indicated that it will, without prejudice, consider any new offer, provided that it makes business sense and would be likely to fall within the PFI rules. BR's decision was a business decision based on an analysis of commercial costs and maintenance schedules.
Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that ABB offered a leasing arrangement which would not have breached BR's external finance limits and involved no capital costs to the taxpayer?
Viscount Goschen: My Lords, BR did not decline to pursue the ABB option because of pressures on resources. It did so because the deal no longer made any sense when BR took into account the comparative costs of the new trains and the cyclical maintenance schedules of the existing rolling stock.
Lady Kinloss: My Lords, will the Minister use his influence to urge the private finance initiative to get BR and ABB York around the negotiating table? If they could reach a satisfactory outcome for new Networker trains for the South Eastern Region, ABB York could stay open and 750 jobs would be saved, many of them highly skilled.
Viscount Goschen: My Lords, we value the existence of a thriving railway manufacturing industry. It is for BR to decide what equipment it needs and when. The private finance initiative has provided opportunities. Indeed, the previous deal, which was agreed under the private finance initiative, provided a great innovation in access to capital.
Lord Taylor of Gryfe: My Lords, is the Minister aware that ABB is a highly skilled operation which specialises precisely in this field? As a result of British Rail's decision, which it will review at a later stage, people in that company are being declared redundant. The ability to manufacture rolling stock, which is so necessary for British Rail, will be lost. Cannot we achieve a reasonable arrangement between British Rail and the manufacturer of rolling stock for a rolling programme that will keep people employed at what they do well?
Viscount Goschen: My Lords, I recognise the value of the ABB capacity and the work that it has done in building rolling stock. However, it is not for the Government to second guess the commercial decisions of BR as to when it requires rolling stock and what rolling stock it requires.
Lord Aldington: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that it is believed that within the past 18 months a promise was made by a Member of Her Majesty's Government that the rolling stock on the South Eastern Region, which is between 35 and 45 years old—older than my noble friend—would be replaced? How can a decision be taken on a commercial basis that does not replace such old rolling stock, which is causing the Eurostar to be held up and many passengers to doubt the safety?
Viscount Goschen: My Lords, any comments made on the matter by my honourable and right honourable friends were made in good faith and based on the then commercial case. It is for BR to make a decision. The
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carriages are old but they are well and safely maintained. BR will make a decision about when it needs a rolling stock.
Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, is the Minister aware that according to his judgment the carriages appear to resemble many of us in this House; old yet reliable? In his view of transport policy generally, what importance does he place on the unreliability and the inconvenience caused to so many passengers? Does he believe that those are important issues which should be taken into account? Does he agree with the view expressed by his honourable friend in another place, the Member for Ryedale, that to allow these works to close —that is what is at stake—would be the most perverse crime that the Government could commit against the people of York? Does the Minister have any sympathy with that point of view?
Viscount Goschen: My Lords, yes, I have sympathy with those who work in ABB and those who manage the plant. They have produced good rolling stock which has served the railways of this country. But I also recognise that BR, in making its commercial decisions, must weigh up the costs and benefits of new stock as against continuing the maintenance of its existing stock. BR has decided that the existing stock requires replacement in 1999.
Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, does the Minister suggest that the clammy hand of the Treasury had nothing to do with the decision? Is it correct that behind the mysterious talk about a commercial case, which appeared not to have influenced Ministers in the assertions that they made repeatedly last year, being convinced by the commercial case, the issue needs to be properly cleared up?
Viscount Goschen: My Lords, I cannot make the issue clearer. Our view is that which I have expressed. It was a commercial decision for BR and the question of revenue, as raised by the noble Lord, was not a reason for the decision.

UK World Interests: Study
2.48 p.m.
Lord Kennetasked Her Majesty's Government:
How they propose to carry forward the review of Britain's place in the world which they began at a recent meeting at Chequers.
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, at Chequers on 13th January, Ministers took a comprehensive look at the United Kingdom's interests in the world and how to make the best use of our assets to pursue them. We will continue to study how best to identify and expand the use of these assets.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, since we appear to have 19 minutes left for Question Time, would the Minister care to expand on that Answer? As a result of the announcement of the Chequers meeting, one gained the strong impression that the study was to be a continuing one, not merely that the Government would keep an eye

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on our future in the world. The impression was given that they would continue the study and perhaps one day finish it and make a statement.
Is it the Government's intention that the study should be carried out in-house by the usual combination of Ministers and senior civil servants, or will they consider going further afield and bringing in people from universities and other institutions who are skilled in considering such matters? Will they even—dare I suggest—include Members of both Houses of Parliament, possibly not confined to members of their party?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, sketches a very broad canvas. It is appropriate to begin by explaining that the meeting on 13th January was convened as a meeting of a relatively small number of senior people to conduct a kind of brain-storming session. From time to time it is appropriate for senior Ministers and officials to get together to try to see the way forward. In this instance, the focus was on the rest of the world other than western Europe, which seems to generate so much debate currently.
It was an informal meeting and it is intended to follow up a number of the points raised. That work runs in parallel with the wider, ongoing process of consultation and listening which the Government do in that regard. Noble Lords will not need me to explain to them that a great deal of valuable expertise and information, bearing in mind our trade interests in the wide world, is to be found outside the realms of government. It may be of interest to noble Lords to know that the 75th anniversary celebrations at Chatham House are to be celebrated with a major conference on that theme on 29th March at which, I understand, there will be widespread representation.
Lord Barnett: My Lords, will the Minister tell us who were the Ministers with brains at that brain-storming meeting at Chequers? Did they discuss the Government's policy—I assume that it is still the Government's policy—that we should be at the heart of Europe?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, I assure the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, that all the Ministers in the Government have brains. I am afraid that I do not have the details of all those who were in attendance at the meeting at Chequers. I understand that there were present a number of the most senior members of the Government. Noble Lords may recall that I said that the meeting did not focus on the problems of western Europe. Having said that, it is the Government's policy now, as it has been, and will be in the future, to be at the heart of Europe.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: My Lords, will my noble friend elucidate what exactly is meant by the English word "brain-storming" when applied to meetings and how does it differ from meetings which are not brain-storming?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, my noble and learned friend puts me in considerable difficulty because I was not present at the meeting in question. I am merely advised that it was a brain-storming session. As I
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understand it, the aim was to have a wide-ranging, informal discussion, if necessary canvassing radical ideas, to investigate all the options in an informal atmosphere and to see how we can advance Britain's policies to everybody's advantage.
Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, is the Minister aware that a committee of reflection has been set up to consider the inter-governmental conference to be held in 1996 associated with the Council of Ministers? I understand from the newspapers that the Foreign Secretary is to chair a Cabinet committee on the same subject. Given the importance of the IGC for the future of this country and its role in Europe, and given the divisions in both major parties in the country, is any provision likely to be made for widening the consultation? Following on from the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, is there any possibility that the Opposition parties and, more widely, the general public could be invited into discussion on those issues as is happening now in the Netherlands and Germany? As another strong democracy, surely we should be able to do that here.
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, as the noble Baroness knows, there is a committee of this House which looks very carefully into matters relating to all things European. Clearly, there will be widespread debate both in this House and in another place in the run-up to the IGC. In addition, unless something extraordinary happens in relation to the temper of the media, there will be an enormous amount of debate about the subject in that department too. Bearing in mind the fact that the members of the British public never seem to be backward in coming forward in letting their elected representatives know their views on those matters, I feel confident that by the time the IGC takes place, the issues will have been widely and comprehensively canvassed throughout the land. Those taking the decisions at that time will be well aware of what is public opinion in that respect.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, does the Minister not agree that that period of discussion will be extremely important? As he said, the whole future of Europe will be affected by the inter-governmental conference. We shall be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. That should not be merely a celebration; it should also provoke a thinking session as to how we fulfil our role within the UN. Will the Minister put forward to his right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary the idea that there should be a continuing discussion? That may take the form of a debate in this House or a Select Committee. However, does the Minister not agree that this is the time at which we should think extremely carefully about the role of Britain in the world?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, I agree. It is very much for that reason that the Prime Minister convened the meeting on 13th January. Inevitably, there will be very wide-ranging debate. In this House, that is a matter for the usual channels. As I said, I feel confident that both here and in another place there will be plenty of

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discussion about the matter. It is a characteristic of a free country that there is free debate about all matters political.
Lord Pym: My Lords, does my noble friend not agree that one of our most valuable national assets is the English language, which is gradually becoming the language of the world? Although we already invest a certain amount in it, does he not agree that further investment in the spread of our language would show a very handsome return and would be of genuine benefit to our country?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, my noble friend is absolutely right about the value of the English language and its widespread use throughout the globe to the benefit of all those who use it. That was one of the matters considered at the meeting at Chequers on 13th January.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, do the noble Lord and the Government agree that one of our most urgent tasks is to prevent war and genocide in Europe?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, is absolutely correct. That was the reasoning behind the recent speech made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Defence in attempting to further the Government's thinking in relation to that.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, will the Government consider discussing this vitally important matter with the Confederation of British Industry, the TUC, and UNISON, which represents a great many doctors and nurses from different specialties? Those three great organisations could contribute a great deal to the Government's policies. The Government should welcome the views of all important organisations, as well as the views of both Houses of Parliament.
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, I feel confident the Government will take seriously any views which they consider contribute positively and constructively to the debate.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, will my noble friend tell us on what day of the week the meeting was held?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, I believe that my noble friend has noticed that the meeting was held on Friday, 13th January.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, I confirm my personal willingness to take part in the intellectual turbulence which appears to have descended over Chequers. Are the Government aware that one of the roles of the United Kingdom in the world is to lead it, as it has done so often during the past two centuries? Will the Government address themselves to the leadership of the nation by getting to the heart of the nation? That will avoid the necessity for periodic genuflection towards everything that comes from Brussels.
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, as your Lordships know, the British Government do not genuflect in a servile way to anyone.
Lord Marlesford: My Lords, can my noble friend say whether the Chatham House conference to be held on 29th March depends upon the success of the Foreign Office in raising contributions to finance it from business? If so, what success has been achieved so far? I gather that the Prime Minister and the shadow Foreign Secretary have been booked to speak at the conference.
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, my noble friend is correct. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister and the shadow Foreign Secretary have been booked to speak at the conference. I understand that it is scheduled to take place on 29th March.
Lord Monkswell: My Lords, will the Government reflect on their policy of placing Britain in the heart of Europe? According to my understanding of geography, that would put us somewhere about the position of Switzerland and would prevent us from using our maritime links to trade with the rest of the world. Bearing in mind the fact that the Government have presided over a rundown in our merchant marine sector over the past 10 or 15 years, can the Minister explain what action the Government propose to take to ensure, first, that we are not placed in the heart of Europe and, secondly, that we can see an expansion and development of our merchant navy?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, as I explained earlier, the Government's policy has been, is, and will continue to be, that we should be at the heart of Europe. We do not concede that there is any incompatibility with that and being a trading nation all around the world.
Lord Elton: My Lords, when there are only three Questions on the Order Paper, is it really necessary to go on flogging a dead horse to complete the full half hour?
Noble Lords: Next Question!
Lord Judd: My Lords, can the Minister confirm that central to the Government's foreign policy is continued, permanent membership of the Security Council? Further, will the Minister agree that permanent membership of that council faces us with immense responsibilities of global leadership? In that context, can the Minister explain why the Government went along with the cancellation of the planned special Security Council meeting in January to discuss the pressures on the UN system at present and the desperate need for regeneration and revitalisation of that organisation? Can the Minister assure the House that, in the Government's preoccupations, central to their thinking is the need for a pro-active foreign policy rather than a reactive foreign policy and the importance, above all, of greater emphasis on conflict resolution and pre-emptive diplomacy?
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, I can confirm that the noble Lord is correct. It is central to our foreign policy to remain a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. We are fully conscious of the responsibilities that rest on our shoulders as a result. I

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am afraid that I am not in a position to answer the specific point raised by the noble Lord, but I shall write to him with the answer.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord on the relaxed and constructive way in which he has handled this lengthy Question. I hope that he will draw the matter to the attention of his right honourable friend and point out that certain parts of the debate were quite a live horse.
Lord Inglewood: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his kind comments. I shall certainly pass on that message.

Pensions Bill [H.L.]
3.3 p.m.
The Minister of State, Department of Social Security (Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That it be an Instruction to the Committee of the Whole House to whom the Pensions Bill [H.L.] has been committed that they consider the Bill in the following order:

Clause 1,

Schedule 1,

Clauses 2 to 13,

Clauses 86 to 99,

Clauses 14 to 71,

Schedule 2,

Clauses 72 to 85,

Clauses 100 to 110,

Schedule 3,

Clauses 111 to 114,

Schedule 4,

Clauses 115 to 130,

Schedule 5,

Clauses 131 to 145,

Schedule 6,

Clauses 146 to 150,

Schedule 7,

Clauses 151 to 154—(Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish).
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Combating Juvenile Delinquency
3.4 p.m.
Lord Northbournerose to call attention to the case for addressing the problems of juvenile crime, delinquency and truanting by making available co-ordinated education and support for young parents, and prospective parents; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I hope to convince your Lordships this afternoon that crime and unemployment, major scourges of our society, could both be substantially reduced if every child received the kind of "good enough" parenting which it needs and
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to which it is entitled. Professor Donald West, who is professor of criminology at Cambridge University, speaking recently at a seminar concluded:
"There is a vital link between the emotional well-being of children and the rising tide of juvenile crime".
In his well-known study, Crime and the Family, published in 1993 by the Family Policy Studies Centre, David Utting came to the same conclusion: there is a link between crime and early experience in the family. Helena Kennedy QC, a leading barrister dealing with children's cases, recently said:
"We spend £1,500 million each year locking people up in prison, which is usually at the end of a process which starts with problems in childhood. A relatively small investment in family support, and mental health services for children, would revolutionise the Criminal Justice System."
For the past quarter of a century, recorded crime figures in England and Wales have risen on average by around 5 per cent. per year. Violent crime is on the increase. Much of that criminal activity is by young people. Almost half of all male offenders known to the police are under 21, and 20 per cent. are under 17.
I believe that your Lordships will agree that unemployment is one of the most important predisposing causes of crime. Particularly for men, unemployment leads not only to poverty but also to humiliation. In this country today we have 2.4 million people unemployed, of whom 1.8 million are men.
In today's global market low skills mean low wages or unemployment. Today, education and training are more important than they have ever been. Yet some of this country's children are not getting the education that they need. We know that some schools are not as good as they should be, but there is a much more important reason; namely, that some children arrive at school without the emotional and social skills which they need to settle down and to learn.
There is a specific set of social and emotional characteristics which are essential for a child when he or she starts school. These have been called by American workers,
"the emotional foundations of school readiness".
It seems that those first days at primary school may well be the most important days in a child's life. During those days he either discovers that he is able to get on with other children—to become part of the group, can settle down to work and relate to teachers—or he discovers that he cannot cope with relationships with other children, he does not trust the teachers, he does not accept that there are boundaries to reasonable behaviour, and he is bored by work which he cannot understand. Such children reject school. They switch off and refuse to try to learn and they usually become disruptive. Later, they turn to truanting. Last year, 12 per cent. of all school children in primary and secondary schools in this country truanted for 12 or more half days in the year.
In that context, the importance of pre-school education was recognised by the National Commission on Education chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Walton of Detchant, who, unfortunately, cannot be in his place today due to an appointment in the north country. The Government have also recognised the importance of

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pre-school education and have committed themselves to making it available to every child over four years of age. It is indeed true that pre-school education can help some children, but often, by the time a child gets to four years old, self-defeating attitudes and social rejection are already ingrained. Problems of emotional disturbance and failure to settle down in school have been shown to be caused by early childhood experience. The roots of the problem go back to the child's life in the family before he goes to school.
Recent research suggests that children seek to make sense of their environment even in the first months of their life. It is then that they first find their efforts encouraged—or not. It is then that they first conclude that the world seems organised and reasonably predictable—or not. It is then that they first learn that adults near to them are basically supportive—or not. Through simple, everyday actions, children learn very clearly whether their needs are important to their parents, whether their effort is supported, whether promises will be kept and whether they are loved. It is in the first three years of life that the foundations for later learning are laid down. Hence the enormous importance of parenting.
So why are some parents failing to give their children the kind of support in the early years that they need? In July last year the all-party parliamentary group for parenting, of which some of your Lordships are members, and the body representing the International Year of the Family jointly held four parliamentary hearings in another place. Some of the conclusions of those hearings are interesting in this context. One was that there is no such thing as a perfect parent. We can all subscribe to that. What children need is simply "good enough" parenting.
Another point which was made was that nearly all parents want to be good parents when they start out. But many, when they start out, have no idea of the difficulties and sacrifices involved. Stress is a major cause of inadequate parenting. Stress may be caused by the breakdown of family relationships or by external factors such as unemployment, poverty, debt, alcohol, violence and so forth. Young lone parents are of course particularly vulnerable. Loneliness and lack of self-confidence are common causes of inadequate parenting. All parents need help at some time. Do not we all know that? Traditional mechanisms in society today—such as grandparents, the extended family and so forth—are not always in place. We have to create a society in which it is realised that there is no shame in asking for help.
I believe that it is not helpful to blame inexperienced parents, especially when they are trying to do their best. What they need is help. With just a little help a vastly greater number of parents could be "good enough" parents. The good news is that it is possible to help parents. We know this because it is being done successfully across the country, here and there, by voluntary organisations and by some local authorities.
I decided to become involved in the issue of parenting in October 1993 and since then I have been contacted by over 140 different voluntary bodies working in this
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field. In addition there are the local authorities. Much excellent work is being done, but it needs to be greatly extended and to be put on a more permanent, secure and nationwide footing. Examples of the kind of things that are being done to support parents include home visiting by such organisations as Home-Start, and by trained volunteers; family centres and parent and toddler groups, such as those sponsored by the National Children's Homes, Barnardo's, the NSPCC and many local authorities; playgroups, in which the outstanding parent organisation is the Pre-School Playgroups Association, and telephone help-lines such as Parentline, Parentlink, Exploring Parenthood and others.
In addition to support, or perhaps prior to support, young people need preparation for parenthood. Education about relationships and life skills should be taught in primary and secondary schools. Relationship education helps children prepare for their future relationships and it can help to break the cycle of unhappy relationships in families which can otherwise be passed on from generation to generation. That cycle of deprivation was identified by the late Lord Joseph more than a decade ago. Relate has been working in the field of relationship education.
Family friendly employment practices can help. The Midland Bank is an enlightened employer in this respect. It has realised that it is easier to recruit and retain good employees if employment patterns are adjusted to reduce the stress which is caused when a good employee also wants to be a good parent. There are other ways to help parents on which I should like to spend time, but I think that time forbids that. I hope that some of those issues will be touched on by other speakers. They include such things as the structure of families in our society today; single teenage mothers; the role of unemployed fathers and of course the tax and benefit system.
Finally, I wish to draw your Lordships' attention to the enormous savings to the Exchequer and to the taxpayer, and the enormous savings in human terms through the avoidance of wasted lives, which could be achieved if we could reduce the number of children who are damaged in their early life by not receiving the "good enough" parenting that they need. In 1991–92 public expenditure for criminal justice was nearly £3,000 million. In the same year the value of goods stolen was £3,500 million pounds. The cost of keeping a child in a secure training centre will be between £100,000 and £150,000 a year. The cost of residential care is around £35,000 a year. The cost of fostering is between £13,000 and £15,000 a year. Contrast that with the cost of putting a Home-Start volunteer into a child's home. That is about £150 a year. The cost of a place in a pre-school playgroup is about £280 per year. It does not need a high success rate to make parent support a good investment:
Supporting vulnerable children by supporting their parents does not cost a lot of money. It has been proved to be successful. Compared to the cost of prison services or the cost of unemployment, it is an incredibly good investment, so why is it not happening? Could it be that the financial pressure on each of the three great spending departments—the Home Office, education and

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health—is so great that they are playing "pass the parcel"? Everyone is fumbling in his pocket and no one wants to pick up the bill. Surely a government who are prepared to spend so much on police and prisons should be prepared to invest just a little on crime prevention. Surely a government who are prepared to spend so much on education would be wise to spend a tiny proportion on reducing disruption in class and on the remedial teaching which is needed. Surely a government who are prepared to spend so much on physical health should be prepared to spend just a little on the emotional health of children.
If money is short, do not spend the money on research, do not spend it on experimental projects; spend it on extending existing good practice which has been proved to work. Spend it on supporting and extending projects which have been proved to be successful. Let us invest in success. Is there any other single investment which could produce such a gigantic dividend in financial and human terms? My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.17 p.m.
Lord Elton: My Lords, first of all I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for bringing this important matter before your Lordships' House. In 1988 the Government appointed a committee to inquire into discipline in schools. The committee was given very wide terms of reference. I chaired it. It reported in January 1989. The fifth chapter of the report dealt with the role of parents and the importance of "socially responsible parenting". I have little time to apologise for or expand on that educationally acceptable phrase in this timed debate.
Good parenting is, of course, both firm and loving. Those who are familiar with their Bibles have no difficulty with this combination. In my experience it is children who have been starved of love and affection who both have the greatest difficulty and cause the greatest difficulty. They it is who most predictably cause serious disruption in school and become the truants, delinquents and, later, the criminals who are the subject of this debate. Those starved of firm direction follow close behind. Those starved of both have the worst handicap and, as adults, pose—let us not forget—the greatest threat to society, as the noble Lord has pointed out. All have been denied what commentators call socially responsible parenting.
We recognised that school age parenthood was a rare but growing phenomenon; that it was a result, very often, of inadequate parenting in the deprived family of the child mother; and that it would inevitably be repeated in the next generation unless the cycle could be broken. It is a very rapid cycle. The children of school age pregnancies themselves become schoolchildren, and school problems, within a matter of five years. We saw that schools are in a uniquely important place in that cycle, but that they can only contribute to breaking it. They cannot break it on their own. They must be encouraged to make their contribution and others must also contribute.
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Accordingly, one of our recommendations was that:
"the Secretaries of State should ensure that education for parenthood is fully covered as a cross-curricular theme in the National Curriculum".
We made it with diffidence, given the difficulty of teaching the subject appropriately in school. But it was necessary in part because our next, and more important, recommendation would take time to implement. This was that:
"the Government should implement a post-school education strategy aimed at promoting socially responsible parenthood"—
the subject of this debate.
I believe that Her Majesty's Government accepted that recommendation, as they accepted all but two of our many recommendations. Can my noble friend tell your Lordships' House, now that the children born to school-age mothers in that January have themselves been in school for up to a year, what steps they have taken to develop that strategy, what the strategy is, and how it is working? If not, what have they put in its place?
3.20 p.m.
The Viscount of Falkland: My Lords, most of us will want to thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for introducing the debate, and will sympathise with him for having a debate in which there is such a limited time to speak.
I should like to launch straight into what most of us would agree are the ideal standards in society and the framework within which to bring up children. We would like to see strong civic standards and strong institutions, which make for a happy and productive community. I believe that few noble Lords will disagree that many of those characteristics in our society have been subject to deterioration over a long time. I do not wish to lay blame for that at the feet of any particular government. It is one of the facts of life.
Within that sad state of affairs we have seen, particularly in deprived areas, children being born into a life in which there is little chance of love and affection, as the noble Lord, Lord Elton, said, and with the ensuing lack of the trust and confidence in others which is so necessary in bringing up children.
Examples are very important for children at an early stage. Television must bear some responsibility. If children do not have a family environment in which good examples are set they will turn to bad examples, whether those are violent television programmes or a delinquent brother who may well be stealing motor vehicles, and so on.
Truanting inevitably leads to the possibility of crime. Most of us have been tempted by truancy at one time or another, but we have not all become criminals.
Noble Lords who have heard me speak on previous occasions will know that I am enormously keen on the provision of pre-school places. I believe that before the age of five, when children enter formal schooling, they need engagement with other children, preferably with their mothers. This morning I went to the very encouraging launch of a reshaped organisation called the Pre-School Learning Alliance—formerly the Pre-School

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Playgroups Association—which is attempting to do just that. Through its pre-schools throughout the country the association now has nearly 1 million children under its umbrella. Another 350,000 are on its waiting list. It needs money and funding, and I hope that the Government will take note of that fact. I know that they are already taking note, but I stress that it is a priority. If parents are failed by society then they in turn will fail their children, with all the disastrous results that we have seen.
3.23 p.m.
The Earl of Longford: My Lords, by the iron rules of the House we are condemned to a symphony of sound bites, but in the few moments available I shall pay my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and those who have supported him so eloquently.
The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has brought before us a subject which has been neglected for far too long. I speak as one who, like other noble Lords, has been involved with youth work in one way or another over many years and has written and spoken about the subject. I published a book on young offenders in 1993.
Most of us who have talked and written about the subject have not said much about parents. Today I shall quote briefly in the time available some of the views of a remarkable woman called Shirl Marshall who has founded a society called Aftermath, which deals with the problems of parents of offenders. She has been in close touch with the parents of the two boys aged 10 and 11 who murdered a little baby aged two. Therefore she knows what she is talking about. She has been concerned not only with juveniles but also with adults. Today I refer to her views on juveniles and particularly the parents of those who have committed such grave crimes. I am a patron of Aftermath, but I am unpaid so I do not think that I need to declare an interest.
The first point I wish to raise is the terrible distress and agony of parents whose children have committed grave crimes. They ask themselves the everlasting question: "Where did I go wrong?". When it is brought home to them what has happened the parents undergo a terrible shock. They begin to recognise some of the damage in their own personalities, which they may have inherited. They are often themselves damaged personalities.
Those who counsel the parents have to ask how they can help those parents to help the young offenders. The short answer is that they have to understand and come to terms with their own damaged personalities to avoid that damage being passed on to their children.
That is not the whole of wisdom, but the information comes from someone who is in daily touch with the parents of children who have done these terrible things.
Baroness Warnock: My Lords, I should like to thank my noble friend—
Noble Lords: Order!
3.26 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, many of us are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne for bringing this subject, which is of such crucial importance, to the attention of the House.
There are many excellent organisations working in this field. I shall not list all 140 of them, being conscious of the text used by a former Member of this House—sadly recently deceased—when he became vicar of Great St. Mary's, Cambridge:
"If you must bore men, well and good; but must you bore your God also?".
I shall therefore mention a few.
One nationally-known organisation is Homestart. Its research on 500 families showed that 82 per cent. of the parents had themselves suffered childhood trauma and, not surprisingly, 45 per cent. of them had poor parenting skills. That brings out a vital point. A theme which runs through the Old Testament is that the iniquity of the fathers will be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. Alas, that it is all too true. Childhood trauma leads to childhood trauma; poor parenting breeds poor parenting. But the good news is that that vicious succession can be broken by skilled help. Parents who experienced poor parenting can nevertheless be helped to overcome that legacy and develop parenting skills themselves.
Another body that does crucial work is the Family Nurturing Network in Oxford. It aims to prevent and reduce physical and emotional abuse by running programmes for groups of families where positive nurturing and parenting skills are learnt. Trained volunteers work with the children at the same time as skilled professionals work with their parents. Short-term evaluation clearly indicates the value of the programme. Children are able to concentrate at school, make friends and develop an increased sense of personal and social responsibility. Parents find ways of managing and avoiding difficult situations and having fun with their children.
There are also organisations such as the Parent and Family Education Unit at the City Literary Institute, which recognises that successful raising of children today depends upon partnership between parents and schools. There are, of course, many other organisations which other Members of the House may mention, such as Parentline, the Family Caring Trust and so on. The point about all this work is that it has very direct results in reducing juvenile crime, and does so in a cost effective way. It is particularly needed in this country.
A recent Euro barometer study found that UK respondents were less likely to see "bringing up and educating children" as the most important purpose of the family—less than one in four did so, compared with about six in 10 Portuguese, Greek, Italian, French and Spanish respondents. That work is cost effective; it is desperately needed and it works.
3.30 p.m.
Baroness Warnock: My Lords, I must apologise to the House for being so keen not to waste time that I

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spoke out of turn and nearly cut out the speech of the right reverend Prelate. I am grateful, as are other noble Lords, to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for introducing the topic.
There are things that can be done. Although the motives for schoolgirl pregnancies are dubious, they are not all bad. Many young, single mothers have been longing to have some object of affection, and to be the unquestioned object of affection of their baby. Therefore they are willing and anxious to help their babies. However, they are totally ignorant about what happens when a baby stops being a baby who can be lumped about, and starts being a person in his or her own right, talking and having a will of his or her own. At that stage the ignorance and lack of experience from their own childhood makes it quite impossible for very young, single mothers to give the child the emotional stability that he or she needs.
We have heard about numbers of small activities in local areas which seek to remedy that situation by educating young parents. I believe that that is the way forward. I have seen some incredibly good and fruitful work undertaken in one of the worst areas just outside Birmingham, where 80 per cent. of members of a block of flats were single mothers. The local GP's wife, all by herself, brought together a group of parents and children. She began to educate the parents, the children went on to nursery school, they increased their vocabulary and began to understand about communication.
I believe that such communication is at the heart of what I call abuse of children; namely, that no adult person talks to those children. They develop no notion of the fact that grown-ups can be on their side, can help them and can be people with whom they communicate. Many children arrive at school or pre-school activities with a vocabulary of about five words, most of those expletives. To start with such a background makes the task incredibly difficult for teachers. But for the children to have gained experience of communication and affection before that age is of enormous importance.
Another medium which is under-exploited is that of radio. I refer to programmes to which mothers and children can listen together from which education may be gained by stealth. They lead to common shared enjoyment and shared moral values. It is an area in which new charities are emerging. Applications have been made to the Department for Education for help. What is needed is not vast sums of money, but seed money, supportive money, for those small local groups.
That brings me to the melancholy part of what I have to say: that such support from Government entails collaboration between different government departments. It entails the Department for Education, the Department of Health, the Home Office and the social services actively working together. Having said that, your Lordships may well think, "The whole thing is hopeless". Over and again, efforts at collaboration have been defeated, generally by small, technical disagreements between different departments. I conclude by beseeching the Government and Ministers to find ways of saying that such collaboration can be
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achieved, but not by saying, "That must go to that department, and that is contrary to the other department's policy". Please let us have collaboration.
3.34 p.m.
Viscount Caldecote: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, 50 per cent. of those found guilty of criminal offences are under 21. Therefore clearly we must spend a far higher proportion of our resources on crime prevention in particular among children where criminal tendencies often originate. All too often good home influences are lacking; there may be no home. Teachers are hard pressed. They have little time or perhaps aptitude to deal with the problems of individual children.
A charity called School's Outreach has shown what can be done by careful, dedicated work. School's Outreach sends highly trained counsellors into schools at the invitation of headteachers. The counsellors develop close personal relationships with disturbed children and have shown that in many cases problems can be resolved. The children are more prepared to confide in an external counsellor than in staff.
School's Outreach is a proven success but on a small scale, limited by financial resources. One headteacher reported on the major success of having a School's Outreach counsellor. In the year before the counsellor was appointed, there were 50 exclusions. In the two years following the appointment, the number fell to four. Similarly, in the two years before appointment, staff turnover was 90 per cent. In the two following years there were no staff changes. Parent/school relationships and attendance both showed marked improvement. There was major progress in dealing with bullying and resolving conflicts among the children.
That shows that School's Outreach does wonderful work. It is a valuable investment in our children's future in every sense of the word. However, the charity is limited in what it can do by financial resources. Some noble Lords who are interested in School's Outreach have sought on a number of occasions to obtain financial support from the Department for Education, and indeed from the Home Office which would find it a good investment in reducing costs of criminal activities later in life. The Department for Education and local authorities to whom we have been referred plead that there is no money available. I implore Her Majesty's Government to look again at the problem. The money invested in an organisation such as School's Outreach would have a quick payback in reducing crime and the huge costs associated with it and, of course, in enhancing our children's personal future.
3.37 p.m.
Lord Murray of Epping Forest: My Lords, like charity, good parenting should begin at home, but too often it does not. When I first began to visit family centres run by the National Children's Home to which the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, referred—we are all indebted to him—I was astonished and appalled to find young mothers literally being taught how to play with their children instead of sticking the child, strapped in a

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high chair, in front of the telly. They were being taught also such advanced culinary arts as how to boil an egg and how to cook mince.
We all have an interest in helping inadequate parents avoid transmitting their own inadequacy at compound interest to succeeding generations. In declaring my own interest, I shall concentrate briefly on what NCH Action for Children is doing through the operation of more than 100 family centres. The form of provision ranges widely. At one end there are drop-in centres which provide play facilities, a toy library, and perhaps a crèche—a place where mothers can sit down for much needed company and a good gossip, and where they can receive advice on benefits and housing. At the other end there are highly structured projects undertaking intensive and highly skilled therapeutic work with deeply disturbed parents and children. To parents, such centres offer help and hope.
The objective is always to build on such strengths as families have and to improve parenting skills in child care, budgeting and healthy diet, and to provide counselling. Family centres help parents to identify their own needs and to find solutions to their problems. Running through all their work is the building of self reliance and independence and helping families to solve their difficulties together and to stay together.
The voluntary organisations, such as NCH Action for Children, can lead the way, but what they can do by way of provision is limited. Their needs are still growing at a time when the social services budgets from which local authorities, in partnership with such agencies as NCH, can meet those needs are being cut. As we have heard so often, manifestly, prevention is better than cure. As the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, emphasised, care about people, building and rebuilding family structures, and strengthening the very fabric of our society—all provide an unanswerable case for putting more public resources into family support.
3.40 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Ripon: My Lords, I wish to join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for introducing the debate. I should like to endorse enthusiastically the remarks that he made during his introductory speech and to accept his invitation to speak on particular projects.
I chair a project set in Leeds known as Leeds Education 2000; it is part of a national initiative which has its emphasis on learning in the community. Leeds Education 2000 works with a pyramid of schools in the inner city part of Leeds where there is a high proportion of both ethnic minorities and single parents. Four nurseries in this area decided that they would like to set up a pilot project to help parents in supporting their children's learning and development in the first three years of life. So the Home Early Learning Partnership was launched, funded by private business, by the Leeds Tech and by the local city action team, in order to provide time for home visits. That, I think, is the key to this particular initiative. People actually visit the homes of parents. It also provides training for staff, play
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equipment for toy libraries, support by educational psychologists and, not least, the monitoring and evaluation which is necessary for such a project.
All the indications are that this initiative has been warmly welcomed. Many parents, particularly young parents, are beginning to realise that learning is something that takes place in all kinds of settings and that such activities as involving your children in sorting the laundry, playing with pots and pans, and trips to the shops are learning opportunities. Children can learn enormously if their parents take the time to be with them. One teacher said: "Children need a running commentary on everyday happenings". As children gain the confidence to learn, so parents also gain confidence. One of the spin-offs of such a project, as has already been mentioned, is that parents themselves discover their own skills and their own possibilities. Already in that part of Leeds parents are beginning to realise that they can work in schools; some of them go on to do NVQs. So far as the children are concerned, the benefits can already be seen in the nurseries: children settle into nursery more quickly and are more easily able to relate and to learn.
I looked carefully through the evaluation which was mounted by Leeds Metropolitan University. It outlined in good academic terms a number of positive contributions. It finished with what seemed to me a marvellous comment that there is a warm glow from having succeeded in developing something so worth while. I hope that the fact that the experience is shared in your Lordships' House this afternoon will be noted not only by the Government but by all those involved in education.
3.43 p.m.
Lord Acton: My Lords, at the Jesuit school which I attended as a boy we learnt the old Jesuit maxim:
"Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards".
Modern research points to the same conclusion. The first few years play a huge part in deciding the direction of a child's life. In America in 1992, the non-profit organisation Zero-to-Three published a report, backed by voluminous research, entitled Heart Start. This report stresses that a child's performance at school depends on characteristics largely formed by the age of three, and that children neglected by their parents in their early years are the poorest performers at school. Drug use and delinquency all too often follow.
Heart Start recommends education for parents in infant development and the expansion of family support programmes to provide parents with the skills and help they need to bring up their children. The report emphasises some great successes. A programme in Syracuse, New York state, gave child care and family support over the first five years of low-income children's lives. Ten years later, the children —especially the girls—were doing far better at school than a similar group who had not been in the programme. As young adolescents, the boys had committed a quarter of the crimes of the non-programme boys and their offences were far less serious.

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Another American success story has been the High/Scope Perry pre-school project for disadvantaged children in Michigan. When the children reached the age of 27, researchers calculated that every dollar invested in High/Scope saved seven dollars 13 cents in the costs of criminal justice, welfare and so on.
Government help for such children in Britain must be a wonderful investment. What is needed is an increase in assistance for agencies working in this field. A potential source of funds is the £30 million a year for three years which the Government mean to spend on the new secure training centres for 12 to 14 year-old persistent offenders. Five secure training centres with 40 places in each are planned. The total of 200 places appears to have been arrived at completely arbitrarily. I suggest that the Government take a fresh and imaginative decision: they should reduce the number of secure training centres to four and the number of places to 160, thereby releasing £6 million a year; use even a part of that money to divert children at risk from becoming criminals; back programmes along the lines proposed by Heart Start; properly fund organisations like Relate, Home/Start and other agencies. If the Government have the will, so much can be done to reduce juvenile delinquency and crime. Let the Government invest wisely in the children of this country.
3.47 p.m.
Baroness Faithfull: My Lords, yesterday I attended a day conference run jointly by the Rural Development Commission, Kids Club Network, the National Council for Child Care Voluntary Organisations and the Association of County Councils. Figures were given that in 1984 there were 9.6 million women working; by 1993, that figure had risen to 11 million. Therefore, we must consider how the children of women working can be cared for at a rate which those women can afford to pay.
Like the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, and the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, I attended the Pre-School Learning Alliance which used to be the Pre-School Playgroup Movement. It was announced this morning that there are 350,000 under-fives waiting for a place in playgroups.
Very good work is being done by Dr. Gillian Pugh of the early childhood unit of the National Children's Bureau, and, of course, by the Association of Directors of Social Services. Dr. Pugh heads a forum for the under-fives. I plead with her that the forum should consider the needs of parents, for the troubles, happiness, joys and sorrows of parents are reflected in the children. Research by the Rowntree Trust and at the Maudsley Hospital reveals that children very soon, even within a day, reflect the problems of the parents. Therefore, I suggest that while, of course, we must look after the children, we should concentrate on helping the parents. I believe that that would do much to diminish many of our problems.
I wish to make a plea for departments to work together. At the moment there is a different ethos and a different way of looking at childcare and of implementing childcare policies among different departments. The Department for Education has the
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figures—I have asked but have been unable to get them—for children excluded from school and children not attending school. A small boy said to me the other day, "Miss, if you want to do a job, get yourself excluded from school". "How do you do that?" I asked. I shall not tell noble Lords what he told me, but he got himself excluded from school for two years and is still not in school.
The Department of Health has a broad and caring outlook on children but one completely at variance with that of the Home Office. There is then the separate question of housing and the environment. In fact, seven departments are involved in meeting the needs of children and families. I suggest that there should be a committee of civil servants from those departments. They agree that there is a committee; but they do not listen to one another. I suggest that the committee should have a chairman who is objective and outside all the departments but who will see that the departments work together and have the same policies so that parents and those of us who work for children know where we are going.
3.51 p.m.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: My Lords, getting married is looked upon as a very happy day. But unfortunately many, many marriages break down quite soon after they are made. We find parents in conflict with one another, and on some occasions in violent conflict. That violence automatically has an effect on the children in the family.
I work alongside the NSPCC in the Midlands and the Birmingham City Council education committee. They are currently working together on a combined teaching programme in schools to make children understand that that is not the whole of life. Learning about violence in the home automatically translates in school into crime and bullying. The NSPCC, which knows many of the families that are on the register, working alongside the teachers is creating a better-informed child; one who sees that life can be better than what he or she has previously suffered.
I should like to mention a special scheme with which I am involved—the St. Basil's scheme for the young homeless. For 16 to 20 year-olds, over the past 12 months, we have put forward the St. Basil's supported lodgings scheme. At the present moment we have over 50 landladies and husband-and-wife teams registered with the scheme, offering accommodation to young people after they have been carefully vetted to make sure that they will not cause problems in those families. They are then accepted into the families. So young people are being matched with landladies and landlords to ensure compatibility, and there is support from the very outset.
The scheme is cost-effective and is also beneficial in many cases to those who act as foster parents (if that is what we want to call them; they do not want that name). It also means that the private sector therefore works with a charity. In the long run it provides a supportive environment for many young people who are as old as 16 or 18 and have never known a family life. The

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scheme helps to mould their attitudes to self and society. We hope that it will be beneficial to them and to their children.
3.54 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, the only advice that was given to me when I became a bishop was, "If it moves, bless it". I am not sure that I had much more advice when I became a parent. Like most people of our generation, my wife and I just got on with it and were helped often by members of our family.
But things have changed across the generations since then. We know that there has been a breakdown in the structure of family life. There are so many people for whom there is no communication within the family between youngsters and parents. There are the influences that have invaded the home and almost removed normal conversation from many homes, which is a tragedy. There are few good role models. Things have changed radically; and many parents today cannot keep pace with the way in which their youngsters think, since the thinking of a generation alters so fast. That is the background.
It is remarkable—and it has been said more than once today—that in our country there are 140 organisations that address the question of parenting, when a large number of people in this country do not even know that it is a problem. It is a tremendous tribute to our nation that so much voluntary work has gone into seeing this as a problem and aiming to meet it. I am thrilled about that. We have heard mentioned organisations such as the Family Care Trust; Relate; Flame; the Mothers' Union; and Care. Imaginative things are going on. Care, for instance, has a huge number of adventure holidays whereby one parent and one offspring go on holiday together—mother and son, father and daughter, or whatever it happens to be—to learn to relate to each other during a specially constructed holiday. The organisation has taken 30,000 people through their marriage strengthening seminars, and so on. All that is very imaginative.
I have spoken to the people in my own diocese who work particularly on this theme. I asked: what are the three things that you would want to say? These are the three points made. First, this work is labour-intensive. The courses being run in our diocese require two carers to 10 parents across eight weeks. That is a lot of people involved in caring. The good news is that almost anybody can do it. It is not necessary to be a professional. You can master the material and teach it, and that is good. Therefore, a higher profile for parenting from the Government, and publicly throughout the nation, will help draw more people into the action that is needed. The second point is that it is not just a matter of that part of society where there is crime. Every section of society needs help over parenting. The third point has come up time and again this afternoon—it was right at the centre of the welcome Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne—namely, co-ordination. We have the resources and a lot of the people, but we simply cannot get the schools, the Department of Health, the voluntary societies and the
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Church to work together. That is the real problem. No quick fix is possible. It may take 10 to 15 years to get to the roots of society in order to change things. But it is happening, and it needs a real boost from the centre. I hope that we can give it that boost this afternoon.
3.58 p.m.
Lord Gisborough: My Lords, we live in a society of opportunity for all; but inevitably that means an ever-widening gap between those who have thrived and those who have failed. The relative deprivation of the weak has encouraged them to try to reach equality through crime—hence the worldwide crimewave.
Most delinquents come from families that have a history of violence, unemployment and crime. Such families produce problem children who grow into problem adults, and they in their turn produce problem children. There is also a direct link between marital conflict and delinquency. Parental conflict, in turn, can be the result of stress through poverty. Lancaster University found that half the families of delinquents had a weekly family income of less than £60. But also, early marriage, live-in girlfriends and single parentage must make their contribution. The young drift off without education or skill, without ethics or self-respect and with no fixed abode. They are unable to get work and have no money. They drift into theft, rackets and anything else in order to survive, and soon land in prison. Desperation may not excuse, but it encourages crime.
The penalties which must be, and are correctly, imposed by the courts can make the position worse for such families and their children. Probation is rated as a severe sentence and can, of course, have a beneficial influence. Fines can make matters worse. For example, destitute single mothers are often fined for not having television licences. Without TV, the children become even less controllable. Where fines are imposed on destitute mothers, probation should offer them piecework such as they can do in their own home, so that—only if they wish to do so—they can earn credits with which to satisfy their debt to the court without further strapping their meagre income.
Schools may be the only good influence for the child from a bad home and may be the only opportunity for such a child to learn the problems in store with early marriage or single parenthood. Without home training, there is no other resource but the teacher. Teachers must be adequately trained in this field. Parenting is, after all, a skill. It can be learned in the classroom. Often teachers find themselves confidants to distraught parents who have marriage problems. Teachers are not trained to deal with that kind of thing and do not have the confidence to try to help. It would be a great advantage for parental problems to be brought into teacher training, to help teachers make tomorrow's adults into better parents.
Sex education is now in place, but the broader "relationship" education is less clearly defined. Such education is not a feature of initial teacher training and tends to be squeezed out by the pressure of other subjects. Despite its great importance for the future of the nation, relationship training rarely attracts mainstream funding. If the state of parenthood for the

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coming generation is to be tackled, teachers must be trained in relationships and be able to make that vital contribution when parents themselves are failures. Even then, it will take a generation to improve things.
4.1 p.m.
Lady Kinloss: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Northbourne is to be congratulated on bringing forward this subject for debate today, when we hear and read so much about the problems that some families suffer.
The International Year of the Family saw a renewed interest and concern about the need to support parents. What is needed is more instruction and guidance to young people embarking on what is a complete change in their lives. It is no longer just two people to please themselves but at least one other human being, whose needs are almost constant when he (or she) is small.
It is very necessary for young boys as well as young girls to be taught about parenthood. The International Year of the Family also found that men in this country apparently work longer hours than any of their European counterparts. Until we see the growth of family friendly policies in the workplace, it is difficult to see how men in this country will be able to rebalance their work and new home commitments. I am told that many new young parents arrive home, sit down and say, "Oh dear, what do we do now?"
The Children Act 1989 was intended to be interpreted more broadly, but limited resources have instead led to a focus on crisis work. It would seem to make more economic sense if it were possible to identify children and families who could benefit from support before they reach crisis point. The National Children's Bureau finds that there is a lot of evidence that broad mainstream services can provide parents and young children with the kind of start they need and prevent them from reaching a crisis point later. Every local authority is required to review services for children under eight every three years. This year we are coming up to the second review. It would seem to be a good opportunity for local authorities to look at services provided for parents and young children together. There are many different providers and many different voluntary bodies involved. It would seem to be a chance to link all those services together to provide a more coherent approach to the subject.
Is the Minister aware of the NSPCC's work at its Stradbroke Family Centre in Sheffield, which offers not only individual sessions with mothers and fathers but group work for parents as well? Likewise, in Barnsley, the children protection team offers therapeutic work with children and families where neglect and abuse are a concern. Those two projects in Yorkshire are typical of many NSPCC centres throughout the country which are trying to help parents and children.
During her antenatal clinic, the mother will too busy with exercises to take in much about the time after the birth. But at the postnatal clinic, perhaps her GP could make sure that she is seeing her health visitor when she calls and asks her any questions that she may have. One way in which young mothers might be helped in the postnatal period is by friends going to visit her, perhaps
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just to talk. That would be especially helpful if the young mother is suffering from depression following the birth of her child.
When young people are growing older, they think about examinations or finding work. Should not they also be taught to think about parenthood in the future—as I have just said, boys as well as girls? Could the Minister suggest some way in which it could be brought to the attention of society in general that we all have a responsibility to help make our country a happy place in which to live? We should therefore prepare young children, as they get older, for the possibilities of future parenthood and show them how to prepare for it.
4.5 p.m.
The Earl of Northesk: My Lords, I join with other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for introducing today's debate. Effectiveness in dealing with juvenile delinquency is entirely dependent upon identifying accurately the factors that predispose children towards criminality. The one incontestable fact to have emerged from research is the direct causal link between inadequate or downright bad parenting and a predisposition to delinquency in children. As Professor Kolvin puts it:
"Good parenting protects against the acquisition of a criminal record".
As a society, we therefore have a responsibility to foster and instil good parenting skills in all parents. That is a view endorsed by the Government. The Home Office reply to Recommendation 11 of the sixth report from the Home Affairs Committee in the 1992–93 Session states:
"The Government has always regarded the family as having a crucial influence on young people's moral standards. Teaching children the difference between right and wrong is a process which must begin in the home and continue throughout childhood. Schools and churches also have an important part to play in this process …But this must be in addition to parental responsibility, not a substitute for it".
It is a not a major conceptual leap to recognise that the principle of training parents—not just some but all parents, both prospective and actual—in the necessary skills to acquit their responsibilities is a sound one. Parenting skills are not inbred; they have to be learned. As Mia Pringle put it:
"Modern parenthood is too demanding and complex a task to be performed well merely because we have all once been children".
My noble friend, when she winds up, may argue that financial prudence militates against any expenditure on universal provision of parenting classes. The reality is that potential mechanisms to provide such a service at a relatively small cost are already in place. The national curriculum at secondary level and antenatal and postnatal courses are possible vehicles for disseminating training in parenting skills.
More pertinently, the Government's commitment to universal provision of pre-school education for all four to five year-olds is curiously opportune in this context. Many forms of pre-school provision, particularly play groups, are already actively engaged in the process of educating parents in the skills necessary for good parenting. Indeed, the PPA perceives that particular aspect of its work, with the associated benefits that it

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brings of enhancing the self-esteem of parents and bringing them more into the mainstream of society, to be of equal importance to its primary aim of providing play group activity.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that the High/Scope research in the United States concluded that nursery educated children were, when older, five times less likely to commit criminal offences. Clearly, parentally-involved pre-school provision could—and should be permitted to—confer a double benefit: that of enabling both children and parents, as well as breaking the "cycle of deprivation".
In conclusion, I offer your Lordships the following observation from Dr. Gillian Pugh:
"Parenthood today is a demanding and at times stressful, lonely and frustrating experience; and if society continues to put high expectations on parents, then it must also provide sufficient support to enable them to fulfil their obligations with knowledge, understanding and enjoyment".
4.8 p.m.
Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, I served for about 27 years as a member of a board of visitors at a young offenders' institution. I have seen hundreds and thousands of young people who have turned to crime. When I ask them how they did at school, many would say that they had truanted—truanted from big comprehensive schools. Sometimes they will turn up in the morning, check in, go away, come back, have a free lunch and go away again. Big comprehensive schools with no form teacher are very easy places from which to truant. I often felt that the teachers were quite pleased not to see the disruptive children there.
I remember one particular young man who told me that, when he came back from the pub, he used to pick up his baby and shake it. That is very dangerous indeed. At one time in that young offenders' institution at an evening class child care was taught by a prison officer's wife who was a health visitor. All young offenders' institutions should have such classes. That class was exceedingly popular. It was always full of 30 keen young people who were eager to learn. It was really useful. Most of those young people were prospective parents, if not already parents.
Two education Bills ago, I moved an amendment to have life skills as part of the curriculum. The Government would not accept it. I am still as sure now as I was then that it should be part of education for all children. One young man who had never been in trouble but whose parents divorced when he was seven, said to me, "You know, the most important thing is never taught; that is, how to be a good parent".
So many children are hurt and disillusioned by parents breaking up. They have no useful model to pass on to their own children. It is a cycle of deprivation which could be remedied and helped by education on good parenting and healthy life skills. I should like to pay tribute to the family service units which do so much to teach families to cope when they find that they have problems. But they are a small drop in the ocean. I found that a high percentage of young people who turned to crime had been in care. Can the Minister say whether
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any research is being done on the reasons for that? Children need stability and a firm foundation upon which to build their lives. I hope that the Minister will do all she can to help the Government realise how important this subject is.
4.11 p.m.
Viscount Brentford: My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for his able introduction of this Motion; it is something about which the Government are extremely concerned. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health asked the Churches for an overview on the family, including parenting, and the report will be published in three or four months. I can tell your Lordships that it will indicate a great lack of funds for the necessary projects.
On Monday last the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chief Justice asked why there was less crime among the youth in the 1930s—a time of high unemployment—than there is today. He suggested that the answer was the strength and discipline of the family which prevailed in the 1930s and which was much stronger then than now. That is a measure of the problem we are discussing.
As my noble friend said, the costs of the breakdown or failure of parenting are enormous. I shall not continue with that point, but it is vital to realise that a small amount of money spent on the education of young people in parenting could save the Exchequer a great deal of money later.
I believe that there is a measure of co-operation between the voluntary, statutory and government agencies. I should like to echo what other noble Lords have said about a much greater co-ordination being needed among the government departments and other agencies and organisations. There is a need to improve relationship skills right across the board. That is a matter close to the heart of the recently formed Relationships Foundation in Cambridge.
I want to turn to one specific proposal that I put forward to my noble friend the Minister. As has been said, there is now education for parents of antenatal and postnatal care of babies. I should now like to see that education extended. For instance, when a child is brought for immunisation, the parents should be educated in the parenting of small children. When their first child joins a primary school, there should be education in the parenting of older children, and when the first child goes to secondary school, there should be a brief course for educating parents on teenagers. A small sum of money spent on good education for parenting would save the Exchequer millions of pounds.
4.14 p.m.
Earl Baldwin of Bewdley: My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend for introducing this Motion in the terms that he has. While not disagreeing with anything that has been said so far, I am concerned, in the short time available, to attempt to widen the focus a little and challenge the automatic assumption that a psycho-social problem must have psycho-social causes. In most cases it does. But in the realm of juvenile crime

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there is now plentiful evidence to show that there are sometimes other forces at work as well, and that parents and educators would do well to take note of them.
I am talking here about the links between diet and behaviour which have been demonstrated in a substantial number of studies over the past 20 years, most notably in prison populations in the States where, for example, reductions of up to 45 per cent. in antisocial behaviour have been recorded after a switch to a wholefood diet. Indeed, this led in Los Angeles to a ban on highly processed foods in all juvenile institutions in the city.
If there were time I could have amplified the evidence by reference to cases like the one known to me locally, where a young lad has only to come into contact with sugar, wheat or milk to go totally berserk, beating up his mother, starting fires and going out and stealing cars. But the best I can do is refer any who are interested in further evidence to previous speeches I have made on the subject (17th March 1993 at col. 1524, and 15th March 1989 at col. 277). They are not all as dramatic as this case of extreme food sensitivity, but they mostly involve a crucial lack of the nutrients needed for proper brain function, mostly from a junk food diet, often at the age of peak growth which is also, incidentally, the age of peak offending.
The fact that this is not more widely known is, I believe, due to the separation of cultures whereby criminologists and nutritionists do not generally read each other's literature, and tend to resist pleas to look at the problem on a multidisciplinary basis—a counterpart to the lack of collaboration between government departments that has already been mentioned. It is also, I am afraid, due to the lamentable gaps in medical education in the field of nutrition.
But a bright spot was the announcement of the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, in reply to what I said two years ago, that the Home Office was proposing to fund a study to he conducted by Dr. Jonathan Brostoff of the Middlesex Hospital to look further into the links between diet and delinquency. I can report that that study is now nearing completion.
Meanwhile parents can only be made aware of the possibility of such links (in fact, many of them are actually a good deal more aware than the so-called professionals), tap in where necessary to the considerable expertise of bodies like the Hyper-Active Children's Support Group, and pay careful attention to what goes into their children's mouths as well as their minds.
4.17 p.m.
Lord Milverton: My Lords, if any of the ideas and principles for the young are to be fulfilled and come to fruition, then a base is needed. The base and foundation I suggest are the words—those who go to Church or study the scriptures may recognise them:
"Be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath".
By "slow to wrath", we mean not to be quick, unreasonable, narrow or prejudiced in opinion.
In those words, particularly,
"swift to hear, slow to speak",
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we have a bridge-building way for appreciation and understanding between all ages and between peers—those of the same age. That is necessary if we are to help one another. It is particularly necessary if parents, whether the traditional mother and father or a single parent, are to help their children.
If children have experience of their parents or a single parent right from the beginning, from when they are born, being "swift to hear" them, and "slow to speak", it is more likely that the children will grow up ready to hear their parents speak and listen to them. Also, if we are,
"swift to hear, slow to speak",
it is more likely that we will appreciate the feelings and hopes of the young as the young themselves will appreciate the feelings of their peers.
It is important that from the home base and foundation that lesson is learnt, so that when children go forth from the home to kindergarten, nursery school and school they have a foundation upon which to build their character and personality and also—this cannot be emphasised too much —to appreciate their elders, their elders having in turn given them the sense of appreciating them. I believe first and foremost that that should happen in the home and from there people will take it outside.
4.19 p.m.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, I feel somewhat embarrassed that on the Speakers' List I, as a winder-up, am given 10 minutes when other speakers, with a great deal more of importance to say, have been allowed only three minutes. I would say to the Government: please do not inflict three-minute times on us. There has been so much to be said today that it is quite unreasonable that people should have only three minutes in which to speak. Inevitably, it has turned into an advertising campaign, which is absolutely fine, but the subject deserves a great deal more time and attention than very well-informed speakers have been able to give it.
It is particularly embarrassing that I get 10 minutes for I know less about this subject than anyone else who has spoken. As a superannuated, childless, spinster, I really would not claim to have anything to say of any importance on the subject of parenthood, which is perhaps why I do not intend to concentrate on the subject of parenthood. What I am going to say is that, very important though all the points which have been made about parenting are, we are asking an almost impossible task of parents—here I think I can speak with some knowledge—unless we attack the basic problems that lie behind crime in this country.
A parent can do a very good parenting job earlier on—I agree that that makes it less likely that children will get into trouble with the law later on—but we have to face the fact that there are parts of the country today, not only in the cities but certainly in many of the inner cities, where crime is accepted as a normal way of life. People are no longer concerned about it in the way that they would have been in the past. In a family I know very well one of the sons, who was serving his third, or perhaps it was his fourth, prison sentence for burglary, said to his mother, "I know most of the chaps in here".

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He was joining a group with which he was very familiar, both outside the gaol and inside the gaol. We must get it clear that we are breeding groups of people up and down the country to whom crime is acceptable. If one were thinking only about the careers of these young people, given the state of the labour market and given the lack of education and skills which so many of them have—I once said this when talking at a gathering organised by the Metropolitan Police—one would have to advise them to stick to burglary because the chances of a decent life outside are so very small.
Unlike everyone else who has spoken this afternoon I want to concentrate on some of these other issues. Here I must declare an interest—a totally unpaid interest but we all declare interests these days—in my connections with the APEX Trust. The position with regard to ex-offenders getting jobs is getting more and not less difficult. The probation service has made it clear over and over again—indeed, it is only a matter of common sense—that someone who has offended and then gets a job is three times less likely to reoffend. I do not know whether the statistical base for the figure is absolutely sound but it is approximately right. Surely people do not need a great deal of convincing that that is likely to be so.
If we want to get rid of these growing centres where crime is accepted, if we want to give a chance to families to keep their young people out of trouble, we must do much more than we are doing at present to help people who get into trouble to get out of it, to get into and stay in a job and therefore have a chance by having an income, by having something to do in order to give them some status, by having an opportunity to have their own home, and thereby not slip back into crime again, which is almost inevitable unless they can get a job.
The situation is becoming more and not less difficult. I wish to quote from a circular from the Association of Chief Officers of Probation. It states:
"Unemployment is common amongst offenders in contact with Probation Services: ACOP' s surveys consistently show a level of 70 per cent. or more unemployment amongst offenders commencing supervision. There is also evidence that the periods of unemployment are becoming longer, and that the skills, qualifications and experience of offenders under supervision are gradually becoming less and less appropriate to the requirements of employers, training providers and providers of employment services. The employment prospects of offenders and ex-offenders are worsening".
The report goes on to say that 90 per cent. of those coming out of prison have no jobs to go to. That is the central problem we need to tackle.
Other speakers have pointed out how important it is to get different government departments working together on these problems. The problem of getting jobs for ex-offenders and thereby cutting down the offending rate is a matter for consideration by and is the responsibility of the Department for Education, the Department of Employment and the Home Office. In addition, as even the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, who is to reply to the debate cannot be expected to answer for all those departments, I would mention the
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Department of Health. From the point of getting jobs, it is the three departments that I have mentioned which must take the lead.
They need to get together to work on this problem and there are specific things which they need to do. The literacy level of offenders is very low. That means that their chances of learning and then training and getting jobs are proportionately low. The Department for Education needs to take seriously the problem of exclusions. Those who are excluded are precisely the people who are likely to turn to crime. They do not have much else to turn to. One understands why the number of exclusions is increasing, but the problem must be looked at from the point of view of what is happening to the people who are excluded. They are certainly going to build up this—I hate the word but I think we all understand it—underclass, this criminal culture, against which we are all trying to fight.
The Department of Employment also has a part to play. Those who are involved with the training and placing of offenders have relied very much on grants, first, from the Manpower Services Commission and then when that disappeared, from the TECs. The TECs are in an increasingly difficult position. We had news only this week that one important TEC in London has gone bankrupt. That does not help those of us who are working in London on these problems. A number of voluntary organisations have been seriously handicapped by what is happening. I hope that a way will be found to rescue the TECs.
The policy in relation to the TECs operates against the benefit of people who are trying to work with ex-offenders. The TECs, handicapped by a lack of money as they are, get their money on the basis of successful results. Successful results mean getting people into jobs or people getting qualifications. If a TEC's money depends on people getting jobs and getting qualifications it will want ex-offenders like a hole in the head. We need to have, but we do not have, premium payments for helping to get offenders the opportunity of training and the opportunity of getting work. Under the much-criticised YTS we used to get premium payments but that has all gone. I beg the Government to look at this again. It is another of these short-term, ridiculous economies. Why save a little money at that point when one will be paying the huge sums, to which other noble Lords have referred, in the whole field of crime? That brings me to the Home Office.
In the minute which is left to me I ask that the Home Office really takes proper training in prison seriously and relates that training to the kind of job the offender has a hope of getting. That would be of very great assistance. Above all, cannot those three departments and the leading voluntary organisations outside who are working in this field and who know about it, get together to promote a scheme with the quite precise purpose of seeing that offenders get jobs?
4.30 p.m.
Lord Morris of Castle Morris: My Lords, is it not nice; is it not very nice, to hear a debate which has been critical, but collaborative and creative as well. The

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whole House is grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and it falls to me to do little more than to present the Labour Party's policy on co-ordinated education and support for young parents, and to point to a few outstanding examples of good practice as we see them, and to applaud them, and to urge the Government (for they alone hold the strings of the public purse) to support them in every way.
One of the five key principles guiding the Labour Party's education policy is partnership. We believe that,
"a civilised society cannot operate when its education system is undermined by confrontation. Policies should be determined after consultation and decision making should be shared. Central government should create the framework for education whilst the local delivery of services must be the responsibility of those who are democratically and professionally accountable. Professionals must be recognised as such. Parents must be actively involved in their children's educational lives".
My Lords, the first priority of a Labour Secretary of State for Education will be a dramatic extension of nursery education. Labour's key objective is to ensure that all three and four year-olds whose parents want it have access to high quality nursery education. I quote again:
"Labour will give particular encouragement to promoting parental involvement in early years education".
That comes from Opening Doors to a Learning Society: a Policy Statement on Education.
So recently as yesterday, my honourable friend Mr. David Blunkett announced the formation of an inquiry team into the integration of early years provision. In their Statement of Intent that inquiry team said this:
"We also wish to develop our services for young children and their families, building on the best of the diverse range of existing provision and on existing innovative models of good practice. We aim to develop the supportive help needed in good parenting, to ensure that parents, where feasible, can participate in the development of their children's education and in the wider goals of increasing literacy, numeracy and educational achievement".
The diverse range of existing provision is indeed considerable, and your Lordships have given many illustrations of excellent practice currently available.
I wonder, for example, how many of your Lordships would have felt confident before today that they could successfully answer some difficult examination questions on the history and achievements of a charity called Parent Network; one of the 140-odd to which the right reverend Prelate referred. Parent Network (just one of many) was set up in 1986 to help parents improve their relationship with their children, thus breaking the cycle of inadequate parenting often passed on from one generation to another. They set up an innovative parent support and education programme called Parent-Link, run by specially trained parents in local areas, offering parents the chance to improve their communication skills, and their abilities to negotiate and to set acceptable boundaries in family life. So far, over 9,000 parents have attended Parent-Link, and over 1,500 continue to meet in support groups. About 200 parent co-ordinators are running groups across the country, from Aberdeen to Cornwall.
Another charity, now called Relate, but perhaps more familiar to some of your Lordships as the old Marriage Guidance Council under another name, is also doing
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vital work in this field. Relate points out that there is a wealth of evidence which links the quality of the relationships between the parents with the ability to be a "good" parent to the child. It is where conflict exists between the parents that children experience confusion and stress. Relate suggests that there are a number of major obstacles to developing a successful relationship education programme in schools, one of which is,
"The demands of the National Curriculum often lead to a 'squeeze out' of elements such as relationship education"—
it is not sexy and it has not got a high image—
"or to attempts being made to cover this subject in an inadequate setting with [far] too little time".
Relate makes four very practical, sensible and cheap recommendations:

"1) that an extension of time be allocated in initial teacher training to
include the subject of relationship education

2) that a programme of training for newly qualified teachers be established

3) that relationship education be offered as a component of in-service training

4) that a resource pack be developed to complement this teacher training".

I feel that these proposals are so clear, so simple and so obviously necessary, and that they emanate from such a responsible and experienced charity, that the Government should consider them with great seriousness and do all they can to implement them as soon as possible. They would cost remarkably little.
May I further commend to the Government's attention the work being done to bring children and parents together in schools by Registered Charity No. 803007—it is a pity about those last three figures! I refer to the City Literary Institute universally known as "the City Lit". Through the work of its parent and family education unit which has already been referred to, it has done an enormous amount to break down the barriers between the home and the school classroom, and we have to acknowledge the fact that these barriers do still exist in many places. There are still schoolteachers who believe that they are the experts, the trained and experienced professionals and that they and they alone should be in command and control of the education of the children committed to their charge: and there are still parents who are content to dump their offspring at the school gates, and then forget about their physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual and social development until half-past three. The City Lit is advocating a better way through the principle of partnership in schools. It makes the central educational point that,
"The successful raising of children in our modern society depends upon an equal partnership between parents and school"
and that,
"In order to achieve this most cost effectively [we must] … appoint professional adult educators to facilitate partnership projects on the ground between schoolteachers and parents".
Their report, one year on, upon their 1993 national conference is an absolute eye-opener. There were 150 participants, 63 parents and 87 professionals, and through exhibitions, drama, discussions and the like, they addressed vital questions like accrediting parents in the classroom—giving them a right by qualification to be there—parent-school partnerships, which is vitally important as an idea and as a practice, and the problem

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of the school gate. Just reading about the conference itself, it must have been absolutely marvellous fun. The "School Gate" was one of their topics, done as a dramatic presentation with music. One of the parents, in the course of this presentation, actually sings. I shall not inflict on your Lordships the tune, but the words went like this:
"I'm standing here and thinking Outside the old school gate.
I'm standing here and thinking While I watch and wait.
I'm standing here and thinking, 'What's happening in there?'
How can I get to find out?
How can I get to share?"
My only reservation about that otherwise splendid conference is that, if the pictures in the report are an accurate representation, there were hardly any men among the participants. There are many of us who believe that parenting, wherever possible, should be a partnership of a father and a mother. It takes two to tango.
But this is the way forward; this is the positive picture of partnership; this is what we owe to our children. As the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, let us build on success like that lovely occasion which happened this morning at BAFTA when the Playgroup Association became the Preschool Learning Alliance. For those of us who were there I can only say that your Lordships would envy us when we saw 26 tiny tots under five standing on a stage and singing, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star". I think that had your Lordships been there you would agree with me, albeit ungrammatically, that, "Where there's kids, there's hope".
4.40 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Baroness Cumberlege): My Lords, I very much welcome this debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. Judging by its popularity, he has touched a chord among your Lordships, and I am not surprised, because I think the debate is tailor-made—if I may say so—for your Lordships' House, and I think that has been evident today. I share the disappointment of the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, that noble Lords had only three minutes to speak, but that was not a government decision, it was a Cross-Bench decision. There could not be a more fitting person than the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, to initiate the debate, with his knowledge and insight, his work in the International Year of the Family, his vice-chairmanship of the all party group on parenting, and his setting up of the parenting forum.
The noble Lord stressed the importance of supporting inexperienced parents, and the Government heartily agree that we should. The problem with being a parent is that experience is only gained when you see the results 20 or 30 years later when it is too late, at least for women, to have another attempt at the job. I think that it was Ogden Nash who wrote:
"Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for".
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The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, suggested that what children need is not a parent but "good enough" parenting. I am encouraged by that, because I could not define a perfect parent or indeed a perfect child, and the enormous social changes that have taken place make being a parent, let alone a perfect parent, even more difficult, especially as many live away from their families and feel isolated. I agree with the noble Lord, and the noble Lady, Lady Kinloss, that it is the first few years of life that are the most important. A year ago the Government introduced their new policy entitled Changing Childbirth. At the very beginning of new life, it encourages parents to make choices as to how and where their baby will be born. It gives them greater control over the care they receive, and urges professionals not to take over the event, but to enable, support and encourage parents rather than assume all responsibility.
It is said that every mother remembers her midwife, but many also remember their health visitor. The Government are unstinting in their support for young parents, and through the NHS employs nearly 12,000 health visitors who give a valuable and valued service to young families. No other country has specially trained nurses committed to health promotion and family support. They are the largest professional group working with parents of young children, and can achieve remarkable results, as the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, I think, knows, for his daughter is one.
My noble friend Lord Brentford mentioned the need to educate parents very early on, and the child development project, devised by Dr. Walter Barker in Bristol, is doing just that. Using a cartoon format, health visitors give advice on parenting to the least advantaged young families, some of whom have a history of deprivation and abuse stretching back through generations. There is no doubt that abused children are more likely to inflict abuse on their children. Breaking that cycle is some of the most challenging work undertaken by health visitors. But of course they visit not just young parents in deprived areas, but parents generally.
The noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, stressed the importance of pre-school or nursery education, and I was delighted to hear the noble Viscount's views about the event you attended this morning. I am just jealous that I was not there. Your Lordships will be aware that the Prime Minister has announced the Government's commitment to provide nursery education for all four year-olds. That is not just a government edict, but part of a determined effort to enable parents, by their own involvement, to give their children the best education.
The Government share the views of many of your Lordships today that good education is not prescribed by governments or teachers. It is a partnership which involves parents, teachers, local authorities, the Government, and, as my noble friend Lord Caldecote reminded us, voluntary outreach schemes, employers and, above all, the children. It fosters that through PTAs, parent governors, strengthening parent choice, publishing league tables, encouraging grant-maintained schools, and giving information, choice and responsibility, as codified in the Parent's Charter. I very

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much agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester that all that change cannot be brought about in 10 or 15 years. It will take 25 years or more as people see the benefits.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Northesk for his considered contribution to the debate. As he emphasised, there is now greater flexibility for schools beyond the core curriculum. While parenting classes are not themselves part of the national curriculum, as my noble friend Lord Elton, I think, would wish, secondary schools must provide sex education which encourages values, and an appreciation of the responsibilities of family life and what it means to become a parent.
My noble friend Baroness Faithfull is right that the exclusion of a pupil is a very serious step for any school to take. It should always be a last resort. Guidance issued by the Department for Education in May 1994 made that very clear. Information on levels of permanent exclusion from schools is being collected through a study of provision for pupils out of school, commissioned by the Department for Education. The study is being carried out by the research centre of Christchurch College, Canterbury.
As sponsor Minister for Plymouth, I have recently visited Highfield School in one of the least well-off parts of the city where the dockyards are closed, unemployment is high and truancy is rampant. In three years, the head teacher, Mrs. Farrington, has transformed the school. When she first arrived there were more children standing in the corridor than sitting in the classroom. That has gone, and she and her team have reduced the absence rate by 20 per cent. in three years. It can be done, as my noble friend Lord Caldecote, said. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, will be encouraged that the Government are currently supporting £14 million of expenditure for local schemes to reduce truancy. Those include Truancy Watch where community involvement is a vital part of the scheme. In Stoke-on-Trent juvenile arrests in school hours were halved over the first four months of the scheme being introduced.
As my noble friend Lord Elton is so well aware, with all the work that he has undertaken on school discipline—I should like to pay a tribute to him for that report—tackling truancy is important as it can lead to criminal behaviour. My noble friend Lord Gisborough gave us a very thoughtful speech concerning juvenile crime. The Government's policy is rightly to divert young people away from crime and, as far as possible, to deal with those who do offend by cautioning and community sentencing. For the majority of youngsters, those measures have been successful. But what about, for example, the 13 and 14 year-old boys who commit numerous burglaries and car thefts and for whom the full range of community penalties has failed? It is for that small group of persistent young offenders that the Government have introduced the new secure training order.
Perhaps I may assure the noble Lord, Lord Acton, that the Government have carried out research to estimate the number of places which would be required for persistent juvenile offenders targeted by the secure training order. Those juvenile offenders will be those for
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whom community supervision has failed, but the order is not a substitute for other approaches. It will merely fill a gap in court powers.
The Government also initiate research. Through the Health of the Nation they set targets to reduce unwanted pregnancies. I can assure the noble Earl, Lord Baldwin, that diet is also part of that strategy. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, may be interested to know that funding is also available through the Department for Education's GEST programme to support the in-service training of teachers in relationship education. We are supporting a Relate project to develop a training programme for teachers in relationship education.
A constant theme of the International Year of the Family was the need for better education, information and advice on parenting issues. My noble friend Lord Elton will be pleased to hear that the parenting initiative announced by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health is designed to examine and evaluate the support available to a wide range of families and parents who feel that they need help with bringing up their children. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, that we are investing in success; £300,000 has been made immediately available to support the best ideas arising from the international year. In the longer-term, a research theme is being developed with grants of £2.5 million over five years.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford referred to voluntary organisations, as did many of your Lordships. The Government support the work of voluntary organisations such as Home-Start, which receives almost £400,000 per year through the family support initiative and other grants. Family organisations receive some £5 million directly from the Government but voluntary organisations need to convince local authorities of their effectiveness in order to secure further funding.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon highlighted some imaginative voluntary schemes. Indeed, we are funding small church groups and in the field of marriage guidance we have funded National Family Mediation, Relate and One Plus One. There are also projects for ethnic minority families under particular stress and we are investing in those.
The Family Forum, initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, will draw together all those involved in the provision of support and education for parents in order to ensure that they collaborate as effectively as possible to provide the best possible service to parents.
My noble friend Lady Faithfull and the noble Baronesses, Lady Seear and Lady Warnock, mentioned the co-ordination of government and said that it could be better done. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health has been appointed Minister for the Family. No one could be more energetic or committed in her role. Recently, the Secretary of State announced that the Government are strengthening the co-ordination of policy by holding discussions on family issues at Cabinet level on a regular basis. She is also working closely with voluntary organisations and including them in her debates.

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I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, that life for parents is more difficult. That was mentioned by many noble Lords today. We used to talk about "child rearing" but now we call it "parenting", and it is much harder. Children are better educated, more aware, more street-wise, less compliant and less respectful. While teaching them right from wrong, we have to make the case and not just lay down our law. That is challenging. The Government would delude themselves if they believed that they had an overriding impact on society. Society evolves, changed by events and attitudes.
The vast majority of young people grow out of behaving badly and become honest, law-abiding, caring people. Governments, like parents, simply have to cope and it is futile to try to legislate for Utopia. We would never begin to agree on what is a good society. And if we ever did, society would have changed and our deliberations would have been fruitless.
But what young people give today is openness. They are less secretive and that makes everything much easier for children, parents, helpers, local authorities and governments. If we can listen to young people they will listen to us. Trust them and they will show responsibility; love them and they will love their neighbours. If we could live up to their ideals, we would be a better society and a finer country in a cared-for world.
4.53 p.m.
Lord Northbourne: My Lords, I thank noble Lords for saying so many interesting things in such a short time and for being such good timekeepers. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, is equally grateful.
I regret that the Minister was not brave enough to tackle the issue which was raised by so many speakers; that of better co-ordination between the departments of state in whose hands the fate of children lie. That is a subject to which we must continually return until we find a solution, recognising that it is a difficult problem but one that must be solved in the interests of children.
It was encouraging to count 16 specific success stories referred to by your Lordships. They prove the point I made at the beginning; that there are success stories out there and that they ought to be backed. It is a good business principle to follow your successes. With those words, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

The Civil Service
4.55 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydalerose to call attention to the role of the Civil Service; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I cannot claim that the topic selected for this debate is the most glamourous that can be devised. However, it is important and I am most grateful for the impressive list of speakers. So impressive is it that I was tempted to speak very briefly and then to sit back and listen. It was a temptation that I decided to resist.
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From a plethora of documents I pick out the Government's White Paper of last July, the report of the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee of another place and the White Paper which the Government slipped out last Thursday with all the fanfare of a reply to an arranged Question for Written Answer. I believe that some of the Government's conclusions may have to be looked at afresh when we have the Scott and possibly the Nolan reports. And so far we have had only the most sketchy outline of what is to happen to the Diplomatic Service, a matter on which the recent White Paper was totally silent. The White Papers, incidentally, have the slight disadvantage of being printed on glossy paper, which makes them quite difficult to read in certain lights.
I am not against change and I recognise that the service cannot be exempt from a share in the mistakes and failures of our post-war history. There are legitimate criticism which, no doubt, we shall hear as the debate proceeds. But when I sat on the Fulton Committee, for instance, I found that the Civil Service was one institution in this country which commanded respect elsewhere, even in France. My theme tonight is to ask whether, notwithstanding all the fine words in the White Papers, the changes already made and those in prospect may be going too far in risking the loss of some of the virtues of the service. I have in mind integrity, loyalty, political impartiality and objectivity, and an ability to respect confidences.
In the time available I shall concentrate on just two topics out of many. The first is the management and provision of services by the executive agencies set up under the Next Steps programme. The second is the support of Ministers on issues of policy.
Nearly two thirds of the Civil Service now work in the executive agencies, if one includes the executive structures of the two revenue departments. Each of them has its fashionable key performance targets and is run by a chief executive. The Government, for some reason, seem especially proud of the fact that a majority of those chief executives come from outside the Civil Service. Last December, we had a weighty report extolling the virtues of these new creations and reminding us that between them they had won no fewer than 30 charter marks. The concept found favour with the Commons Select Committee, so it is perhaps churlish to harbour any reservations.
I wonder whether the recent discussions about the Prison Service and, notwithstanding all the explanations, the doubts which many of us still have about the blurring of responsibilities at the top, may prove to be a foretaste of the need to revise our traditional notions of ministerial responsibility to Parliament.
I have time to touch on only a couple of other aspects. The first is the issue of financial probity. I believe that the Welsh Development Agency is not technically a Next Steps body and I shall not dwell on its lamentable record. But it strikes me that the recent White Paper is perhaps a shade over-complacent in ruling out any possible connection between the upheaval in the service and the report of the Public Accounts Committee that it had come across a number of serious failures in

1527
administrative and financial systems which represented a departure from the standards of public conduct established over the past 140 years.
If there is no conceivable cause for concern, I wonder why the White Paper announced that a new handbook would be issued to all agency chief executives setting out the rules on conduct and financial propriety. The Comptroller and Auditor General, in his evidence to the Select Committee, went further and urged that there should always be discussion with a new chief executive on those issues before he took up his post, and not just on what contribution his expertise would bring. I ask whether that is to be done.
My second point in that context is that one of the main aims of the Northcote-Trevelyan report was to mitigate the evils which resulted from a fragmented service. The theory of a uniform service was still alive at the time of Fulton but now it seems to have gone and instead we have the vision of a federal structure—ominous words, those—of autonomous units. Some of those brought in from outside have difficulty in recognising that they are civil servants. I wonder what will happen over the years to any concept of a public service ethos and just where loyalty will lie.
There may also be some rather strange practical consequences. With delegated powers of settling pay, two civil servants doing strictly comparable jobs may receive quite different rates of salary, something that has just been condemned roundly by the Audit Commission in respect of local government. I know that we cannot put the clock back but there are real dangers. When the Minister responds, I wonder whether he will be able to give us any words of comfort.
I turn to my second main theme—helping Ministers on the development and implementation of policy which I believe, unlike the Home Secretary, cannot be altogether separated. What is now in prospect is a senior Civil Service of some 3,500 individuals down to the present Grade 5, whatever that may be, including all agency chief executives. The inclusion of those executives prompts me to ask whether, when they complete their contracts, they will be subject to the normal restrictions on civil servants taking other jobs when leaving—the two-year moratorium and so on—and if so, whether they are warned about that at the outset.
As I understand it, before any single vacancy among those 3,500 is filled, the question of whether to advertise, either in the service or by full open competition, will have to be considered. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the first advertisement for a permanent secretary post has appeared, and that in Mr. Portillo's department. Contracts are to be introduced for all 3,500, normally for an indefinite term but with specified periods of notice. There is to be a single pay scale for all permanent secretaries, the individual's position within that range being settled by a remuneration committee which will include outside members.
As I see it, the problem is that there is more to work of that kind than measurable management skills. We are talking of people who, on what has happened hitherto, have devoted a career to administration and to gaining
1528
experience of the unique relationship between the Executive and the legislature, with a strong service-wide ethic, and trained to tender independent advice, whether palatable or not, to governments of any political complexion. The July White Paper says that the contracts will put those people more on a par with their counterparts in other walks of live. But there are not any counterparts in other walks of live. There is a special art of government, so I believe, which cannot be acquired overnight, as the Clinton Administration found out. There is a need for a profession, as someone put it, which is able to translate the language of politics into the language of government. I believe that deeply, but I do not get much sense of it from the two White Papers. Behind all the words, they make one wonder whether any place is to be left for the public service ethic in a world of contracting-out and market testing.
I ask your Lordships to consider whether someone brought in from outside, with a business ethic and on a short-term contract, could be counted on to act, as the relevant Permanent Secretary acted, in setting down his objections to the Pergau Dam project, which was something by no means without precedent. I do just wonder.
On a practical point, the prospect that the number of posts at the top will be reduced as the service shrinks and that some of that reduced number of posts will be filled from outside serves only to diminish the attractiveness of the service for the prospective bright young entrant.
As regards pay, there is already a great deal of scepticism about performance-related pay for people of lesser ranks. I am baffled to know what are the criteria for a permanent secretary. Does he score a mark every time he prevents his Minister doing something foolish and lose one every time he fails to do so? Or possibly, is it the other way round? How on earth is the remuneration committee to know?
One feature of the latest White Paper is to be applauded; that is, the decision to introduce a code of ethics with a right of appeal. There may be arguments about the contents of the code and the appeal procedure but I have gradually come round to the view that the case for some sort of code is indeed made out.
I am not so sure about the need for legislation giving statutory backing to the terms and conditions of service of civil servants, presumably including diplomats. In the recent White Paper the Government suggest that there is something to be said for legislation if it can be based on a cross-party consensus. It is interesting that they are talking of consulting the other parties on that fairly narrow issue when, as far as I know, no initiative was taken by way of cross-party consultation on the drastic changes already decided by the Government without even seeking a parliamentary debate.
My time is nearly up. I just wish to say that if things go on as now proposed and if, in a couple of years, a bright young man were to ask me whether I should recommend his joining the service as a career, I fear that having first enjoined him to have a care about talking of anything so old-fashioned as a career, for the first time I should tell him to hesitate for a very long time indeed and to consider carefully other possibilities

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before joining the service which I was proud to serve for the whole of my working life. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.10 p.m.
Lord Jenkins of Hillhead: My Lords, the House will be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Allen, for bringing this subject before it this afternoon. Indeed I believe that the House will be grateful to him in a longer-term sense for his most notable contributions to our deliberations. I am especially grateful to him for special services rendered nearly 30 years ago.
As the noble Lord said, there is a notable list of participants in the debate, although there are some notable categories of absence. For example, there is no noble Lord present, whose experience is primarily a business experience, to tell us about the virtues of business values and business practices in the Civil Service; nor is there a very strong what I would call "mainstream" Conservative representation among today's speakers. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Harptree, is to speak. But, sparkling a speaker though the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, may be, I do not believe that he exactly represents the mainstream governing Conservative tradition.
However, we are very rich in Permanent Secretaries. The debate is almost a reunion to me. I say that because, among the speakers today, there are no fewer than three Permanent Secretaries who—and I am not sure how to put this: if I say, "Who served me", I would regard that as being presumptuous; if I say, "Who I served with", that would not be exactly true because that would imply that I was a Permanent Secretary which, alas, I am not; but if I say, "Under whom I served", that would not be true either. However, in making a farewell speech once to a very powerful and authoritative Permanent Secretary—not, I should add, a Permanent Secretary in your Lordships' House—I said, as a joke, that I had assembled the four Home Secretaries who had served under Sir Charles.
It is the case that there are three speakers with whom, whatever the appropriate word is, I served as a Minister when they were Permanent Secretaries. There is a fourth from another branch of the service who I think once believed that I was due to come to him as Secretary of State—indeed, I would have done so had the electorate not decided otherwise—who braced himself for the experience. As a result of that, I have been left with an almost unalloyed admiration for the British higher Civil Service as it has evolved and developed. It has certainly not been static in the 140 years since the Northcote-Trevelyan report and the 120 years since it was implemented.
Perhaps some of the virtues of the higher Civil Service have been what are called "mandarin virtues". But the field of recruitment has been by no means exclusive. Of the three most outstanding Permanent Secretaries whom I had, two of them were without the benefit of Oxbridge. Indeed, one of them was a boy entrant into the Civil Service but, nonetheless, he became a distinguished Permanent Secretary. I also believe that they maintained genuine political
1530
impartiality. For example, when my experience with working in the Civil Service began in 1964, I believe that, on the whole, senior civil servants welcomed the change of government. That was not because of any ideological prejudice, but because they thought that 13 years was long enough—so, indeed, it was; and longer is more than enough—for the healthy working of the system. But, I should say that they maintained their impartiality by becoming fairly quickly disenchanted with the deficiencies of the new government, although certainly not to the extent of ceasing to do their best for us.
Similarly, I never found that civil servants wanted to dominate Ministers and do their job for them. If a Minister cannot make up his mind, then the civil servants will have to move in, fill the vacuum and provide him with some sort of makeshift policy. But, in my view, high quality officials always prefer a strong Minister to a weak one. They have a very shrewd conviction that someone who is putty in the hands of the department, will be putty in the hands of the Cabinet and will be pushed around by the House of Commons with the general result of low standing and low morale for the whole department.
I believe that what senior civil servants want—and rightly so—is a Minister who will treat them with respect and courtesy and give rational consideration to their arguments. But if the decision goes against them at the end of the day, they will nearly always accept it and carry out the contrary decision with loyalty and goodwill.
Just so that it will not be thought that I am painting too idealised a picture, I should stress that on about two occasions I received bad advice on major policy issues. However, it was my fault for taking that advice. When I set those two occasions against the innumerable ones on which I received good advice, it is as nothing in the balance.
I have been talking about 25 years ago. But is the position as rosy today? I am afraid that I do not think so. Civil Service morale is pretty poor. The prestige of being a high functionary has not fallen as much as that of being a Minister or an MP; but it is not what it was. As the quality of Ministers has gone down, so the dependence of officials upon them has become greater. In my view, they have become more dependent on Ministers for their promotions, for their honours and even, as may now be the case, for the renewal of their contracts. Yet it is essential that officials should speak fearlessly and forthrightly at times to Ministers. There is a danger of creating a web of caution and sycophancy.
Equally, the field of the operations of civil servants has been invaded by quangos, by businessmen brought in to do jobs that have hitherto been performed by officials—with precious little evidence that they do it better—and there are also too many junior Ministers who can often get in the way of the proper relationship between the Secretary of State and his senior officials. It is extraordinary that, as the functions of government departments and the number of their senior officials are cut down, so the number of junior Ministers is at a record level. I suppose that it is thought to be the only way of stopping their intriguing on the Back-Benches.

1531
All that, combined with a Government-encouraged climate which increasingly worships Mammon rather than respects public service, gives me serious worry about the ability of a battered Civil Service to retain its drawing power for high quality applicants. I earlier cited two exceptional people who did not need Oxbridge to get to the top of the Civil Service. Nonetheless, it is the case that those universities with their traditional encouragement of articulateness, both on paper and in speech, and emphasis upon critical methods of thought rather than purely specialised knowledge should remain important reservoirs of recruitment for the Civil Service.
However, to cite a by no means wholly irrelevant parallel, the percentage of Oxford graduates going into teaching has fallen from 30 per cent. before the war, to 8 per cent. 20 years ago to 2 per cent. today. That has not been good for teaching and I doubt whether that has been good for the University of Oxford. But the scissors effect of the lure of Mammon and a battering of the prestige of teaching has done the deadly work. The numbers involved in entry to the higher Civil Service have always been much smaller, but I could see the same process—certainly upon the highest quality of potential recruits—operating there.
Unless this Government, or a future government, take early action to restore the quality and the morale of the Civil Service, I see the dismal prospect of our weakening what has been one of Britain's most famous world assets, and in the name of what?—of introducing business values and business methods into the public service. At least since the end of the 19th century Britain, to be blunt, has not been particularly good at business. Such success as we have achieved has mostly come from refugees or other immigrants. But what Britain has been particularly good at has been maintaining a Civil Service which has been outstanding throughout the world. Cannot we have some sense of proportion and of historical perspective?
5.21 p.m.
Lord Dean of Harptree: My Lords, it is wholly appropriate that this important debate should be introduced by a distinguished, retired civil servant with an outstanding record of service to our country. I am glad that he started his speech by saying that we can be justly proud that we have a Civil Service which is able, loyal, impartial and wholly incorruptible. Would it not be nice if that could be said of all other countries in the world?
As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, has just said, there is normally a strong bond of trust and confidence between the civil servant who advises on policy and the Minister who has to make decisions. The civil servant is the expert. He puts the pros and cons of a particular course of action before Ministers, and the effect that a particular course will have on other activities. The Minister is the amateur. He has to make up his mind what course to take having received the advice, and above all of course, if he is wise, he has to ask himself: can I get this policy accepted in Parliament and will it be regarded as fair and reasonable by the
1532
public? The relationship between Ministers and officials is the hallmark of our system of government. It serves us well. It provides for both innovation and continuity.
I remember very well, as a young, very green Minister, in 1970, being sent to the then Department of Health and Social Security. It was thought by the pundits that the Conservatives would lose that election. Therefore I was agreeably surprised when I reached that department to find the amount of work that civil servants had done on what Conservatives had been saying in Opposition. The papers were prepared for us on day one. That, I think, is a remarkable tribute to the way in which our Civil Service operates.
The noble Lord, Lord Allen, mentioned executive agencies. I have also been asking myself the question: how do these fit in with the traditional Civil Service? I am glad that the Government have made clear in successive White Papers that the arrangements for policy formation will remain unaltered and that the executive agencies will deal with administration. They have performance targets. I believe their work has sharpened administration in our country. I believe that they are more responsive now to those they serve and that they provide better value for money. All this is of course in keeping with the Citizen's Charter.
Some doubts were expressed when agencies were first introduced whether there would be a dilution of parliamentary accountability. I think one only has to look at the recent troubles within the Child Support Agency to see that Parliament has adequate means of giving Ministers a rough ride if it feels that that is necessary, and of persuading Ministers that they should change course. In some of the other agencies, for example those which pay out social security benefits or those which collect taxes, there is little difference in practice as regards parliamentary accountability. It was always the case in the old days that a Member of Parliament who had a constituent with a grievance would take up that case with the local social security office or the local inspector of taxes, where he would normally receive satisfactory redress. That still obtains today. However, the Member of Parliament still of course has the all-important reserve power in that if he is dissatisfied with the answer he is given from the agency, he can reserve the right to take up the matter with the Minister concerned or to raise it on the Floor of the House of Commons.
There has been a good deal of criticism lately of the role of quangos as distinct from elected bodies, such as local authorities. I believe that local authorities have an important role in the government of our country. They are a link in the democratic process. They give local people opportunities to serve their community and to gain experience about the way government works. However, elected councillors do not guarantee good administration or a response to the needs and wishes of people. All your Lordships, I am sure, will recollect cases of oppressive regimes running council house estates. One of the many great advantages of the sale of council houses is that one can now paint one's own front door the colour that suits one and not the colour that suits the local council.

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Another example is the local management of schools. We now have a situation where governors, parents and teachers are able to make decisions based on their local knowledge. I suggest to your Lordships that this is a better arrangement than having to refer decisions to slow moving county council bureaucracy. I suggest that there is a case for quangos and for bodies that are appointed and not directly elected to assist in administration in an increasingly complex society. What really matters is whether these bodies are effectively accountable. Do they have clear terms of reference? Do they have performance targets? If they do, it seems to me that they have a valuable function to perform.
I now turn to the more controversial area of the National Health Service. There is criticism of National Health Service trusts and of GP fund-holding. I realise that these are controversial matters, but I do not believe that they would have developed to the extent that they have unless there was a popular demand for them. I believe that the Government deserve credit for the reforms in the Civil Service which have been introduced in recent years. I believe equally that the Civil Service has nothing to fear from these reforms. It enables it, in my view, to give more attention to helping Ministers to get policies right for the benefit of the community. This is the job that only our Civil Service can do, and on the whole it does it superbly well.
5.29 p.m.
Lord Barnett: My Lords, I, too, wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, on introducing not an insignificant debate, as he seemed to imply at the outset, but a rather important one. Like him, in general I agree with paragraph 1.1 of what the Government say in the July White Paper. They state that our Civil Service has:
"a high reputation, nationally and internationally"—
as the noble Lord, Lord Allen, said, even in France—
"for its standards of integrity, impartiality and loyal service to the Government of the day".
However, the fact that there have been two White Papers in six months and a report of an important Select Committee in another place indicates that there are grounds for concern, which I share, that standards are in serious danger of deterioration. There is a danger of the erosion of the very ethos of the Civil Service, and the qualities of which we are rightly proud.
A survey of more than 4,000 civil servants, referred to in paragraph 84 of the Select Committee report, found exactly that; namely:
"a belief that the public service ethos is being eroded".
I have two major concerns. The first is the devolution to agencies or quangos. Today 20 per cent. of officials are based in those non-departmental agencies. Last April they numbered 110,200, according to a Written Answer which I received yesterday, and at the same date there were 533,000 civil servants in the Civil Service.
My second concern is the effect of 15 years of single party government on the Civil Service we care so much about.
1534
On the first point, I do not necessarily complain about the transfer to quangos. Indeed, I welcome the point made in paragraph 3.9 of the January White Paper about the improvement in value for money. That is very important. But my concern arises in relation to issues raised by probably the most important all-party Select Committee—which I had the honour to chair myself—the Public Accounts Committee. Robert Sheldon, my successor as Chairman, who has been chairman for 11 years and therefore has great experience, referred in evidence to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee to the eighth report of the Public Accounts Committee issued last year. That was a devastating report. It covered various non-departmental bodies, including the Welsh National Development Agency and the Wessex Water Authority.
Much worse was what he said in replying to questions from the Select Committee. In reply to question 1576 on page 92 of the report he said that he found a common thread running through recent examples. That has to be worrying, coming from an all-party Select Committee. There was no disagreement in that committee about the point that Robert Sheldon made.
I am pleased that, as the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, said, the Government have at last recognised that there is a serious problem. David Hunt, the Minister concerned, will announce new guidance on ethics for quango members. Indeed, there is a possibility of a new code for civil servants, possibly having statutory status. I do not know whether statutory status will be necessary, but Mr. Hunt spoke of the possibility of setting up the code of practice jointly with the Opposition. I hope that my noble friends will co-operate and work to find an appropriate code which can work effectively. If it is not agreed between the three major parties, it will not work effectively.
My next major anxiety concerns the effect of 15 years of single-party government. Sir Robin Butler himself conceded (in paragraph 81 of the Select Committee report) that the length of time one party has been in office might give rise to scepticism about continuing impartiality. There is the possibility of further evidence of falling standards when the results of the Nolan and Scott inquiries are published.
Jim Plowden, the former head of the Central Policy Review Staff, has said that a number of Ministers are reluctant to entertain unfavourable advice and, as a consequence, officials are reluctant to tender it. That is understandable. Apparently junior Ministers are asking civil servants to draft political speeches. Perhaps the civil servants can draft them better than the Ministers, but it cannot be right for civil servants to accept that approach.
We are told that civil servants can appeal to Sir Robin Butler. There has been only one appeal in nine years. That is hardly surprising. I regret to say—because I like Sir Robin—that I fear that he has compromised himself. He did so especially by agreeing to investigate charges against Ministers at the request of the Prime Minister. He should have refused. I am not sure to whom he could have appealed, but he should have refused to carry out such an investigation. That is one of the ways in which he compromised himself.

1535
Elizabeth Symons, General Secretary of the First Division Association, told the Select Committee that civil servants fear that if they appeal they will be singled out and pilloried by Ministers. That is not a matter that we can laugh away. It is very important. I therefore welcome paragraph 2.10 of the January White Paper which indicates that the Government now propose, as the Select Committee recommended, to establish an independent appeal procedure to Civil Service commissioners. I am sure that that is right and I am delighted that that is to happen.
Despite my welcome for the White Paper, it still does not deal with the major issue raised by Vernon Bogdanor, a very respected Reader in government at Oxford, published in the Independent last Wednesday and raised by many others in recent times. That question is, where does ministerial responsibility lie? For example, following the escapes from Parkhurst the present Home Secretary said that he is responsible to Parliament for policy but not for operational matters.
I agree that it would be a nonsense if every time a prisoner escaped the Home Secretary had to resign. That would not be sensible. However, Vernon Bogdanor quoted Sir John Woodcock's report on Whitemoor prison:
"'There exists at all levels within the service some confusion as to the respective roles of ministers, the agency headquarters and individual prison governors'. Nor is it surprising that he said there was difficulty in determining what was an operational matter and what was policy".
The White Paper does not dispel that confusion between policy and operational matters. I hope that the Minister will look at that question, and consider doing so this evening. I see him smiling. He obviously has it in his speech already. Therefore, I hope he will do so because it is not unimportant.
I conclude by repeating that I have great respect for our civil servants—as every other speaker has said in the debate so far—and their standards, which are high in comparison with most other civil services throughout the world. However, it is vital that we should be vigilant to prevent slippage of the kind to which I have referred. With those reservations, I welcome the White Papers as a move in the right direction.
5.38 p.m.
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster: My Lords, I should like to join with those who have congratulated the noble Lord—and my former master—Lord Allen of Abbeydale, on initiating this debate on the role of the Civil Service.
In a memorandum of guidance issued in December 1987 by the then head of the Home Civil Service (and wild horses would not drag his name from my lips) it was stated that:
"The Civil Service is there to provide the Government of the day with advice on the formulation of policies, to assist in carrying out decisions, and to manage and deliver the services for which the Government is responsible … Civil servants should conduct themselves in such a way as to deserve and retain the confidence of Minister … it is the duty of a civil servant to make available to the Minister all the [relevant] information and experience at his disposal … and to give to the Minister honest and impartial advice, without fear or favour, and whether the advice accords with the Minister's view or not …"
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Finally, as my noble friend Lord Jenkins of Hillhead (who is also a former mas said:
"When the Minister has taken ecision, it is the duty of civil servants loyally to carry out tha ecision with precisely the same energy and good will whether they agree with it or not".
Nothing has happened since December 1987 to invalidate those words. Indeed, I was encouraged to see that those principles inform the draft code of conduct recently formulated by the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee in another place and by the Government in their response to that Select Committee.
I am not absolutely convinced that there is a need for a new code. However, I have no objection to producing a code which encapsulates what is already implicitly, if not explicitly, in existing guidance of one kind or another. I do not believe that it is necessary to give the proposed code of conduct the force of legislation. Indeed, given the difficulty of changing a statute once it is on the book, that might make it more difficult to adjust the code to meet changing conditions. Perhaps such a code could be scheduled to an Act, rather like the Highway Code is scheduled to the Road Traffic Act.
I wish to comment on only one aspect of the report's provisions. It is an issue to which the noble Lord, Lord Allen, referred. It relates to the provision for appeals to the First Civil Service Commissioner. The grounds of appeal now proposed, covering as they do not only issues of conscience but any requirement to act in a manner inconsistent with the code, are too wide and are likely to make the recourse to appeal more customary and more frequent than it need be.
I am also doubtful about the need for making the First Civil Service Commissioner the appellate authority. Such matters are best dealt with within the internal framework of the system, including recourse in the final analysis to the head of the Home Civil Service. If the objection to that procedure is that a civil servant might hesitate to resort to it for fear of possible damage to his prospects for future advancement, I am not persuaded that appeal to the First Civil Service Commissioner would be any less intimidating or less likely to affect departmental views on the appellant's fitness for promotion. I fear that appeal to an external authority could undermine the confidence between Ministers and civil servants on which the relationship depends.
I welcome the reaffirmation by the Government of their commitment to the maintenance of a permanent Civil Service based on the values of integrity, political impartiality, objectiveness, selection and promotion on merit, and accountability through Ministers to Parliament. Those values have stood the country in good stead for many years and are as relevant and important to public life and good government today as they have ever been.
I do not see any sign that the commitment of civil servants to these values has been compromised by the fact that one party has been in government for 15 years. I have no doubt whatever that if there were to be a change of party in government at the next general election, incoming Ministers would find a Civil Service which would serve them as faithfully, impartially and loyally as it has served the present Government and their predecessors.

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However, if the values which I have referred are to be maintained it is not ugh just to reaffirm them, or even to entrench them in vodes of conduct. They have to be defended and protected in deed as well as in words. And I begin to share the apprehensions of those who fear that some of the management changes which the Government have been making, and indeed the sheer volume and pace of change in recent years may, perhaps unintentionally, put the maintenance of those values at risk.
I have supported the principle of executive agencies under the Next Steps proposals; indeed, when working in government I worked hard to bring about their adoption. But the arrangement works most satisfactorily in areas of activity where there is little political content and therefore little risk of political controversy and damage to the relationships between Ministers and civil servants. In my view, it would be unwise to extend the agency principle to areas of activity where the process itself is a matter of high political interest and potential controversy. Murphy's law (I believe it is called) is relevant here: if something can go wrong, one day it will; and, as we have seen in the case of the Child Support Agency, when something goes badly wrong it brings the agency principle itself into disrepute and is liable to undermine confidence between Ministers and civil servants.
I could go into detail on various aspects of the changes which have been made, and their possibly difficult effect. But time is too short to allow me to do that. I shall simply say that the pace of management change—often major change—in the public service during the past 15 years has been intense and seemingly relentless. One change follows another almost before the first has been wholly carried through. I have no doubt that there is room—perhaps there will always be room—to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the public service. But the uncertainties and the disruption resulting from constant and unremitting change can have, over time, a deeply unsettling effect on morale in the public service.
As my noble friend Lord Allen pointed out, the decentralisation of responsibility for pay and grading carries the risk of fragmentation and of undermining the cohesiveness of the Civil Service and the sense of public service as an honourable vocation and a reputable profession.
Civil servants take pride in doing their jobs as well as they can as a matter of individual self-esteem and of pride in public service in the best sense. But against a background of restless change and disruption there is a danger that civil servants may come to feel like the man in A.E. Housman's poem:
"Oh, let me lie abed and rest.
What's to show for all my pain?
Ten thousand times I've done my best,
And all's to do again".
That feeling, exacerbated most recently by the sharp reductions in numbers at senior levels in the Treasury and elsewhere, is liable, I fear, to create a sense almost of despair which could drive increasing numbers of existing civil servants—I am sorry to say that they are
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usually the better ones—to seek employment elsewhere, and discourage the recruitment of the more able people upon whom the future of the public service depends.
In this situation the virtues and values of the public service as we have known it come under great strain. Like the dikes at Nijmegen, they might not be able wholly to withstand the pressures put upon them by the process of unremitting change, however strongly the Government believe in and reaffirm the importance of maintaining them. Once impaired, they become difficult to restore.
I share the hope that the Government will be sensitive to this danger. I believe that the public interest in the maintenance of a permanent Civil Service staffed by people of high quality and based on the values of integrity, impartiality and objectivity, would now be best served by a deliberate slowing down of the process of management change. No piece of machinery can give of its best if it is being radically overhauled all the time—particularly if it has to stay on the road while it is being overhauled.
The time has now come for a let up in the process of change: for a period of assimilation of the changes that have been introduced; for reaffirming and, what is more, re-establishing by deed as well as by word the virtues and values which have made the British Civil Service one of the best—perhaps the best—public service in the world; and for restoring the confidence between Ministers and civil servants—a two-way confidence—which is an indispensable foundation of the ability of civil servants to serve the Government of the day as they should do and as they wish to do, and of Ministers to get the best out of the civil servants who are responsible to them and who are keen to give the best service they can to the Government and to their country.
5.48 p.m.
Lord Simon of Glaisdale: My Lords, it is many years since I had any direct responsibility for the Civil Service, and that arose because at that time the Civil Service was administered in the establishment division of the Treasury. I am afraid that my experience therefore antedates that of all the noble Lords who have so far addressed your Lordships. My diffidence is increased when I find my name among some of the most eminent public servants of our time, if not of any time. I join in the expression of thanks to my noble friend Lord Allen of Abbeydale.
Since I shall be suggesting that there are some limitations which should be acknowledged to the role that the Civil Service can play, perhaps I may say at the outset that so far as my experience and knowledge goes our own Civil Service is by a considerable measure the best in the world.
The Northcote-Trevelyan reform brought in a middle class meritocracy; and that brought in, too, the middle-class virtues of probity and loyalty. As regards probity, at the most, the Pontings, the Pottingers and the Tisdalls are rare figures. The recent directive by Sir Robin Butler as to airfares, air vouchers and free travel shows that the austere standard of financial probity is being rigidly adhered to.

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As for loyalty, my only demur is on the question of leaks, of which there have been far too many recently. When the noble Viscount replies, I should like him to tell us, if he can, how many identified leaks there have been; how many of those have been investigated; what the investigation has shown—in other words whether the leaker has been identified—and, finally, what disciplinary action has been taken, where it has applied. That seems to me to be a matter of great importance. We have had two extremely damaging and worrying leaks in the past two days, but they are merely the last of a long series.
The next question which I believe your Lordships would wish to consider is whether we are suffering from over-government in Whitehall. The Brussels bureaucracy provides a dangerous and menacing warning. I say that, presuming myself to be a convinced European. There are several reasons why we have over-government from Whitehall. The first is the proliferation of numbers which is endemic in any bureaucracy, not only government. When I was a law officer, the department was scarcely, if at all, larger than when it was instituted at the end of the last century. Since then, it has increased a hundredfold. Part of that is due to taking over Northern Ireland, but it is a small part and is by no means an unusual feature of any department.
The second reason we have over-government is the doctrine that the gentleman in Whitehall really knows best. To a great extent he does know best. He can take a broader and longer vision than the individual who is affected by the decision. But there are limits to his knowledge. However skilfully the shoe is cobbled, it is only the wearer who can tell where it pinches. That is why we should apply the principle of subsidiarity, moving the decision as near as possible to the person affected by it. Perhaps I may draw attention to the Swiss constitution which embodies the principle of subsidiarity as part of its ethos.
The third reason I think we suffer from over-government is simply that the Civil Service is a necessary repository of power. As Acton tells us, all power tends to corrupt and the first sign of corruption is generally an itch for greater power. So we have some extraordinarily worrying developments. There were the repeated efforts by the Department for Education—four efforts consecutively—to intrude upon academic freedom. That was finally repelled by your Lordships.
The most striking example was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Dean: the Child Support Act 1991. That is a major invasion of the magistrature by the bureaucracy. I think it is generally acknowledged that it has worked out disastrously for the citizen and disastrously for the Government.
What is the answer? I have no doubt that one answer is that we should restore the former function of the legislation committee of the Cabinet. I am certain that if that committee had, as part of its remit, to consider the drafting and constitution aspects of any measure, the Child Support Act would never have survived. It would have been referred back to the department. There must be other ways by which, through constant vigilance, we may repel the advance of bureaucracy at the expense,
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say, of the lay magistrature whose decision-making is close to the citizen. I commend to your Lordships the thought that the legislation committee could well be revived in its previous form.
I have come to the end of my time, but I want to raise the question of the regional dispersion of the Civil Service. I gave the noble Viscount notice of that; perhaps he can reply without my saying anything. I draw attention also to London weighting. I have made several suggestions which indicate some limitation on the role which the Civil Service can play. I do so without derogating in any way from my admiration for the way the Civil Service has functioned, particularly since the Northcote-Trevelyan reform.
5.58 p.m.
Lord Merlyn-Rees: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, told us that he had thought of cutting his speech. He was right not to; his wisdom shone through, as it did to me as a junior Minister in the department of which he was the Permanent Under-Secretary 30 years ago. I was glad to take his advice, as I was that of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, on security. In view of what has been said, I trusted him implicitly to do the right thing in the defence of this country. A temporary civil servant would have been no use to me in those circumstances. Also reminiscing, two current PUSs were formerly my private secretaries. I am sure that their behaviour will be in the same tradition as that of PUSs in the past.
The happy conjunction of the publication of the report of the Treasury and Civil Service Committee and this debate enables me to say, fitting in with what has been said, that the recommendation of the Select Committee that agency chief executives should be directly and personally accountable to Select Committees would be wrong. I am glad that the Government have rejected it. I am also happy to see the acceptance by the Government of the principles of an independent line of appeal to the Civil Service, despite the changes that have been made in the past. I think that that is right.
Some people may have been surprised when I appeared in court as an expert witness on the Ponting affair. I shall explain why. I would not want the man in my office, but on the Franks Committee we had recommended that it should not be a criminal offence to do what he did. It was on that precise point. If the matter had been better handled, I do not believe that the trouble would have arisen.
As to the Civil Service Code, there is sense in that, although I am by no means an expert and I should need to read it again. On the whole matter of the report and the changes that will take place, I hope that all junior Ministers—and there are far too many of them—read it when they come to office, together with the procedure for Ministers.
For three or four years I was a member of the committee of privy counsellors which vets (if that is the right word) civil servants, generals, admirals and air marshals who take jobs when they leave government service. It does a good job and there is no force of law behind it. There is no time to develop the point, but I believe that if senior civil servants have to go through

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that procedure their political lords and masters should go through the same sort of procedure if they take jobs too soon, in the same vein as those they had as civil servants. It would be difficult, but it is hard for civil servants to go one way and their lords and masters another.
On the relationships of civil servants to Ministers, I look forward to the Scott report. In the same respect, I read the book by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe. His account of the Westland affair makes very interesting reading. It arose, it seems, because of the too personal attachment of civil servants to Ministers. The account is well worth reading. Regretfully, I missed the debate last week on prisons and the discussion on the division between policy and operational matters.
The White Paper states:
"The Government's view remains that Ministers are accountable to Parliament for the policy, administration and resources of their departments, including operational action, successes and mishaps, whatever the extent of delegation and whether they were personally involved or not".
I raise the point because over the weekend I was in the company of prison officers. The subject arose of the difference between policy and operational matters. One of the officers said that in his view the trouble at Everthorpe—there was, I suppose, an insurrection—was caused because home leave had been stopped as had going out to work. Both had been stopped so suddenly that the trouble that arose was not an operational matter. It arose because of policy changes emanating from the Home Office. I was also told that prisoners who are now unable to go on home leave from a Category D prison or out to work have to undergo risk assessments by the police but that the police do not have the necessary manpower for the task and that the Home Office had not dealt carefully with the issue. It had not dealt with the matter at all; it had not made sure that enough police were on hand.
I turn to the question of junior Ministers. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, is not in his place at the moment. When the noble Lord was Minister of State and I was Home Secretary, the matter arose of a chief constable whom I was to sack. I should have remembered that there are other noble Lords present who will remember the incident. Fortunately the man resigned, so the action was unnecessary. But we were girding our loins to do it and going through all the correct legal procedures. Somebody suggested that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, should handle the matter and that I should not, because at the end of the day the man would have the right of appeal to me. I would have sacked him and would also have had to act in appellate fashion. I was firmly advised that there is only one god, and that is the Secretary of State. Ministers of State and junior Ministers have no authority at all.
I read in the paper from time to time that so-and-so is the Minister for prisons and so-and-so is the Minister for this, that and the other. It is a pure creation of the Secretary of State and the department. It has no legal force. Ministers, whether Secretaries of State or not, are very unwise when they stand at the Dispatch Box and
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say "My department this" and "My department the other". They will soon find out whose department it is. It shows an attitude of mind which is mistaken.
I want to raise one other matter. The report deals with the executive agencies. I am very interested in devolution of some government matters to the regions. Indeed in Northern Ireland there is a very efficient Civil Service. Education is very near the ground. Those who deal with it know the schools and universities. They are not distant things because government concerns 1½ million people. The Government have decided to beef up regional offices in Leeds and other places. The Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Employment, the Department of the Environment, the Department of Transport and the Home Office will be locating a senior member of staff in regional offices. I am glad to see that. In Leeds, where I am chairman of the South Leeds Groundwork Trust and temporarily national chairman of the foundation, I deal with the local officers who are absolutely first class. But to whom are they responsible? There is a Cabinet committee, I presume, which somehow co-ordinates activities. We have to be clear. I have here a list of all the responsibilities. I am glad that certain matters are being dealt with in the regions, but if questions are asked about the agencies, I hope that the responsibilities of the new regional offices will be included. I am told that they work quite well. There is a lot of sense in what they do.
Looking back, it is very easy to congratulate ourselves. When I first came back from the war, I taught at a grammar school. We were great ones for clapping each other in the morning, or clapping what the school had done. The French assistante leant over to me one morning and said, "This place will clap itself to death if it is not careful". So far as the Civil Service is concerned, we ought to be proud of it. In the period of 11 years during which I was a Minister civil servants served me well. They will continue to serve well in the future; of that I am sure. But the powers-that-be should listen to the advice offered in today's debate. Too much change is taking place, and if care is not taken a great deal will be lost in the doing.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, I hate to rise, but I remind your Lordships very gently that when the clock indicates nine minutes, we are actually in the tenth minute. We are running slightly behind schedule at the moment.
6.9 p.m.
Lord Bancroft: My Lords, the time limits and the excellent earlier speeches confine me to two propositions. My first is that, so long as we have our parliamentary democracy, the essential role of the Civil Service—though not how that role is discharged—should be unchanging; namely, to act both as a ballast and, if need be, an engine in a constitution which includes a volatile and increasingly powerful Executive, and a volatile and, until very recently, increasingly regimented legislature; a ballast and engine of permanent officers, duly subordinate to Ministers yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability and experience to be able to advise, assist and to some extent influence those who are from time to time set

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above them. I quote, of course, the timeless verities of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. Those verities extend from the Permanent Secretary advising the Minister to the youngest clerk in a local office caring for clients beyond the call of duty. On a personal note I relished all the many Ministers I served except one.
In order to perform its role effectively, the service must be self-confident. Something has gone far wrong when too many civil servants are furtive or apologetic about their occupation. Partly as a result of the service's loss of self-confidence, some of our fellow citizens have lost confidence in it.
I simply cannot fathom the Government's refusal to commission an independent attitude survey of its employees. As a result, we all have to rely on anecdotal evidence. Mine is uniformly depressing at all levels. Heaven knows, I am no supporter of navel gazing but anecdotes show deep anxieties. I beg the noble Viscount to come back to us with a more satisfactory response on this point.
As others have remarked, the service is also handicapped by being mucked about too much, too rapidly and too incestuously. We needed a weighty Royal Commission at work some years ago. I am in no way overlooking the Select Committee in another place, which has been admirably persistent. I find myself welcoming most of the words but only some of the proposed actions in the latest White Paper. There is a gap between the words and the actions—the almost total break-up of a unified service into hundreds of semi-autonomous agencies, each under its own chief executive. Some arm's length agencies and indeed quangos-yes; but not hundreds. It makes for a cat's cradle of lines of accountability, rather like the work of a clever idiot trying to map Tom Tiddler's ground. Will the noble Viscount draw that last point to the attention of one or two of his ministerial colleagues?
Will he also be kind enough to mention to the same colleagues that it is distressingly simple minded to seek to separate policy and operational matters? Does he agree that while the acts of conception and birth are separate, they are also intimately linked—at least to the extent that one informs the other. Does he further agree that there is an intimate link between concept (that is, policy) and implementation (that is, operational matters)? Will he confide in us the Government's definitions of "responsibility", "answerability" and "accountability"? The partial attempt in the White Paper, although not unfamiliar to me, falls below the level of acceptability in the new circumstances.
My second proposition is that it is the natural condition of any public service to be corrupt. If that is much less true in this country than in others, it is because for a long time now, but by no means time out of mind, our Civil Service has maintained high standards of probity. That has not come about by accident. High standards have persisted because they became deeply ingrained in the ethos of the service. That ethos was rapidly absorbed by new arrivals, whose very method of recruitment to the service—by open competition—set the tone. They soon learned from their elders what was expected of them. Indeed, until I left Whitehall, I continued to ask myself, "What would
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Bridges (my noble friend's father), Brook or Serpell have done in like circumstances?" The ethos was further safeguarded by the tradition that the service offered a lifetime's career. That is now largely disappearing. It had the merit of building a deep commitment to the service and to its reputation. To become set in one's ways is not an unmitigated evil, if the ways have virtue. Standards are now at risk.
For years I opposed a code of ethics as I saw no need for it. But I now see the need with piercing clarity, given the fragmentation of the service. As a result of this, staff will remain largely unexposed to the ethos, which in the past was taken for granted. So, as a fellow repentant, I welcome the Government's conversion to the need for a code. I welcome too the introduction of independent redress for those who find themselves pressed to depart from those established standards. That is particularly necessary with the disappearance for many of a right of appeal to a long-serving permanent secretary, who is in no doubt about what is properly required of civil servants.
Many of the new agencies will be headed by people who themselves have had little or no previous experience of public service. I surmise that there will be a muddling number of differing categories of civil or public servants in the future. Will the noble Viscount confirm that, despite the apparent muddle, it will be crystal clear to which categories the Civil Service code and Civil Service status will apply in terms of recruitment, conditions of service, pensionability and acceptable post-retirement work —a point touched on by my noble friend Lord Allen?
The Government's proposed code is too general. I believe that after further consultation it should be embodied in legislation. I am glad that the Government have an open mind on that.
Finally, the appointment of the new part-time first commissioner on an initial short contract will be vitally important, given his enlarged responsibilities. Will the noble Viscount be kind enough to provide assurances on two points? First, while of course being subject to ministerial approval, will the selection process be free from any ministerial influence? Secondly, does he agree that it is essential for the new guardian of the Civil Service ethic to have been long marinaded in the public service? The advertisement which I have refers only to experience with company boards or with the public sector. Nowhere in the advertisement is the term "public service" used. That is crucial. It is not a matter of semantics.
Muddle makes for complexity, which in turns breeds mistrust, for what cannot be readily understood is not readily trusted. Simplicity should be the aim. The Government have still to convince us that the latest White Paper will bring the service to the frontier of achieving it; ripe also for reunification, with ethos intact, when the present ministerial fever abates.
What we have witnessed so far is partly a bold leap into the future and partly a disorderly retreat into the unreformed past. Meanwhile, I salute with sympathetic

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admiration those at all levels of the service who continue to serve their country with such devotion and probity.
6.18 p.m.
Lord Croham: My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Allen of Abbeydale, for initiating this debate, and especially for the powerful way in which he opened it. I entirely agree with his remarks. I also welcome the proposals in the White Paper about a code of conduct, for the reasons which the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, has just given.
In particular, I like the proposal for a final avenue of appeal when doubts about conduct, legality and propriety occur. However, I would not expect that final avenue to be utilised any more frequently than the other avenue of appeal which already exists when improper decisions about spending have been made; namely, the exposure of the impropriety to the Comptroller and Auditor-General and thence to Parliament. That possibility is powerful enough to make it virtually unnecessary to invoke it. I believe that it is a much stronger safeguard in its relevant area than what is now proposed for the rest. It is vital that the new arrangements involving the role of the First Civil Service Commissioner should not be allowed to affect that longstanding safeguard. As regards that role, I myself would have thought it better to have given it to the Parliamentary Commissioner and not to a Civil Service commissioner.
The enhanced role and strengthening of the Civil Service Commission is one of the main features of the White Paper which came out last week. Provided that the person appointed as First Civil Service Commissioner is fully acceptable to all parties in Parliament his inclusion on the Senior Appointments Selection Committee should help to remove the suspicion that there could be party political bias in top appointments.
However, in my experience in the rare cases when Ministers have expressed strong views about candidates for posts, it has been more a question of personalities than about suspected party affiliations or sympathies. It would be a much cleverer Minister than most whom I have known who could detect whether their senior civil servants have any party affiliations.
As regards the commissioner's contribution to senior appointments, if it is to be anything more than a negative one it would be necessary for the commission as a whole to have much more contact with the ongoing work at senior levels in departments than it has had in the past. I do not believe that that would be desirable.
As the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, pointed out, if the First Civil Service Commissioner is not to be an existing serving senior civil servant, it raises the question of what he will know. It also raises the question, if he is not to be a civil servant, of what the role of the commission itself is to be. Is it to be a special government department or a quango and to what extent will Ministers be able to give it directions? Indeed, what is its range to be if the service is fragmented? We must await more details.
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The main concerns which I have, and which the White Paper does nothing to diminish, are that many recent developments run the danger of fragmenting the service and that its whole ethos will be destroyed. This is a possible consequence of the proposals that central grades should be abolished; that there should be a new pay system for senior civil servants, with a number of overlapping pay ranges, and that organisational structures should be flat though different from department to department. These may be ideas in line with private sector practices and some modern management theories, but such ideas tend to be short-lived.
Just before I retired from the Civil Service I was taken to task by a committee of the other place because the proposals for unified grading which the Fulton Committee had recommended had not been fully implemented. Unified grading was seen as essential to the ease of movement of staff about the service and to the bringing of the professional classes into senior management posts. Shortly after the war a number of posts in intermediate grades were created in order to improve the co-ordination of new tasks. Now unified grading and hierarchies are frowned on.
With good will, most forms of organisation can be made to work but too much variation in pay in a public service usually causes endless problems for assessment and negotiation, and arbitration if that is permitted. It should not be forgotten that the pay of individuals in the public service has always been ascertainable through either the Imperial Calendar or its successor the Civil Service Yearbook and that when differentials are detected they are followed by claims. In those private sector posts where remuneration is public knowledge, as for company chairmen and chief executives, strenuous efforts are made not to have less remuneration than the peer group.
The White Paper also discusses appointments to senior Civil Service posts from outside the service. Such appointments are not new. They have been essential for some professional posts and have at times been very fruitful in general administration. But the proportion of outside appointments and the nature of their contracts has to be watched if key qualities of the Civil Service are to be maintained. I have observed that where in the private sector there is a strong sense of loyalty to the firm there is always an expectation of long-term employment and promotion from within, unless the appropriate talents cannot be found inside. Where firms rely on recruiting staff on strictly short-term contracts there is rarely any sense of belonging to the firm and the idea of loyalty to the firm is laughable. Nor do talented senior people in the private sector accept jobs on genuinely short-term contracts. They demand rolling contracts so that if their services are no longer required they can obtain a payment of two or three years' salary, part of which is tax free. Someone on a short-term contract can be expected to be loyal to the terms of the contract, but that is all.
What I find lacking in the White Paper is any understanding of what it has meant to be a member of the Civil Service or of the factors which have influenced people to remain in public service out of a sense of

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loyalty. A department of state is an institution with a history; it has been developed into a working team and its members are concerned about its standing, its performance and its long-term objectives. Morale is not just a word in a list of worthy qualities; it is a vital element if a department or a service are to be any good. And it has to be supported by leadership. Senior members of departments are not just there to do the job of the moment under contract but believe that their duty is to ensure that the department functions efficiently, effectively and lastingly. That involves the duty of training, developing and encouraging their potential successors. Concern for such things is what distinguishes a service from a mere employment. Excessive fragmentation of the service will result in it being just a collection of employments. Many years ago one of my colleagues asked in an interview about his responsibility, and he said that he considered himself responsible to his concept of what made an ideal civil servant. That is an attitude that strikes a chord with those of us who have served in the British Civil Service, and in your Lordships' House. I do not find that degree of understanding in the drafting of the White Paper.
6.25 p.m.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I have been neither a Minister nor a Permanent Secretary; I almost hesitate to speak. But what I wish to say is atmospheric, reflecting a general but widely-shared fear that we risk destroying a great national asset.
Within the service morale is low and the Civil Service is no longer perceived by young graduates as the natural goal for high flyers. Even in my time undergraduates would say to me, when I asked why they were not sitting the CSSB examinations, that the service had become like Marks & Spencer; it is not a public service anymore so it is more sensible to go into Marks & Spencer and be better paid.
Fortunately, I gather from inquiries in Oxford that, though there remains scepticism about the value of Next Steps, undergraduates are slowly beginning to think that it might be worthwhile to enter in the hope that something may be done to salvage the public service for which they care.
The White Paper says:
"The Civil Service needs … to make better use of its most important resource … by providing the prospect of a career with a good employer, offering challenge and reward".
But what does it do in practice? It takes people whose whole ethos is public service; disinterested, objective, committed to helping to shape national policies—as they did in the crucial years after 1945 about which Peter Hennessey writes so brilliantly in Never Again—and to working together, and it introduces a totally different set of values. Suddenly, in order to succeed civil servants are required to be competitive; to be market tested; to give value for money measured not by quality but by statistics: how many pieces of paper are handled; how many ticks are placed in boxes; how many successful sound bites are produced for citizens charters?
I am not arguing that there is not merit for some, and for some satisfying challenges in the various agencies. But I do oppose the application of this demi-business
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culture to all the operations of the public service and to the judgment and assessment of quality and performance and hence the prospect for advancement by inappropriate and even suspect criteria. It is repeating the mistake made in academic assessment today where someone who publishes six relatively trivial though perfectly respectable articles will be judged to have done better than the serious scholar who takes some years to write a book and produces nothing in the interval.
Throughout the Civil Service, the agencies and the non-departmental public bodies, people are writing endless business plans, market plans, financial audits, budget reviews and strategic plans. There are endless rehearsals of what has been done and what will be done but with no time left to do the central work or to think cohesively and broadly. There are too many buzz-words; too many charters; too much time spent projecting images. As one official put it to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee, they have all been "scrutinised to death".
The Government will say that that is all a necessary radical process from which a slimmer, meaner and altogether more satisfactory Civil Service will emerge. Statistically, that may be so. But what will the qualities of the staff be? Who will want to enter a service where there is deep insecurity? The young today are accustomed to being mobile in the City. They understand that to reach the top in the public service and secure really good jobs requires experience and commitment. What are they to make of a system under which, if an outsider wins an agency chief's job, he or she can expect whatever the market dictates, but a career civil servant can expect only his or her existing salary?
Civil Service pay has never been high and is now well behind the market. Civil servants must perceive themselves not to be valued. If the best leave, where will the successors to the present senior civil servants come from? The Government are devaluing their best asset—a highly motivated and dedicated body of people in a long and honourable tradition. To some extent that springs from a mistaken perception of Oxbridge elitism among the so-called mandarins. But as the then Secretary of State rightly pointed out to the committee, Oxbridge today is very broadly based and the perception of social bias in the Oxbridge intake is wholly unfounded. Incidentally, those who regard it as ridiculous to take someone with a degree in philosophy overlook, as the Treasury does not, that they have the best possible training for the higher reaches of information technology and artificial intelligence.
Far from pushing their reorganisation further, I hope very much that the Government will pause and consider urgently how best to motivate existing members of the service to stay. Unilever and ICI promote from within to managerial and boardroom status. Why not the Civil Service? I have always wished that we had the equivalent of ENA—the École Nationale d'Administration—in this country. It gives the valuable exposure to other experience but it also reinforces pride in being one of the elite—a civil servant. The Government should be thinking how to restore the public perception of the Civil Service, which it has

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become the fashion to denigrate, as a splendid career and civil servants as people who are valued, trusted and needed.
6.30 p.m.
Lord Hunt of Tanworth: My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Allen on arranging this debate and also those concerned for the impeccable timing of it in relation to the White Paper. I almost began to smell inside information, which would, of course, have been in breach of paragraph 10 of the new Civil Service code.
I agree with much that former colleagues of mine have said today but in the time available to me I propose to concentrate on the proposed new Civil Service code and the right of appeal for those who feel aggrieved under it. I can understand why government witnesses to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee of another place argued against a code of ethics or conduct and indeed I do not find all the arguments put forward for it at all convincing. There is, however, one argument which seems to me to have been growing in importance and which has now in my view become decisive. This is the fact—other noble Lords have referred to it—that the Civil Service is becoming less of a unified and homogeneous body with a shared tradition and culture which does not need to be written down and which is absorbed by the new entrant almost by a process of osmosis.
The Civil Service used to be a very centralised body in so far as establishment and personnel matters were concerned. But the whole object and intention of executive agencies is precisely so that everything does not have to be laid down and overseen by the centre. I do not quarrel with that. However, as different agencies start to develop their own cultures and traditions, we cannot rely on homogeneity and osmosis to reinforce the ethic of a non-political, fair-dealing Civil Service, particularly when executive agencies are under pressure to achieve their performance indicators and targets and possibly have temptation at times to cut a few corners to do so. Similarly, the greater degree of recruitment, particularly at senior level, from outside the service, however desirable it may be for other reasons, means, as has already been said, that not all senior officers have grown up in the service; and to me it calls for a more formal definition of what the public service means.
This question of homogeneity seems far more meaningful than any question of so-called politicisation, which has been argued by some people and which I simply do not believe. There are arguments against any party—whichever party it is—remaining in power for too long. It introduces a kind of sloppiness in administration and so on. But that is nothing to do with partisanship. I am absolutely certain that the Civil Service today, just like the Civil Service which I grew up in, would treat a change of party in government as a kind of challenge to be met.
The draft code in the White Paper, based as it is largely on the text prepared by the Treasury and Civil Service Committee, deals with both duties and rights and has much to commend it. In the time available I
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would make only one detailed point about it and one more general and important one. In the White Paper the Government provided a very helpful crib to the changes which they had made to the original Select Committee draft. I was fascinated to note in paragraph 5 that the Government had struck out "fairness" and substituted "impartiality" in a sentence saying how civil servants should conduct themselves, vis-à-vis Ministers, Parliament and the public; along, of course, with integrity and honesty. That is fair enough. But I wonder whether "fairness" should not appear in the following paragraph which concerns how the public expect to be dealt with: sympathetically, efficiently, promptly and without bias or bad administration.
This may sound a detail but no one is value-neutral or completely objective and, in handling the affairs of the public, civil servants must observe due process or neutrality of process in order to ensure that individual cases throughout the country are treated on a similar basis. That is the reason for much of the red tape associated with Civil Service procedures. I hope that the need for neutrality of process, which is not quite the same as an absence of bias, will be reflected in the final draft of the code.
My more important point concerns the right of appeal to the Civil Service Commissioners for civil servants who feel that they are required to act in a way inconsistent with the code and have not had satisfaction through the normal departmental channels. I accept the need for an outside point of appeal and I cannot think of a better one than the Civil Service Commissioners. But how wide should this right of appeal be given? This point was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong.
Paragraph 11 of the Government's draft code offers it not only on matters of legality and ethics but also where a civil servant believes he or she is being required to act in a way,
"which is otherwise inconsistent with this Code or raises a fundamental issue of conscience".
The words used are "or raises a fundamental issue of conscience", not "and raises a fundamental issue of conscience". Is this really the intention? The code covers a very wide range of activities, not all of which involve issues of legality or conscience. I hope that careful thought will be given to how this right is defined to make it clear that it relates to genuinely improper requirements placed on civil servants and is not an avenue for civil servants whose real grumble is about a Minister's policy or his behaviour. Misuse of this procedure or extending it too widely would not help the Civil Service and could become the shortest cut to politicisation of the Civil Service.
I have an open mind on the desirability of introducing the new code under the prerogative or by legislation. I would have tended to prefer the use of the prerogative so far as the role of the Civil Service Commissioners is concerned, for the reasons given in paragraph 2.15 of the White Paper, and to mark the fact that they stand apart from the normal Whitehall departments. However, the wording of the following paragraph in the White Paper would now seem to imply that the Government will legislate if there is inter-party agreement. That

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wording worries me quite a lot because it implies that if the Government then proceed under the prerogative there has been inter-party disagreement and that would be the worst thing of all for the Civil Service. I very much hope that the consultations which will take place are successful and that there is inter-party agreement on the code.
6.38 p.m.
Lord Greenhill of Harrow: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Allen, on his opening speech. When he invited me first to call on him in his office in 1969 I knew at once that he was not an ordinary civil servant. He had copies of Private Eye open on his desk.
I hope your Lordships will not think it unreasonable for an elderly retired Diplomatic Service officer to seek some assurance that the proposed reform of the Home Civil Service will not lead to the weakening of the strength of the Diplomatic Service. Some of the projected reforms will doubtless be applicable to both services. But it is important that they do not damage the Diplomatic Service and prejudice the United Kingdom's ability to pursue the objectives of a global foreign policy.
My suspicions were somewhat aroused by the glossy White Paper which has some of the characteristics of a commercial catalogue. The first White Paper issued some months ago made a brief reference to the Diplomatic Service and further details were promised. Such details do not appear in the present document. I hope that a further document is not intended. I know that some significant reforms of the Diplomatic Service are already being considered in the same way as for the Home Civil Service. One example is the consideration of "contracted" senior officers. I question the wisdom of that. Can noble Lords imagine the head of state of a foreign country being impressed by a British ambassador whose contract he knows is coming to an end and who has made only a temporary financial commitment to the service.
As your Lordships know, the form of the present Diplomatic Service is based on an Order in Council which establishes the procedure for recruitment and the terms and conditions of the service. In my opinion that is most important. There is some suggestion that it should be superseded in future by legislation. Would not that legislation destroy inter alia the sense of service which is a very valuable feature at present?
The Home Civil Service, so long admired, is in the process of shedding functions to agencies and is increasingly subordinated to consultants. I had experience of seeing this in action in the Select Committee on the King's Cross Bill. In contrast, the Diplomatic Service faces the problems of additional responsibility as the new pattern of the world requires us to participate in new problems affecting our safety and our economy. We may be helped by the European Union. But the Secretary of State, Douglas Hurd, says rightly that we must control our own national defence. I agree with that and I believe that we should also control our own diplomatic machine.
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Our Diplomatic Service, I know, is under modernisation and internal reform. It is sharing experience with the Home Civil Service. It is greatly helped by its own inspectors who travel worldwide and see for themselves the problems on the spot. The last nine years of my own 30 years' experience were in Whitehall under different governments and contrasting political parties. The new White Paper includes a proposed Civil Service code on pages 43-44. I see little in it which has not been accepted practice in the Diplomatic Service over many, many years.
The working relationship between members of the Diplomatic Service and Ministers has been, in my experience, frank, cordial and loyal. Members have not been self-seeking, deceitful or exercising their own private political views. I can see here several Members on all sides of the House who can give testimony to that. Successive governments were able to rely on their staffs despite the changes. I hope that that state of affairs will continue.
I was myself once considerably nonplussed by a Foreign Secretary's remark and I shall repeat it. It was the late Michael Stewart—Lord Stewart of Fulham. He asked me to explain a complicated disarmament question, which I did. When I had finished he said: "You explained very well the interests of Her Majesty's Government, but tell me", he said, "what are the interests of mankind?" I was completely nonplussed by that.
There is one possible cloud on the horizon to which I was going to refer, but I shall not, in regard to the Scott Report. I hope that it is responsibly dealt with and does not lead to a determined attempt to move the settling of diplomatic affairs to the television screen.
Another point I wish to make concerns the qualifications and abilities of the members of the future Diplomatic Service. It has become fashionable to accuse both the Home Civil Service and the Diplomatic Service of not knowing what goes on in the so-called "real world". My guess is that, as regards the Diplomatic Service, sometimes its members know more than most of what goes on in several real worlds.
For many years the service has seconded individuals to industry and finance, and vice versa, and recruited outside staff with special abilities. But from time to time politicians from both parties have held high diplomatic appointments. Most have been highly successful and welcomed by their staffs. I had personal experience of working with Lords Franks, Harlech, Cromer, and Caradon and the journalist, Mr. Freeman. No doubt such appointments will again be appropriate in certain circumstances and will no doubt include Ladies this time. However, I hope that we shall not follow the methods of the United States in that respect.
No doubt some of the proposed reforms to the Home Civil Service can be followed in the Diplomatic Service. But the Government will be taking a risk if all the present White Paper is fully implemented. In my view, the Diplomatic Service must act in parallel with the

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Home Civil Service but must continue to be independent and separate in order to adapt to future global developments.
6.46 p.m.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, it is recorded that Abraham Lincoln was approached by a delegation who informed him that General Grant was addicted to whisky. His reply was, "If you will be good enough to tell me the brand of whisky, I will send a cask to each of my other generals". In other words, Abraham Lincoln, like great men, was concerned with the outcome. He wanted to know that there would be victories and he credited the general who brought him victories.
The public in general is very remote from the interesting problems that we have been discussing this afternoon about the internal morale of the Civil Service and about the possibilities of appeals if there are matters of conscience. Things of that kind are important and interesting, but the public are concerned about whether Britain is being well governed—that is, has the Civil Service any responsibility, which can be pinpointed, for various things which have happened and which are, to a greater or lesser degree, unwelcome?
In our debate on Monday afternoon it was pointed out how between them the Department for Education and the Treasury managed, from a perfectly sensible idea that people whose education benefited from the public purse might pay back some of it when they achieved larger incomes, to create chaos. In our debate this afternoon it was pointed out how many good intentions by different government departments towards dealing with the problems of children are vitiated by the apparent inability of Whitehall departments to act together satisfactorily. I do not believe that I need rehearse other examples which will be apparent to many noble Lords.
In thanking the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, for introducing this debate, I only regret that he did not emphasise even more strongly the absurdity of the notion that administration or management can usefully be separated from policy. It is like the general who says, "My strategy was splendid, but it was the wretched people on the ground who messed it up with their tactics".
Whether or not we get it right must largely depend on the quality of the civil servants employed. Therefore, my own interest has been—and I echo some of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Park—in the recruitment process which, like everything else, has undergone many changes. We now have the Recruitment and Assessment Services Agency which has taken over the role which the Civil Service Commission once enjoyed. I have been looking at its constitution and what attitudes can be derived from the kind of tests which it imposes on would-be applicants. It seems to me that this is an agency which is excessively weak. It is manned, for short periods, by persons from other departments, and we know that that means persons whom other departments believe they can spare. The documents it produces are written in a jargon which betrays all the influence of modern
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managerial newspeak and little of the discipline, intellectual and linguistic, which is presumably to be expected of the people it is trying to recruit.
The agency works, as many noble Lords will know, through panels of three. One is the chair. It was a chairman in the published document about the new system, but it is a chair in its internal documents—a very vigorous piece of furniture which writes, interviews and looks after things in general. The other two are a psychologist and a departmental assessor. It is pointed out that the two, as it were, lay members of the board, although they all have to agree on the report, are not expected to understand the psychologist's contribution, because that is very technical. It is also suggested that the psychologist must try to demystify his or her contribution by explaining to the candidate what it is that he or she is trying to find out.
The agency tries to meet what it claims are demands from the departments that its reports should be better formatted. I do not know exactly what "formatted" means. I suppose that if you can have matted hair you can have formatted reports.
Members of the panels are told that they must not use what is called "familiar language"—clubby terms such as "Wykehamist". I never thought of Wykehamists as very clubby, but no doubt in the recesses of that body Wykehamists are thought to be clubby. It goes on in that way, and I shall not bore your Lordships with further quotations from its grammar or syntax. But the impression that it leaves, combined with other information one has, is of a serious denigration of intellectual qualities in the people being sought, and that is of some importance to noble Lords. It applies of course to the Diplomatic Service, which it also handles, and noble Lords will realise that it is also how our Clerks are being recruited or will be recruited; that is to say, the business of being able to work in a team; to get through a test involving an in-tray and an out-tray; circular discussions among teams—all that modern newspeak—is given preference.
It is said that the intellectual qualities are guaranteed by the fact that everyone who is allowed to proceed to these tests must have a first or second-class degree. If they are so remote from the world that they believe that a 2:2 from the University of Loamshire is a guarantee of high intellectual performance, then those civil servants at any rate are as remote from the real world as it is often thought civil servants in general are.
It is important that we should look, as the Treasury Select Committee did not look, at the general method of recruitment and of what is being looked for. The general public does not mind. They would not mind if all civil servants were Oxbridge, provided they felt that they were getting good government. The accent on being politically correct (gender conscious) and all the types of things which fill these documents and their conversations is something which threatens our future.
6.55 p.m.
Lord Bridges: My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Allen of Abbeydale for selecting this subject for debate and for his excellent introduction. The Civil Service is not exactly a popular topic, and that

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comes as no surprise to former members of the public service who have been taking part in today's discussion. We are well aware that we continue to be grouped in the public mind with mothers-in-law and Wigan Pier as objects of ridicule. I borrow that phrase, which is not mine, from a speech made by a former head of the Civil Service (my father) in his Rede Lecture of 1950 on this very subject.
I should at the beginning declare an interest. I am a member of this breed: for four generations my family has contributed a number of members to the public service. I have some pride in being the great grandson of one of the architects of the Victorian Civil Service who was, for no fewer than 18 years, the Permanent Secretary at the Board of Trade. His name was Thomas Henry Farrer, and he came to this House in his retirement. As a former member of the Diplomatic Service, I do not forget the life of my great uncle, Cecil Spring-Rice, ambassador in Washington in the difficult years of American neutrality between 1914 and 1917 and removed from his post by Lloyd George when he became Prime Minister to make way for a political appointment. With that personal background, your Lordships will understand why I take a particular interest in the Government's policies towards the Civil Service. I suggest that they need to be looked at in a long perspective as well as with close attention to detail.
The creation of a unified public service in this country was one of the notable achievements of the last century. It stands with the other great Victorian reforms such as the creation of a universal education system, the improvements to our system of criminal justice, the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the extension of the franchise, and so on. We should not forget that it was a deliberate move away from the atmosphere of political corruption and jobbery in the 18th century, which was a source of much public disgust. Northcote and Trevelyan have been mentioned, but the person who led the foundation for those reforms was none other than Edmund Burke in a series of important Bills which he steered through the other place from 1780 onwards.
The underlying principles of the Victorian Civil Service—the great reform—are worth reciting. Some of them have been mentioned already. They are important: selection of entrants by a competitive system; the supervision of that system by an independent body; promotion on merit; and political neutrality. In their White Paper, the Government specifically confirm their endorsement of those principles. I am glad. My concern is that some of the individual reforms in the White Paper, and some already introduced, do not fit very well with those principles. I shall explain in a moment my grounds for concern.
Before going into those matters, I should like to mention a few other general considerations; first, the quality of the administrative machine we have inherited from the past. By international standards, that machine is outstanding. It gave us the civil apparatus which enabled us to win two world wars and to manage the great transfer of power which took place in 1945. More recently, in travelling around, I have heard in most European capitals—not just in France, which has been mentioned—admiration of the manner in which the
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Cabinet Office secretariat and the Civil Service generally in London handles the co-ordination of our European policies. The policies are a different matter; it is the way in which they are carefully co-ordinated and prepared that commands admiration. All the other countries wish that they had such a system.
Then there is the issue of political neutrality. I had a ringside seat for two changes of administration. The first was in 1964 as a Private Secretary in the Foreign Office and the second was 10 years later as a Private Secretary at 10 Downing Street. Those are always difficult times. I doubt whether members of incoming administrations appreciate to the full the determination of the Civil Service to work for the incoming government and to give them their wholehearted support. I heard with gratitude and strongly support what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. The desire to support a new government is held regardless of the respect or personal liking that civil servants may have had for those leaving office. Political neutrality too, is an asset that we should not lightly throw away. As has been pointed out, it is easy to maintain if there are fairly frequent changes of government and if there is broad national consensus on at least the main policies.
Then there is the issue of cost. Of course there is need for strict financial discipline in Civil Service pay as in other matters. The White Paper states an important assumption on page 9. It says that,
"pay and price increases should be offset, or more than offset, by efficiencies and other economies with adjustments as necessary for workload".
The last six words are crucial. One may prune any extravagances that one may find and curtail marginal matters. However, beyond that one will have to cut into the main stem if one is to make economies year on year. I am not sure that the present Government understand how difficult it is to do that without reducing workload and function. The creation of Next Steps agencies may have masked the problem temporarily in statistical terms but the problem is still there. Nor can all policies be readily measured by cost benefit analysis, important though that is. There are a number of areas in which that analysis does not help. Foreign policy and defence are two such areas and the principles of Civil Service reform may be another.
Returning to the text of the White Paper, I have two main anxieties. They relate to the process of selection and recruitment and the issue of political neutrality. As regards selection, the crucial point is the way in which candidates for the most senior posts are chosen. It is clearly the intention that most of these posts will be filled by a new procedure after public advertisement. It is not clear exactly how that will be carried out. We are told that the Civil Service Commission will audit the procedure and approve all outside appointments. We are also told that the first commissioner will sit on the senior appointments selection committee.
But some further explanation seems to be required. Who exactly will make these appointments? Will Ministers have a role? What will be the chosen criteria? To whom will the selectors be responsible? Furthermore, who will determine the salary levels? Will they be within published scales or applicable ad hoc to

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attract particular candidates? That appears to have been the procedure used to select the director of the prison service. In order to clarify uncertainty, it would be helpful if the Government could tell us more. Personally, I shall reserve judgment on the reforms until they have done so.
Finally, there is the matter of political neutrality. I can briefly illustrate my worries by the following comments. I read in the press that the Government intend to reduce the senior staff in the Treasury from 24 to eight and that the eight people will be chosen by the new procedure. Let us suppose that that happens. If subsequently there should be a change of government—and I assume that that will eventually occur—what will be the attitude of the incoming administration towards the senior officials? Of course, much will depend on the answers to the questions that I have just posed, but it is extremely important to avoid the situation in which neither group has confidence in the other. Very often, these government changes take place when rapid decisions need to be taken on financial matters. An incoming Chancellor of the Exchequer who lacked confidence in the senior team at the Treasury would surely put into effect policies worked out outside the Treasury. We should do well to recall what happened in the great row about import surcharges in 1964.
I am not a natural ally of Colonel Blimp and I believe in the steady need for reform and innovation. However, I also believe in principles. I hope that the noble Viscount will be able to convince me that the Government will not damage the essential principles of our Civil Service.
7.5 p.m.
Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, this has been an impressive debate, not least the last speech by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges. He raised some extremely important questions which I hope the Minister will answer today or in the near future. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, derives pleasure from the fact that on the Benches today are some of his most distinguished colleagues from the public service, and a slew of young Ministers who were once under his guidance are now older Peers and who learnt a great deal from him about the public service. It can be fairly said that the noble Lord, Lord Allen, is the very model of the finest type of public servant. I say that as one who had the great honour of serving with him—not under or over but with—as Minister of State at the Home Office when he was Permanent Under-Secretary in that department.
One of the features of the debate has been an almost elegiac sense of the passing of one of the finest assets that this country has ever had. It is the British Civil Service and the concept of public service that has for so long been associated with it. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, referred to his ancestor, Cecil Spring-Rice, and I could not help recalling the words of the famous hymn that he wrote:
"I vow to thee, my country all earthly things above
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love".
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That is perhaps a Victorian way of putting the sentiment of devotion and loyalty by which so many civil servants in this country have been marked; but all of us recognise that something fundamental has changed. I must ask the question that was echoed in many speeches today: why is it that we in this country seem to destroy the very things that we do best and seem to be so reluctant to recognise that they have added greatly to our reputation?
It is difficult to deny that not only we in this country but others live in a time of great disillusionment and cynicism as regards the processes of government and the personalities of those engaged in it. Much of that cynicism is directed at Ministers and politicians, and not primarily at civil servants. We should be living in a world of astonishing complacency if we failed to recognise that several events during the past few years—from the Spycatcher case, which appeared to make the Government look obsessive, through the Matrix Churchill case, which appeared to make Ministers deceptive, to the Pergau Dam case, in which fortunately the beacon behaviour of a particular Permanent Secretary upheld the highest traditions of the civil service—have raised profound questions in the minds of our fellow citizens about the probity, efficiency and honour with which in the broadest sense governance is conducted today.
I wish to comment on a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, in a most significant and impressive speech. It is the anxiety felt by many about the use of patronage to appoint people to quangos and executive agencies, and the great uncertainty about the lines of accountability from those quangos and executive agencies to Parliament and the wider public. The noble Lord, Lord Dean of Harptree, referred reasonably tc the idea that quangos might have a useful role to perform provided that the highest standards of public conduct are maintained. I could not help asking myself why the chairman of the Welsh Development Agency, so heavily criticised by the Public Accounts Committee, was almost immediately after leaving that position appointed to be a governor of the BBC. It seems a strange way of recognising outstanding public service.
Perhaps I may raise three issues which have been mentioned extensively in the debate, each of which raises some very troubling questions. The first of those is the issue of ministerial accountability. Ministerial accountability to Parliament is the very linchpin of the unwritten British democratic system. Once ministerial accountability ceases to be clear, the whole of our structure begins to become shaky.
I echo the contribution of three other noble Lords in the debate who said that it was extremely troubling that in another place, the Home Secretary, on 10th January, in his reply to the right honourable Member for Berwick, attempted to distinguish between his responsibility for policy matters and his responsibility for operational matters in relation to the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Merlyn-Rees—prison escapes.
That is a very dangerous fudge. Ministers are responsible for what goes on in their departments. That has been made clear repeatedly. It is not only troubling

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but it is a slippery slope away from the sense of responsibility which is so crucial to try to make that false distinction between operational and policy areas.
But it is possible to do that just because the creation of executive agencies has raised major ambiguities which remain unresolved. When we discuss, as we do, the issue of a code of conduct for civil servants, it is very important indeed that that code of conduct should reflect the responsibility of heads of executive agencies and deal with some of the particular issues in regard to their relationships with the public and who is responsible for them.
The second area of concern that has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords including the noble Lords, Lord Bridges and Lord Bancroft, affects the issue of appointment by merit—open promotion—which was referred to in the case of the director of the Prison Service. It is troubling when Ministers intervene in appointments, as seems to have occurred on that occasion. That would go a long way towards destroying the trust which is essential between the Civil Service and Ministers and potential Ministers which has been one of the great achievements of our Civil Service.
I have no objection to the idea of open advertisement for certain posts. Indeed, I believe that I was the first Secretary of State ever to appoint a senior official as a result of open advertisement—the appointment of the Director-General of Fair Trading. I see nothing wrong in that reform. But I believe that it must be quite clear who makes the appointments and that many of the questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, are crucial questions which deserve a full response.
The third area of concern affects the issue of objectivity and neutrality. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, will allow me to question that fundamental statement about the role of the Civil Service—what is sometimes called the Armstrong Memorandum, which was the work of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster. The Armstrong Memorandum has become the basis of much that has been quoted in the White Paper and also in the accompanying paper from the First Division Association and the IPMS. I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me for not warning him that I should be raising this point but as I am winding up the debate, I did not know that I should be referring to it until a few moments ago.
The Armstrong Memorandum states:
"The Civil Service as such has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly constituted Government of the day".
I recognise fully the outstanding intellectual abilities of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, but I am troubled as to whether it is the case that there is no responsibility other than that to the duly constituted government of the day, whatever they do. I am not referring to the present Government or any other particular government. But at present, we are entering into commitments to international treaties where our signature lies on them; for example, the European Convention on Human Rights. We are committed to upholding the rule of law. I wonder whether that statement deals with the possibility—and heaven knows, we live in a world
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where we have seen it happen!—that the government of the day might go beyond that for which it would be proper to have responsibility.
That is an issue which is raised particularly by the question of misleading Parliament, deceptive statements and any steps which Ministers may take which breach the rules of proper behaviour. We must address those matters, although we may not wish to do so, because we do not live in quite the world of homogeneous values in which we once lived.
I conclude by raising a few questions which I shall address to the noble Viscount. The first of those questions concerns the proposed code of conduct. How will that code of conduct deal with the period between leaving the Civil Service and taking up a job in an area which may be related to one's previous post in the case of those who are on fixed-term, renewable contracts? For example, if the Director-General of the Prison Service were to take up a post as a director of a private security agency, what is the period of time that would be required to elapse between those two positions? That is an extremely important question if we are to retain respect and belief in the probity of our public service.
The second question that I wish to raise is more minor but is not unimportant. Perhaps the noble Viscount will tell the House whether there is any common statistical base among the executive agencies of the Civil Service which will enable the monitoring of discrimination on both gender and racial grounds to be conducted properly because I understand that that is becoming increasingly difficult.
Finally and thirdly, I ask the Minister to give us a fuller statement about the proposal that there should be a right of appeal for civil servants to a body outside their direct senior officer. What is the Government's view about that at present? I apologise by speaking for one minute longer than I should do but I had been told that there was a minute in hand so that I trust that the government Chief Whip will not be too angry with me.
7.17 p.m.
Lord Richard: My Lords, I start by joining in the congratulations offered to the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, for raising an issue which the House has clearly found important. Not only that, it has given rise to what has proved to be an extraordinary debate. There have been 17 speakers in the debate: six former permanent secretaries, three former Cabinet Ministers, two former very senior civil servants and one or two people like myself who, at one stage, was an incorporated civil servant, if that is the right way to put it.
It is interesting that consistent themes have run throughout the debate. With the exception of the noble Lord, Lord Dean of Harptree, nobody has spoken favourably about the Government's attitude. If I had to sum up the whole flavour of the debate in a sentence, it seems to me that there was intense pride in what we had in the form of the Civil Service, great unease as to what is now taking place, and considerable uncertainty as to what the future may bring.

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I believe that that is fair summary of the speeches that we have listened to during the past three hours. If that is right, the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, deserves more than the usual formal congratulations of the House for giving this subject an airing at this particular time. The noble Viscount the Leader of the House who is to reply to the debate has a formidable task before him in answering the queries which have been raised and in reassuring those noble Lords who have spoken.
One point of agreement that has emerged is the crucial importance of the British Civil Service to the proper working of our governance. Since the 1870s, that great national asset has been the permanent and impartial instrument of all administrations, guaranteeing constitutional and financial propriety. I know of no other Civil Service in a comparably-sized country in the world about which one could make such a proud claim with so much historical basis in fact and in accuracy. We must remember that the Civil Service numbers not only those who advise Ministers in Whitehall, but also the remainder—the overwhelming majority of the service of over half-a-million people—from departmental messengers to prison staff, from those who calculate social security benefits to official receivers, and indeed many others.
Our Civil Service has exemplified public administration founded upon principles of public service, impartiality, integrity, accountability and selection and promotion on merit. On behalf of the Labour Party, I am very happy to pay our tribute to the way in which those qualities in public service and public administration have been exemplified in the Civil Service.
When the Minister responds he will, no doubt, say much the same thing and promise that the Government will continue to stand by their principles in their dealings with those who administer the policies that they make. He may do so, but the whole tenor of the debate seemed to have been in the opposite direction. Recently, a group of senior civil servants expressed the following view:
"Civil servants have felt undervalued and beleaguered; cost-cutting and short-termism has often appeared to displace a rational approach to the improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of the service".
They concluded with the words, "Current morale is low". Once again, the Government's claims and the real experience of those affected by them do not precisely and entirely coincide.
After 15 years of a single party in government, there are some in the Civil Service who fear that the Civil Service may be perceived as the property of one party by those in charge. I believe that all the other issues only serve to reinforce that threat of loss of independence—the redundancies consequent upon efficiency drives, performance-related pay, the apparent greater politicisation of the higher grades, agency status and contracting out, and the lines now being drawn between the accountability of Ministers and of those under them. It is those matters which have led to what many believe to be an unprecedented loss of morale.
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No one quarrels with the need for increased efficiency—certainly, I do not—but that is an issue where good management skills must be applied. Low morale is in itself a major threat to increased efficiency; there is little point in cutting jobs and thereby saving money if the people who remain feel so threatened and under such pressure that they cannot work as well as they used to. Redundancies, or, perhaps, the threat of them, may make civil servants less willing to give unwelcome advice to their managers or to Ministers. Do we really want a Civil Service where it is those who keep their heads down who are the ones most likely to make progress? I think not.
Nearly 150 years ago, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report produced a blueprint for the modern unified politically impartial Civil Service which we now regard as the norm. The unity of the service was to be fostered by uniform methods of recruitment and systems of promotion across all departments. In 1968, the Fulton Report sought to reinforce that unity through shared methods of recruitment and shared structures for pay and grading. In 1987, the Government set out the advantages of service-wide pay and personnel management arrangements. They said that,
"staff can move easily between Departments and do any work for which their qualifications and experience suit them; machinery of government changes can be effected quickly and easily; Departments do not compete against each other for the same scarce skills."
Government policy now seems to me to have abandoned that approach and with it many Civil Service pay agreements, some concluded as recently as 1992. Gone, apparently, is the idea of a single employer paying individuals on the same grade and doing the same job—albeit in different departments—the same amount of money. The new thinking seems to be that departments and agencies can pay the "market rate" which may apparently differ now from department to department. The Government's 1987 objections seem to have vanished. Perhaps the noble Viscount the Leader of the House can tell us why there has been such a change over the past six or seven years.
The fragmentation of unified pay structures has been accompanied by the introduction of performance-related pay. The practical experience of performance-related pay—at least, so far as concerns the Civil Service—is that it is both demoralising and ineffective. Many of the functions carried out by civil servants are in their nature difficult if not impossible to measure. Quite apart from that, the pay budgets of departments remain cash limited, so that they cannot afford staff who are performing well above the expected level. Indeed, one hears the rumour of a marked decrease in box markings for the year before performance-related pay was introduced to the year of introduction. It seems that staff are being given the message that their performance has suddenly declined, when in fact it has done nothing of the sort. But, of course, it is much cheaper to do it that way. There is no objective research to show that performance-related pay improves performance. I believe that it is time for the Government to commission an independent study themselves to find out what difference, if any, it has made.

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Finally, the role of the Civil Service is threatened by the drive to contract out as many services as possible—even those which verge on the judicial, such as the traffic commissioner, or those where most would agree it is for the state to take responsibility, such as the administration of justice or the incarceration of offenders. It seems as if almost nothing has been ruled out; not even the Serious Fraud Office, with the extensive powers of search, seizure and interview that that body possesses.
Clear issues of public service, confidentiality and impartiality are raised by contracting out. There are also very serious questions as to whether contracting out really does save any money. Indeed, actual payments often exceed the agreed operating costs. One should not ignore the fact that many companies to which matters are contracted are in business in order to make profits.
I should like to say a few words about agency status. I believe that the dangers involved have been exemplified recently by the numerous problems that we have had in the prison service. We are now told that the Minister with responsibility for prisons is responsible only for policy; the Prison Service Agency is responsible for operation. First, I should add that that is not a distinction that I entirely appreciate. I do not quite see how one can draw such clear lines between that which is a matter of policy and that which is a matter of operation. We are told that all the recent problems have been operational and that, therefore, the Minister does not have to accept criticism. But he can pass it on to the paid officials. That must be wrong.
Ministers cannot hide behind their civil servants; indeed, it would be very wrong if they were to try to do so. That is especially so when those officials are part of an agency. Lines cannot be conveniently drawn between policy and operation. For example, we await the report of Mr. Justice Scott into the arms to Iraq affair and the use of public interest immunity certificates. Ministers must not be allowed to carry out the same exercise in taking refuge behind their advisers. It must be clear: civil servants may advise, but Ministers take ultimate responsibility for what is done and for how it is done. It is a reflection of what has been happening recently that this now has to be said.
We cannot manage in this country without a Civil Service which is trusted by everyone and which feels itself to be valued and trusted by Ministers. We still believe that our Civil Service is among the best in the world. But, I close with the following question. Unless government attitudes change, how much longer will we be able to say that?
7.28 p.m.
The Lord Privy Seal (Viscount Cranborne): My Lords, I can certainly agree with almost everyone who has spoken this afternoon in saying that we have had a most interesting and important debate. I must say that I intervene now with some diffidence for many reasons,
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but mainly because I feel rather as I imagine a novice Freemason must feel when stumbling into the reunion dinner of the inner ring—
Lord Graham of Edmonton: I would not know!
Viscount Cranborne: My Lords, nor would I.
We have had a short debate and I am sure that noble Lords will forgive me if I do not manage to answer every point that has been raised. However, I undertake to write to noble Lords if any points remain unanswered. Nevertheless I will do my best tonight.
On 13th July last the Government published a White Paper on the Civil Service entitled Continuity and Change and my noble friend Lord Wakeham repeated a Statement in your Lordships' House on that White Paper. Indeed the noble Lord, Lord Richard, during his remarks on that occasion said, among other things,
"our existing Civil Service … has an enviable reputation for certain qualities: its impartiality; its independence of advice, irrespective of who is in government and the nature of that government; its continuity; and, finally, its sheer professionalism".—0[Official Report, 13/7/94; col. 1833.]
I was of course delighted to read those words, although I was not fortunate enough to hear them. They are a tribute to the enduring achievement of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, so often mentioned with approval this afternoon. If the noble Lord, Lord Richard, will allow me the impertinence, they encapsulate with his usual happy phraseology the Government's views of what are the essential qualities we should expect of the Civil Service. As he himself said during these exchanges, on that all sides of the House can agree.
However, certain allegations have been made by the inner ring this evening. I think they can be encapsulated in the use of the word "morale". I shall come back to that in a minute. I would say to my noble friend Lady Park in particular that it is interesting, during a time of change when morale will inevitably be at risk, that the number of people applying to the Civil Service has been consistently high. There has been an annual average in recent years of 10,000. I would underline that by saying that the figures for 1993 show that for the first time for a number of years the numbers successful in the fast stream entry exceeded the numbers the Civil Service was seeking.
I return to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and in particular to his remarks today. It cannot have escaped the noble Lord's notice that the world has changed a little since 1853. I hope it has not escaped the notice of the noble Lord, Lord Allen. Although I was a little more doubtful about this—if he will allow me to say so—I hope it has not escaped the notice of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkins. The pace of change, stimulated by an unprecedented technological revolution, has accelerated at a vertiginous rate over the past 20 years. Indeed it would perhaps be churlish not to recognise that the Labour Party, when it was in Government —that is now an awful long time ago as a number of your Lordships have observed—understood that change of this nature demanded a re-examination of the way the Government was administered.

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As long ago as 1968 the Fulton Report—on which commission the noble Lord, Lord Allen, was. such an ornament—recognised that we needed to introduce a more professional approach to management and more modern methods of recruitment and training. Your Lordships will remember that the Fulton recommendations led to the establishment of what is now the senior open structure, and the foundation of the Civil Service College which, I think your Lordships will agree, is one of the outstanding successes of recent reforms.
The technological revolution I referred to a moment ago has led to a revolution in management techniques. It tends to do so. It did so, after all, at the time of the first Industrial Revolution. In our case information technology in particular has given great power to the individual. It has enabled management to introduce, in the jargon, much flatter structures. It has made financial control a much more exact science. It has made administration more flexible and less hierarchical. Above all, perhaps, it has become essential for large organisations to institutionalise change while at the same time maintaining stability—an apparently paradoxical double objective which demands new attitudes of mind which I suspect both Northcote and Trevelyan would have found alien and at least as difficult as we do.
Having said that, I wholly accept the strictures of the noble Lords, Lord Bancroft and Lord Armstrong, and my noble friend Lady Park when they pointed out the dangers of permanent revolution. After all, I think it was Chairman Mao who advocated a state of permanent revolution—
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: Trotsky!
Viscount Cranborne: in the wake—as the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, also points out—of one of his intellectual predecessors, the late unlamented Leon Trotsky. Of course we are well aware that such a state of affairs failed. I think a state of permanent revolution is a profoundly un-Tory attitude, and certainly I would be the last to disagree with the idea that consolidation is as important as change and should certainly follow periods of radical change.
The world outside Whitehall is, nevertheless, being forced rapidly down this road that I have described. That is the world with which the Civil Service has to deal. I may risk —I am aware of this—the charge of impertinence when I say to the various distinguished former permanent under-secretaries who have spoken this evening, that the Civil Service would not with ease be able to deal with that outside world unless its organisation to some degree reflected the change that was happening on the outside. Indeed the outside could not respect and understand our public administration unless it functioned along something of the same lines.
I am told that the great Sir Humphrey Appleby—a man who I am sure really existed, although we are told by the BBC that he was merely a figment of its imagination—was keen on maintaining the art of public administration as a high priestly mystery. I have to suggest that this will not do in an age which puts a
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premium on openness and accountability. Therefore it is only sensible that the Government should have given such a high priority to the reform of public administration since 1979. I will not weary your Lordships—particularly in view of the relatively limited time available to me—with a full account of what has happened in the past 15 years, even if I had time to do so. However, it is perhaps worth highlighting some of the principal changes to illustrate why I believe that the reforms have a coherence which is entirely consistent with our aim of satisfying the demands of the age in which we live and at the same time living up to the aspirations of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms.
The Financial Management Initiative that was launched in 1982 set out to introduce a system which clarified management's responsibility for expenditure. That is a theme of management responsibility which has run through your Lordships' debate like a thread. I think it is important to realise that there are practical results to this initiative. Managers begin to see their objectives clearly. They have acquired a responsibility for making the best use of their resources and of course were given access to the training, information and expert advice which continuous change dictates must be constantly available. I am sure your Lordships will accept that it is no longer possible to rely solely on the training available at the beginning of a career if we are to be able to deliver the sort of quality of service we should rightly demand.
I would remind your Lordships that if the Financial Management Initiative was to work, it was equally important that the structures that provided government services should also be reorganised. The Government therefore commissioned an efficiency scrutiny which examined management across the spectrum of government undertakings. That scrutiny resulted in a report entitled Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps. Again that is a subject that has been much alluded to this evening. However, I must say that, listening to your Lordships this evening, I rather failed to recognise the series of reforms which were described by the Select Committee in another place as,
"the single most successful Civil Service reform programme of recent decades".
I equally have to say that I find it difficult to disagree with that assessment. There are now 102 agencies in existence and 62 per cent. of all civil servants now work in agencies or other organisations working along Next Steps lines. They range in size from the Benefits Agency with 65,000 employees to Wilton Park—formerly, I believe, the responsibility of the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill—with 32. Their occupations and activities are at least as diverse.
As my noble friend Lord Dean so rightly pointed out, the result has been greater clarity, devolved responsibility, better control of resources and proper and regular review, all of which is consistent with the objectives which the Government have set themselves.
I say to both my noble friend Lord Beloff, whose speech I listened to with my customary enjoyment, and the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that the reforms are now beginning to produce results. I shall not weary your Lordships with endless examples, but to take just two,

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the Driving Standards Agency has reduced the waiting time for driving tests from 13 weeks in 1988 to less than six weeks today. Her Majesty's Stationery Office's new business supplies service can supply 4,000 items in a 48-hour service.
Of course reorganisation is a mechanical and important process, but it is not that alone which delivers results. The Citizen's Charter has by implication been dismissed with faint praise this afternoon. I remind your Lordships that it too demands openness. The second element of the revolution is competition. Openness and competition are the engines that drive the search for accountability to the consumer and for improved services. We forget that before the code of practice on access to government information and individual charters were issued it was much more difficult for the Queen's subjects to obtain information on which to base complaints, or indeed where to address them. One does not want to place too much weight on this argument, but to that extent an increase in the incidence of complaints may paradoxically be a sign of improvement rather than the reverse.
Equally, Competing for Quality—which covers the competitive element of the process I have just described—with its introduction of the private sector into the provision of public services, has also begun to yield dividends in terms of performance. I am sorry that none of your Lordships sought to acknowledge that this evening.
During the past two and a half years the annual cost savings that have been identified amount to well over £400 million, on average a saving of 20 per cent. on the £2,000 million of activities that have been reviewed so far. Incidentally, it is a tribute to the quality of the staff in the Civil Service that in the market testing part of the programme in-house teams have won 73 per cent. of the work by value.
All that has been important. However, the Government believe that there remains scope for further improvement in both efficiency and quality of service. We said so in last year's White Paper. We believe that further delegation was and is the key to achieving both objectives. It is for that reason that the White Paper proposed that departments should take greater responsibility for deciding their organisational structures, the pay of their staff and the best mix of efficiency measures to meet the never-ending pressure to raise standards and to control costs.
Departments and agencies are already beginning to implement the White Paper. Your Lordships have described some of the effects that that will have on the senior Civil Service. We hope and believe that these changes will develop a smaller, better paid and better motivated Civil Service and that as a result it will be equipped to maintain the standards and values which, it has been made plain this evening, are the very minimum that the country expects from its public administrators.
In that context it is worth my saying to the noble Lords, Lord Allen and Lord Bridges, that not only was the British Civil Service formerly respected throughout the world for its professionalism and integrity, but it is still respected. I also suggest to the noble Lords that it has acquired a further feather in its cap in its
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international reputation. It is clear that our Civil Service has gained a worldwide reputation as a leader in public service reform. We are helping many governments in that field, notably the South African Government, in the huge task which they face. Curiously enough, the United States is pursuing reforms which bear many similarities to our own, and we are also in close contact with the administration of that country.
Of course your Lordships are right to stress the implications of our reforms for the staff in the many departments which are affected. Noble Lords are right to say that we are witnessing dramatic changes. Of course change and uncertainty are very unsettling for people in the course of their careers. It is essential that we make every effort at our disposal to keep staff informed, to maintain morale and to enable them to adapt to the new demands upon them. I believe strongly that consistency is one of the most important elements. If what we say will happen does happen, then the credibility of the Government among those who serve them is less likely to suffer in a time of inevitable change.
The government White Paper of last summer invited comments from interested parties. Comments were received from 50 individuals and organisations, and the Government have considered those comments. However, the most important response was the very thorough report of the Select Committee published last November entitled The Role of the Civil Service. It was notable that the report's conclusion enjoyed the unanimous support of the committee.
I shall not go through those conclusions. However, the Government have now responded to the Select Committee report and to the other responses to the White Paper. The document, again rather catchily entitled Taking Forward Continuity and Change, accepts most of the Select Committee's conclusions. Underpinning the approach we intend to take is the importance we attach to maintaining values and standards.
We therefore acknowledge that the committee's proposed Civil Service code should apply across the Civil Service. Although the Government have amended the committee's draft code slightly, they admire the original draft and intend to use its amended version as a basis for further consultation.
A number of noble Lords asked me detailed questions about the code. I have very much a weather eye on the clock. I hope that your Lordships will allow me merely to observe that the debate has been listened to and will be read with the keenest of interest and I am sure will form an important part of the consultation process. I am delighted that so many noble Lords, notably the noble Lords, Lord Barnett, Lord Croham, Lord Merlyn-Rees and Lord Bancroft, among others, welcomed the part of the report which recommends a Civil Service code.
We have also accepted the Committee's other recommendations. For example, there will be a new line of appeal to the Civil Service Commissioners for alleged breaches of the code or on issues of conscience. To emphasise and reinforce the well-established independence of the Commissioners, as your Lordships have observed, the first Civil Service Commissioner will in future be a Crown appointee. I have noted the

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reservations of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, about that decision and the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, and others on the subject. I hope that noble Lords will allow me to write to them in view of the pressure on time.
The same applies in relation to the important matter of accountability. On the issue of accountability I shall merely say that it is important to draw a distinction when responsibilities are discussed. However, I emphasise that in the end Ministers are responsible. If my right honourable friend the Home Secretary had devolved responsibility for events in the prison service, I doubt whether he would have been given such a grilling as he was in another place. He was rightly willing and able to answer.
This has been a short debate on an important subject, and I believe that the House should be extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Allen, for introducing it. I hope that we shall return to the question at regular intervals, particularly as I know that those who are responsible for these matters, both Ministers and civil servants, will pay close attention to the views that your Lordships have expressed. I hope that noble Lords, especially the noble Lord, Lord Croham, will accept that the Government cling firmly to the Northcote-Trevelyan principles. As the noble Lord, Lord Bancroft, observed, they are indeed eternal verities. Nevertheless we shall seek to maintain them in a way which reflects the opportunities with which today's social and technological change has presented us.
The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, said that we should look at the subject in the long term. If all the mainstream political parties can achieve a degree of consensus on the way in which the Government's administrative machinery should work, between us we should have made an immeasurable contribution to the future stability of the country and, indeed, towards increasing the British people's respect for our national institutions.
7.50 p.m.
Lord Allen of Abbeydale: My Lords, I have a few minutes available to me, but I do not propose to prolong what has been a fascinating debate. I should like to thank all those who have taken part. I still believe that the debate ought to have taken place in government time. The noble Viscount referred to the Statement which the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, made last July. He will have noted that the noble Lord went pretty far in agreeing that the Government might provide time for a debate; but there it is. We have had to take up three hours of our Cross-Bench allocation.
I made it quite clear at the beginning—and I think all who have spoken made it clear—that there is no objection to change and that we all recognise that time marches on. For my part, I shall read carefully what the noble Viscount says. But I note with pleasure his undertaking that he and his colleagues, and those who advise them, will also read carefully what has been said. The thoughts which have been expressed from all sides of the House require careful consideration.
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I shall not pick out more than a few points for special mention, and I shall do that briefly. The first is the fear which some of us have about the long term impact on recruitment, notwithstanding the figures which the noble Viscount quoted, at a time of high unemployment. Secondly, there is continued uneasiness about the distinction between policy and operations. I am not sure that the remarks of the noble Viscount are entirely satisfying. Thirdly, although it is comforting to note that one does not wait so long now for a driving test, there is a much more important issue underlying the debate: the question of ministerial responsibility for matters which are being dealt with more and more remotely from the centre.
I note what the noble Viscount said about writing to cover the points with which he has not dealt in his speech. I was surprised at two omissions. First, he made no comment on the point that I raised—the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, pursued it with much greater eloquence—on the restrictions on the short-term agency chiefs taking up employment when they leave. Can the head of the Prison Service take up a role with Group 4 when his contract expires? I believe that that is an important point. Secondly, we have still been left with no word whatsoever about the Diplomatic Service. No doubt we shall be told the answers in the letters that we shall receive. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion, for Papers, by leave withdrawn.

War Crimes (Supplementary Provisions) Bill [H.L.]
7.55 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Campbell of Alloway.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[THE LORD SKELMERSDALE IN THE CHAIR.]
Clause 1 [Limitation]:
On Question, Whether Clause 1 shall stand part of the Bill?
The Earl of Harrowby: I was one of the people who voted in your Lordships' House against the Bill proceeding. Since then I have had an experience which I should like to explain briefly to the Committee.
Throughout most of the war I was in the Stoke City Field Regiment. However, I was too busy after the war ever to attend its reunions. When I retired three years ago, I attended a reunion for the first time. Despite an attendance of perhaps 150 ex-members of the regiment, I recognised not one of them after that 50 year gap. I believe that that exemplifies why noble Lords were so unhappy with the concept of the original Bill.

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It is interesting to speculate on why noble Lords' opinion was not accepted in another place. I believe that the reasons were two-fold. First, noble Lords have a greater spread of age; and that is an advantage. The spread is less concentrated in middle age than in another place. Secondly, noble Lords can exercise a more objective view without having to look over their shoulders. I trust that my noble friend's initiative regarding the Bill will receive a happier reception from another place than it received on the last occasion.
Lord Simon of Glaisdale: I, too, voted against the Second Reading of the Bill and spoke previously when the matter was debated on the Hetherington-Chalmers report. The question now is: what shall we do with the Bill? It seems to me that the desirable course is for the Attorney-General to follow the course that has been taken by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Advocate and simply drop the proceedings. Indeed, it would be anomalous if a different legal regime were instituted in this country from that in Scotland.
I had three reasons for opposing the Bill. First, in reality it was retrospective legislation, although not according to the rules which apply to statutory construction and which are not really relevant here. Secondly—it is a point which has been referred to by the noble Earl—I referred to the difficulties of identification and the consequence that it would be impossible to vouchsafe a fair trial to whoever was brought to trial.
However, I believe that there is a third reason. I refer to the danger of a backlash if the prosecutions proceed. We had warning of that as early as the Hetherington-Chalmers report. When those two public servants were holding a press conference and discussion the other side of Parliament Square, the British National Party, full of anti-semitism and xenophobia, was demonstrating against what was proposed. It seems to me that if the prosecutions go ahead there is a real danger of extremist parties cashing in in that way.
The question is: what is the easiest way to facilitate the Attorney-General taking the course which I suggested? It is rather like the rustic who was asked the way to Little Kirkhampton. He said: "If I were going to Little Kirkhampton, I would not start from here." If we want to arrive at the consummation which appeals overwhelmingly to the Committee, we would not start from where we are now. In my view, the best thing is to give the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, his Bill here. I venture to suggest that it should then be dropped before it gets to the other place. If there were a challenge between the two Chambers, it would be difficult for the Attorney-General to take the course I have ventured to propose.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Harrowby and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon. In my mind, there is no question or intention of there being any confrontation with another place. I am grateful to both speakers for what they said about the War Crimes Act and for their
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support for the Bill. I would be grateful if Mr. Attorney were to say, "There will be no prosecutions". If there are to be no prosecutions, there is no need for the Bill. I am the last person in the world to seek to bring pressure in that direction. At the moment, however, for the reasons I gave at Second Reading and shall not repeat, I have no option but to proceed. I commend the clause.
Clause 1 agreed to.
Lord Bridge of Harwichmoved Amendment No. 1:
After Clause 1, insert the following new clause:
("Jurisdiction of Crown Court
. For the avoidance of doubt it is hereby declared that on any prosecution for an offence under the War Crimes Act 1991 the Crown Court has jurisdiction to quash the indictment on the ground that, in the circumstances of the case, the lapse of time from the date when the offence was alleged to have been committed to the date when the prosecution was instituted—

(a) is likely to cause substantial prejudice to the defendant in the conduct of his defence; or

(b) is likely to make a fair trial impossible.").

The noble and learned Lord said: In moving this amendment, I wish to make clear at the outset something that is self-evident anyway. The proposed new clause and Clause 2 as I propose to amend it are wholly independent of Clause 1. They have utility of necessity only so long as the jurisdiction to prosecute offenders for alleged offences, by virtue of the jurisdiction conferred by the War Crimes Act 1991, remains in existence and so long as there is still a prospect that that jurisdiction will be invoked.
I commend the amendment on the premise—and for present purposes I accept it—that it is at least theoretically possible in some cases to have a fair trial of a person who is charged with an offence, notwithstanding that more than 50 years have elapsed since the date when the offence is alleged to have been committed. However, if that is possible in some cases—and I venture to hope that no one will dispute the proposition—it will be manifestly impossible in others. Perhaps that will be so in the great majority of cases.
If a distinction is to be made between those cases which can fairly be tried and those which cannot, it will have to be made by the judiciary. If this House had done as I urged it to do when the War Crimes Bill came before it for the second time and had given the Bill a Second Reading, I should have thought it appropriate then to move an amendment to the same effect as that which I now propose. This is the most important amendment that I hoped to have the opportunity to propose then. Now the Bill proposed by my noble friend Lord Campbell presents at least the theoretical opportunity—I do not know that it is any more than that—for the omission to be remedied.
The amendment makes clear the scope of the court's jurisdiction, on a prosecution under the War Crimes Act 1991, to stay the proceedings on the ground of prejudice by delay. As the 1991 Act stands, there seems real doubt as to the scope of the jurisdiction. In the absence of any statutory period of limitation applying to prosecutions on indictment, the

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citizen's safeguard against stay of prosecutions rests in the discretion of the court to stay a prosecution on indictment, to quash the indictment, halt the proceedings—whatever phrase one uses does not matter—on the ground that the accused has been so prejudiced by delay that the matter should not proceed. The other side of the coin is that it is not possible to have a fair trial.
The normal ground on which such an application of common law proceeds is that of prejudice by delay. But, as I understand the law, it is also necessary to show to some extent that the prosecution bears responsibility for that delay. To take an obvious illustration, if a murder victim has been so successfully buried in a hidden place that the crime does not come to light until more than 20 years later, the court would give short shrift to an application on behalf of the defence for a stay of proceedings on the ground that he had been prejudiced by the delay in bringing the prosecution.
My real concern about the operation of the 1991 Act as it stands is that the court may be invited to say—and it is an arguable proposition—that since there was no jurisdiction to bring a prosecution for any of the crimes before the 1991 Act reached the statute book, the prosecution is in no way at fault in having failed to bring the prosecution earlier. Therefore, the delay prior to the date when the Act came into force should be disregarded. The sole purpose of the amendment—and it is purely a declaratory amendment—is to remove that doubt, to make it clear that such an argument is not acceptable. It is to make it clear that the whole period of delay from the date when the offence is alleged to have been committed is to be taken into account by the court in deciding whether it has substantially prejudiced the defence and rendered a fair trial impossible. That was the view of the effect of the statute which was commended to the House on behalf of the Government when the Bill was first introduced. In moving the Second Reading of the War Crimes Bill on 4th June 1990, in reply to a point that was made by my noble friend Lord Campbell, the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, said:
"I would only remind him of this: under the law as it stands, it is possible for the defence to apply to have a charge dismissed on the ground that the length of time which has elapsed since the offence occurred has made it impossible for the accused to be able to gather together the evidence which he needs for his defence and thereby be sure of obtaining a fair trial. There is nothing in the Bill which alters that position in any way. It will remain open to the judge to prevent a case from proceeding if he believes that a fair trial will be impossible".—[Official Report, 4/6/90; col. 1085.]
I know that as the law stands now—it was not so when the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, pronounced those words—by virtue of the decision of this place in the case of Pepper v. Hart (a decision in which, as I recall, there was only one dissenting voice) the court may now resort to Hansard as a means of resolving any uncertainty as to Parliament's intention in enacting a particular statute. My submission to the Committee is that it clearly cannot be right in principle to rely
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on reference to Hansard, even if it is possible, to clarify an uncertainty. The proper course is that the statute should declare clearly and unambiguously on its face the intention of Parliament as to the scope of the jurisdiction that it confers upon the court. That is precisely what this amendment sets out to do. I beg to move.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: I should like very briefly to support the amendment and thank the noble and learned Lord for the manner in which he explained it. It would be retrogressive if at this stage, after Pepper v. Hart, we were, for example, in a case like this to rely on ministerial utterances in place of the plain words of the statute. It would be a wrong sort of precedent to set. And in particular, as Members of the Committee know, there is a whole mass of new practice directions which have to be followed before you can rely in court upon the words of a Minister to interpret the words of a statute. That is quite right. It is quite unnecessary.
I suggest that this is a matter that was made plain at Second Reading of the Bill by my noble friend Lord Ferrers in answer to a question from me, and which was made plain again by my noble friend Lady Blatch at Second Reading. Even so, that is not the right way for the statute to be prepared. The amendment is a declaratory provision, and I hope that it will commend itself to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor.
8.15 p.m.
The Lord Chancellor (Lord Mackay of Clashfern): My noble friend Lady Blatch made clear at Second Reading the Government's position in relation to this Bill. So far as the amendment of my noble and learned friend Lord Bridge is concerned, on the substance of the matter there is no dispute between my noble and learned friend Lord Bridge of Harwich and the Government. We believe that it is right that the court should have power to stay proceedings for abuse of process where there is a probability that a fair trial will not be possible having regard to the delay. In the light of the decision in the Attorney-General's Reference No. 1 of 1990, it is not necessary to show that the prosecution was in any way at fault. What has to be shown is that in all the circumstances having regard to the delay no fair trial will be possible. I believe that that is the result that my noble and learned friend would like to achieve.
It is plain, as my noble and learned friend said, that the view of the Government is that the War Crimes Act which is presently on the statute book does nothing to damage that law in relation to this class of case, and that there is therefore no impediment at present in the law to the success of an application to stay proceedings for an abuse of process on these grounds in relation to war crimes.
I will not take up the invitation that my noble and learned friend seemed to tempt me with to reopen any questions about Pepper v. Hart. I entirely agree with him that it is not a wise principle to rely on that decision, however many of my noble and learned

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friends supported it and however unique was the dissenting voice. I am sure it would be agreed on all sides that it would be better to make the matter clear. For that reason, my noble and learned friend will remember that I was of the same view as he in relation to an amendment that might have been put forward if this House had granted a Second Reading to the original Bill when it came here for the second time. However, that particular opportunity did not open to my noble and learned friend. The result is that he has taken it up now.
Our view of the matter is that this amendment is not necessary. Our view is that the substance of the amendment, leaving that point aside, is in accordance with the present law. I think I am right in saying that it is normally put on the basis that the correct procedure is to apply to stay proceedings for abuse of process. I believe that is the phrase that is usually used, although, as my noble and learned friend said, the precise phrase used is not really important; it is the substance of the matter that counts. With that point I agree.
The government position, as I said, has been explained so far as the Bill as a whole is concerned. It is a matter for the Committee what it does with this amendment. I have sought to explain the substance of the matter from the point of view of the Government.
Lord Bridge of Harwich: I am most grateful to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor. I am delighted to discover that we are ad idem to the extent that we are. He may be right that the doubt as to the effect of the Act as it stands is limited or, as he would say, that there is no doubt. It seems to me that at least it is arguable the other way, and so long as it is arguable the other way a declaratory amendment of this kind to resolve any possible doubt is, in my submission, an appropriate amendment to be made.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 2 [Jurisdiction of the Court of Appeal]
Lord Bridge of Harwichmoved Amendment No. 2:
Page 1, line 8, leave out from ("on") to the end of line 12 and insert ("any ground referred to in section (Jurisdiction of Crown Court) above an appeal shall lie to the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) from the decision of the Crown Court granting or refusing the application.").
The noble and learned Lord said: In moving this amendment I make clear, as is apparent on the face of the amendment, that its effect is to render a decision by the trial judge in a Crown Court either to grant or to refuse an application to stay—I use that phrase because I cordially agree with my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor that it is the commonly used phrase, although it has the same effect as an order to quash—a prosecution on the ground of delay amounting to an abuse of process. The effect of the amendment is that such a decision would be open to the Court of Appeal. It was thought—indeed it was believed to be the law at the time when the War Crimes Act was passed—that such a decision was open to judicial review.
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That proposition was advanced in the course of the debate on the Second Reading of this Bill by the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch. I ventured to question it and she was good enough subsequently to concede in correspondence that the view had become out of date. The judicial review of a decision by a Crown Court judge is subject to Section 29(3) of the Supreme Court Act 1981, which precludes any judicial review of a decision made by a Crown Court in exercise of its jurisdiction
"in matters relating to trial on indictment".
Unfortunately, over the years the courts have taken different views as to the effect of that provision. In the case decided in 1991 by the Queen's Bench Divisional Court —surprisingly, the Committee may think—the conclusion was reached that an order staying proceedings on indictment on the ground that they amounted to an abuse of process was subject to judicial review on the basis that such a decision was not in the matter relating to trial on indictment.
I shall not take up the Committee's time in attempting to expound the reasoning which led to that decision. At all events, two years later, in 1993, the matter came before your Lordships' House in its judicial capacity. In a decision to which I was party, in a case called Ashton, we felt obliged to decide, because the language was so clear, that a decision whether or not a trial on indictment should be permitted to proceed was manifestly a decision in a matter relating to trial on indictment. So the decision in Randle was reversed and an order of a Crown Court is no longer subject to judicial review. Although we felt constrained by the statutory language to reach that conclusion, the result has always seemed to me to be a very unhappy one.
A decision whether or not the prosecution should proceed when it is very stale and when an application for stay on the grounds of abuse of process has been made is a difficult one. As I understand it, it is a decision partly of law and partly of discretion. It is a decision in which a judge may clearly err, and some judges have erred in the past. Not only, in my view, is it desirable—as a matter of general law, quite independently of war crimes trials—that the law should be amended so as to render such a decision subject either to review or appeal in a case where an application to stay has been refused, to avoid what may turn out to be a long, expensive and quite unnecessary trial, it is perhaps even more desirable that the prosecution should be able to appeal against the wrongful grant of stay when, if the stay has been wrongfully granted, the defendant will wrongly and unjustly escape the prosecution altogether. But if that amendment to the law is desirable in general, which is the view that I would commend, it is still more particularly desirable—indeed, I would say essential—in war crimes cases.
If a prosecution under the Act of 1991 is ever brought, it will be because the Attorney-General has authorised it and has taken the view that a fair trial is possible. The defence is almost bound to apply to have it stayed and to contend that a fair trial is not possible. The decision is likely to attract great public

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interest and to be a highly controversial and sensitive one. In my submission, it would not be right that the burden and responsibility of pronouncing the last word in such circumstances on the question of whether or not the prosecution should go ahead should rest with a single judge. It would be right that it should be subject to an appeal to the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division). As I said, that is what this amendment would effect. I beg to move.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: Again, I shall be extremely brief. This amendment is the only provision in this Bill or in the master Act which does anything to mitigate the backlash factor, to which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St. Albans, whom I see in his place, has referred. It is a matter of which I have no personal knowledge. But it is a matter to which the right reverend Prelate is able to speak from his own personal experience. What it will mean to have an expensive, costly, lengthy trial with the inevitably emotive overtones, all to no good—but one could not say that; rather, all to the bad, the bad of the trouble and tensions that it arouses for no good purpose. That is the main reason why I support the amendment.
As I am addressing the Committee, perhaps I may deal with a serious misunderstanding that arose—I have given notice that I would raise this matter—between the Home Office and myself on Clause 2. After Clause 2 was considered at Second Reading, the Home Office wrote (the letters are in the Library):
"Alan Campbell argued that it was needed because, in his view, such prosecutions should never be brought in the first place".
I did not so argue. I have never argued that prosecutions should never be brought in the first place. The letter goes on:
"My response to Alan's point is simply that I do not accept his general proposition that war crimes prosecutions should never be brought".
I have never on this Bill or any other Bill in any other circumstances ever made such a proposition or so argued. I asked for an unqualified retraction and apology, which has been given. I am content to accept that it was not intended to state in this letter what was so plainly stated. I am obliged to the Chamber for allowing me to correct the record.
The Lord Chancellor: I am sure that if my noble friend Lady Blatch had been here, she would have wanted to add her oral apology to the very full apology that she gave to my noble friend in writing. It was not intended to misrepresent the situation. It was a misdescription of the situation as it appeared. I accept entirely that my noble friend did not make such a statement.
It has to be said in relation to this amendment proposed by my noble and learned friend Lord Bridge of Harwich that it can only apply, if this Bill is passed and becomes law, to prosecutions which have been started before the Bill becomes law. There will not be any after the Bill becomes law in view of the provisions of Clause 1. So it would be an innovation introduced as a result of that position.
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With regard to the history of judicial review in relation to decisions to stay proceedings, my noble and learned friend Lord Bridge said that the Committee might think that the decisions taken in 1990 were surprising. I know one or two people at least who were surprised, and therefore not very surprised when this Chamber, including my noble and learned friends Lord Bridge and Lord Ackner, found that the words of the section in question prevented a review by the Divisional Court of decisions of this kind by a trial judge. We are therefore agreed that at present, under the law, no intervention is possible by any higher court in a decision of this kind unless it goes in favour of the prosecution and the review will only take place after the matter has proceeded. It may therefore be subject to appeal if there is a conviction.
I can understand the argument that there should be some form of possible appeal at that stage generally. The argument that there should be a right of appeal by the defence is usually met with the answer that, if the whole matter goes against the defence, they will have the right of appeal at the end of proceedings under the present law. But as my noble and learned friend forcefully pointed out, there is no such provision for the prosecution. Therefore one can find that the decision of a judge at first instance in relation to a prosecution generally, not just in relation to war crimes, may defeat the prosecution with no effective appeal in a situation where some may feel that the judge's decision was at least open to question.
That is a question of general importance and there is much to be said for it being considered. I should perhaps say that when the Criminal Justice Act 1987 was passed, an avenue of appeal by either side against a decision on a point of law by the trial judge in a preparatory hearing in a serious fraud case was instituted. There is therefore already a precedent of that type of appeal in a specific case.
The Committee heard the arguments of my noble and learned friend in favour of including such an appeal in the proceedings with which the Bill deals. It would be unusual to institute a new appeal to the prosecution in such a case after the case has started. However, that would be a consequence of the amendment and the general structure of the Bill.
The general matter is one on which different views may be expressed. I can see that in the future your Lordships' House may be asked to consider the matter as a general question. With regard to including it at this time, I have put the points to the Committee that occurred to us and it is for the Committee to decide what should happen to the amendments.
8.30 p.m.
Lord Bridge of Harwich: Again I am grateful to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor, particularly for what occurred to me was at least a qualified welcome to my general proposition that the law needed amending in this respect, independently of what happens in war crimes trials.
In reply to the point that the amendment could only operate in relation to proceedings already instituted before the Bill became an Act of Parliament, I make two

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comments. First, I envisaged at least the possibility that, if the Bill reached the statute book, it would reach it shorn of Clause 1, which I apprehended ,was the provision which would be least acceptable to the other place. Secondly, there is nothing unacceptable in law to the introduction of an amendment of the law which is purely procedural and which operates retrospectively to the extent that it affects the procedure in relation to litigation which is already on foot. The fact therefore that the amendment may operate only in relation to prosecutions already instituted, is not a significant objection.
There was a point not specifically addressed by my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor. It was the most powerful point concerning the desirability of introducing a right of appeal in war crimes cases; that is, if it is not introduced then the position of the single
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judge, the trial judge, in having to make such a sensitive and controversial decision—whichever way he may make it—will be invidious. I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 2, as amended agreed to.
Clause 3 [Short title and extent]:
Lord Bridge of Harwichmoved Amendment No. 3:
Page 1, line 15, leave out from ("(2)") to ("only") and insert ("Sections (Jurisdiction of Crown Court) and 2 of this Act apply").
The noble and learned Lord said: Amendment No. 3 is a minor and purely consequential drafting amendment which follows from the two amendments already accepted. I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 3, as amended, agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported with amendments. House adjourned at twenty-two minutes before nine o'clock.