Sitting of 21 November 1955

Preamble
The House met at half-past Two o'clock
PRAYERS
[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]
PRIVATE BUSINESS
  GLOUCESTERSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL BILL [Lords] (by Order)
    SWANSEA CORPORATION (FAIRWOOD COMMON) BILL [Lords] (by Order)
    Second Reading deferred till Thursday.
ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS
  PENSIONS AND NATIONAL INSURANCE

    Old-Age Pensioners (Representations)
    Mr. Hector Hughesasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will state what, and how many, representations he has recently received from old-age pensioners and their organisations about a rise in pension scales.
    The Minister of Pensions and National Insurance (Mr. Osbert Peake): The Joint Parliamentary Secretary met a deputation from the National Federation of Old-Age Pensions Associations on 8th November when they put their case for an immediate improvement in the position of retirement pensioners. Since then I have received some 200 communications from individual pensioners, mostly in uniform terms, making similar demands.
    Mr. Hughes: In view of the large number of representations that have been made, when does the Minister intend to improve the conditions of the old-age pensioners, particularly having regard to the invidious way in which the old-age pensioners are treated as contrasted with Forces and other pensioners, who may earn as much as they like on retirement, whereas the old-age pensioners must not?
    Mr. Peake: The hon. and learned Gentleman had better await the reply to later questions upon this point. His Question was concerned only with the number of the representations I have received, and I have given him a full answer to that point.
    Miss Burtonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what reply has been sent to the National Federation of Old-Age Pensions Associations concerning the points put to him by the recent delegation from the Federation.
    Dr. Kingasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance whether he will accede to the request of the National Federation of Old-Age Pensions, forwarded to Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer on 9th November, for immediate improvement in the rate of retirement pensions.
    Mr. Peake: I cannot add to the replies given to the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Lewis) and other hon. Members on 14th November.
    Miss Burton: While not recalling those replies—
    Mr. Lewis: They were not answers but evasions.
    Miss Burton: I expect that they were in the negative. Is the Minister aware that the cost of living has reached an all-time high record and that the cost of food and fuel has now, in addition, made the position worse for old-age pensioners? When does he propose to send an answer to the associations?
    Mr. Peake: The question is concerned with the National Insurance pension, and I remind the House that an increase of 7s. 6d. a week, single, and 11 s. a week, married, came into operation as recently as 23rd April and that since then the cost of living has moved by only about 2½ per cent.
    Miss Burton: Is the Minister aware that those most in need received 2s. 6d. and 4s.? His reply is a complete evasion. What will he do about those people?
    Mr. Peake: There are later Questions about National Assistance; I would rather give my answer when we come to those Questions.
    Mr. W. T. Williamsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will make a statement on the representations made to him during the week ended 19th November by the Welsh, English and Scottish Federations of Old-Age Pensions in respect of retirement pensions increase.
    Mr. Peake: No such representations have been received since a deputation met the Joint Parliamentary Secretary on 8th November, and I cannot add to the replies on this subject that I gave on 14th November.
    Mr. R. Williams: By that, does the Minister mean that the Government have made up their mind that in present circumstances they will not do anything further to help old-age pensioners?
    Mr. Peake: There are, of course, no such bodies as Welsh, English and Scottish federations. There is one federation. My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary saw the federation and told it that as recently as 23rd April very substantial increases in retirement pensions have been made.

    Earnings
    Mr. Holtasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will introduce legislation to amend Section 4, subsection 6, of the National Insurance Act, 1951, to enable a pensioner to earn a total of £104 in a year without suffering any reduction in pension benefit.
    Lord Balnielasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance whether, in their review of the earnings rule and the present earnings limit as it applies to widows, he will request the National Insurance Advisory Committee also to consider the rule and the earnings limit as it applies to retirement pensioners.
    Mr. Gowerasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will now arrange consultations with the nationalised industries, the Trades Union Congress, the Federation of British Industries, and other appropriate bodies, in regard to the earnings permitted for old-age pensioners without diminution of their pensions.
    Mr. Peake: I have now referred to the National Insurance Advisory Committee
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    the question whether adjustments in the present earnings limits for retirement pensions as well as widow's and adult dependants' benefits—including connected Questions such as the method and period of calculation of earnings—are called for. The procedure of the Committee is designed to ensure, and does ensure, adequate opportunity for the various viewpoints, including those of the trade unions and the employers, to be fully represented and to be considered by the Committee. I am glad to think that the Question by my hon. Friend the Member for Barry (Mr. Gower) recognises the importance and, indeed, the necessity for this before conclusions can be responsibly reached.
    Mr. Holt: While welcoming this sound move on the part of the Minister, may I ask him if he is aware that there are many pensionable people doing useful work teaching at evening classes, often earnings fees of a little over £2 a week but which do not total £104 a year, who are having their pensions cut, and that this is no encouragement?
    Mr. Peake: That and, of course, all other points will be considered by the National Insurance Advisory Committee. I would remind the House that on this question of the earnings rule and its present limits the Trades Union Congress was definite—
    Mr. Ellis Smith: How long ago?
    Mr. Peake: Less than a year ago. The Report of the Phillips Committee in December last year and the British Employers' Federation took the same view. Therefore, I think it would be wise to take the opinion of the National Insurance Advisory Committee on this matter before proceeding any further.
    Mr. Chetwynd: Are the views of this Committee binding upon the Minister, and can he say how long he expects it to take, because the delay is getting beyond a joke?
    Mr. Peake: As hon. Members know, the Advisory Committee is at present preparing its report upon the important reference regarding widows' benefits. As soon as it has concluded that matter, it proposes to give priority to the question of the earnings rule. That is a much less complicated question than the issue of

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    widows' benefits, and the Committee should be able to report upon it far more speedily.
    Mr. Gower: Can my right hon. Friend say, in the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Kidderminster (Mr. Nabarro), that these objections to the introduction of an increase are quite unrealistic, and cannot something be done pending the findings of this Committee to afford a modest increase in the permitted earnings of these pensioners?
    Mr. Peake: I do not think that would be practicable, because the Trades Union Congress was quite definite, not only that there should be an earnings rule, but that the present limit of 40s. ought to stand.
    Mr. Bowles: How often does the Advisory Committee meet, or is it one of those committees which is so overworked that it can deal with only one subject every six months?
    Mr. Peake: The Advisory Committee is taking a very important part in the non-statutory review of the National Insurance Scheme. Its great value is that it consists not of experts but of ordinary citizens who have other jobs to do. It has given me a number of extremely valuable reports already, particularly the one dealing with maternity benefits. I am sure that we gain immensely by referring these questions to a body of that sort.
    Mr. E. Johnsonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance (1) how many people in the Manchester area have postponed retirement on reaching pensionable age between the date on which the National Insurance Act, 1946, came into force and the latest convenient date;
    (2) how many people in the Manchester area were receiving retirement pensions on the last convenient date; and how many of these had reductions made from their pension on account of earning more than £2 per week.
    Miss Burtonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance how many people in the Coventry area were receiving retirement pensions on the last convenient date; and how many of these had reductions made from their pension on account of earning more than £2 per week.
    Mr. Peake: Information regarding particular localities is not available, but the broad national picture is that there are some 5½ million insured persons over pension age. About 400,000 of them are now receiving increased pensions by reason of deferred retirement after 1948. A further 600,000 are currently earning the right to future increased pensions. Some 500,000 have not yet completed the minimum ten years in insurance to qualify for pension. Of the 4½ million pensioners, about 3½ million are receiving pensions which are not subject to any earnings rule. Of the remaining million under age 70 (65 for women) some 50,000, though they have retired, are doing sufficient work for their pension to be reduced on account of earnings.
    Mr. Johnson: Does not my right hon. Friend think there is something to be said for abolishing both the earnings rule and the provisions about increments? Does he not agree that if people who have retired but would like to continue doing some part-time work were able to keep a little more of what they earned, it would make a very valuable contribution to the problem of filling the 7,793 vacancies now notified to the Ministry of Labour in Manchester?
    Mr. Peake: No, Sir. I hope my hon. Friend will not ally himself with reactionary Liberalism in advocating the abolition of the retirement principle which progressive Tories and Socialists accepted ten or twelve years ago.
    Miss Burton: Would the right hon. Gentleman agree that the 50,000 pensioners who are suffering some reduction from their pensions because of the earnings rule are in a position worse than that of a Cabinet Minister who, if he were to retire—I believe I am right in saying—could have a pension—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."] I was about to specify before the Minister shook his head the case of the Prime Minister, or a Chancellor, who are able to do that—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."] They would be able to earn—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."] I meant the Lord Chancellor. If those two gentlemen were to retire, they would be able to receive pensions and do another job, without suffering any deficit in the pensions, so why should the 50,000 old-age pensioners unduly suffer?
    Mr. Peake: By general consent, we adopted the retirement principle in pensions about ten or twelve years ago. Of those 50,000 who are having their pensions reduced or extinguished by virtue of the earnings rule, about two-thirds are having the pension altogether extinguished, because they undertake a full week's work for a full week's pay. As for the remainder, I have now announced that I have referred this question to the National Insurance Advisory Committee, and any hon. Member who has views upon it will be able to give evidence before the Committee, if he so pleases.

    Personal Case
    Mr. Collinsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance whether he has now reviewed the case of Mr. A. A. Major; and what decision he has reached.
    Mr. Peake: A letter was sent to the hon. Member on 15th November explaining that the right to a National Insurance benefit is a matter for the independent statutory authorities, and that I have no power to intervene in their decisions. As the hon. Member is aware, Mr. Major has appealed to the local tribunal.
    Mr. Collins: Is the Minister aware that the pensioner went in good faith to a job to which he was sent by the Ministry of Labour at £2 for 22 hours and that for this reason he has lost, with his wife, seven weeks' pension amounting to £26 and has received only £10 in National Assistance? Is this not disgraceful? Will the Minister take steps quickly to make good the money of which the pensioner has been unjustly deprived?
    Mr. Peake: No, Sir, I could not accept those strictures in a matter where a case is sub judice and an appeal is pending before the local tribunal.

    Increments
    Mr. Collinsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he is aware that through pension, insurance contributions and Income Tax the State benefits by £150 when a man continues working for one year after the age of 65; that at 3s. a week he would have to live to 85 to recover £150; and whether, in view of this, he will increase the rewards for those who continue working after the age of 65.
    Dame Irene Wardasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance whether he will examine the possibility of an increase in increments on retirement pensions.
    Mr. Peake: I would remind the hon. Members that the question of increments was examined by the Phillips Committee, who recommended that there should be no alteration in the present rates of increment. I cannot accept the figures given by the hon. Member for Shoreditch and Finsbury (Mr. Collins).
    Mr. Collins: Will the Minister look at the figures again? He will then find that they are, if anything, an understatement, and that if a man continued working until 70 he would have to live to be about 160 before he was in on the deal. Will the Minister look at the possibility of remitting the 6s. 9d. for the stamp in the case of people who work after reaching 65 or give them some further advantage when they receive their pensions?
    Mr. Peake: I will certainly look at the last point, which was not raised in the Question, but I would point out to the hon. Gentleman that his figures take no account at all of the very important fact that the widow of the insured man inherits his right to increments and that, generally speaking, widows live a very long time.
    Mr. Collins: The widow would need to live a very long time.
    Dame Irene Ward: As we cannot debate the Phillips Committee Report, which is extremely boring to many hon. Members on this side of the House, may I ask my right hon. Friend, as we have at last made some impression on him about the earnings rule, how long it will take us to make an impression on him about the need to increase increments? What efforts are now required on our part so that we do not have to refer to him as the Minister who neither 'necks nor gees?
    Mr. Peake: Puzzled as I am by the latter part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question, I would inform her that we must pay some attention to the recommendation of the Phillips Committee that, even if National Insurance pensions were subsequently increased, there should be no

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    alteration in the present rates of increment.
    Mrs. Braddock: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that some people get no benefit at all from the increments, as they are often being taken into account if a person applies for National Assistance? In view of that, is not his answer to the supplementary question put by my hon. Friend the Member for Shoreditch and Finsbury (Mr. Collins) rather a peculiar one?
    Mr. Peake: The hon. Lady has a later Question on the Order Paper dealing with that matter, but I would point out that the whole Beveridge conception of supplanting the need for assistance by insurance benefits would fall by the way if the insurance pension, or part of it, were to be disregarded for computing National Assistance.
    Mr. Collins: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply to my Question, I beg to give notice that I shall raise the matter on the Adjournment.
    Sir H. Linsteadasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what percentage of men awarded retirement pensions in 1954 received increments; and what was the average total increase of pension which those of them who were married thus received for themselves and their wives.
    Mr. Peake: About half the men awarded retirement pensions in 1954 received increments, of an average value of some 15s. a week for those who were married.
    Sir H. Linstead: I found some little difficulty in following the figures which my right hon. Friend gave in reply to Question No. 9. Could he tell me either how many or what proportion of those who qualify for retirement pensions have postponed retirement in order to increase their pensions?
    Mr. Peake: I am afraid that I shall have to look into that. These figures are very complicated indeed, and it would require a little study before I could give my hon. Friend a completely accurate answer.

    Cost of Living
    Captain Pilkingtonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance how the purchasing power provided for
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    by the old-age pension today compares with that in 1947 and 1951.
    Mr. Peake: Retirement pensions were introduced in 1946 at a standard rate of 26s., which remained unchanged until the autumn of 1951, when it was increased to 30s. for most but not all retirement pensioners. On the basis of the Interim Index of Retail Prices and the previous cost-of-living index, the present 40s. rate of retirement pension is equal to 26s. 7d. in 1947 and to 32s. 9d. in 1951.
    Captain Pilkington: While everybody wants to do what they can to help the old-age pensioners a little further, does not my right hon. Friend think it would be a good thing if this improvement were mentioned a little more frequently, especially by hon. Members opposite?
    Captain Pilkingtonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance how the standard of living provided for by the National Assistance Board today compares with 1951.
    Mr. Peake: I am informed by the National Assistance Board that the value of the scale payments varied from time to time during 1951. At no time in that year was the standard as good as it is today, and throughout most of the year it was substantially lower.
    Captain Pilkington: While I congratulate my right hon. Friend on this improvement, does he think a further improvement could be effected as soon as the Budget has strengthened the country's economy?
    Mr. Peake: As my hon. and gallant Friend knows, the question of responsibility in the matter of National Assistance rests in the first place with the Board itself.
    Mr. Warbey: Will the Minister agree that last December, when introducing the new scales, he told the House that they were 56¼ per cent. over those of 194S and the cost of food and fuel, the main items, had risen in the same period by 56 per cent.? As the cost of living has since increased by a further 5 per cent., will he now admit that people receiving National Assistance are not only worse off than they were last December but worse off than they were in 1948?
    Mr. Peake: No, Sir, I cannot agree with that. In any case, the Question deals only with a comparison between scale rates today and in 1951.
    Sir H. Linsteadasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will state the rise in the cost of living since the current retirement pension rate of 40s. was approved; and how this rate compares with the rate which it replaced.
    Mr. Peake: Since December last, the Interim Index of Retail Prices has risen by 4½ per cent. The pension rate of 40s. is 23 per cent. more than the former 32s. 6d.
    Mr. Patonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what weight is given to the peculiar pattern of old-age spending when the value of retirement pensions and National Assistance scales is assessed by reference to the cost-of-living index.
    Mr. Peake: Account has been taken of information of this kind in settling the rates, which give a higher purchasing value than changes in the retail prices index would themselves call for.
    Mr. Paton: If this weightage is given in assessing the scale, why is it that the Minister in this House inevitably refers to the Interim Index of Retail Prices when defending these figures? Is he aware that the average expenditure of persons living alone is, on fuel and on food, something like three-fifths of their total income, and that therefore it is of no relevance whatever to quote the index in relation to these figures?
    Mr. Peake: Hon. Gentlemen will have noted that I refer to the index only when referring to insurance pensions, because we know that more than three cut of every four insurance pensioners have other resources and do not have to have recourse to the National Assistance Board for supplementation.
    Mr. Paton: Will the Minister publish in the OFFICIAL REPORT a statement of how the rates are applied by the National Assistance Board, because this is of very great importance and interest to hon. Members of this House?
    Mr. Peake: The hon. Gentleman must know that under successive Governments the National Assistance Board has always
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    declined to publish any kind of notional budget because there is such wide variety in the needs of individual pensioners.
    Mr. Hale: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that in this House he has been constantly urged to issue an index of old-age pensioners relating to their needs; that he has on a number of occasions refused to disclose the methods used by the National Assistance Board for computing the basis and what basis is computed; that the index of consumer prices is wholly out of accord with the Interim Index of Retail Prices, and therefore every figure he has given today relating to old-age pensioners and National Assistance is, in essence, deceptive and misleading?
    Mr. Peake: No, I cannot accept that. I have stated to the House what has been the practice under successive Ministers ever since 1948.
    Dame Irene Ward: Can my right hon. Friend explain how it is that when the cost-of-living index rises, owing to a rise in the cost of seasonal foods, the index does not also drop when the costs of those foods drop?
    Mr. Peake: Perhaps my hon. Friend would put that question to the Minister of Labour and National Service, who is responsible for the index.
    Mr. Hamiltonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance the estimated loss in purchasing power of the old-age retirement pension since the date of the last pension increase.
    Mr. Peake: On the basis of the Interim Index of Retail Prices, the loss in purchasing power of the 40s. retirement pension is 1s. 4d. The retirement pension is still worth more than at any time before the present rates were introduced.
    Mr. Hamilton: Is the Minister aware that this further underlines the complaint of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale) that he is basing this additional cost of living on the Interim Index of Retail Prices? Is he aware that in that period food prices have gone up 5·7 points in that same index and fuel prices more than that; that the cheaper clothing will be dearer as the result of the Budget, and that all these things affect old-age pensioners

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    more than the average citizen? Will not the Minister consult his right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Labour and National Service to see whether he can formulate some special cost-of-living index to show the real loss in purchasing power of old-age pensions.
    Mr. Peake: Those considerations may be very relevant to the scales of National Assistance, but when we consider National Insurance pensions we must remember that the whole population is insured today and more than three out of four pensioners have other resources.

    Fuel Costs
    Miss Burtonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance when he expects to receive up-to-date figures from the National Assistance Board concerning the number of special discretionary allowances paid to old persons to help them to meet fuel costs.
    Mr. Peake: The Board informs me that further information will be available in a few weeks' time from a sample inquiry made earlier this month.
    Miss Burton: Is it any use asking the Minister what he imagines the old people should do during those few weeks? Is he not aware that, however keen the local branches of the National Assistance Board may be, they have not the power to give additional discretionary allowances for coal beyond what they are giving today? How does he suggest these old people buy their coal this winter?
    Mr. Peake: Discretionary additions are, of course, given for a wide variety of purposes and over a very wide field. In 1954, 620,000 cases of discretionary additions were granted. This, of course, is the time of year when discretionary additions for fuel are being given and are on the increase.
    Mr. Marquand: Will the Minister not now tell the National Assistance Board that the House of Commons is really anxious about this question of coal prices and would like to get this information quickly and not wait for four weeks? Could it at least, in answer to Questions, say what it has in hand next week?
    Mr. Peake: On this Question I was confining my answer to the number of
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    special discretionary allowances. Each year, at the beginning of November, the Board invariably takes a sample of all the cases in which discretionary additions are being granted, and the results of that inquiry will very shortly be available; but I can assure the House that no one receiving assistance at the present time is having the grant of a special discretionary addition delayed on account of the preparation of these statistics.
    Mr. Nabarro: Would it not be appropriate that all these questions about coal for old-age pensioners should be remitted to the appropriate place, namely, the National Coal Board?

    Prisoners' Families
    Mr. G. Jegerasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what instructions he has given to the National Assistance Board to ensure that the families of prisoners are relieved of hardship or destitution.
    Mr. Peake: None, Sir. Any person over the age of 16 who is in need may apply to the Board for assistance.
    Mr. Jeger: Has the Minister's attention been drawn to a report in the Press of a man who appeared before the Scarborough magistrates last week and who asserted that in a prison, which should be well known to the Minister, Leeds Prison, he was receiving better food than were his family who were at liberty? Would the Minister ask the National Assistance Board to bring its scales up to at least the standard enjoyed in prison?
    Mr. Peake: I am afraid that I know nothing about the fare provided in Leeds Prison, but I will convey what was said by the hon. Member to the National Assistance Board.

    National Assistance
    Mr. Ness Edwardsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will state the number of pensioners in receipt of National Assistance for each month of the present year up to the most recent monthly count.
    Mr. Peake: An analysis of the recipients of National Assistance grants giving information of the kind asked for

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    is made only quarterly. With the hon. Member's permission, I will circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT the figures for

    —

    December, 1954

    March, 1955

    June, 1955

    September, 1955

    Number of regular weekly national assistance grants in supplementation of retirement and non-contributory old age pensions

    1,158,000

    1,159,000

    1,050,000

    1,039,000

    Note:—Some of the grants provided for the requirements of a household with more than one pensioner.

    Mr. Ness Edwardsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what has been the amount paid out by the National Assistance Board for supplementary pensions each month this year, up to the most recent return.
    Mr. Peake: The National Assistance Board regrets that the information asked for is not available. The Post Office records of payments on the Board's behalf do not distingush the amounts paid to different categories of recipients of assistance.
    Mr. Ness Edwardsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance the national average of supplementation paid to pensioners in January, 1955; and what was the national average at the most recent available date.
    Mr. Peake: The National Assistance Board informs me that information of the kind asked for is usually obtained only once a year, but information is available which shows that the average amount paid in supplementation of retirement and non-contributory old-age pensions was 15s. 3d. at the end of 1954 and 12s. 5d. at the end of June, 1955.
    Mr. J. Patonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance the number of recipients of National Assistance who also received additional help in kind through the exercise of the local officer's discretion during September, 1954, and September, 1955, respectively; and what percentage of the total recipients of National Assistance these figures represent in each year.
    Mr. Peake: The National Assistance Board regrets that the number of persons who are given assistance in kind is not known, but states that this form of assistance is rarely used.
    December, 1954, and March, June and September, 1955.
    Following are the figures:
    Mr. Paton: I did not hear the last part of the Answer, but I will not ask the Minister to repeat it. Is he aware that, rightly or wrongly, there is a pretty widespread feeling in different parts of the country that there has been a change of policy with regard to the use of the discretionary power; and can he say that that impression is a wrong one? Instead of waiting for the review that we are promised, is he able to indicate to the House now what the trend is with regard to these figures?
    Mr. Peake: I can categorically deny that there has been any change of policy at all regarding discretionary additions to National Assistance payments. The regular autumn sample count is now in progress, and the figures will be available very shortly.
    Mr. T. Brownasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance why the discretionary powers vested in the National Assistance area officers, under the 1948 Act, in dealing with hard cases, have been transferred to the regional officers at the regional offices.
    Mr. Peake: The Board informs me that the discretionary powers of their area officers have been in no way curtailed. The very extensive use which is made of these powers can be seen from the figures given in the Board's Annual Report for 1954.
    Mr. Brown: The Minister cannot ride off on that answer. Is 0the right hon. Gentleman aware that the discretionary powers conceded to area officers have now, in many cases, been transferred to the regional officers? The regional officers are having meetings with the area officers and are laying down what they should do, how they should do it, and why they should do it. In view of the

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    reports reaching us from time to time, will the Minister have some inquiries made in the regions of Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland, and try to find out what is actually happening?
    Mr. Peake: The hon. Gentleman is, I think, misinformed, because the Board tell me that references of these types of case to regional offices are fewer than ever before.
    Mr. Brown: On a point of order. In view of the apparent complacency and the high degree of stupidity on the part of the Minister, I beg to give notice that I shall raise this matter on the Adjournment at the earliest opportunity.

    Benefits
    Mr. Burdenasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance the total weekly benefit, including family allowances, now payable to a married man with three children who is sick or unemployed; what was the corresponding rate at the start of the National Insurance Scheme in July, 1948; and how the increase compares with the increase in the cost of living since that date.
    Mr. Peake: The total at the existing benefit rates is 99s. 6d., as against 59s. 6d. in July, 1948, representing an increase of about 67 per cent. Between July, 1948, and October, 1955, the Interim Index of Retail Prices rose by 41 per cent.
    Mr. Burden: While this is certainly very satisfactory, in comparison with what was done by the party opposite, may I ask my right hon. Friend if he will make certain that the officials of the National Assistance Board take great care to ensure that, where there are young children in a family, they always have adequate nourishment and clothing?
    Mr. Peake: It, of course, depends upon the age of the children, but, broadly speaking, a man on National Assistance would get more than the 99s. 6d. which I have mentioned if he were a householder.
    Mr. Houghtonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance by what criteria he reaches conclusions regarding the adequacy or otherwise of the present level of National Insurance benefits.
    Mr. Peake: As I stated in my Report last December, there is no scientific way of deciding what rate of benefit it would be appropriate to provide under an insurance scheme. In the last resort the selection of rates must be a matter of judgment, and in arriving at them various considerations must be weighed up and balanced against each other. The main considerations were dealt with in my Report.
    Mr. Houghton: Cannot the right hon. Gentleman bring something more definite before the House as an explanation of the basis upon which he judges the adequacy of these National Insurance pensions? Surely, it is time that he got away from the Public Assistance mentality of the Beveridge Report and considered the present level of pensions more in relation to the level of wages than to the basic necessities of life? Will not the right hon. Gentleman bring to bear on this problem a progressive Tory view, if he has none other to put before the House?
    Mr. Peake: My statutory duty was imposed by the Act of 1946, which was passed by the Government then in power. My Report to Parliament under Section 40 was a fairly lengthy document, and I do not think I could undertake either to repeat it or to explain it at this Box this afternoon.
    Mr. Marquand: Would the right hon. Gentleman bear in mind that when he defends himself from any criticism he always refers to the cost of living? Is that the sole criterion, or does he take wages into account as well?
    Mr. Peake: My duties, as regards the rate of benefit I recommended in that Report, are set out in Section 40 of the 1946 Act, and I had to comply with my statutory obligations under that Act. I can only add that the benefit rates and the pension rates at the basic figures command a higher purchasing power today than at any previous time.
    Mr. Hubbard: Would not the Minister agree that he is in no way tied to the terms of the original Act; that there was a review of the National Insurance Act in December; and that it was within his power to put into that new Act anything that he thought fit and proper in the interests of the recipients?
    Mr. Peake: I did my best to carry out my statutory duties, but we must recall that there is a relationship in an insurance scheme between the rates of benefits, on the one hand, and the rates of contribution, on the other.

    Information
    Mr. Houghtonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance whether he will conduct a sample survey of the domestic expenditure, living conditions, and general well-being of retirement pensioners and report his findings to this House.
    Mr. Isaacsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if, in order to provide this House with factual and up-to-date information regarding the adequacy of the present rate of payment to meet the needs of aged pensioners, he will direct his local offices to undertake visits to an agreed percentage of aged pensioners in their respective localities to collect details of expenditure upon essential needs.
    Mr. Lewisasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will move to appoint an independent committee of inquiry for the purpose of ascertaining by what amount old-age pensions should be increased to compensate them for the loss in purchasing power of their pension resultant upon the increases in price of food, rent, rates, and increased taxation.
    Mr. Peake: I appreciate the motive behind these suggestions, but I do not think that such inquiries would assist us, having regard to the considerations set out in my Report last year on the statutory review of the rates and the amounts of benefit.
    Mr. Houghton: May I ask how the right hon. Gentleman can know how old-age pensioners live unless he takes steps to find out? If he will not listen to the old-age pensioners' associations, how does he know what privation the old-age pensioners are suffering? When will he bring before the House some enlightened evidence obtained by himself and his Department upon which the House can judge the adequacy of the present level of pension?
    Mr. Peake: One must recall that more than three out of four retirement pensioners have other resources, but so far
    1036
    as my information is concerned we have, for example, the Report of the National Food Survey as to their nutrition. If the hon. Gentleman will read the Report of the National Assistance Board published in July last, he will see that the Board, which had the opportunity to make domiciliary visits, produced a most interesting section on how old people are getting along at present.
    Mr. Isaacs: As the Minister continually criticises the cases brought from this side of the House, will not he agree that it would be much more satisfactory to the House if an official investigation were made, because my information about cases that have come before me from the borough which I have the privilege to represent in this House shows that very considerable suffering and hardship exists among these people, and I believe that these facts cannot be put before the Board, otherwise it would certainly pay attention to them?
    Mr. Peake: The Assistance Board is continually making inquiries and paying visits to the homes of aged pensioners, especially those who live alone; but if the right hon. Gentleman, or any other hon. Member, has an individual case where he thinks that the allowances granted by the Board are inadequate, he can bring it direct to me or to the Chairman of the Assistance Board.
    Mr. Marquand: Was not the Question of my hon. Friend the Member for Sowerby (Mr. Houghton) addressed to the general question of the cost and standard of living for a certain group of the community? Is not it true that the Phillips Committee said that it would have made such a survey had it had time? In view of that, will not the right hon. Gentleman seriously consider making a survey of this kind?
    Mr. Peake: I pointed out, I think, a week ago that a survey undertaken by the National Assistance Board into the condition of 120,000 retirement pensioners of over' 80 years of age, living by themselves, was undertaken subsequent to the Report of the Phillips' Committee.
    Mr. Marquand: Yes, but is not that survey merely a survey—very good, I agree—of welfare, which says nothing whatever about the cost of living and the type of commodities which these people have to buy?
    Mr. Peake: It says a very great deal about how these people are getting along at present.
    Mr. Hubbard: Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that the number of old-age pensioners undergoing treatment in our hospitals and mental institutions is far higher than ever before, because of their suffering through inadequate pensions? Will the Minister inquire of his right hon. Friends the Minister of Health and the Secretary of State for Scotland, when he will find that hospitals are having great difficulty in supplying beds for remedial cases because of the number of old people receiving treatment for ailments brought about through lack of proper food?
    Mr. Peake: I am rather surprised at those allegations, but I will have inquiry made into them.
    Mr. Lewis: Will the Minister look at my Question No. 55, where he will see that I am more concerned with the position arising upon the iniquitous Budget which will reveal a rise in rent, rates, cost of living and food? If he will not have an inquiry about what has happened in the past, will he have an inquiry now to see to what extent old-age pensions may be increased, if only to offset the rise in the cost of living which is inevitable as a result of the Budget that the Chancellor has just introduced?
    Mr. Peake: Despite what the hon. Gentleman says, we know that the present 40s. pension is worth 9s. more in purchasing power than was the 26s. pension in the dying days of the last Socialist Government.

    Deferred Retirements
    Mr. Patonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance how many men and how many women over retirement age were continuing in full-time employment at 30th June, 1953 and 1955, respectively.
    Mr. Peake: According to information published by my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Labour and National Service, the estimated numbers of full-time and part-time employees over retirement age at the end of May, 1953, were 537,000 men and 333,000 women. The corresponding figures for 1955 are not yet ready, but those for 1954 were 541,000 and 344,000. Separate figures for full-time employees are not available.

    Discretionary Allowances
    Mr. W. T. Williamsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance the number of special discretionary allowances paid by the National Assistance Board to persons in receipt of National Assistance, and what was the total and the average payment made, and in respect of what special needs, at the last convenient date in the London area.
    Mr. Peake: The latest information at present available is based on a sample examination made towards the end of last year, when it was estimated that 621,000 assistance allowances included discretionary additions to provide for special circumstances, at an annual cost of over £8½ million. The Board regret that figures are not available for particular areas.
    Mr. Williams: Is the Minister aware that almost all hon. Members can give him endless examples of people who come to them, at constituency "clinics" and on other occasions, with stories of very real hardship? Is the Minister also aware that, when questioned, many of those people say that when it comes to occasions of real hardship the officers of the Board exercise their discretion with extreme strictness, if not harshness? [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] Will the Minister attempt to gather up the figures, both of the amounts which have been given and the matters on which discretion is refused, in order that he may, from the samples taken, discover the real extent of the hardship which exists among people who are granted National Assistance, but find it impossible to make provision for any unusual expense without further help from the National Assistance Board?
    Mr. Peake: The statistical information available shows that there has been no restriction. On the contrary, the Board has been granting discretionary additions more freely, both in spirit and amount, for every year which has gone by.

    Voluntary Organisations
    Mr. Hamiltonasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance whether he will issue a directive to the National Assistance Board prohibiting it from referring applicants for assistance to voluntary organisations.
    Mr. Peake: I do not issue directives to the Board, who tell me that they welcome the co-operation of voluntary organisations in cases presenting special problems.
    Mr. Hamilton: Does the Minister realise that the old people dislike going to these voluntary organisations even more than they dislike going to the Assistance Board, valuable as is the work which they are doing? Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm or deny that the number of cases being referred to these bodies by the National Assistance Board is on the increase?
    Mr. Peake: I am afraid that, offhand, I cannot answer the last part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary, but I would suggest, in this rather difficult field, that if the hon. Gentleman will send me particulars of any case where he thinks that the National Assistance Board has made a mistake, I shall be very happy to investigate it.
    Mr. Ellis Smith: Does the Minister not agree that one of the outstanding features of the Beveridge Report was that all forms of charity should be eliminated from the administration? Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that this principle operated under the old chairman, and that, as a result of the appointment of the new chairman, this kind of thing is creeping in more and more?
    Mr. Peake: I must completely refute that allegation. In exceptional cases of peculiar difficulty, the Board has found it advantageous under any chairman to be able to call upon a voluntary society to help.

    Draft Regulations (Assistance)
    Mr. T. Brownasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what proposals he has received from the National Assistance Board following recent representations made by organisations on behalf of the old-age pensioners of this country.
    Mr. Doddsasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what representations the National Assistance Board has now made in regard to the scale of allowances to old-age pensioners.
    Mr. Haleasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance what proposals he has now received from the National Assistance Board following the representations made by old-age pensioners' associations.
    Mr. Peake: I presume that the hon. Members refer to the submission of draft regulations under subsection (1) of Section 6 of the National Assistance Act, 1948. I have not received any such draft regulations.
    Mr. Brown: As the Minister is charged with the responsibility of seeing that the needs of these poor people are attended to, and as representations were made to the Board last week when we were promised that the views which we then expressed about the poverty and dire need of the old-age pensioners in receipt of National Assistance would be dealt with, has the right hon. Gentleman any information of a specific character to give to us today?
    Mr. Peake: I see from the Press reports that the hon. Gentleman's deputation was received by the Chairman of the National Assistance Board last week, who promised to lay the views of the deputation before a forthcoming meeting of the Board. That meeting has not yet taken place, but I am quite confident that the Board has this matter under close and constant consideration.
    Mr. Dodds: Will the Minister bear in mind that over a million of the poorest old-age pensioners did not receive the increases of 7s. 6d. and 11s. given in April, but received only the miserable increases of 2s. 6d. and 4s.? In view of the recent increases in the cost of living—it went up by 2 per cent. last month, and goodness knows what is going to happen in the next few months—will the Minister not do something to avert tragedy before it is too late? It is no use the Minister saying that he has no obligation in the matter. He has an obligation.
    Mr. Peake: I think that we can rely upon the Board to do in the future, as it has in the past, the right thing and to carry out the statutory duties laid upon it under Section 6 of the 1948 Act. I should like to endorse the suggestion made at Question time a week ago by the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough, East (Mr. Marquand) who

    1041
    suggested that we might leave this matter to the Board and not attempt by Question and answer to influence its decision.
    Mr. Hale: As the right hon. Gentleman himself altered the constitution and the personnel of the Board, is it not really a little sanctimonious to say, "Leave it to the Board"? Will the right hon. Gentleman bear in mind on this extremely important matter that a real Minister of Social Insurance for the last three-quarters of an hour would have been putting to the House the figures and facts which have been put to him?
    Mr. Marquand: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that what I commented on last week was his own use of figures which I was afraid might prejudice consideration by the Board? Is the Minister further aware that hon. Members have only one way of making their views known to the National Assistance Board, and that is by asking the Minister Questions about them, whatever he may say?
    Mr. Peake: I am obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for making himself perfectly clear. The National Assistance Board has this matter under close consideration at the present time, and I am afraid that I cannot add to my answer.

    Disregards
    Mrs. Braddockasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance to what extent the extra amount of retirement pension earned by postponed retirement is disregarded for the purposes of granting National Assistance.
    Mr. Hubbardasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if he will agree to have the additional sums payable to old-age pensioners, in respect of the period they continued in gainful occupation after reaching retirement age, added to the disregards when their income is assessed for National Assistance.
    Mr. Peake: Increments of pension were not included in the list of disregards put into the National Assistance Act, 1948, and I am not prepared to introduce legislation to do so. One of the advantages of the increased pensions men can earn by continuing at work after 65 is the better prospect they offer of remaining independent of assistance.
    Mrs. Braddock: In view of that answer, will the Minister also issue a leaflet through the local post offices to the effect that it is only in circumstances where a man can be positively certain that he will not have to apply for National Assistance that he is likely to get any benefit from working over the age of 65? In view of the very serious position which that creates, does not the Minister think that he ought to let people know what exactly is the situation in relation to the matter?
    Mr. Peake: I do not think that there is much doubt in anybody's mind that the main purpose of the Beveridge Plan was to replace the necessity for recourse to assistance by the payment of insurance benefit as of right.
    Mr. Hubbard: Is the Minister not aware that in 1948 old people were specifically asked to continue in industry owing to the shortage of manpower and that, as a consequence, they were to receive added increments? Many old people continued in industry for three or four years beyond the retirement age, and now when, because of the difference in the cost of living today, they make application for National Assistance they find—[HON. MEMBERS: "Speech."] I am asking a question; I know that some hon. Members opposite do not like it. Many of these old-age pensioners responded to the call of the Government at that time, but every penny of the added increments is taken into account and deducted from their National Assistance payments. Is the right hon. Gentleman further aware—
    Mr. Speaker: Order. This is becoming a rather long supplementary question, but hon. Members do not assist in getting a certain number of Questions answered in a certain time by interrupting. I hope that the hon. Member will now come to the point of his question.
    Mr. Hubbard: Is not the Minister aware that the very large figures which he gave for 1954 will diminish when the pensioners realise that they will get no added benefit?
    Mr. Peake: I cannot agree. One of the main purposes of the whole Beveridge Plan would be completely stultified if increments granted for deferred retirement were disregarded in calculating the National Assistance allowance.
    Mr. Hubbard: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I beg to give notice that I will take the first opportunity to raise the matter on the Adjournment.

    War Pensions
    Mr. Slaterasked the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance if, in view of the increase that is taking place in the cost of living, he will now give consideration to the raising of pensions of the war disabled; and what representations have been made to him by the British Legion ex-Service men's Association on the matter.
    The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (Brigadier J. G. Smyth): As the hon. Member knows, the war pension rates were increased substantially in February last. My right hon. Friend has received representations on a number of war pensions matters, including the basic war disablement pension rate, and will shortly be receiving a deputation from the British Legion to discuss them.
    Mr. Slater: Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman aware that the minds of these people are seriously disturbed, especially when they read Press reports to the effect that they are now—[Interruption.] I should like my supplementary question to be heard by the Minister, Mr. Speaker, if we may have a little order. Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman aware that reports are now appearing in the Press indicating that these people are now becoming known as the forgotten servants of the nation? Secondly, as it is now becoming a blot upon the conscience of the people, does not the Minister think that when the reports which are being made are taken into consideration, serious thought should be given to this question?
    Brigadier Smyth: I could not agree with those remarks at all. The British Legion's claim is based upon a comparison between the value of the 1938 basic pension and its value today, but it takes no account of the big increases in the whole pensions code; improvements that
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    have been made since the war in the introduction of special allowances; the great improvements which have been made in the pensions and allowances of very seriously disabled men who are unable to work, and the improvements in the social security scheme, which all affect war pensioners. I feel perfectly certain that the position of the war pensioner today is better than it has ever been.
    Mr. Shinwell: Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman aware that, in spite of what he has just said, British Legion branches, especially in the County of Durham, are dissatisfied with the present rate of war pension, and are making representations, if not to the Ministry, at any rate to hon. Members? They are not satisfied with the adequacy of the pensions. Can we be assured that when the British Legion shortly make representations upon this subject—as the hon. and gallant Gentleman has just indicated will be the case—they will receive much more sympathetic treatment than the Government are apparently prepared to give them at present?
    Brigadier Smyth: My right hon. Friend will certainly receive them sympathetically, as he always does, but I should point out, first, that in the big improvements which we have just made in war disability pensions, we gave priority to the badly disabled men who were unable to work—we have increased their emoluments by 32s. 6d. a week—second, we increased the pensions of war widows, and, third, we made the biggest ever increase in the basic rate.
    Mr. Lewis: On a point of order. May I ask your guidance, Mr. Speaker? In view of the fact that every hon. Member—indeed, every person in the country—would like to see the old-age pensioners receive an increase in their miserable pension, can you advise us upon what steps we back benchers can take to ensure that the will of the people shall prevail?
    Mr. Speaker: That is not a point of order.

RAILWAY ACCIDENT, MILTON
Mr. Neave(by Private Notice) asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whether he has any statement to make on yesterday's railway accident at Milton, near Abingdon.
The Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation (Mr. John Boyd-Carpenter): Yes, Sir. At about 1.15 p.m. yesterday the 8.30 a.m. excursion train from Treherbert to Paddington became derailed when it was diverted, as planned, from the up main line to the up goods loop near Milton, between Steventon and Didcot, owing to engineering works in progress on the up main line. The engine went down the 20 ft. embankment to the left and was overturned and seven of the 10 coaches were derailed. The leading four coaches followed the engine down the embankment and were wrecked. I regret to say that 10 passengers were killed, and 96 people were taken to hospital, of whom 76 were detained, including the driver and travelling ticket collector whose injuries are not very serious. The fireman was practically uninjured. The up main line was reopened to traffic under a speed restriction at 8 a.m. this morning.
I have appointed Brigadier C. A. Langley, an Inspecting Officer of Railways, to hold an inquiry into this accident and he has already visited the site. I am sure the House will understand that I cannot make any further statement on this matter at present.
The House will, I know, wish to express its deep sympathy with the relatives and friends of those who lost their lives in this accident and with those who were injured. The rescue operations were organised with exceptional promptness and efficiency, and a leading part in them was played by the personnel of the R.A.F. and military depots nearby. I should like to express appreciation to them and to the various local and railways services who took part in this prolonged and distressing work.
Mr. Ness Edwards: I should like to associate my hon. and right hon. Friends with the sympathy which has been expressed. This accident has cast a blot over the valleys in and around my constituency. I have met some of the people
1046
concerned, and I am sure they would like me to say that what they appreciated more than anything else was the succour voluntarily given them by the men from the two Service camps. That sense of gratitude, of what was done to succour the wounded and injured, has remained uppermost in their minds. On their behalf, I should also like to pay a compliment to the part which British Railways played in succouring these people after the tragedy.
Mr. Boyd-Carpenter: I appreciate what the right hon. Gentleman has been good enough to say.
Mr. G. Wilson: Can my right hon. Friend give us an assurance that when the inquiry into this most regrettable accident takes place special attention will be given to ascertaining whether the accident was in any way connected with the alteration in signalling rules at places where a speed restriction is in operation, having regard to the fact that some engine drivers believe that the rules—
Mr. Monslow: On a point of order. In the light of the statement which has been made—and as an inquiry is to be held, in which certain members of my organisation are involved—may I suggest that the matter is sub judice, and that no further statement should be made at this stage?
Mr. Wilson: I was not asking for a statement; I was merely asking that something should be considered—
Mr. Speaker: Order. I heard the Minister say that an inquiry would be held into this most distressing accident. I have no doubt that every relevant circumstance, as the House would desire, will be taken into consideration and duly weighed.
Mr. Boyd-Carpenter: I need only say that this investigation will be undertaken by an extremely experienced officer, in whom I have the utmost confidence. I am quite certain that he will go very fully into the causes of this accident.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
Proceedings on Government Business exempted, at this day's Sitting, from the provisions of Standing Order No. 1 (Sittings of the House).—[Mr. Crookshank.]

FINANCE BILL
3.39 p.m.
The Lord Privy Seal (Mr. Harry Crookshank): I beg to move,
That this House will Tomorrow resolve itself into a Committee on the Finance Bill.
This Motion—[HON. MEMBERS: "Resign"]—arises from the rather unusual circumstances of Thursday morning when, at about 8 o'clock, a Committee of the whole House unanimously—[Laughter.] Hon. Members who were not in the Committee at that stage are probably more amused than those who were and whose one thought was that by accepting the Motion the Committee would suspend its sitting and they could all go home, having spent a long night here. The Committee accepted that Motion, which itself, as is well known—[Laughter.] I am sorry to be assuming more knowledge in the House than, it apparently thinks it has.
The Motion which was passed by the Committee is an alternative to that for reporting Progress. On this particular occasion the Chairman of Ways and Means had declined, in his discretion, to accept the Progress Motion, so it seemed clear that only by the Motion which was then proposed could we bring the sitting to a close at all. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Well, the Progress Motion was not acceptable and neither side of the Committee wished to continue the debate. Therefore, there was an impasse, which resulted in the other Motion being moved, which had the desired effect. [Laughter.] It certainly had the desired effect. Otherwise, we might still be sitting, for all I know. The Motion was accepted by both sides of the Committee and the sitting came to a close.
The consequence of that was that the Order lapsed, which happens in various other circumstances as well. The Motion I have moved is, therefore, necessary in order to revive the Order and to permit the Committee of the whole House to resume its consideration of the Finance Bill tomorrow.
Mr. Sydney Silverman: Why should we?
Mr. Crookshank: The hon. Member is very effervescent today. All that the
1048
Motion does is to revive the Order. [An HON. MEMBER: "Why?"] Because the majority of this House desires it. The unanimous decision was to bring that sitting to an end, but I quite realise that some hon. Members are not so anxious to see it continued.
Be that as it may, the Motion seeks to make it possible for the Committee to meet and to continue its business at the point where it was interrupted on Thursday morning. That is as clear an explanation as I can give and is apparently—[An HON. MEMBER: "An apology."] There is nothing to apologise for. As hon. Gentlemen appear to think that they know more about the matter than anyone else, I hope that the Motion will be carried.
3.43 p.m.
Mr. Hugh Gaitskell: There is clearly a sense of occasion in the House this afternoon. That is not surprising, because we do not often have the opportunity of being in attendance at a ceremony to revive a corpse. I thought that in the circumstances the speech of the Leader of the House was curt and peremptory, more reminiscent of a few muttered words by a grave digger than of a revivalist effort to bring the corpse to life. He accused my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) of effervescence; there ought to be a little more effervescence on the Government side of the House.
We shall not have a long debate on this Motion. I understand, after looking at the precedents that the rules of order limit what we can talk about. I believe that we cannot talk about the merits of the Finance Bill in any detail, and another equally important reason is that many of my hon. Friends wish to discuss the Housing Subsidies Bill. Nevertheless, it is right that before we decide this matter of the corpse two questions must first be asked about the situation. The first is: how did the deceased come to his regrettable end? The second is: should the corpse be restored to life again? [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] Unlike the Leader of the House, I propose to give reasons in my speech, and they will be to the effect that the corpse should not be revived again.
There are three possible answers to the question of how the death occurred. It certainly was not a natural death. We

1049
can all agree that the Bill did not die of old age. It might have been the result of justifiable homicide. It might have been murder. It might have been accidental death. [An HON. MEMBER: "Or suicide."] It is a little difficult to conceive of the suicide of a Bill, but we will let that point pass. I want to make an admission. My right hon. Friend the Member for Huyton (Mr. H. Wilson) has asked me to say that he pleads guilty to justifiable homicide. He will always be able to be proud of his achievement, because on that occasion he successfully, at any rate for the time being, killed a tyrant, and that is something which he can whisper in his old-age to his grandsons and great-grandsons.
We must also consider, since the Leader of the House gave so little attention to the point, the position of the Government in this matter. I do not think anybody would suggest that the Government were guilty—if that is the right word—of justifiable homicide. If they were, they would not be trying to revive the corpse. One's first impression, and the first impression of all of us, was that the whole business was an accident and that the Government did not understand that death would occur.
I was rather surprised when the Leader of the House this afternoon—he did it the other day as well—implied that to the Government there was no accident about it at all. They were prepared to accept the charge and plead guilty of murder in this case. One often hears of a criminal when he stands in the dock pleading that something that has happened was an accident, but I have seldom heard of a case where the man in the dock says that although everybody thinks the death was an accident he really committed murder. The only case when that happens is when the criminal concerned is of unsound mind.
I commend to the Leader of the House the example of the late Stanley Baldwin who, on a similar occasion in 1923, came to the House and said quite frankly, "The truth of the matter is that the Government were caught napping." The Leader of the House would have done better to have pleaded in that way, but if he wishes to have the stain ever upon him that he took part in this murder we cannot do anything about it. It raises the question: why do the Government want to revive the corpse which they took
1050
part in killing? They may say that the Bill was nearly dead already—there is some truth in that—and that it was an act of mercy to finish it off altogether.
I suppose the Government are saying that to pass the Motion in the early hours of Thursday morning was the only way in which we could all go to bed. That brings me to the immediate circumstances in which the Government and all of us found ourselves when, as the Leader of the House has said, the Chairman of Ways and Means refused to accept the Motion to report Progress. Probably I might be in trouble with you, Mr. Speaker, if I were to attempt to investigate in any detail the behaviour or conduct of the Chairman of Ways and Means, and I have no intention of doing that. I would only say, in passing, to get it on the record, that we do not accept that the decision as to the interpretation of "Progress" is an appropriate one. I realise that I can say no more than that, and that if we wished to we should have to discuss it on another occasion.
I will, however, say this to the Government. It may be that the decision of the Chairman of Ways and Means put them in this difficulty, but they really got themselves into the difficulty long before that. The situation all began—and I am sorry that I must remind the Chancellor of this—when, on the previous evening, he gave this undertaking:
"As I have said before, hon. Members will have another opportunity of raising all the points that they desire to raise to their hearts' content, and representing their constituents' points of view."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 15th November, 1955; Vol. 546, c. 364.]
I submit that those words could only be understood to mean that the Government had no intention of moving the Closure on our debate. Yet we all know that while there were still at least 12 Members standing up and wishing to take part in the debate—and, as I am reminded, there were Members on the Government side wishing to speak—the Closure was moved. That did not prevent the Government moving the Closure, and it did not prevent the Chancellor speaking to us in the debate which immediately followed in the most aggressive and menacing manner about the intentions of the Government in future. I think that he may now perhaps be regretting what was done that night and what he said that night, because it has

1051
certainly not got him anywhere as far as the Finance Bill is concerned, and of course, he then started along the road which eventually led to the death of the Bill.
I should like to ask this question of the Government. In the light of all that has happened and of the really disastrous failure of the intervention by the Patronage Secretary the other night, can we have an assurance that the Closure will not be used again during the passage of the Bill? I am quite willing to give way if the Leader of the House would like to give us that assurance. [HON. MEMBERS: "Answer."] We must assume that, as I rather feared, that is not the view of the Government. They have not learned their lesson. Well, they will have to learn it on further occasions.
The second question, should the corpse be revived, can be answered quite simply. This Finance Bill had a very unhappy first life. It was unwanted from the start. It was neglected by its parents, and the relatives were horrible to it. It was a most unpopular child all round, and it would be really both inhuman as well as stupid to attempt to bring it to life again. It is far better to let it lie and give it a decent burial. That is what we should like to do, and that is why we shall certainly vote against the Motion.
3.53 p.m.
Mr. Sydney Silverman: I have no desire to continue at any length this second edition of the obsequies of the Finance Bill, and I would not have intervened at all but for my total inability to follow the argument of the Leader of the House. I can understand certain circumstances in which the House may have inadvertently done something, when the Government might ask the House to put it right. I can understand circumstances in which, having been compelled to take a certain course with a certain object, that being the only way in which it could be done, the right hon. Gentleman would come and ask the House for mercy and allow it to be done.
The Leader of the House has said quite deliberately that everybody knew what was the consequence of accepting this Motion. He said that it was only an alternative Motion to a Motion to report Progress. But that is inconsistent with his
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argument, because had it been only an alternative with the same result, the Chairman of the Committee could not have accepted it. The Chairman had decided that to move to report Progress would have been an abuse of the process of the House and, therefore, refused it. He would have been bound by that ruling to refuse the second Motion, too.
The second Motion was a totally different one with a totally different result. The totally different result was the extinction of the Bill, and the Leader of the House said that everybody understood that when they accepted the Motion, and that the Committee, when it unanimously accepted this Motion, knew that that would mean the end of the Bill. That being so, and the Committee with its eyes open and after full deliberation having accepted the Motion, and the Leader of the House now having said that that is exactly what was intended to be done—that the acceptance of the Motion would kill the Finance Bill—how can the right hon. Gentleman now come to the House and ask us to resuscitate it?
If the Government had said, "That is not what we intended at all. We adopted this course only because the procedure necessitated it. Now let us do what we always intended and bring it back again," that would have been one argument. But the Leader of the House says the exact opposite. He says. "We knew perfectly well that the result of this Motion was to kill the Bill. Everybody knew what would happen. We knew that when we moved it. The Committee knew it when it unanimously accepted it. Now let us reverse our decision." The House cannot reverse this decision when it has definitely and unanimously made up its mind.
The truth is that the Government were afraid of further discussion on Clause 1, because they knew perfectly well that the discussion was getting on to dangerous ground on which they had no vestige of defence. Having deprived every Lancashire Member of any right to say a single word about the effect of the Finance Bill on the textile trade, and the failure of the Government to lend an atom of support or aid or consideration, they were content to deceive the Committee into following a procedure which would have the ultimate result, in their opinion, of bringing the Finance Bill back to the Committee stage but in such a

1053
condition as to silence hon. Members on the measures which they wanted to discuss and which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had undertaken should be discussed without limit. I hope that the House, having come to a unanimous decision on Thursday morning, will not change that decision today.
3.58 p.m.
Mr. Eric Fletcher: I wish to add two words to those which have been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) in explaining why the House should not accept this Motion.
This is a most unusual and humiliating experience for the Government, and it is worth while for the House to consider how this situation has come about, and to take steps to prevent it recurring. Those hon. Members who were not present during the early hours of Thursday morning should bear in mind what my hon. Friend has said. The situation which arose at 8 o'clock or thereabouts on Thursday morning arose entirely from the action of the Patronage Secretary in moving the Closure at about 3 o'clock on Thursday morning, and, as is now obvious, his action was not only an admission of failure but was a breach of faith.
It was because of that breach of faith in going back on a solemn assurance which the Chancellor had given the previous evening, that steps were taken to ensure that the Government learned a lesson from their failure to observe assurances that had been given. Anyone who was not here on Thursday and has since read the OFFICIAL REPORT of the debate will recognise that the reason that was given by the Chairman of Ways and Means for not accepting the Motion to report Progress was that he said no progress had been given. Of course, he was entitled not to accept that Motion, and I am not challenging his Ruling. But why had no progress been made? Because of the Chancellor's failure to allow hon. Members on both sides of the Committee to continue the discussion whether Clause 1, as amended, should stand part of the Finance Bill.
When the debate adjourned late on Wednesday night it was apparent that not only my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Exchange (Mrs. Braddock) but a number of other hon. Members on both
1054
sides wanted to state the reasons why they were opposed to the Purchase Tax provisions. We all assumed that the debate on the Question, "That the Clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill" would continue until all hon. Members had had an opportunity of expressing their point of view and the point of view in which their respective constituents were interested. The Chancellor found himself, for the first time since he has been Chancellor, faced with the Patronage Secretary moving the Closure. Before this debate is concluded we are entitled to know whether the Chancellor takes responsibility for that decision or whether it was the responsibility of the Leader of the House.
It was most apparent during the debates on the Bill that there was complete lack of support for the Chancellor from his Cabinet colleagues. Hardly any senior member of the Government was present during any part of these important discussions on the Finance Bill. The Chancellor was left with the tenuous assistance, for what it was worth, of the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Neither the Law Officers for England nor the Law Officers for Scotland were present. [HON. MEMBERS: "Two words."] The Leader of the House was conspicuous by his absence until, at a late hour, he came in to try to clear up the mess which the Patronage Secretary had caused.
The situation which we are now debating has arisen very largely, as must now be obvious, as a result of the division in the ranks of the Cabinet about the merits of the Bill. If the future proceedings on the Bill are to be considered in an orderly manner, I hope that neither the Leader of the House nor the Patronage Secretary will intervene as they did so unwisely and unhappily on Thursday to prevent the Chancellor from carrying out the policy of which he has always boasted, of giving the Opposition and, incidentally, his own supporters every opportunity of the fullest discussion on the Finance Bill before reaching a decision.
It must now be obvious that nothing was achieved between the Closure which took place at 3 a.m. on Thursday and 8 a.m., five hours later, when the House adjourned, for five hours had been taken in four or five Divisions and in a debate of an earlier Motion to report Progress.
Air Commodore A. V. Harvey: On a point of order. [HON. MEMBERS: "The hon. and gallant Member was not there."] I was here. Mr. Speaker, may we have your guidance on this point? When on hon. Member says he intends to say only two words, are there any means of keeping him to that?
Mr. Speaker: I have heard that exordium used frequently by hon. Members and, like the words, "In conclusion, Mr. Speaker," I always think it is a little ominous.
Mr. Fletcher: In view of your advice, Mr. Speaker, I will try to avoid the temptation to use the words, "In conclusion."
I think that before we part from the Motion we are entitled to an assurance from the Chancellor that during the remaining stages of the Bill we shall be allowed to discuss every Amendment adequately and that he will resist any attempt by the Leader of the House or the Patronage Secretary to impose the Closure. He knows perfectly well that neither this year nor on any previous occasion when we have discussed these financial Measures have the Opposition resorted to obstruction. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] The Chancellor has himself said so time and again. Year after year he has acknowledged the serious and constructive contribution which has been made by the Opposition to the Clauses in the Finance Bill. That is a duty we are entitled to discharge.
Mr. Nigel Fisher Mr. Nigel Fisher (Surbiton) rose—
Mr. Speaker: Order. I fail to see what all this has to do with the Motion before the House. The hon. Member is entitled to argue that the House should not pass
the Motion because of certain events which happened when I myself had not the advantage of being present. I am asking the hon. Member to show some reason for which the House either should or should not accept the Motion.
Mr. Fletcher: That is exactly what I was trying to do, Sir. The Motion has become necessary because the Chancellor, either deliberately or because he was over-ruled by the Leader of the House and the Patronage Secretary, decided on Thursday to depart from his previous custom of allowing the fullest discussion of Clauses in the Finance Bill. Had it not been for that decision taken at 3 a.m. on Thursday, the Motion would not be necessary.
We still do not think it is necessary and we think it should be defeated. We think the Government should accept the conclusions into which they were forced as a result of their hasty, ill-considered action last week and should realise that here is a heaven-sent opportunity of thinking again about the Budget proposals. There is no need to reintroduce the Bill. It would be open to the Government, if they were wise, to recast and reconsider their Purchase Tax proposals, which have been condemned not only on this side of the House but by hon. Members opposite. A situation has arisen, therefore, in which I hoped that the Chancellor or the House would take the opportunity of throwing out the Motion and giving the Government an opportunity to think again about their unhappy financial measures.
Question put:—
The House divided: Ayes 308, Noes 245.

Division No. 54.]

AYES

[4.5 p.m.

Agnew, Cmdr. P. G.

Baxter, sir Beverley

Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.

Aitken, W. T.

Beamish, Maj. Tufton

Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry

Alport, C. J. M.

Bell, Philip (Bolton, E.)

Brooman-White, R. C.

Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)

Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)

Browne, J. Nixon (Craigton)

Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)

Bennett, Dr. Reginald

Buchan-Hepburn, Rt. Hon. P. G. T.

Anstruther-Gray, Major W. J.

Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)

Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.

Arbuthnot, John

Bidgood, J. C.

Burden, F. F. A.

Armstrong, C. W.

Biggs-Davison, J. A.

Butcher, Sir Herbert

Ashton, H.

Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel

Butler, Rt. Hn. R. A.(Saffron Walden)

Astor, Hon. J. J.

Bishop, F. P.

Campbell, Sir David

Atkins, H. E.

Black, C. W.

Carr, Robert

Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.

Body, R. F.

Cary, Sir Robert

Baldwin, A. E.

Bossom, Sir A. C.

Channon, H.

Balniel, Lord

Bowen, E. R. (Cardigan)

Chichester-Clark, R.

Barber, Anthony

Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.

Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)

Barlow, Sir John

Boyle, Sir Edward

Cole, Norman

Barter, John

Braine, B. R.

Cooper, Sqn. Ldr. Albert

Cooper-Key, E. M.

Hudson, Sir Austin Lewisham, N.)

O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim, N.)

Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.

Hudson, W. R. A. (Hull, N.)

Orr, Capt. L. P. S.

Corfield, Capt. F. V.

Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.

Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)

Craddock, Beresford (Spelthome)

Hughes-Young, M. H. C.

Page, R. G.

Crookshank, Capt. Rt. Hn. H. F. C.

Hulbert, Sir Norman

Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)

Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.

Hurd, A. R.

Partridge, E.

Crouch, R. F.

Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)

Peake, Rt. Hon. O.

Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)

Hutchison, James (Scotstoun)

Peyton, J. W. W.

Crowder, Petre (Ruislip—Northwood)

Hylton-Foster, Sir H. B. H.

Pickthorn, K. W. M.

Cunningham, Knox

Iremonger, T. L.

Pilkington, Capt. R. A.

Currie, G. B. H.

Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)

Pitman, I. J.

Dance, J. C. G.

Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)

Pitt, Miss E. M.

Davidson, Viscountess

Jennings, J. C. (Burton)

Pott. H. P.

D'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry

Jennings, Sir Roland (Hallam)

Powell, J. Enoch

Deedes, W. F.

Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)

Price, David (Eastleigh)

Digby, Simon Wingfield

Johnson, Eric (Blackley)

Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)

Dodds-Parker, A. D.

Jones, A. (Hall Green)

Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.

Donaldson, Cmdr. C. E. McA.

Joynson-Hicks, Hon. L. W.

Profumo, J. D.

Doughty, C. J. A.

Kaberry, D.

Raikes, Sir Victor

Drayson, G. B.

Keegan, D.

Ramsden, J. E.

Dugdale, Bt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)

Kerby, Capt. H. B.

Redmayne, M.

Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.

Kerr, H. W.

Rees-Davies, W. R.

Duthie, W. S.

Kershaw, J. A.

Remnant, Hon. P.

Eccles Rt. Hon. Sir D. M.

Kirk, P. M.

Renton, D. L. M.

Eden, Rt. Hn. SirA. (Warwick & L'm'tn)

Lagden, G. W.

Ridsdale, J. E.

Elliot, Rt. Hon. W. E.

Lambert, Hon. G.

Rippon, A. G. F.

Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn

Lancaster, Col. C. G.

Roberts, Peter (Heeley)

Errington, Sir Eric

Leather, E. H. C.

Robertson, Sir David

Erroll, F. J.

Leavey, J. A.

Robinson, Sir Roland (Blackpool, S.)

Farey-Jones, F. W.

Leburn, W. G.

Robson-Brown, W.

Fell, A.

Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.

Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)

Finlay, Graeme

Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)

Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard

Fisher, Nigel

Lennox-Boyd, Rt. Hon. A. T.

Russell, R. S.

Fleetwood-Hesketh, R. F.

Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)

Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.

Fletcher-Cooke, C.

Linstead, Sir H. N.

Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.

Fort, R.

Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)

Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.

Foster, John

Lloyd, Rt. Hon. Selwyn (Wirral)

Sharpies, Maj. R. C.

Fraser, Hon. Hugh (Stone)

Lloyd-George, Maj. Rt. Hon. G.

Shepherd, William

Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe & Lonsdale)

Longden, Gilbert

Simon, J. E. S. (Middlesbrough, W.)

Freeth, D. K.

Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.

Smithers, Peter (Winchester)

Galbraith, Hon. T. G. D.

Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)

Smyth, Brig. J. G. (Norwood)

Cammans, L. D.

Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh

Soames, Capt. C.

Garner-Evans, E. H.

McAdden, S. J.

Spearman, A. C. M.

George, J. C. (Pollok)

Macdonald, Sir Peter

Speir, R. M.

Glover, D.

Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry

Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)

Godber, J. B.

McKibbin, A. J.

Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. (Kens'gt'n, S.)

Gomme-Duncan, Col. A.

Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)

Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard

Gough, C. F. H.

McLaughlin, Mrs. P.

Stevens, Geoffrey

Gower, H. R.

Maclean, Fitzroy (Lancaster)

Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)

Graham, Sir Fergus

McLean, Neil (Inverness)

Steward, Sir William (Woolwich, W.)

Grant, W. (Woodside)

Macleod, Rt. Hn. Iain (Enfield, W.)

Stewart, Henderson (Fife, E.)

Grant-Ferris, Wg Cdr. R. (Nantwich)

MacLeod, John (Ross & Cromarty)

Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.

Green, A.

Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)

Storey, S.

Gresham Cooke, R.

Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)

Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)

Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)

Madden, Martin

Summers, G. S. (Aylesbury)

Grimston, Sir Robert (Westhury)

Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)

Sumner, W. D. M. (Orpington)

Hall, John (Wycombe)

Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)

Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)

Hare, Hon. J. H.

Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R,

Taylor, William (Bradford, N.)

Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)

Marlowe, A. A. H.

Thomas, Rt. Hn. J. P. L. (Hereford)

Harris, Reader (Heston)

Marples, A. E.

Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)

Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)

Marshall, Douglas

Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)

Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)

Mathew, R.

Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)

Maude, Angus

Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R. (Croydon, S.)

Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Macclesfd)

Maudling, Rt. Hon. R.

Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. P.

Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)

Mawby, R. L.

Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.

Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)

Maydon, Lt.-Comdr. S. L. C.

Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)

Harvie-Watt, Sir George

Medlicott, Sir Frank

Tilney, John (Wavertree)

Hay, John

Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.

Touche, Sir Gordon

Head, Rt. Hon. A. H.

Molson, A. H. E.

Turner, H. F. L.

Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel

Monckton, Rt. Hon. Sir Walter

Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.

Heath, Edward

Moore, Sir Thomas

Tweedsmuir, Lady

Henderson, John (Cathcart)

Morrison, John (Salisbury)

Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.

Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.

Mott-Radclyffe, C. E.

Vickers, Miss J. H.

Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)

Nabarro, G. D. N.

Vosper, D. F.

Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)

Nairn, D. L. S.

Wakefield, Edward (Derbyshire, W.)

Hill, John (S. Norfolk)

Neave, Airey

Walker-Smith, D. C.

Hirst, Geoffrey

Nicholls, Harmar

Wall, Major Patrick

Holland-Martin, C. J.

Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)

Ward, Hon. George (Worcester)

Hope, Lord John

Nicolson, N. (B'n'mth, E. & Chr'ch)

Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)

Hornsby-Smith, Miss M. P.

Nield, Basil (Chester)

Watkinson, H. A.

Horobin, Sir Ian

Noble, Comdr. A. H. P.

Webbe, Sir H.

Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence

Nugent, G. R. H.

Whitelaw, W.S.I.(Penrith & Border)

Howard, Gerald (Cambridgeshire)

Nutting, Rt. Hon. Anthony

Williams, Gerald (Tonbridge)

Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)

Oakshott, H. D.

Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)

1058

1059

Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)

Wood, Hon. R.

TELLERS FOR THE AYES:

Wills, G. (Bridgwater)

Woollam, John Victor

Mr. Studholme and

Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)

Yates, William (The Wrekin)

Mr. Robert Allan.

NOES

Alnsley, J. W.

Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.

Moss, R.

Albu, A. H.

Greenwood, Anthony

Moyle, A.

Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)

Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.

Mulley, F. W.

Allen, Arthur (Bosworth)

Grey, C. F.

Neal, Harold (Bolsover)

Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)

Griffiths, David (Rother Valley)

Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)

Anderson, Frank

Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)

O'Brien, T.

Attlee, Rt. Hon. C. R.

Griffiths, William (Exchange)

Oram, A. E.

Awbery, S. S.

Grimond, J.

Orbach, M.

Bacon, Miss Alice

Hale, Leslie

Oswald, T.

Balfour, A.

Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)

Owen, W. J.

Bartley, P.

Hamilton, W. W.

Padley, W. E.

Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J.

Hannan, W.

Palmer, A. M. F.

Bence, C. R. (Dunbartonshire, E.)

Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)

Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)

Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)

Hastings, S.

Pargiter, G. A.

Benson, G.

Hayman, F. H.

Parker, J.

Beswick, F.

Healey, Denis

Parkin, B. T.

Bevan, Rt. Hon. A. (Ebbw Vale)

Henderson, Rt. Hon. A. (Rwly Regis)

Paton, J.

Blackburn, F.

Herbison, Miss M.

Pearson, A.

Blenkinsop, A.

Hewitson, Capt. M.

Peart, T. F.

Blyton, W. R.

Hobson, C. R.

Plummer, Sir Leslie

Boardman, H.

Holman, P.

Popplewell, E.

Bottomley, Rt. Hon. A. G.

Holt, A. F.

Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)

Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S.W.)

Houghton, Douglas

Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)

Bowles, F. G.

Howell, Denis (All Saints)

Probert, A. R.

Boyd, T. C.

Hoy, J. H.

Proctor, W. T.

Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth

Hubbard, T. F.

Pryde, D. J.

Brockway, A. F.

Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)

Pursey, Cmdr. H.

Broughton, Dr. A. D. D.

Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)

Reeves, J.

Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)

Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)

Rhodes, H.

Brown, Thomas (Ince)

Hunter, A. E.

Roberts, Albert (Normanton)

Burke, W. A.

Hynd, H. (Accrington)

Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)

Burton, Miss F. E.

Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)

Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)

Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)

Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)

Ross, William

Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)

Irving, S. (Dartford)

Royle, C.

Callaghan, L. J.

Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.

Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.

Carmichael, J.

Janner, B.

Short, E. W.

Champion, A. J.

Jeger, George (Goole)

Shurmer, P. L. E.

Chapman, W. D.

Jeger, Mrs. Lena(Holbn & St.Pncs, S.)

Silverman, Julius (Aston)

Chetwynd, G. R.

Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)

Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)

Clunie, J.

Johnson, James (Rugby)

Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)

Coldrick, W.

Johnston, Douglas (Paisley)

Skeffington, A. M.

Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)

Jones, Rt. Hon. A. Creech(Wakefield)

Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)

Collins, V. J.(Shoreditch & Finsbury)

Jones, David (The Hartlepools)

Slater, J. (Sedgefield)

Corbet, Mrs. Freda

Jones, Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)

Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)

Cove, W. G.

Jones, Jack (Rotherham)

Snow, R. W.

Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)

Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)

Sorensen, R. W.

Cronin, J. D.

Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)

Sparks, J. A.

Crossman, R. H. S.

Kenyon, C.

Steele, T.

Cullen, Mrs. A.

Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.

Stewart, Michael (Fulham)

Daines, P.

Lawson, G. M.

Stones, W. (Consett)

Dalton, Rt. Hon. H.

Ledger, R. J.

Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.

Davies, Rt. Hon. Clement (Montgomery)

Lee, Frederick (Newton)

Strauss, Rt. Hon. George (Vauxhall)

Davies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)

Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)

Stross, Dr.Barnett (Stoke-on-Trent, C.)

Davies, Harold (Leek)

Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)

Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.

Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)

Lewis, Arthur

Swingler, S. T.

Deer, G.

Lipton, Lt.-Col. M.

Sylvester, G. O.

de Freitas, Geoffrey

Logan, D. G.

Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)

Delargy, H. J.

MacColl, J. E.

Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)

Dodds, N. N.

McGhee, H. G.

Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)

Donnelly, D. L.

MoGovern, J.

Thornton, E.

Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)

McKay, John (Wallsend)

Tomney, F.

Dye, S.

McLeavy, Frank

Turner-Samuels, M.

Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.

MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)

Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn

Edelman, M.

MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)

Viant, S. P.

Edwards, Rt. Hon. Hess (Caerphilly)

Mahon, S.

Warbey, W. N.

Edwards, Robert (Bilston)

Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)

Watkins, T. E.

Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)

Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)

Weitzman, D.

Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)

Mann, Mrs. Jean

Wells, Percy (Faversham)

Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)

Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.

Wells, William (Walsall, N.)

Evans, Stanley (Wednesbury)

Mason, Roy

West, D. G.

Fernyhough, E.

Mayhew, C. P.

Wheeldon, W. E.

Fienburgh, W.

Mikardo, Ian

White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)

Fletcher, Eric

Mitchison, G. R.

White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)

Forman, J. C.

Monslow, W.

Wigg, George

Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)

Moody, A. S.

Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.

Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.

Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)

Wilkins, W. A.

Gibson, C. W.

Morrison, Rt. Hn. Herbert (Lewis'm, S.)

Willey, Frederick

Gooch, E. G.

Mort, D. L.

Williams, David (Neath)

1060

1061

Williams, Ronald (Wigan)

Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)

Zilliacus, K.

Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)

Winterbottom, Richard

Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)

Woodburn, Rt. Hon. A.

TELLERS FOR THE NOES:

Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)

Yates, V. (Ladywood)

Mr. Holmes and Mr. John Taylor.

Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)

Younger, Rt. Hon. K.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

  HOUSING SUBSIDIES BILL
  Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Amendment to Question [17th November], That the Bill be now read a Second time.—[Mr. Sandys.]
  Which Amendment was, to leave out "now" and at the end of the Question to add "upon this day six months."—[Mr. Lindgren.]
  Question again proposed, That "now" stand part of the Question:—
  4.20 p.m.
  Mr. Aneurin Bevan: I think that, on reflection, hon. Members in all parts of the House will regret very much that this debate has been broken in half. It would have been much more seemly, and certainly much more in keeping with the stature of the subject, if we could have had a continuous two days' debate. It is also unfortunate that a considerable amount of time has elapsed which has eaten into the second day of the debate. I hope, however, that that will not prevent us from having a Division at a reasonably early hour. Of course, we would have preferred if the Leader of the House had found it possible to take the recent Division after the housing debate, although, I suppose, it is far too much to expect the Leader of the House to throw away one half of his scissors.
  This is the first major debate on housing since 1945. That is not to deprecate many of the other debates that have taken place but, in the main, they did not concern themselves with the fundamental principles of housing. They occurred, in the main, on the revision of subsidies from time to time. But this is the first time since then that we have been able to discuss the fundamentals of the question. I welcome it for that reason, because I think the time has come when we should now review the whole of our housing programme.
  I would have preferred that the Government would have found it possible to be able to discuss at the same time the proposals with which they are threatening us
  1062
  about rent restrictions. We would then have had a complete picture of the Government's proposals and the country would have a better idea of what is in store for it. This issue is of very great importance indeed, as hon. Members in all parts of the House will soon find. Local authorities up and down the country are deeply disturbed, and the more they learn of the Government's proposals the more disturbed they become.
  I might be permitted, as this is a wide, sweeping discussion, to try to indicate the lines upon which we considered post-war housing should be conducted and I should like to refer to a speech which I made as far back as 1945.
  The Minister of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Duncan Sandys): In the House?
  Mr. Bevan: Yes. I am referring to a speech made on 17th October, 1945. We said then that in our judgment the main responsibility for dealing with post-war housing should rest upon the local authorities; and in this we were making no departure from a statement made by the previous Government.
  It was clear to everybody that we would be faced with a very dangerous political situation if the provision of post-war housing was left to the caprice of private enterprise. Even as it was, as early as 1946 there were dangerous movements among homeless peoples in different parts of the country. Hotels and other buildings were forcibly seized. I ask hon. Members opposite, who have been boasting about their housing policy since, what would have been the situation in Great Britain if, in the immediate post-war years, the people with the longest purses had been able to buy houses and the returned ex-Service men in their hundreds of thousands had been walking the streets homeless? I venture to say that the post-war years of Great Britain would not have been as peaceful and prosperous and progressive as they were had that been the case.
  Although hon. Members opposite made all kinds of wild speeches, they knew in

  1063
  their heart of hearts that the only way in which this grave social problem could be successfully tackled was by the Government and the local authorities co-operating and keeping private enterprise firmly under leash. There were numbers of people, especially speculative builders, who looked enviously and covetously at the money in the pockets of people at that time at the end of the war, and who desired to do as they did from 1921 onwards and make large fortunes out of speculative building. But we knew that it was not in the best interests of Great Britain that they should be let loose on the community, so we decided that postwar housing should be entrusted to public enterprise. I have not heard any right hon. or hon. Member on the other side of the House, who dare, even to this day, quarrel with that decision.
  It is quite true that at that time the Leader of the party opposite, with his usual irresponsibility, got up in the place where I am now standing and asked that all forms of building should be let loose, that there should be no attempt to canalise building materials and labour into the public housing, but that anybody should build a house—where he liked, what he liked and as much as he liked. But, thank goodness, the right hon. Gentleman was not in office. Fortunately, he was not permitted to have his way.
  In those years we had an ordered building programme. It was not as fast as we would have liked—[Interruption.] Certainly not. We would have preferred to have built houses much more quickly—of course. The country would have liked to do it, but I ask hon. Members, even today, to ask themselves, as we had to ask ourselves over and over again in those years, what would we not build if we wanted to build more houses? For example, the Minister last week, in moving the Second Reading of the Bill, mentioned that he had been Minister of Works. I am bound to say to him that a most calamitous Minister of Works he was. I had to spend the first year, almost the first two years, of my office in cleaning up the demoralised mess in which he had left the building industry.
  When hon. Members say that they would have liked more houses, have they ever looked at the figures of those years? Have they realised that in July, 1945, there were 204,000 building workers on
  1064
  war damage repairs alone? Have they realised that one of the great difficulties of bringing the building industry back to a more wholesome state of health after the war was the right hon. Gentleman's policy of cost-plus on all war damage repairs?
  I am not suggesting for one moment—I want to be entirely fair to him—[HON. MEMBERS: "Fair?"] Yes, I desire to be fair to him. I remind the House that after the war we had a tremendous repair problem on our hands and resources had to be mobilised very quickly. In some instances, so impossible was it to make any proper estimates on the houses that were damaged as to what it would cost to put them back in repair that cost-plus methods were a rough and ready way of getting the job done. But we all know—and those connected with the building industry know much better than anybody else—that that method brought into the building industry all kinds of undesirable elements, all sorts of people who never belonged to the building industry, who just mobilised labour of all kinds from wherever they could get it, and some of them made very large sums of money indeed.
  Indeed, in 1946, 157,000 building workers were engaged on war damage repairs, and in 1947 the figure was 99,000. In 1948, the building programme was in balance, when we had almost reached our post-war peak, but there were still 76,000 building workers on war damaged building repairs. In all those years, we had to deal with the legacy left by the war, and I must say that I was astonished at the irresponsibility of some of the campaigns carried out at that time.
  Furthermore, and hon. Members in all parts of the House must remember this, in addition to providing homes for our people, we had to provide them with places in which to work. I represent a South Wales constituency which depends on steel and coal. There was a very great need indeed for housing—a much greater need than in some other parts of the country—because, in between the wars, hardly any building was being done—hardly any industrial building at all. There was some slum clearance, but the result was that there was hardly any building labour in the area and hardly any building contractors.

  1065
  We had to make a very hard decision. Should we build a smaller number of houses and build factories and steel works and places of that sort, in which the workers would have secure employment, or should we build more houses and have them unemployed in the new houses? We made the decision, which was endorsed at the time, that it was better to secure work and put up with the overcrowding a little longer. That was the decision.
  But we decided something further in 1945, and the right hon. Gentleman should begin to pay a little attention to it. He was quite wrong the other day in saying that the main purpose of the housing subsidy was to keep rents within the means of tenants. There was a second reason, and it remains as important today as it was then. It is to try to guide the building of houses where they are most needed in the national interest, and that the relationship between the local authorities and the State should be of such a nature that the State could get the building of houses done where they would serve the long-term interests of the nation. Therefore, allocations and licences were necessary.
  I will give the House an illustration. One of the greatest needs of all, as I think hon. Members who represent rural constituencies will admit, is to get houses built for agricultural workers, but in the deep rural areas there were hardly any builders at all. There were areas in Great Britain where no new rented house had been built for a hundred years, and it was appreciated that if we were to place our agriculture on a sound footing we had to provide houses for agricultural workers.
  Today, the provision or lack of provision of houses for agricultural workers in the countryside is the most pressing need. At present, one of the greatest difficulties—one of the reasons there is a migration of labour from the countryside—arises because the agricultural worker does not get in the countryside the amenities which he can find in the towns. Hon. Members know that very well in their hearts.
  How were houses to be built in the rural areas? I will tell the House exactly how it was done. Almost every rural area is bordered by belts of speculative building, where the speculative builders
  1066
  made fortunes before the war by building the ugliest houses ever seen. They were aesthetically quite outrageous. Never has there been such an outrage committed on the British landscape as was committed in those years, and, of course, they wanted to stay there, adding to the spectacle. The only way in which I could drive them to build houses in the rural areas, and the only way in which they have been driven, was by refusing licences in the urban belts, so that if they wanted to continue to make a living building houses, they would have to build them in the deep rural areas.
  That was how it was done, and one of the reasons why rural housing is now declining is because the speculative builder now deserts the deep rural areas and is operating once more in the urban belts. I challenge hon. Members opposite to say how they would have tackled the problem. If they had been allowed to do then what they have done since, if they had abandoned building licences, if they had not given what were called at the time negative directions to the building force, these rural houses would not have been built and the agricultural situation in Great Britain today would be much worse than it was then. The right hon. Gentleman, I am afraid, does not begin to understand his job. His job is to use the powers of Government in co-operation with the local authorities to try to create a sensible ground plan for the nation, and if this had been done earlier, we would not have had the housing problem which we have now.
  In the years between the wars—and I am not simply mentioning this again as a "King Charles's head"—there was a mass migration of labour from the North and West to the South and South-East. Scotland lost hundreds of thousands of men, and so did Wales, Durham, Northumberland and parts of Yorkshire—all of them proceeding into the South and South-East to follow employment. Now, having created that situation and having almost coagulated them, so that the term "traffic in London" has become a term of irony, we have now to spend hundreds of millions of pounds in unspilling them. That was Tory planning. We now have to do our best in building new towns, with the local authorities leap-frogging over each other in trying to get building sites elsewhere.

  1067
  This is being done not merely to deal with better housing and not merely to deal with the problems created by increased population, because that was not the only thing.
  I have a figure in my mind as to the migration that took place before the war, when there was an increase of population of about 12 per cent., but here was an increase of population in the South and South-East of England of 32 per cent. It also occurred in the Midlands, and here we had a profound redistribution of the industrial population, with the result that today the nation has to spend very large sums of money to repair the follies of those years.
  Mr. Sandys: Which years?
  Mr. Bevan: The in-between-the-wars years. The right hon. Gentleman himself, in his Bill, is having to continue the work which was started by the Labour Government, because it was we who started the new towns. We started all the administrative schemes which are now being carried out, and it was while we were in office that the extended towns programme and the overspill programme were laid down.
  The right hon. Gentleman has to continue them, because the housing of London and its environs is now one of the scandals of Great Britain. The rents in London are so high that they are an outrageous burden on people's shoulders. The pallid faces of hundreds of thousands of men and women workers who crowd into London every morning and try to empty themselves from London every evening, spending weary hours in travelling, is a monument to the misbehaviour of the party opposite in the inter-war years. [Laughter.] I can hardly see any cause for laughter in that.
  There was a further principle which governed us after the war, and it is one I want to commend to the right hon. Gentleman. It bears directly on what we are discussing today. I had the idea—if it was wrong I should be told so, but I have not been told so yet—that there was something that was bad in the segregation of people with the lower incomes in districts—"villages"—of their own. I had the idea that if there was one thing we wanted to do it was to avoid what I then described as "castrated townships,"
  1068
  twilight townships, from which scarcely anybody came, except the gentlemen in pinstripe trousers and with rolled-up umbrellas, the townships where one could hardly see anybody at all who did not belong to the same or similar and distinct income group.
  I thought it was desirable that our communities should be as mixed as possible, that the people of the different income levels should be mixed together and not live in different places. We did our very best to bring that about. At first, of course, in the immediate post-war years, it was inevitable that the people who went to live in the townships on the municipal estates should have been of the lower income group, because, as a general rule, they had most need; but, later, we encouraged the local authorities to provide other accommodation on those estates. I even went so far as to ask them, in arranging their plans, their siting, to leave plots of ground they could sell to people to build houses on. In other words, we wanted to mix them up as much as possible.
  When hon. Members opposite now tell us one of the justifications of this Measure is that they can see people with motor cars on the municipal estates, I answer that that is what we wanted, that is what we set out to ensure. We set out to try to get the doctor and the lawyer and the banker and all kinds of people mixed up on the municipal estates. [An HON. MEMBER: "Yes, but not subsidised."] I will deal with that in a moment.
  It was, in our view—and I want hon. Members opposite to answer if they disagree with me—an undesirable feature of British life that there should be class segregation. Let us see how far this Measure now before us bears on that matter. As I say, we did bring about a certain amount of mixing up of the people; we had some success. As hon. Members know, the best villages in England in which to live are the villages where, walking down the main street, one finds the doctor's house next door to the grocer's house next door to the "vet's" house next door to the country labourer's house—[Interruption.] The noble Lord the Member for Dorset, South (Viscount Hinchingbrooke) is impudent. If there is one person from whom one cannot usually get good manners, it is he who starts with a noble title. We wanted to

  1069
  bring about that sort of mixing of the people, and when we are told that the character of the local authorities' estates has now changed, we regard that as an excellent thing.
  I shall not tonight argue the merits of differential rents as such. On this side of the House we can see no relationship whatsoever between subsidy and differential refits. Differential rents were applied before the war and are being applied today with the subsidy in existence. As I said earlier, the twin purposes of the subsidy were to link the local authorities with the State in a social planing operation and to keep down the general level of rents. Both those purposes are as important today as ever they were. Therefore, the argument about differential rents is irrelevant in this discussion.
  However, I would ask hon. Members opposite to consider this. If the application of differential rents becomes universal, if we are to have probings into personal incomes, if we are to have people spying on their neighbours and telling upon their neighbours, if we are to set neighbours against each other, and if we are to pauperise local authorities' estates—there is an element of all that if there is an investigation into the needs Of people before it is decided at what levels to fix their rents—will there not be a disposition to make local authority estates once more second-class estates? Will there not be a danger that many who can afford to will leave those estates as quickly as possible? Will not then the very aim I thought was universally accepted, that we should have as much variety and differentiation of people on local authority estates as possible, be lost? Shall we not once more have the dreary, monolithic villages of people all of the same income group? Other people will be living elsewhere, where they will be unlikely to be subjected to this kind of investigation.
  I put that before the House as a danger. No one can say that it is not a danger. It is a real danger. Therefore, before we base the whole of our housing policy upon the principle of differential rents we ought to ask ourselves what kind of Britain we are trying to create. Are we trying to create a Britain in which class differentiation is accompanied by class segregation and, therefore, by class bitterness? Or are we
  1070
  trying to create a Britain in which every man is as good as his neighbour?
  I ask right hon. and hon. Gentlemen to think very carefully indeed. It may be that, over a period of years, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, as local habit adjusts itself, as schemes are carefully worked out with as much delicacy and equity as possible, local authority after local authority will adopt some form of differential rents scheme. It may be possible. It might happen, but it ought not to be made the principle of action and the centre of legislation. It ought not to be the fulcrum of legislation.
  This is precisely what the Minister has aimed at. What has the Minister said? He justifies the reduction of subsidy and its eventual abolition on the ground that if a local authority spreads the cost of its housing over the whole pool of local authority housing by the application of differential rents, State subsidy will not be necessary. That is exactly what the right hon. Gentleman says in the Bill—exactly what he says. He takes this national, notional pool and he says—
  Mr. Hugh Dalton: Two and three-quarter million houses.
  Mr. Bevan: Yes, 2¾ million houses. He says that if we spread the cost of contemporary building, spread it out over all of the local authority houses, it may not be necessary in some cases to raise the rents at all, and that over the whole house building programme it is necessary to raise the rents only by 7d.—5d. and 2d. That is not a complicated sum.
  He does this by applying the principle of averages. Averages are a very convenient arithmetical formula. They enable us to arrive at rough approximations. They are very rough, extremely rough, I am reminded of the old chestnut, that the tramp and Rockefeller had all the money in the world between them.
  The great difficulty about this is that the number of old houses available to local authorities varies enormously over different parts of the country and this proposal will alight with varying degrees of violence in different areas. The average upon which the Minister has based his proposal is a very unreal average indeed. Therefore, we consider that in the meantime it would be desirable to continue the subsidy and let the local authorities, if they so wish, gradually adjust themselves to the situation.

  1071
  It was only last year that the right hon. Gentleman reduced the housing subsidy and justified it on the ground that the Bank Rate had been reduced. This year the Bank Rate is up and the subsidy goes down, and in a short time it will go down even further. Last year the housing subsidy was reduced, not only on account of the reduction in the Bank Rate but on account of the lower standard of housing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton) has been attacked on a number of occasions—perhaps I should not say "attacked" because he has been cheered sometimes by the party opposite—because it was he, it was said, who recommended what was subsequently called the "People's House" to the local authorities.
  Mr. Dalton: I put it forward to them for information. I did not recommend.
  Mr. Bevan: I am trying to put the facts. My right hon. Friend informed the local authorities of the existence of the house. [Interruption.] Does the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries wish to intervene? Perhaps not. I understand his diffidence. He is on very thin ice. The local authorities looked askance at these houses. They were not building them very rapidly, and then the Minister did a little trick, on which he was congratulated by his hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell). The right hon. Gentleman based the reduced subsidy on the house that was not being built in sufficient numbers. In the past, the subsidy was always based upon taking the actual cost of building a threebedroomed house of 950 superficial feet. That was the house which I recommended in 1945, and the subsidy was based on that house all the time.
  We met the local authorities each year and we took into account the actual cost of building, not what might have been the cost. We did not take a house that was not built and say, "We think that it will cost that sum of money." We took the actual house and then agreed about the subsidy, but what the right hon. Gentleman did, in order to enforce low-standard housing on the local authorities, was this—he based his subsidy on the "People's House," so that if the local
  1072
  authorities wished to build a better house they had to do so at their own expense.
  The right hon. Gentleman himself said last year, on 21st October:
  "The ideas embodied in that type of house, originally put forward by the last Government, are now being adopted to an ever greater extent by local authorities, and the subsidy is based upon the type of house which local authorities in general have decided to build."
  The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West used these word:
  "That was precisely what was expected in 1952 both by the Government and by the local authorities, when they agreed that a more general compliance"—
  A lovely selection of language. I congratulate the hon. Member—
  "with the suggestion made to them by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton) would have this result."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st October, 1954; Vol. 531, c. 1389–1412.]
  That is, a reduction in the cost of the house anywhere from £50 to £100.
  Therefore, what actually happened was that the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West congratulated his right hon. Friend upon basing his subsidy on a lower standard house, which would cost £50 to £100 less. This was to reverse the whole procedure formerly adopted. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland did not reduce the housing subsidy to make the local authorities build that house. It was this Government and the right hon. Gentleman who did that, and it is they who are now responsible for the fact that that house is being built as to more than 80 per cent. of local authorities—houses described by The Times as the slum of the future.
  Mr. J. Enoch Powell: What was the date when the subsidy was reduced?
  Mr. Bevan: In March.
  Mr. Powell: Of this year.
  Mr. Bevan: That is entirely irrelevant to the question. We are discussing a housing debate that took place on 21st October, 1954. As the hon. Member knows very well, the housing subsidies are revised in March and, therefore, it was hardly possible to revise last March from a decision which was made last October.
  Mr. Powell: The right hon. Member is making the charge that the revised subsidies were based on a house which had not been built in considerable number. I pointed out that it had been built in considerable number.
  Mr. Bevan: The answer to the hon. Member is that his own Minister informed the House in that debate that the house was being built in greater numbers under pressure from the regional Dicers of the Ministry of Health and, what is more, before the year was out, the right hon. Gentleman informed the House—
  Mr. Sandys: I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman is referring to me or to my predecessor, but apparently one of us is supposed to have said that these houses were being built in larger numbers under pressure from the regional officers. Could the right hon. Gentleman read those words?
  Mr. Bevan: I know it from my experience. [HON. MEMBERS: "Ah."] I did not attribute those words to anybody. [HON. MEMBERS: "Yes."] Oh, no. I am in the recollection of the House.
  Mr. Sandys: When the right hon. Gentleman looks up HANSARD he will see that he said that "the right hon. Gentleman informed the House" that these houses were being built under pressure from the regional officers. I am quite content if the right hon. Gentleman now withdraws that statement.
  Mr. Bevan: If, on reading the words tomorrow, I find that they bear that construction, I will withdraw them.
  Mr. Sandys: Very well.
  Mr. Bevan: But I again come back to the right hon. Gentleman's own statement in the debate on 21st October, 1954. I must now read it all to put it right. When the right hon. Gentleman was reminded that this was a smaller house, he said:
  "I think that is very satisfactory."
  The right hon. Gentleman added:
  "In any case, I would point out to the hon. Member"—
  that is, my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale)—
  "that the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton) conceived the idea of
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  the house which was subsequently … christened by my right hon. Friend"—
  that is, the present Foreign Secretary—
  "… the 'People's House'."—[OFFICIAL. REPORT, 21st October, 1954; Vol. 531, c. 1389.]
  And the Minister himself said last year that he thought that this house was desirable. I know enough about the administration of the Ministry of Health to realise that when the Minister says he told us that a certain kind of house was desirable his officers would convey that to the local authorities.
  Mr. Sandys: May we get this clear? Does the right hon. Gentleman think, or does he not, that the "People's House" is a good kind of house?
  Mr. Bevan: I do not.
  Mr. Sandys: All right.
  Mr. Bevan: I do not, but I do say that it is highly undesirable for the Government to use their financial power to impose that type of house on the local authorities, and I am also saying that they reverse the whole process in doing so.
  I would remind the House, also, that we had a long defence the other day of the principle of differential rents as applied to these houses. How far the local authorities will adopt this proposal I do not know, but it is generally agreed that there will be an increase in rent which in some circumstances may be substantial. That is not denied anywhere. Of course, it will be all the more substantial where local authorities have not large pools of pre-war and post-war houses. It will be very substantial.
  In narrating the history of subsidies after the war, the right hon. Gentleman pointed out that when wages went up the relationship between wages and rents was maintained by the Labour Government in much the same way as had been established in 1945 and 1946. That was quite right. As earnings rose, we did not lift the subsidy because we thought it was desirable to maintain the same sort of relationship, which was about 10 per cent. Last year, when this was discussed, it was suggested that this was a proper kind of relationship and that it should be continued. Do we now understand that the same logic applies to rents in the future, that if rents are raised by the abolition of the subsidy or by the proposal for

  1075
  differential rents, the workers are entitled to an increase in wages equal to the increase in the rise in the rents because subsidies were kept at that level to keep pace with the rise in wages and to maintain the same relationship?
  Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us whether he would now consider it to be fair that if rents go up, as they will do, to 15 per cent. of earnings therefore all the trade unionists in the country are entitled to demand an increase of wages equal to the increase of rent? Will he answer that?
  If the relationship was right then, why will it not be right in the future? If it was right to defend that relationship before, why is it wrong now? Does the Chancellor realise that this argument will be heard in every home and that people will say that it is the policy of the Government—that it was the policy of the Labour Government, it is the policy of the Conservative Government—that this relationship between earnings and rents should be maintained and that, therefore, if it is disturbed no one can complain if all the unions of the country insist on re-establishing the same ratio as formerly?
  The party opposite are making a proper whip with which to whip their backs; indeed, I almost heard it crack just now. This arises directly from the policy which the Government are adopting at the present time. Of course, I do not believe that it emanates from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. It emanates from the Treasury. It is the same kind of silly blunder of which we have had an example in the last few days—a failure to appreciate that when we begin to juggle with these figures we shall have physical responses. What I mean by physical responses is that the workers will take action to protect themselves in the industrial field against wounds inflicted on them in the political field.
  Hon. Members must bear in mind that a Government majority is not sufficient. They were warned at the Election of that. A Government cannot govern a country successfully unless it carries with it the good will of the people. Today, the working classes are highly organised and rather more intelligent. They will understand what is happening and, furthermore, they will feel that they have been betrayed.
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  The Government have insisted that in future local authorities shall go to the market to raise their money. What a shocking decision—in order to put money into the pockets of a lot of financial "spivs." What necessity was there for that? We have had no justification of it. The rise in the rate of interest is no justification. Can any hon. Member seriously justify sending local authorities of varying sizes, of different capacities, some with officers of little or no financial experience, to raise money in the City? I ask hon. Members to think seriously about this action.
  We have had much experience of this. For many years I was a member of a local authority and I paid many visits to the Public Works Loan Board. My local authority had to go to it because we could not raise money in the open market. At that time the Board told us that as a consequence of our lower financial status we would have to borrow money on higher terms, that our lack of security would have to be expressed in terms of an increased rate of borrowing.
  The Press is now reporting that some local authorities are going to the City in great distress, offering high commissions but unable to get accommodation. Why have they done that? It does not affect the standard of borrowing, it does not affect the amount of money raised, because all this money is sanctioned first by the Government. The local authorities cannot raise a loan at all without first getting loan sanction. It is not as though the Government are discouraging local authorities from borrowing by forcing them to borrow at disadvantageous rates, because local authorities have first to jump that hurdle before they can borrow at all.
  Why, then, are the Government doing this? We should like to know. Is it to put money in the pockets of their friends? [An HON. MEMBER: "Of course it is."] It is a monstrous proposal. The right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Housing and Local Government is a past-master of the art. He has been putting large sums of money in the pockets of the steel masters for the last few years. Now he wants to add to the loot. It cannot be said that this is regarded by the Government themselves as a reputable action—perhaps I can take the grin off the silly face of the noble Lord the Member for

  1077
  Dorset, South by reading a statement made by the Assistant Postmaster-General on 14th November this year. He said that the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr. Shepherd) had
  "… paid the best tribute in the House today to the Post Office services when he said that they were the best and cheapest in the world. That is true; they are the best and the cheapest. He went on to ask why we did not borrow money in the open market. If we did, we should not get it more cheaply. In fact, it would cost the Post Office more, because we would have to bear brokerage and other charges. At present, we borrow money at the cheapest possible rate."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 14th November, 1955; Vol. 546, c. 146.]
  Here is a tribute from the Assistant Postmaster-General to the borrowing of money through Government agencies. Why do the Government drive local authorities into the open market? We have not been told a single justification for it, and therefore, we are left to conclude that the only justification is the one that I have mentioned, that what they are anxious once more to do is to allow large numbers of parasites to earn easy money.
  There is one more thing that I want to say. The next thing that the country will have to bear in mind is the extent to which the Government failed to take the country into their confidence about their proposals at the last General Election. The authority of Parliament has already been undermined by the Conservative Party. It was undermined just before the General Election, when it rigged some of the constituencies. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] Oh, yes. Hon. Members should read their own newspapers, where they will see it admitted.
  At the General Election there was no suggestion that, if it got power, the Conservative Party would immediately reduce housing subsidies. In fact, the Conservative Party gave the opposite impression, saying, in its manifesto:
  "The problems of local government finance will receive our urgent attention."
  That form of words is usually taken to mean that one is going to help somebody, give someone a hand; it does not usually mean that one will make the problem worse.
  The Conservative Party also said:
  "They must be considered afresh in the light of present-day conditions. When the
  1078
  effects of the new valuations can be fully measured we shall review the proportion of the rate burden falling upon the different groups of those who occupy property and we shall consider whether any changes are needed to remove injustice. We shall examine possible ways of supplementing the rate"—
  Has the Chancellor of the Exchequer heard about those words—
  "including the revision of Government grants."?
  We should like to know whether the Government intend to replace the subsidy that they are taking away by other forms of Government assistance. I should have thought that anyone reading those words would have taken it for granted that what the Government had in mind was to reconsider the financial relationship between local government and the State in order to put the local authorities in possession of greater finances. That is surely the inference; but the Government are doing the very opposite.
  The Government are, in fact, at the present time carrying out the injunctions of the former leader of the party, the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill), who, when speaking one day on the subject of steel, said, "Of course, you can stick anything into an Election manifesto, but you do not necessarily have to carry it out." That is the political morality of the Conservative Party.
  Following a demonstration at their party conference, hon. Members opposite have boasted that they have built a much larger number of houses. But they were not concerned about building houses; they were building their majority. Having built their majority, they now start undermining the housing programme. One can find very few authorities in the country who will say that they are now building at the same rate as they built formerly. Nor, indeed, will the slum clearance programme come along fast enough to replace the fall in housing which will occur in local authority programmes.
  We can, therefore, look forward, to seeing, very shortly, unemployment in the building industry, and that, in the view of many of my hon. Friends, is what the Government really have in mind. The whole of their financial operations, the whole of their policy, is designed to attack the public sector as much as possible, to reverse the policies of recent

  1079
  years, and to offend an old British political convention that, when serious, fundamental changes are accomplished after years of effort, the opposing party accepts them. The Conservative Government are now attempting to reverse all the fundamental conceptions which the Labour movement convinced the country it should adopt.
  It is now clear to all of us that the welfare of the country can no longer be entrusted to a group of people who do not respond to the welfare of the State and to the needs of ordinary men and women, but are pulled by those who represent the worst elements in the British community.
  5.17 p.m.
  Mr. J. Enoch Powell: I am sure that the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) was right when he said at the outset of his speech that, in considering this Bill, the House is taking the gravest decision upon housing policy since the end of the late war. I am disappointed that he did not use a speech which was not short to develop the real nature of that decision. Most of his remarks would have been relevant to a Bill which proposed to deprive housing authorities of their housing powers, or a Bill the provisions of which necessarily involved differential rents, or a Bill which altered the conditions of borrowing by local authorities; but of the essential decision which is before the House the right hon. Gentleman said little or nothing.
  The fact is—it is acknowledged on both sides of the House and widely throughout the country—that the present situation, resulting from the combined operation of rent restriction and housing subsidies as we have them, is intolerable. [Interruption.] I shall quote the manifesto of hon. Members opposite in support of my statement.
  Whatever view one takes of the purpose of housing subsidies and rent restriction, it is recognised that this situation involves gross anomalies and injustices; anomalies and injustices as between owner-occupiers and tenants, the one subsidised if in a council house and the other not; anomalies and injustices between the tenants of privately owned hours and the tenants of council houses;
  1080
  injustices and anomalies within each of these groups, since the rent which a person pays, whether in a privately owned house or in a council house, has no ascertainable relationship either to the value of the house or to the means of the tenant; injustices and anomalies, finally, in the source of the subsidy, which is drawn haphazard either from the rates and the taxes in the case of a council house or from the capital of the owner of the house in the case of rent restriction.
  This system is already resulting in a widespread waste of housing accommodation. That was acknowledged quite frankly and correctly by the party opposite at the last Election. In "Challenge to Britain" it promised:
  "Labour will ensure that our existing stock of houses is more sensibly used. … People must be encouraged to move out of houses or flats, which are too large for them, into smaller ones."
  I agree. There is at present an immense waste of housing accommodation. As usual, the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale stated the same truth more fearlessly, candidly and vividly when, on 30th November, 1953, he said:
  "… taking the country as a whole we are not very far away from the amount of total accommodation which the nation requires … if we take the country as a whole we find that there is a very great deal of under occupation … the nation is in grave danger, unless it is careful, of being stupidly extravagant."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 30th November, 1953; Vol. 521, c. 826.]
  This situation is widely recognised by hon. Members on both sides of the House.
  Mr. George Chetwynd: In those circumstances why, during the Committee stage of the Housing Repairs and Rents Bill, did the hon. Member and his Friends oppose a new Clause, put down by hon. Members on this side of the House, to enable exchanges to take place?
  Mr. Powell: It would enable me to detain the House for a shorter length of time if, instead of anticipating the point I am about to make, hon. Members would wait for me to make it.
  Mr. E. Fernyhough: Answer the question.
  Mr. Powell: I am about to do so.
  At the last Election and long before—notably through the mouth of the right

  1081
  hon. Member for Ebbw Vale—the party opposite announced that they saw no escape from that intolerable situation, except by municipalising all rented houses and bringing all rented accommodation under a single control.
  Mr. Bevan: If we do not contradict that now, it will be used against us again. We referred to all houses within the Rent Restrictions Acts.
  Mr. Powell: All rent-controlled private properties. Let us take those 7 million properties for a start. The proposition is that all rented houses except those outside rent control at the present should be added to the pool of council houses, so that some equity, justice and reason in the allocation of tenancies and the application of subsidies could be obtained over the whole field.
  If such a policy were used—as, presumably is the intention—to reduce the majority of rents of such houses below the economic level, it would also eventually necessitate the control of all rented houses, and the control of the prices at which houses in the market could change hands. One cannot leave uncontrolled one sector of a commodity—and that the minor sector—and purport to control all the rest. Virtually, the proposition of hon. Members opposite is that the provision of this human need of housing should, in the main, be nationalised.
  Mr. Wilfred Fienburgh: Municipalised.
  Mr. Powell: Brought into State ownership, or under State control, in some form or other.
  Hon. Members: No.
  Mr. Powell: Brought under public control.
  Hon. Members: Yes.
  Mr. Powell: That is one possible solution of the problem. It affords a possible means of removing many of the anomalies and discrepancies to which I have referred. But before we conclude that it is the only one, or the right one, we ought to consider the assumptions upon which it is based.
  It would undoubtedly be deeply repugnant to the mass of the people; certainly to those who are tenants of privately-owned rent-restricted houses. Before we
  1082
  decide that that is the right direction in which to go, let us look at the assumption which underlies the proposal. That assumption is that for the majority of families—or, at any rate, for a very large minority—the provision of decent accommodation from their own resources is impracticable. That is the assumption which underlies the claim that the mass of housing, one way or another, should be subsidised.
  Mr. Sydney Silverman: Does the hon. Member extend his argument to furnished houses? In pursuance of the argument which he is now developing, is he in favour of repealing the Act under which the tenant of an uncontrolled, derestricted but furnished dwelling-house may apply to a tribunal to control his rent?
  Mr. Powell: My general views upon the subject will become perfectly clear before I finish.
  If it be true that decent accommodation, at current standards and prices, cannot be paid for by a large section of our families, and if it should therefore be the case that we have to provide a new social service analogous with education and medical treatment, within the scope of which nearly everyone will or can come, the solution proposed from the benches opposite is the correct one. We have, therefore, to consider whether it is in fact a tenable proposition that the current price of decent housing accommodation cannot or will not be afforded by the great mass of families in Britain.
  The House ought to recall that the conception of subsidised housing, both after the First World War and the Second World War, has been that it is, in essence, temporary—to deal with conditions created by war. These are words used by the late Lord Addison in introducing the first housing subsidies Act in 1919:
  "… whether they are built by private enterprise or not, you ought to arrange it so that when you have got rid of the artificial inflation of cost, caused by the War, at the end of that time the rent received ought to pay for the charges on the house."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 7th April, 1919; Vol. 114, c. 1730.]
  Mr. S. Silverman: Did the hon. Member's party ever get rid of it?
  Mr. Powell: Yes, in 1933.
  When a general housing subsidy was reintroduced at the end of the Second

  1083
  World War, the Coalition Government said of that housing subsidy, in Cmd. 6609 on Housing, issued in March, 1945:
  "The Government recognise that subsidies will be needed while building costs are abnormally high in consquence of the war; and they propose to provide them for house building both by local authorities and by private enterprise."
  In both cases, therefore, when Parliament has introduced general housing subsidies, it has done so for the purpose of avoiding the sudden rise in rents which would result from abnormal conditions after a war, followed by an equally sudden decline to normal conditions.
  Mr. Bevan: The hon. Member is a past-master in the art of sub-editing history. He has been accused of it before. He has left out one very important housing Minister who laid down a different policy—Mr. Wheatley.
  Mr. Powell: Yes, but there is another Minister of Housing of more recent vintage whom I was about to pray in aid, and that is the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Ebbw Vale who, when he implemented the policy—or very largely implemented the policy—of the Coalition Government, as he himself reminded us in his speech, built into his 1946 Act a provision for the progressive reduction of the general housing subsidies. Not only that. So convinced was he that these subsidies were of a temporary nature that he actually obliged himself, if he were not able to start reducing them after twelve months, to come to the House with a report explaining why not.
  Therefore, in his view the purpose of the general housing subsidies was, so to speak, to level out the bulge of abnormal post-war shortage and abnormal post-war prices.
  Mr. G. R. Mitchison: Would not it be fair to add that the provision was just as applicable to an increase as to a reduction?
  Mr. Powell: No. There was no provision in the Act of 1946 for an increase in the housing subsidies. That required completely new legislation.
  But we must do more than study the intention of the authors of the 1919 and subsequent inter-war Acts and also of the authors of the 1946 Act. We have for our consideration the whole experience
  1084
  of those inter-war years. We can see how events followed from the abolition of the general housing subsidy in 1933. My right hon. Friend's predecessor, Sir Hilton Young, in 1933 did what my right hon. Friend is doing in the Bill before the House by discontinuing the general housing subsidy while leaving the emphasis upon the subsidy for slum clearance.
  In 1933 the circumstances were somewhat less favourable for doing that than they are today. The number of houses built between 1918 and 1933 bore a somewhat lesser proportion to the existing stock of houses than those which have been built between 1945 and 1955. The proportionate increase in the total national housing stock which occurred between 1918 and 1933 compared rather disadvantageously with that which we have seen since 1945.
  After the 1933 Act discontinued the general housing subsidy, local authorities continued to build on a great and increasing scale. Every year from 1933 to 1938, with one exception, the local authorities built many more houses than in the preceding year. Those houses included a considerable number built for general needs without subsidy—something which is still permissible under this Bill. Therefore, presumably, there was a demand in 1933 for houses at current costs of construction which local authorities were prepared to build and prospective tenants were able and willing to rent.
  What is much more important is that the need for rented houses was, after 1933, fulfilled on an increasing scale by private enterprise.
  Mr. J. A. Sparks: Will the hon. Gentleman then explain to the House why the 1936 Act was necessary? [An HON. MEMBER: "Nineteen thirty-five."] That is the major Housing Act.
  Mr. Powell: The effect of the 1936 Act—which, as someone who knows a little better says, only consolidated the 1935 and previous Acts—was that it extended the emphasis of the subsidy from concentration upon slum clearance to the subsequent phase of concentration upon overcrowding in individual houses. It was in no sense a reversion to the general housing subsidy which had been abolished in 1933.

  1085
  The effect upon the provision of rented accommodation after 1933 was remarkable. The Ridley Committee which examined rent restriction in 1937 found that during the three years, March, 1934, to March, 1937, roughly one-third of the small houses built by private enterprise had been let; so that straight away after the abolition of the general housing subsidy, we find private enterprise building small houses—and small houses in this context are those of £13 and below rateable value outside London—to let without subsidy.
  Mr. Bevan: How many?
  Mr. Powell: Several hundred thousand.
  Mr. Bevan: One in three.
  Mr. Powell: One in three, and that speeded up as we came to the end of the 1930s. The Pole Report of 1944 on private enterprise housing records that of 110,000 houses built for letting between October, 1937 and March, 1939, over half were of a rateable value not exceeding £13. Those houses themselves were over one-third of the total output, then at its maximum, of the private enterprise building industry.
  Mr. S. Silverman: One in six.
  Mr. Powell: No, it is one-third. Of those built to let, quite apart from those built to sell on mortgage, one-half were of a rateable value of under £13; thus one-sixth of the total product of private enterprise fell within class "C."
  Mr. Silverman: I understood the hon. Gentleman to say that this one-third was one-third of a total which was itself one-third of the general housing programme.
  Mr. Powell: I am sorry if I was not clear. One-third of the houses built in those years by private enterprise were built to let, and half of the houses built to let were of the smallest type—of the same size as was then still rent controlled. Thus, in the 1930s, after the abolition of the general housing subsidy, as large a number of houses of the smallest type were built by private enterprise to let as had been provided in most preceding years by local authorities under subsidy.
  It may be objected that circumstances today are widely different; that although
  1086
  today there are many favourable factors affecting the earning power and the purchasing power of families, there has not been that fall in the cost of building and rise in the value of money which was experienced in the inter-war years, and it is perfectly true that by 1933 the gap between current unsubsidised rents and the rent assumed in the calculation of the subsidy was already a very narrow one.
  We must, therefore, ask whether, in comparing the 1930s with today, the relationship between current building costs and wages has changed to the disadvantage of the tenant. We must ask whether the same people who in the 1930s were being built for by private enterprise, the people who were moving out of rented houses into houses built by private enterprise and sold on mortgage, are today less able to afford current costs either as rents or repayments on houses built to sell.
  I am glad that the hon. Member for Barons Court (Mr. W. T. Williams) is in his place, because I noticed what he said on Thursday about taking chance indications of ability to pay, and I very much agree with him how wrong it is to pick upon the fact that one sees a car outside a house on a council estate and deduce from that a widespread ability to pay unsubsidised rents. Nevertheless there are certain general facts which are quite revealing and ought not to be dismissed.
  One is that over one-third of the families in this country have television licences. The running of a television set costs approximately twice as much as the full amount of the subsidy for general housing needs. It must therefore be clear that a very large number—not by any means a majority, but at any rate, a substantial minority—of families, both in council houses and in rent restricted houses, are able to afford an item of need which, at least in the scale of necessity, would usually be placed lower than decent accommodation.
  Beyond indications of that kind, however, we can appeal to the relationship between building costs and the level of earnings. Since 1939, the level of average adult male earnings has risen, or had at March of this year, by about 315 per cent.
  Mr. Bevan: Earnings?
  Mr. Powell: Yes, and that is of course practically the same figure as the increase in building costs which was established by the Girdwood Committee.
  Mr. Bevan: That is the actual income, including overtime?
  Mr. Powell: That is earnings.
  Another feature which we have to take into account is that today, owing to full employment and the opportunities for women to be employed, the average family income has risen much more steeply than the average earnings of male wage earners. There is, therefore, a considerable margin to play with between the average family earnings today as compared with 1939 and the current cost of building today as compared with 1939.
  I am well aware that the figures I am using are figures of earnings, and that it would be undesirable if we assumed that a family ought to be dependent on the present level of earnings for an item of expenditure so essential and, by its nature, so permanent or enduring as its rent or its housing accommodation. We must, therefore, bring other factors into account, and the first is that we are, in these figures, talking about new houses. We are comparing with the figures of earnings or wages the current cost of new houses, which in the nature of things are necessarily the most expensive.
  It is the essence of housing that the vast majority of the stock available at any given time is second-hand and in the whole range of values it will be the new houses, the current production, which will be found at the top. Therefore, we are entitled to assume that the economic value of the second-hand houses in the country, upon which the vast majority of our people are and must remain dependent for their accommodation, grades, as it were, downward according to amenity and intrinsic value, from the current cost of the new houses which are provided.
  An interesting fact bearing on that came out in the inter-war years when houses were being decontrolled under the Rent and Mortgage Interest Restrictions Act, 1923.
  Mr. Mitchison: I recall a speech made by the hon. Gentleman on 21st October, 1954, when he said:
  "… the crux of this whole business,"—
  1088
  that is, the rate of housing subsidy, which is exactly what we are discussing today, is—
  "the average net rent to which the subsidy is designed to reduce the gross rent."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st October, 1954; Vol. 531, c. 1414.]
  The hon. Gentleman took, as his measure of this continued upgrading by one Government after another of the subsidies, 10 per cent. of net earnings. Why has he now so completely changed his point?
  Mr. Powell: I have not changed my point at all. The point is that I have taken as a comparison the earnings going into the family and compared them with the current replacement costs of new houses, and those figures show that for a considerable proportion of families current rents are not out of range.
  I am now proceeding to show that for many families the economic cost of the inferior houses, that is the existing stock of houses which take their value downwards from the new houses, is also not out of range; for whenever in the interwar years rent controlled houses were decontrolled, it was found—and these include the smallest houses—that their rents did not in fact rise to a level with current replacement costs, but formed a bracket, as it were, between controlled rent and replacement cost approximately at the level of the subsidised rents of the time. That will be found in a table in paragraph 41 of the Ridley Report in 1937. Yet even those figures, which show how the rent of decontrolled houses moved in relation to current replacement costs, themselves give an unfavourable view of the true position; for the existence of rent control creates an artificial scarcity, and in 1931 it was officially estimated that the rents of the individual decontrolled houses were at a higher level than they would have been if decontrol were general.
  In view of these facts, it seems to me impossible to claim that for the majority of families in this country it is unreasonable to expect that they should be able to pay the current economic value of the accommodation which they reasonably require. Or, to put it in another way, that they cannot or will not demand decent accommodation for themselves and their families, and that the building industry and the existing stock of houses are not capable of complying with that need and that demand.

  1089
  Having reached that point, let me say that the transition which it is evident must be made from the totally unreal position in which we stand today to a position of reality, must be a gradual one. The answer to the right hon. Gentleman, when he asks are we proposing suddenly to alter the relationship upon which the subsidies have been based between wages and rents, is, "No." The answer is that by terminating the general housing subsidy the impact made upon rents will, for several years, be a negligible one, except under differential schemes in cases where local authorities think them appropriate.
  Mr. Bevan: That is a very important point. Would the hon. Member suggest that earnings should be taken into account—gross earnings—in determining rents? If so, it would seem that the less a person lived in a house, the more he should pay for it.
  Mr. Powell: I am certainly not going to prescribe to local authorities the type of differential rent scheme they should adopt.
  In bringing about the first stage of this process by abolishing the general subsidy, my right hon. Friend has made two exceptions. The first exception is where a local housing authority does not possess any considerable pool of subsidised houses and where, therefore, the consequence of transition would be a sudden and abrupt one and not gradual. The other exception he has made is in the case of slum clearance.
  At present, local authorities are the only instrument which we can use for the rapid clearance of the slums and thus for the raising of the standard of housing by the most immediate method, the removal of the lowest stratum. If local authorities today are to go ahead and be able to demolish the slums as rapidly as possible, we must give them the assurance that they will not, in ten, twenty or thirty years' time, find themselves with houses built at higher costs than then obtain and thus with difficulties of letting them and covering the annual charges on those houses.
  It is very logical and right that slum clearance should be promoted by the retention of subsidy for that purpose. No alternative has been suggested from the benches opposite whereby slum clearance can be expedited. No one who
  1090
  has spoken from those benches has suggested any way in which the present rate of slum clearance can be accelerated. On the contrary, when the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Lindgren) spoke, he criticised hon. Members on this side of the House for having supported the building of 300,000 houses and more a year, and accounted on that ground for our present economic difficulties.
  If hon. Members opposite intend to revert, should they have the opportunity, to fixing the maximum possible output of houses at 200,000 a year, what is the chance of more rapid progress with the clearance of slums? On two scores, therefore, their policy is entirely negative. The only contribution they have to make to the debate is to advance the theory of the municipalisation of all rent controlled accommodation. That is a counsel of despair. We on this side of the House believe that, in conditions in which the country can demand and obtain an ever-rising standard in all other fields, essential and inessential, it is absurd to say that the British people cannot, or will not, house themselves. It it absurd to say that British industry, which has gone ahead in every other sphere, cannot, if it has the opportunity, go ahead with the housing of the people. We view this Bill as the first step in a new phase of enabling the British people to improve their own housing conditions.
  Mr. Michael Stewart: The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) will remember that earlier in his speech he promised to answer a question from my hon. Friend, the Member for Stockton-onTees (Mr. Chetwynd). He has not done so. Does he care to do so?
  5.53 p.m.
  Mr. Clement Davies: I agree with the opening sentence of the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan), that this is the most important debate on housing we have had since 1945. My only regret is that it has to, take place within such narrow limits, because the question of subsidy and whether it is fair or should be changed is linked with a number of other questions. I should have preferred—as I believe would all hon. Members—to have seen the full picture of the housing policy of Her Majesty's Government.

  1091
  The problem of subsidies is linked with rent restriction, with the powers of local authorities, the strength of local authorities, the rating system and whether the rating policy which was followed by the Conservative Government in 1925–29 is still within the purview of their immediate policy for the future, or whether they propose to change it. All these matters would have come very much better had we had a full White Paper explaining the present position and how the Government proposed to deal with it.
  I want to take up one point mentioned by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), namely, slum clearance. Do the Government propose to change and speed up the procedure in respect of the acquisition of land and matters of that kind? The provision of homes—I prefer that word to "housing"—is a basic social service, because it is not much use providing all the others, even education and health services and the like, unless there is a decent comfortable home for every family. It has been the policy of all parties for a very considerable time that the obligation to provide such homes must rest upon a public authority and it has, therefore, been put upon the shoulders of the local authorities.
  I do not think that anybody wants to change that, because local authorities know their own conditions and problems and are in the best position to deal with them. Unfortunately, however, local authorities differ so much in every way. I believe that I am the first hon. Member to speak in the debate who represents a purely rural area. Every one of the other speakers has represented a large industrial area where there are large numbers of people and where the local authorities are comparatively wealthy, certainly compared with those responsible for country districts.
  Mr. Ellis Smith: We are not wealthy in Stoke.
  Mr. C. Davies: There is also very considerable difference within the large areas. The right hon. Member for Glasgow, Kelvingrove (Mr. Elliot), who was Minister of Health at the time, will remember, because I had to deliver the report to him—and my Welsh colleagues know—that in 1939 I reported on the
  1092
  conditions in Wales. As far as I knew, there was no difference between the conditions in my own country and those in England. Those conditions could be described as shocking. It was a disgrace and a blot upon our civilisation that decent human beings should be compelled to live in the conditions which I then found and about which evidence was given to me by all the local authorities. The mere description was enough to make people shudder.
  Nevertheless, people are still living in those conditions. Had the war not come, by today those slums would have been removed. The terrible thing is that people are still living in those houses, even today, condemned as they were, not merely in 1938–39 by me, but by medical officers of health, even fifty years ago, as unfit for human beings. That is not merely due to lack of energy, lack of drive by local authorities. It is also due to the fact that local authorities have not the power or wealth possessed by many other authorities, for example, the London County Council.
  I have given these figures in the House before and it may interest hon. Members to know that the rateable value and the capital value of all the 13 counties of Wales, including Monmouth and the four county boroughs, Cardiff, Swansea, Merthyr and Newport, were less than the rateable value and the capital value of the City of Westminster alone. Yet they were responsible for more than 2½ million people living in all kinds of conditions. That is one of the difficulties with which one has to contend. That being so, one regards what the rural districts have done with more tolerance than one might otherwise have done.
  Undoubtedly many rural districts failed between the two wars to take advantage of such grants as had been made available by the Government of the day. I could give instances in which this rural neglect should be condemned in the very strongest terms because the hardship caused by the councils at that time is having to be paid for by the councils there now.
  We cannot understand why we should go on adding to the continuous chaos from which we are suffering and that we should be content with one housing grant from John o'Groats to Land's End,

  1093
  which cannot be applied equitably. The whole of our local government system ought to be looked at and brought up to date. I hoped at one time that the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale would tackle it. He was sorely tempted to do so. It needs great courage.
  The local government system was carefully thought out in the 1870's and 1880's, nearly 80 years ago, when the local authorities were created. In 1884 the borough councils were brought into being, in 1888 the county councils, and in 1894 the rural councils, all based upon the conditions that prevailed at that time. Within two years of the creation of the rural district councils the revolution took place, namely, the abolition of the need for a man to walk in front of a motor car with a red flag. That made a world of difference to transport and communications. The greater use of the telephone also began, making all the difference in methods of administration. Yet still any new problem or obligation or difficulty is handed over to one or other local authority, without inquiring very much further about it.
  The Bill is a first step towards reform, and I want to know what the other steps are. I do not think much can be expected from going into averages, so I will base my case on the differentiation made by the Minister between the poorer and the wealthier authorities. That differentiation is not right. We want to provide homes for people at rents which are fair in the districts in which they live, however that is arrived at, whether out of the rates or out of a national fund. Homes must be something that people can pay for at a fair rent. We cannot make anything out of the differential rent system in the rural areas or by pooling, because we have not the amount of housing on which we can rely for the reduction of rents.
  It is interesting to look at the condition of some of our local authorities because it gives a picture of the other rural counties of Wales. My own county council has six borough and urban councils and four rural councils, and the total population is only 42,000. The result is that the total amount of the rates available is very small indeed, even with the council which is best off. In the case of a rural authority which is largely helped by having the Liverpool reservoir within its area, a penny rate produces £235 a
  1094
  year. In some of the boroughs it falls to as low as £36, £19 19s. 3d. and £14.
  I take it that the Minister will particularise in the Committee and will explain what is intended by Clause 5. We have high rates amounting to as much as 31s. 8d. in the £ in the rural areas. The lowest is 24s. 6d., in a district where there is not much difference between one area and another. The rents are as high as 29s. 3d., although there are some as low as 10s. a week. I therefore look forward to hearing from the Minister about the weaker areas.
  I conclude by congratulating him on his courage in bringing forward a Measure which I hope will be part of a bigger policy dealing with rent restrictions, rating and local authorities. Otherwise there is no justification for the Bill. I hope that it is only part of a general picture.
  6.7 p.m.
  Mr. J. C. Jennings: Mr. Deputy-Speaker, this is my maiden speech. In making it, I ask the House to be kind to me. I shall, in accordance with tradition, endeavour to be non-controversial, and if I unwittingly err I hope to be forgiven. I have approached this occasion with diffidence, but am comforted by the thought that all hon. and right hon. Gentlemen have faced a similar ordeal and have survived.
  Before I came to this House I was a schoolmaster. I feel very much the new boy in a new school, with almost everything to learn. Because of my experience in schools and my knowledge of working with children in a variety of schools and a variety of districts, from mining villages to urban areas and back to a country village, I have learned the value of good homes and good houses. A good house is not necessarily a good home, but it helps considerably. Housing is not only a problem of bricks and mortar, materials and labour, but is essentially a human problem, with men, women and children as its raw material.
  In schools and classrooms I have seen children unable, because of the home they lived in, in a slum, to benefit by what the schools were able to offer them. I have seen children in schools, and have listened to their talk in playgrounds, who were old beyond their years because of what they had seen and heard in the house in

  1095
  which they lived, in a slum. Because of those things I welcome the concentrated attack on slums which will take place as the result of the Bill. There are 13 million permanent houses in England and Wales. Out of those, 847,000, or 6½ per cent., are designated as unfit to live in and are due for demolition.
  I represent the division of Burton, in Staffordshire, and against the background of the national figure I should like to deal with the figure which applies in my own division. Many people associate Burton with beer. But Burton is not only famous for beer. Besides the Borough of Burton, we have the extremely busy market town of Uttoxeter, with its racecourse and its busy Smithfield market, and in between the two there is a wide expanse of agricultural land with a great many people living in an agricultural community. Burton is synonomous with other things besides beer—its Hanbury alabaster, its world-famous Tutbury glass, and its numerous light industries.
  Let us consider slum clearance in this widely varied division. In the borough itself the figure is only 1·7 per cent. In Burton, there is no clearance area specified by the authorities. This is a tribute to the work of the city fathers in the past and to the people who own and live in the houses. In the whole of the division the figure is 2·8. Therefore, against the general background of slum clearance Burton stands very well. Within five years there ought not to be a single slum in the Burton division.
  This Bill provides an incentive to clear the slums, and it therefore puts heart into the older parts of many of our towns. It would be criminal folly to continue increasing the sprawl of new housing estates over good farming land while town centres are allowed to decay. I welcome Clause 4 (1), which enables the Minister to increase by £9 the general needs subsidy of £10 in respect of dwellings provided for the agricultural population. It has been said that slums are not built, but made. In our future policy we should encourage the right type of people and stop the exploitation of big houses which are not in themselves slums, but which can soon be made into slums by crowding people into them.
  I should like humbly to make two constructive suggestions to my right hon.
  1096
  Friend. I think we should be very careful when dealing with compensation in connection with the demolition of slum property. There are various types of houses scheduled as fit for demolition. I know one, a cottage, which was bought by a person who did not know that a demolition order was soon to be made against it. Is that person to be given site value? I know of an old couple who bought a house in the country many years ago. It is now scheduled for demolition. They bought it with their savings and they are now living on their pension. Are they to be given site value? If local authorities all over the country acknowledge the principle of differential rents, I suggest to my right hon. Friend that in all conscience we can also accept the principle of differential compensation for varied types of slum property.
  I have one other suggestion. It is a plea for the old folk. Those of us who have worked on local authorities know that all sorts of ideas for housing old people are propagated. Some people urge that they should be put into groups of houses, together. Others urge that they should be spread out over the estates. We should consider whether the bungalow type or the terrace type of house is the most suitable. As there is a special subsidy for slum clearance and for agricultural houses, so I suggest that my right hon. Friend should consider granting a special subsidy for the erection of houses to accommodate old people. Our aim in building should be a separate home for each family.
  In conclusion—and I hope hon. Members do not think that this is an ominous sign, bearing in mind Mr. Speaker's remarks about that phrase—I hope that this proposal will soon be realised. I thank the House for its indulgence.
  6.16 p.m.
  Mr. George Isaacs: The House has listened to one of our new colleagues, the hon. Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings), speaking for the first time, and we can well understand his feelings. He has admitted that he has been told to avoid controversy, and he has certainly taken good notice of that advice. I would liken the hon. Member to a swimmer who has approached a strange stream for the first time. He says to himself, "I do not know how strongly the current is running. I must not be in too long, and I must

  1097
  avoid bumping my head on the rocks of controversy." The hon. Member has done very well. He has avoided the rocks, and he has not stayed in the water too long. He has certainly crossed the stream with vigorous free-style strokes and has shown that he was a master of the effort that he has undertaken.
  The hon. Gentleman knows also that his colleagues will have been watching to see how he makes the passage, and his constituents will note his achievements. I believe that his colleagues consider that he has done very well, indeed, and I am sure that his constituents will feel that he has put forward with vigour a case in which we are all interested. I am sure that the House will look forward to hearing the hon. Member again. The hon. Gentleman may now turn to those of his hon. Friends who have not yet taken the plunge and may say to them, "Come on in; the water is fine."
  I approach the subject of this Bill from the point of view not so much of its national aspect as the manner in which it will affect the constituency which I represent. We want the slums to go. We have plenty of them in Southwark, and we shall certainly be glad to see them disappear. One thing that the war did in Southwark was to clear away a lot of the slum property, although it would have been better if we had had notice so that we might have removed people's furniture before the enemy came. I hope that when clearing the existing slums we shall not turn other fairly decent property into slums by failing to make necessary provision for it.
  We have heard a lot about the expense involved, and there has been discussion on whether the figure is 2d., 5d. or 7d. This discussion takes my mind back to the days when the country was split on a question of "9d. for 4d." That figure has certainly increased a lot since then, and I should like to know what the amount is going to be in this case. I have made inquiries in my borough, and I am told that land on which to build a five-storey block of flats will cost about £15,000 an acre. The present subsidy for a block of flats with a lift is £67 7s. Under the new proposal with no special subsidy for the lift, it will be £48 17s. when the building is for slum clearance—a difference of £18 10s. a year or 7s. 2d. a week. If these buildings are to be used to house people who are not
  1098
  coming from slum clearance areas the new subsidy is £36 17s. instead of £67 7s. The difference is £30 10s., which is 11s. 9d. a week.
  I am advised that these provisions will have an effect on the cost of the loan. In March of this year we were paying, in Southwark, 3¾ per cent. on loans raised for the building of flats. That has risen to 5 per cent. On a flat costing £2,500 the extra charge will be £26 15s. a year, which is 10s. 3d. a week. That makes a total in extra cost for the slum replacement house, with subsidy, of about 17s. 5d. a week and for general building of 22s. a week.
  Even if these figures do not work out to be correct when averaging is done—and I do not know how averaging is to be done in Southwark—it seems strange that when we are discussing a Budget very much linked with a housing Bill there should be talk of making people spend less to cure inflation and of encouraging export and, at the same time, talk of placing them under the risk of having to pay more in rent.
  What will be the consequences? In Southwark, which is not one of the largest boroughs in London, although hon. Members will expect me to assert that it is one of the best, we have 3,644 families on our housing waiting list. If we restrict our housing accommodation to those who are removed for slum clearance, we shall be in a difficult position. Under construction at present is accommodation for 2,281 families. If all those families are taken from the list of 3,644, we shall have 1,350 still on the list with no hope whatever of getting accommodation if all future accommodation is to be given to people from the slums. At the present, we still have to take people from the slums into some of these houses.
  What prospect is there for these people? It must be remembered that a lot of our homes are overcrowded without being slums. I know what slums are like, for when a boy I lived in a slum. I lived in a house which was pulled down over our heads because somebody thought he could get more money for the site as a factory site. I know what it is like for people living in those conditions. We have to do something for people who were forced into bad housing conditions—not slum houses—and bad conditions of life in their homes because of the war.

  1099
  Some of the houses in the borough are structurally sound in so far as the walls and window frames are good, but they have leaky roofs, bad drainage and there is rat infestation to a great extent. In the nine months up to 30th September this year our local authority had to take action in 1,460 cases of people living in these houses, which are in bad conditions but not slum conditions; and however much one patches a leaky roof one does not keep all the water out, for one needs to have a new roof to do the job properly.
  I have seen quite a number of these cases. Since 1951, since I have had more freedom and a position of less responsibility, I have made regular weekly visits to my constituency and I have seen personally, and have records of, over 3,000 cases; and most of them are housing problems. Many of the people are on the London County Council list, many are on the borough council list and some are on both lists. Some of the cases are tragedies. It must be said to the credit of the borough council and the L.C.C. that they make out their priority schemes, they have a system under which they work, and they will not deviate from that system because of special pleas from any of their councillors or any Members of Parliament. We put cases to them and we find that, bad though they are, other cases are worse.
  Perhaps I may quote some examples of life in the Borough of Southwark, which lies between the Palace of Westminster and St. Paul's Cathedral, on the south side of the river. If necessary, but not for publicity, I can give the names and addresses of these cases. They are of people whom I myself have seen. When the war ended the youngsters came home from the war and wanted to get married. There were no rooms for them, because we lost 50 per cent, of our rateable value in property in the borough during the war. Everybody knows what we suffered.
  The young people were taken in to live with their parents. That was not so bad, allowing a son or a daughter to have a room for the first year or so, but as the years went by, with no prospect of a home for themselves, and as the family began to grow, tragedy followed—the tragedy of broken homes, divorces and men living away from their wives. I know of cases where the wife is living with
  1100
  her parents and the husband is living with his parents and they see each other virtually only at meal times.
  I ask the House to remember that I am not talking about the days of Charles Dickens. He said enough about the Borough of Southwark in his day. I am talking about the present day. The first example I give is of a man and his wife with three children of mixed sexes, aged 6, 5 and 2 years, with one bedroom and a kitchen. The next is the case of a man and his wife with three children of mixed sexes, aged 7, 5 and 2 years, with a medical priority, living in one bedroom and one kitchen. The medical priority brings them into the L.C.C. list of category A. They tell me that they have been moved from category B to category A—and they tell me that with great joy. I have not the heart to tell them that nobody in category A has a chance of a house until he has been there for at least 12 months because the category A list is so full of cases, in front of his, which are as bad as his and probably worse.
  The next case is of a widow with adult sons and two adult daughters, all living in two rooms. Another case is of a man with his wife and three boys, aged 7, 5 and 3, and a girl aged 4, who have only two rooms and who have been on the list since 1951.
  I will not go through all these cases, but there are two others which I ought to mention. The first is of a man and his wife with two boys, aged 15 and 5, and two girls aged 14 and 9, who have been on the list since early 1954—that is not a long time—and who have only two rooms and a scullery. The other case is of a widow who has, living with her, her married son and his wife, with four other sons aged 18, 14, 7 and 5, all living in two rooms. They have been on the list since 1950.
  None of these people is in a slum. I am told that a very small percentage of the 3,500 on the waiting list—under 5 per cent.—are living in slums. All the others are in houses which are quite habitable and suitable, but which are all overcrowded.
  What does it bring in its train? What of the problem of education? Mothers tell me that their children have had to give up trying for scholarships because, with only one or two rooms and five or

  1101
  six people living in them, there is nowhere for the boy or girl to study and to do homework. Children are driven on to the streets because there is no room for entertainment at home. The young people go to the cinema. Hon. Members may talk about "spivs" and Teddy boys, but they must bear in mind that a boy cannot take his girl friend home or a girl cannot take her boy friend home when they are living in such conditions.
  There is another drawback in these conditions. What is to be the future of the little children? If hon. Members were to come with me this evening to the Borough of Southwark I could show them young parents with children of 4, 5 or 6 out in the streets at 9 o'clock or 10 o'clock. The children cannot be put to bed as the house is full of grown-ups and they have to be dragged around by their parents. It is all very well for the Government to tackle the question of slums—we support them on that—but they have also to do something about over-crowding.
  Seeing and understanding these people, I know that many of them could well afford better accommodation if only they could obtain it. Sometimes we ask them what they could afford and we are staggered by the answers they give. Some of them have got on in the world and are now better off.
  Another important factor is that our social habits have changed. When I was young and lived in a big house in which there were several families there was only one w.c., but no one thought that a hardship. Now young people regard that as a most important thing. They say, "We have to share the w.c. with another family." There is a change in the outlook of people today; people want more decency. They want bathrooms. The first time I saw a bathroom in a house was when I moved to Leyton, in 1905. There was a bathroom there with cold water only. Such were the conditions of those days when landlordism was running rampant.
  My plea is not only that we should clear the slums, but so amend the Bill as to enable us to have decent houses for people who are not slum bound, but are overcrowded—not to the extent that a local authority can charge them with overcrowding, but morally overcrowded.
  1102
  We should so amend the Bill that it could not be said, "No houses built on Sandys."
  6.32 p.m.
  Mr. John Barter: I hesitate to impose on the House another maiden speech. However, I was greatly encouraged by the right hon. Member for Southwark (Mr. Isaacs), who suggested that I should "Come on in as the water is fine." If by any chance I should appear to be swimming in rather deep water, I trust that I may have the indulgence of the House and be excused if occasionally I accidentally enter into the streams of controversy.
  I am prompted to participate in this debate because, like many areas in the country, this subject particularly affects my division of Ealing, North. Mention of that division will remind the House of the departure of a gentleman who was at one time certainly one of its institutions; one who I understand was very well respected on both sides of the House. Whilst I found that my disagreements with him were not confined to the political field, I also found that he was a most gracious and courteous adversary.
  Ealing, North, as hon. Members will deduce, is a part of the Borough of Ealing. I hesitate to advance its claims as the most important part, particularly in the presence of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, South (Mr. Maude). Hon. Members will understand that to me it is of supreme importance. In the years since the war the borough has played a very notable part in the housing drive. In the statistics published up to March, 1949, it held first place in the country, and at no time in the five years during which the statistics have been published has it dropped below fifth place. As a result, in my division there is approximately one council dwelling for every six dwellings.
  I have spent much time meeting constituents all over my constituency, and I find that they consist of council house dwellers, those who dwell in ordinary rented houses, and owner-occupiers. I am much impressed by many of the arguments brought forward by my constituents.
  The constituency was largely built in the 1930's and subsequently. By virtue of that fact many of those who are

  1103
  owner-occupiers have completed the purchase of their houses and have now retired. There are also very many other cases where the homes are still being purchased. I find that in both cases these people have one thought in common. These people feel that they are doing their best to make provision for themselves, their wives and families. Very often, however, they find the costs, the payments to building societies, payments for rates and repairs, extend their available means as far as they should be stretched. Their concern is—and this has frequently been expressed to me—that they can point to others who, for one very good reason or another, have not been able to make that provision and are in consequence, living in rented houses let by the council. They raise no objection to people living in these houses, but to them it is an intolerable burden that in many cases they have to assist in artificially depressing the rents of certain council tenants who, they state, are very often in receipt of higher incomes.
  They look at the council houses—particularly those developed since the war—and note that they contain very many attractive amenities. Many council houses I have seen have fitted kitchens—a thing I certainly do not have—and refrigerators and washing machines. All those things are very attractive and extremely desirable, but my friends who are owner-occupiers feel that they should not be asked to contribute so greatly towards the rents of those who live in those circumstances.
  I state these complaints I have received without comment. Hon. Members generally will agree, I think, that the case is one which should attract an element of sympathy, although hon. Members may not agree on the solution to the problem. The point I should like to make is that the misfortunes of widowhood, sickness and hardship are not the monopoly of those who live in rented houses. On the other hand, also in my constituency—some 16 per cent. of that constituency—are a number of council house tenants. They live in flats, houses—traditional and prefabricated—and in hutments. There are many on the waiting list. Some of these undoubtedly have been able to provide themselves
  1104
  with some additional pleasures—the television set and the motor car we hear so much about.
  I would underline the fact that the presence of a motor car outside a house does not necessarily mean that the person inside the house enjoys a very high level of living or income. Many of my constituents have a motor car outside their council house because they must have it for the purpose of earning their living. I also want to make it clear that we should not avoid drawing a balance on generalisations of this kind. There are too many of these generalisations. I want to be sure that those who find that their economic circumstances are difficult, who in my opinion are very often those who should have first call on council houses, do in fact have first call.
  I recognise that this is a local matter, and I am not anxious to interfere with local politics, but I must point out that in my division it has been expressed to me by a number of borough councillors that they are concerned at the number of people who come to them with urgent housing needs but are not able to meet the present level of council house rents. It is for that reason—at least so it was expressed to me—that they have introduced a differential rent scheme. I attended a meeting which was arranged specifically for council tenants to hear how the scheme worked. As one might expect, I found that there was concern among the tenants at any increase in rent, but their main concerns were for the condition of some of the new properties—I offered to go round and inspect them, but my offer has not so far been taken up—and the method of assessing their ability to pay.
  Perhaps one of the greatest means tests of all is Income Tax. I would hope that there might possibly be some measure which enables those authorities who have to assess means at all to do it all together. I should like to express my great appreciation to the House for the courtesy it has extended to me.
  6.41 p.m.
  Mr. A. Blenkinsop: We have all listened with a great deal of real pleasure to the speech that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Barter). Above all, we are amazed at the facility and the easy way in which he embarks

  1105
  upon what is certainly a very onerous task and responsibility. He certainly showed no strain or sign of anxiety and I think it would be fair to say that the hon. Member's predecessor, for whom everyone in the House had a great respect, would himself, had he been able to do so, have been very glad to compliment his successor on his ability and the fluency of the speech that we have just heard.
  Not only was the hon. Member's speech a fluent one. The very interesting ideas that he gently suggested rather encourages us to hope that we may hear a little more about them at later times when we further debate some of these subjects. And so I would say that we have all very much enjoyed listening to the hon. Member, and we hope to hear him develop more fully later some of the points that he put to us this evening.
  It seems to me that my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) was quite right in suggesting that the Bill cannot be looked at by itself. We must look at this Measure within the broader context especially of the financial measures of which it is really part. Indeed, this Bill is part of the Chancellor's proposals to reduce local authority expenditure. The right hon. Gentleman indicated that much in his earlier speeches on the Budget when the House reassembled after the Summer Recess. He indicated that, broadly speaking, the proposals that were to be put forward for housing would be brought forward in part with regard to the financial stringency from which, it was impressed upon us, we are suffering at the present time.
  So far from the Minister of Housing and Local Government being a man of great courage, it seems to me that he is a man who has submitted to pressure. If he had introduced this proposal before the Election, we might indeed have been willing to grant him courage—and we should have granted him several other things too. But in these circumstances, at this time, after the Election is over and under the pressure of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, courage is a misnomer for the present acts of the Minister. He has been under very great pressure for a long time to do precisely this, as many of us have well known. The proposal for housing in this Bill is a proposal that will result inevitably in a slowing down, if not, in some areas, a complete stoppage,
  1106
  of public housing work. It is to some extent covered up by the right hon. Gentleman with a lot of pious, platitudinous words about slum clearance.
  We are told that local authorities are given a great new incentive and encouragement to get on with slum clearance. Really, what does it amount to? When one looks at the Bill, what is this marvellous new incentive that is given to local authorities to get on with slum clearance? In fact, it means that the Government are retaining the lower level of housing subsidy that was imposed upon unwilling local authorities earlier this year. They are retaining those lower subsidies for slum clearance work while intending to do away altogether with a good part of the other subsidies for general housing needs. That is a crazy sort of incentive.
  We have heard various expressions about negative compulsions. This present proposal, I should have thought, was a negative incentive. Perhaps it is rather less negative than the complete wiping out of the subsidies for other purposes, but it is negative all the same in the sense that it is withdrawing something that the local authorities had available to them earlier in the year.
  We have heard a great deal of talk about the need for local authorities independently to face their difficulties. Who has placed the difficulties in their way? It is the Minister himself and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The major factor—not the only one. I agree—during these months has been the Government's determined policy to raise interest rates and to impose upon every local authority heavy new burdens. That is another example of what the Minister presumably calls his incentive to local authorities. The only incentive that he is giving them is an incentive to check their work, not to get on with it. It is an incentive to withdraw from their activities.
  I would rather that hon. Members opposite expressed their arguments openly instead of coming here with all these wonderful phrases about how the local authorities will carry on with their work. We are told that despite the Bill local authorities will get encouragement to get on with more work. Hon. Members know that that is nonsense. The purpose of the Bill is to restrict the amount of local authority building, not to increase it; and

  1107
  at the same time as public building is to be restricted, private building—provided people have the cash in their pockets—is to be given free licence to do whatever is wanted.
  In my own area on Tyneside, one can see lavish schemes of private house building going forward which, I say quite frankly, under past Administrations would not have been licensed and would not have been approved so long as the overwhelming needs of the mass of ordinary people had not been met. Now these relatively luxury needs are being met at the very moment when, by this Measure, local authorities are being discouraged from getting on with the essential and vital work that they need to do.
  Therefore, I shall not join any hon. Members who pay tribute to the courage of the Minister. I rather regard the right hon. Gentleman as now making his second step backwards. In earlier days, when his father-in-law was present and was leading the Government, there was a disastrous period in his term of office. Now we are to suffer apparently from another disastrous period of office by the right hon. Gentleman. I am not going to join those who pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman for his courage.
  Mr. John Hay: Will the hon. Gentleman specify which was the first disastrous period during which my right hon. Friend the Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) was responsible?
  Mr. Blenkinsop: I refer to the right hon. Gentleman who is now the Minister of Housing and Local Government. His earlier disastrous period was when, as Minister of Works, he made or was supposed to have made some provision for meeting housing needs at the end of the war, which landed us in such difficulties that we needed a long time to clear them up. If one simply mentions the problem of the steel houses, I think it will have some reminiscent ring in the mind of the Minister of Housing and Local Government, if not in that of anybody else.
  Let us look at what this Bill will in fact do. It is clear that it will discourage building by local authorities. Secondly, in so far as local authorities decide to carry on with their building programmes, it will inevitably, due to financial pressure, force them into considering further
  1108
  reductions of standards, and there will be pressure upon the Minister to approve further reductions of standards. Will he be sorry to receive these representations? I doubt it. Indeed, I think that the right hon. Gentleman will welcome them as a move towards restoring the position, as he conceives it, in which the duty of the local authority is merely to provide housing for the most indigent of our people, and to build down to that kind of level. That is what we shall be hearing about before many months have passed.
  As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale said earlier—and I believe it to be true—the effect of the Bill will be to increase the amount of class segregation from which we suffer. In my own constituency, there are housing estates which are still known as the old slum clearance estates, where the tenants and their children are still known as the slum clearance tenants—houses that were built down to a low level for people who were trying to exist under the means test in those days—and that stigma has clung to those people ever since. It was my great hope that we were trying to do something, as my right hon. Friend said, I thought with a great deal of agreement on both sides of the House, to get away from that concept, but I believe that this proposal is dragging us down again.
  Let us consider what is happening. Under the previous provisions—reasonable subsidy provisions, and, above all, low rates of interest charges—it was possible to see a general development of housing for the general needs of those within an area, and, under those circumstances, with the variety of types of house being built, it was possible to encourage people to realise that their housing needs were being met, not so fast, certainly, as any of us wanted to see, but certainly to see their needs being met within a reasonable period of time.
  Now, under these proposals, which will inevitably involve further increases of rent, the result will be to cause more overcrowding, not less. What will happen, surely, will be that we shall find cases of people living in houses which are perhaps too large for them, who will be encouraged, the Minister says, to take houses which are not so large. But what will happen? Consider the case of an old couple who may be living on their own in a house that is too large. When

  1109
  their rent goes up, as the Minister is anxious to ensure that it shall, what will happen in those circumstances? There is no guarantee at all that there will be any other proper provision for them of the size of house which is needed. Naturally, what would happen in that case is what happened during the interwar years. They will go to live with their families, and create further overcrowding problems, in order to save money.
  This is not merely my own political view—a jaundiced political view, as some hon. Members may think—because I have here a recent valuable and impartial report of Political and Economic Planning called "How many Houses"? It refers to the revision of the Rent Restrictions Acts, and we must consider this aspect, because the Minister has announced his intention to revise the Acts in order to do away with rent control. The report includes this comment:
  "A revision of the Rent Restrictions Acts might stifle the expression of the demand for housing by economic means and might conceivably make small families living in large houses want to leave them. But it is doubtful whether the large overcrowded families could afford the rents charged for the larger houses."
  I think that is absolutely true. This so-called courageous attack on the problem of housing is a miserable retreat, not an attack at all. It is not an attack on the problem, but a retreat from it.
  I was amazed at the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), who I am sorry is out of the Chamber at the moment, because, towards his peroration—a rather empty peroration, I must say—he claimed that we on this side of the House had never made any proposals for speeding up slum clearance. Yet, if I am not mistaken, the hon. Gentleman was a member of a Committee of this House which was discussing an earlier Bill introduced by this Government—another bad, botched Bill, dealing with housing rents and repairs—to which we on this side of the House made certain suggestions for amendment. Those Amendments would have made it possible for Birmingham and other cities of that size to carry on with the emergency powers which they then possessed to execute slum clearance and other housing works much more rapidly than they can do within the scope of existing legislation.
  1110
  I must say, to the credit of the Conservative councillors in Birmingham, that that was supported by them there. Was it supported by hon. Members opposite, and, in particular, by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West? Not a bit of it. There was the opportunity. What a great shame it was that they did not seize upon the opportunity of supporting that proposal.
  Mrs. Harriet Slater: Was it not also true that, during the Committee stage of that Bill, representatives of Birmingham on the other side of the House voted against the proposal, although they supported it when they were in Birmingham?
  Mr. Blenkinsop: That is absolutely true, and indeed many of us pointed that out at the time. I merely want to make it quite clear that the effect of the present Bill, linked with the financial measures which are part of it, and linked with the proposals with regard to rent control, which have been discussed by the Minister, will not be to give encouragement to people to tackle the problem but will be a means by which all the hopes of this country of moving forward can be destroyed. All our efforts and all our hopes of wider opportunities for our people and their families are being set back.
  I live on Tyneside, an area about which not very much has been said in the debate so far, and there are some features, one especially, that I want to mention, which have not been sufficiently stressed. This Bill contains phraseology about slum clearance and about maintaining the lower subsidy rate for slum clearance. As I understand it, it is intended to do away altogether, over a period of a year or two, with the subsidy for normal housing, with certain special exemptions. On Tyneside, we have some of the most severe overcrowding that is to be found in any part of England. It may well be that in some parts of Tyneside we do not suffer quite as much as do other areas from the slum problem—a great deal has been done in that direction—but, as far as overcrowding is concerned, the figures are absolutely appalling.
  The figures of the 1951 census show that on Tyneside something more than 20 per cent. of all families occupy only

  1111
  one or two rooms, and there is 11 per cent. of overcrowding. These are figures which are higher than those for the rest of the country, even including other urban areas, and yet this is the very problem which the Minister invites us to imagine has been largely solved and about which we can do little more.
  Mr. John Arbuthnot: Is it the hon. Gentleman's suggestion that it is a mistake for small families to move into smaller houses to make the larger houses available for larger families?
  Mr. Blenkinsop: Not a bit. Long before the hon. Gentleman came into this House I was advocating urgently that it should be made easy by local authorities for the older people to move from their larger houses into smaller houses more suitable for them. What I am objecting to very strongly—I had better again make it clear, so that the hon. Gentleman can follow—is that the Minister's proposals are intended to raise the rents of houses where the old people are now, without any guarantee at all that smaller houses suitable for them will be available for them. It may be that because of the increased rents, which they cannot afford to pay, they will go back to existing slum or semi-slum or overcrowded areas, making the housing problem more and not less difficult. If the hon. Member cannot understand that, I cannot help him.
  It is true that on Tyneside there is a very severe problem of overcrowding that we have been trying desperately to tackle. In spite of all our efforts the problem exists still, and is still very severe indeed. It is no use the Minister saying that the local authorities can go on building. They can: admittedly, there is nothing to prevent them from building—except the fact that the Government intend to withdraw the subsidy, and that that will inevitably raise rents generally.
  Already pre-war and post-war housing rents have been averaged out to some extent on Tyneside and in many other areas, but, after all, the contrast between the standard of housing pre-war and the standard post-war is very great indeed, and it would be utterly intolerable to charge much higher rents for pre-war houses, with less facilities and smaller rooms than the post-war houses.
  Yet that is the very problem which the Minister utterly refuses to face. That is
  1112
  why we think it is absolutely monstrous that at this moment the Minister should present this proposal to the House. So far from being courageous, he has been pressed on by others. We allow this in his favour, that he is being pressed by his right hon. Friends. However, there are other forces less reputable behind the scene outside this House, who have been pressing for this policy for a long time. I hope we shall hear the voices of the representatives of those pressures and interests express their viewpoint here in the House.
  It should be our responsibility to fight the Bill line by line, and to fight it, not only on the simple political grounds, but in the realisation, and because of the realisation, that this Bill will set back all our hopes in all our areas for the kind of decent housing development that we had hoped to see.
  7.3 p.m.
  Mrs. Evelyn Emmet: I hope the House will extend its kindly tolerance to yet another maiden speech. I shall keep the House only a very short time. I want to raise the difficulty that the widows of Service men with families find when they try to obtain civilian housing, and I relate this problem to Clause 5 of the Bill, which states:
  "Where the Minister is of opinion … that there is urgent need for more housing accommodation … and that unless the Minister exercises his powers under this section that housing accommodation could not be provided … the Minister may direct that, in the case of any approved dwelling … the amount of the annual exchequer subsidy otherwise payable under this Act, if less than the amount hereinafter specified, shall be increased to such sum as may be specified in the direction. …"
  These cases in which I am interested and wish to put before the House cannot be dealt with in groups, as can agricultural workers' cottages or the houses of workers in industry. They are scattered up and down the country. It might be thought that for that very reason they could be easily absorbed by the local authorities, but unfortunately the problem of housing is inevitably a local one and many of the local authorities as a rough guide have priority lists based on points from which they make their allocations and outside cases upset their lists. Local residents, if they hear of an outside family being taken on the list, are naturally very loud in their complaints and feel that they have been superseded.

  1113
  I think that for the same reason it is easy to distinguish between the Service widow and civilian widow who, perhaps, also loses her house on her husband's death. The latter, after all, will be among friends and neighbours. Moreover, she may have lived in the locality some time. She may even be a native. She will have very little difficulty, on making application, in being immediately put on the local housing list. The widow of a Service man, however, not only loses her husband and her home but also her friends and neighbours when she moves out of married quarters, and she becomes an outcast in her own country.
  I am encouraged to think that the Minister may be able to help in these cases, or, at any rate, look upon them sympathetically, in view of the Circular he sent to housing authorities on 8th March this year. I want to quote a paragraph of it:
  "Sailors, soldiers and airmen, returning to civil life after a period of years in the Forces, as often as not possess no fixed abode anywhere at all. To insist, in such circumstances, on a residential qualification is to make it quite impossible for many of them to get their names put on the housing list, however great may be their need. That these men should be penalised in this way solely by reason of the fact that they have been serving their country, is a most grievous injustice, which should not he allowed to continue."
  If it is difficult enough for a man with a wife and family, a potential wage earner, or one with already a good job to go to, to find a house, how much more difficult it must be for a woman left with very small financial means, and with children to support and a home to find. The benevolent societies which work for the three Forces stand behind these widows and help them as much as they can, but they cannot provide houses.
  I should like to suggest that possibly the Minister may see his way in these cases, which, after all, are not very many, to offer to increase the subsidy to a local authority willing to take on one of these families. It cannot be, I think, a very large financial burden. It may be said from the local authority's point of view to be an enticement financially so small as not to be worth while, but I think a gesture of this sort would establish a principle; it would make quite clear the duty that, I am sure, everybody feels we have to the dependants of men in the fighting Services who die during their period of service.
  1114
  It would, I am perfectly certain, give tremendous satisfaction to the men who are serving to know that this had been made possible. It would bring the local authorities into partnership with the Government in meeting this need, and, above all, it would allay the fear which must be constantly in the minds of our young wives, especially those who marry into the Royal Air Force, in which death can come so suddenly, the fear which must take the form of the question, "What shall I do with the children if anything happens to my Bill?"
  7.10 p.m.
  Mr. George Chetwynd: It is my duty to congratulate the hon. Lady the Member for East Grinstead (Mrs. Emmet) on her maiden speech. It is more than a duty; it is a very sincere pleasure. The hon. Lady is a very distinguished member of the Conservative Party, with a very wide experience in the international field and in the sphere of local government. She has impressed the whole House with her plea for the people of whom she spoke. I hope that her maiden speech will not fall on deaf ears in the Government. It was a very human approach, full of a warm sympathy, delivered with the confidence that betokened not a maiden speech but many years of practised public speaking. We shall all look forward to hearing her again in the Chamber, when perhaps she may choose one of the wider issues in our discussions.
  The Minister sought to present the Bill last week in the guise of doing a favour to the local authorities. He sought to convey the impression that he was not really taking anything from them. He was going to make it very much easier for them to do their job of slum clearance. He adopted the attitude throughout his speech of saying, more or less, "This will hurt me far more than it will hurt you." But we should not be deceived by the right hon. Gentleman's approach, because he is one of the most ruthless Ministers in the Tory Party. When the party wanted to de-nationalise the iron and steel industry it chose the right hon. Gentleman to do it. A year ago, when it wanted to make the first cut in the subsidies, it was the right hon. Gentleman who had the job to do, and throughout his speech on this Bill there stuck out the blatant Toryism which we

  1115
  warned the people would appear once the party opposite had won the Election with an adequate majority.
  The right hon. Gentleman's speech on 21st October, 1954, when he reduced the housing subsidy, was the thin edge of the wedge. If the right hon. Gentleman had stuck to the principle and policy then enunciated, he ought now to be increasing the subsidies and not doing away with them. Last October, according to the right hon. Gentleman, it was necessary to reduce the subsidies because the loan rate had fallen. Today, the loan rate has risen, and therefore, in logic, the right hon. Gentleman should be increasing the subsidy; but we know perfectly well that the Government have now departed completely from the former principle. They are now reducing the subsidies deliberately, as a frontal attack upon the social services.
  This act is part of an economy campaign directed at that sphere at which the Government feel that they can direct it, that is, the public authorities. They ought to be directing it at private enterprise, but that would be contrary to their convictions. The Government choose this sector for attack because there is here a buffer between the Government and the people who will be affected. When rates rise it will not be the Government who will be directly blamed but the local authorities, who have to take the action. The Government, therefore, have deliberately chosen this form of attack.
  The Minister said, in effect, that these proposals would not hurt the local authorities, but I have here a letter from the Northern Regional Committee of the National Housing and Town Planning Council, addressed to all Members of Parliament for constituencies in the Northern Region, including, I hope, Conservatives. The letter is headed, "Housing Subsidies Bill" and states:
  "At a meeting of the Northern Regional Committee of the National Housing and Town Planning Council, held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the 18th inst., the provisions of the Housing Subsidies Bill were considered"—
  This is important:
  "The meeting was attended by representatives of five county borough councils, nine non-county borough councils, 32 urban district councils and nine rural district councils, situate in Cumberland, Durham, Northumberland and the North Riding of Yorkshire. Two representatives were authorised to vote on behalf of each local authority.
  1116
  The following resolution, moved by the representative of Jarrow Borough Council, was adopted by 67 votes to 11:
  'That this meeting of representatives of housing authorities in the area of the Northern Regional Committee of the National Housing and Town Planning Council voices the strongest possible protest at the introduction of the new housing subsidies which will have the effect in the case of most housing authorities of virtually suspending the building of houses for local authority housing lists.
  Secondly, that this meeting further characterises the new subsidies as a retrograde step which, in conjunction with the increase in the rate of interest on loans, will mean the withholding of decent homes from countless numbers of people for many years to come, and urges Her Majesty's Government to reconsider the matter without delay.'"
  That is a letter from a thoroughly responsible body.
  It is part of our case, on this side of the House, that the Government have virtually limited, if not suspended, completely, the building of houses by local authorities except for slum clearance. We maintain that this is part of a deliberate policy, followed by the Government since they have been in office, of limiting the activities of municipalities in the matter of house building.
  We claim that by this policy the Government hope to bring about a reduction in the demand for corporation houses. It is clear that this is a fundamental change in housing policy. We now see quite clearly that need is not to be the key but whether one can afford a house. We see that need, which was the ground for obtaining a house when Labour were in power, has gone overboard and that many people who have been looking forward for years to obtaining a house, and whose need is apparent, must be disappointed and that we might just as well scrap most of the housing lists.
  It would not be quite so bad if the Government faced the alternative means of bringing about their avowed purpose. No real effort has been made to bring about a reduction in the cost of house building. I know of an instance brought to my notice last week of a certain ring supplying a building component which could be reduced in price by 14s. a ton if free enterprise were given proper rein. Because prices are fixed and a ring exists, the cost of house building is artificially kept far too high.

  1117
  Again, if the Government had not proceeded to make the recent increase in interest charges, the cut in subsidies would not have been so calamitous. If the Government would adopt the scheme, favoured by this side of the House, of giving the local authority the right and the power to arrange exchanges between occupiers of private houses and corporation houses that would go a considerable way towards solving the housing problem. But when hon. Members opposite talk about people moving out of large houses two questions arise. The first is, where are they to move and who is going to provide accommodation for them? The second is, what guarantee is there that those who go into the new houses will be able to afford the high rents which will be charged for them? There are innumerable ways by which some of the desired results could be achieved if the Government so wished without cutting the subsidies.
  Clearly, the social consequences of the Bill will be evil. Many people will have to face the choice of spending money on higher rents and spending money on feeding their families. Before the war Dr. McGonigle conducted an experiment in my constituency, which proved quite clearly that, once corporation rents pass a certain level, malnutrition sets in among families because they cannot afford the increased rents. As higher rents had to be paid, expenditure on food became less. We do not want to see a repetition of that state of affairs, but I am certain that these conditions will come about again if the Bill is passed and that we shall see once again the segregation of people in the country into two classes—corporation tenants and others. There will grow the snob outlook which over the past few years was being gradually wiped out.
  The Bill should not be taken in isolation. It is part of the Government's wider economic policy. The Government are seeking to deal with inflation and believe that the Bill is one of the weapons with which to deal with it. But the Bill will have an effect opposite from what is intended. Faced with a demand for increased rent, the housewife—and she is the one who bears the burden—is bound to agitate with her husband to get an increase in pay and, day in and day out, he will have this nagging about his not earning more money to meet the increased rent. In that economic aspect alone the
  1118
  Bill is bound to fail. Government policy in dealing with inflation should have been to aim at keeping rents as low as possible, instead of putting them as high as possible.
  It is clear that local authorities will not be able to build at the present rate, even if they can afford it. Who will build the houses for the sort of people on our waiting lists? Who will provide houses for elderly people, such as the person in my constituency who is now living in a house far too big and who had some hopes, until the Bill came along, that in 18 months she could be rehoused in a small bungalow built by the local council? Now that is right out and she is condemned to stay in a house much too large, with all the inconveniences that brings. Who will build houses for families living in overcrowded conditions, or those cases where a man is having to live away from his wife because there is no room in the house? Who will provide for the person who is living in what is not a slum, but what is certainly a sub-standard house?
  As things were developing, as more corporation houses were being built, those people had some hope that they would be rehoused in better conditions, but the Bill has been the death knell of all those hopes. Now such people are condemned to living for as far ahead as one can see in precisely the conditions from which they are now suffering. That is not good enough. The Government have now abandoned all pretence of planning in all these building operations. They have no conception whatever of what raw materials and what manpower will be available for building. If everything is left to local authorities, private enterprise, garages, petrol stations and all the rest of it, how can the Government say what raw materials will be available in adequate supplies? How can they say from where the building force will come to do the necessary jobs, such as building schools and hospitals? The Government have given up any conception of planning the resources of the building industry.
  We are most anxious that slum clearance should proceed. In fact, in that connection the Government got all the help they needed in the Housing Repairs and Rents Act, 1954. But the Government's figure of 60,000 houses a year is ludicrous. It means a trickle of houses to each local

  1119
  authority each year, if they are to do that and at the same time to undertake other house building. It means that people will have the heart-breaking task of waiting for years for a house to come along. But that is by no means the worst of it.
  This is part of the Government's policy of "divide and rule." They are saying to all the people who do not live in corporation houses, "Look at all those wicked people living in corporation houses who could afford to pay higher rent. It is not right that you should be living in worse accommodation and have to support them. Therefore, let us put up the rents of people living in corporation property." They will do that; but what is the next step? The Government will come along and say to private tenants, "People living in corporation property have had to have their rents increased. It is unfair that you should be living at the expense of the landlord and, therefore, we shall also put up your rent."
  I warn people who think that they are on a good thing by backing the Bill to be more careful and to look a little further than the end of their noses. This is the first step in the process of putting up rents all round, and the worst effect of the Bill is clearly that it will make the statutory duty of the local authority virtually impossible. My own local authority will be faced with having to make an increase per house, per week—that is a three-bedroomed house—of about 11s. 4d. as a result of the Bill and the rise in interest charges. If they spread the increase over all their housing accommodation, it will still mean a substantial increase in rents and their attitude will therefore be that they must leave that kind of building alone and concentrate on those where they get the subsidy, although that is not offering any benefit, but only maintaining the present level.
  We have seen, particularly in a speech of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), that the idea of a Tory housing policy should be, "Condemn the people who now want houses to the kind of house that was provided by private enterprise before the war; do not let them have a car; do not let them have television; do not let them have any of the normal amenities when, if they can afford such amenities, they should be paying for another house."
  Mr. C. J. M. Alport: My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) is not present, but I shall be grateful if the hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. Chetwynd) will give chapter and verse and quote where my hon. Friend said anything of the sort.
  Mr. Chetwynd: If the hon. Member for Colchester (Mr. Alport) will read the speech of his hon. Friend, he will see that what I said is a perfectly fair summary of what he said. That is the Tory idea.
  I want to ask only one question. Where are the private enterprise builders who will provide those houses for letting at a reasonable rent? Why is it that the bulk of all houses built by private enterprise since the war have been for sale?
  Mr. Hay: The answer is in the Rent Restrictions Acts.
  Mr. Chetwynd: What is clear is that private enterprise has failed in the job of housing the people. The only alternative is to place that job fairly and squarely on the local authorities, but they will not be able to do it if they are crippled by a Bill of this sort. We have to bear in mind that we ought now to be building with improved standards, better housing conditions, and not just keeping things as they are. We are not building for next year or the year after, but for 50 or 60 years ahead and we ought to be improving the standards of the houses.
  The Minister has said that in a year or so he will bring in provisions to abolish the subsidy as it will be in the Bill. We are entitled to know what "a year or so" means. The Minister has half-severed the neck of local authorities in the present Bill and we are entitled to know when the axe will fall with its full force.
  7.28 p.m.
  Mr. David Price: I think that the hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. Chetwynd) will agree with me—and I think that this was the burden of his speech—that in considering the Bill we are considering the whole social outlook of the present Government. Both sides of the House will agree that this is not merely an ad hoc Measure. There may be certain hon. Members who will not agree, but that is the general tenor

  1121
  on both sides, and it is therefore fair that we should look at the alternative social philosophies of the two parties. I do not think that it was fair of the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) to carp at the fact that my right hon. Friend had introduced a Measure which was not in accordance with the social philosophy of the other side of the House. The electorate at the last General Election made it clear that it was prepared to give this side of the House a sufficient majority to try—
  Mr. Arthur Lewis: Did the electorate know at the Election that a Budget was to be introduced and Purchase Tax placed upon kitchen articles, and that subsidies were to be cut and abolished?
  Mr. Price: The hon. Member has given ample expression to that first point already, in the House and outside.
  With regard to the general, broad, philosophic approach to politics and the social philosophy of the Conservative Party, I can say, speaking for myself, that I endeavoured to make it quite clear at the General Election. The specific Measures of my right hon. Friend are Front Bench Measures, and we as back benchers are not brought into the picture until after they are presented to the House.
  Mr. Mitchison: I have not been able to find a single word in the Conservative election manifesto indicating anything of the sort; I have found a quotation to the contrary. Did the hon. Gentleman know about, or did he say one word about, reducing housing susidies?
  Mr. Price: I can be held responsible only for what I personally said. If the hon. and learned Gentleman were to read that admirable book of some of my hon. Friends, One Nation, he would see this philosophy very clearly expounded.
  I suggest to the House that we on this side have quite a clear social philosophy in this matter. Our aim is a property-owning democracy founded on a dynamic economy with a basic minimum standard of life and labour below which no man or woman of good will, however weak, will be allowed to fall. I suggest that the essential philosophy of the party opposite—and I hope that this is not an unfair description—is an egalitarian society
  1122
  based on public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
  Those are fundamental differences of approach. I do not feel that hon. Gentlemen opposite are entitled to accuse my right hon. Friend of dishonesty or sharp practice in bringing forward a Bill which I believe accords with the general and well-known explicit social philosophy of hon. Members on this side of the House. I should like to suggest certain features of the Bill that accord with this philosophy. We must judge the Bill as one in a line of general measures, and I agree with those hon. Gentlemen opposite who say so. I accept it as one of a general line of measures. If it is not, I am very disappointed in my right hon. Friend.
  I believe that the Bill acknowledges the basic responsibility of all to provide themselves with their own accommodation, if they can. The argument that people should have public authority houses, especially in relation to people in the middle income group who can afford their own houses, is one which is an anathema to many of us on this side of the House.
  Mr. Victor Collins: How does the hon. Gentleman suggest that in a constituency like mine, a metropolitan borough, where the developed cost per site is £28,000 an acre, people can provide themselves with houses?
  Mr. Price: If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me I intend to go through certain aspects of the Bill, and I have that point very much in mind.
  The second point in what I regard as a sound Conservative social philosophy which the Bill reveals is that it acknowledges a duty to society to help those who are not able to help themselves. I agree that there is room for a great deal of argument as to how one should define that. I am open to the suggestion that there may be flaws in the Bill. I acknowledge that, but, as this is a Second Reading debate, one is entitled to deal with the broad issues. The third point which I think the Bill acknowledges is the role of the State to deal vigorously with special problems. It may well be that the point raised by the hon. Member for Shore-ditch and Finsbury (Mr. Collins) comes under that head.
  Of those special problems the one of slum clearance is very properly put at the

  1123
  head of the list. In view of the amount of building there has been since the end of the war—and I am aware of the length of certain housing lists—it is right to take up the crusade against slums which, from this side of the House, was carried out so energetically in the years just before the last war. In view of the housing record of hon. Members opposite during their term of office, it ill becomes them to carp at the Minister for putting this emphasis on slum clearance. Speaking for my own constituency, I say that we welcome particularly the emphasis that is put on clearing hutted camps. These hutted camps, many of which have reached the end of their planned life, are a scandal. Even those who are on the general housing list in Eastleigh will, I am sure, welcome the removal of certain of these hutted camps.
  I would also say that the special provision in the Bill in respect of new factories being established in an area is one which we welcome. It is proper for extra Government assistance to be given. The movement of industry is a national rather than a local problem. The fourth point in which the Bill makes an important step forward towards a Conservative social philosophy is that it moves from indiscriminate subsidy to discriminate subsidy. That is a fundamental point. It is one which right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite cannot ignore in considering their approach to the problem.
  There must be a limit as to how far one is prepared to turn to one's neighbour and say, "You must contribute towards my rent because I cannot afford it." This may be brought down to a personal level. How far is anyone entitled to go to his neighbour and say, "You must help pay for my rent." The economic price of all houses has to be paid by the nation as a whole. The only problem is how we distribute the burden. I am certain that hon. Gentlemen opposite would not ignore that point.
  Mr. Lewis: Would the hon. Gentleman take that argument a little further, and say that the same should apply to farming subsidies and to industrial derating?
  Mr. Price: That is a fair point, and my answer is that in principle I agree with the hon. Gentleman. I am speaking
  1124
  for myself when I say that, as a general principle, one must move away from indiscriminate subsidy to discriminate subsidy. One should subsidise people who show a need. I believe that that is sound and morally correct.
  Mr. F. Blackburn: How is there discrimination in the general housing scheme when the subsidy on all houses is to be reduced and eventually taken off altogether? How is the hon. Gentleman discriminating there?
  Mr. Price: I think that my right hon. Friend answered that point when he talked about the spreading of the abolition of the subsidy over all houses.
  I come to the point which follows from that. Obviously some form of rent rebate scheme—or other authorities may prefer differential rent schemes; I prefer the former—is a fair one. Those who can afford to pay the economic rent should pay; those who cannot should be subsidised. I accept the point—I concede it to the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Mr. Blackburn)—that it may be that the financial rates worked out by my right hon. Friend may need to be adjusted. I accept that, because I personally do not regard this as a Measure for saving the Exchequer money. I regard this as a Measure for sorting out what in my opinion is a social injustice; namely. that the subsidies are not going to the right people.
  Even if it meant that as a result there had to be increases in certain sections of National Assistance, I should accept that as a logical consequence. Let me make it clear that I am speaking about how I view the matter as a back bencher, and not necessarily as one who has the direct confidence of the Minister. The problem that follows from what I have said is, how does one measure need? It is very easy for hon. Gentlemen opposite to run away from this problem. Unless one is to have indiscriminate subsidies for ever rising, which have to be paid for by the nation, at some stage one must measure need. It is pure political and Governmental cowardice to run away from that problem. I hope that when we reach the Committee stage there may be opportunity to discuss this matter in greater detail.
  Mr. Lewis: May I intervene just for one moment?
  Mr. Price: No. The hon. Gentleman makes more than his fair share of interventions.
  The Bill must be viewed as one of a number of Measures. I hope that in due course my right hon. Friend will introduce a Bill to amend the Rent Restrictions Acts, the argument for which has been most cogently put from this side of the House. Secondly, I hope that he will be even more generous regarding private house purchase. I declare my interest. I am a complete, profound and fervent believer in private ownership and owner-occupation of houses. I should like to see the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act extended so that the local authorities can grant 100 per cent. mortgages and also include legal fees.
  Under slum clearance schemes I should like to see special compensation paid additional to Clause 40 of the 1936 Act which amounts to little more than site value, at the best one-and-a-half site value. May I make it clear that I am holding no brief for the Church Commissioners and other mass slum landlords? I am talking specifically about owner-occupation, of which there has been a great increase since the war. I should like to support the suggestion made from this side of the House that we should have a differential approach to compensation in this respect, and I hope that the suggestion will be taken up by my right hon. Friend.
  The other matter which I feel should follow from this general approach is that I hope that my many right hon. Friends involved in the major problem of the people on fixed incomes and the pensioners will reconsider some of their recent replies to Questions in the light of the Bill. It gives me great pleasure to welcome this Bill, not only as one which is removing distortions in our economy, but as an important step forward towards social equity.
  7.42 p.m.
  Mr. C. W. Gibson: The hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. D. Price) will forgive me if I do not follow him too far, but there was one question over which he made me ponder. He said that he and some of his hon. Friends are against indiscriminate subsidies and he applauded what he calls discriminate subsidies. Does that apply to family allowances?
  Mrs. Slater: And education?
  Mr. Lewis: And National Service, the Army and Navy and the Air Force?
  Mr. Gibson: I will not press for an answer now.
  I have listened to the debates on this subject, and it has brought back to my mind the experiences of some of us in the 1920s and the 1930s. Unfortunately, I am old enough to remember the first wild attacks by the Tory Party on housing subsidies after the First World War and similar attacks in the 1930s. On each occasion similar arguments were used, but a fresh Government had to reintroduce subsidies, and generally at a higher level than before. That had to be done because of the pressure of public opinion. I warn the Minister that he will not get away with this Bill without a violent public agitation.
  Already in many of the most responsible quarters in local government there is a very strong feeling about this. Last Saturday I attended a conference and I was surprised at the number of those present and the vigour with which they attacked the policy behind this Bill. Assertions were made which were backed by knowledge and experience that, in spite of what the Minister has said and the tone of some of the speeches to which we have listened in this House, this Bill will have the effect of raising rents to a figure which it will be utterly impossible for the kind of people for whom we say we are building to pay.
  Let me mention one or two. In Southall, we were told, if this Bill goes through and the subsidies are altered as it is proposed, rents will be 51s. to 60s. a week for a normal two-bedroom house, in addition to rates. In Finsbury, the figure will be from 51s. to 61s. 6d. In Deptford, where they have expensive land as well as severe overcrowding, rents will be anything from 33s. to 53s. a week, plus rates, and plus 10s. more if the 5 per cent. charge on housing loans is insisted on, and the authority has to build under it. At Stepney the figure will be 64s.
  This is typical of the effect which this Bill will have on future housing in London, not only in the county but in the greater London area as well. The result will be that house building will stop. No houses for general purposes will be built, and I doubt if houses for slum clearance

  1127
  purposes will be built. How can we expect people, who have been living in slum houses generally, at a lower rent, to occupy houses or flats for which will be charged the kind of rents that I have just mentioned? It is already becoming very difficult. I wish the Minister were present in the Chamber at the moment, because I wish to say something about a case in his own borough.
  The House will forgive me if I tell a personal story. A woman came to me at my political surgery a fortnight ago and complained that she was paying £2 11s. 9d. a week rent for a two-bedroom flat in the Borough of Wandsworth which is run at the moment by the Tory Party—and she said that her husband, who had a regular job as a labourer, was earning £8 a week. She said that because she must pay her rent her children had been getting less food these last few months, and although she ought not to do so, she was proposing to find a job again in order to be able to see that her children got enough to eat.
  That kind of thing will be duplicated hundreds of thousands of times all over the country. That is what happened in the 1920s and 1930s and it is as clear as daylight that it will happen again, because that has always been the inevitable outcome of Tory policy. I warn hon. Members opposite that some of us will not feel ourselves in the least inhibited in supporting and encouraging violent protests outside this House at the way in which this Bill will work.
  Inevitably this Bill will result in a slowdown and, ultimately, in the stopping of house building. It is rather cleverly arranged that the existing subsidy will be paid on houses which are now being built under contracts already agreed. We reckon that that will carry us on for another 18 months or two years. The Minister himself did not give it more than 18 months; we shall feel the full effects of this Bill after that period. Already local authorities are deciding not to go on building in view of the high cost of interest rates. I know a housing association which has made that decision during the last couple of weeks, and it is clear that in the end this will mean the stopping of general housing altogether.
  Is there any reason for all this? Can the Government suggest that there is no
  1128
  longer a need for houses? The Minister himself agreed that there was still a great need for houses all over the country. There are enormous waiting lists in every town. Most of the authorities have now sorted out those lists into urgent cases and those which are not so urgent. In London we have a very urgent waiting list of nearly 50,000 families, and it is probably true to say, on the same basis and taking the whole country, that there must be 200,000 families, if not more, whose demand for decent accommodation is really urgent. The supply of housing for those families will stop.
  Under the Bill the supply of houses for that kind of family will stop, because the pressure of the Government against general housing by local authorities is already resulting in nearly all the houses which they are building having to be allocated in rehousing people from slum areas or people living in temporary houses—which, we all agree, must go at some time or other—or the thousands of families now living in requisitioned houses, especially in the Greater London area. Even the London County Council is finding it very difficult to provide new houses for families who are on the urgent waiting list, because of the enormous demand made by families affected by the factors which I have just mentioned.
  Some of the road programme is to continue, and every time a new road is built in a great town it is inevitable that the local authority concerned is compelled to rehouse many families. In London that is a very considerable figure. The Bill will not satisfy the need for new houses by families who urgently require them. In a longish letter to The Times I did my best to make that point. In the last few days there has appeared in that newspaper another letter, written by a Mr. Audrey Harvey, whom I do not know, who gives a list of badly housed families. He says:
  "A family of 11—two adults and nine children—have only two rooms into which to wedge themselves. Conversely, a young couple have already waited seven years to start a family because they do not think two rooms in a reeking basement a fit place. Many desperate young husbands have been forced to live apart from their wives for years because their one-room homes cannot hold both father and babies."
  I know that to be true from my personal experience. The writer of the letter also mentions the case of a father, mother and

  1129
  daughter—who is now aged 15—who are obliged to share the same bed.
  "The parents of a girl of 10 have been told not to let her use the same lavatory as their tubercular co-tenants, but there is only one—so the child must be kept under hospital observation. Why is there no hope of moving these people and thousands like them. for years to come?"
  These are not slums, or houses which we should be able to condemn as unfit to live in; they are the ordinary type of rather bad house, in which people are crowded together like a lot of sheep. With that kind of situation, whatever may be our social philosophy, any humane society would insist upon local authorities continuing to build as fast as ever they can, in order to find sufficient houses for that kind of family.
  This is a problem which private enterprise building has never been able to solve. It is rather interesting to note that not once in this debate has any hon. Member opposite suggested that private enterprise should build new houses for the slum dwellers, or pull down the slums; for the very good reason—as I know, having spent seven years as chairman of the largest housing authority in the country—that when a slum is pulled down and the familities in it are rehoused, first, it requires the building of more houses than the total number pulled down, because they are always occupied by two or more families, and, second, it always costs a tremendous amount to do the job. That loss is partially met by the rates, but there still remains a loss, which private enterprise firms will not look at. It is merely in accordance with good Tory policy of greed and grab that nobody on the Tory side wants private builders to pull down the slums and build new houses for the people living in them.
  Can it be said that we cannot afford it? We have heard a good deal about the cost of housing subsidies. The Annual Report of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government for 1953–54, which was issued a few months ago, shows that the housing subsidies for last year amounted to £35,494,000. I could not find details of the amount which the rates have to bear, but if it is one-third, and that proportion is added, one gets a total of £47,325,000. Is anybody going to say that a great nation, with an income of £8,000 million a year. which
  1130
  can throw away £1,500 million upon armaments, cannot afford less than £50 million a year in order to provide masses of our people with decent homes? Hon. Members on this side of the House will not only always say that housing is a social service, but will accept all the implications of that statement, and will be prepared to provide the subsidies which are necessary in order to maintain the rents at a figure which ordinary workmen can afford to pay.
  The Minister and other hon. Members opposite—including the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell)—have said that plenty of money is available with which to pay these increased rents; one had merely to amalgamate family incomes. As though anybody with any experience of working-class life could ever imagine, first, that family incomes could be amalgamated, and, second, that if it were possible to do so it would be effective for more than four or five years. Children at school produce nothing in the way of income. Some children remain at school until they are 16, 17 or even 18 nowadays, and when they are 21 and 22 they marry and go off, if they can find a place in which to live. It is only for a few years, therefore, that this amalgamated family income can be regarded as being in any way real.
  One reads in the Daily Mail that there are thousands of families with incomes of £20, £30 and £40 a week. I can only say that from my experience that is complete and utter poppycock. I have never known a family in my constituency to have anything like that amount of income—even adding together the wages of the husband, wife, sons, daughters and grandparents. I do not say that working-class people are not now financially better off than they were before the war, but, taking into account the changing value of money and the fact that the value of the £ is still going down—even under a Tory Government—the amount of money earned by working-class families is, proportionately, not large as compared with what it was in 1938. The real improvement in these days arises not from the fact that more money is going into working-class homes but that, because of full employment, we are getting 52 weeks' wages every year—except in the building industry, where we always get some broken time, whatever the weather.

  1131
  The average income of our workers can easily be found. It is mentioned in the Blue Book on National Income and Expenditure, prepared by the Government and issued only a week or two ago. There we find—and this amazed me—that there are 18,100,000 workers whose earnings, after taxation, were less than £10 a week. It is true that another 5,900,000 earned between £500 and £750 a year, but, adding them all together, one does not arrive at anything like the fantastic figure which has been mentioned in some Tory newspapers and by some hon. Members opposite this afternoon.
  These are incomes and not wage rates, which are much worse. In the building trade, craftsmen like bricklayers, plasterers, painters and plumbers are getting a wage rate which is only about £9 6s. for a full week. At this time of the year they are working winter hours, four hours short at least, even if the weather does not rain or turn foggy and make it impossible for them to work at all. Many men in the electricity industry are below £10 a week. When a man works overtime to try to buy his children some boots or clothing or to give his wife a better time, why should it automatically be assumed that part of it should go to the landlord in increased rent?
  We cannot work a social policy on that basis. We can only take general averages. The facts show that the general average of income is below £10 per week. It is impossible to expect on that income the kind of rent which local authorities all over the country are now beginning to discover will have to be paid after the Bill is passed. As it is impossible to expect such rents to be paid, we must resist the Bill.
  I believe the Bill is the beginning of unemployment and slump. If there were time, I could argue this point in detail. Experience proves that it happened in the 1920's and 1930's. The slump always starts with great unemployment in the building industry, and this industry is afraid of it. Recently, one of the biggest unions, the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, decided that the situation was getting so serious that it had to write to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and call his attention to what was happening.
  1132
  I have a quotation from that letter, which was published in the Builder for 4th November. I mention that point in case somebody may think that Mr. Lowthian, the Secretary of the Union, has primed me with it. The letter was written by Mr. G. H. Lowthian, who is the Secretary of the Union and is a member of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. He said, on behalf of his union, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, talking on general housing policy:
  "Local authorities, therefore, will be faced with the dilemma that they may be able to demolish slums, but cannot provide new houses at reasonable rents for those being displaced."
  That is the point I have been making. He goes on:
  "Obviously there is going to be an even more drastic fall in municipal house building than has taken place in the last few months."
  He adds:
  "More bricklayers are unemployed than usual at this time of the year."
  If the policy adumbrated by the Bill is persisted in, the inevitable results will be the slowing down and final stopping of new building, for general purposes certainly, and probably for slum-clearing purposes as well; an increase in unemployment; the raising of rents of all houses, and the beginning of a trade slump about which, frankly, the trade-union movement has very great fears.
  The Bill will create a tremendous disturbance, and every working-class home will feel it. Those who are not living in council houses will be alarmed at the suggestion that we are going to lift the Rent Restrictions Act. If the worst comes to the worst and rents go up, there will be an inevitable demand for further wage increases. How can any Tory object to them? The right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) stood at the Government Dispatch Box and said, "Let's have a free-for-all. Let us have a free economy." It must be free for the workers as well as for others.
  If we put the organised workers into the position in which their incomes buy less and they have to spend a greater proportion than 10 per cent. on rent—and that will be high—inevitably there will be demands for more wages. We shall begin again the cycle of booms and slumps which created so much havoc in earlier years in the lives of our people.
  8.6 p.m.
  Mr. J. J. Astor: Unlike the hon. Member for Clapham (Mr. Gibson), I welcome the Bill in general. I could not see the force of the argument of the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan), when he suggested that the 300,000 houses which this Government have managed to build were achieved by some sort of trick, that we were trying to build for votes and, having got the votes, we were going back on the house building programme. The argument seemed to appeal to hon. Gentlemen opposite.
  The fair way of looking at the last General Election is that the electorate, which by and large likes to judge performance and not promises, found itself better served by the performance of the present Government in the field of housing than by the performance of the party opposite, because of our more realistic approach to housing conditions. [Interruption.] I agree that the Bill is particularly unpopular, but I believe it is part of a larger plan designed to make the earnings of the wage earner buy more. When that is understood, the Bill will not be as unpopular as hon. Gentlemen opposite say that it is.
  Mr. Barnett Janner: Does the hon. Gentleman include in that larger plan the increase of rents which will come when the Rent Restrictions Acts are removed?
  Mr. Astor: I was referring to a larger plan, because I believe that the Bill is part of a Government plan to prevent the situation which arose when the party opposite were in power, and when earnings gradually bought less and less.
  I have intervened in the debate to draw the attention of the Minister to one aspect of this subject. I am not very impressed by the reactions of hon. Gentlemen opposite about the result of the last General Election in relation to housing. They are sensitive to the result of the Election, which was largely brought about by the performance of the present Government in house building—[Interruption]—and that is why hon. Gentlemen opposite have made so many of what have seemed to me to be illogical noises. I want the Minister to pay attention to Clause 5, which empowers him in certain circumstances to increase the subsidy where it
  1134
  can be proved that the local authority has to bear an unreasonable rate burden or to impose unreasonably heavy rent.
  I hope we shall have an assurance that it is under that Clause that the Minister intends to deal with blitzed cities. I shall try to relate the peculiar position of Plymouth to the provisions of Clause 5 (1, b). I hope that the Minister does not think that because the blitz happened more than ten years ago the responsible local authorities have no problem now.
  Mr. Stan Awbery: Hear, hear.
  Mr. Astor: The City of Plymouth lost 4,000 houses and, because of further clearance, which must precede reconstruction, coupled with the dockyard development plan, 6,000 families have had to be rehoused. The City of Plymouth has made heroic efforts, as anyone in the Ministry can tell the Minister if he does not know, and some 13,000 houses have been rebuilt.
  The difficulty of blitzed cities, however, is that even now they are suffering from the wounds which were inflicted on them more than ten years ago. A significant and important fact is that in 1946 the families per house in Plymouth were 1·41, and now the figure is 1·45—an even larger number of families per house, in spite of the fact that the local authority has built 13,000 houses; and the national average, I understand, is 1·09.
  Having established the fact that the blitzed cities suffered, and that their local authorities made heroic efforts to reconstruct their houses, I appreciate that the Minister will not be convinced unless it can be proved that there is a direct relationship with the rate burden applicable in 1955—and, of course, there is. In 1945, the Plymouth Council, which was Socialist, took a brave decision. It decided that, at the expense of the rateable value of its city, it would, instead of building shops and factories, build houses. It is estimated that this policy has cost the council £50,000 a year. The policy to rebuild houses at the expense of shops and factories has meant a loss of rateable value each year to that city.
  Clause 5, to which I have referred, relates also to unreasonably high rents. The level of rents can be judged only if one takes into account the level of wages.

  1135
  Since 1949, the local authority in Plymouth has worked a differential rent scheme—not a rebate scheme. It has resulted in considerable inquiries, and among other points that have emerged is the fact that only 20 per cent. of the council tenants earn more than £10 a week, inclusive of overtime.
  That shows the low wage-earning capacity in Plymouth. The same is true under either Government because the whole field of employment is dominated by the dockyard and there is not, in the dockyard, the same opportunity to earn either high wages or considerable overtime as there is in some Midland and North Country cities. I hope that the Minister will be impressed by this figure and will realise that the level of rents in a blitzed city such as Plymouth can only be judged in relation to the wage-earning capacity of the tenants.
  What are known in building circles as "abnormals" are considerable in the Plymouth area. For each house built, some £200 abnormal expenditure is involved because of the severe contours, the steep hills and the very shallow subsoil, underneath which is hard rock. Therefore, the building costs in which the local authorities are involved are abnormally high in that area. I hope we shall have an assurance that it is under Clause 5 that the blitzed cities will be dealt with, and that the City of Plymouth will be remembered as a Service town which endured a severe blitz, has made a spectacular recovery, and has carried an unreasonably high rate burden for some years, although it is a low wage area.
  Mr. Lewis: I should like to congratulate the hon. Gentleman and tell him that I support him in his remarks on blitzed cities. I, too, represent a blitzed city. At the moment the Minister has not given even a faint promise on the point which the hon. Gentleman has mentioned. If the Minister does not make a promise, would the hon. Gentleman support me in moving an Amendment in Committee to cover this point?
  Mr. Astor: The hon. Gentleman and I have been in these blitzed city discussions before. I think this is a good point. I hope—in fact, I am pretty sure—that the Minister will give an assurance that this subject will be considered under that Clause. I could not, on the Floor of the
  1136
  House, promise to support any Amendment which the hon. Gentleman might move until I saw it in writing and until I was sure that both I and he understood what it meant. Therefore, my support must be conditional. If Clause 5 means what it says—and I have no reason to think that it does not—I feel sure that the Minister will give proper consideration to the City of Plymouth.
  8.16 p.m.
  Mr. Simon Mahon: The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mr. Astor) commenced his speech by saying that he supported the Bill and then he went on to present an admirable case against it. I suggest that the hon. Gentleman should try to make the same speech outside the Plymouth dockyard and should tell the men and women with three children who are living in a back room that they can afford to pay the new unsubsidised rents whereby £29 is taken from the assistance which they should receive.
  I was interested in the speech of the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. D. Price), who entered this Parliament with me and who is, I think, making considerable progress. He said that he believed in the ownership of private property. When I was a child and I had done something particularly handsome, my mother, with thousands of years of Irish ancestry behind her, said, "Son, you are the son of a dispossessed Irish King." The point is that I have always wanted to own my own home and I have always wanted people to own the land of this country. Most of the people, however, who assume they own their own homes know very well that they do not own the land, and a man very often cannot have the pleasure of digging his own soil.
  The thing to do is to make people own their own homes. People feel best when they own their homes. They have a greater interest in the country. But who are the people who stopped them owning their homes? The world did not start in 1945. Since I have been coming here I have heard people talking about 1945 and 1951 until I am sick of it. I remember 1931. I started work in 1929 as a scaler-boy in the Liverpool docks. In those days people were moving because it was cheaper to move than to pay the rent. That is perfectly true.

  1137
  We talk about so many houses being bought and so many being rented. Let us consider the position today. I have heard many speeches from hon. Members representing London constituencies, but I want to tell the people from London that their problem fades into insignificance when compared with the problem of Merseyside. The hon. Member for Sutton has referred to war-time bombing. We are tired of the promises of Governments. We have had no help at all. Our towns were bombed. We listened to Evans of the "Broke." We listened to the late Ernest Bevin, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, West (Mr. Attlee) and to the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) saying "Keep open the Western Approaches." We kept them open, and now this is the way the Government are treating the people who kept them open.
  In Liverpool there is a population of 350,000 slum dwellers—the population of a city living below standard in anti-social conditions. To be fair to the Government, I regard the building of 300,000 houses a year as a tremendous achievement. The only comment I have to make is that they reduced standards, and I objected to that—and I have had considerable experience as chairman of a housing committee; but it would be churlish and ungracious if I said there had not been a considerable effort in the House and in the country to house a million people a year in new surroundings. A tremendous effort has been made by the building industry, by local authorities and by various governments. In spite of paying that compliment, I have an objection to make: it is not how many houses we build that matters, it is where they go and what happens to them.
  There has been a major change of policy and I am objecting to it because it affects the people whom I represent and it will slow down their progress. They have been badly treated for long enough. The Government's new policy is based on a higher level of wages in industry. Let us be honest and reasonable; whatever comes to the Chancellor comes out of the human frame. The Government are telling men working on the docks that they are earning high wages and that the removal of the subsidy is based on the standard of wages. That was said from the Government Front Bench—that they are removing the
  1138
  subsidy because of the high wages. But the people in Liverpool are not earning high wages, even though they have to work long hours, and because of the high cost of living and the fact that people want to do the best they can for their children, wives are being forced to go out to work.
  I want to be very serious on this. The Government should consider whether it is good socially and economically to drive women out to work in order to keep their homes going. I say that it is not a good thing and that ultimately we shall find that it is the most retrogressive step ever taken.
  I make a plea to the Government to tell the Liverpool docker that they think he can afford to pay £2 and £2 5s. a week for his house. I say that he cannot do it. For years I have been chairman of a housing committee, and I want the House to know that I am telling the truth about these things, for it is important that people should tell the truth on such an issue. I have interviewed every family which has been given a house by my committee—and we are a town of 76,000 people and have built 800 houses a year. The people cannot afford to pay a big rent. They can pay no more than they pay now. Do not let us go into these abstract matters. I am telling hon. Members frankly that people in Bootle can afford to pay no more. It takes us all our time to get the rents in as they are.
  If a man is earning £15 or £16 a week, by all means let the Government take this action, but the wages in our area are £7 or £8 or £9 a week and the average wage of a docker is only about £10 a week. Even that ignores how old a man is. I answered an article in one of the national Sunday newspapers on this subject. Their headline was, as far as I remember: "Whilst trouble brews on Britain's bustling waterfront, men earn £40 a week." Some hon. Members will recall that in the newspapers. I answered it, but they would not tell the dockers that a Labour M.P. had answered it and the answer was pushed on one side. Their statement was not true, and I suggest that the policy of the removal of the subsidy is completely without foundation.
  I studied the figures concerning these 300,000 houses. This year there is to be a reduced number of local authority

  1139
  houses and there is to be an even lower number next year. If we are in earnest about slum clearance, do not let us stop private house building altogether, if there is a need, but let us keep it in social balance with the demand for local authority houses. An excellent case has been made out by my hon. Friends for this. Let us tackle slum clearance as it should be tackled.
  Last year 308,000 homes were built, and of them 199,000 went to local authorities, 88,000 to private firms and 21,000 to special needs. In 1955 the local authority proportion will be considerably less. Figures given by the Prime Minister were 60,000 houses to accommodate 200,000 people a year. Already there is a discrepancy, because in the Command Paper on Slum Clearance we have been told that there are 13 million dwellings in England and that 847,000 of them are unfit. The estimate of future demolitions is given as 375,000 in five years, which means 75,000 a year. Even on the record of the local authorities, the Government estimate is 15,000 a year short. These things have to be borne in mind.
  I want to allow other hon. Members to speak and I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me this extension of my Parliamentary experience. I am not yet used to standing up here and making speeches. Altogether 847,000 houses are estimated as unfit—one-fourteenth of the houses of the country, with one-tenth of the people of the country living in them. In other words, one-tenth of the people are living in unfit houses. Let me remind hon. Members that 94,000 of these houses are on Merseyside and that the 350,000 people living in them, in anti-social conditions, have been living in them for too long.
  I have known of the anxiety displayed by the Minister of Labour about people in industry, particularly on Merseyside, but how can the Government expect people to be industrially responsible whilst the Government are being socially irresponsible? In many circumstances the Government are lucky to get the men to go to work as the conditions are so bad. There are filthy jobs on which they have to work in all kinds of weather, and they come back to the girl who has waited for years for a decent home and the bloom has gone off family life. The man is conditioned to his social
  1140
  and domestic environment when he goes to work. Although my hon. Friend the Member for the Liverpool, Exchange (Mrs. Braddock) and I have stood at the gates of Gladstone Dock on many occasions, we shall be slow in future to go there and tell the men to curb their ambitions, because they should fight if ever they fought.
  How can 350,000 be got out of the slums without a fight? It has been a fight all the time. We have not a house for sale because social statistics are so appalling. The Minister might take this as a pat on the back. Two years ago I raised the question of houses sold in slum-clearance areas—£500 was paid for a two-up and two-down in a zoned area. I am grateful for the fact that eventually a pamphlet was put out on slum clearance which helped us.
  We are talking about slum clearance and allowing the subsidy to remain. That would mean £22 from the Government and £7 from the local authority. To bear out all I have said, in slum clearance areas on an A.4 house we in Bootle had an extra deficit per week of 15s. 11d. after the local authority subsidy and after the Government subsidy. A four-bedroom house is given a subsidy of £41 7s. 11d. per year extra, not because we want to do so, but because we have got to do so. We just cannot put people into a house in a slum-clearance area and say that the rent is £2. We have to destroy the environment of poverty and the habits of poverty which have accumulated over the years. That has to be done gradually, and people cannot be dealt with in those circumstances on those figures because the figures would double up again. It is self-defence against high costs. I can give figures to show that on an A.1 fiat for old people the deficit is 3s. 10d. after the subsidy. On an A.2 it is 7s. 2d., on an A.3, 10s. ld. and on an A.4 15s. 11d. That is after slum clearance. The amount should be stepped up and a reasonable subsidy given.
  We are told that we should spread the load. How can we spread the load in a working class town where everyone has to work? It is all right for Bournemouth, it is all right for Brighton, but in a town like mine with its tremendous responsibilities surely Clause 5 must operate. I have not sufficient faith that Clause 5 will operate. I have seen a similar Clause

  1141
  in other Bills. I have come to the Government on behalf of local authorities when such Clauses have been inserted but never used. I do not expect the Government to give way—they will not give way to me—but I want a categorical undertaking that when we have this Clause in the Bill we shall have all the help we deserve.
  8.32 p.m.
  Mr. John Hay: The speech of the hon. Member for Bootle (Mr. Mahon) has indicated that the House has acquired a new hon. Member of considerable calibre. It was a very difficult speech to answer in some ways because the hon. Member obviously speaks from a great deal of personal experience of conditions in his district. I want to say a word or two to show that the problem is a difficult one, and that unless something is done now—and I believe this Bill makes an honest attempt to do it—the problem will, as time passes, grow to such dimensions that it will be almost impossible ever to tackle it.
  One person who has not been mentioned in the debate on the Bill is the taxpayer. I know that the taxpayer is not very popular except at Election time, but it is worth mentioning that we are talking of a subsidy bill of about £107 million a year. I should remind the House what the Bill seeks to do is not to abolish the payment of that £107 million a year, but to prevent it rising any further. If the Minister had chosen to be as drastic and as wicked, as cruel and as heartless as some hon. Members would have us believe, he would, I suppose, have introduced a Bill to abolish housing subsidies altogether.
  Mr. Lewis: He is going to.
  Mr. Hay: No, he is not. If the hon. Member looks at the Explanatory Memorandum again, he will see that my right hon. Friend is saying that for the moment—
  Mr. Lewis: Ah.
  Mr. Hay: —for the next year or so, the normal rise in the "general need" subsidy is to be checked by reducing the amount to £10 a year; and then eventually it is to be abolished altogether. But that will not affect houses already built and, to use my right hon. Friend's expression, those "in the pipeline,"
  1142
  which will still carry the same rate of subsidy as at 3rd November. That is the point that the House must be seized of before we come to a decision tonight.
  We do not seem to have had in the debate so far a sense of perspective. I do not set myself up as a model, but we must realise that the purpose behind the Bill is to check the constant drain on public funds which comes from indiscriminate subsidies. My own feeling is that if we were to ask the ordinary man in the street about housing subsidies, he would say that it has been a good thing for a lot of people for a long time but that it is about time the thing was checked. That is my view about this.
  Unless we make a break at this point, when the country really is prosperous, when employment is full, when production is rising and when revenue, to use the technical expression, is buoyant, I can see a time coming when it will be virtually impossible ever to do it. With all respect to the hon. Member for Bootle, to whose sincerity I have already paid tribute, I believe that the ordinary man or woman living in a council house—or, to be precise, those who will be going into council houses—will be able to pay the higher rents which will be demanded.
  I know that there will be individual cases of hardship. Some people will say that they are faced with a bill that they simply cannot meet. If that is so, and if those people are living on such a low rate of income or earnings that they cannot pay an increased rent, that is the very purpose for which we set up National Assistance—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—in which both parties in the House took the greatest delight and pride, for the reason that National Assistance was always intended to be the underlying foundation below which nobody should be allowed to fall.
  As I have said, I think that the great majority of people who will qualify for council houses will be able to pay the rents, but there will be cases, I believe, of people who will not be able to pay. There, National Assistance will come to their aid, as it already does for such a very large number of older people and people who have undergone particular vicissitudes.

  1143
  I am not trying to make a cheap party point. I ask the House to accept that in this Bill we are not trying to be hardhearted, and I am not trying to be hardhearted, in mentioning National Assistance. I merely say that there is that underlying support should any individual tenant find that he cannot pay the rent.
  Mr. Albert Evans: Is the hon. Member arguing that if as a result of the Bill rents rise beyond the reach of increasing numbers of council tenants, he is prepared to see an increasing number of people appeal to the National Assistance Board for relief?
  Mr. Hay: I do not think there will be an increasing number. There will be some, but I do not put the number very high.
  Mr. Lewis: They are not entitled to go to the National Assistance Board.
  Mr. Hay: The hon. Member will no doubt have a chance of speaking later in the debate. I shall not be speaking for more than another few minutes.
  I want to say a word now about—
  Mr. Lewis: Before the hon. Member leaves that point—
  Mr. Hay: The hon. Member has had a pretty good run, and usually is not backward in coming forward with his views. I hope he will allow me to occupy just a few moments of time—
  Mr. Lewis: On a point of order. Surely the hon. Member is not entitled to mislead the House and the country. Those people do not have the right to go to the National Assistance Board.
  Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Rhys Hopkin Morris): That is not a point of order.
  Mr. Hay: I suspected that that might be your Ruling, Mr. Deputy-Speaker.
  As I understand it, if people are in need and their means are insufficient to enable them to pay their way, they can go to the National Assistance Board and obtain National Assistance. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] If I am wrong, no doubt the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Lewis) will instruct me, but I do not think I am wrong.
  The Bill marks a definite transition stage. It is a stage to which we would
  1144
  have to come sooner or later, and I am glad that it comes now. It is a stage where we change over from this artificial pattern of subsidies and controlled rents to one of greater realism.
  It follows that the Rent Restrictions Acts must be revised, and my right hon. Friend has already announced that he is in process—with his colleagues, I assume—of reviewing the whole effect of the Rent Acts. I want to urge that that review should be carried out very quickly and without too much prolixity, because I do not think the present Bill makes sense without a review of the Rent Restrictions Acts. It is part and parcel of the policy of getting back to economic realism, as we did in the case of the food subsidies and in a number of other aspects of our national finance.
  Frankly, I believe that the people of this country will be better housed once we have got rid of this artificial rate of subsidy and the no less artificial but private rent subsidies, which are the inevitable result of continued rent restriction. These are highly controversial matters, and I do not expect hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite to agree with me. I do ask them to accept the view, which I hold, that these are highly necessary measures. For that reason, I commend the Bill to the House and strongly support the proposals of my right hon. Friend.
  Let us remember that we have before us some very difficult problems, and that they will raise a great many human difficulties. The sooner we tackle this problem with realism and energy, the sooner we grasp this nettle, as my hon. Friend has called it, the sooner we shall be in a position to house our people better. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for West Ham, North tempts me to take a little more time, but I will resist doing so, because I will debate with him on some other occasion whether and to what extent we should allow private enterprise to provide new houses.
  I say to the hon. Member for West Ham, North that because one believes in private enterprise and private ownership it does not mean that one does not believe in the necessity of human values. It does not mean that one ignores the great human problems that arise when one embarks on a big programme of

  1145
  slum clearance and the like. I think that the hon. Gentleman and I would most likely agree on the things that have to be done, although we might be in disagreement about the methods by which they are done. I believe that this is the first essential step to be taken and that the Bill should pass into law as quickly as possible.
  Mr. Tom Brown: Is what the hon. Gentleman is suggesting intended as a reward for those people who are responsible for increased productivity?
  Mr. Hay: The hon. Member for Ince (Mr. T. Brown) has obviously not understood the whole point of my speech. It was not that one should reward this person or that for what they have or have not done. I say that we should try to get back to an economically realistic system—[Interruption.]—and that we should not subsidise indiscriminately those who deserve the subsidy and those who do not. That is the basis of this Bill and of my speech, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman now understands it.
  8.44 p.m.
  Mr. Herbert Butler: Housing debates seem to follow a pattern in which we usually have the Minister making a statement which invites a lot of interruptions, and eventually the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) coming along with a lot of incomprehensible notes and diverting the attention of the House from the real purpose of the Minister's Bill. We have analogies made with all sorts of things which are in no way analogous, and we get asides which cannot be backed up by any figures at all. We get percentages of all kinds and a mixture of all, but, generally speaking, the position of the Conservative Party is amply demonstrated by one youthful adventurer who informs us of the political philosophy of his party.
  We have heard the speech of the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. D. Price), which illustrated the Conservative conception of the responsibility of the Government to the people of this country. It was that the State should not intervene in these matters, but that private enterprise end the individual should assert individuality, that the individual should express himself and maintain himself.
  1146
  whatever the vicissitudes or the circumstances in which the people have to live.
  What is the position of the Minister, and what is his outlook? We have to go a long way back to find the Minister's point of view. We have to go back beyond the time of the Act of 1890 which dealt with the common lodging houses. We have to go back beyond that, because after the humanitarian principles of certain people had been espoused in the country it was then necessary for Parliament to intervene to remedy the terrible conditions which existed. The Minister and the Conservative Party today believe that these things, bad as they are, do not necessitate the intervention of Parliament, and so they are back to the beliefs of the time before 1890. We on the other hand, say that the Bill will pave the way for the recurrence of all those evils which existed until the State intervened in this matter.
  The Minister, while he may go back even as far as 1850, based a large part of his case on the fact that there was an Act which abolished subsidies. I think the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West referred to it. I remember looking at Circular 1334. I have been connected with housing in this country since 1928, and I happen to know something about houses and something of the methods which are adopted by local authorities in an attempt to provide the accommodation which private enterprise did not find it profitable to provide. That Circular said:
  "For the supply of houses for letting to the working classes it is anticipated that with the present re-establishment of more normal conditions the economic forces operating in a free field will secure a larger volume and variety of production at competitive rents and that a greater number and diversity of persons and organisations will take a share in the ownership of working class houses."
  By that Circular local authorities were particularly asked—I put it no higher than that—to lower the standard of the roads on their estates, and they were asked to hand over to private enterprise any sites they could. Therefore, the mind of the Minister, at least sociologically, is conditioned by 1850. He has certainly not moved any farther than 1934.
  The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West said how much had been done to provide houses to let since the Act of 1933. I can only answer that what has happened in London is that

  1147
  apart from houses built by the utility companies whose dividends were limited—The 4 per cent. Dwellings Company and the Samuel Lewis Trust Dwellings for the Poor—there has been practically not a house built to let in London since that time.
  So the Minister now is faced with a problem. He has deep human feeling. We saw that when he gave us the Requisitioned Houses and Housing (Amendment) Act. We have seen that in his action with regard to the subsidies. He is a warm, pulsating being, who responds to all the misery. He is as warm and cultured as a second-hand slide rule.
  The right hon. Gentleman bases his case on the fact that his gentlemen in Whitehall, who serve him very well indeed, prepare the figures of the millions of pounds which he cuts from the subsidies. They divide those millions by the number of local authority houses, and the right hon. Gentleman then produces the sum as a social policy. What he is really telling us is that he can read. After dividing the millions of pounds by the number of local authority houses as a matter of Government policy, the right hon. Gentleman says that all the cut amounts to is the equivalent of 2d. and 5d, making 7d. per week.
  I do not propose to deal with the details of the Bill. We shall discuss them in Committee, but I assure hon. Members opposite that the subject matter of the Bill is one of those issues on which there will be no occasion for their suggesting that there are divisions of leadership and alterations of policy on this side of the House. We shall oppose the Bill, conscious of the fact that however harsh may be the Minister who has devised its Clauses he must not expect to have those vicious Clauses approved by the Committee.
  The Minister cannot rely upon the "pink document" this time. Hon. Members who were so assiduous in their attendance at our debates on another Bill will remember that the Minister sat in Committee armed with two sheets of pink foolscap paper trying to suggest that local authorities in London had agreed with his proposals. He knew very well, and we told him at the time, that that was an absolute travesty of the truth, and that when the local authorities entered into
  1148
  negotiations with him he confronted them with, "Either this or that." But on this occasion the Minister knows, and I expect that the Parliamentary Secretary also knows, that when it comes to negotiations not only has the House assessed the Minister's character but the local authority representatives are not allowing themselves to be placed again in the same position.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Lindgren) indicated the attitude of the Urban District Councils' Association. The Minister was at Harrogate in September, when the annual meeting of the Association of Municipal Corporations was held. The Minister was due to attend there one day, but there was some difficulty with the Cabinet and he came the next day. The Conference adopted a resolution, without dissent, protesting to the Minister against the Public Works Loan Board rates and pressing him for an increase in the subsidies.
  I ask hon. Members opposite who are connected with local authorities to remember that approximately 70 per cent. of the local authorities who were represented at that conference are controlled by Tory majorities, and that that 70 per cent. agreed with the resolution. When the Minister spoke he said that there must have been a murmur in the conference. The right hon. Gentleman needs a National Health hearing aid if he thinks that it was only a murmur. He said that local authorities were obviously waiting for a lead from the Government. These Conservative local authorities, meeting in conference press for an increase in subsidy and a reduction in the Public Works Loan Board's rate and the Minister says that he thinks that that is a murmuring in the conference.
  My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Stoke Newington and Hackney, North (Mr. Weitzman) gave figures showing how the changes would apply to the borough, part of which he represents. I have had the advantage of a joint report from the town clerk and the treasurer, and my figures show that the increase on a typical flat will be 26s. 11d. a week, made up of approximately 10s. 5d. per week due to increased charges, 2s. 10d. because of the reduction in the subsidy in February and 13s. 8d. by these proposals. No amount of juggling with

  1149
  figures can alter that. The Minister says that he expects that that increase will not be charged. That is entirely immaterial. The Government's decision is that the subsidy shall be reduced by the amounts I have indicated, and where local authorities decide to pass the increases to someone else, that is absolutely outside the purview of the Government.
  Differential rents have nothing to do with the question of the reduction of subsidies, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) indicated. Socially, it would suit the Tory Party to have a workman living in one flat with his wife telling him of a man in the next flat who was supposed to have another £1 a week income. It is Conservative policy to separate people from each other and to set child against family.
  Mr. Alport: Why have Socialist councils introduced differential rent schemes?
  Mr. H. Butler: I am not responsible for what Socialist councils do. The Minister is the first Minister to cut housing subsidies and then to tell people, because of that, to carry out inquisitions. It is to that point that the hon. Member for Colchester (Mr. Alport) should address himself.
  In his speech on Thursday the Parliamentary Secretary said that we have to inject some realism into our housing finances. Having said that, he proceeds to drain their life blood. He injects some realism into housing finances and then decides to cut the subsidies. On previous occasions I have said that on our local authority waiting list are approximately 6,000 families, and that of those 2,380 families are in category A of urgency. We have still more than 3,000 requisitioned units of accommodation which the same Minister has told us we must release by 1960. If those figures are added together, it can be seen that for our local authority the cutting of the subsidy will make it almost impossible for the general housing register to be maintained.
  It is said that the Minister is concentrating on, and giving an incentive to slum clearance. One would imagine that local authorities had not done any slum clearance and had never heard of Arthur Greenwood. We had been carrying on with slum clearance up to the outbreak of war in 1939 and dealing with tenants who had been living in insanitary
  1150
  property. It is deceitful to attempt to give the impression that the subsidy for slum clearance in any way represents an advance. As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, all the Minister has done is to maintain the existing subsidy.
  When we were clearing slums in 1934 and 1935 we often found that the people whom we cleared from the slums were unable to occupy the property erected to rehouse them. The reason was that they could not afford the rent, low as it was at that time, of the new property. When we start clearing slums again we shall find that there are many people who, although cleared from slum property, cannot afford to pay the rent of the new houses.
  The Minister cannot get away with this "great crusade" which he talks about as if nobody but he knows anything about clearing slums. I have no doubt that the Minister has been told what he should do. His contribution has to be so many million £s from the housing subsidy. I have no doubt that other Ministers will come to the House and tell us about their little contribution to Conservative prosperity. The Minister has now given his "O.K." to reactionary authorities to allow them to contract out of their civic responsibilities. We had to fight for a long time in the sphere of local government to get a national standard of wages for local authority employees because of the reactionary complexion of Tory councils. The Minister has given one sop to the reactionary councils—they need not make the statutory contribution.
  Once again housing legislation is tending to become permissive instead of obligatory, and once again the local authorities can be taken out of the sphere of competition with private enterprise. This is another increase, and we all know it, in the cost of living for working people. This proposal is in line with the policy pursued by this and previous Tory Governments. Their idea is to destroy the social services and force the people back into the jungle of free competitive enterprise.
  The former Prime Minister said, "Set the people free." We have had increases in the rate of interest to local authorities; increases in the interest for the bankers; increases in the price of food by the removal of subsidies and increases

  1151
  in the cost of goods by additions to Purchase Tax. In addition, we have also had increases in the cost of spectacles and spectacle cases. Regional hospital boards have been told to keep their budgets down to last year's figures. There have been cuts in all the social services and increased rents, so that old-age pensioners and disabled ex-Service men are forced to contribute, even though they have been living in local authority property more than thirty years old.
  These are the proposals of the Government—increase the cost of everything and then pass the responsibility to that section of the community least able to bear it. Hon. Gentlemen opposite, probably frightened of the British Legion, gave ex-Service men the 90s. pension, but they will acquiesce in making that 90s. worth less and less every week. We are now seeing the real policy of the Conservative Party, and getting from the Minister a true indication of Tory political philosophy. It will not stop here. It will be impossible for this thing to be fought out entirely in the political organisations of this country.
  This matter will be discussed in the trade union branches. One of my hon. Friends said that when the trade unionist gets home, his wife will want to know, "What about it?" It will be no use the man saying, "The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West explained to me that it did not mean a thing." His wife will still say, "What about it? The rent is going up, the food has gone up, and when I telephone my mother-in-law the price of the call is going up. Everything is going up." People will want to know what is going to happen. I am exceedingly glad that at last we have had a real statement of Tory policy.
  9.6 p.m.
  Miss Edith Pitt: We have heard a number of speeches today from hon. Members opposite endeavouring to suggest that this Bill has as its intention the decision of the Government to depress the poor and put money in the pockets of unnamed people; that the Government have yielded to pressure from people, again unnamed, and now that the Government intend to destroy the social services. Those arguments might have had some point twenty or thirty years ago, but I suggest that the hon. Members opposite have still a lot of
  1152
  thinking to do about present-day conditions.
  This Bill is part of a deliberate policy—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."]—wait for it—to stablise the financial position of the country and to tackle inflation.
  Mr. Lewis: Poppycock.
  Miss Pitt: These things are necessary if we are to preserve the prosperity in which we enjoy a good standard of living and by which we maintain our social services and full employment.
  The principle of the Bill is to restore realism to housing finance. We have gone a long way since 1919 when the duty of providing houses for the working classes was placed upon local authorities. It was the deliberate policy of the party opposite, when they were in power from 1945 to 1951, to force almost everyone on to the lists of the council housing departments. [HON. MEMBERS: "Force?"] There was no choice. But that meant that local authorities were housing not only members of the working classes—if we must use that expression—but professional people and people of all categories. That was confirmed in 1949, when the words "working class" were deliberately removed from the legislation.
  Now the position is that about one-third of the rented houses in this country are controlled by local authorities. Surely, it is not suggested that all these people need the benefit of housing subsidies?
  Mr. Denis Howell: The hon. Lady and I both served on the Birmingham City Council. She will be aware of the advertisement which, when her party had a majority, was addressed to the 66,000 tenants upon the register of Birmingham, asking how many would like to buy their own houses. I have the figures here. The city council spent £523 in advertising. Out of those 66,000 tenants, 2,813 wanted to buy their own houses—and most of those were people without families.
  Miss Pitt: That is perfectly correct, but that advertisement was not followed up by an explanation of the procedure which had to be followed if people wanted to buy their own houses. The filling in of a coupon taken from a newspaper was not sufficient to tell would-be house purchasers what was involved, as the hon. Member is aware.

  1153
  As long ago as 1934, the party opposite, at its party conference, passed a resolution in these terms:
  "The demands of the social services on public funds are so great and urgent … that the best results can only be obtained by a careful schedule of priorities. … 'Each according to his need' is a good Socialist precept … and it is believed that housing subsidies can be put to the best use, and best benefit according to need, by the adoption of the differential principle."
  If that were true in 1934, how much more true is it now, when the general standard of living has so much improved? I wonder if hon. Members opposite really are against benefiting the poorer sections of the community. If we subsidise all, we do not give to those in the greatest need the greatest amount which it is possible for them to enjoy. If the Bill encourages local authorities to use their pooled subsidies to introduce rent rebate schemes—which I prefer to differential rent schemes—it can only benefit those most in need.
  If we are honest we can all give instances of tenants of municipal houses who can afford to pay more—
  Mr. Lewis Mr. Lewis rose—
  Miss Pitt: No, I cannot give way. I have been asked to be brief, and I know that many hon. Members opposite are anxious to speak.
  I want to give an instance to prove my point that there are people living in municipal houses at the moment who can afford to pay more rent. In Birmingham, the Socialist-controlled Council recently announced—as hon. Members representing Birmingham constituencies will know—that applications for permission to erect garages on municipal housing estates were coming in at the rate of ten a week, or 500 a year.
  Hon. Members: Why not?
  Miss Pitt: I am perfectly happy; I am very glad to know that many working people have cars of their own. It gives great pleasure to the whole family, and not merely to the man of the house. Nevertheless, if those people can afford to maintain cars they can afford to pay more rent in order that other persons who are less well off may apply for rent rebates. When we introduced a rent rebate scheme in Birmingham two years ago, approximately £130,000 was set aside to meet the anticipated demands in the first year, but applications amounted
  1154
  to only £40,000. That does not suggest that every municipal tenant is experiencing great hardship.
  In a recent speech the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) said that he was all in favour of robbing Peter of his subsidy to pay Paul, if Peter had a couple of grown-up sons and Paul had four babies. That is the essence of this argument: that we should help the people most in need, especially the families with young children who are growing up. There is very little incentive at the present time to tenants of municipal houses, and especially of pre-war houses, to vacate the premises. There is no financial inducement to do so, because they enjoy a low rent. Where they have families with grown-up sons and can afford to take on a more expensive house, they will not do' so because they are enjoying the benefit of a low rent. Where a couple are living in occupation of a larger house on their own they usually do not want to give it up, and not only because of financial reasons; but in many circumstances if the rents were more comparable with what they are paying they might release it for a family.
  Mr. Lewis: Would the hon. Lady turn them on to the streets?
  Miss Pitt: I have no intention of suggesting that anyone should be forced out of his home. When I was a councillor in Birmingham I have several times helped people to retain their houses where they had a great sentimental attachment to them. Nevertheless, I know old people who would be willing to go to something smaller, like a bungalow, with less work, if the rent of the new place were comparable to what they are paying now for a pre-war house.
  It was suggested by hon. Members opposite, and particularly by the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) and the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East (Mr. Blenkinsop), that we should encourage a better type of tenant, such as the doctor or the lawyer, in municipal estates.
  Mr. Bevan: I do not say that the lawyer is necessarily a better person than a collier.
  Miss Pitt: The right hon. Gentleman suggested that we did not want all one type of person, such as people who had

  1155
  come out of the slums. I am not disputing the point. It is very good to have a mixed community, but surely the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends are not suggesting that this better type—I must use the word "better" for lack of something more descriptive—should enjoy the benefit of subsidised rents.
  Mr. Bevan: Why does the hon. Lady use the term "better" all the time? It is a denigrating term to use. Surely her vocabulary is better than that.
  Miss Pitt: Do I explain myself more clearly if I say "people who have not removed to municipal housing estates from the slums?" Doctors and other such people living with former slum dwellers who have come to the new area can afford to pay the full rent. If hon. Gentlemen opposite suggest that those people would not stay in that area, they defeat their own argument. It does not mean that they lack financial capacity to pay the unsubsidised rent.
  We have got away from a proper sense of proportion in the way we spend our money. We have for very long enjoyed protection in the basic things. We enjoyed protected food prices during the war, and protected rents for a very long time. It only remains for hon. Gentlemen opposite to suggest that we should have subsidised coal prices for us to see the whole pattern. That is wrong. We must go back to the essentials and make up our minds how much out of our individual income we are prepared to set aside for the three old, basic principles of food, shelter and warmth.
  I am surprised to find that the pre-war record of personal expenditure showed that we allocated 11·8 per cent. of our incomes to housing while last year we allocated only 8·9 per cent. Does that suggest a proper proportion towards one of our basic needs? We are also building up an enormous burden of expense for future generations, and we ought to be aware of it. The burden of the social services, especially of pensions, will fall very heavily on future generations, who will be fewer in number. Why, then, continue to add to this with a housing subsidy burden which falls on all and is unfair to many who have to contribute to it?
  Dr. Barnett Stross: I have listened with great interest to the hon. Lady. I wonder whether, in her solicitude for the lower income groups, she has borne in mind the evidence which came from Stockton-on-Tees, where the medical officer of health in the 1930's showed that if a new burden in the form of increased rents is added the death rate is increased? Will the hon. Lady bear that in mind, for the rest of her speech, at least?
  Miss Pitt: We are not talking about the 1930's. We are talking about 1955. I think that this Measure will be welcomed by all fair-minded citizens. It is wrong of hon. Members opposite to try to make political capital out of it, because it could easily recoil. Many of the fair-minded citizens who are paying contributions towards the subsidised rents of municipal tenants are anxiously watching what happens to this Measure, and if ever the party opposite were returned to power they would have cause to be grateful for the fact that this problem has been tackled by the present Government. It gives impetus to slum clearance and it endeavours to restore sound principles to housing finance.
  9.22 p.m.
  Mr. G. R. Mitchison: I am not going to follow the remarks of the hon. Lady the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Miss Pitt) beyond saying to her that Edgbaston must be a very remarkable place.
  The Bill to which we are asked to give a Second Reading seems to me—and I am not mincing words—to be an iniquitous Measure with a great deal of political concealment about it both in regard to the past and the future. The main object of it, we are told, is to reduce and finally abolish subsidies on a number of houses, estimated at 80,000—annual subsidies, therefore, amounting to between £2 million and £2,500,000 a year, if one includes the obligatory local authority subsidy. If one adopts the methods so dear to the right hon. Gentleman and spreads that amount over, I suppose, the whole number of taxpayers, direct and indirect, it seems to me to amount to about ½d. a week, and I cannot conceive a saving of that order better calculated to cause the maximum of distress than that proposed in this Measure.

  1157
  We were told by the right hon. Gentleman with, I thought, a little less than his usual openness, that
  "There is nothing new in what I am saying today. We have never attempted to conceal our views. In fact, as long ago as November, 1953, in the White Paper issued by the Government and entitled 'Houses: the Next Step' we drew attention to 'the ever-growing burden of housing subsidies which cannot, in the interests of the general body of taxpayers, continue indefinitely at the present rate'."[OFFICIAL REPORT, 17th November, 1955; Vol. 546, c. 797–8.]
  If, in fact, the right hon. Gentleman had made it clear that they were going to reduce housing subsidies, one would at least have expected to find something about it somewhere in the Tory Election literature. One would have expected some candidate or another at some time, some speaker's notes or something of that sort, to mention the change, which quite obviously would have a very considerable effect on the votes of all council tenants and of those who were looking for council houses.
  I cannot believe that the right hon. Gentleman meant to do anything of the sort. Indeed, when I look at the pamphlet to which he referred, "Houses: the Next Step," I find that the passage was quoted for quite another purpose—to call attention to the valuable contribution which in his opinion private enterprise could make towards solving the housing problem.
  Certainly he has acted on that. What is the position? In 1951, the last year for which the Labour Party can be held responsible in this matter, one private house was built for every six built by local authorities. The Tories came into power and the proportion changed rapidly to 1-to-4. Then, in 1953, it changed to 1-to-2½, then to 1-to-1¾, and it is now nearly equal. Since 1953. the number of houses built by local authorities has not been rising but falling. To take the two years together, in 1953 there were about 205.000 of them and, if we take the rate of the first nine months of this year, the total would now be under 140,000.
  The Government, we are told, has been building 300,000 houses a year. What complete nonsense. What has been happening is that the local authorities have been cramped and restricted by the deliberate policy of the Government and, for the past two or three years at any rate,
  1158
  have been building fewer and fewer houses, while the private builder, having been let loose, has been building more and more for those who can afford to buy houses. No one will convince me that out of the 100,000 houses built last year, and the increasing number likely to be built next year, by private enterprise for private owners, any very large proportion will be to let. These are the houses for people who can afford to pay for them, and the houses built which have gone down in number and in quality have been those for people who need them most—council tenants and those on the ordinary housing lists of local authorities.
  This very remarkable proceeding is justified now on the score that we can reduce the housing subsidies and can thereby introduce economy, to the extent which I have indicated, and fairness into, local housing finance; and at the same time can give a great incentive to slum clearance.
  Let us consider slum clearance first. As a result of the 1954 Act, local authorities had been asked about their proposals for slum clearance before this Bill came into being and before they knew anything about it. Their proposals were 375,000 houses in the course of five years—slum houses; that is to say, at the rate of 75,000 a year. So remarkable is the incentive which the Minister proposes to give by keeping the subsidy at exactly the same figure that he anticipates that when the Bill has gone through not 75,000 houses but 60,000 houses will be built in a year. This is a curious kind of incentive. "Houses: the Next Step" was certainly a step backwards and the incentive to slum clearance appears equally to be an incentive backwards.
  What is the sense of the matter? The Government do not give any extra inducement whatever to local authorities to clear slums. All they do is to cramp and restrict their activities in another and similar sphere and drive them in that way in the good old Tory fashion into doing something they think the local authorities might not otherwise do. That of course is not direction; it is coercion. Local authorities are going to want to do something, for they have some public spirit. If they are prevented from meeting their ordinary housing needs then, says the right hon. Gentleman, with pride, what an incentive they will have—they will get on

  1159
  with slum clearance at a rate rather less than they would if this "incentive" were not there. I never heard a more preposterous proposition in the whole of my life.
  We are then told that fairness and economy will be introduced. What about fairness? In October, 1954—which was not so very long ago—we had the last housing subsidy Bill, brought forward by the right hon. Gentleman with the unfailing support of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) and the debate was wound up by the present Parliamentary Secretary. What did they do? They brought forward, as a fair and adequate criterion of what a man could afford by way of rent, the very traditional 10 per cent. of earnings. They took for that purpose the earnings that are published from time to time by the Ministry of Labour and proved with pride that they were 8d., 9d., or 6d.—or whatever it was—better than that particular figure, patted one another on the back, and we all went away tolerably happy.
  Having listened to the argument of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West—which on that occasion was much simpler and, I think, much more easy to follow than the somewhat complicated tangle which he produced tonight—the conclusion of the Parliamentary Secretary was:
  "It seems to me perfectly fair, to relate this figure"—
  That is the notional rent a man is supposed to be able to afford by way of rent—
  "to increased earnings, and 10 per cent of earnings is a fair proportion."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st October, 1954; Vol. 531, c. 1454.]
  The right hon. Gentleman and everyone who spoke from the benches opposite, including that political sadist, the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West, was at that time of that opinion. What was so fair in October, 1954, by the time we come to November, 1955, has apparently become grossly unfair. It now involves terrible unfairness as between one council tenant and another, a terrible unfairness as between private building and council building and all the dreadful things we have heard from hon. and right hon. Members opposite today.
  1160
  What is the reason for the change? I am quite certain that everyone in this House knows it perfectly well. The reason for the change is that what was said on the former occasion was before a General Election and now we are having a debate after a General Election in which nothing whatever was said about all this to the people of the country. What the Government are doing now is getting over the beginnings of their thoroughly nasty programme, the nastiest part of the nasty programme, in the hope that it will be forgotten sufficiently by the time we get to the next General Election. That is as it may be, but let us see the effect of what they are doing.
  Mr. Powell: The hon. and learned Member has referred quite a lot to me and implied that this was a policy adopted after the General Election with no warning to the electorate. I think I might enlighten him that so far as I am concerned I made it quite clear in my constituency in the last three General Elections—particularly the last one—that this would have to be done. I said that rent restriction in particular had been a cause of one of the major social evils of the last twenty years and one of the major reasons for bad housing conditions today and we would have to tackle it and the present subsidy structure. That was reported in the Wolverhampton newspapers on 21st May.
  Mr. Mitchison: It appears to me that the hon. Member is not only a political sadist but a political masochist. I can merely say that no doubt he put the nastiest possible face on his own political views. He was re-elected none the less, so there must be something to him. But not a single word of all this appeared in the Tory manifesto and, obviously, it was perfectly unknown to the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. D. Price) who was questioned about it and quite clearly had not the foggiest idea that it was in the wind.
  I will tell the House what I think has happened. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West must have got hold of the Cabinet on some occasion or another and talked to its members at such length that he finally persuaded them that the right thing to do is what they are doing now. At any rate, let us leave the man alone for a moment and continue to look at the subsidies.

  1161
  What has been happening? This figure of 10 per cent. has been persistently followed. It was followed first in 1946. It was followed in 1952. It was followed in April, 1955, as recently as that, as a result of the debate to which I have just referred; and it is only now, for the first time, that as far as the subsidy is concerned an entirely different figure is taken.
  Of course, not only subsidy is involved. One cannot consider simply this attack on council housing without also considering what has been happening to the even more serious matter of councils' arrangements for borrowing and the rates of interest at which they have to borrow. I am not going into all that again at any length. I merely say this. If one takes the example of a three-bedroomed council house, one assumes a cost of £1,600. If one takes slightly different figures, there is a slightly different result, but the trend is the same. The rent assumed was 10s. in October, 1946, 18s. in April, 1952, and 19s. 8d. in April, 1954.
  During the last year, the effect of the rise in interest rates, without any account whatever of the Bill, has been to raise that average notional rent from 19s. 8d. to 25s. 9d. a week. The effect of the Bill will be to raise that further to 33s. 2d. and, when the subsidy is abolished altogether, assuming a rough maintenance of the same earnings, to 37s. What a marvellous bit of Tory policy. Interest rates and the Bill between them succeed in practically doubling the rent of an average council house between April, 1954, and the period to about a year from now, when subsidies are to be totally abolished. And that, we are told, is fairness in council house finance.
  I do not know how this Bill will work. I do not suppose anybody knows. One thing that I am quite clear about is that neither of the two methods that the Minister suggested has anything to do with the merits of the case. One can talk about spreading the increase over a number of houses and so making it look a little bit smaller. It reminds me of the pickpocket who takes half-a-crown from one's pocket and says, "If you have 6d. in a lot of other pockets and put them all into that pocket, you will not notice that the half-crown has gone". That seems to me to be the sort of argument involved in saying that the burden must
  1162
  be spread out. The plain fact is that unless some increase is to be put on other tenants, that will be the increase for a council house.
  Then, we are told that differential rents is the right method. Some councils—of both political colours—have practised differential rents or rent rebates for many years. We had a highly expert Committee, headed by no less a person than the present Financial Secretary to the Treasury, which reported on this matter in 1953. The conclusion which it came to is very simple:
  "We make no general recommendations for or against any of these rent systems we have described, for we well realise that the circumstances of local authorities vary greatly and what is suited to one area may be of little advantage to another."
  They go on to elaborate that.
  What a pass the right hon. Gentleman must be driven to when the best way he can find to defend the effects of what he is doing now is to take out of the hands of local authorities something which has long been, and ought to be, their business, and to attempt to force upon them differential rents and rent rebate schemes whether or not they happen to be suitable to the conditions of that particular local authority. What about the respect which hon. Gentlemen opposite so often profess for local government in this country? What about the respect which anyone holding the office of the right hon. Gentleman ought certainly to express? But that is not the only injustice and not the only encroachment on local authorities.
  What is going to happen? For eighteen months, there will be houses in the pipeline, and in eighteen months' time, when our debates, as hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite hope, may be partly forgotten, the effect will begin and it will continue increasingly. But, by that time, they hope that the blame will be placed on the local councils, and that their contribution—something which, after all, is just a little difficult for the man in the street to understand in detail—will be hidden by the lapse of time, and will seem, by the form in which it appears, as an apparent activity and decision by the local council.
  What is to be the effect? I quite recognise that there may be some cases—I do not know how many, and I do not

  1163
  think the right hon. Gentleman has any idea how many—where this proposal will not have as much effect as in others. Take the case of the rural district councils. They have no pool on which to draw. They are simply to be stopped from house building. If the right hon. Gentleman does not believe me, he had better look at the remarks recently made by the Chairman of the East Ashford Rural District Council in the constituency of his Parliamentary Secretary, who said that this provision will stop rural district council building, and will certainly stop his rural district council from building.
  That is one case, and we have heard of others today—described with great eloquence and particular knowledge—from my hon. Friends the Members for Bootle (Mr. Mahon) and Hackney, Central (Mr. H. Butler). Those are the sort of places where the housing lists for years ahead will go on being filled with applicants whose needs can never, under these arrangements, be satisfied.
  The fundamental fault of the Government is this. In this Bill, they think in terms of houses, and not in terms of human need and of changing human needs. There is provision for decayed houses; there is none for overcrowding, none for the special needs of the aged and apparently no special provision for blitzed cities. The Bill has been concocted by those who may be very capable of thinking in terms of houses and money, but who seem to me, on this occasion at any rate, to have been somewhat bereft of ordinary human sympathy.
  The effect of this Bill will be to confine new council estates to what will be known by everybody as slum clearance estates, and to prevent the bringing together of people of all kinds and all views in one community in a council housing estate. The effect will be that action in respect of the mass of houses in this country which have not yet reached the stage at which they ought to be demolished but which are beginning to reach it and are getting nearer and nearer to it every year—the houses which are already deficient for very many purposes, many, indeed, which might have been condemned if councils had always been fully active in the matter—will be postponed. Building to meet the needs of the young married couples, who have had to live with the father and mother of one or another of
  1164
  them, and who have not been able to get houses of their own, building to meet the needs of people who, in one degree or another, have been miserable under modern housing conditions, and who are seeking something better, building to meet the needs which have not been met, will be indefinitely postponed by the operation of the Bill.
  I recognise, and I believe that all of us on these benches recognise, that there is an inconceivable muddle in present rents, just as there is in present rating. There is an inconceivable muddle because Parliament from time to time has recognised that we cannot go on putting up rents against people who have to live somewhere and who cannot afford to pay more, so that we have had the Rent Restrictions Acts, sometimes a bit crazy in their operation, sometimes repealed in one way or repealed in another, passed for the time being to operate in this way or to operate in that one. I agree that the result is an almost inexplicable confusion.
  But what will this Bill do about it? The Bill is the first step towards killing council housing, and its effect will be to drive those who need houses, with a few specialised exceptions, more and more into the hands of landlords who, at the same time, are to find themselves freed from rent control and able to raise rents. That is no solution. That is an invitation. as some of my right hon. and hon. Friends have already pointed out, to make wage claims to meet those increases in rents.
  If we consider again the case I was talking about just now, the result will be that instead of average earnings of 217s. 5d., the last published figure, average earnings will be required of 370s. in order to maintain the 10 per cent. ratio when subsidies are entirely abolished, assuming the present high rate of interest. This is not the way out. This is only one more muddle.
  There is really only one thing to be done about housing in this country, about the type of house that is at present represented by the rent-controlled house. The relation between the man who owns the house, of whatever type, who is bound to regard it as a money-earning investment, and the man who lives in it as a tenant, is fundamentally wrong. The house is the home of the tenant; it is the income of the landlord. Out of a relation which is

  1165
  fundamentally wrong we never get anything that is politically, morally or administratively right or workable in the long run. I say, therefore, that the only remedy, the remedy from which the Bill is a step backwards, is to take rent-controlled houses—not the owner-occupied ones but the rent-controlled ones—and let them be held, managed, and built in the future by the local authorities.
  There is no other way out. If ideological prejudice and blindness conceal that simple fact from hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite, I ask them to search their own consciences. I ask them to consider what is right in this matter, to consider the only right way out of this muddle, and then to tell me whether there is any other than that which I have just described.
  We propose, for these reasons, to divide against the Bill. It raises numbers of detailed questions of considerable importance. I earnestly hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to assure us that the Bill will be taken in Committee on the Floor of the House. I add one warning to the more sanguine hon. Members on both sides of the House—"Go and look at the Money Resolution before you put your faith in Amendments."
  9.51 p.m.
  The Minister of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Duncan Sandys): I should like to start by giving the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) the assurance for which he has asked, and to say that the Government hope that it will be possible to take the Committee stage of the Bill on the Floor of the House. I hope that that will result in a more expeditious handling of the Measure.
  This has been a much advertised row. For a number of weeks we have read that there was to be the most terriffic battle and storm and violence in the House of Commons over the Second Reading of the Bill. In fact, this has been an extremely sober and constructive debate. Different points of view, naturally, have been expressed, but, with one or two exceptions, those views have been expressed with moderation and, on all sides, with great sincerity. Personally, I have no complaint at all. We have launched the new Measure in an atmosphere which has been certainly very much calmer than the
  1166
  atmosphere that prevailed during our debate on the so-called agreed Measure, the Clean Air Bill, the other day.
  I listened with pleasure to three maiden speeches today. One was delivered by my hon. Friend the Member for East Grinstead (Mrs. Emmet), whose family has a long tradition of service to our country and who comes to the House with a wealth of experience in the public service. We had another extremely interesting maiden speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Barter), and another from my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings), about which I should like to say a little later on.
  I am sure it will be generally agreed that each of the three hon. Members made a distinctive contribution to our discussions from their different standpoints, and I am sure that we all hope they will contribute to our debates again soon. I should also like to refer to the maiden speech, made last Thursday by my hon. Friend the Member for Devonport (Miss Vickers). It sounds patronising to say of an hon. Lady's speech that it was charming, but it was charming nevertheless, as I am sure everybody who heard it will agree.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Devonport and also my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North (Sir A. Hudson) asked a question which I should like to answer now. They asked whether the slum clearance subsidy would be available for houses to replace temporary bungalows. So far as temporary houses are concerned, that is to say Portal houses, the answer is in the negative. Those are good houses and are very useful for small families. It is not part of the Government's policy to simulate the premature scrapping of those dwellings. Temporary hutments, on the other hand, are thoroughly sub-standard—I think that we can all agree upon that—and we want to see them replaced by proper houses as soon as possible. Therefore, dwellings built to replace those temporary hutments, as distinct from the Portal houses, will attract the slum clearance subsidy. [HON. MEMBERS "Oh."]
  I should like to clear up this point, because Lord Portal, being no longer alive, is unable to defend himself, and it is only fair that it should be made clear that the programme of 150,000 temporary

  1167
  houses—I think it was—which as Minister of Works I ordered in 1945, was, in the main, houses already designed and in a far advanced state of planning before I took over. In other words, it was Lord Portal and not I who was responsible for the planning of those houses, and it is very unfair to suggest that he was responsible only for a steel house which was never built.
  Mr. Bevan: The right hon. Gentleman used the term "Portal houses." That was attached to the houses upon which very large sums of money were spent which could not be made because it had not been discovered that steel would not be available to make them. But the other houses, the Arcon house, the Tarran House and the others were not in an advanced stage of construction when he took over, and every business man in Great Britain is of the firm opinion that that was the most stupid policy ever conceived by any Government at any time.
  Mr. Sandys: I know that the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) was not a Member of that Government, but a number of his hon. Friends on those benches were, and the most expensive of all these temporary houses was the one constructed by Sir Stafford Cripps—but I supported the whole programme. The aluminium houses cost about £2,000.
  Mr. Bevan: It was the most successful.
  Mr. Sandys: Anyhow, I supported the policy. I was largely responsible for this policy of the temporary house. I believe that it was inevitable at the time, but we need not be brought into that argument at this moment.
  Mr. Lewis Mr. Lewis rose—
  Hon. Members: Sit down.
  Mr. Sandys: I gave way to an inordinate extent on Thursday because I was very anxious to avoid any misunderstandings. We have now had two days' debate. If I misrepresent anybody, I will, of course, give way, but so far I have not alluded to the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Lewis).
  Mr. Lewis Mr. Lewis rose—
  Hon. Members: Sit down.
  Mr. Sandys: As we are dealing with the history of this subject, I should like to say that the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale devoted part of his speech to complaining about my conduct as Minister of Works ten years ago. His exact words were that he spent his first two years of office cleaning up the demoralised mess in which I had left the building industry. He made the extraordinary complaint in support of that statement that I put more than 200,000 building operatives on war damage work.
  Mr. Bevan: No.
  Mr. Sandys: Yes. The right hon. Gentleman quoted the precise figure of 204,000. If he did not complain about it, I do not know why he wanted to quote a figure which was ten years old.
  Mr. Bevan: The answer is simple. I said that when one estimated the number of houses that could be built after the war, account had to be taken of the very large number of building workers who had to be employed on war damage repairs. I complained about the demoralisation arising from the cost-plus system and about all kinds of people not connected with the building trade who came in and made fortunes.
  Mr. Sandys: The remark about the 204,000 came immediately after. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] I may be wrong, but the OFFICIAL REPORT will show. All I would say is that, so far as building operatives were concerned, the right hon. Gentleman seems to have forgotten that the war was still on and that bombs were still falling. As for the question of cost-plus, my job was to try to do something quickly about houses which had been torn open by bombs and the roofs taken off. Did the right hon. Gentleman imagine that I would send a quantity surveyor around to get out estimates and competitive tenders? I am very proud of the fact that during my period of office as Minister of Works over 700,000 houses were repaired in London while bombs were still falling. As for cost-plus, what I complain about is that it was allowed to drag on for so long after the war was over.
  Various serious allegations have been made during the debate. Various hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Lindgren), who is not here tonight—
  Mr. Bevan: He is away on business of the House.
  Mr. Sandys: I see. He has gone to Peru.
  Mr. Bevan: That is not quite fair. My hon. Friend is elsewhere on the business of one of the societies connected with the House.
  Mr. Sandys: I quite understand. I was told that he had gone to Peru. The hon. Member for Wellingborough, the right hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. A. Henderson), the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Poplar (Mr. Key) and the hon. Member for Aston (Mr. J. Silverman), and I think others also, alleged that the Bill will drive local authorities out of house building altogether. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] That is evidently a point of view which is generally shared by the party opposite. It is utterly absurd and utterly misleading. First, there are in the pipeline a quarter of a million houses which will not be completed for 18 months or more. All of them will attract subsidy at the existing rates.
  Mr. R. R. Stokes: But what about after that?
  Mr. Sandys: Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would let me develop the point. Before very long about half the local authority house building effort will be going into new towns, overspill and slum clearance. And those houses will all be attracting either the same subsidy or a higher one.
  Local authorities will continue to receive nearly £50 million a year in Exchequer subsidies for houses already built which they can spread over the relatively small proportion of new houses. [HON. MEMBERS: "Relatively small?"] Of course it is relatively small. The number of new houses, compared with the existing houses, is a relatively small proportion. If the small increase in rents which this Bill will involve—and I will go into that again later—should entail hardship to some tenants, it is open to a local authority to introduce a differential rent scheme.
  If a local authority genuinely cannot afford to finance its new house building with the new rates of subsidy, it can apply for the additional grant under Clause 5 which, in extreme cases, would permit the
  1170
  subsidy to be raised to as much as £30 a year per house. Therefore, I submit, that there is not one single shred of justification for the misleading and mischievous suggestion that this Bill will drive local authorities out of house building.
  The right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale and the hon. Member for Wellingborough thought it worth while spending some of their time denigrating the Peoples' house. They said that the Conservative Government had lowered the standards of house building. When I asked the right hon. Gentleman whether he thought well of the Peoples' house, he said that he did not think it was a good house. Whatever he may thing about the Peoples' house, I think it a very good solution to the problem which faced us then.
  Mr. James Simmons: Does the right hon. Gentleman live in one?
  Mr. Sandys: Whatever we may think about it, this is not a party issue. I have here a circular sent out by the then Minister the right hon. Gentleman for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton) on 28th April, 1951.
  Mr. F. Blackburn: The party opposite lowered the standard.
  Mr. Sandys: Let us be clear. We are accused by the hon. Member for Wellingborough of departing from the Dudley standard. I think that the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale said the same thing. The Dudley standard lays down that there should be 900 feet super, as they are called. [HON. MEMBERS: "It is 950 feet super."] I believe that it is 900—
  Mr. Bevan: It is 950.
  Mr. Sandys: All I can say is that the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland, in his circular, thought it was 900, and I am still advised by my Department that it was 900. I believe that there were certain exceptional cases in which it was 950. But this is what the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland, then the responsible Minister, sent out to the local authorities. He said:
  "The Minister has now decided to leave it to the discretion of local authorities to dispense with the minimum requirement of 900 feet super for a three-bedroom house …

  1171
  provided that the sizes of the individual rooms and the total amounts of living space do not fall below the present standards,"
  that is to say, the standards laid down in the manual of 1949 issued by the Labour Government. We have adhered precisely to that arrangement.
  Mr. Blackburn: No.
  Mr. Percy Wells: The Conservative Government knocked 6 ins. off the height of the room.
  Mr. Sandys: So far as I am aware, we are adhering to the same arrangements as were to be permitted by the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland in his circular.
  Mr. Bevan: On the contrary. The charge against the right hon. Gentleman is not that he failed to allow the People's house to be constructed, but that in July of last year he placed an order before the House which based his subsidy upon the cost of production of that house, and therefore made it far more difficult for local authorities to build any other more expensive and better type of house.
  Mr. Sandys Mr. Sandys indicated dissent.
  Mr. Bevan: That is the main point—that the Government drove them into it by reducing the subsidy.
  Mr. Sandys: I cannot wag my head as hard as the right hon. Gentleman can. I see that he is shifting his ground. The answer to his point was so well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) that I do not need to repeat it.
  This is the first time I have heard an apologia from the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale. It was an interesting experience that we had this afternoon. He endeavoured to explain away his failure to build houses in adequate numbers when he was the responsible Minister. He may laugh, but in the course of his speech he said that it was a deliberate decision of the Labour Government to build fewer houses—
  Mr. Bevan Mr. Bevan indicated dissent.
  Mr. Sandys: —in order that they might be able to build more factories. Does he deny that?
  Mr. Bevan: I made a perfectly simple statement, which even the Minister can understand. What I said was that we had to decide whether we would build more houses and less of something else, or build less houses and more of something else.
  Mr. Sandys: I rather think that I put the right hon. Gentleman's point more clearly than he did. He can have it as he likes; the fact is that during the last three years of the Labour Government—by which time they had presumably got into their swing—about 80 million square feet of factory space was built. In the first three years of the Conservative Government, almost 100 million square feet were built.
  Mr. Stokes: So what.
  Mr. Sandys: The right hon. Gentleman says, "So what?" My reply is, "So the right hon. Gentleman had better think out a better excuse next time."
  There is a very important statement made by the hon. Member for Wellingborough to which I should like to refer. He said on Thursday last:
  "Knowing"—
  I have the actual quotation here.
  Mr. S. O. Davies: Do not worry. Make it up.
  Mr. Sandys: I do not have to make it up. I have something very good here. This is what the hon. Member for Wellingborough said:
  "Knowing that, with all the other commitments, 200,000 houses was the limit of the capacity of the building industry and the economy of the country, what did the Tory Party do? They built 300,000 houses."
  He went on to say:
  "In fact, much of the trouble with which we are dealing today, together with the problems which the Chancellor is having to handle, arise from the fact that the whole economy of the country was upset by the Tory Government when they set out to build 300,000 houses a year."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 17th November. 1955; Vol. 546, c. 818.]
  We are grateful to the hon. Member for having been so frank. It is evident that the Labour Party still consider that, no doubt confined to Socialist methods, 200,000 houses a year is the maximum that they could produce if they were returned to power.
  Mr. Stokes: Boloney.
  Mr. Sandys: I do not know what other inference one can draw from the statement of the hon. Member for Wellingborough.
  Mr. Stokes: The trouble is that the right hon. Gentleman's mind is not straight.
  Mr. Sandys: I have not such a tortuous mind as the right hon. Member for Ipswich (Mr. Stokes).
  The hon. Lady the Member for Peckham (Mrs. Corbet) made an interesting point, though not a very sound one, the other day, and it was repeated by the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale in his speech today. The hon. Lady argued that differential rents would drive away the better-off council tenants. If asked to pay the full, unsubsidised rent they might, the hon. Lady said, well prefer to go and buy a house of their own. Thus, local authority housing estates would be left only with tenants who needed to be subsidised. This would create what the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale described as "castrated townships." The right hon. Gentleman has a knack of inventing inelegant phrases.
  I agree entirely with him that mixed communities are socially desirable, but that does not mean that everybody has to live in a council house. I do not know of any case where there are not council houses and privately-owned houses in the same local authority area. In fact, the right hon. Gentleman said this afternoon that he had asked local authorities, when he was Minister, to arrange for plots to be left which could be sold to people who wished to buy their own houses. The right hon. Gentleman nods his head in assent. It is therefore absurd to suggest that because a man leaves a council house he has to leave the district and thereby create a castrated township.
  Mrs. Freda Corbet: The point I wanted to make was that the financial aspect of differential rents might very well look quite different in, say, 10 or 20 years' time when a large number of better-off tenants had departed, leaving the local authority with tenants most of whom were in such a position that all their rents had to be subsidised.
  Mr. Sandys: I see the point, but if we are not going to charge the better-off tenants any more, we shall not get any benefit from their being better off, and when they do go—if they do—there will
  1174
  be a council house available without having to build a new one for somebody else.
  The hon. Member for Acton (Mr. Sparks) made an important point on Thursday last when he said that it was not correct that
  "the people living in the slums are being passed over."
  It was against a point that I had made in my speech. He said:
  "They qualify on the housing lists with any other persons. Many of them have been rehoused."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 17th November, 1955; Vol. 546, c. 794.]
  Are hon. Members opposite, and the hon. Member for Acton in particular, suggesting that the families in the slums are already getting as large a proportion of the new houses as is fair and good for them? What does the hon. Member mean?
  Mr. Sparks: The right hon. Gentleman was telling the House that these persons living in the slum areas had been passed over. He made no qualification. That is not a correct statement of fact. Quite a number of them have been re-housed in new housing schemes. That is not to say that there is not a lot still to be done.
  Mr. Sandys: That was just my point. In England and Wales since the war about 1½ million new local authority dwellings have been built. It is probable that, at the most, about 150,000 of these new dwellings have gone to the families from the slums. The reports from local authorities which were published in a White Paper the other day show that in England and Wales there are about 850,000 slum houses. Yet only one in ten of the new houses are going to the families living in these wretched slum areas. Nobody can seriously suggest that these people in the slum areas are getting fair shares.
  There was one speech made on Thursday last which was agreeable to listen to but to which I must take very grave exception, and that is the speech of the hon. Lady the Member for Cannock (Miss Lee). Other hon. Members made the same point, but not with the same pointedness as the hon. Lady. This is a serious matter. She suggested that strikes in industry, such as in mining, engineering and on the railways—she mentioned them specifically by name—would follow the increase in rents which will result from

  1175
  this Bill. The right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale said something similar, but not in the same direct way as the hon. Lady, and that is why I am referring in particular to her speech. This was, I consider, a most irresponsible speech, more particularly coming from someone who has for so long been a Member of this House.
  Miss Jennie Lee: Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will read from HANSARD what I said. I asked him to look at the larger arithmetic of what he was doing and to calculate how much it would cost if the miners or the railway men or any other group of workmen decided that they were entitled to ask for their economic rights and to have the additional money which they would have to pay on rents. Let the right hon. Member quote from HANSARD.
  Mr. Sandys: I think everybody who listened to that speech—[HON. MEMBERS: "Quote."] It was a long speech and I am not going to read it all out. In my view, at any rate, listening to it, I formed the impression that it amounted to little short of incitement to industrial action to frustrate the will of Parliament. As such, I believe it will be resented and repudiated by all responsible Members of the House.
  If the people of this country misunderstand the effects and purposes of the Bill, it will be due to the distortions and misrepresentations of the party opposite and their Communist comrades. [Laughter.] I am glad the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale is enjoying it. I come now—[HON. MEMBERS: "Withdraw."]—to a maiden speech.
  Mr. David Jones: Substantiate or withdraw.
  Mr. Sandys: I come to a reference to a maiden speech, and I hope it will be received with the respect which is due to it.
  Miss Lee: On a point of order. A responsible Minister has referred to my speech. Obviously he has had a copy of HANSARD and can read from HANSARD, but he has not done so. Have I your permission, Mr. Speaker, to read from my speech?
  Mr. Speaker: I am afraid not. There is nothing in the rules of order which allows that to be done. If the hon. Lady
  1176
  feels that she has been misrepresented, on considering the whole matter, perhaps she can see me on a future occasion and see whether it can be arranged for her to make a statement. I have never heard it suggested that an hon. Member is entitled to read from HANSARD in the middle of another speech.
  Mr. Herbert Morrison: On a point of order. May I suggest that the difficulty can easily be resolved by the Minister, having quoted from memory what my hon. Friend said, giving way for a moment in order that my hon. Friend may quote from her speech.
  Mr. Sandys: Since I made the allegation, I think it is up to me to read the text. This is the passage to which I referred, and it is reported in col. 883 of the Report of last Thursday's proceedings. The hon. Lady said:
  "I do not care whether they are miners, bus conductors or engineers—we need them all to make a community."
  So far we can take no exception. The hon. Lady continued:
  "But is it seriously expected that the working people will take a cut in their standard of living—on top of those already contained in the emergency Budget—and that there will be no retaliation?"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 17th November, 1955; Vol. 546, c. 883.]
  Mr. Bevan: It was on the basis of a statement of that sort, which is quite unexceptionable, that the right hon. Gentleman linked a number of names, including my own, and spoke about our "Communist friends." The fact is, the right hon. Gentleman is riding for an awful lot of trouble—and he will get it.
  Mr. Sandys: I know nothing about the right hon. Gentleman's friends. All I observe is that the Communist Party, and the Daily Worker in particular, are running precisely the same line.
  Mr. H. Butler: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that they use a similar type of ink?
  Mr. Sandys: I was about to make a short statement in reply to the speeches made by my hon. Friends the Member for Burton, the Member for Portsmouth, South (Sir J. Lucas), the Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Iremonger) and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke), about slum clearance compensation. They

  1177
  raised the question of the adequacy of compensation for owner-occupiers of slum property in slum clearance areas. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, North called it a grave injustice, and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Portsmouth, West talked about people being robbed of their property by a stroke of the pen.
  I should like to say this to the House. I am very much aware that there are cases of real hardship which arise in connection with the compulsory acquisition of slum property; in particular, owner-occupiers who have bought their houses under scarcity conditions during and since the war may, in certain circumstances, suffer severe financial loss which they could not reasonably forsee. I can give the House the assurance that the Government are considering actively what can be done to ease the position in this kind of case, and I shall make a further statement about this as soon as possible.
  The right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale criticised my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West for relating the level of rents to the level of earnings. He seemed to think it was improper to consider earnings which include overtime, and suggested that only the basic level of wages ought to be taken into account. [Interruption.] I assumed the purpose—
  Mr. Bevan: The right hon. Gentleman assumes too much.
  Mr. Sandys: If the right hon. Gentleman accepts that earnings are a reasonable basis for any of these personal calculations in respect of rent and not the basic level of wages, then I will not pursue that point.
  Hon. Members: Answer.
  Mr. Bevan: The answer is quite simply, as I put it, that if all overtime earnings in a family are taken, what will really happen will be what I said. It must be the earnings, family income—
  Mr. Sandys: Is it earnings or basic wages?
  Mr. Bevan: It must be family income, which may be earnings from several members of the family working overtime. What I suggested was that the less left in the house the more rent is paid for it apparently.
  Mr. Sandys: I cannot follow the right hon. Gentleman's argument. Anyhow, the fact remains that, when he was Minister and calculated the notional rent for the purpose of subsidies, he based it on earnings and not on wages.
  The right hon. Gentleman poured scorn on the calculation I made that the effect of the new subsidies, combined with the rise in the interest rates, would necessitate, on the average, an annual rent increase of about 7d. a week. He said it was only an average and that averages are very misleading. Of course it is only an average, and I made it perfectly clear in my speech that it was only an average; but that average figure of 7d. does give a broad indication of the order of magnitude of the rent rise which will be involved. It may interest the right hon. Member to know that, as a check on my arithmetic, I have made the same calculation for his constituency of Ebbw Vale. The rent increase which will be involved there is almost exactly 7½d. a week. He will see that averages are not always so misleading.
  The alarmist and exaggerated statements made by the Opposition about rent increases which will be involved as a result of this Bill, will, I believe, act as a boomerang. When rents go up by some moderate amount the main reaction of tenants will be, not irritation with the Tory Government, but relief that the rises are so much smaller than they had been led to expect.
  I come last to the rather moving speech of the leader of the Liberal Party, the right hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. C. Davies). He spoke about the shocking conditions in the slum areas. I think we agree with him that they are a standing reproach to the whole nation. The right hon. and learned Member declared his support for this Bill. He said he did so in the belief that it formed part of a wider policy which would tackle the problem of rent control as well as the problem of local government reorganisation. I can assure him that that is our intention. I have already announced that we are reviewing the structure of the Rent Acts. As for local government reorganisation, I hope to be in a position to submit proposals to the House during the course of the present Session.
  This Bill forms part of a consistent and comprehensive policy to build new homes,

  1179
  to save the old houses, to clear away the slums and to restore some fairness and sanity to our housing finance.
  The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (Mr. P. G. T. Buchan-Hepburn)
  rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put:—
  Question put, That the Question be now put:—
  The House divided: Ayes 321, Noes 250.

  Division No. 55.]

  AYES

  [10.40 p.m.

  Agnew, Cmdr. P. G.

  Dodds-Parker, A. D.

  Howard, John (Test)

  Aitken, W. T.

  Donaldson, Cmdr. C. E. McA.

  Hudson, Sir Austin (Lewisham, N.)

  Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)

  Doughty, C, J. A.

  Hudson, W. R. A. (Hull, N.)

  Alport, C. J. M.

  Drayson, G. B.

  Hughes, Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.

  Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)

  Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)

  Hughes-Young, M. H. C.

  Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)

  Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.

  Hulbert, Sir Norman

  Anstruther-Gray, Major W. J.

  Duthie, W. S.

  Hurd, A. R.

  Arbuthnot, John

  Eccles, Rt. Hon. Sir David

  Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)

  Armstrong, C. W.

  Eden, Rt. Hn. Sir A. (Warwick&L'm'tn)

  Hutchison, James (Scotstoun)

  Ashton, H.

  Elliot, Rt. Hon. W. E.

  Hyde, Montgomery

  Astor, Hon. J. J.

  Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn

  Hylton-Foster, Sir H. B. H.

  Atkins, H. E.

  Errington, Sir Eric

  Iremonger, T. L.

  Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.

  Erroll, F. J.

  Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)

  Baldwin, A. E.

  Farey-Jones, F. W.

  Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)

  Balniel, Lord

  Fell, A.

  Jennings, J. C. (Burton)

  Barber, Anthony

  Finlay, Graeme

  Jennings, Sir Roland (Hallam)

  Barlow, Sir John

  Fisher, Nigel

  Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)

  Barter, John

  Fleetwood-Hesketh, R. F.

  Johnson, Eric (Blackley)

  Baxter, Sir Beverley

  Fletcher-Cooke, C.

  Jones, A. (Hall Green)

  Beamish, Maj. Tufton

  Fort, R.

  Joynson-Hicks, Hon. L. W.

  Bell, Philip (Bolton, E.)

  Foster, John

  Kaberry, D.

  Bell, Ronald (Bucks, 8.)

  Fraser, Hon. Hugh (Stone)

  Keegan, D.

  Bennett, Dr. Reginald

  Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe & Lonsdale)

  Kerby, Capt. H. B.

  Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)

  Freeth, D. K.

  Kerr, H. W.

  Bidgood, J. C.

  Galbraith, Hon. T. G. D.

  Kershaw, J. A.

  Biggs-Davison, J. A.

  Cammans, L. D.

  Kirk, P. M.

  Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel

  Garner-Evans, E. H.

  Lagden, G. W.

  Bishop, F. P.

  George, J. C. (Pollok)

  Lambert, Hon. C.

  Black, C. W.

  Glover, D.

  Lancaster, Col. C. G.

  Body, R. F.

  Godber, J. B.

  Leather, E. H. C.

  Boothby, Sir Robert

  Gomme-Duncan, Col. A.

  Leavey, J. A.

  Bossom, Sir A. C.

  Gough, C. F. H.

  Leburn, W. G.

  Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.

  Gower, H. R.

  Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.

  Boyle, Sir Edward

  Graham, Sir Fergus

  Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)

  Braine, B. R.

  Grant, W. (Woodside)

  Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)

  Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)

  Grant-Ferris, Wg Cdr. R. (Nantwich)

  Lindsay, Martin (Solihull)

  Bromley-Davenport. Lt.-Col. W. H.

  Green, A.

  Linstead, Sir H. N.

  Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry

  Gresham Cooke, R.

  Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)

  Brooman-White, R. C.

  Grimond, J.

  Lloyd, Rt. Hon. Selwyn (Wirral)

  Browne, J. Nixon (Craigton)

  Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)

  Lloyd-George, Maj. Rt. Hon. G.

  Buchan-Hepburn, Rt. Hon. P. G. T.

  Grimston, Sir Robert (Westbury)

  Longden, Gilbert

  Bullus, Wing Commander E.

  Gurden, Harold

  Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.

  Burden, F. F. A.

  Hall, John (Wycombe)

  Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)

  Butcher, Sir Herbert

  Hare, Hon. J. H.

  Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh

  Butler, Rt. Hn. R. A. (Saffron Walden)

  Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)

  McAdden, S. J.

  Campbell, Sir David

  Harris, Reader (Heston)

  Macdonald, Sir Peter

  Carr, Robert

  Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)

  Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry

  Cary, Sir Robert

  Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)

  McKibbin, A. J.

  Channon, H.

  Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Macclesfd)

  Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)

  Chichester-Clark, R.

  Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)

  McLaughlin, Mrs. P.

  Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)

  Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)

  Maclean, Fitzroy (Lancaster)

  Cole, Norman

  Harvie-Watt, Sir George

  McLean, Neil (Inverness)

  Conant, Maj. Sir Roger

  Hay, John

  Macleod, Rt. Hn. Iain (Enfield, W.)

  Cooper, Sqn. Ldr. Albert

  Head, Rt. Hon. A. H.

  MacLeod, John (Ross & Cromarty)

  Cooper-Key, E. M.

  Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel

  Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)

  Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.

  Heath, Edward

  Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)

  Corfield, Capt. F. V.

  Henderson, John (Cathcart)

  Maddan, Martin

  Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)

  Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.

  Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)

  Crookshank, Capt. Rt. Hn. H. F. C.

  Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)

  Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)

  Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.

  Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)

  Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.

  Crouch, R. F.

  Hill, John (S. Norfolk)

  Marlowe, A. A. H.

  Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)

  Hinchingbrooke, Viscount

  Marples, A. E.

  Crowder, Petre (Ruislip—Northwood)

  Hirst, Geoffrey

  Marshall, Douglas

  Cunningham, Knox

  Holland-Martin, C. J.

  Mathew, R.

  Currie, C. B. H.

  Holt, A. F.

  Maude, Angus

  Dance, J. C. G.

  Hope, Lord John

  Maudling, Rt. Hon. R.

  Davidson, Viscountess

  Hornsby-Smith, Miss M. P.

  Mawby, R. L.

  Davies, Rt. Hon. Clement (Montgomery)

  Horobin, Sir Ian

  Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.

  D'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry

  Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence

  Medlicott, Sir Frank

  Deedes, W. F.

  Howard, Gerald (Cambridgeshire)

  Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.

  Digby, Simon Wingfield

  Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)

  Molson, A. H. E.

  Monckton, Rt. Hon. Sir Walter

  Remnant, Hon. p.

  Thomas, Rt. Hon. J. P. L. (Hereford)

  Moore, Sir Thomas

  Renton, D. L. M.

  Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)

  Mott-Radclyffe, C. E.

  Ridsdale, J. E.

  Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)

  Nabarro, G. D. N.

  Rippon, A. G. F.

  Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)

  Nairn, D. L. S.

  Roberts, Peter (Heeley)

  Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R. (Croydon, S.)

  Neave, Airey

  Robertson, Sir David

  Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. P.

  Nicholls, Harmar

  Robinson, Sir Roland (Blackpool, S.)

  Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.

  Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)

  Robson-Brown, W.

  Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)

  Nicolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. & Chr'ch)

  Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)

  Tilney, John (Wavertree)

  Nield, Basil (Chester)

  Roper, Sir Harold

  Touche, Sir Gordon

  Noble, Comdr. A. H. P.

  Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard

  Turner, H. F. L.

  Nugent, G. R. H.

  Russell, R. S.

  Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.

  Oakshott, H. D.

  Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.

  Tweedsmuir, Lady

  O'Nelli, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim, N.)

  Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.

  Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.

  Orr, Capt. L. P. S.

  Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.

  Vickers, Miss J. H.

  Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)

  Sharples, Maj. R. C.

  Vosper, D. F.

  Orr-Ewing, Sir Ian (Weston-S-Mare)

  Shepherd, William

  Wade, D. W.

  Page, R. G.

  Simon, J. E. S. (Middlesbrough, W.)

  Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)

  Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)

  Smithers, Peter (Winchester)

  Walker-Smith, D. C.

  Partridge, E.

  Smyth, Brig. J. G. (Norwood)

  Wall, Major Patrick

  Peake, Rt. Hon. O.

  Soames, Capt. C.

  Ward, Hon. George (Worcester)

  Peyton, J. W. W.

  Spearman, A. C. M,

  Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)

  Pickthorn, K. W. M.

  Speir, R. M.

  Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.

  Pilkington, Capt. R. A.

  Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)

  Watkinson, H. A.

  Pitman, I. J.

  Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. (Kens'gtn, S.)

  Webbe, Sir H.

  Pitt, Miss E. M.

  Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard

  Whitelaw, W.S.I. (Penrith & Border)

  Pott, H. P.

  Stevens, Geoffrey

  Williams, Gerald (Tonbridge)

  Powell, J. Enoch

  Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)

  Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)

  Price, David (Eastleigh)

  Steward, Sir William (Woolwich, W.)

  Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)

  Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)

  Stewart, Henderson (Fife, E.)

  Wills, G. (Bridgwater)

  Prior-Palmer, Brig. 0. L.

  Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.

  Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)

  Profumo, J. D.

  Storey, S.

  Wood, Hon. R.

  Raikes, Sir Victor

  Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)

  Woollam, John Victor

  Ramsden, J. E.

  Summer, G. S. (Aylesbury)

  Yates, William (The Wrekin)

  Rawlinson, P. A. G.

  Sumner, W. D. M. (Orpington)

  Redmayne, M.

  Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)

  TELLERS FOR THE AYES:

  Rees-Davies, W. R.

  Taylor, William (Bradford, N.)

  Mr. Studholme and

  Mr. Edward Wakefield.

  NOES

  Ainsley, J. W.

  Corbet, Mrs. Freda

  Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)

  Albu, A. H.

  Cove, W. G.

  Hamilton, W. W.

  Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)

  Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)

  Hannan, W.

  Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)

  Cronin, J. D.

  Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)

  Anderson, Frank

  Crossman, R. H. S.

  Hastings, S.

  Attlee, Rt. Hon. C. R.

  Cullen, Mrs. A.

  Hayman, F. H.

  Awbery, S. S.

  Daines, P.

  Healey, Denis

  Bacon, Miss Alice

  Dalton, Rt. Hon. H.

  Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwly Regis)

  Baird, J.

  Davies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)

  Harbison, Miss M.

  Balfour, A.

  Davies, Harold (Leek)

  Hewitson, Capt. M.

  Bartley, P.

  Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)

  Hobson, C. R.

  Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J.

  Deer, G.

  Holman, P.

  Bence, C. R. (Dunbartonshire, E.)

  de Freitas, Geoffrey

  Holmes, Horace

  Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S. E.)

  Delargy, H. J.

  Houghton, Douglas

  Benson, G.

  Dodds, N. N.

  Howell, Denis (All Saints)

  Beswick, F.

  Donnelly, D. L.

  Hoy, J. H.

  Bevan, Rt. Hon. A. (Ebbw Vale)

  Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)

  Hubbard, T. F.

  Blackburn, F.

  Dye, S.

  Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)

  Blenkinsop, A.

  Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.

  Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)

  Blyton, W. R.

  Edelman, M.

  Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)

  Boardman, H.

  Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)

  Hunter, A. E.

  Bottomley, Rt. Hon. A. G.

  Edwards, Robert (Bilston)

  Hynd, H. (Accrington)

  Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S. W.)

  Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)

  Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)

  Bowles, F. G.

  Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)

  Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)

  Boyd, T. C.

  Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)

  Irving, S. (Dartford)

  Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth

  Evans, Stanley (Wednesbury)

  Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.

  Brockway, A. F.

  Fernyhough, E.

  Janner, B.

  Broughton, Dr. A. D. D.

  Fienburgh, W.

  Jeger, George (Goole)

  Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)

  Fletcher, Eric

  Jeger, Mrs. Lena (Holbn & St. pncs. S.)

  Brown, Thomas (Ince)

  Forman, J. C.

  Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)

  Burke, W. A.

  Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)

  Johnson, James (Rugby)

  Burton, Miss F. E.

  Freeman, Peter

  Jones, David (The Hartlepools)

  Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)

  Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.

  Jones, Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)

  Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)

  Gibson, C. W.

  Jones, Jack (Rotherham)

  Callaghan, L. J.

  Gooch, E. G.

  Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)

  Carmichael, J.

  Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.

  Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)

  Champion, A. J.

  Greenwood, Anthony

  Kenyon, C.

  Chapman, W. D.

  Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.

  Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.

  Chetwynd, G. R.

  Grey, C. F.

  King, Dr. H. M.

  Clunie, J.

  Griffiths, David (Rother Valley)

  Lawson, G. M.

  Coldrick, W.

  Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)

  Ledger, R. J.

  Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)

  Griffiths, William (Exchange)

  Lee, Frederick (Newton)

  Collins, V. J. (Shoreditch & Finsbury)

  Hale, Leslie

  Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)

  1182

  1183

  Lever, Harold (Cheetham)

  Panned, Charles (Leeds, W.)

  Stross, Dr. Barnett (Stoke-on-Trent, C.)

  Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)

  Pargiter, G. A.

  Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.

  Lewis, Arthur

  Parker, J.

  Swingler, S. T.

  Lipton, Lt.-Col. M.

  Parkin, B. T.

  Sylvester, G. 0.

  Logan, D. G.

  Paton, J.

  Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)

  MacColl, J. E.

  Peart, T. F.

  Taylor, John (West Lothian)

  McGhee, H. G.

  Plummer, Sir Leslie

  Thomas, George (Cardiff)

  McGovern, J.

  Popplewell, E.

  Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)

  McKay, John (Wallsend)

  Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)

  Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)

  McLeavy, Frank

  Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)

  Thornton, E.

  MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)

  Probert, A. R.

  Tomney, F.

  MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)

  Proctor, W. T.

  Turner-Samuels, M.

  Mahon, S.

  Pryde, D. J.

  Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn

  Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)

  Pursey, Cmdr. H.

  Usborne, H. C.

  Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)

  Rankin, John

  Viant, S. P.

  Mann, Mrs. Jean

  Reeves, J.

  Warbey, W. N.

  Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.

  Rhodes, H.

  Watkins, T. E.

  Mason, Roy

  Roberts, Albert (Normanton)

  Weitzman, D.

  Mayhew, C. P.

  Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)

  Wells, Percy (Faversham)

  Messer, Sir F.

  Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)

  Wells, William (Walsall, N.)

  Mikardo, Ian

  Ross, William

  West, D. G.

  Mitchison, G. R.

  Royle, C.

  Wheeldon, W. E.

  Monslow, W.

  Shawcross, Rt. Hon. Sir Hartley

  White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)

  Moody, A. S.

  Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.

  White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.>

  Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)

  Short, E. W.

  Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.

  Morrison, Rt. Hn. Herbert (Lewis'm, S.)

  Shurmer, P. L. E.

  Wilkins, W. A.

  Mort, D. L.

  Silverman, Julius (Aston)

  Willey, Frederick

  Moss, R.

  Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)

  Williams, David (Neath)

  Moyle, A.

  Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)

  Williams, Ronald (Wigan)

  Mulley, F. W.

  Skeffington, A. M.

  Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)

  Neal, Harold (Bolsover)

  Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)

  Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)

  Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)

  Slater, J. (Sedgefield)

  Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)

  O'Brien, T.

  Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)

  Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)

  Oram, A. E.

  Sorensen, R. W.

  Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)

  Orbach, M.

  Sparks, J. A.

  Winterbottom, Richard

  Oswald, T.

  Steele, T.

  Woodburn, Rt. Hon. A.

  Owen, W. J.

  Stewart, Michael (Fulham)

  Yates, V. (Ladywood)

  Padley, W. E.

  Stokes, Rt. Hon. R. R. (Ipswich)

  Younger, Rt. Hon. K.

  Paget, R. T.

  Stones, W. (Consett)

  Zilliacus, K.

  Paling, Will T. (Dewsbury)

  Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.

  Palmer, A. M. F.

  Strauss, Rt. Hon. George (Vauxhall)

  TELLERS FOR THE NOES:

  Mr. Pearson and Mr. Arthur Allen.

  Question put accordingly, That "now" stand part of the Question:—
  The House divided: Ayes 319, Noes 243.

  Division No. 56.]

  AYES

  [10.50 p.m.

  Agnew, Cmdr. P. G.

  Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)

  Digby, Simon Wingfield

  Aitken, W. T.

  Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.

  Dodds-Parker, A. D.

  Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)

  Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry

  Donaldson, Cmdr. C. E. McA.

  Alport, C. J. M.

  Brooman-White, R. C.

  Doughty, C. J, A.

  Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)

  Browne, J. Nixon (Craigton)

  Drayson, G. B.

  Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)

  Buchan-Hepburn, Rt. Hon. P. G. T.

  Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)

  Anstruther-Gray, Major W. J.

  Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.

  Duncan, Capt. J. A.

  Arbuthnot, John

  Burden, F. F. A.

  Duthie, W. S.

  Armstrong, C. W.

  Butcher, Sir Herbert

  Eccles, Rt. Hon. Sir David

  Ashton, H.

  Butler, Rt. Hn. R. A. (Saffron Walden)

  Eden, Rt. Hn. Sir A. (Warwick&L'm'tn)

  Astor, Hon. J. J.

  Campbell, Sir David

  Elliot, Rt. Hon. W. E.

  Atkins, H. E.

  Carr, Robert

  Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn

  Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.

  Cary, Sir Robert

  Errington, Sir Eric

  Baldwin, A. E.

  Channon, H.

  Erroll, F. J.

  Balniel, Lord

  Chichester-Clark, R.

  Farey-Jones, F. W.

  Barber, Anthony

  Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)

  Fell, A.

  Barlow, Sir John

  Cole, Norman

  Finlay, Graeme

  Barter, John

  Conant, Maj. Sir Roger

  Fisher, Nigel

  Baxter, Sir Beverley

  Cooper, Sqn. Ldr. Albert

  Fleetwood-Hesketh, R. F.

  Beamish, Maj. Tufton

  Cooper-Key, E. M.

  Fletcher-Cooke, C.

  Bell, Philip (Bolton, E.)

  Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.

  Fort, R.

  Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)

  Corfield, Capt. F. V.

  Foster, John

  Bennett, Dr. Reginald

  Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)

  Fraser, Hon. Hugh (Stone)

  Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)

  Crookshank, Capt. Rt. Hn. H. F. C.

  Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe & Lonsdale)

  Bidgood, J. C.

  Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.

  Freeth, D. K.

  Biggs-Davison, J. A.

  Crouch, R. F.

  Galbraith, Hon. T. G. D.

  Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel

  Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)

  Gammans, L. D.

  Bishop, F. P.

  Crowder, Petre (Ruislip—Northwood)

  Garner-Evans, E. H.

  Black, C. W.

  Cunningham, Knox

  George, J. C. (Pollok)

  Body, R. F.

  Currie, G. B. H.

  Clover, D.

  Boothby, Sir Robert

  Dance, J. C. G.

  Godber, J. B.

  Bossom, Sir A. C.

  Davidson, Viscountess

  Gomme-Duncan, Col. A.

  Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.

  Davies, Rt. Hon. Clement (Montgomery)

  Gough, C. F. H.

  Boyle, Sir Edward

  D'Avigdor-Goldsmid, Sir Henry

  Cower, H. R.

  Braine, B. R.

  Deedes, W. F.

  Graham, Sir Fergus

  Grant, W. (Woodside)

  Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)

  Rippon, A. G. F.

  Grant-Ferris, Wg. Cdr, R. (Nantwich)

  Lloyd, Rt. Hon. Selwyn (Wirral)

  Roberts, Peter (Heeley)

  Green, A.

  Lloyd-George, Maj. Rt. Hon. G.

  Robertson, Sir David

  Gresham Cooke, R.

  Longden, Gilbert

  Robinson, Sir Roland (Blackpool, S.)

  Grimond, J.

  Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.

  Robson-Brown, W.

  Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)

  Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)

  Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)

  Grimston, Sir Robert (Westbury)

  Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh

  Roper, Sir Harold

  Gurden, Harold

  Macdonald, Sir Peter

  Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard

  Hall, John (Wycombe)

  Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry

  Russell, R. S.

  Hare, Hon. J. H.

  McKibbin, A. J.

  Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.

  Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N. W.)

  Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)

  Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.

  Harris, Reader (Heston)

  McLaughlin, Mrs. P.

  Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.

  Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)

  Maclean, Fitzroy (Lancaster)

  Sharples, Maj. R. C.

  Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)

  McLean, Neil (Inverness)

  Shepherd, William

  Harvey, Air Cdre, A. V. (Macclesfd)

  Macleod, Rt. Hn. Iain (Enfield, W.)

  Simon, J. E. S. (Middlesbrough, W.)

  Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)

  MacLeod, John (Ross & Cromarty)

  Smithers, Peter (Winchester)

  Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)

  Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)

  Smyth, Brig. J. G. (Norwood)

  Harvie-Watt, Sir George

  Maddan, Martin

  Soames, Capt. C.

  Hay, John

  Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)

  Spearman, A. C. M.

  Head, Rt. Hon. A. H.

  Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)

  Speir, R. M.

  Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel

  Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.

  Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)

  Heath, Edward

  Marlowe, A. A. H.

  Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. (Kens'gt'n, S.)

  Henderson, John (Cathcart)

  Marples, A. E.

  Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard

  Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.

  Marshall, Douglas

  Stevens, Geoffrey

  Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)

  Mathew, R.

  Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)

  Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)

  Maude, Angus

  Steward, Sir William (Woolwich, W.)

  Hill, John (S. Norfolk)

  Maudling, Rt. Hon. R.

  Stewart, Henderson (Fife, E.)

  Hinchingbrooke, Viscount

  Mawby, R. L.

  Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.

  Hirst, Geoffrey

  Maydon, Lt.-Comdr. S. L. C.

  Storey, S.

  Holland-Martin, C. J.

  Medlicott, Sir Frank

  Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)

  Holt, A. F.

  Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.

  Summers, G. S. (Aylesbury)

  Hope, Lord John

  Molson, A. H. E.

  Sumner, W. D. M. (Orpington)

  Hornsby-Smith, Miss M. P.

  Monckton, Rt. Hon. Sir Walter

  Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)

  Horobin, Sir Ian

  Moore, Sir Thomas

  Taylor, William (Bradford, N.)

  Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence

  Mott-Radclyffe, C. E.

  Thomas, Rt. Hn. J. P. L. (Hereford)

  Howard, Gerald (Cambridgeshire)

  Nabarro, G. D. N.

  Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)

  Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)

  Nairn, D. L. S.

  Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)

  Howard, John (Test)

  Neave, Airey

  Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)

  Hudson, Sir Austin (Lewisham, N.)

  Nicholls, Harmar

  Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R. (Croydon, S.)

  Hudson, W. R. A. (Hull, N.)

  Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)

  Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. P.

  Hughes, Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.

  Nicolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. & Chr'ch)

  Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.

  Hughes-Young, M, H. C.

  Nield, Basil (Chester)

  Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)

  Hulbert, Sir Norman

  Noble, Comdr. A. H. P.

  Tilney, John (Wavertree)

  Hurd, A. R.

  Nugent, G. R. H.

  Touche, Sir Gordon

  Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)

  Oakshott, H. D.

  Turner, H. F. L.

  Hutchison, James (Scotstoun)

  O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim, N.)

  Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.

  Hyde, Montgomery

  Hylton-Foster, Sir H. B. H.

  Orr, Capt. L. P. S.

  Tweedsmuir, Lady

  Iremonger, T. L.

  Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)

  Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.

  Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)

  Orr-Ewing, Sir Ian (Weston-S-Mare)

  Vickers, Miss J. H.

  Jennings, J. C. (Burton)

  Page, R. G.

  Vosper, D. F.

  Jennings, Sir Roland (Hallam)

  Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)

  Wade, D. W.

  Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)

  Partridge, E.

  Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)

  Johnson, Eric (Blackley)

  Peake, Rt. Hon. O.

  Walker-Smith, D. C.

  Jones, A. (Hall Green)

  Peyton, J. W. W.

  Wall, Major Patrick

  Joynson-Hicks, Hon. L. W.

  Pickthorn, K. W. M.

  Ward, Hon. George (Worcester)

  Kaberry, D.

  Pilkington, Capt. R. A.

  Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)

  Keegan, D.

  Pitman, I. J.

  Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.

  Kerby, Capt. H. B.

  Pitt, Miss E. M.

  Watkinson, H. A.

  Kerr, H. W.

  Pott, H. P.

  Webbe, Sir H.

  Kershaw, J. A.

  Powell, J. Enoch

  Whitelaw, W. S. I. (Penrith & Border)

  Kirk, P. M.

  Price, David (Eastleigh)

  Williams, Gerald (Tonbridge)

  Lagden, G. W.

  Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)

  Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)

  Lambert, Hon. G.

  Prior-Palmer, Brig. 0. L.

  Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)

  Lancaster, Col. C. G.

  Profumo, J. D.

  Wills, G. (Bridgwater)

  Leather, E. H. C.

  Raikes, Sir Victor

  Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)

  Leavey, J. A.

  Ramsden, J. E.

  Wood, Hon. R.

  Leburn, W. G.

  Rawlinson, P. A. G.

  Woollam, John Victor

  Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.

  Redmayne, M.

  Yates, William (The Wrekin)

  Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)

  Rees-Davies, W. R.

  Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)

  Remnant, Hon. P.

  TELLERS FOR THE AYES:

  Lindsay, Martin (Solihull)

  Renton, D. L. M.

  Mr. Studholme and

  Linstead, Sir H. N.

  Ridsdale, J. E.

  Mr. Edward Wakefield.

  NOES

  Ainsley, J. W.

  Baird, J.

  Bevan, Rt. Hon. A. (Ebbw Vale)

  Albu, A. H.

  Balfour, A.

  Blackburn, F.

  Allaun, F. (Salford, E.)

  Bartley, P.

  Blenkinsop, A.

  Allen, Arthur (Bosworth)

  Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J.

  Blyton, W. R.

  Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)

  Bence, C. R. (Dunbartonshire, E.)

  Boardman, H.

  Attlee, Rt. Hon. C. R.

  Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S. E.)

  Bottomley, Rt. Hon. A. G.

  Awbery, S. S.

  Benson, G.

  Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S. W.)

  Bacon, Miss Alice

  Beswick, F.

  Bowles, F. G.

  1186

  1187

  Boyd, T. C.

  Hoy, J. H.

  Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)

  Braddook, Mrs, Elizabeth

  Hubbard, T. F.

  Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)

  Brookway, A. F.

  Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)

  Probert, A. R.

  Broughton, Dr. A. D. D.

  Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)

  Proctor, W. T.

  Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)

  Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)

  Pryde, D. J.

  Brown, Thomas Once)

  Hunter, A. E.

  Pursey, Cmdr. H.

  Burke, W. A.

  Hynd, H. (Accrington)

  Rankin, John

  Burton, Miss F. E.

  Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)

  Reeves, J.

  Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)

  Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)

  Rhodes, H.

  Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)

  Irving, S. (Dartford)

  Roberts, Albert (Normanton)

  Callaghan, L. J.

  Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.

  Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)

  Carmichael, J.

  Janner, B.

  Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)

  Champion, A. J.

  Jeger, George (Goole)

  Ross, William

  Chetwynd, G. R.

  Jeger, Mrs. Lena (Holbn & St. Pncs, S.)

  Royle, C.

  Clunie, J.

  Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)

  Shaweross, Rt. Hon. Sir Hartley

  Coldrick, W.

  Johnson, James (Rugby)

  Short, E. W.

  Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)

  Jones, David (The Hartlepools)

  Shurmer, P. L. E.

  Collins, V. J. (Shoreditch & Finsbury)

  Jones, Elwyn (W. Ham, S.)

  Silverman, Julius (Aston)

  Corbet, Mrs. Freda

  Jones, Jack (Rotherham)

  Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)

  Cove, W. G.

  Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)

  Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)

  Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)

  Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)

  Skeffington, A. M.

  Cronin, J. D.

  Kenyon, C.

  Slater, Mrs. W. (Stoke, N.)

  Crossman, R. H. S.

  King, Dr. H. M.

  Slater, J. (Sedgefield)

  Cullen, Mrs. A.

  Lawson, G. M.

  Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)

  Dalton, Rt. Hon. H.

  Ledger, R. J.

  Sorensen, R. W.

  Davies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)

  Lee, Frederick (Newton)

  Sparks, J. A.

  Davies, Harold (Leek)

  Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)

  Steele, T.

  Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)

  Lever, Harold (Cheetham)

  Stewart, Michael (Fulham)

  Deer, G.

  Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)

  Stokes, Rt. Hon. R. R. (Ipswich)

  de Freitas, Geoffrey

  Lewis, Arthur

  Stones, W. (Consett)

  Delargy, H. J.

  Lipton, Lt.-Col. M.

  Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.

  Dodds, N. N.

  Logan, D. G.

  Strauss, Rt. Hon. George (Vauxhall)

  Donnelly, D. L.

  MacColl, J. E.

  Stross, Dr. Barnett (Stoke-on-Trent, C.)

  Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)

  McGhee, H. G.

  Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.

  Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.

  McGovern, J.

  Swingler, S. T.

  Edelman, M.

  McKay, John (Wallsend)

  Sylvester, G. 0.

  Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)

  McLeavy, Frank

  Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)

  Edwards, Robert (Bilston)

  MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)

  Taylor, John (West Lothian)

  Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)

  MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)

  Thomas, George (Cardiff)

  Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)

  Mahon, S.

  Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)

  Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)

  Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)

  Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)

  Evans, Stanley (Wednesbury)

  Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)

  Thornton, E.

  Fernyhough, E.

  Mann, Mrs. Jean

  Tomney, F.

  Fienburgh, W.

  Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.

  Turner-Samuels, M.

  Fletcher, Eric

  Mason, Roy

  Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn

  Forman, J. C.

  Mayhew, C. P.

  Usborne, H. C.

  Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)

  Mikardo, Ian

  Viant, S. P.

  Freeman, Peter

  Mitchison, G. R.

  Warbey, W. N.

  Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.

  Monslow, W.

  Watkins, T. E.

  Gibson, C. W.

  Moody, A. S.

  Weitzman, D.

  Gooch, E. G.

  Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)

  Wells, Percy (Faversham)

  Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.

  Morrison, Rt. Hn. Herbert (Lewis'm, S.)

  Wells, William (Walsall, N.)

  Greenwood, Anthony

  Mort, D. L.

  West, D. G.

  Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.

  Moss, R.

  Wheeldon, W. E.

  Grey, C. F.

  Moyle, A.

  White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)

  Griffiths, David (Rother Valley)

  Mulley, F. W.

  White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)

  Griffiths, Rt. Hn. James (Llanelly)

  Neal, Harold (Bolsover)

  Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.

  Griffiths, William (Exchange)

  Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)

  Wilkins, W. A.

  Hale, Leslie

  O'Brien, T.

  Willey, Frederick

  Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)

  Oram, A. E.

  Williams, David (Neath)

  Hamilton, W. W.

  Orbach, M.

  Williams, Ronald (Wigan)

  Hannan, W.

  Oswald, T.

  Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)

  Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)

  Owen, W. J.

  Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)

  Hastings, S.

  Padley, W. E.

  Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)

  Hayman, F. H.

  Paget, R. T.

  Willis, E. G. (Edinburgh, E.)

  Healey, Denis

  Paling, Will T. (Dewsbury)

  Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)

  Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwly Regis)

  Palmer, A. M. F.

  Winterbottom, Richard

  Herbison, Miss M.

  Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)

  Woodburn, Rt. Hon. A.

  Hewitson, Capt. M.

  Pargiter, G. A.

  Yates, V. (Ladywood)

  Hobson, C. R.

  Parker, J.

  Younger, Rt. Hon. K.

  Holman, P.

  Parkin, B. T.

  Zilliacus, K.

  Holmes, Horace

  Paton, J.

  Houghton, Douglas

  Peart, T. F.

  TELLERS FOR THE NOES:

  Howell, Denis (All Saints)

  Plummer, Sir Leslie

  Mr. Popplewell and Mr. Pearson.

  Question put and agreed to.

  Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Godber.]
  Committee upon Thursday.

  HOUSING SUBSIDIES [MONEY]
  Considered in Committee under Standing Order No. 84 (Money Committees)—[Queen's Recommendation signified.]
  [Sir CHARLES MACANDREW in the Chair]
  Motion made, and Question proposed.
  That, for the purposes of any Act of the present Session to make provision with respect to contributions in connection with housing accommodation, it is expedient—

  A. To authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament to a local authority or to a development corporation in respect of each new dwelling, and in certain cases in respect of the site of a building consisting of or comprising one or more new dwellings, being in either case a dwelling or dwellings approved for the purposes of the said Act of the present Session by the Minister of Housing and Local Government (in this Resolution referred to as "the Minister") and provided by, or provided in pursuance of arrangements under section ninety-four of the Housing Act, 1936 with, the authority, or, as the case may be, provided by the corporation otherwise than in pursuance of such arrangements, of an annual subsidy for a period not exceeding sixty years of the appropriate amount hereinafter specified, that is to say—

  (a) in respect of a dwelling provided for the purpose of re-housing persons displaced by slum clearance or re-development in accordance with a re-development plan within the meaning of the said Act of 1936 or coming from camps or other unsatisfactory temporary housing accommodation designated by the Minister, or for the purpose of accommodating persons from outside the local authority's area in which the dwelling is situated, an annual subsidy not exceeding—

  (i) in the case of a dwelling other than a flat in a block of flats of four or more storeys, twenty-two pounds one shilling or, where that dwelling is provided for the purpose of accommodating persons as aforesaid, twenty-four pounds;

  (ii) in the case of a flat in a block of flats of four storeys, thirty-two pounds;

  (iii) in the case of a flat in a block of flats of five storeys, thirty-eight pounds;

  (iv) in the case of a flat in a block of flats of six or more storeys, fifty pounds, increased by one pound fifteen shillings for each storey by which the block exceeds six storeys;

  (b) in respect of any other dwelling, an annual subsidy not exceeding—

  (i) in the case of a dwelling other than a flat in a block of flats of four or more storeys, ten pounds or, where the Minister thinks fit so to determine in the case of a dwelling provided for the agricultural population of a county district, nineteen pounds;

  1190

  (ii) in the case of a flat in a block of flats of four storeys, twenty pounds;

  (iii) in the case of a flat in a block of flats of five storeys, twenty-six pounds;

  (iv) in the case of a flat in a block of flats of six or more storeys, thirty-eight pounds, increased by one pound fifteen shillings for each storey by which the block exceeds six storeys;

  (c) in respect of the site of a building consisting of or comprising one or more dwellings, being a site as determined in accordance with the said Act of the present Session the cost of which as developed, expressed as a cost per acre, exceeds four thousand pounds, an annual subsidy at the rate of sixty pounds per acre, increased at the rate of thirty-four pounds per acre for every thousand pounds or part of a thousand pounds by which the said cost exceeds five thousand pounds.

  B. To authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of the sums necessary to increase any annual subsidy aforesaid in respect of a dwelling provided by a local authority, if in the opinion of the Minister the provision of that dwelling is urgently needed but would impose an unreasonably heavy rate burden or necessitate the charging of unreasonably high rents, to any amount not exceeding, in the case of a dwelling other than a flat in a block of flats of four or more storeys, thirty pounds or, in the case of such a flat, forty pounds.

  C. To authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of any increase attributable to the provisions of the said Act of the present Session in the sums payable under any other enactment out of moneys so provided.

  D. To authorise the payment into the Exchequer of all sums received by the Minister of Housing and Local Government under the said Act of the present Session.

  In this Resolution, the expression "new dwelling" means a dwelling—

  (a) the tender or estimate for the erection of which was accepted by a formal resolution of a local authority or development corporation passed on or after the third day of November, nineteen hundred and fifty-five, not being a tender or estimate which was submitted to the Minister for approval before that day; or

  (b) provided in pursuance of arrangements under section ninety-four of the Housing Act, 1936, made on or after the said third day of November.—[Mr. Sandys.)

  11.4 p.m.
  Mr. Eric Fletcher: There is one important question which I hope the Financial Secretary will be able to clear up on this Money Resolution. Clause 5 of the Bill gives the Minister power, in certain circumstances, to increase the subsidies. As Clause 5 is

  1191
  drafted, it appears to confine rigidly the circumstances in which the Minister can have power to make these increased subsidies. I hope the Financial Secretary will be able to assure us that the terms of the Money Resolution are not so narrowly drawn as to make it impossible in Committee, during the Committee stage, to put down Amendments to enlarge the scope of Clause 5.
  I am sure the Minister will be aware that there will be a widespread demand by local authorities that the Minister should exercise his powers to increase the subsidies on the ground that a large number of local authorities will be adversely affected by the provisions of the Bill. As Clause 5 now reads, it seems that the Minister can act only if he is satisfied both that there is urgent need for more housing accommodation in a particular locality and that such additional accommodation cannot be provided without imposing an unreasonably heavy rate burden or necessitating the charging of unreasonably high rents.
  The words do not seem nearly wide enough to enable the Minister to deal with the large number of hard cases that will arise and cause acute hardship, particularly in overcrowded boroughs like Islington where there are no longer available any housing sites and where there is an immense housing problem still to be tackled. A number of my hon. Friends and I will necessarily seek during the Committee stage to amend the provisions of Clause 5. Therefore, this is an appropriate time to make sure that we are not told then that the terms of the Financial Resolution are drawn in such a way that such Amendments will be out of order. I hope that we shall have a clarification of that point.
  Mr. G. R. Mitchison: I rise to associate myself with what has just been said. I was amused from one point of view and slightly shocked from another to listen to speaker after speaker in the course of the debate which has just ended urging that his constituency at any rate should be included for all purposes in the scope of Clause 5. "Me-too-ism," jumping on the band wagon, or whatever one calls it, has hardly ever reached such a stage before, and so far
  1192
  as I can see from the Money Resolution—I hope that I shall be corrected—there is not the least prospect of enlarging in any way the terms of the Bill. That does not apply only to Clause 5; it applies to, the Bill as a whole.
  An understanding was restated in the House soon after the war that Money Resolutions on Public Bills—and I include the present Bill as a Public Bill—should be so drawn that their terms would be wide enough to give the Opposition a reasonable opportunity to put forward Amendments. I suggest that this Money Resolution is oppressive and so tightly drawn that any debate that arises afterwards is bound to be academic and will, in practice, be confined to Motions, "That the Clause stand part of the Bill."
  The powers of the Government and of the Treasury ought not to be exercised in this way, to stifle debate and restrict Amendments on a matter of such immense importance as this Bill, important financially, from the point of view of the housing policy, if any, of the Government, and from the point of view of human needs of thousands of people whom we represent. It is altogether wrong, and I trust that I can be told that I am mistaken and that the Money Resolution will admit reasonable Amendments and allow the continuation of Committee proceedings to be something more than the somewhat dreary and restricted business which my reading of the Money Resolution would make it.
  I therefore beg the representative of the Treasury or of the Ministry to tell me that I am wrong and that some line of Amendments is possible and that, by this Money Resolution, the power of the Executive in this House has not once again been abused by the Tory Party.
  Mr. J. A. Sparks: Clause I provides that, on and from 3rd November, the reduced rates of subsidy shall apply unless, prior to that date, the local authority has already approved a tender or estimate for a housing scheme and has submitted it to the Minister. I think it is most unfair to stipulate the termination or reduction of these subsidies to the actual approval of tenders and estimates. The right hon. Gentleman has given the House the impression that he is very much concerned about slum clearance, but he must know that

  1193
  the procedure for slum clearance is a very long one, spreading in many cases over a period of two years before a start can be made.
  A good number of local authorities, both for any slum clearance they now have in mind and for development of housing schemes under Part V of the 1936 Housing Act, have first to obtain the permission of the right hon. Gentleman to acquire the land before they can think of preparing plans and getting estimates. Many local authorities have been committed to spending or raising substantial sums of money in the acquisition of land but have not yet had sufficient time to prepare plans, to secure the Minister's approval of them and then to invite tenders and to submit them to him for final approval.
  Therefore, I feel that if he wants to cushion the blow, as he tells us he does, he should in fairness accept, regarding this date, not the approval of estimates or tenders, but should consider in its place his approval of the acquisition of land for this purpose; because surely the responsibility of the right hon. Gentleman commences at the point where he authorises the acquisition of land for housing purposes. That is where his responsibility starts, and, in fairness to local authorities, they should be incorporated in Clause 1.
  I am not quite clear whether it is possible in Committee to put down an Amendment to ask the Minister to do that. I should rather think the Money Resolution in its present form will put out of order any subsequent Amendment designed to achieve the point I am emphasising. I am asking the right hon. Gentleman to indicate whether the Money Resolution is so tightly drawn, or whether it would be possible to rectify this obvious injustice regarding the date of application of the new and reduced subsidies.
  I should also like to protest against the Money Resolution in so far as it leaves out of consideration the important housing schemes developed by local authorities under Part V of the Housing Act, 1936. Many of these schemes are just as important as slum clearance, because they are in part being used to house families from the slum areas. They are not going to divide these families into the sheep and the goats and allocate a slum
  1194
  family to one flat and someone from an overcrowded area to another flat. The problems of overcrowding and slum clearance cannot be separated. They are the same problem. Therefore, local authorities cannot be expected to develop two separate types of scheme, one earmarked for slum families and another for other families not technically in the slums.
  11.15 p.m.
  What will happen will be that a local authority, developing its housing schemes, will use all its houses to rehouse not only families from the slums but those living in overcrowded conditions and living in many cases in just as bad conditions as a good many people in the slums. If the right hon. Gentleman is anxious that the local authorities shall make a success of this proposal, he cannot do that by leaving out of the Money Resolution provision for the full rate of subsidies for housing schemes of local authorities, irrespective of whether they are for slum clearance or whether they are erected under Part V of the Housing Act, 1936. Therefore, before we part with this Money Resolution we ought to be told quite clearly by the Minister that it allows us in Committee to ensure that housing schemes, apart from purely slum clearance schemes, are going to receive the benefit of subsidies that should be allowed for slum clearance.
  This question of the reduced rate of subsidies is going to have a very considerable effect on the progress of slum clearance. The right hon. Gentleman is actually reducing the scale of subsidies_ The subsidy scale that he has got in this Bill is less favourable than the old subsidies even for slum clearance, and that, with a general increase in interest rates on housing loans, inevitably means that the rents of slum clearance schemes are going to be very much higher. I feel, therefore, that the scale of subsidies for slum clearance are far too low.
  Perhaps I may give one or two illustrations of the added burden that will be placed upon local authorities and the slum families, most of whom are poor people. The right hon. Gentleman will appreciate how inadequate they are. For instance, in a constituency like mine where land is very expensive to buy, with a scheme with a site area of one acre,

  1195
  costing £10,000 to acquire, upon which it is possible to put between 32 and 45 flats, it means that if on such a site my local authority were to erect thirty three-storey flats to house people from slum houses or overcrowded conditions, the reduction in subsidy per flat of three storeys amounts to £34 5s. 8d. per year. That is not merely for one year. It is for sixty years—the period of the loan—and that is a very considerable loan. For four storeys the loss of subsidy is £24 5s. 8d.; five storeys £22 5s. 8d.; six storeys £16 5s. 8d.; seven storeys £15 12s. 7d.; eight storeys £14 14s.; nine storeys £11 15s. 9d. per flat per year for sixty years.
  I do not believe that the scale of subsidies embodied in this Money Resolution is one which will enable local authorities to achieve the purpose the right hon. Gentleman thinks it will achieve. He must realise that quite a number of families who live in slum areas—and it is impossible to say what the number is—whose incomes are low, who are among the poorest people in our country, have very low rents, so that the problem is not a question of designating slum clearance areas, of demolishing the houses and saying to the people "Go along. You go into a new flat." The problem for them is one of rent. In a constituency such as mine, adjacent to the London area, the rents of some of these places, the poorest of the houses, may be very low.
  The right hon. Gentleman spoke about rents of 6s. or 9s. a week for which he said some council accommodation is let. The rent in this poor slum property is very low, and these people are being forced out of low-rented slum property into high-rented council property, where the economic rent will be, not 6s. or 9s. a week, in a constituency like mine, but for a three-bedroomed flat, on the basis of this Money Resolution and the ultimate extinction of the subsidies, £3 5s. a week. The normal rent charged to people in my constituency with full benefit of subsidy is somewhere in the region of 35s. and over a week. Although in my constituency we technically have no slums in the generally accepted sense of the word, we are rehousing people with low incomes, occupying very poor properties,
  1196
  and we find the greatest difficulty in adjusting our rents at a level which enables people to take advantage of the new accommodation.
  If the right hon. Gentleman is anxious that his slum clearance proposals shall succeed, he must be prepared to give a far more generous rate of subsidy than he is proposing in this Bill, otherwise it will defeat its own object and will arouse a great deal of resentment against himself and his Government—which will help us when the people living in these slums realise that he is forcing them out of low-rented properties into other accommodation where there rents will double, treble and quadruple in consequence. He might avoid these snags if he cares to do so; if he cares to increase the rate of subsidy laid down in the Money Resolution he can overcome that difficulty.
  If the right hon. Gentleman's scheme is to succeed, it must be financially favourable. As far as I can see, at present it does not make for success, first because the scale of subsidies is too low, to say nothing about the general rise of interest rates on housing loans, and second, because the right hon. Gentleman is leaving out of his calculation redevelopment under Part V of the Housing Act, which is just as important as redevelopment under Part III. Unless he is prepared to bring in Part V redevelopment and entitle it to the same rate of subsidy as that under Part III of the 1936 Act, he will find in the long run that his proposals are not likely to succeed.
  I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman if he would be prepared to reconsider the basis upon which the reduced rates of subsidies are to apply; whether he will, in fact, take the date of his approval of acquisition of land—where his responsibility begins—rather than the date of approval of tender or estimate. Secondly, I ask whether he will agree to include within the benefit of the subsidies laid down for slum clearance, redevelopment under Part V of the Housing Act, 1936, which is just as important as slum clearance and assists slum clearance in so far as families from slum areas are entitled to be considered with other people on the housing list for accommodation in general housing schemes. In view of the fact that they come from slum areas in redevelopment

  1197
  schemes under Part V of the 1936 Housing Act, I think the right hon. Gentleman should be prepared to bring Part V of that Act within the scope of the Money Resolution.
  Mr. A. Fenner Brockway: Before we pass this Money Resolution, I want to ask certain questions about some of its specific paragraphs. The first question is in relation to the definition of a new dwelling. The Resolution refers to 3rd November as the date on which the new house shall be accepted in the form of a tender. I ask the Minister to reconsider the date. I support what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Acton (Mr. Sparks) on this subject. I suggest it is manifestly unfair to have given local authorities such short notice in this matter.
  I can illustrate a case from my constituency where the advertisement for tenders had actually been issued for 130 houses. Those tenders were to be received on 4th November, one day after the date in this paragraph. As a result, my borough council will lose £94,000 over the sixty years. I suggest to the Minister that, at the very least, he should say that where tenders have already been issued for contracts the borough council should not lose the advantage which otherwise it would have had.
  I wish to ask whether, if we pass this Money Resolution in its present form, it means that when we come to the Committee stage it will be still possible for us to put forward an Amendment to make the date from the enactment of the Bill rather than from 3rd November—even before we have passed the Bill. I ask the Minister to give very sincere consideration to that point.
  The second point to which I draw attention is subsection A, paragraph (a), which starts with the words:
  "in respect of a dwelling provided for the purpose of re-housing persons displaced".
  This refers both to the rehousing of people in slum areas and to what has been called the special provision for overspill. Before I am prepared to accept this Resolution, I should like the Minister to make perfectly clear what is intended by this wording.
  1198
  11.30 p.m.
  I might almost say that all of my constituency is a spillover area. It has increased in population from 17,000 to 65,000 in 30 years by spillovers from the great distressed areas of the country. They were described graphically by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) in his speech. Will the Money Resolution cover the needs which arise in such towns as Slough, Luton and similar places?
  We had exceptional problems because of the rapid growth of our town by this invasion from Wales and the North, from Durham, Scotland and Belfast. We needed to build but we could not build because we did not have the drainage. I recognise that the Ministry of Supply, in both the Conservative Government and the preceding Labour Government, was helpful in enabling us to proceed with that drainage scheme, but during those years we could not build. We now have the problem under the Bill that we have to make up for those lean years.
  The right hon. Gentleman this afternoon suggested that the current contracts for houses are comparatively small compared with the total number of houses built, but in Slough they number 40 per cent. of the houses which have been constructed by the council. Current contracts are for 1,684 houses out of a total of 4,128. Unless the Money Resolution covers that kind of situation, many of us will not be content to pass it. Particularly on these two grounds, I ask for some response from the Minister.
  Mr. Arthur Lewis: My hon. Friends the Members for Islington, East (Mr. E. Fletcher) and for Acton (Mr. Sparks) and others who have spoken from this side are to be congratulated on keeping the Committee at this early hour to discuss a vital matter which has not been fully discussed during the Second Reading debate. It is right that the few of us who remain and who are interested should try to get from the Minister clear information as to how far we shall be able to put forward constituency points in the Committee stage.
  I tried to interrupt the Minister during the Second Reading debate when he dealt, in part, with a point raised by one of his hon. Friends about war damage in blitzed towns and cities. However, the

  1199
  right hon. Gentleman never attempted to deal with the major part of his hon. Friend's argument, which was, "Do the blitzed cities come within what might be called the special extenuating clause—Clause 5—so far as assistance is concerned?" If they do not, then will it be possible, under the terms of this Money Resolution, for us to put down Amendments during the Committee stage?
  My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison), who has sat through the whole of the debate, and whose opinion I value very much, has told us that, as the Money Resolution now stands, it will be impossible for my hon. Friends the Members for Acton and Islington, East and other hon. Friends to put down Amendments. This is a most important matter to those of us who represent the most constituencies in the country—and I refer to London and its surrounding area—because the matter to which I have referred is especially concerned with constituencies such as those.
  Mr. A. Blenkinsop: May I point out to my hon. Friend that what he is saying also affects many constituencies outside the London area?
  Mr. Lewis: I agree. I listened to my hon. Friend's remarks on the Second Reading and only regret that I did not have the opportunity of making such a speech. I agree with what he has just said, but may I emphasise that, as the Money Resolution stands at the moment, it would appear that the blitzed cities, which have been sadly neglected, particularly by this Government, are going to be in an even worse position in the months ahead so far as financial assistance is concerned.
  My hon. Friends make no comment on the amount of the subsidy for the slum clearance programme. It is typical of this Government to be mean and miserly, even after the Minister's explanation that, in view of the depreciation in the purchasing power of the £—
  Mr. Blenkinsop: My hon. Friend means the maintenance subsidy; not slum clearance.
  Mr. Lewis: Yes; well, the maintenance subsidies are not worth so much because
  1200
  of the depreciation in the value of the £. However, I am not so much concerned with slum clearance as with points raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Acton and Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway).
  When is the operative date for the new subsidy? As matters stand, it would appear that the subsidy will apply only to tenders approved by a local authority after 3rd November, and that any future reductions of the subsidy, made under Clause 2 of the Bill, will apply only to tenders made after the date of the order effecting the reduction. In other words, local authorities—and there are many of them which will be thus affected—particularly those in slum areas, have to go through a long procedural rigmarole before they can obtain final approval for development schemes. They get the initial approval from the Minister, and we feel that they should not suffer financially because they may not, perhaps, have the formal tenders agreed by the specified date.
  If my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kettering is right, then if in Committee on the Bill we want the opportunity to provide authorities such as those with maintenance of the subsidy for a longer time, we shall not be able to have it, because the Money Resolution is too restrictive. We should like an assurance on that matter.
  Another matter on which the Minister merely touched in passing was the exclusion of the temporary hutments, the "prefabs." Does that description include those frightful hutments my hon. and learned Friend the Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) can speak about so eloquently here and which I call "railway arches"—the Nissen huts? We want to know whether that type of building will come within the exceptions. Then there are the Army hutments, as they are officially and technically described, which I would call rabbit holes, in which people in blitzed areas have had to live and are still having to live at the present time.
  Then there are the surviving homes, some of them isolated, in bomb-damaged areas, and there is the question of their clearance. Perhaps their removal will not technically come within slum clearance, but I hope the Minister understands that there are areas which the blitz completely

  1201
  or almost completely cleared of buildings, but in which a few houses or a few dozen houses remain, and that they ought to be pulled down for redevelopment purposes, even though that redevelopment may not be slum clearance within the meaning of the 1936 Act. It will, of course, be necessary to clear them away if proper development is to take place in such areas, yet it appears that the local authorities concerned with such work will not get any financial assistance with it under the present arrangements. Moreover, if the Money Resolution is not amended it will, it appears, preclude us in Committee from putting forward our proposals for including redevelopment of that sort in the financial provisions of the Bill, although that redevelopment will be necessary in bomb-damaged areas for rehousing purposes.
  11.45 p.m.
  There is also another matter that affects a number of London boroughs like East Ham and West Ham, which suffered greatly in the blitzes and which, because of the limited amount of available land, have had to create their own overspill areas elsewhere and themselves build houses there. I believe that, as the building authorities, they will not be entitled to the special additional subsidy. It will be the receiving areas, not the exporting areas, which will receive them. Before we approve of the Money Resolution, therefore, we should be careful to safeguard the interests of blitzed areas which suffered so much for so long during the war and which, it would appear, are to suffer again.
  It is all very well to say that we shall help the slum areas. I would not attempt for a moment to under-estimate the problems created by overcrowding and slums, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East (Mr. Blenkinsop) has referred, but the difficulty in constituencies such as I represent is that a third of every type of available accommodation was destroyed in the blitzes. We therefore have a grave housing problem. If we go forward with our plans for clearing and rebuilding, the Minister will say that, under the terms of the Bill and the Money Resolution, we cannot have any subsidy, because the work is not slum clearance. In all probability the Minister would be correct in saying that we could not have an additional subsidy
  1202
  as things stand. I had a word with the Minister on the point. I believe that on Second Reading he said that he would deal with such cases on their merits if there were exceptional hardship.
  The Deputy-Chairman (Sir Rhys Hopkin Morris): The hon Member id now confined to the Money Resolution. He cannot discuss the terms of the Bill.
  The Minister of Housing and Local Government (Mr. Duncan Sandys): I did not refer to this matter in my speech on Second Reading.
  Mr. Lewis: I withdraw if I am wrong, but I understood the Minister to say to one of his hon. Friends that under Clause 5 there would be an opportunity for any authority which was experiencing exceptional circumstances to approach him.
  I was saying before you took the Chair, Sir Rhys, that the Money Resolution debars our putting forward in Committee Amendments to increase the rate of subsidy and to vary the type of housing to which it should apply. I was proceeding to say that it would be wrong to allow the Money Resolution to be passed without expressing our objections. I was asking for some clear explanation from the Minister, and I was saying that there were various types of new building which my hon. Friends felt ought to attract subsidy. Subject to the Chair accepting them, we shall propose Amendments in Committee.
  I was going on to say that I wanted some clear explanation from the Minister. It is not clear whether, as the Resolution stands, the Minister could use it to give exceptional treatment to an exceptional authority under Clause 5. It is not clear whether the Money Resolution would permit this for areas such as my constituency, West Ham. We claim that we have an exceptional problem. We have a rate of 28s. in the £. The interest rates have gone up, and we have to find another £30,000, which is a 6d. rate. This Money Resolution says,
  "(a) in respect of dwellings provided for the purpose of re-housing persons displaced by slum clearance or re-development in accordance with a re-development plan within the meaning of the said Act of 1936 or coming from camps or other unsatisfactory temporary housing accommodation designated by the Minister, or for the purpose of accommodating persons from outside the local authority's area in which the dwelling is situated, an annual subsidy …"

  1203
  I want to get clear whether under the Money Resolution the Minister will have permission, or authority, to extend the subsidy, subject to suitable Amendments being put down and carried in Committee, to cover such areas as West Ham. There the rate of 28s. in the £ will go up to 28s. 6d. to cover the reduction, and eventual abolition, of the subsidy, which is proposed.
  We need some clear, definite explanation from the Minister that the Resolution, as drawn, is wide enough to permit us to deal with these matters. I am not going to argue who is right, the Minister or my hon. and learned Friend. I have great respect for my hon. and learned Friend's view. He tells us that the Resolution will preclude hon. Members from putting down Amendments. I challenged the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mr. J. J. Astor) to support us when we put down an Amendment. Unless we can see that the Resolution is drawn widely enough, the hon. Member will not be able to support us.
  Mr. Elwyn Jones: My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Lewis) is to be congratulated, Sir Rhys, on having caught your predecessor's eye, because he has brought to the notice of the Committee a number of important matters directly related to the Money Resolution. Some of them are of immediate concern to our constituents in West Ham.
  There are one or two aspects of the Money Resolution about which the Committee is entitled to further elucidation and I should like first to refer to the provisions of Subsection B, which are:
  "To authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of the sums necessary to increase any annual subsidy … in respect of a dwelling provided by a local authority, if in the opinion of the Minister the provision of that dwelling is urgently needed but would impose an unreasonably heavy rate burden …"
  Can the Minister give the Committee some indication of what kind of moneys it is contemplated that the Exchequer will be involved in paying under that heading?
  I know that it is impossible to state a specific sum. Of course, at this stage the exact sum is unascertainable, because it is not yet precisely known how many and in what circumstances local authorities will apply for this additional
  1204
  assistance. But it would be of some assistance to the Committee if we could get some idea of the amount involved. Those of us whose local authorities regard Clause 5 as their lifeline, will then be able to know whether it is a lifeline to which they can cling with confidence, or just a little straw cast upon a flood of Ministerial eloquence and ingenuity. I should be grateful for some indication of whether, say £10 million or £20 million is to be put into the kitty for the purposes of special aid, or whether this is merely a face-saving device for the purposes of this unhappy Bill.
  Another matter which is of some importance is the terms of subsection A (a) of the Money Resolution. That is in respect of subsidies payable in respect of dwellings provided for the purpose of rehousing persons coming from camps or other unsatisfactory temporary accommodation. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North has already asked some very pertinent questions about that. I understand from the Minister's speech that he has already decided in his Ministerial discretion that two-year huts at any rate are to be designated as unsatisfactory temporary housing accommodation.
  Does the Money Resolution enable the Minister to go even further in his designation? I have two particular classes of property in mind, one is requisitioned premises the occupants of which will not be acceptable to the landlords as tenants after 1960. That is a matter of very great concern—if I may handle the parish pump once again—to my constituency where about 1,800 houses will be involved. I should like the Minister to tell us whether he is satisfied that the terms of the Money Resolution will enable us at the Committee stage to draft appropriate Amendments, if they be necessary. I hope that he will say that we need not worry about that kind of temporary accommodation, and that rehousing these tenants of requisitioned premises will attract the full subsidy. But certainly I think that is a matter on which we are entitled to information at this stage.
  12 midnight.
  Another class of unsatisfactory temporary accommodation is the class of ten-year bungalows, or "prefabs." The year is 1955. These bungalows were erected almost precisely ten years ago, so their allotted span of life is over. I wonder,

  1205
  therefore, if the Minister can tell us whether, where a case is made out by the local authority that the class of ten-year bungalows, which are not uniform in quality or maintenance, is unsatisfactory, he will feel able, under the terms of this Money Resolution, to say to the local authority, "Yes, that also shall come within the ambit of the financial provisions of this Bill."
  My hon. Friend has also mentioned the problem of provision for the areas of war damage, which is a matter of particular concern in the borough which my hon. Friend and I represent. It is one of the worst blitzed areas in the country. I would like the Minister to say where provision is made in the Money Resolution for what I feel sure he must recognise as a class of housing well worthy of the assistance of the community. I find it difficult, in reading the terms of the Money Resolution, to appreciate where it is dealt with specifically, but this is the kind of problem we have in mind.
  We have considerable areas of war damage, and the redevelopment of those areas will involve, first of all, the demolition of a number of houses. Unless those houses can be condemned under the Housing Act, it would appear that no subsidy would be payable on the houses built to rehouse the occupants of these houses condemned as part of the process of redeveloping a war-damaged area. I would like the Minister to tell us whether the Money Resolution is drawn up in terms adequate to deal with that class of rehousing.
  The matter is one of considerable concern in my constituency, and I feel it would be wrong to let it go unclarified. I feel that the whole class of temporary accommodation provided in West Ham was the product of a national danger and catastrophe, and those of us who represent the area feel most strongly that it is intolerable that time and again this burden, which should be borne by the nation, is cast on the shoulders of an impoverished and hard-pressed community.
  I therefore hope that in dealing with this Money Resolution we shall have assurances that these matters will be dealt with. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison), in what was no doubt intended to be a helpful interjection, has asked whether
  1206
  there is not a sewer to rate. That does not arise directly within the terms of the Money Resolution.
  The Deputy-Chairman: It does not arise indirectly either.
  Mr. Elwyn Jones: It was only the wickedness of my hon. and learned Friend.
  Mr. Lewis: On a point of order, Sir Rhys. Clause 5 with which this Money Resolution deals refers to exceptional circumstances. Surely, the sewer is an exceptional circumstance?
  The Deputy-Chairman: I think it would be in order to ask the Minister what the Financial Resolution includes or excludes, but I do not think hon. Members should go into all the details.
  Mr. Elwyn Jones: I respectfully accept your Ruling, Sir Rhys. It was only the seduction of my hon. and learned Friend which brought me back to an age-old and familiar theme, namely the derating of the Outfall Sewer, on which I can assure the Minister I shall be returning to the attack at the earliest possible opportunity.
  Mrs. Lena Jeger: I should like some guidance on the relevance of this Money Resolution to blitzed areas. This is the sort of problem which I have in mind and on which some assistance is required from the Minister. In the Borough of Holborn, if I may be forgiven for being parochial, we have not yet overtaken our war damage. We are still several hundred dwellings short of the number that were lost during the blitz. We are not alone in this.
  I have read the Resolution through carefully, and I cannot find any hope for a local authority in this position. In cases where these tenements have been destroyed, the previous owners have collected the war damage compensation and have happily retired somewhere. Our problem is to consider what is to happen to the people who used to live in those bombed tenements and who are now living in overcrowded conditions in very great difficulty. We must have some guidance, otherwise the local authorities will be placed in a most unfair position.
  A local council may be trying to continue a housing programme, which is not an expansionist one but one which is

  1207
  intended only to bring up its supply of housing to something near the pre-blitz level, and it may find that there is going through this House a Bill which will make it impossible for any special help to be given to such a bombed area. The urgency of slum clearance has been emphasised, but this Money Resolution will frustrate the efforts of the central London local authorities to carry out slum clearance, because the prerequisite of any slum clearance programme is decanting, and if we have already been prevented from even catching up on our war damage we are never going to be able to decant our slum dwellers anywhere, so that the one acceptable purpose which I believe hon. Members opposite have recommended is itself going to be defeated.
  I hope that the Minister will be able to dispose of this point quickly by giving us an assurance that he regards the blitzed areas of central London and the suburban blitzed areas to which some of my hon. Friends have referred as coming within the category of special hardship to which he will give a little more generous attention. If we could have that assurance, we would know where we stood. As this Resolution is drawn, I cannot see that any thought has been given by the Minister or his advisers to this very urgent problem. These areas which suffered so heavily in the war will be liable to face an ever-increasing rate burden—a burden which is to fall upon people who I should have thought had suffered enough from the bombing itself without now being told that they have got to put their hands deeper into their pockets to pay for the bad luck of having been bombed.
  If I am told that it is the intention within this Money Resolution that the central London authorities should take advantage of the overspill provisions and send their people somewhere else, again I find no comfort because we have to consider the position of men and women whose contribution to the life of our great community involves them living in central London—people like the Covent Garden porters, the Smithfield porters, men and women who work at our railway termini, and the printers who at this moment are producing our newspapers in many streets which border my constituency.
  1208
  I realise that I am in grave danger of overstepping the bounds of order, but I do ask the Minister to help Central London authorities over this, because the problems are all interconnected, and if this Money Resolution goes through in its present form, with no assistance or guidance from the Minister, all these problems, which it would be out of order to discuss at this moment, will accumulate and add to the intolerable burden, both financial and social, of the housing authorities in the Central area. The Committee need not be detained very much longer if only the Minister would, quite simply, give us a little attention and give us the assurance that would help us.
  Mr. Albert Evans: I hope that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) is, for once, incorrect in his interpretation of this Money Resolution. In an earlier intervention he seemed to suggest that it would not be possible to amend Clause 5 of the Bill, which is covered by subsection B of the Money Resolution. Subsection B empowers the Minister to give especially heavy subsidies in certain circumstances, and if Clause 5 were amended to widen that discretion the Minister would be paying out more than he would have paid out had Clause 5 not been amended. I therefore hope that subsection B will allow for the amending of Clause 5 so that the Minister's discretion can be wider than it appears to be at present.
  The Minister will know that the discretion given to him under Clause 5, covered by subsection B of this Money Resolution, is a discretion which is vital to his attempt to deal with slum property. He knows that the amount of discretionary moneys he pays to the hard core areas will largely determine how far he is successful with his slum clearance problem. I therefore hope that my hon. and learned Friend is incorrect about Clause 5 of the Bill and subsection B of the Money Resolution, and that it will be possible for us to amend Clause 5, and that subsection B will cover wider discretions than Clause 5 at present allows.
  Now I wish to say a word or two upon the slum clearance subsection of the Money Resolution. Subsection A gives, in due form, the different categories of building which will be provided for under the slum clearance arrangements, which

  1209
  will receive the slum clearance rate of subsidy. Paragraph (a) says:
  "in respect of a dwelling provided for the purpose of re-housing persons displaced by slum clearance."
  Perhaps the Minister would tell me exactly what that does cover. A problem which has already been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras, South (Mrs. L. Jeger) is that in slum clearance in the inner urban areas, where the hard core of the slum clearance problem lies, the authorities will have great difficulty in claiming the slum clearance subsidy under the slum clearance arrangements if it is not possible under the Money Resolution for them to get the slum clearance rate of subsidy for the clearances they do on decanting sites.
  12.15 a.m.
  The Minister will know that it is vital to a solution of the slum clearance problem in the hard core areas in the centre of cities that the subsidy should be made available. If the Resolution does not make it available, I ask that it be made available to the decanting areas. If we assume that the subsidy is applied to the decanting areas, they will displace people and room must be found for them. I ask the Minister to see that the slum clearance rate of subsidy should apply not only to the decanting areas but to the small isolated areas which must take people from the decanted sites. That is vital for authorities in the older urban areas which are faced with the hard core of this problem.
  I wish to emphasise the point made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) about the phrase:
  "or other unsatisfactory temporary housing accommodation designated by the Minister."
  I ask whether or not requisitioned houses are to be designated as "unsatisfactory temporary housing." That is vital to many hard-pressed authorities, particularly my own. The Borough of Islington, part of which I represent, has probably the most grievous housing burden in the country, with smaller resources than almost any other part of the country. The slum clearance rate of subsidy is vital to that authority to enable it to proceed with the task of clearing slums.
  Will the Minister designate underground rooms as unsatisfactory housing
  1210
  accommodation? Believe it or not, in my borough there is the colossal total of 14,000 underground rooms occupied illegally by human beings because there is no alternative accommodation. I ask whether, under the Money Resolution, the slum clearance subsidy will be payable for dealing with those underground rooms, which are unfit for human habitation, but in which our fellow mortals have to live. I do not wish to detain the Committee unduly, but I feel that on these points—which I know are causing great concern to my local authority and to others—I am in duty bound to put these questions to the Minister.
  The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. W. F. Deedes): A good many questions have been asked about the Money Resolution. If I were to answer them all, I might be in danger of anticipating the later Committee stage, but I appreciate the anxiety of hon. Members as to the drawing-up of the Money Resolution and its narrowness, which, they fear, may preclude discussion at a later stage. The Resolution is admittedly tightly drawn. A subsidy Bill is essentially a Money Bill, and I do not think that in the way we have drawn it we have in any way changed sound precedent for a Money Resolution of this kind.
  The hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) said that the Resolution should be wide enough to enable a good deal to be done in the Committee stage. That is nearly always the view which is expressed from that side of the Committee, but there is the precedent of what happened at the last comprehensive review of the subsidies—that is, in the 1946 Bill. There are precedents, and good ones, for the Money Resolution to be drafted in this form.
  Mr. Lewis: That Bill did not abolish subsidies, did it?
  Mr. Deedes: No. It was the last comprehensive review of subsidies. It had a Money Resolution, and it will be found that it stated, as this one states with great precision, the amount of the subsidy which should be paid in each particular case, and so on.
  Mr. Lewis: What I wanted to get clear was that that comprehensive review did not, as this Measure does, reduce and abolish subsidies.
  Mr. Deedes: I am not talking about what it did. I am saying that it was the last comprehensive review of the subsidies.
  Within those general considerations, may I now try to answer some of the main questions which have been put by hon. Members as to how the Committee stage may be affected by the Money Resolution—
  Mr. Mitchison: I think it was after that Bill that my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) restated the proposition that Money Resolutions on Public Bills ought to be drafted as widely as possible. In so doing, he was merely repeating—this has not always been the Opposition case—what appears on page 681 of the last edition of Erskine May. After a long controversy, in 1937 or thereabouts, the Prime Minister of the day, on 9th November, 1937, announced that instructions were to be given to the Departments and the Parliamentary Counsel's Office that Money Resolutions in respect of Bills should be
  "so framed as not to restrict the scope within which the committees on the bills may consider amendments further than is necessary to enable the Government to discharge their responsibilities in regard to public expenditure, and to leave to the committee the utmost freedom for discussion and amendment of details which is compatible with the discharge of those responsibilities."
  Since, in effect, this Money Resolution repeats the whole language of the Bill, it leaves, so far as I can see, no scope whatever for any amendment. Does the hon. Gentleman consider that a Money Resolution in that form is really consistent with what was arrived at after that dispute in 1937? I hope he will not answer me with a bit more of "1946 and all that".
  Mr. Deedes: I will deal in a moment in a little more detail with what is covered and what is not. What I was stressing was that on the last occasion that there was a comprehensive review of subsidies, the Money Resolution appeared very much in the form in which we are presenting it now. It was then defended by the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale as being, for a Money Bill, an appropriate Money Resolution. All I am saying is that there are respectible precedents for the Money Resolution which is now before the Committee.
  1212
  The hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. E. Fletcher) asked about Clause 5; and I know that that has also been a matter for concern on the part of other hon. Members. That Clause, which is governed by paragraph B in the Money Resolution, is one about which hon. Members have spoken, and I should like to say a word about paragraph B. The important words in that—perhaps I might call them qualifications—are,
  "… would impose an unreasonably heavy rate burden or necessitate the charging of unreasonably high rents. …"
  These words are a repetition of what appears in the Bill, and once the Money Resolution is passed these words cannot be altered. What would be open to hon. Members in committee would be to obtain a definition of both of those expressions.
  Mr. Sparks: It would be very helpful if the hon. Gentleman could give the definition now.
  Mr. Deedes: I should like to help the hon. Member, but it is not for me to suggest such interpretations as might be put upon it. I have to point out that in the Committee stage, which all hon. Members will be able to attend, such definitions as the Committee might then think fit would not be ruled out of order. But, as I say, the limit of my duty tonight is to explain how we stand in relation to the Money Resolution once it has been passed.
  The hon. Member for Acton (Mr. Sparks) and his hon. Friend the Member for Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway) referred to the expression "new dwelling" and the definition of that which is found in the middle of paragraph D of the Money Resolution. They thought that that was an unreasonable arrangement. I have to tell them that the definition of "new dwelling" cannot be altered in the Committee stage, but we do believe that it is right on its merit. Without that, the purchase of a site could never be a satisfactory project. Sites are often purchased years in advance, but if they have been so purchased, they can be used for houses in replacement of slums with no loss of subsidy.
  The hon. Member for Eton and Slough also spoke about overspill, and wanted to know if that expression would cover

  1213
  Slough or Luton. I attempted to cover the point in our first day's debate and to show where we might stand on that, but it is something which cannot be defined quickly. But I do not think we shall be altogether precluded by this Money Resolution, since the categories are open to discussion during the forthcoming Committee stage. Here I should like to stress that, although the Money Resolution is specific as to the amount of the various subsidies, it is, in various respects, more general than the Bill itself in the matter of the different dwellings which attract subsidies. That is a point of substance.
  The hon. Members for West Ham, North (Mr. Lewis) and for Holborn and St. Pancras, South (Mrs. L. Jeger) raised the question of the blitzed cities. I can only repeat what I have already said about paragraph B and the words
  "… would impose an unreasonably heavy rate burden or necessitate the charging of unreasonably high rents …"
  We are committed to these words, and I make no secret of the fact. Any definition which the Committee may be able to add to those words is open to hon. Members to suggest; but it is no part of my duty to say what such definition might be. I think that I may say that it is not impossible to define both these expressions in relation to the blitzed cities, but I do not think that I should go further than that.
  12.30 a.m.
  The hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) wanted to know what difficulties might be involved because of Clause 5 of the Bill. He said Clause 5 would be the life-line and he hoped that I should be able to give a figure showing that it would be of substance. I do not think we can have too many people on the same life-line, if I may use the hon. and learned Gentleman's designation. There is not a figure, and there is no figure I should be prepared to give at this stage. I should not be prepared to commit my right hon. Friend to any estimate, however broad, at this stage.
  Another question has been asked about unsatisfactory temporary accommodation. The words "temporary" and "unsatisfactory" are all-important. If such houses are to be included, both words must apply. I am advised that it would
  1214
  be possible to designate, for instance, Portals, in addition to hutments, as unsatisfactory. That is a matter of policy which, as such, may be discussed in Committee on the Bill. I am not making any commitment about it, but the answer is briefly that accommodation must be shown to be temporary and unsatisfactory, and within that description it is a matter within the Minister's discretion.
  I have done my best to answer the questions I have been asked, and I hope that the Committee, though it may not be altogether satisfied by the drafting of the Money Resolution, will appreciate that it has respectable precedents and that, as far as possible, we have left the Committee, if not scope on the subsidies themselves, flexibility in discussing the various categories of dwellings which may attract the various subsidies.
  Mr. Lewis: Would the hon. Gentleman deal with the question raised by several of my hon. Friends, the development of blitzed areas? Such development may not be town development or slum clearance, but there may be a large blitzed area with, perhaps, a dozen or so houses left in it, which must be pulled down if the area is to be properly developed. Will the local authority, or will it not, be able to claim subsidy for that work of clearance? Shall we be able, in Committee, to put forward Amendments to the Bill on that matter?
  Mr. Sparks: I understood the Minister to say that houses erected under the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act are not included for subsidy. He referred to Portals and unsatisfactory hutments. The Minister has been engaged recently in instructing local authorities to demolish certain of their temporary houses. In my constituency, for instance, the Minister has insisted that certain of those "prefabs," as they are generally known, shall be pulled down within a certain period, and he has authorised the retention of certain others for an additional five years. The "prefabs" were all intended to last ten years only, and then they were to come down, and the people in them were to be rehoused by the local authorities. I would ask the hon. Gentleman if he does not think it fair that subsidy should be maintained on rehousing people from those temporary "prefabs," in view of the fact that the Minister himself, by administrative action,

  1215
  is compelling local authorities to demolish those dwellings, and forcing the local authorities to rehouse those tenants by general housing schemes.
  Mr. Deedes: To reply to the hon. Member for West Ham, North, I was anxious not to mislead the Committee as to what might or might not happen during the Committee stage as a result of the Money Resolution, and I therefore avoided making sweeping generalisations without being sure of the facts. I am rather anxious not to give the hon. Member a snap answer for that reason. The reply to the hon. Member for Acton is that it is a matter of policy as to what will happen in that case, and discussion of it at a later stage is, as I am advised, not excluded by the Money Resolution. That is the best opinion that I can give the hon. Member now.
  Mr. B. T. Parkin: I am sorry to raise a question at this hour, but I should be grateful for the courtesy of a reply from the Minister. I hope that by giving it to a Committee of the whole House he might possibly shorten discussion at a later stage. I ask about the implication of the Money Resolution in connection with high building, a matter of intense importance to the Borough of Paddington and one which, if the Minister gives the right lead, may mean the beginning of a new chapter in the history of English architecture. The Minister knows that I have taken various opportunities to try to lobby him and ask questions on this subject.
  If one did not know much about the Government policy and one saw only the Money Resolution, one might say, "Here is an opportunity for those who have been seeking the chance to experiment with high building in London and other great cities as the next chapter in the history of English dwelling houses and as an alternative to the policy of overspill into distant areas." If encouragement is to be given by special subsidies to overspill, it seems, from the terms of the Resolution, that the Minister offers the choice of overspill to distant territories or overspill upwards.
  I would ask the Minister a question on behalf of those who read into the Money Resolution exciting possibilities of increased subsidies for blocks exceeding
  1216
  six storeys in height in the offer to continue special subsidies for expensive sites and in the reference in paragraph B of the Resolution to that kind of encouragement of higher building. The question is whether the Minister intends to match the Resolution with administrative vigour, and intends it to be a lead to local authorities to get moving at once on proposals for the kind of high building of which he has had examples in the plans for High Paddington, and for Perkins' Heights, which unfortunately he was obliged to turn down.
  If the Minister will say tonight that he meant what he said on Thursday when he referred to local authorities and said they could build as high as they like. and if he will give his personal backing and drive to this new vision of architectural development, I am sure that that will be one thing in the Money Resolution from which the country can obtain some encouragement. It would be rather nice if the Minister could take the opportunity of giving this lead to the local authorities so that his own name may be associated with encouragement of this new development of the English dwelling-house in great cities—this alternative to overspill to new towns.
  Lieut.-Colonel Marcus Lipton: The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government dealt rather cursorily with the question of 3rd November as the limiting date. It was raised by several of my hon. Friends. The hon. Gentleman merely said in reply that the date on which the site was acquired could not be regarded as a satisfactory jumping off ground from the point of view of excluding subsidy, because it might well be that the site was first acquired some considerable time before actual building commenced. That is not the whole story.
  I do not think that my hon. Friends were suggesting that the zero date, or the basis of calculation, ought necessarily to be the date on which the site was acquired, because it must be known that a local authority could be well advanced in the preparation of schemes on which it has embarked to meet declared commitments to those on its waiting list, in addition to having acquired a site. It would be hard that a local authority which had embarked on a number of schemes additional to the acquisition of a site, but had

  1217
  not yet received a tender, should be penalised by rigid adherence to the date of 3rd November. The Parliamentary Secretary dealt with this matter in one sentence. I do not think he did the arguments justice. He claimed that the Money Resolution is flexible. Here is one respect in which he can show himself to be a little more flexible than he has been so far.
  Mr. Deedes: If I may be permitted to do so, I will reply briefly to the two points raised. I know that the hon. Member for Paddington, North (Mr. Parkin) feels strongly about high building. I hope that he has opportunities in Committee to make some of the exciting speeches which can be made on the exciting possibilities. I have to point out that in the Money Resolution, in paragraph A, are clearly specified the rates for the flats in respect of each storey. I do not want the hon. Member to be under misapprehension about what the Resolution says. Subject to that, I am sure that the Minister will be glad to hear from the hon. Member about high building. I hope that he will take part in our future discussions.
  Regarding the point raised by the hon. and gallant Member for Brixton (Lieut.-Colonel Lipton), we do not think that this is an unreasonable definition. Any dateline must cut into someone's programme: it is bound to fall on either one side or the other. The best answer I can give is, as the Minister said earlier, that there are
  1218
  250,000 houses, that is a quarter of a million, in the pipeline which will receive the old rate of subsidy. I hope that that will acquit the Minister of having brought down the guillotine at an unreasonable point.
  Resolution to be reported upon Monday next.

  FOOD AND DRUGS BILL [Lords]
  Considered in Committee; reported, without Amendment.
  12.44 a.m.
  The Solicitor-General (Sir Harry Hylton-Foster): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
  I have listened to many hon. Members saying that they did not wish to detain the House. I do not wish to detain it longer than to say that this is a bulky Bill involving much difficult and skilled labour. I know that the House would not wish to part with it without expressing gratitude to the staff of the Lord Chancellor especially engaged in these matters, and to the Members of both Houses who served on the Joint Committee.
  Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed, without Amendment.

  PRISONER, PENTONVILLE (TREATMENT)
  Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Wills.]
  12.45 a.m.
  Mr. Wilfred Fienburgh: The point which I want to discuss tonight involves a rather squalid and sordid story. It is, fortunately, the kind of affair which is not often raised in the House, and I want quite definitely at the beginning to say that I realise full well that the weight of evidence which will be brought against the case I shall deploy by the Under-Secretary of State will far outweigh any case which I shall be able to bring.
  I am raising one of those unfortunate cases of a prisoner in one of Her Majesty's prisons who alleges that he was forcibly and brutally treated by the warders who were in charge of him. It is not the sort of case which is very often brought to the House. I hope that among the several reasons is the fact that it does not often happen. There are, of course, cases in which prisoners offer provocation to their warders, and I suppose that in theory the warder should not rise to the provocation but be angelic and civil and respond in reasonable terms. That is asking a little much of a human being who is a prison officer.
  In general, the number of cases brought forward is pretty small, but after having had this case brought to my attention some time ago, and having discussed it with people particularly interested in penal reform, the conclusion which I and they have reached is that, although in theory this sort of incident should never happen, in practice it sometimes does, and in fact it is never possible to prove such cases.
  I will not say that there is deliberate collusion among prison officers to hide or suppress evidence, but it is only natural that a prison governor, the Home Secretary, or the Prison Commissioners, if they have to weigh in evidence the word of a convicted criminal—possibly one who has been convicted several times—and the word of a prison officer, the word of the prison officer will usually carry the day. Therefore, in this case I propose to outline the circumstances in
  1220
  some detail, because, frankly, I do believe the prisoner, or the ex-prisoner, who brought this story to me.
  Quite honestly, he is a man with quite a career in Her Majesty's prisons. He assures me that there will be no return to Her Majesty's prisons, because the next sentence which he will almost certainly get will be preventive detention, which he is most anxious to avoid. If it is any help to the Under-Secretary, I will make that point in advance. It is because he is a man with a peculiar code of his own, who reckons that if he were to attack a warder and the warder were to respond in kind he would have no complaint, because that is the kind of code in which he lives, because he accepts that code and has yet persistently for several years now been nagging on this issue—and I have been in correspondence with the Home Secretary—that I am inclined to believe the substance of the story which I shall try briefly to outline.
  The prison in question was Pentonville where he was serving a four-year sentence for receiving. He had nine previous convictions. He had once previously been on report. On this occasion he was on the top storey of the block of cells at Pentonville, I am sorry to have to go slightly into the domestic arrangements of Pentonville, but they come slightly into the case.
  One of the difficulties is that water reaches the higher levels of Pentonville Prison only intermittently and spasmodically, and certainly not when prisoners in the lower cells are using the water supply. Therefore, when slopping-out is in progress—the Under-Secretary will appreciate the term—on the top corridor, there is usually a queue of prisoners with their slops, waiting to get rid of them at a time usually overlapping the breakfast-time. The prison officers are usually anxious to bring an end to these proceedings, because, first, they do not like the smell, and, secondly, because they want to get on with the day's work.
  On this particular occasion the prisoner to whom I am referring was one of the last in the queue, and was ordered by the warder in charge to go back and take his slops back into his cell. He thereupon refused to do so, because, he said, he had had them there all night and he proposed to leave them on the landing.

  1221
  Whereupon he was told that he would be put on report for insolence. That is fair enough. He refused to do what he was told to do by a prison officer. He was therefore put on report the next day on this particular charge.
  The procedure whereby prisoners are taken on report at Pentonville appears to be as follows. They are taken to the lower basement cells, which form both sides of a corridor, and along that corridor they are taken by prison officers to where the Governor or Deputy Governor sits to adjudicate. On this occasion—and I am assured it is the normal practice in Pentonville—the prisoner was taken forward for adjudication with both arms pinioned behind him while being led forward to the Deputy Governor, who was adjudicating that morning.
  I understand this is the normal practice, and I suppose it is the prison equivalent of the "caps off" order which we had in the Army when marching in a man on a charge, a means of seeing that no violence was done to the officer who might be handing out justice. But his hands were seized, and he was marched towards the Deputy Governor, whereupon, being of an aggressive nature, he said, "Don't push me so hard"; whereupon they pushed him harder, he then tried to sit on the floor and was then kicked smartly on the ankles, prodded in the kidneys with a key by one of the warders, and taken up to the Deputy Governor.
  So far he is making no charge of brutality. He tried to sit down on the floor and was pushed along. He complained to the Deputy Governor at the time, and the Deputy Governor said he had seen nothing. The charge was made, he received three days' solitary confinement, with certain loss of privileges and forfeitures, and he was then taken back to his cell to stay in the solitary confinement to which he had been sentenced.
  I understand that while in the cell in solitary confinement, prisoners are confined there most of the day, are allowed out for some measure of exercise, and there is usually a bell handle inside the cell which they can ring to call attention to the fact that they need to go to the lavatory, or for some other purpose. In this case the bell was apparently not
  1222
  working. The prisoner, now my constituent, says that he heard the officers disconnect the bell before they put him in, and he suggests that that is the normal practice of the officers—and admittedly they are overworked, understaffed and underpaid. He says that this is a frequent practice of theirs to avoid the trouble of having to respond to these bells too often.
  However, for whatever reason there may be, the bell did not work. The man was still feeling a certain resentment at the way he had been manhandled down the corridor, and he wanted to report the incident to the Governor. The Under-Secretary will agree that it is necessary, when one wishes to make a charge against a prison officer for manhandling or brutal treatment, that the charge should be made immediately against the officer concerned. But, being unable to attract the attention of the warders by use of the bell, which was not working, the prisoner pounded heavily on the door, whereupon, after some time, the door was opened and four warders came in. I will not mention names in the House, although I have them and they are known to the Under-Secretary.
  The first of these officers said, "You are the bloke who wants to see the Governor," and he hit the prisoner smartly about the face. I am giving all possible benefit of doubt to the prison officers concerned. They may have been working on the simple principle that here was a fairly violent character who had been complaining to the Governor already, and were warning him that if anyone was to be struck at the entrance to the cell they would do the striking first. They would be believed anyway if the prisoner ever complained about it. Their word has been believed, and I can see that that is precisely what went through their minds. They probably thought he was violent when they went in, so they went in quickly and got their blow in first.
  Again, this is a thing which in theory should not happen, and I will insist should not happen in practice either. They closed the door behind them and left him. They came back again later, and this time frogmarched him backwards along the corridor and upstairs. They took him to the prison hospital where they said that they wanted the restraint jacket so

  1223
  that they could put him in it, as he was by then beginning to show signs of violence. I think that is only reasonable, if a man is being frogmarched backwards and has been struck in the face when he has been asking to see the prison Governor in order to make a complaint.
  The story goes—and on this there was a degree of substantiation from the reports that I have had from the prison authorities and in correspondence with the Department—that the principal officer said that he had no power to allow them to place this prisoner in a restraint jacket and that only the doctor could do so. Then they took him away and put him in a strait jacket, the principal officer in charge of the hospital having said that he would give no authorisation and that if they did so they would do it on their own responsibility. From inquiries since, I have found out that the prison doctor was away, and that it is only a prison doctor who can give authority for a prisoner to be put in a strait jacket.
  An outside civilian doctor was acting for the prison doctor, and he was contacted on the telephone by the warders concerned. He gave his permission over the telephone for the prisoner to be placed in a strait jacket. To his credit, he came down quickly and ordered the prisoner to be removed from the jacket. But something had happened in the meantime. It is not an easy matter to be a prisoner in a strait jacket, especially if one resists, and naturally after a degree of provocation it would require a strong-minded man not to show some resistance.
  The principal officer from the hospital came round and saw the prisoner in the strait jacket and found that it had been intolerably tightened by knee pressure in the back so that it was causing acute pain in the groin, and he himself loosened the straps. As a result of that pressure, the prisoner concerned spent over 3½ weeks in the prison hospital. There is some dispute about the period that he spent in hospital. The prisoner said that he spent four weeks and three days in hospital, and the Commissioners accept the fact that he had spent over three weeks in there. But prison hospital is not the kind of place in which I would suggest people would be allowed to remain for slight causes. There must have been something wrong with the man.
  1224
  The prisoner did not go back to his normal cell immediately but was kept under observation in a B.2 block of the prison for a further few weeks. When I took the matter up with the Prison Commissioners I was told that the reason that he had been kept in hospital for over three weeks was that he had slight bruises produced by having been put in a canvas restraint jacket. Surely he would not have been kept there for over three weeks for merely slight bruises. The Prison Commissioners insisted that the bruises had disappeared within four or five days of the incident.
  Here we come across a peculiar story, in which I have made some close investigation myself. The prisoner told me that three or four weeks after the incident, after having first been refused permission to receive a visit from his wife unless he gave prior assurances that he would not discuss the assault which had been made upon him, his wife and daughter then aged seven came to see him in the prison. He tried to show them the bruises which he still had upon his body from the treatment by these four warders. He was dragged forcibly from the interview room by several warders.
  The Prison Commissioners insisted that that interview never took place. I have talked to the daughter. This happened some three or four years ago, and the delay in having brought this matter to the attention of the House is due to the necessity to wait for the prisoner to serve his sentence and to the fact that I have been in correspondence on the matter. The daughter is now aged about ten. I have cross-questioned her closely, without her parents being present, and there is no doubt in my mind at all that the girl was there, she did see her father, she did see him try to show the bruises some four or five weeks after the incident, and she did see him being dragged out of the room. Her mother, who is a kindly and matronly sort of person, tells me the child still suffers at times because of this—because, after all, it is a very disturbing thing to see one's father, not brutally, but fairly roughly handled in this way.
  I believe that this incident took place. There is confusion in the record about it, and it is quite possible that it might have happened. There is no doubt in my mind that the bruises were there long after the Prison Commissioners say they

  1225
  were not. If this was only a slight case of rough handling, why on earth was it necessary for this prisoner to be confined in the prison hospital for over three weeks?
  I therefore say two things. First, on the question of the original assault by the warders who went into the room and struck him, even giving them the best possible benefit of the doubt, I believe this prisoner, although this is where, as I say, the advantage is all against me. After talking this case over, saying I did not believe him, and talking it over with him again and again, I have now come to believe this man's case is true and that these warders went in and struck him. They may have been only anticipating that probably he was going to try to get a blow in first; that may or may not have been in their minds, but they should not have done it, even if in charge of violent criminals. Secondly, there has been such a mix up over the evidence concerning the lengthy stay of this man in hospital that it cannot have been the case that only slight injuries were involved in placing him in a loose canvas restraint jacket; he must have been rather severely bent or leaned upon—as current American phraseology would have it.
  Therefore, I rest this case, first, on the individual case, which I have already discussed with the Department; and secondly, that, having taken up this case and discussed this kind of thing with people interested in penal reform, and with one or two ex-warders, who are constituents of mine but are no longer in the prison service, there seems no doubt that unfortunately this sort of thing does happen from time to time; and although subjected to temptation and provocation, as prison officers no doubt must be on occasion, my belief is that it is entirely wrong that this sort of thing should happen.
  1.3 a.m.
  The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sir Hugh Lucas-Tooth): The hon. Member for Islington. North (Mr. Fienburgh) has raised the case of a constituent, and I do not at all complain of the way in which he has done so. His information has necessarily come largely from the constituent's side of the story, and I think it right that I should try to tell the House what I can of this
  1226
  story having regard to what I have seen in the record.
  The prisoner concerned, in September and October, 1951, received sentences which in aggregate totalled more than four years. He was properly allocated to Dartmoor and served the first part of his sentence at Pentonville. So far there is no difference between us. It was at Pentonville that the incidents which have been mentioned took place. Very careful investigation was made of these incidents fairly shortly after the events took place, and therefore, although they are now some years ago, it is possible, by looking at the records, to see accurately what took place.
  On 24th May, 1952, the prisoner was reported for using improper and obscene language at 7.25 a.m. It seems that he had taken an intense dislike to one particular prison officer. I do not know whether there was any reason for that dislike. I know of no good reason, but it is quite clear that the beginning of these events arose because of that dislike. The prisoner was taken at once before the Governor, and the case was heard by the Governor between 10 and 11 o'clock that morning. There is, therefore some slight discrepancy between what the hon. Member has said and the facts.
  The prisoner was awarded punishment on that occasion. two days confined to cell, two days No. 1 diet, he was reduced in grade 28 days and forfeited three days' remission of sentence. The prisoner was returned to his cell and there became violent and abusive. He made a tremendous noise in his cell, and started banging on the cell door with the chair. One prison officer looked through the inspection glass and saw him standing in the middle of the cell in a wild attitude, threatening violence and saying that anyone who dared to open the door would "get it." Those were the words as reported to me.
  A disturbance of that kind has to be quelled. It cannot be allowed to continue in the interests of discipline or the interests of the other prisoners. The chief officer authorised two officers to take the prisoner out of the cell. A medical officer—it is true that he was not the medical officer of the prison but a locum tenens—authorised the placing of the prisoner in a loose canvas restraint-jacket.
  Mr. Fienburgh: By telephone.
  Sir H. Lucas-Tooth: I have tried to ascertain whether it is known how the authorisation was given, but cannot say whether or not it was by telephone; I have no information on that score.
  There was a struggle in the cell, but it will be seen from what I have said that that was to be expected in the circumstances, I have no doubt that it was quite a violent struggle. The officers removed the prisoner to the observation cell in the hospital and he remained in the loose canvas restraint-jacket from 2.30 p.m. to 6.45 p.m. The hon. Member, I think by a slip, referred to a strait jacket at one time. This was not a strait jacket but simply a loose jacket the effect of which is to prevent the prisoner from using his arms.
  I think it is really quite inconceivable that the prisoner could have sustained any serious injury at all from wearing that strait jacket. He did certainly sustain two large bruises to his left thigh. There is no doubt of that. That would be natural in the circumstances in view of what took place in the cell, but he was in fact allowed out to take slow exercise as early as 2nd June, so that the bruises were not as bad as all that. The evidence I have shows that the bruises had in fact disappeared as soon as 3rd June. The prisoner was kept in hospital until 18th June.
  I cannot at the moment say what was in the medical officer's mind, and what was the reason for keeping the prisoner there for that length of time. I can only suppose that he was exceedingly anxious that, in view of what had taken place, no complaint should be made that the man had been unduly rushed from hospital. The hon. Member may be aware that on occasion I have had to stand at this Box and answer exactly the reverse of the charge he has made, namely that the prison authorities are harsh in taking a man out of hospital too quickly. The prisoner was again punished, not for the resistance he put up, but for his misbehavioúr in the cell, the noise and the banging and the rest of it.
  Mr. Fienburgh: My information, from the hon. Gentleman's Department, says that the prisoner was not put on a report for anything to do with a second offence, but the hon. Gentleman now says that he was punished for some second offence.
  Sir H. Lucas-ToothI appreciate that. I know that reference to which the hon. Member is referring and I think there has been some misunderstanding.
  I want to make it quite clear that the prisoner was not punished for resisting what was done to him when he was taken out of his cell, but he was, of course, punished for the disturbance which he made in his cell when he was there by himself. For that, he received 14 days no association, no earnings, no canteen and no smoking, 7 days No. 2 diet, 28 days reduction in grade and 7 days loss of remission. That was, of course, a more serious punishment, but for a much more serious offence.
  The prisoner's wife visited her husband on 2nd June. That is at variance, I think, with what the hon. Member has been told. Some time after that, she complained to the hon. Member—I am not certain when she made the complaint—that her husband had been "knocked about." It may well be that that would be an appropriate expression; it depends from which side one is considering the story. The hon. Member wrote to my hon. and gallant Friend the Home Secretary, whereupon a thorough investigation was made.
  The prisoner himself wrote to the hon. Member in, I think, October. 1952, and he made a number of further complaints. All of them have been investigated and I should like to deal with them, as they answer a number of specific points made by the hon. Member. In the first place, the prisoner complained that he was not allowed to wash his chamber pot. That is really the opposite of what the hon. Member said this evening.
  Mr. Fienburgh: The hon. Gentleman must not misunderstand me; perhaps I was not sufficiently clear. The prisoner was on the top corridor of Pentonville Prison and was one of the last in the queue. It was because the prison officer, against whom he may or may not have had the dislike, ordered him to take his chamber pot back into the cell, swill it out and wash it, that the first incident arose in which the obscene language and the insolence occurred.
  Sir H. Lucas-Tooth: I am sorry that I misunderstood the hon. Member. I am told that the allegation that the prisoner was not allowed to wash the chamber pot is not true.

  1229
  The second complaint is that while undergoing restraint, the prisoner kept on demanding to see the Governor and that these requests were refused. Of course, the Governor had personally dealt with the report when the prisoner came before him between 10 and 11 o'clock that morning. The Deputy Governor visited the prisoner in the hospital cell at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, when he made no complaint beyond inquiring why he was wearing the loose jacket.
  Then the prisoner says that he asked the deputy chief officer if he could see the medical officer but that nobody came. In fact, the deputy chief officer denies that the prisoner made any such request. The prisoner complained that he did not receive appropriate medical treatment. I think that that was a quite general complaint and related not to this specific occasion, but at all events it is quite clear
  1230
  from the medical officer's report, which I have seen, that the position is quite the contrary, and that the prisoner did receive medical treatment on this and on many other occasions.
  The prisoner asked why a certain prison officer had been moved from the prison; and apparently tried to make some sort of capital out of that fact. The truth is that that was quite unconnected with the incident, and the prisoner was properly told that he was not entitled to know why particular officers were moved. The prisoner then complained that—
  The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
  Adjourned at sixteen minutes past One o'clock.

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