Sitting of 11 April 1974

Preamble
The House met at Eleven 0'clock
PRAYERS
[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]
ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS
  AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND FOOD

    Horticulture Industry
    Mr. Blakerasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether he will make a statement about his proposals for the expansion of the horticulture industry.
    The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Roland Moyle): The Farm and Horticulture Development Scheme and the Horticultural Capital Grant Scheme provide encouragement to growers to modernise and, where appropriate, expand their production.
    Mr. Blaker: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that his right hon. Friend was reported in the Grower magazine of 16th March as saying that he was anxious to see horticulture expand and that he hoped to see more access to this country for low-cost producers? How does he reconcile those two statements? Are we to be forcibly fed on tomatoes and have subsidised chrysanthemums?
    Mr. Moyle: I think my right hon. Friend was drawing attention to the desirability of having stable and reasonable prices for consumers in this country at the same time as encouraging the horticulture industry.
    Mr. Michael Lathamasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what representations he has received since 21st March regarding the current difficulties being faced by the horticulture industry; what reply he has sent; what action he proposes to take; and whether he is now in a position to make a statement on his policy on this matter.
    Mr. Adleyasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he is now in a position to make a statement on the steps he intends to take to alleviate the hardship caused to the horticulture industry by the increased cost of oil.
    Mr. Biggs-Davisonasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he has completed his consideration of the cost of fuel oil to horticulturists; if he will provide relief for Lea Valley growers affected by the increase of oil fuel prices; and whether he will make a statement.
    The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Fred Peart): I intend to introduce a temporary subsidy at a flat rate for all types of heating oils in circumstances in which the grower already qualifies for rebate of the 1p a gallon excise duty. A payment of 6p a gallon will be made on oil delivered in the first six months of this year and 4p a gallon for the second six months. There will be no subsidy on oil delivered after 31st December 1974.
    Payments will he made under the authority of the Appropriation Act and a Supplementary Estimate will be presented in due course. One provisional estimate of the cost is £7 million.
    In accordance with our treaty obligations our intention to introduce this new subsidy is being notified to the EEC Commission and it will be discussed through Community institutions along with proposals for corresponding aids to their own producers put forward by other member States.
    Mr. Latham: The House will be very grateful for this immediate cash injection and will want to consider the Minister's statement carefully. Constituents of mine have been working 70 or 80 hours a week and earning at the most £16 a week from their activities, and have even been reduced to living off their savings.
    Mr. Peart: I am grateful for the hon. Member's comment. As for the method of payment, growers will make their normal claims for repayment of excise duty and the subsidy will be paid on the same evidence that the oil has been supplied.
    Mr. Newens: Many of the growers in the Lea Valley would have faced bankruptcy if this decision had not been taken.

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    They will receive the announcement with great pleasure.
    Mr. Peart: I am grateful for those remarks.
    Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop: Does the Minister not appreciate that welcome as the announcement is it will be almost entirely offset by the Chancellor's VAT proposals, which mean that the horticulturist, on average, will have to support, out of his meagre cash flow, six weeks' consumption of oil and the VAT on it, and that therefore the right hon. Gentleman is only giving with one hand what the Chancellor is proposing to take away with the other?
    Mr. Peart: The hon. Member must be aware of the history of VAT. I have taken this decision and I am glad it receives the approval of the House.
    Mr. Stephen Ross: The announcement will be extremely welcome to the growers in my constituency, where there has been rapid expansion in the last 10 years. Did I hear the Minister correctly to say that the arrangement would finish at the end of 1974? If that is so, why? I understand that in Holland these prices have been pegged until the end of 1975.
    Mr. Peart: I think that the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that I have to have consultations and that in the circumstances the decision and the timing were right. However, I am, of course, always prepared to look at a subsidy.
    Mr. Anthony Stodart: Will the right hon. Gentleman tell the House how this figure compares with the subsidies that we hear are to be given in other countries in Europe? Is he aware that in the middle of February I set an inquiry afoot within the Department to find this information in conjunction with the NFU? I was a little puzzled when, in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone (Mr. Wells) last Friday, the Parliamentary Secretary said that he had no knowledge of such an inquiry. Has the right hon. Gentleman had the information that the inquiry was designed to bring out?
    Mr. Peart: Naturally, I asked for the information. During the past few days, I have heard of the Dutch proposals for a subsidy at 2p per gallon. Other pro-
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    posals have been made by the French and German Governments, but I understand that the details have not yet been settled.

    Milk (Production and Quality)
    Mr. Pardoeasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will make a statement on his long-term policy relating to the production levels and quality of milk produced on British farms.
    The Minister of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Norman Buchan):Our objectives are to encourage the maximum expansion of efficient milk production, as of agricultural production generally, and a continuing improvement in milk quality.
    Mr. Pardoe: That is a simply splendid aim, but will the hon. Gentleman be a little more oncoming about the way in which he intends to carry it out? Is he aware that milk production and the quality of milk is falling as a result of the impossibility of affording the high prices of foodstuffs? What immediate steps will he take to ensure that the quality and production of milk will rise?
    Mr. Buchan: As the hon. Gentleman knows, there was a fairly big injection into the milk industry as a result of the last review. As for the livestock industry in general, we ourselves have given it an injection following my right hon. Friend's discussions in Brussels. We are watching the position. We appreciate the hon. Gentleman's point, but there is no indication of a severe fall in quality.
    Mr. Gwynoro Jones: I accept that my hon. Friend appreciates the major problem, but is he aware that in the last six months milk production declined by 45 million gallons? Will he promise to keep under close and continuous review any major change in the animal feeding stuff situation in the coming months?
    Mr. Buchan: Yes. As my hon. Friend knows, I have been saying a great deal about this in the last few months. We shall keep the situation under review. The important thing is to see how the trend develops in the spring and summer months.
    Mr. Peter Mills: Does the hon. Gentleman realise that the further subsidisation of milk has created a serious imbalance

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    between milk for liquid consumption and for cheese making? This, coupled with a cut in production, will mean that there could be a serious shortage of cheese and butter by Christmas. Will the hon. Gentleman accordingly take further steps to see that milk production is increased?
    Mr. Buchan: As I said, we are keeping the matter under review. I appreciate the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but I do not expect a shortage of milk for liquid consumption. If there should be a shortage on the manufacturing side, we know the steps which we shall have to take to deal with it.
    Mr. Bidwell: Does my hon. Friend not agree that as this is a vitally important food, in which we are self-sufficient, it is absolutely criminal to carry on a policy of not providing children with free school milk?
    Mr. Buchan: That question is not directly one for me; it concerns my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science. I think my hon. Friend will agree that the massive subsidy that has been given to milk production in this country, helping primarily, as it does, the less well-off families, is a major step in the direction in which I am sure my hon. Friend wants to go.

    Brucellosis
    Mr. Beithasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether he will institute an investigation into the reasons for the lack of success of the brucellosis eradication scheme in Northumberland.
    Mr. Moyle: No, Sir. The factors are well known. Northumberland has a heavy weight of infection and some local husbandry practices make eradication difficult. Advisory effort by the Ministry is limited by the veterinary manpower available.
    Mr. Beith: Does the hon. Gentleman realise that there is a deep concern about the likelihood of the scheme collapsing because the figures which his hon. Friend produced in Written Answers show that the rate of withdrawal and breakdown is double the national average? What action does the hon. Gentleman propose to take to deal with the shortage of vets to which he has referred?
    Mr. Moyle: I am aware of the concern in the area. We are applying the normal Ministry practices, and there is the incentive scheme to produce clean herds. We are aware of the shortage of veterinary manpower, and that the situation is causing some concern.
    Mr. W. E. Garrett: Is my hon. Friend aware that part of the trouble in Northumberland lies with the farmers themselves, because they are reluctant to participate in a voluntary scheme for the eradication of brucellosis? It has been very disappointing indeed.
    Mr. Moyle: Yes, I am well aware that husbandry practices in the area make it very difficult for the voluntary scheme to operate. We are doing our best to encourage farmers to take part in it.
    Mr. Wiggin: On the point made by the Minister about the State Veterinary Service, can he say when, if at all, the Government will make an announcement about this matter, and whether he will consider employing private veterinary surgeons to assist, in view of this shortage of manpower?
    Mr. Moyle: We hope to maintain the State Veterinary Service at its established strength. Unfortunately, I am unable to give a date when we might be expected to make an announcement.

    Beam Trawling
    Mr. Wallasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he proposes to proceed with the banning of beam trawling within the 12-mile limit.
    Mr. Luceasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether he plans to introduce an order to ban beam trawling.
    Mr. Bowdenasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food when the ban on heavy beam trawling will be imposed up to the 12-mile limit.
    Mr. Buchan: I would refer the hon. Members to the answer I gave to the hon. Member for Thanet, East (Mr. Aitken) on 9th April— [Vol. 872, c. 107]—which, in case the hon. Member missed it, was that I intend to review the whole position for myself and consult urgently once more with all the interests involved.
    Mr. Wall: I thank the Minister for that reply, but I wonder whether he appreciates that the previous Government finally decided, on conservation grounds, that beam trawling should be abandoned. Is he aware that some fishermen abuse the whole concept of beam trawling by loading the beams with chains, which is definitely a bad practice from the point of view of conservation? Will he take action as quickly as possible?
    Mr. Buchan: The regulations have not yet been brought in, and I am taking the opportunity to look into the matter myself. I want to look at the scientific evidence and at both sides of the argument. With any luck, I hope to use a portion of the recess to go down to the area myself, if I possibly can, to have discussions. I am concerned about conservation, but I do not want to hinder unnecessarily an efficient method of fishing.
    Mr. Luce: Will the Minister do his best to make a decision as quickly as possible? Is he aware that the previous Government undertook weeks of consultation with the fishing industry before taking their final decision? Is the hon. Gentleman aware also that the inshore fishermen of Sussex are giving evidence that their catch so far this year is roughly half their catch last year? May we have an assurance that the Minister will keep closely in mind the whole problem of conservation and the need to preserve our offshore breeding grounds?
    Mr. Buchan: I shall keep all these matters in mind. In terms of inshore fishing, I have lived with these problems for 30 or 40 years. I know the problem to which the hon. Gentleman refers, and I shall be paying great attention to it.
    Mr. Bowden: The Minister's reply will be very disappointing to the inshore fishermen of Sussex, and of Brighton in particular. He will find on his file—I hope that he will study it—the correspondence which I sent to his predecessor from all chief fishery officers in the country, who overwhelmingly said that they believe that there should be an immediate ban on this type of beam trawling and who are convinced that it will lead to long-term permanent damage. Since widespread consultations have already been taken, will the hon. Gentleman
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    please act quickly, since otherwise there will not be any fish left to catch?
    Mr. Buchan: I ask the hon. Gentleman to recognise that there has been no delay. In the meantime, I am taking the opportunity to re-conduct the discussions. I remind the hon. Gentleman, lest he has forgotten, that we are now the Government, the responsibility is ours, and, with respect, I think that the responsible Minister is entitled to re-examine the evidence before he finally decides whether to proceed with the regulations. I shall bear all the points in mind, including any fresh representations which the hon. Gentleman wishes to put to me.
    Mr. Costain: Will the Minister take it that the situation is exactly the same on the Kent coast and in the Straits of Dover? Does he realise that while we are waiting for a decision beam trawling is going on apace and conservation is becoming a serious problem?
    Mr. Buchan: I do not think that the situation will be greatly altered by the time scale which I have set myself for the discussions.
    Mr. Anthony Stoddart: Will the hon. Gentleman accept from me that I found this an immensely difficult matter to decide? Will he, at the same time, take into account that there was—and there is no reason to suppose that there is not still—a tremendously heavy weight of opinion in the fishing industry itself which should not be neglected? I detected a shake of the head on the Minister's part when my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Mr. Bowden) said that people would be very disappointed if the previous Government's decision were not adhered to. I assure the hon. Gentleman that the concern is not confined to Sussex. The representations made to me came from all over the country.
    Mr. Buchan: I think that we are coming to a sorry pass if shaking one's head is seen as a definitive answer in these matters. However, I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's recognition of the difficulties, and I acknowledge the attention which he gave to the matter himself. Perhaps he will bear in mind that there is always a tendency to get an imbalance of argument one way or the

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    other when these interests come up. In a sense, I suppose that the beam trawler-men reacted a little slowly on this matter. What I am trying to do, regardless of the volume of the representations made, is to assess the merits of the representations. I shall try to do it as objectively as I can.

    Cheese (Import Levies)
    Mr. Bodyasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether he will take steps to end the levy on cheese imported from countries outside the EEC.
    Mr. Buchan: The levies are required under the rules of the common agricultural policy. The operation of the common agricultural policy is one of the matters to be covered in the negotiations referred to in the statement made to the Council of Ministers on 1st April by my right hon. Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary.
    Mr. Body: Does the hon. Gentleman realise that the levy on cheese now imported from outside the Common Market is £247·69 a ton, and even in the case of New Zealand, with which we have a special arrangement under the Treaty of Accession, the levy—or tax—on what used to be cheap cheddar from that source has now risen to £217·95 a ton? Does this levy now make any sense, when we are being told by members of the Milk Marketing Board that there is a real danger of having cheese rationed before the end of this year? Will vigorous action be taken by the Minister of Agriculture in Brussels to bring these levies to an end?
    Mr. Buchan: I confirm the figures which the hon. Gentleman has given. I think that it would be better if I did not comment on the discussions which have been initiated by my right hon. Friend. We have outlined to the House the method of approach which we were adopting. The hon. Gentleman will, no doubt, recall some of my own remarks in the past on this and similar levies.
    Mr. Jay: Has this levy any purpose other than carrying out the obligations of the common agricultural policy?
    Mr. Buchan: I suppose that the short and correct answer is probably "No, Sir".
    Mrs. Kellett-Bowman: Knowing that the well being of milk farmers is of vital importance not only to the farmers themselves but to housewives, and knowing that the well being of milk producers and beef producers is inextricably interwoven, will the Minister acknowledge that beef farmers in my constituency are desperately worried about his handling of the beef problem? Since they know that even those who are to benefit from the calf subsidy will receive no benefit until July at the earliest, will the hon. Gentleman kindly meet a delegation of farmers from my constituency at the earliest possible moment during the Easter Recess to discuss their plight?
    Mr. Buchan: I take it that the hon. Lady's concern is about cheese if it arises on this Question, though if it relates to another Question it may be about beef.
    Mrs. Kellett-Bowman: The whole lot.
    Mr. Buchan: We have received a large number of representations. Indeed, I am beginning to think that the threshold of the Ministry of Agriculture has been permanently darkened by the powerful figure of Sir Henry Plumb over the past few weeks.
    Mrs. Kellett-Bowman: Answer my question.
    Mr. Charles Morrison: Is it not a fact that there is a world shortage of cheese, and does not that shortage stem partly from the easing of import quotas into the United States, with the consequence that much New Zealand cheese which would otherwise come here is now going to the United States? Do not these facts underline the need for increasing milk production at home? In view of the assurance which the hon. Gentleman gave to one of my hon. Friends a few minutes ago, will he say what steps he will take, and when, to encourage the home producer to increase his output?
    Mr. Buchan: To a large extent, I answered that question in earlier replies. We are looking at the matter to see to what extent we are required to take any further action. Reverting to my last reply, may I say that I welcome the presence of Sir Henry Plumb. What I was trying to emphasise was how ably the representatives of Britain's farming

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    industry have been putting their case to us over the past five weks.
    Mr. Pym: Does not the phrase used by the hon. Gentleman show that he does not understand the magnitude of the difficulties facing agriculture today? Does he not totally underestimate what is actually happening?
    Mr. Buchan: No, Sir, I do not.

    Live Animals (Export for Slaughter)
    Mr. Whiteheadasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will now make a statement about the Government's intentions concerning the ban on the export of live animals, following the publication of the O'Brien Report.
    Miss Fookesasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will introduce legislation to ban permanently the export of live animals for slaughter.
    Mr. Peart: The hon. Members know that the interested parties are being consulted and that for the time being we shall not resume export licensing. I am unable to make any further statements until the views of the interests concerned are known.
    Mr. Whitehead: Is my right hon. Friend aware that many of us on both sides of the House very much regret the recommendations of the O'Brien Report? Is he further aware—I say this in the friendliest way—that in this Parliament the Government have no chance of stopping the ban on the export of live food animals should they propose to do so?
    Mr. Peart: I hope that my hon. Friend, whose views I know well, will recognise that I must consult all organisations. There may be a debate before a decision is reached.
    Miss Fookes: I recognise the Minister's need to consult, but will he bear in mind that any attempt to resume these exports will be met with my implacable hostility and, I hope, that of many of my hon. Friends.
    Mr. Peart: I understand the hon. Member's views and take note of them.
    Mr. Ronald Atkins: Is my right hon. Friend aware that many of us who have studied the export of live animals find
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    some conclusions in the O'Brien Report incredible? We are concerned not merely with the transit but with the fact that when they are exported these animals are slaughtered in conditions which would not be accepted in Britain.
    Mr. Peart: The matter is being discussed and I am meeting various organisations. It would be wrong to comment on the report.
    Mr. Hooson: Is it not a fact that the O'Brien Report does not bear out the misgivings expressed by hon. Members about this trade? Is the Minister negotiating with his colleagues in the Common Market to ensure that there are proper safeguards, so that those who are worried about this issue can be assured and the trade can continue?
    Mr. Peart: I must have consultations with the Community on the latter point. For the moment I have stated my position and I must wait before making a statement. As I have said, there may be a debate.
    Mr. Winterton: Is the Minister aware how disappointing his answer will be to the farming industry, which wants an immediate removal of the ban? I am sure that he accepts that agricultural wages are ridiculously low in this country and that the workers have a special case. Unless farmers can make a profit they cannot pay their farm workers more money. By imposing the ban the Government have reduced the farming industry's profitability.
    I am one of the few Members of this House who has bothered to go to Europe with a consignment of cattle, and I agree with the report that there is little evidence of any general ill-treatment of animals either on the way or in the slaughterhouses on the Continent.
    Mr. Peart: The hon. Member is being unreasonable in demanding a statement of approval this morning. Parliament made a decision on this matter. I think I am adopting the right course of action.

    Forestry
    Mr. Anthony Stodartasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if the consultations which have been taking place on the detailed aspects of a future policy for forestry have been

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    concluded; and if he will state what decisions have been reached.
    Mr. Moyle: Consultations are still in progress. Decisions will be reached when they have been concluded.
    Mr. Stodart: Will the Minister say what is now causing a hold up in what I freely admit has been a long drawn out operation? Is it the level of grants, or are the Government not satisfied with the plans that I, perhaps with a little prejudice, thought were good for combining forestry with questions of amenity and the integration with agriculture?
    Mr. Moyle: The prime reason for the delay has been the decision to hold a General Election and the problems which arise from a new Government taking over.
    Mr. Roderick: Has my hon. Friend any proposals for reducing the advantage enjoyed by private forestry over the Forestry Commission and for introducing much stricter control into planning applications for planting?
    Mr. Moyle: We shall be consulting on these matters during the course of the next few weeks.
    Mr. Watt: Many woodland owners have no idea what to do about the 1974–75 planting programme because the decision has not been taken by the Government.
    Mr. Moyle: We have the matter very much in mind and hope to be able to announce a decision as soon as possible.

    Pig Swill Feeders
    Mr. Hal Millerasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what representations he has received from pig swill feeders on the regulation due to come into force in July; and how he intends to reply to them.
    Mr. Moyle: My Department has received a number of letters about the new regulations raising points of detail which are being dealt with in the usual way. In addition, representations have been received against the regulations from the Waste Food Pig Feeders' Association and a full reply has been sent to the points raised in its memorandum.
    Mr. Miller: Is the Minister aware that while the majority of swill feeders heartily
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    concur that the cowboys in the business should be controlled, and would welcome more even enforcement of the 1957 order, their efforts to comply with the new regulations are hampered by the delays in obtaining grant approvals, planning permissions and the necessary building materials? They are frustrated by a lack of finance stemming from the low market price of pigs and by the unworkable nature of some of the regulations. Their efforts are threatened by the lack of any assurance that their licence will be renewed subsequently if they have not met the standards this year.
    Mr. Moyle: I am not without sympathy for the many problems faced by the breeders of swill-fed swine. We hope to review the situation at the end of this month.
    Mr. Anthony Stodart: I do not think we can take too many precautions to get on top of animal diseases like SVD, and we support anything that is practicable. Will the Minister give an assurance that anyone who has done his best to comply with the regulations but has been held up by lack of materials or the other problems referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove and Redditch (Mr. Miller) will not be put out of business on a certain date, but that there will he flexibility and tolerance in the mater?
    Mr. Moyle: I am grateful for the support offered by the right lion. Member for Edinburgh, West (Mr. Stodart). I cannot go as far as he has asked, but we have that aspect of the problem very much in mind and we shall be reviewing it and making an announcement. I do not think that pig producers will be disappointed.

    Poultry
    Mr. Biffenasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what consideration has been given to providing relief for the United Kingdom poultry producers on account of high feed costs on grounds analogous to the assistance recently announced for the pig industry.
    Mr. Buchan: I am not satisfied that such action is called for at the moment. I am, however, keeping the matter under review, and indeed my right hon. Friend met a deputation from the industry yesterday to discuss the position.
    Mr. Biffen: Just in case this topic has been overlooked in the perpetual pilgrimages that we understand Sir Henry Plumb is making to the Ministry of Agriculture, will the hon. Gentleman confirm that in fact feeding costs are precisely the same in the poultry industry as they are for pig producers, and that, therefore, the poultry industry is faced with the implications of having to sell its product against subsidised competition? Is he aware that there is a widespread sentiment that, at current producer prices for eggs and poultry, costs are barely being covered?
    Mr. Buchan: I know the problem. In general the hon. Gentleman is correct. The problem of feeding stuffs faces the whole of the livestock industry, but particularly pig and poultry producers. We are keeping an eye on the situation. We should like to achieve greater stability of production in relation to demand than there has sometimes been in the past, with the more rapid cyclical turnover in the poultry industry. We are keeping the matter under review.
    Sir D. Renton: As my hon. Friend has asked that the poultry industry should be treated by analogy with the pig industry, will the hon. Gentleman bear in mind that the help recently given through the EEC to the pig industry, welcome though it was, is not preventing that industry from declining, which is contrary to the interests of not only producers but consumers? Is he aware that unless this decline is stopped immediately, the economy will suffer badly from the heavy slaughtering of pigs over the next few weeks?
    Mr. Buchan: We are again moving rather far from the Question. To a large extent, the argument that I was putting up last year, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman will remember, related to the problem of the cost of feeding stuffs. That has been partly taken care of by the Price Review under the Conservative Government and also by our discussions in Brussels, followed by the injection of £15 million into the pig industry. The complaint of the hon. Member for Oswestry (Mr. Biffen) is that that did not happen to the poultry industry, but I am keeping the matter under review.
    Mr. Pym: I do not wish to be in any way offensive to the hon. Gentleman, but is he aware that his replies sound extraordinarily complacent? Does he not know that the consequences of the rise in food costs, affecting not only poultry but pigs and beef, are extremely serious but that it sounds, certainly to my hon. and right hon. Friends, that the hon. Gentleman has not grasped just how serious the present situation is?
    Mr. Buchan: I must say that that is a bit rich, coming from a member of the Cabinet in the former administration. We have been in office for only five weeks, and agriculture does not alter all that much in five weeks. If there is a basic problem facing us, it must lie at the door of the Opposition.
    Mr. Pym: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the real cause is the result of his right hon. Friend's negotiations in Brussels? I know that his right hon. Friend was very pleased with that result, but the truth of the matter is that that is what has caused the problem, and that is what the hon. Gentleman does not seem to understand.
    Mr. Buchan: The right hon. Gentleman should know that we were endeavouring—I believe successfully—to harmonise the interests of the consumer and the needs of the producer. That is what we regarded as our duty and that is a duty that we have fulfilled.
    The problem facing agriculture was the rapid rise in costs of £600 million or £700 million, resulting in our being confronted with a review in the middle of an election. That rapid rise occurred during the last administration. We had to deal with the situation as we found it. We decided that doing so would not be at the cost only of the consumer in this country, and that we had to secure the interests and the needs of the farmer while protecting the interests of the consumer. We therefore embarked on discussions in Brussels, with the object of keeping down prices for consumers while seeking means of injecting capital into the beef industry and the pig industry. The right hon. Gentleman should be congratulating us and apologising for his Government's record.

    >Milk (Sales)
    Sir G. de Freitasasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether he is aware that in each of the last six months the sales of milk were less than in the same month a year ago ; and in what month he expects the sale of milk to be greater than the year before.
    Mr. Buchan: Mainly as a result of high feed prices, sales of milk have been running at a lower level than last year. It is not possible to forecast precisely future levels of production.
    Sir G. de Freitas: Is not that very disappointing? Has it not been Government policy not only to make milk production once more profitable but to increase the sales of milk, especially to young people?
    Mr. Buchan: I agree on both counts. Indeed, we have been hearing that consumption will increase, partly because of our subsidy, to the extent that there may be some shortage on the manufactured side. I agree that it is important to get a proper response from the industry and we shall do all we can to ensure that.
    Mr. Hooson: I am bound to say that the hon. Gentleman appears to be excessively complacent. Does he not appreciate that milk production, beef production and pig production are all declining in this country, largely because of the failure of the previous Government, and that although the present Government have had time to review the position they are showing excessive complacency in a critical situation?
    Mr. Buchan: I agree with exactly half of that analysis.
    Mr. Hooson: Which half?
    Mr. Buchan: The half in which the hon. and learned Gentleman correctly attributed blame. We are far from being complacent. We have already made two major injections into the industry and we have had innumerable discussions. We have taken a number of rapid decisions, as is admitted by the Opposition and certainly the farming industry. Having inherited problems of the gravity that we found on taking office, we have taken steps quickly. We shall not be panicked, but we have taken initial steps and we
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    shall take further steps if they prove to be necessary.

    New Zealand
    Mr. Raphael Tuckasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in what way the alterations in policy which he recently negotiated with the EEC will affect the United Kingdom's ability to purchase food from New Zealand.
    Mr. Peart: Directly, not at all; but indirectly the increase in the butter subsidy has probably averted a fall in butter consumption.
    Mr. Tuck: Is my right hon. Friend aware that not long ago—a matter of weeks—Mr. Walding, the Minister of Overseas Trade in New Zealand, said that cheap food from New Zealand would still be available to this country? Is it not about time that we took advantage of that situation? In answering Question No. 8 from the hon. Member for Holland with Boston (Mr. Body), my right hon. Friend gave figures for the cheese duties that I found disconcerting.
    Mr. Peart: I assure my hon. Friend that I am concerned with Commonwealth trade and with New Zealand. Indeed, that will be a subject within the context of renegotiation.
    Mr. Jopling: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that, as a result of his disastrous negotiations with the EEC, we are likely to be able to buy a good deal less beef from our own sources, let alone New Zealand, in future? Is he aware that he infuriated farmers in his own part of Cumbria? Is he aware that after his meeting with the Cumbrian NFU last weekend it issued a statement saying that it was appalled that a Minister of Agriculture who for 33 years had supported guarantees should have made a settlement without any guarantees for beef producers following his Brussels negotiations? Is the right hon. Gentleman making arrangements to see that at future meetings with farmers the back door is unlocked, so that he may creep out, as his Labour predecessor did?
    Mr. Peart: I assure the hon. Member that my package deal in Brussels was welcomed in this House, even by Conservative Members. I believe that it struck the right balance between the interests of producers and consumers. I am answering

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    questions on New Zealand at present. I am prepared at any time to answer questions relating to the farmers of Cumbria. I am always ready to meet them. There is no question of my sneaking out through any back door.
    Mr. Jay: Does not the present situation show that the system of intervention buying without guaranteed prices, introduced by the Conservatives, is just as damaging to producers as to consumers? Would it not now be the logical step for the Government to return to the system of guaranteed prices and deficiency payments?
    Mr. Peart: I have a certain sympathy with what my right hon. Friend says, but at present I am answering questions dealing with New Zealand.
    Mr. Anthony Stodart: Is the Minister aware that the remarks attributed to the New Zealand Minister of Trade are a travesty of what he actually said—
    Mr. Tuck: No.
    Mr. Stodart: —and that there is no cheap food left in New Zealand or anywhere else? Is he also aware that he was immediately criticised from the Opposition Front Bench for his failure to provide either intervention or a guarantee for beef? Does he recall that during his last period of office his effigy was burnt? How long does he think it will be before farmers do it again?
    Mr. Peart: This is a Question relating to the Commonwealth. It was the right hon. Gentleman's party which did not negotiate a sensible agreement for New Zealand dairy products. It was his party which was responsible for the Treaty of Accession. We shall seek to renegotiate it.

    Forestry Commission
    Mr. Wattasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will take steps to ensure that the wages of Forestry Commission workers are based on the average weekly wage of agricultural workers and not on the statutory minimum wage, as at present.
    Mr. Moyle: The pay of the Forestry Commission's forest workers is a matter for its industrial and trade council, where negotiations are at present in progress.
    Mr. Watt: Is the Minister aware that many of these men, dedicated workers, are taking home wages below subsistence level? Does he realise that they have no chance to work overtime, and get no perquisites, as do agricultural workers? Is it not time that something was done quickly?
    Mr. Moyle: No doubt the hon. Member's remarks will be noted. Since negotiations are in progress I should not like to say anything further.
    Mr. John Ellis: May I apologise to you, Mr. Speaker, and to the House in that I was not here for an earlier Question of mine? Will my hon. Friend consider the position of craftsmen, which is plainly unsatisfactory?
    Mr. Moyle: I take it that my hon. Friend is referring to craftsmen in the agricultural industry.
    Mr. Ellis indicated assent.
    Mr. Moyle: I shall certainly make sure that his views are made known to the Agricultural Wages Board. My hon. Friend will appreciate that the board is an independent body, over which my Department has no direct influence.

    Sugar Industry
    Mr. Dykesasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will make a statement on his proposals for the reorganisation of the sugar industry in Great Britain.
    Mr. Peart: I am considering this matter urgently, but I am not yet in a position to make a statement.
    Mr. Dykes: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that that answer is as complacent as the answer given by the Minister of State about the pig industry? Is he further aware that there is an acute shortage of the sugar needed for manufacturing industry in this country—so much so that it will not be long before it begins to affect housewives? When does he think that will be? Will he consider taking much more urgent action than he has so far contemplated?
    Mr. Peart: I hope the hon. Gentleman realises that the current shortage of sugar is not caused by any arguments about the reorganisation of the industry.

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    I am having urgent talks with the industry, sections of which I have already met. Discussions under the previous Government went on for a long time. I must be responsible for my decision, and it is therefore right that I should have proper discussions.
    Mr. Pym: Does the right hon. Gentleman expect any difficulty, from the Commonwealth point of view, in supplying the 1·4 million tons? Will he assure the House that he is negotiating the maximum possible increase in the sugar beet acreage quota in Europe? Does he not think, in view of the present situation, that it is a matter of urgency that a speedy conclusion should be reached about the industry's reorganisation?
    Mr. Peart: The right hon. Member has raised wider issues on this question. I am dealing specifically with reorganisation. I shall note carefully the points that he has made. I have already met Commonwealth Governments on this subject and I have been to Brussels. I give the right hon. Gentleman my assurance that I am aware of the urgency of the matter. I hope to make a statement as soon as possible.

    SOUTHALL
    Mr. Ridleyasked the Prime Minister if he will make an official visit to Southall.
    The Prime Minister (Mr. Harold Wilson): I have at present no plans to do so, Sir.
    Mr. Ridley: In that case will the Prime Minister invite the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Bidwell) to visit his five homes, of which the hon. Member appears to disapprove, to show him that they are all put to good use and that there is nothing to complain about? Will he further assure his hon. Friend that to own three houses is in no sense a social injustice, and is no worse than land reclamation?
    The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend is perfectly capable of speaking up for himself. I am sure the hon. Gentleman recognises that I do not have a house in Southall.
    Mr. Bidwell: I assure my right hon. Friend that if he should change his mind
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    and visit Southall, in my division, he will receive a warm-hearted, multi-racial, new-fashioned Socialist welcome. Is he aware that some memories are sufficiently long to recall that the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley), who tabled this Question, was known at the time of the Upper Clyde shipbuilding business as "Butcher Ridley"?
    The Prime Minister: I thank my hon. Friend. I remember the warm-hearted multi-racial, new-fashioned welcome which I received last time I was in Southall. Anyone in Southall must attach first importance to the problem of the multi-racial community there. There has been great success in solving this. The House will be aware of the interest some of us have taken in the work done by the late Hugh Anderson, who founded special facilities there for helping various groups to come together.

    BBC EXTERNAL SERVICES
    Mr. Ashleyasked the Prime Minister if he is satisfied with the coordination between the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office regarding the BBC's external services.
    The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir.
    Mr. Ashley: Is my right hon. Friend aware that cuts in the BBC's Overseas Service would muffle the voice of Britain at a time when our words are far more important than our warships, and when other countries are extending their foreign transmissions? Is he further aware that while I appreciate the need for cuts in public expenditure I am disturbed by the attitude of general vagueness of the Foreign Office? Will he kindly give a commitment to the House to the effect that there will be no further cuts in the Overseas Service of the BBC?
    The Prime Minister: I hope my hon. Friend will not feel that the inquiry going on means that any decision has been taken, or is in prospect. This is an automatic review of all areas of public expenditure, following the adoption of the Estimates announced by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer last December. All areas are being reviewed, as is right. The House knows the importance of the external services and the job they

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    do. We have to look at costs and, in particular, at value for money.
    Mr. Biggs-Davison: Cannot some of the home media learn from the BBC's World Service something about reading the news straight?
    The Prime Minister: I think there is something in what the hon. Gentleman says. One of the great values of the external services, quite apart from the message that is sent out to many nationals in a large number of countries, is that they help expatriate Britons abroad who can get—as many of us find when we travel abroad—a straight, clear and informative kind of news about this country.
    Mr. Michael Stewart: Does my right hon. Friend agree that it would be much easier to damage this country's interests by curtailing these services than to repair that damage later if there were a change of policy?
    The Prime Minister: I agree with my right hon. Friend. As I have said, here, as in all other aspects of expenditure, a review is made and decisions have to be taken by Parliament.
    Mr. Tom King: Does the Prime Minister recognise that there is considerable concern in many quarters that the Home Office should have any responsibility for co-ordinating broadcasting services, and that the recent changes that have been made following the abolition of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications mean that this extremely sensitive area of broadcasting comes under much more direct political control?
    The Prime Minister: I am not aware of any representations that have been made on that point. The hon. Gentleman might like to get in touch with myself or the Home Secretary. I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman's criticism. It does not arise out of this Question because responsibility for the BBC's external services is with my right hon. Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary.

    PRESS
    Mr. Molloyasked the Prime Minister if he will now appoint a commission of inquiry into the Press.
    Mr. loan Evansasked the Prime Minister what further consideration has been given to the proposal to set up a Royal Commission to investigate the ownership of the newspaper industry: and if he will make a statement.
    The Prime Minister: I would refer my hon. Friends to the reply which I gave on 9th April to the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Taylor).
    Mr. Molloy: Does the Prime Minister agree that a free and unfettered Press is vital to the establishment and maintenance of our free society, that the Press has played an important part in the past, and that the loss of any newspaper, national or local, is a threat to the great rôle that the Press has played? Does my right hon. Friend further agree that an inquiry in which journalists participated would assist in solving the economic problems of the industry, and that such an inquiry might also consider some of the lapses from grace of the British Press?
    The Prime Minister: I agree with the opening words of my hon. Friend's supplementary question. When this matter was last raised orally in the House three or four weeks ago, I replied in terms of the freedom of the Press and quoted the anxieties of Aims of Industry, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the print unions, and the big body of opinion in between. I have always thought that the freedom of the Press meant the freedom to choose between individual newspapers and the availability of an adequate choice so that that can be done.
    Sir David Renton: Will the Prime Minister consult the Law Officers with a view to considering whether legislation should be introduced to ensure that before a writ for libel is issued the matter is brought before a High Court judge, so that he may be persuaded that a prima facie case of defamation is established before giving leave for the writ to be issued?
    The Prime Minister: That is an entirely different question from the one on the Order Paper.
    Mr. Evans: Does my right hon. Friend realise the deep anxiety that exists about the continued concentration of the ownership of the Press in fewer and fewer hands? Does he agree that newspaper

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    ownership is allied with the Conservative Party and that alleged indiscretions by members of the Labour Party are looked at through a microscope, whereas indiscretions by members of the Tory Party are looked at through the wrong end of a telescope?
    The Prime Minister: The question of the freedom of the Press raises much wider issues, not only of ownership but of allegations and actions by other groups to prevent the publication of particular matters. At the present time I should have thought that most people who are connected with the Press—not to mention the readers—are anxious above all about the economic situation, the costs and the prospects of survival of individual newspapers, the loss of which would restrict the freedom of choice to which I referred.
    Mr. Pardoe: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that it is 12 years since the Royal Commission found that national newspaper production was gravely inefficient and recommended accordingly? Is not the newspaper industry, even today, the most inefficient, the most wasteful and the least well managed industry in the country? Is it not time, not for a new inquiry but for the recommendations of that Royal Commission to be implemented?
    The Prime Minister: There was not only the Royal Commission ; as the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition reminded the House three or four weeks ago, there was the authoritative independent inquiry by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which was blistering on certain aspects of management and attitudes on both sides of the industry. Some attempt has been made to deal with this, but one reason for anxiety today about newspapers that have recently closed down is not only industrial relations but sheer bad management and inflated costs.
    Mr. Gorst: Even if the Prime Minister will not go along with an inquiry into the mechanics of the Press, will he refrain from closing his mind to the possibility of an inquiry into the functioning of the Press Council? When the Prime Minister made criticisms of the conduct of the Press in his statement to the House a few days ago, I was struck by the fact that
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    neither he nor anyone else had referred this matter to the Press Council. Does not that tend to give the impression that he does not himself believe that the Press Council is functioning adequately?
    The Prime Minister: Everyone has his own views about the adequacy of the Press Council and its relative success in dealing with some kinds of question and not with others. This would be a matter that a Royal Commission would look into, and I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has raised this point.
    There are many other matters to which hon. Members and people connected with the newspaper industry attach importance. I have seen representations and submissions from several groups, institutes, and so on, and if any hon. Member has any suggestions to make before we proceed further in the matter I shall be pleased to receive them.

    AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
    Mr. Norman Lamontasked the Prime Minister whether he will seek an invitation to address a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in London.
    The Prime Minister: No, Sir.
    Mr. Lamont: Has the Prime Minister had an opportunity to study the recent speech made by the General Secretary of the TUC to the American Chamber of Commerce in London, in which he said that he was puzzled why people worried so much about inflation and were so mesmerised by the issue? He said that we should worry about inflation only if it caused social instability. Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that that is not the Government's view, and is not the basis on which the social contract was made?
    The Prime Minister: It is not necessary for me to ask the American Chamber of Commerce for another invitation to speak for me to be able to read the excellent speech made by Mr. Len Murray. There is no ministerial responsibility for his speech. I do not regard one sentence taken out of context in a most valuable speech as justifying a supplementary question of that kind.
    Mr. Body: As the existing level of Anglo-American trade is put in peril by the protectionism of the common agricultural policy, and as this protectionism is likely to increase throughout our transitional period of membership, will the Prime Minister undertake to make plain to any gathering of the American Chamber of Commerce that he is insistent upon fundamental changes in the CAP?
    The Prime Minister: I discussed this matter at some length with the President of the United States last Saturday. The hon. Gentleman will be glad to know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade will be visiting the United States in the near future and will deal with the general problems of our trade, the adequacy of the effort being made here and the difficulties we face. He will also be discussing with members of the American Government the particular issues raised by the United States in relation to GATT and the compensation it wants for the enlargement of the Community.

    UNITED NATIONS
    Mr. Blakerasked the Prime Minister if he will pay an official visit to the United Nations.
    The Prime Minister: I would refer the hon. Member to the reply which I gave on 4th April to the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters).—[Vol. 871, c. 432.]
    Mr. Blaker: Is the Prime Minister aware that his right hon. Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary is reported to have said yesterday that the Government intended to be more positive in their activities in the United Nations? Does the right hon. Gentleman think that a good way to start is by appointing as permanent representative to that body a man who, however worthy, has stated publicly that if there is another General Election within the next six months he hoped and assumed that he would be a candidate in that election?
    The Prime Minister: I have seen the statement which was made last night by my right hon. Friend, and I have heard extracts on the radio, as have other hon. Members. I think that we are all
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    extremely pleased with the line taken by my right hon. Friend.
    We have made clear, as we did between 1964 and 1970, that we want someone with political experience to hold this appointment. Mr. Richard, who was well known as a Member of the House until a few weeks ago, is particularly well-qualified, and is respected for his knowledge of and concern with the Third World and the problems of the Third World, which some of us feel were a little neglected in the United Nations by the previous Government.
    Mr. Mendelson: When the Prime Minister visits the United Nations Assembly, as I hope he will, and speaks to it as he has done in years past, will he recall that his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs said on 27th March, in reply to a Question, that the Government will support any move made in the United Nations on the matter of human rights in Chile? Since the Foreign Secretary made that statement there have been further accounts of the murder of political opponents of the régime. Many of my right hon. and hon. Friends, at any rate, are deeply dismayed by the Foreign Secretary's announcement yesterday afternoon that the supply of arms to this military dictatorship is to be proceeded with. Will my right hon. Friend give an assurance that because of the Adjournment of the House, and because of the method which the Foreign Secretary has chosen, which precludes his being questioned in the House, no such material will be moved to Chile before 29th April, when the House resumes, when the Adjournment can be moved and we can debate the matter?
    The Prime Minister: I recall and endorse what my right hon. Friend said about raising these matters in the United Nations. My hon. Friend will be aware that we have introduced a total ban on new arms contracts. The question of the ships, which I think is a matter that concerns my hon. Friend, raises many other matters that I am sure will be fully debated in the near future. My hon. Friend has asked a number of questions on this matter, both oral and written. I can assure him that the issue is not quite as he puts it.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
The following Question stood upon the Order Paper:
Mr. Bishop: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what use he proposes to make of his powers under the Immigration Act 1971 to remove illegal entrants.
Mr. Speaker: Mr. Jenkins—to answer Written Question No. 43.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Roy Jenkins): With permission, Mr. Speaker, I will now answer Question No. 43 about my powers under the Immigration Act 1971.
I have now reached a decision regarding the exercise of the administrative power under the Immigration Act 1971 to remove illegal entrants who are Commonwealth citizens or citizens of Pakistan. This power, which came into effect on 1st January 1973, applies to those who entered this country illegally before that date, and who were irremovable by administrative means until the law was changed with retrospective effect.
In considering the important and difficult question of how the power should be used, I have had to balance the risk of encouraging the smuggling of immigrants against the need to allay the widespread apprehension within the immigrant communities which the continued exercise of these retrospective powers would be likely to cause. I have also thought it right to take into account the widely felt distaste for the use of administrative powers granted under a change in the law which took away an important legal immunity.
Having considered all these factors, I have decided not to exercise the power of removal in respect of those who were adversely affected by its retrospective operation. This means that I shall not direct the removal of any Commonwealth citizen or citizen of Pakistan who entered illegally before 1st January 1973. Those in this category will, on application to the Home Office and verification of the facts, be given indefinite leave to remain. Their dependants will, in accordance with the immigration rules, be admitted when they have obtained entry certificates.
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We shall continue to make every effort to suppress the smuggling of immigrants, and where a person has entered illegally on or after 1st January 1973 he will normally be removed from the country.
My decision does not extend to those who were not adversely affected by the retrospective provisions in the Act of 1971 and so does not apply to foreign nationals other than citizens of Pakistan, to deserting seamen, to stowaways, to people who entered in defiance of a deportation order or to people who entered lawfully but then overstayed.
Mr. Tebbit: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. As this matter has now changed from what the House understood would be a statement to an answer to a Question further down the Order Paper, may I raise with you the point of order about which I spoke to you earlier?
Mr. Speaker: I shall deal with that now. The hon. Member asked whether it would be in order for him to move an application under Standing Order No. 9. That would not be in order as we shall not be sitting at seven o'clock today or at 3.30 p.m. on Monday of next week to raise the matter on the Adjournment. The hon. Member can take his chance on the Adjournment today if there is time left over. In that event it would be open to him to raise the matter.
Mr. Tebbit: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. It has been my intention to move the Adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 9 as I felt that this was a specific, important and urgent matter—
Mr. Speaker: Order.
Mr. Tebbit: With respect, Mr. Speaker, may I continue?
Mr. Speaker: I having intervened on the Standing Order No. 9 point, the hon. Member should know where he is on that matter. We shall now have question and answer as usual, then he can raise any further point of view at the end.
Mr. Bishop: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there will be a wide welcome for his pronouncement—especially amongst people of moderation and of good sense—which has been made appropriately at Easter, a time of amnesty for all mankind? Is he further aware

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that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department of the previous Government recently admitted that there was a great deal of subterfuge and deception in this matter, which is a situation that my right hon. Friend has inherited? Will my right hon. Friend give the House an assurance that he will look urgently at the situation of dependants, including the appeals procedure, entry certificates and all aspects which contribute to illegal entry, particularly from areas such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh?
Mr. Jenkins: I am grateful for what my hon. Friend began by saying. This is not an easy question. I believe that it is right to have taken this limited step in view of the distaste which generally the House feels for retrospective legislation—and I have no doubt that this was retrospective—and the need to avoid the dangers of harassment and insecurity in the immigrant community. I shall keep under review the other matters which my hon. Friend has raised.
Mr. Prior: I think that the right hon. Gentleman should realise that he is treating the House in a cavalier fashion by answering a Written Question of such importance on Maundy Thursday. That is a considerable abuse of our proceedings. Is it that the right hon. Gentleman is ashamed of what he is doing and that he is trying to slip this through when publicity is at a minimum? If he is not ashamed, why does he choose such an inappropriate time to raise such an important matter.
Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that his statement is bound to cause concern? Have not the much stricter controls on immigration which were brought in by the previous Government been widely supported by the immigrant community itself? Have they not resulted in an improvement in race relations? Will the additional number of dependants who will now be permitted to come to this country be within 10,000 to 20,000? Is not our first duty to those who are here legally and those who intend to come and who have a legal right to do so? Do we not fail in our duty if we give preference to those who have come here illegally?
Have not the administrative arrangements, which enable each case to be considered individually and compassionately, been working successfully?
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Whilst we are always prepared to have a fresh look at any humanitarian problem, can the right hon. Gentleman produce any new evidence to support a change which is so damaging to those who are waiting in the queue?
Mr. Jenkins: No. I can agree with very few of the points which the right hon. Gentleman has made. I do not regard this as an inappropriate time. The Government have been in office for a limited period and they have had to reach decisions on reversing some false decisions that were taken by the previous Government. There have been a number of other matters involving the previous administration which I have had to clear up already.
As there were people who were in prison pending a decision and statement, I thought that it would not be right for that position to continue for two and a half weeks and for me to make the announcement on a different day. Those who have experience of Home Office matters, although they may not always have agreed with the decisions which I have taken whilst in this office, will not accuse me of being unwilling on any occasion to defend them. There is no question at all of my being anxious to slip it through. I wished to announce my decision in the House at the earliest possible opportunity.
There is no question but that the Act was retrospective in its effects and that this was not made clear to the House when it was under consideration but emerged subsequently. The House is very jealous of retrospective powers when, for example. they affect taxation or other matters of that kind, and it is also appropriate that we should be jealous and suspicious of retrospection when it affects people who are in other difficult circumstances.
No one approves of illegal entry, and I am most concerned about relations with the great law-abiding mass of the immigrant community. But there is no question but that all the evidence from the representatives of that community, and from those occupying positions of wide authority who are concerned with relations with the immigrant community, pointed to the fact that these retrospective provisions, with the possibility of blackmail and harassment extending far beyond anyone who might be here illegally,

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are very dangerous and damaging. I have thought it right to put this matter on a better basis.
There can be no doubt about our broad intentions. They were made clear in a debate in June 1973, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stevenage (Mrs. Williams) moved a motion which was supported by both the Labour and Liberal Parties. There is no question of doing anything underhand here. But there is the question of dealing with a difficult situation in a way which I believe will help to improve community relations.
Mr. Arthur Davidson: Is my right hon. Friend aware that anyone who is tolerant and fair-minded will agree that retrospective legislation is always offensive, particularly so where the liberty of law-abiding human beings is concerned? Will he confirm that the vast majority of the people he is rightly helping have been living here in jobs, in a settled life with their children at school? He has done quite right to remove the fear of blackmail and harassment from them. Is my right hon. Friend aware that many hon. Members opposite would have objected no matter when he made his announcement?
Mr. Jenkins: I naturally think that what I have done is right, or I would not have done it. There are difficulties involved in this question, but I believe that my decision is right and in accordance with the great majority of views amongst the law-abiding community against retrospection of this sort, which was not made clear at the time. There were extremely ambiguous statements from the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mr. Maudling) and other Conservative Ministers at the time on this matter. The position was not made even remotely clear in advance, and it is right that I should deal with the retrospective aspect.
Mr. Stokes: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that his announcement will be received by millions of ordinary English men and women with sadness and dismay? His words never once mentioned England or our own people, and it seems that from the right hon. Gentleman and from the Home Office there is to be one law for the English people and another for illegal immigrants.
Mr. Jenkins: The hon. Gentleman is talking nonsense. My announcement does not and cannot apply to English people. I believe that many millions of English, Welsh and Scots are deeply concerned with ensuring good community relations and adopt a more broadly based attitude to them than does the hon. Gentleman.
Mr. Beith: Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that the Liberal Party made three attempts in the House of Lords to introduce legislation to this effect. We warmly welcome his decision. Can he confirm that the form in which it is made will mean an end to the searches which were made necessary and which caused such grievance and distress in the immigrant community? Does not he agree that his decision should make it possible to gain the support of the immigrant community, by the removal of this grievance, for the application of strict further measures against illegal immigrants?
Mr. Jenkins: Yes, Sir. I attach importance to the last point put by the hon. Gentleman. It is highly desirable and is certainly a principle of law enforcement generally that for a law to be effective it has to carry the support of the great majority of the community in which it is being operated. I believe that my decision will help in this direction and make it easier for us to be firm against illegal immigration. That is the intention and we shall be particularly firm against those who indulge in this most unworthy and discreditable trade. Let there be no doubt about this. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that aspect.
Mr. Tom Boardman: What numbers, including dependants, are involved? Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that he undertook to consider consultation with local authorities and other responsible organisations in areas likely to be affected by relaxation of the controls? Has any such consultation taken place, including with immigrant communities in cities such as Leicester?
Mr. Jenkins: No, Sir, because I do not think that that aspect is precisely involved here. The people who are involved are, by definition, already in this country. The number involved is limited. Last year, 70 people were removed. My predecessor, the right hon. Member for

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Carshalton (Mr. Carr), exercised his discretion not to remove some of those involved, so there is no question of his having taken the view that a man here illegally must automatically go. The right hon. Gentleman condoned by administrative action illegality in a number of cases.
What I have decided to do is to make it clear that we do not condone the retrospective aspect and that those who believed they were secure and found that after all, they were not, should now be made secure. There is also the question of dependants. It is natural that people allowed to stay here regularly will in due course be allowed to bring in dependants. —[HON. MEMBERS: "How many?"]— It is not possible to give exact figures but I do not think that the number will be vast by any means.
I made it clear to the House in answering my first Questions as Home Secretary in the present Government that I believe my duty to be to endeavour to remove particular injustices, compatible with maintaining—as I believe I am doing—an effective overall control of numbers, which I believe is also necessary to good community relations.
Mr. Sedgemore: My right hon. Friend's statement will be most welcome to the Wandsworth Community Relations Council, of which I am Chairman, to my constituents in Luton, West and to civilised people throughout the country. Will my right hon. Friend accept that the only sadness about his statement is that he has not been able to make it a somewhat wider amnesty?
Mr. Jenkins: I am grateful for what my hon. Friend said to begin with, but I must make it clear that it would not be right to deal here except with the position of those who were caught by the retrospective provisions of the 1971 Act. I have dealt completely with those who were caught by those provisions and have restored the rights which previously they thought they had.
Mr. Speaker: Mr. Tebbit, for a supplementary question.
Mr. Tebbit: May I first congratulate the Home Secretary? By coming here on a Maundy Thursday when there are no newspapers on Good Friday, he has
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found a cheaper way of muzzling the Press than the Prime Minister with his libel writs. Will he say why, in answer to me on 28th March, he implied, if he did not say, that it would not be the purpose of what he described as any limited changes that he might make in the regulations from time to time to increase the number of immigrants here? Will he now say how many additional dependants he expects to come to this country as a result of this decision? It is no good his saying that it is a certain number and then not being certain about it.
Mr. Jenkins: I said that it was not the purpose, and I was correct in saying that. My purpose is not to increase the numbers coming in. As I recollect, I also said in my answer to the hon. Gentleman that my purpose in introducing such limited changes as I would introduce from time to time when I thought it right to do so was to deal, with a mixture of justice and humanity, with these difficult questions. These may involve some limited increase in the numbers. They are not subject to exact estimation. They were not subject to exact estimation when it was decided to put in the retrospective clauses in this Bill. But I say to the hon. Gentleman that the statement of general policy which I made in answer to his Question was and remains the guiding line which I shall pursue in this matter.
Mr. Bidwell: Is not it a fact that my right hon. Friend, in the way in which he has made his announcement today, has not in any way offended the conventions of this House? One hopes that the maximum publicity will be given to what he said today. However, I wonder whether it is realised that the bulk of those who pass under the name of "illegal immigrant" are those, as I understand it, who are here often without plan, having overstayed a limited visit and who over a period of time—possibly because of extensions on compassionate or educational grounds—have built up different family circumstances from those which they had at the beginning? I applaud my right hon. Friend's method of announcing his intention to the nation and to the House and do not deprecate it. My right hon. Friend is not hiding behind the considerable power which is always in his

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hands—[HON. MEMBERS: "Too long."]—and which was in the hands of his predecessor—
Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman must be brief, please.
Mr. Bidwell: Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is no fundamental difference between the two sides of the House on the matter of family unity and that, however it is exercised and however it was exercised under the compassion of my right hon. Friend's predecessor, it is fundamentally the same?
Mr. Jenkins: What is certainly the case is that my predecessor, in allowing a number of illegal immigrants to stay here and in not using his powers in relation to them, was envisaging that their dependants should come. Here I think that the numbers should be increased to that extent. However, the right hon. Gentleman thought it right—which I do not—to stand by certain retrospective provisions in the Bill and to run the risk of harassment, and police raids of the kind which caused the House and I believe my predecessor concern in October last year were more likely in these circumstances. I have thought it right to make a further limited change to get rid of these difficulties.
In answer to the point about the day of my announcement, if the House sits on a Maundy Thursday and there are no newspapers on Good Friday, I do not think that this House should be precluded from business. I hope that television and the newspapers on Saturday will give whatever publicity to and make whatever comment on this decision that they think right. But I cannot believe that hon. Members, beyond making petty debating points on the last day before Easter, think that I should have held up taking this decision and held up the possibility of releasing people affected by the decision for 2½ weeks in order to come to this House on a different day.
Mr. Prior: The Question was put down on the Order Paper. The right hon. Gentleman could easily have made a statement yesterday. What stopped him? He knew that the Question was down. Presumably he had it planted. Would it not have been much fairer to the House to make his statement yesterday?
Mr. Jenkins: I do not think that it would have been significantly fairer to the House. There is a large attendance in the House this morning. I could not possibly have made the announcement before yesterday and, although I know that this House comes first, I had an engagement with the Metropolitan Police which I undertook following my predecessor's undertaking and which I did not wish to cancel thereby causing disappointment at short notice.
Several Hon. Members rose—
Mr. Speaker: Order. Business Question. Mr. Heath.

ADJOURNMENT DEBATES
Mr. Blaker: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will be aware that I have the first debate, which is to be about horticulture, and that it is due to last until 1.15 p.m. The Minister of Agriculture has made an announcement in answer to a Question which goes a substantial way towards meeting the case that I intended to put to him. In view of the importance of the announcement made by the Home Secretary, I wonder whether it would be in order for me to surrender the time remaining until 1.15 p.m. so that this matter might be debated right away.
Mr. Tebbit: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. On Tuesday, this House passed a motion relating to the Adjournment for Easter. Had that not been the position, it would have been proper for a Standing Order No. 9 application to be made on a Thursday. However, because this House did not think it fit, in its motion to adjourn for Easter, to amend Standing Orders in that respect, as Standing Order No. 9 reads it cannot conceivably make sense because neither the days of the week nor the hours of sitting are as envisaged in that Standing Order. May I therefore support the request of my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Blaker) that we might discuss this urgent subject while the Home Secretary is still in the House?
Mr. Speaker: I shall consider that point. Meanwhile we will take the Business Question. Mr. Heath.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
12.28 p.m.
Mr. Edward Heath: May I ask the Leader of the House to state the business for the week after we return?
The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Edward Short): The business when the House resumes after the Easter Adjournment will be as follow:
MONDAY 29TH APRIL—There will be a debate on London, which will arise on a motion for the Adjournment of the House.
TUESDAY 30TH APRIL—Second Reading of the Channel Tunnel Bill, which it is hoped to obtain by about seven o'clock.
Motion on the Value Added Tax (General) (No. 1) Order.
WEDNESDAY 1ST MAY—Supply (3rd allotted day): Topic for debate to be announced.
Remaining stages of the Rabies Bill.
THURSDAY 2ND MAY—A debate on Nuclear Reactors, on a motion for the Adjournment of the House.
FRIDAY 3RD MAY—Private Members' Bills.
Mr. Heath: With regard to the motion on VAT, will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that the debate will run until 11.30 p.m., having started at seven p.m.? As regards the debate on nuclear reactors, will he confirm that this will not be the occasion for the Government to announce final decisions on a nuclear reactor programme but, rather, for an exchange of views? If that is so, as this is an immensely complicated subject, will the right hon. Gentleman ask the Secretary of State for Energy to take care to set out as fairly as possible the various options open to the Government in reaching their decision?
Mr. Short: The debate on the VAT motion will run until 11.30 p.m. As for the right hon. Gentleman's second point, the Government will not take any action until we have heard the debate in the House. I shall pass on the right hon. Gentleman's request to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy.
Mr. Lamont: Will the right hon. Gentleman seek to ensure that Ministers observe what I believe to be the convention that information is not made available to the Press when it is the subject of a Parliamentary Question in this House? Will he therefore investigate the circumstances in which the Minister for the Civil Service refused to answer a Question from me about a list of Labour Party appointees in Whitehall on the very day that such a list was published in a national newspaper?
Mr. Short: There are no Labour Party appointees in Whitehall, but there are some Government appointees. However, I will look into the point that the hon. Gentleman made and write to him about it.
Mr. Dudley Smith: As the Home Secretary's statement will have gone a long way towards destroying confidence in sensitive areas such as the West Midlands that the Government intend to have a tight policy on immigration control, irrespective of what Mr. Speaker may decide, may we have an early debate on the Government's whole immigration policy?
Mr. Short: I do not accept the premise on which the hon. Gentleman based his question. I am afraid that there will be no opportunity in the near future for a debate on this matter.
Mr. Speaker: It might be of help to the House if I were to say now what I have decided on the matter raised by the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Blaker). He has until 1.15 p.m. allotted to him for his topic. If he chooses to raise the matter of immigration he will not be out of order. However, I must make it clear that the debate will stop at 1.15 p.m.
Dr. Winstanley: As hon. Members on this side of the House are anxious that statements made in the House should have proper publicity, may I ask the Leader of the House when he will provide time to debate Motion No. 22 regarding the broadcasting of the proceedings of the House?
[That this House agrees in principle to the radio broadcasting of its proceedings (including at an appropriate time "sound

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on vision" and instructs its Services Committee to prepare, for the approval of the House, the necessary arrangements on the lines of those recommended by the Select Committee on Broadcasting, &c. of Proceedings in the House of Commons of Session 1966–67.]
Mr. Short: I said on a previous occasion that I hope to arrange a debate on that subject some time in this Session.
Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop: The Leader of the House will be aware that there is a substantive motion on the Order Paper expressing dissent from the ruling given by Mr. Speaker yesterday. As it is the custom of the House that such a substantive motion should be debated and disposed of with the minimum delay, may I ask when he will give time for it to be debated?
Mr. Short: I am afraid that I cannot give any undertaking about that at the moment.
Mr. Silvester: Does the Leader of the House intend to introduce a motion after Easter to set up the Committee governing secondary legislation from Europe?
Mr. Short: I hope to table a motion on the day that the House returns after the recess.
Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles: Will the Leader of the House tell us what the procedure will be about the Armed Forces Pay Review? This is now ten days overdue. It was due on 1st April. With troops on patrol in Ulster drawing perhaps only a third of what miners now draw, it is a matter of great interest to the Army. Will this review be announced during the recess or will it have to be delayed until after the recess?
Mr. Short: The hon. and gallant Gentleman raised this matter on the Adjournment debate on Tuesday, to which I replied. I am afraid I have nothing to add to the reply that I gave on that occasion.
Mr. Patrick Jenkin: Will the Leader of the House convey to his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy that it is essential for the House to be furnished with a forecast of electricity demand if the debate on nuclear reactors
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on the Thursday after we come back from the recess is to have any meaning? This seems to be a very important matter.
Mr. Short: Certainly I will pass on to my right hon. Friend the point made by the right hon. Gentleman and that made by his right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition.
Mr. loan Evans: Does my right hon. Friend realise that we welcome the statement on immigration made to the House today? We hope that the practice of Ministers making statements to the House will continue, unlike the practice followed by the previous administration who went into recess to make awkward statements.
Mr. Shersby: Will the Leader of the House arrange an early debate on the serious situation that has arisen following an instruction by the National Association of Local Government Officers to its members not to volunteer their services for the London borough council elections to be held on 2nd May?
Mr. Short: I am afraid that I cannot promise a debate on that matter. However, the hon. Gentleman will know—I mentioned this matter in the debate on Tuesday—that a number of discussions are taking place on it.
Mr. Michael Marshall: On the assumption that we are to lose the debate on the horticulture industry today, may I ask the Leader of the House whether he will undertake to provide time for us to discuss the long-term problems of this industry which will remain, notwithstanding the announcement that has been made today?
Mr. Short: I cannot promise a debate on that matter. My right hon. Friend has answered a Question on it today. I cannot hold out any hope of a debate on the glasshouse sector of the agriculture industry in the near future.
Mr. Newens: Will my right hon. Friend allocate time to debate the decision on sending warships to Chile announced yesterday by his right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary? Will he provide us with an opportunity of discussing the ramifications which will arise from that decision?
Mr. Short: I cannot promise a debate on that matter, but I will certainly consider it. I should point out that the only ships going to Chile are those for which there are contracts between this country and Chile.
Several Hon. Members rose—
Mr. Speaker: Order. I think that we must now proceed to other matters.

BILL PRESENTED
  HOUSING
  Mr. Secretary Crosland, supported by Mr. Secretary Jenkins, Mr. Secretary Ross, Mr. Secretary John Morris, Mr. Joel Barnett, Mr. Reginald Freeson, and Mr. Attorney General, presented a Bill to extend the functions of the Housing Corporation and provide for the registration of, and the giving of financial assistance to, certain housing associations; to make further provision in relation to areas in which living conditions are unsatisfactory or otherwise in need of improvement; to provide for the making of grants towards the improvement, repair and provision of housing accommodation and for the compulsory improvement of such accommodation; to amend the law relating to assistance for house purchase and improvement and expenditure in connection with the provision and improvement of housing accommodation and of hostels; to raise the rateable value limits under the Leasehold Reform Act 1967; to amend the Housing Finance Act 1972 ; to amend the law relating to the rights and obligations of landlords and tenants and the enforceability of certain covenants relating to the development of land; and for purposes connected therewith: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time upon Monday 29th April and to be printed [Bill 30].

  PUBLIC ACCOUNTS
  The Committee was nominated of Mr. Tom Boardman, Mr. Richard Buchanan, Mr. Cant, Mr. Ray Carter, Mr. A. P. Costain, Mr. George Cunningham, Mr. Denzil Davies, Mr. Edward du Cann, Mr James Lamond, Mr. John MacGregor, Mrs. Sally Oppenheim, Mr. Maurice Orbach, Mr. John Pardoe, Mr. David Price and Mr. Michael Shaw.
  Ordered,
  That the Minutes of the Evidence taken before the Public Accounts Committee in the last Session of the last Parliament and reported by them to the House on 7th and 8th February be referred to the Committee.—[Mr. Walter Harrison.]

  RACE RELATIONS AND IMMIGRATION
  Ordered,
  That a Select Committee be appointed to review policies but not individual cases, in relation to—

  (a) the operation of the Race Relations Act 1968 with particular reference to the work of the Race Relations Board and the Community Relations Commission; and

  (b) the admission into the United Kingdom of Commonwealth citizens and foreign nationals for settlement.

  The Committee was nominated of Mr. Norman Atkinson, Mr. Guy Barnett, Mr. Sydney Bidwell, Mrs. Lynda Chalker, Mr. Deedes, Mr. Norman Fowler, Mr. Eric Moon-man, Mr. William Shelton, Sir George Sinclair, Mr. Dudley Smith, Mr. Tom Torney and Mr. William Wilson.
  Ordered,
  That the Committee have power to appoint persons with expert knowledge for the purpose of particular inquiries, either to supply information which is not readily available or to elucidate matters of complexity within the Committee's Order of Reference.
  Ordered,
  That the Committee have power to send for persons, papers and records; to sit notwithstanding any Adjournment of the House; to adjourn from place to place; and to report Minutes of Evidence from time to time.
  Ordered,
  That the Committee have power to report from time to time.
  Ordered,
  That Four be the Quorum of the Committee.
  Ordered,
  That the Committee have power to appoint Sub-committees and to refer to such Sub-committees any of the matters referred to the Committee.
  Ordered,
  That every such Sub-committee have power to send for persons, papers and records; to sit notwithstanding any Adjournment of the House; to adjourn from place to place; and to report to the Committee from time to time.
  Ordered,
  That the Committee have power to report from time to time the Minutes of Evidence taken before such Sub-committees.
  Ordered,
  That Three be the Quorum of every such Sub-Committee.
  Ordered,
  That the Minutes of the Evidence taken before the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration and before the Subcommittee appointed by that Committee in the last Session of the last Parliament and reported by them to the House on 13th December, 24th and 31st January and 7th February be referred to the Committee.—[Mr. Walter Harrison.]

  EXPENDITURE
  Ordered.
  That, notwithstanding the Order of the House of 8th April relating to nomination of Members of the Expenditure Committee, Mr. Mark Hughes be discharged from the Committee and Mr. Bernard Conlan be added to the Committee for the remainder of this Parliament:
  Ordered,
  That this Order be a Standing Order of the House.—[Mr. Walter Harrison.]

  ADJOURNMENT
  Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Michael Cocks.]

  ADJOURNMENT DEBATES (PROCEDURE)
  Mr. Speaker: Before calling the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Blaker), I must tell the House that this must be regarded as an exception. I have to choose the topics for debate on the Adjournment. I do so having regard to their interest and importance. As one hon. Member pointed out, the debate on horticulture will not take place. However, the hon. Member is in order in raising another topic if he wishes, so I will call him.
  Mr. Michael Fidler: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. As hon. Members have chosen matters, presumably on the basis of the subjects submitted to you, may I ask whether it is in order for a completely different subject to be debated subsequently? Does this not open the way to
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  hon. Members putting down one topic knowing full well that they can talk on a different one in the time allotted?
  Mr. Speaker: The situation today is abnormal.
  Mr. Michael Latham: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. May I as a new Member, seek your guidance? What matters will it be appropriate to raise during the next three-quarters of an hour?
  Mr. Speaker: On the Adjournment an hon. Member may raise any matter that he wishes, but we should follow certain conventions. One is that a topic has been notified and that a Minister is present to hear and to reply to the debate. I strongly deprecate a matter being raised when there is no Minister here to listen to the debate and to reply to it. But this exchange is taking up time.
  Mr. Sydney Bidwell: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. May I seek your assurance that if immigration is now to be included with horticulture problems, hon. Members on this side of the House will have adequate time to participate?
  Mr. Speaker: This debate will stop at quarter past one. Within the time available I shall try to be fair between the two sides of the House.
  Mr. Stanley Newens: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it to be taken as a precedent that hon. Members may change the subject of debate at the last moment, bearing in mind that hon. Members may have come from considerable distances to participate in debates? In these circumstances, on future occasions they may come along with no certainty that the subject that they have come to talk about will be discussed.
  Mr. Speaker: There would need to be very special circumstances to justify it. I do not approve of what is happening. However, the hon. Member for Blackpool, South is in order.
  Mr. John Biggs-Davison: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Would it be wise for the Select Committee on Procedure to consider the whole question?
  Mr. Speaker: That might not be a bad idea.

  ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
  12.38 p.m.
  Mr. Peter Blaker: You, Mr. Speaker, have rightly said that this is an abnormal situation. It was for that reason that I sought your permission to do what I am proposing now to do.
  I have been faced with a difficult decision. I am aware that some of my hon. Friends, and no doubt hon. Gentlemen opposite, have come here with the intention of debating horticulture. On the other hand, I have had to take account of the fact that the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has made an important statement in answer to a Question this morning, which, as I heard it, conceded a large part of the argument that so many of my hon. Friends have been pressing on him for the last month. We shall want to examine that statement with great care. Therefore, it is right that we should take time to do so.
  It was only because of the grave statement made by the Home Secretary that I sought permission to raise this subject. I apologise to hon. Members who have come here to debate horticulture for not raising that subject.
  The statement made by the Home Secretary is of vast interest to the great majority of citizens of this country. I want to make only two points. First, it is deplorable that the right hon. Gentleman should have made the statement today, whatever the motives may be, because it will inevitably reduce the attention that it would normally receive in the Press. Secondly, it seems to be setting a precedent for the legalisation of past illegal acts.
  12.40 p.m.
  Mr. Sydney Bidwell: The House is faced with a serious situation. As a former candidate in the Lea Valley area I have an interest in horticultural problems, and I am a little disappointed that the subject originally chosen for debate has been switched in this way. I also have a greenhouse, and
  656
  I have a distant interest in what goes on in there.
  As the House knows, I have a powerful interest in the problems of immigration as they affect the country generally and my constituency in particular. I am one of the original members of the Select Committee on Immigration and Race Relations that was set up by the previous Labour Government and carried on while the Conservative Government were in office, and only a few moments ago the House accepted that that Committee should once more be established.
  I disagreed with the Conservative Government's bringing in the 1971 Immigration Act, becauses it flew in the face of the recommendations of that valuable all-party Committee. What that Committee put forward was a sane and sensible—
  Mr. Hugh Dykes: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether, through you, the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Bidwell) could be asked to speak more narrowly to the announcement that was made today by the Home Secretary on the ground that time is extremely limited and a number of hon. Members wish to take part in the debate?
  Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Oscar Murton): The hon. Member who has the Floor must be allowed to deploy his argument. I have no control over it, because I do not know what the hon. Member will say.
  Mr. Bidwell: I promise not to be discourteous to the House by taking an abnormal amount of time to explain my feelings on this matter, but I must tell the hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes) that interventions such as his merely have the effect of prolonging my speech because I then have to allude to the abnormal circumstances in which the debate is taking place.
  The topic being debated today is not of my choosing, but I am unavoidably constrained to take part in the debate for the reasons that I have already announced. I have a feeling that Conservative Members—Members of good will and of good Christian virtue—do not have a proper understanding of the illegal immigration situation in Britain. Perhaps I may ask for the patience of the House while I say something about the problem, because it may then be

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  appreciated that my right hon. Friend's announcement, although made in a form that has been questioned, was the right and proper thing to do.
  One hears wild and fantastic stories about tens of thousands of illegal immigrants. We do not know the figures, and not even the police know them. We have a hunch that many immigrants have come here for short periods but have overstayed and are now resident. We hear stories about people being smuggled on to the beaches, and of others trafficking in illegal immigration. We all deplore what is happening, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary agrees with that statement, but this is the lesser part of the problem of illegal immigration as a whole.
  France and Germany have dealt with this problem in a much more civilised way than we have hitherto tackled it. Some of the more moron-like noises from the Conservative benches sicken me. It is not merely a matter of putting right an injustice, because it was not the intention to make the 1971 Act retrospective. When the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mr. Maudling) was Home Secretary, time and again in the Standing Committee he said that those who had already settled here would not be adversely affected by the passage of that measure and that if people were outside the jurisdiction of the magistrates' courts by virtue of being Commonwealth citizens they had won the right to legal settlement here. However, that provision was wiped out by an inadvertent and deplorable aspect of the law, as we subsequently discovered, and my right hon. Friend has now sought to put the matter right.
  My right hon. Friend's statement will, of course, please those families who have suffered from the anxiety of knowing that the breadwinner had the Sword of Damocles hanging over him and ran the risk of its dropping at any moment, but it will, in addition please the police. I have discussed this matter with the local police and with representatives of the Police Federation, and I know that today's announcement will ease their minds, because it will remove from them the duty of having to look for illegal immigrants and put an end to the obnoxious practice of fish net raids.
  When the police look for people whom they suspect have been engaged in criminal
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  activities, they are often constrained to ask every coloured person in sight for his passport. This obnoxious practice is carried out not only with everyone with a dark skin, but with their relatives and friends. Very often white people who have struggled to build up a multi-racial harmonious situation find themselves involved in this kind of inquiry.
  People in Blackpool and in the wilds of other parts of the British Isles have no great experience of this problem of immigration. The more distant people are from immigrant communities and their white friends, the more afraid they are of the problem. The hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Blaker) has allowed himself to be inveigled into the position of giving up the time allotted to him for his original debate because it seems that he is not sufficiently interested in the problems of the horticulture industry.
  12.48 p.m.
  Mr. Piers Dixon: The Home Secretary's remarks will be interpreted by ordinary people as compounding a felony, as it were. This is a sad day for Britain.
  I recognise that in certain cases—I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will agree with my next statement—an amnesty has the effect of minimising the mischief. An amnesty on the illegal possession of arms, on balance, has the effect of getting people to hand in their illegal arms, but this amnesty will have precisely the opposite effect. It will increase mischief. The message will go around tonight in India, in Pakistan, in the West Indies, and throughout the Commonwealth countries, "Look boys, you don't have to obey the British law. All you have to do is get inside the country, and once you are inside the Labour Party will see you right and make sure you are allowed to stay."
  12.50 p.m.
  Mr. William Molloy: The only thing I would say about the reprehensible speech that we have just heard is that when the history of extreme Communist and Fascist nations is written and we see in some perspective the inhumanity of one group of people to another, the verdict will be that although Britain might have lost a great Empire, on this Maundy Thursday she showed

  659
  what a truly great nation she was and how civilised were her people.
  This cannot have been an easy statement for my right hon. Friend to make. Illegal immigration creates great bitterness, particularly when people who are afflicted by poverty and other disadvantages relieve their frustrations by attacking another human being who has entered this country.
  The hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Dixon) talked about the people of India, Pakistan and the Caribbean countries being such a bunch of criminals that they are waiting to see how they can race to Britain to break our laws. Perhaps they will do so in the same way as they answered Winston Churchill's call in the last war and came here in their colourful uniforms to fight for the freedom which my right hon. Friend has emphasised again today.
  The real criminals in illegal immigration are mostly those who are white, like me, who feast on the agonies of other people, and bring them by devious means into this country through their free enterprise, entrepreneurial lawbreaking activities. They should be condemned.
  Is my right hon. Friend satisfied with the liaison between this country and the other Commonwealth nations whose nationals are allowed to come here, as some of our nationals go to their countries? Any lapses in that administration could help these peddlers in filth and those who feed on people's problems. Any loopholes should be sealed. This could contribute to erasing something which is distasteful in principle.
  Because the laws of man sometimes make things unwholesome and even rotten for ordinary people, the action which my right hon. Friend has had the courage to take today will be applauded today and in years to come as a marked courageous and humanitarian move; it will be remembered for centuries.
  12.54 p.m.
  Mr. Norman Tebbit: The only point on which I would agree with the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Molloy) is in his call for the most rigorous measures against those who profit from the trade in illegal immigrants. If we can remember, on a morn-
  660
  ing on which we are considering a matter on which strong views are held, that we share certain views, this can be helpful. We are all interested in good community relations, but have differing views about how they should be achieved.
  This short debate could have been conducted in a much more gentlemanly manner had the Home Secretary not concealed to the extent he did the fact that a statement was to be made today, and its nature. After it had emerged late last night that a statement was to be made and there were suspicions about its nature, journalists who rang the Home Office were told blankly only that there was to be a statement. Had it been more clear yesterday—when the right hon. Gentleman must have known that he was to make this statement—what it would be about, there would have been much less bitterness and heat this morning.
  The Home Secretary said that he had to balance in his mind the effect on the illegal immigrant against the improvement in community relations which would result from this step. He must accept that many of us sincerely believe him to be wrong on this matter, who sincerely believe that it will not be believed in the trade that there will not at some time be another amnesty, and who believe that, by taking these measures, the right hon. Gentleman has given a great boost to the trade.
  The right hon. Gentleman must also accept that many Opposition Members are not unused to the problems of inner cities and have lived in inner areas of cities ourselves.
  Mr. Bidwell: Like Truro.
  Mr. Tebbit: The right hon. Gentleman must accept that we feel that the fears of the host communities must be taken into account.
  The right hon. Gentleman must come clean and tell us more—particularly what he will do about those people who were found out and deported, who were perhaps a little more honest and got heaved out in the last year. They will feel that they are much worse off than those who managed to continue buying their way through to stay in this country until this statement. How many does the Home Secretary think are involved? He cannot just say "a number" and leave it at that.

  661
  What about the dependants of the illegal immigrants, dependants who are not already in this country? Presumably the illegal immigrant has been happy to live here without his dependants for some time, and presumably he could be reunited with them at no cost to himself by going back to where they are today.
  What depresses me most about the manner of the making of this statement is that the word will go out again in the world, from Ulster to Clay Cross, from Pakistan and India to the West Indies, that this Government are a pushover for those who want to achieve their objectives outside the law, as opposed to those who are willing to comply.
  12.58 p.m.
  Mr. E. S. Bishop: I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate because a Question that I tabled was partly responsible for this statement. Hon. Members opposite talk about my right hon. Friend hiding behind this procedure, but they forget that he could have given a Written Answer to my Question and not appeared before the House at all. He took the opportunity to turn my Question into an Oral Question and he has now announced his policy to the House and submitted himself to questioning. We should commend him for that action.
  In my supplementary question I mentioned the problems which create the trend towards illegal entry. I have in mind the fact that, on 19th December last, in reply to a Question about the length of time between application and interview at the British Embassy in Islamabad, the then Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Relations said that there was an interview delay of more than six months for all applications received during 1973. The then Minister of State said that 3,343 applicants had been allotted interviews with a delay exceeding six months.
  With regard to the administrative arrangements at the British Embassy at Islamabad, the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration stated in its report that the immigration work at Islamabad was very heavy and that the staff of 46 were under intense pressure. In spite of a 5 per cent. increase in staff, outstanding applications for certificates rose to 2,000 in 1972.
  662
  Another aspect to which I referred earlier was the matter of appeals. The procedure here should he speeded up, because appeals take a great deal of time. There has been an increase of about 80 per cent. between 1971 and 1972, yet the proportion upheld declined from 31 per cent. to 18 per cent. I have noticed Press reports about delays of two years being not infrequent. I have had information about an application which was submitted on 25th August 1972 to the British Embassy in Islamabad, the person concerned being offered an interview on 17th September 1974—about two years later. I understand that in 1974 the entry certificate offices are fully booked.
  I have seen this kind of situation in action. When I was a member of an IPU delegation to India, I spent a day at the immigration office of the High Commissioner in New Delhi. One sees there the teeming numbers of people who want entry, and one hears the allegations about families and husbands being in various parts of Britain. This is a human problem which must be seen in that kind of context.
  I appreciate the comments made by Opposition Members, but the fundamental point on this matter is that when the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mr. Maudling) put through the legislation, there were allegations on both sides of the House that the regulations were not at all clear. By making the announcement which he has made today, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has done a service and a justice to those concerned, and certainly not an injustice to those here. The announcement will get rid of some of the harassment, blackmail and undesirable features which attend those who come here in certain circumstances. It will also help to clear the air. But, in the long run, we can resolve the problem of illegal entry only if my right hon. Friend looks at some of the points made about the position of dependants and the time taken and the delays in the consideration of entry certificates and appeals.
  1.2 p.m.
  Mr. Toni Boardman: In my constituency there is probably a greater proportion of immigrants than there is in the constituencies of most hon. Members. My concern is that we get

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  the best community relations possible and reduce the pressures which have inevitably built up over the years where there has been a large concentration of immigrants. It is for that reason that I deplore the decision which has been announced today by the Home Secretary and reached without consultation with the authorities of those cities which have to bear the brunt of the consequences of such action. It is to those cities that the dependants will go. It is in those cities that the overcrowded schools will continue to be overcrowded, and the people there who have legally come into this country will feel that they have been deprived for some time of the opportunity of bringing in their dependants because those who have come in illegally have been allowed to remain here in preference to the dependants of those waiting to bring them in.
  It is because of the lack of consultation with local authorities and responsible bodies and associations in such communities, which have to face the problem and the fact that the immigrant community will feel no less strongly on this matter than the indigenous population, that I deplore the decision and the way in which it has been made.
  1.4 p.m.
  Mr. James Prior: We have to judge the Home Secretary's decision on the question whether it will improve community relations or make them worse. In these matters it is always a difficult decision to reach. But what some of my hon. Friends and myself are worried about is that community relations depend not just on the happiness of the immigrant population but on the acceptability to the rest of the population of those who come in. Now, more and more, among the immigrants themselves there is a desire for strict control over immigration, because they recognise the social and other problems which have resulted from too many coming in. That is the background against which I have tried to judge what the Home Secretary has said.
  I recognise that there have been cases of harassment and perhaps, blackmail although I think that many of the worst fears which were expressed in the House in debates last year have not been realised.
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  I should like the Home Secretary to tell us a little more about the present fears of the immigrant community. It is my impression that they are now considerably less than they were a few months ago. It is quite remarkable how, in recent months, there has been a settling down of the whole immigrant problem. I should have much preferred to see the administrative and compassionately made arrangements continue, rather than the step that has been taken today.
  What is also worrying many of us is that the illegal immigrants who will now be granted an amnesty will be allowed to bring their dependants here. It would be grossly unfair to legal immigrants if their dependants did not get preference over those of illegal immigrants. I hope that the Home Secretary will give an assurance, particularly to the immigrant community, that no dependants from the category that he has announced today will be allowed to jump ahead of those who are already in the queue waiting to come here. That is very important.
  My right hon. and hon. Friends will wish to return to this subject. The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) was perfectly right. There will be considerable worry now on the question whether there is to be a further amnesty in the future for other illegal immigrants, which could encourage illegal immigration. That would be deplorable.
  We have tried to adopt a policy of making it absolutely plain that permanent immigration must now be cut to the absolutely inescapable minimum, that only close dependent relatives of those already settled here lawfully should come in, and that those who have to come as a result of our imperial past possess citizenship of this country and of no other. That is our firm policy. We should deplore anything that the Home Secretary does to move away from the policy which we think has been working satisfactorily for the last few years.
  1.8 p.m.
  The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Roy Jenkins): I am glad that the right hon. Member for Lowestoft (Mr. Prior) introduced a rather more temperate note into our brief debate than that of some of his hon. Friends. I share the

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  right hon. Gentleman's view that one's approach to these matters must be based on what will encourage good community relations. My view here is that it does not so encourage good community relations to make use of a retrospective provision which takes away from people rights which they thought they possessed, even though they had entered illegally at a time in the past—but that has been condoned by successive administrations—and to do it in a way which was not made remotely clear to the House when the provision was going through it.
  There is no doubt that this has been the view which many eminent authorities have taken. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Salmon, in his judgment, said:
  "I feel bound to express concern that the draftsmen of this Act should have chosen to achieve its retrospective effect through a labyrinth of verbiage which may well have been as perplexing to many of those who had to consider it in Parliament as it was to many of those it has deprived of their constitutional rights."
  I therefore start with an exceptionally retrospective position. I also have no doubt about the effect upon community relations from the point of view of the coloured community and of those closely concerned, and from the point of view of many tolerant indigenous British citizens whose view certainly has to be considered, I agree.
  There is no doubt about the attitude of those most closely concerned. For instance, the Chairman of the Community Relations Commission, recently reappointed by the previous Government, said:
  "I said that the Bill's effect"
  —he was referring to the Immigration Act 1971—
  "must be to increase acutely the sense of insecurity already felt by minority groups living here and that it would do incalculable harm to community relations; and so it has."
  Neither is there the slightest evidence to support the right hon. Gentleman's point that what I have done will cause resentment amongst those of the immigrant community who have legally settled here. On the contrary, every representation that I have received from people of the utmost legality and responsibility who have settled here has been one of strong objection to this retrospective provision and the dangers of harassment for many who are here wholly legally to
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  which this leads, of which the raid in October was the most significant but not perhaps the only example, and for the need for them to be asked for passports constantly for various reasons. So far as I am aware, there is not a single body of immigrant opinion which has expressed a view other than in favour of the repeal of this retrospective provision.
  There is no question of queue jumping. There is no question of pushing them ahead of anybody else. There is a delay at posts abroad. The delay, which I think most of us will regret, because it is very considerable, will apply just as much to those who now apply in this category. So there is no question of pushing them ahead.
  Nor is there a new principle in saying that those who entered illegally could after a time, when they acquired immunity, be allowed to bring in dependants. My predecessor when he exercised his discretion, which he assured the House that he would, and which he was doing in many cases, granted that right for dependants to enter. There is not a change of principle. What I have thought it right to do is to say that where there was this degree of retrospection which was exceptional and wrong, and which was causing resentment and doing much harm, I should make it clear that I intended to exercise my discretion more widely than my predecessor did, but not erect any new principle of condoning illegality, merely a principle that the retrospective provisions should be removed.
  There is nothing clandestine about this. There could have been no doubt about the attitude of the Labour Party, of the Liberal Party and of a great deal of cross-bench opinion in the other place where this matter was debated in January. Distinguished speaker after distinguished speaker from the cross-benches spoke strongly on this issue. So before the election there could have been no doubt about what was the attitude of the Labour Party, of the Liberal Party, and of a broad range of opinion on this matter.
  It would be utterly wrong for people to try to take the point which I thought was most unreasonably taken by the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Dixon) that people should interpret this as meaning

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  that we do not believe in enforcing the law. We do not believe in retrospective legislation, and I thought that that was the attitude of the Conservative Party.
  I am getting rid of that objectionable provision, but I can assure the hon. Member for Truro and the House that there is no question of our not enforcing the law. There is no question of our not dealing in the most stringent way possible with those who indulge in the trade of smuggling. There will be no question of this, and it is very damaging to suggest otherwise. I am dealing with a specific proposal which is retrospective and whose effects were not made clear to the House.
  I do not propose to introduce any retrospective legislation. I hope that a future Conservative Government, if and when one comes to office, will do no such thing in the future. If that does not arise, then there will be no question of proceeding in a similar way in the future, because the issue will not present itself.
  I have been convinced that one was dealing with an unacceptable degree of retrospection and that its practical effects were such as to produce worry throughout the whole immigrant community, including the most law-abiding parts of it, and that unless I took notice of that there was, on the criterion put forward by the right hon. Member for Lowestoft, a danger of impediment of relations between that community and the host community far out of proportion to any numbers here involved.

  PAY CODE
  1.15 p.m.
  Mr. Arthur Davidson: I wish to draw attention to certain anomalies under the Pay Code, anomalies which, I submit, border on the absurd for the adverse way they affect a group of my constituents, namely, the foremen working at Platt International, the largest works in my constituency.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East (Mr. Lamond) has been faced with the same problem in his constituency, affecting foremen in the same firm. My hon. Friend, who unfortunately is unable to be present to-
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  day, wishes to be associated with the remarks that I shall make.
  The Pay Code and the rigid legalistic interpretation placed upon it by the Pay Board have resulted in a serious injustice to hundreds of people in my constituency. If the situation were not so serious for my constituents it could be described as farcical. Foremen are now receiving, and ever since the Pay Code came into operation have been receiving, less than the men whom they supervise. It is a Catch 22 situation, because the catch is the anomaly clause in the counter-inflation policy. Paragraph 178 of the Counter-Inflation (Price and Pay Code) (No. 2) Order 1973 is supposed to enable a payment to be made outside the Pay Code to a group of people if it can be established that their salaries are linked to the salaries of others, working in the same establishment.
  The foremen in my constituency are the victims of the rigid technicalities and the legalistic verbiage of the Pay Code, a code which has become, and indeed was from the outset, totally irrelevant to wage bargaining. It is an irritant. If any case were needed to prove that, this case does so. I know my hon. Friend the Minister of State's view of the statutory incomes policy and of the Pay Code.
  For many years the salary of the foremen at Platt International—this is not unusual—was adjusted at the beginning of each year to restore the differential between the foremen and those they supervised. Within a few weeks or months that differential was lost because of the rise in piece work earnings of, the men. But for almost two years the employers of Platts International, the foremen and the union, ASTMS, had been negotiating to try to resolve the problem by the introduction of a salary structure which was linked with the skilled piece work earners. The negotiations, as is frequently the case, went on for several months, and when a solution was finally reached the Pay Code stopped its introduction. That was the first catch.
  However, they were caught not only by the standstill but by phase 2 and by phase 3. Whatever wage increase was given under those various phases, it still fell considerably behind the wages

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  of the very men whom they were supervising. So we have the typical Catch 22 situation. One can have an advancement of the position of the foremen, who perform a very responsible job—and employers want to encourage responsible people for promotion—but the catch is that such a person must take a drop in his wages if he wants to supervise. Alternatively, one can have the reverse Catch 22 situation. One can have a substantial wage increase but one must cease to be a foreman and go back to the shop floor from which one was promoted. It is an absurd situation.
  To do the Pay Board justice, after I had written bringing its attention to the anomaly, I received a reply on 4th September from Mr. Johnson, the deputy chairman, who said:
  "This is a particularly unfortunate case but I regret that the Pay Board is unable to vary the terms of the decision …".
  He admits that it is an unfortunate case. The foremen certainly think it is unfortunate. The employers at Platt International are willing, anxious and eager to pay the new salary structure but the anonymous men on the Pay Board—I am not blaming them personally because they only interpret the rigid rules which this House has laid down and was wrong to lay down—can do nothing to come to the aid of men whom they consider have been treated in an unfortunate manner.
  The Counter-Inflation (Price and Pay Code) (No. 2) Order 1973 has a paragraph, paragraph 178, to which I referred earlier and which ASTMS certainly felt covered the case of the foremen. It is the anomaly clause. It is meant to enable increases to be given outside the pay limit in order to correct certain anomalies. Paragraph 178 says:
  "In order to qualify as an anomaly on the basis of a link—"
  and do not forget that the wage structure of the foremen has been based, certainly unofficially, on the wage structure of the shop floor workers—
  "the link must have been broken by the standstill."
  The link was certainly broken by the standstill, but the catch is that the Pay Board is not satisfied that there has been a link. The workers think there has been a link. The employers think there has been a link. It has always been under-
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  stood that there has been a link but the interpretation of the anonymous men of the Pay Board is that there has not been a link.
  Paragraph 178(ii) states:
  "but for the standstill, the link must have determined the pay of the group concerned."
  According to the employers and the men, the link did determine the pay of the group concerned, but the catch is that the Pay Board think that the link, if they admit that there has been a link, did not determine the pay of the group concerned because,
  "In order to satisfy this condition there must be evidence of that link and clear identification of the pay group being followed; and the effect of the link on the pay of the group must have been known (even if not formally agreed) before 6 November 1972 or have been predictable within a narrow range."
  The workers say that the best evidence of the link is the fact that their wages have always gone up at some stage to keep abreast of the wages of the shop floor workers. That is common sense, but unfortunately common sense apparently does not enter into the regulations of the Pay Code. Nor apparently does natural justice enter into it. It would be common sense to everybody, if common sense principles were applied rather than complicated irrelevant regulations, that foremen who have a responsible job of supervising must be expected to get a higher salary than the salary of the men who they are supervising.
  May I draw attention to the current position. There are four grades of foremen at Platt International, as follows: Grade D £2,125 amounting to £40·75 a week ; Grade C £2,205, £42·40 a week ; Grade B £2,260, £43·34 a week ; and Grade A £2,315, £44·40 a week.
  The shop floor workers get the following salary structure: a toolroom charge-hand gets £47·03 a week; a toolroom worker £46·53 a week; a chargehand £43·50 ; maintenance men £42·50; skilled inspectors £43·50 to £45 a week. Clearly this is a ridiculous situation. The foremen have not criticised and I do not criticise the earnings of the shop floor workers; they would be happy to see those wages go up. They merely point to the anomalies of the absurd situation which is created, for them as a result of the statutory incomes policy and the Pay Board's interpretation of the Pay

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  Code. At present the foremen are working, according to the local Press, without enthusiasm. They are not on strike. They are not indulging in any industrial practice in support of their claim, but if they are working without enthusiasm, one can hardly blame them for that.
  I understood, when I raised this matter at Question Time about a fortnight ago, that my right hon. Friend has no power to intervene in a case of this sort. It seems absurd that he should not have a right to intervene because it seems to me that industrial relations are eminently a matter for a Government Minister and should never be left to a board of men, however honourable and sympathetic those men may be personally, to decide these matters. There is no right of appeal from their decision.
  I had the doubtful pleasure of appearing at the Pay Board with the foremen, when various arguments were advanced for not granting this very worthy claim. "We agree with you", said the members of the Pay Board, "You have been very badly treated. You are the victims of various phases of Government policy, but unfortunately we cannot help you." I am delighted that the Government intend to abolish the Pay Board at the earliest opportunity. It has no place at all in industrial relations and I want to see it swept away as soon as possible. I am quite sure that my hon. Friend the Minister of State does, too.
  I have done my best to show my hon. Friend that this is a very special case. If he has any powers whatever to help, this is, surely, an anomaly which ought to be rectified. If he comes to the aid of these men, he will not open the flood gates. The case would not, as it were, let in a whole variety of other similar claims, since it is a very special case, though I do not doubt that there are many thousands of workers who have been affected in a similar absurd and anomalous way as a result of the application of various phases of the statutory incomes policy.
  As the last resort, therefore, I ask my hon. Friend to intervene if he possibly can to grant these men what can only be regarded as their justifiable pay increase. It is an increase within the salary structure which the firm itself wishes to pay.
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  When I went to the Pay Board, representatives of the firm went too, and the personnel manager argued the case most skilfully on behalf of the men.
  The firm itself is extremely concerned. It wishes to encourage responsibility on the shop floor. It wishes to encourage promotion. But, in present circumstances, it faces the risk of people actually turning down the chance of promotion or of even leaving the firm altogether. As a matter of fact, some of these foremen are considering leaving the firm. There is the further absurdity that, when the shop-floor workers gain as a result of increased production, as they rightly should, the foremen who have contributed to that increased production gain not a penny. This cannot be right. There is a great injustice here, and I ask my hon. Friend to remedy it if he possibly can.
  1.32 p.m.
  Mr. Norman Atkinson: My hon. Friend the Member for Accrington (Mr. Davidson) has put clearly to the House the circumstances of an anomaly about which he knows—an anomaly that has arisen because of the existence of a statutory incomes policy. There are dozens upon dozens of examples to be found all over the country—they have been happening over quite a long time—of anomalies which either Ministers or employers' organisations have said they are powerless to remedy.
  My union, the AUEW, has contested many of these anomalies and tired to correct them. It has made many suggestions showing how employers can solve the problems which a statutory policy has created. If there were any will on the part of this employer, Platt International, it could remedy the difficulties which it has experienced in its establishments, and do it without reference to the Minister or anyone connected with a Government Department. It may be argued that to put them right would be immoral, that it would be wrong to do so, but many employers have found ways to make a decent arrangement and so honour their moral obligation to their workers, and to supervisory staff in particular.
  I shall not now give a list of ways in which this employer, given the will, could honour his agreement or obligation towards the people it employs. I

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  am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Accrington, an eminent lawyer with knowledge of these matters, could show the ways by which money could be paid. Although it might be called immoral to do so, it would not be illegal. I say, therefore, that the matter could be put right if the employer wanted to put it right.
  This debate and the whole context within which it arises demonstrate the need to dismantle the statutory policy, the Pay Board, the Pay Code and all the other trappings which have led to a whole series of situations of this kind, which are ridiculous, contradictory, and unhelpful in every possible way towards the betterment of industrial relations.
  How soon can we get rid of the Pay Board and all that goes with it? That is the question. Hon. Members opposite are no doubt exercising their minds on how to preserve the Pay Board and the Pay Code. I put this matter very seriously to my hon. Friend the Minister because I accuse the Government and those representing them of deliberate deviousness in not wanting to get rid of the Pay Board or to dismantle the statutory system. Whether they have personal misgivings about it, I do not know, but I believe that they have accepted the present policy of the Treasury—that is, to keep a statutory wage policy in being—and are attempting to justify it by saying that the whole apparatus of wage control cannot be dismantled quickly without the creation of a series of difficulties in other areas of industrial relations.
  I do not accept that view. If I were a Minister wanting to keep the Pay Board and to keep wage restraint in the present orthodox statutory form, I should take the course of introducing another Bill and inserting therein a clause dealing with the Pay Board, so that that Bill could probably be accepted while the clause dealing with the abolition of the Pay Board could be defeated in Committee. If I were devious, that would be the way I should go about it.
  There have been discussions in the House about the way in which that is to be done. I have heard hon. Members opposite discuss ways by which they will preserve the Pay Board by defeating Clause 5 of the Prices Bill. Thus, a way has now been found of making known
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  publicly, or of demonstrating, that there is some desire to abolish the Pay Board, while leaving it pretty certain that the clause which is the instrument to abolish the Pay Board and dismantle the statutory policy will be defeated during the Committee stage of the Prices Bill.
  Many of us believe that the Prices Bill will not get through the House in this Parliament anyway. There are indications that it will not. Certainly, if my idea and those of a majority of my hon. Friends are right—namely, that we shall have a General Election in June—there will be no time to pass the Prices Bill, and the Pay Board, therefore, will remain intact. Even if the Bill does get through this House—I am assured that there is no chance of its getting through Committee in this Parliament—the House of Lords has already indicated that it will not let it go through.
  Thus, we face the continuation of anomalies such as that which my hon. Friend has raised, the guaranteed continuation of the statutory policy of wage restraint in all its forms as we know it, and the continuation of the Pay Board throughout the life of this Parliament.
  There were alternatives open to the Government. They could have proceeded in a simple, straightforward way, by a surgical operation, so to speak, cutting the thing away completely. They could have got rid of the statutory policy, the Pay Board and the rest overnight if the had wished. If they had chosen that method, they would not have created the problems which they claim would have been created. I regard it as totally wrong to say that they are doing the best they can to get rid of the Pay Board and dismantle the statutory incomes policy by tucking an insignificant provision into Clause 5 of a Bill dealing with prices—a Bill, incidentally, which does not set out to control or regulate prices, which would be an alternative to a statutory incomes policy. It does not pretend to do that job. It merely gives certain powers to the Minister in respect of various matters specified and scheduled in the Bill in the way we have heard about already.
  Those are my misgivings. I do not believe that the Prices Bill and the dismantling of the Pay Board will go through in this Parliament. I believe

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  that a devious way has been taken to keep it in existence. I am assured that the Opposition will defeat the relevant clause, and, certainly, if there be a chance of its reaching the House of Lords, that it will not survive there.
  The situation is clearly understood throughout the trade union movement. The Government must recognise that. The Pay Board will continue, and along with it the life of a statutory incomes policy in the United Kingdom will continue.
  1.40 p.m.
  The Minister of State, Department of Employment (Mr. Albert Booth): I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Accrington (Mr. Davidson) for the way in which he raised the subject and for the steps he took before raising the matter to try to deal with a particular anomaly in the operation of the Pay Code as it affected his constituents. The action which he and other hon. Members took in seeking to resolve these problems underlines the need, if it needed any underlining, for a rapid termination of the operation of the Pay Board and the Pay Code.
  The Government are fully aware of the many anomalies of the kind mentioned in the debate and which we believe are bound to continue to arise when collective bargaining is forced into the strait-jacket of statutory control. This inflexibility has been felt particularly where wage structures have become outmoded or where differentials have needed adjusting through the passage of time or for other good reasons.
  The situation at Platt International, where the earnings of supervisors have fallen below the earnings of those they supervise, is absurd and harmful. That can only create feelings of unfairness and impair the efficiency of the company. The company has made several approaches to the Pay Board and has asked for its case to be treated as an anomaly under the appropriate provisions of stage 3. But the Pay Board, which is in one sense as much hemmed in by its statutory responsibilities as we are hemmed in by the legislation, has concluded that there is no way in which the problem can be resolved under the code.
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  Unfortunately, this case is by no means unique. If it were I should be delighted and life would be much simpler in my Department. There are many cases where differentials have remained unadjusted because of the operation of the code. Not only have matters not been put right; the situation has grown worse. Differentials have been squeezed, anomalies have grown more bizarre and relativities have become more and more unfair. That has been the case particularly in firms like Platt International, where the companies realised that something needed to be done and were negotiating new wage arrangements when the freeze intervened. This inflexibility of the Pay Board has hit hard where piecework is prevalent. It has also created problems in relation to day wage arrangements. Piecework earnings have been increased in recent years, even under the pay code. In contrast, in the absence of an arrangement linking their pay directly with that of the workers they control, the wages of supervisers have been left behind
  I understand, from having worked in the engineering industry, the point of my hon. Friend's argument. He and I and many others would contend that there must be a link, but it is the view of the Pay Board—and the statutory responsibility for interpretation rests with it—that in this case there is not a link for the purposes of the operation of phase 3. One of the major reasons for abolishing the Pay Board is precisely because the operation of the code, with all its inevitable inflexibilities and rigidities, has created problems of this kind. However, a decision about the Pay Board must rest with the House because the original decision was made in legislation. We are therefore seeking powers in the Prices Bill, which was given a Second Reading on Tuesday, to abolish the Pay Board and all the associated controls over pay.
  My hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Atkinson) said that the provision in the Bill was a devious way of trying to get rid of the Pay Board. We are making no bones about the fact that Clause 5 is designed to create the situation in which the House can take a clear-cut decision about the sole issue of the Pay Board. The clause provides for an order to be laid before the House under the affirmative resolution procedure providing for the abolition, and I am confident that

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  when that order is brought there will be no doubt what the House is debating and voting upon. There will be nothing devious about it. The situation will be perfectly clear and I am certain that every hon. Member will understand what we are seeking to do.
  The best way to resolve the problem raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Accrington, and all similar problems, is to sweep away altogether statutory controls over pay. But until we have the statutory authority to abolish the board there is no alternative but to accept the existing controls. So long as the board remains it has a statutory duty to enforce the code.
  Mr. Ronald Brown: Surely the Minister realises that many of the cases that have been pursued by my hon. Friend and myself—I have been pursuing a different argument from his—concern people who are already three years behind. One example is the London teachers. Assuming that the Minister gets to his millenium and the Pay Board is abolished, those people will still be three years plus six months behind. The stupid situation will exist in which everyone will want to go ahead, yet these workers who have been waiting patiently will be unable to move any faster than anyone else and must remain in their present position.
  Mr. Booth: If we waited until we had abolished the Pay Board and expected everybody to proceed from there, as if there never had been counter-inflation legislation, there would be even greater anomalies than there are already, and greater than there were a year ago under the Counter-Inflation Act. But that is not what we suggest should happen, and it will not be any part of my argument that the abolition of the Pay Board is the millenium and that all anomalies will automatically end. When it goes there will be a great many anomalies, and we therefore require some measure of agreement on policies which will operate there after. That means not only policies on pay hut policies about all the things which determine the work which is done in this country and the remuneration for it in relation to broader economic and social policies. We do not see the abolition of the Pay Board as the answer to all our problems—as the magic key to the box.
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  As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has told the House, the rigidity of the code can be tempered by the power to consent to increases outside the limits set down. He has already exercised that power in the instance of the miners' settlement, and I hope that no hon. Member will now contend that that settlement was not a case of exceptional circumstances. I believe that it will be accepted that never again should we have a situation in which a large number of people have to work a three-day week because of a refusal to recognise what are now generally agreed to have been exceptional circumstances.
  The wording of Schedule 2 of the Act does not allow the Secretary of State to exercise his power in any general or indiscriminate fashion. In this instance, there is no unique feature that would justify our saying that this was a case of exceptional circumstances. If we said that this case was exceptional, we should be defining circumstances that were applicable to many others. It might he said that that would be just and that if there are many other cases like this, they should be similarly treated but that would be giving one group of cases priority over many other groups, many of which are in as bad and some of which are in worse difficulties.
  Moreover, we have to have regard to the need to move from a situation such as we now have with statutory pay control into the voluntary situation that is expected to succeed it We are trying to move into that situation in a way that will redress the serious anomalies that have arisen out of the statutory period. I hope that we shall do that with a clear and broad understanding with the Trades Union Congress, the CBI and others who are properly involved in securing an alteration not only in the relative position of incomes but in the relationship of incomes and the country's economic development.
  When he spoke on 18th March, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State emphasised that the transition needed to take account of our policy on inflation and on the future growth of incomes. He said that it was essential that pay settlements in the rest of this pay round should be at a level that did not go beyond the many settlements already reached. It is conceivable that we could have a

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  sudden upsurge in the level of pay settlements in the middle of this pay round as a consequence of ending statutory pay control in the present circumstances without regard to the serious anomalies that that control has itself created. If we are to end statutory pay control in a situation in which it is conceded that pay control itself has created anomalies, it is sensible to have a proper agreement with the trade union movement to enable us to hold out a reasonable prospect that what happens following the abolition of statutory pay control will resolve many of the anomalies.
  The discussions that the Secretary of State has already begun with the TUC and the CBI cover a wide range of issues. The first meeting, at the beginning of this month, was concerned primarily with the urgency of repealing the Industrial Relations Act, and that will be understood by my fellow trade unionists in the House. But further talks have covered the establishment of an independent conciliation and arbitration service, and ways of meeting genuine grievances and difficulties of the kind that my hon. Friend the Member for Accrington has described. We have made it clear that we do not think that a relativities procedure of the kind recommended by the Pay Board is the right answer.
  If we deal with the problem solely as a matter of relativities, we shall leave at the bottom of the pay structure those who were at the bottom of the pay structure three years ago, many of them, in my opinion, deserving much better pay in a proper wages policy. The problem cannot be dealt with merely as a matter of relativities. Such an approach would not work, and to attempt it would be a mistake. We are seeking voluntary cooperation by the trade unions and their members, and I believe that we shall receive it.
  Therefore, I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham will not take it amiss when I say that I reject his suggestion that the Government wish to continue a statutory policy. If he cares to come to the Department and meet my fellow Ministers he will find that if there is one thing that is exercising our minds and on which we are all working more than any other it is how to get rid of the statutory pay policy.
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  Hon. Members may have read in this morning's newspapers reports indicating that the TUC and its members are reviewing the subject of pay negotiations. In part, the reports confirm that many existing settlements would continue for some time beyond the ending of the statutory pay policy. The TUC has shown that it is clear that any consents given under the Counter-Inflation Act could operate only in exceptional circumstances. I have said that I do not believe that the Pay Board is the sole source of all the anomalies and inefficiencies in the pay situation, important though it is and with all the priority that I give to terminating its life and persuading hon. Members that to do so is the correct course.
  Mr. Atkinson: I am certain that the planning in my hon. Friend's Department depends upon a time scale, which he must clearly envisage, for bringing the Pay Board to an end. A great deal depends on that, as he appreciates. How does he foresee that time scale? When does he expect the Bill to have passed through the House of Lords, so that we may start on the work of repairing—reclamation, to put it that way—and the other jobs that have to be done following the passing of the Bill?
  Mr. Booth: I agree that the time scale is extremely important. I believe that we must move as rapidly as we can to the termination of the statutory life of the Pay Board. As soon as the Prices Bill has completed its Committee stage we must move towards the issuing of the order.
  I make it clear, because there may be some misunderstanding, that we do not regard a continuation of the statutory policy as any sort of bargaining factor in bringing about the policy that is to succeed it. To put it crudely, we do not regard the statutory pay policy as a blunderbuss to be held at the head of the General Secretary of the TUC as a means of getting him to commit the trade union movement to the policy that is to follow. We foresee the very reverse as the case—namely, that any continuation of the statutory policy would militate against the sort of voluntary policy that we hope will succeed it.
  In my view, the Pay Board is not the only source of all the anomalies, inefficiencies and injustices in the current

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  pay situation, and when it is swept away, as I hope it will be, many problems will remain—problems concerning the way in which those who man the country's services are remunerated compared with those who man manufacturing industry.
  Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles: The Minister mentioned services. In his global look at this question does he mean the Armed Services—because it is a most outstanding paradox that the Armed Forces should be paid very much below the industrial average? I am sure that the Government will take this into consideration, although I know that this subject is not his departmental responsibility.
  Mr. Booth: I did not have the Armed Services in mind when I made that statement; I was thinking of those who work in services, be they public or private, as compared with those who work in manufacturing industry, nationalised or private. As the hon. and gallant Member says, the pay of the Services is not my direct responsibility, but we do have to consider the total claim of the Services in just the same way as we consider the claims of other sectors. It is quite proper to raise the matter in that context.
  We have also to examine relativities and have some idea about what will happen. I believe that it is not just a matter of relativities. We need to have a view on the extent to which price control has a bearing on wages. If we have a statutory prices policy that works, that will circumscribe the wages which can be earned by those in manufacturing.
  We must also consider the extent to which new, highly capital-intensive methods of production alter the relationship between workers and the total output of the establishment in which they work. We must consider conciliation and arbitration, and the new, wider rôle they can play when the statutory pay policy goes. Above all, we are a party committed to the basic ideal of the redistribution of wealth. This must play some part in our policy. Our discussions with the TUC and the CBI must be seen as a continuous process. Those who are looking for the drama which so often attended discussions under the last administration, will I fear, be disappointed.
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  We have seen how futile it is to seek agreement on voluntary arrangements against a background of divisive policies. It is our belief that as it is seen that the Government are ready to act on pensions, food subsidies and other social measures, so we shall be able to take concrete steps towards carrying out a redistribution of wealth, if trade unions and their members will voluntarily co-operate to make the whole policy successful. This, in the end, is the only way it can be done.

  MR. DAVID ANDERSON, QC
  2.2 p.m.
  Mr. Alexander Fletcher: I want to bring to the attention of the House the case of Mr. David Colville Anderson, QC, who is a former Member of Parliament and a former Solicitor-General for Scotland. My purpose is to ask the Government to set up a public inquiry into the evidence, procedures and the overall circumstances of Mr. Anderson's conviction at Ayr on 22nd May 1973.
  I say this first because Mr. Anderson is one of my constituents and secondly because there is considerable public disquiet about the case. For several years, and in particular during the past few months, Mr. Anderson has conducted a vigorous campaign in protestation of his innocence in the course of which most right hon. and hon. Members will have received rather a large mail. I have received a good many letters supporting a public inquiry, three from former Moderators of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, who support the case in no uncertain manner.
  Many people including members of the legal profession—members of the Bar and solicitors—have expressed the opinion to me that there should be an effective judicial review of Mr. Anderson's conviction and all other cases tried in this way. The review was prevented by a serious defect in the appellate procedure.
  In addition to the case at Ayr, Mr. Anderson has publicly raised questions relating to national security. I am sure that the House and the country would expect such matters to be thoroughly investigated. I will seek an assurance from the Secretary of State on that point.

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  It is against this general background of public concern about a possible miscarriage of justice that I address the House. Following Mr. Anderson's retiral from politics in 1964 he returned to private practice and in particular to work in which he was involved with public planning inquiries. During the latter half of the 1960s he was Reporter at 14 public inquiries in Scotland. Almost all of the recommendations he made were upheld by the Secretary of State. I suggest that this is a measure of Mr. Anderson's ability. In October 1972, following a change of Government policy aimed at speeding up planning procedures, Mr. Anderson was appointed Chief Reporter of public inquiries in Scotland with the Civil Service rank of Under-Secretary.
  I come now to the details of the case at Ayr. The incident took place on 18th December 1972 a few weeks after Mr. Anderson's new appointment. Apparently the two girls involved in the case were approached by a man who told them that he came from Edinburgh and was staying at an hotel in Troon. Following the complaint the police eventually found the man from Edinburgh staying at an hotel in Troon, and that man was Mr. Anderson.
  The House may find it extraordinary that anyone would, in those circumstances, divulge such information about himself. At the Sheriff's Court in Ayr in May 1973 Mr. Anderson was convicted and fined £50 on a charge of breach of the peace. The two 14-year-old girls involved were the only eye witnesses. Mr. Anderson's appeals failed for reasons which I shall explain later. As a result he was dismissed from the Civil Service and his career and reputation are now in ruins.
  On the evidence that came before the court at Ayr I believe that my constituent was entitled to expect an acquittal. One girl wrote on a piece of paper which was produced in court by the police that the car was a bright blue Chrysler with a 4 and a 5 in its registration number. It was not disputed in the court that Mr. Anderson's car was a dark greenish-blue Triumph estate and that its registration number was 555—an easily remembered arrangement.
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  Furthermore, the girls gave the police a description of the man. This was read out in court from a police notebook. The description differed from Mr. Anderson in at least six important particulars including the colour of his hair, his complexion, his build, his eyes and his eyebrows. He was described as being short, about 5 ft. 6 ins. whereas he is 5 ft. 9 ins.
  I know that any one of these points by itself would not be significant. But surely when they are put together, as they must be, they present a very different picture for the important purposes of identification in court. During the trial one of the girls at first positively identified the shorthand writer in the court. It was only after being asked to look around again that she identified Mr. Anderson. In addition the two hotel proprietors gave evidence that Mr. Anderson and his car were at the hotel throughout the evening and there was police evidence which said that a minimum of 40 minutes would be required if Mr. Anderson were to leave the hotel, go to the scene of the offence and return.
  There was further evidence, in addition to that of the two hotel proprietors, which gave a strong indication that Mr. Anderson was at the hotel during the evening. What was the evidence against my constituent? It was an identification made by the two girls who were sitting together in a police car awaiting Mr. Anderson's arrival at the police station to hand in a photograph, which he had agreed to do. This identification possessed features which caused unreliability and considerable public disquiet.
  I have here instructions to the police in Scotland on these proceedings adopted by the Chief Constables' Association. On page 8 of the pamphlet it is made absolutely clear that witnesses must be separate when identifying a suspect so that they will not influence each other. I am sure that the House will agree that this is especially necessary when young people are concerned.
  The two girls were about 130 feet from Mr. Anderson when they identified him from the police car. That is roughly the equivalent of you, Mr. Speaker, making a detailed identification from your Chair of a person standing just opposite Churchill's statue at the entrance to the Members' Lobby—rather a long distance.

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  It is no wonder that one of my constituents wrote to me and asked whether the girls concerned had telescopic eyes. What happened was that, on their own admission, the girls identified Mr. Anderson because he was driving the car that they had a day or two previously picked out in the Troon car park.
  The House may well ask how a conviction on such evidence could have been upheld on appeal, and that is an appropriate question. As I said earlier, it was because an effective review of the conviction was prevented by a defect in the appellate procedure. Mr. Anderson was tried by a sheriff sitting alone, with no jury, and he had no option of a jury trial. The appeal was governed by the Summary Jurisdiction (Scotland) Act 1954, which makes the appeal court totally dependent on such facts as the sheriff chooses to state. Such facts cannot be challenged by looking at the actual evidence in the case, so the appeal is confined to questions of law based on the unappealable facts as presented by the sheriff.
  For all practical purposes, therefore, it is not possible to appeal against mistaken identity in Scotland where there has been no jury. In cases where there is a jury, official shorthand records are kept and the appeal court can look at the actual evidence.
  If, therefore, it is said that there have been appeals and that my constituent has exhausted his judicial remedies, the House should remember that the appeal court could not look at the verbal evidence. There is no alternative open to my constituent but to seek some form of public inquiry into the propriety of his conviction.
  In the appeal the sheriff omitted from his findings of fact all reference to several important items. These were items of unchallenged police evidence. They included the description of the man involved and the evidence of the two hotel proprietors and others relating to his being in the hotel throughout the afternoon. The sheriff made no mention of the breaches of the rules of identification. It is difficult to see how this system can be justified.
  Mr. Anderson's counsel, who is a sheriff principal and Vice-Dean of the Scottish Bar, submitted to the Ayr sheriff ten pages of proposed additional facts, but the sheriff refused the lot except for
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  one procedural sentence, and refused to allow a hearing. It is difficult to find fairness in these proceedings when one examines the background of the case.
  I referred earlier to the distinction between a jury trial and a non-jury trial in the case of an appeal. I have here two Press cuttings. The first is from the Scotsman of 4th October 1973 and it deals with Mr. Anderson's appeal. It is reported that Lord Justice-Clerk Wheatley said that there was a presumption that Sheriff Reid, as a very experienced sheriff, would take the defence evidence into account.
  A few weeks ago, on 23rd March, the same appeal judge dealing with a case involving the same sheriff took rather a different view. He said that the sheriff deserved serious criticism for having failed to do that very thing—that is to take the defence evidence into account—and he reversed the sheriff's finding. The difference between these two cases is that the second one had been a jury trial, and the full evidence presented was available to the appeal court.
  Many letters I have received express concern that the appeal system places so much unappealable responsibility on the sheriff who has tried the case. The governing Act, which was passed in 1954—rather recent as Acts go—repeats a system which goes back to the days when it was customary to hang people for sheep stealing.
  I have with me the evidence of the Ayr case, because Mr. Anderson's legal advisers, being fully aware of the weaknesses of the system, hired at their own expense a firm of official shorthand writers to take down the full details of the case. This volume is available to the public inquiry. So far I have confined my remarks to the Ayr case and the subsequent appeal, about which there is a great deal of public concern.
  I should like to refer briefly to another aspect of this case which concerns certain security matters of which the House should be informed. Mr. Anderson has described a mission he undertook in Norway just before the end of the war, and suggested that his activities did not exactly please some of our allies. Mr. Anderson was decorated with the Norwegian Freedom Medal, and the citation was:
  "For outstanding services in connection with the liberation of Norway"

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  My constituent believes that, as a result of this Norwegian affair, it is possible that agents of another country may have plotted to embarrass him in 1963 when he was Solicitor-General for Scotland and a Member of the House. I have here a copy of a personal minute of the Prime Minister dated 21st June 1963 which refers to the resignation of Mr. Profumo and warns Ministers that many rumours and allegations are circulating which are damaging to Ministers and other people in public life. The copy I have is addressed to the Solicitor-General at the time, Mr. Anderson. Mr. Anderson considers that similar circumstances may surround the incident at Ayr in December 1972.
  He has advised me that he reported certain matters to our security services on two occasions, the more recent being in 1972. I cannot claim to have personal knowledge of these matters, but these disclosures have added to the public disquiet about the case, and I ask the Minister who is to reply to make specific reference to them.
  On Monday of this week the Home Secretary made a statement about the case of Mr. Laszlo Virag which, he said, involved a grave miscarriage of justice. I remind the House of three points from that statement. First, Mr. Virag appealed unsuccessfully against his conviction and sentence. Secondly, the Home Secretary referred to a similar case—the Meehan case—with which I think the Secretary of State for Scotland is familiar, which involved identification. That case concerned an incident which also took place at Ayr.
  Thirdly, the Home Secretary said that the case against Mr. Virag rested on identification, as did the case of Mr. Dougherty, and that he would appoint a committee to examine the law and police procedure as a matter of urgency. I am sure that the Secretary of State for Scotland will wish to take the same open and searching attitude to the criticisms of procedure that I have made today.
  In this case the purpose of an inquiry should be to examine whether a miscarriage of justice has occurred and to examine the law and the police procedure. It is not for me, the Secretary of State or the House to question the
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  guilt or innocence of my constituent but to see that justice is done. As the purpose of the debate is to question the circumstances of the law and not the guilt or innocence of Mr. Anderson, I hope that I shall have the support of the House in urging the Government to set up a public inquiry.
  2.20 p.m.
  Mr. Malcolm Rifkind: I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this debate and to make a short contribution. I first compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North (Mr. Fletcher) on the lucid manner in which he presented what must by any stretch of the imagination have been a difficult and delicate case. All hon. Members who have any knowledge of the law will have been impressed by my hon. Friend's handling of the legal aspects which, for a layman, must have been extremely difficult.
  My hon. Friend has stressed the need for a public inquiry. I am sure that all hon. Members will be definitely of the view that he was right in not wishing to prejudge any decision to which an inquiry might come if one were to be set up as a result of this debate. For anyone to try to predetermine the result of such an inquiry would be wrong and improper. It is clear that if an inquiry were to be appointed it would be necessary and desirable that those conducting it should have access to all information that might be relevant to its purposes. All evidence—oral, written and otherwise—that might be remotely relevant would have to be considered by such an inquiry.
  It is indicative of the determination with which Mr. Anderson wishes to pursue his plea that an inquiry would result in his acquittal or in pardon, that it has led him to take this course of action. For Mr. Anderson this must be the crossing of the Rubicon. Were an inquiry to be held, many matters would come before it which must have caused Mr. Anderson considerable embarrassment and hurt in the past and would certainly do so again if the matter were reopened. The House should take that into account in considering his determination that the matter should be reopened.
  Many people in Scotland have grave qualifications about the procedure for an appellant following summary conviction.

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  My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North has pointed out the grave limitations facing an appellant in such a situation. For example, no records are kept of the evidence, and the appeal must be on matters of law rather than of fact. It is for the presiding sheriff to determine the facts that will go before the appellate court. In the majority of cases with which the summary courts deal, such a procedure is only right and sensible. The majority of the matters considered by such courts are of a relatively trivial nature and have no serious consequences. The offence of which Mr. Anderson was convicted was one of breach of the peace. That is one of the least serious of offences. However, it is clear that there are occasions when the most trivial of offences may have the most dramatic consequences to an individual's life and reputation.
  The point can be made legitimately that there are deficiencies in the Scottish procedure. Far be it from me to point to those instances in which the English procedure for dealing with summary conviction might be superior to the Scottish procedure, but we know that there have been occasions when the English have borrowed from the Scottish criminal law—for example, diminished responsibility and majority verdicts. I suggest that in this case Scottish law could usefully borrow from the English procedure.
  I understand that when a man is convicted by a summary court in England he has the right to demand a rehearing of his trial—in effect, a new trial—so that the higher court can not only consider the questions of law that were determined by the court of first instance but can reexamine the witnesses. Further, that court can hear new evidence that the appellant might wish to bring forward. If such a procedure had been available in Scotland to Mr. Anderson there is no doubt that this debate would not have been necessary. Indeed, if the case had been reheard and the result had been a conviction, Mr. Anderson could have had no legitimate complaint about the procedure employed.
  I hope that the Secretary of State will consider not only the immediate question of a public inquiry but the procedure that is applied in Scotland to summary convictions. I hope that he will seriously con-
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  sider whether changes should be made so as to allow some form of a review of the facts when a person has been convicted under the summary procedure. I understand that the English system provides that after a second trial has been heard, which might result in the same verdict, then and only then is an appeal restricted to matters of law. In that event new evidence could not be brought before a further court of criminal appeal. Such a change would be eminently desirable.
  I hope that the Secretary of State and those concerned with the administration of law in Scotland will give serious consideration to a matter that has caused considerable disquiet in Scotland over many years. There has been disquiet not only about Mr. Anderson's case but about many others.
  2.26 p.m.
  The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. William Ross): I make no complaint that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North (Mr. Fletcher) has raised the matter of Mr. D. C. Anderson's conviction at Ayr Sheriff Court last year on a charge of a breach of the peace. The hon. Gentleman made it clear, and I confirm what he says, that Mr. Anderson has been assiduous for quite a time in pressing his case for some form of inquiry. His latest memorandum has been put in the hands of hon. Members and many other people. One result has been that a considerable number of letters has been sent to me and to my hon. and learned Friend the Lord Advocate.
  The whole complex of issues as set out by Mr. Anderson represents a vast web of incidents over many years, and at least some of these the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North has touched upon. Even if time were available, I do not think that it would be profitable to undertake a lengthy commentary. I can well understand the distress Mr. Anderson feels over the position in which he finds himself. The whole subject is inevitably painful. I was present when Mr. Anderson became a Conservative hon. Member, having already been appointed Solicitor-General for Scotland by Mr. Macmillan. I can equally well remember the occasion when he resigned from that office when the right hon. Member for Kinross and West Perthshire (Sir A. Douglas-Home), was Prime Minister.

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  So far as I can judge, the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North is seeking some form of inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Mr. Anderson's conviction last year in the light of the considerations that Mr. Anderson has brought forward, including the long history of alleged attempts by Soviet agents to subvert him. The hon. Member will realise that that is a tall order. I should make it plain now that the Government have no intention of setting up an inquiry of the kind suggested.
  Mr. Alexander Fletcher rose—
  Mr. Ross: I do not have much time. Two of the hon. Gentleman's hon Friends have spoken.
  Given that the whole history as set out by Mr. Anderson in his memorandum represents an enormous tangle, it may be convenient if I separate two strands—first, and the more specific, his conviction at Ayr Sheriff Court last year and, second, the argumentation bearing on the supposition over many years that he was subject to impersonation and victimisation by Soviet agents.
  Those two strands run together in Mr. Anderson's mind, although it is true to say that the Soviet agent strand did not appear until 1969. Mr. Anderson maintains that he must have been impersonated in the context of the episode which led to the charge of breach of the peace.
  It may be helpful to say something separately about the two issues. The one at least can be said to come within my responsibility, although I was not in office at the material time. All these matters took place while there was a Lord Advocate who was the predecessor of the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Pentlands (Mr. Rifkind). As far as I can judge, the second strand goes a good deal beyond my sphere of responsibility.
  I shall take the Ayr position first. I have no intention of going over the facts of the matter, let alone commenting on the evidence. It seems clear that Mr. Anderson has, since his conviction in May last year, followed through every avenue of appeal, as he was fully entitled to do. He went so far as to take the highly unusual course of petitioning the High Court of Justiciary for the exercise of
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  the nobile officium to quash his conviction. On 21st December the High Court of Justiciary dismissed the petition as incompetent, but it may be noted that the court went out of its way to remark on the nature of the evidence before the sheriff and on the sole question for decision at the trial, which it said was:
  "a question essentially of credibility and reliability within the competence of an experienced sheriff to resolve upon the evidence."
  That same day, I am informed, Mr. Anderson, through his solicitors, lodged a petition with the then Secretary of State seeking the exercise of the Royal Prerogative—in other words, seeking a pardon. I am assured that my predecessor, Mr. Gordon Campbell, gave the petition very careful consideration. This is not new information. I have seen a copy of Mr. Campbell's letter, sent on his instructions on 8th January 1974, to Mr. Anderson's solicitors.
  Mr. Campbell's letter explained that, in considering whether to advise that the Royal Prerogative be exercised in any particular case, the Secretary of State cannot act as an appeal tribunal and that the circumstances in which such advice may be given are strictly limited.
  Mr. Michael Ancram: Is the right hon. Gentleman suggesting that he is satisfied with the appellate procedure under the Summary Jurisdiction (Scotland) Act?
  Mr. Ross: I am coming to that. The letter went on to say that Mr. Campbell had carefully considered the petition in its bearing on the circumstances of the trial and conviction, but had concluded that there were no grounds which would justify him in recommending exercise of the Royal Prerogative.
  It is not for me to comment on Mr. Campbell's decision, but I do not think that I would have any grounds for taking a different view from that which he took. Nor do I wish to comment at length on the points that have been made by Mr. Anderson and by the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North about the system of appeals from summary trials. The hon. Gentleman must appreciate—this is public knowledge—that in the course of the nobile officium judgment, when the petition was declared incompetent, this matter was gone into very carefully. The

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  Lord President, who is head of the judiciary in Scotland, then said about the case:
  "Lest it be thought, however, that in so saying we have overlooked the petitioner's criticisms of the Sheriff in relation to the preparation of the Stated Case we have to add that all these criticisms were advanced and rejected by the High Court of Justiciary which heard the petitioner's appeal. In delivering the opinion of the Court the Lord Justice General said this—
  'It was forcibly submitted by applicant's counsel, however, that the facts stated indicated that the Sheriff had obviously accepted the evidence of identification given by the two girl complainers without due regard having been given to all the other evidence in the case which conflicted with the reliability of that identification. And that in any event there were elements in the stated facts, relating to their evidence, which indicated that their identification was not reliable. On this latter point I confine myself to saying that the criticisms of the girls' evidence as stated were not well founded. These criticisms were valid matters of comment before the Sheriff, and were admittedly made to him, but he did not regard them as affecting the reliability of their identification and that was a matter for him, and not for this court'".
  Quite clearly, therefore, these matters had been considered very fully.
  It is perfectly true that, in an appeal from a summary trial, the appeal is on questions of law and not on questions of fact. This has been the position for a very long time, under a succession of Lords Advocate, most of them Conservatives, including Mr. W. R. Wylie, who represented Edinburgh, Pentlands in the last Parliament. But no doubt an argument can be made for broadening the basis of appeal in summary cases.
  I gather that the Thomson Committee on Criminal Procedure will be considering whether any changes in the appeal procedure should be introduced. Having looked at the stated case myself, I must say that the ground covered in the appeal in Mr. Anderson's case seems to have been remarkably wide indeed. All these things are public knowledge. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North has read them. These matters were very well covered.
  Mr. Alexander Fletcher: Surely the point is that the Appeal Court could not consider the evidence presented to the Sheriff at Ayr, its decision depending, apparently, upon the stated case which he put forward to the Appeal Court. One
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  is building sand upon sand if one is satisfied with that sort of system particularly in this case.
  Mr. Ross: The system has been in existence for a very long time and has been upheld by the Lord Justice General in this case and by others. The system is under examination at present, but I must emphasise that all these facts were considered and have been considered time and time again.
  The question of identity and identification is at the heart of the matter. In this case, Mr. Anderson declined to take part in an identification parade. The hon. Member for Edinburgh, North must appreciate that what he read out was guidance in relation to identification parades. The police must do the best they can in such circumstances and they run the risk that any departure from normal procedures will be used as an argument by the defence. In the present case, the matter of identification was fully canvassed in the trial. I should like to quote from the Sheriff's findings as set out in the stated case:
  "I consider that the investigation by the police was very ably and discreetly carried out and that there was no coaching whatever of the young girls on the critical matter of identification. Their identification of the appellant as the person concerned with the incident on 18 December seemed to me to be the naked truth and I believed their evidence in its entirety."
  Mr. Alexander Fletcher: They were sitting together in a car.
  Mr. Ross: The hon. Gentleman was not there. He did not hear all the evidence. The sheriff was there and he was satisfied by the evidence. In other words, I must make it clear to the hon. Member that I do not see any grounds for thinking that this case comes into the category to which my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary was referring in his statement to the House on 8th April on identification procedures.
  Mr. Ancram rose—
  Mr. Ross: I am sorry, but I have little time left.
  Certain people have been accused. I may point out that this case had nothing to do with me. All these procedures were carried out under the Conservative Government. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary referred to identification

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  procedures, and here again we are awaiting the findings of the Thomson Committee, which is considering identification procedures among other matters.
  As the High Court of Justiciary remarked in its opinion of 26th December on the petition I have mentioned, what is in point is very much a question of credibility. In this context, there is one circumstance which I consider that in the public interest I should make known, in view of the repeated allegations of miscarriage of justice. In a letter of 26th December 1972 to the Crown Agent, Mr. Anderson admitted that he had been out of his hotel on the evening in question and that he had spoken to two girls on the pavement whom he thought looked scared. This letter was consistent with oral statements made by Mr. Anderson to the Crown Agent and later to two officials of the Scottish Office.
  Mr. Alexander Fletcher: If the right hon. Gentleman is introducing fresh evidence which was not admitted at the trial at Ayr, surely that justifies a public inquiry into the case.
  Mr. Ross: Not at all. Without this evidence, Mr. Anderson was found guilty and this evidence would not have helped him. It is relevant now to the kind of thing said in the memorandum. Mr. Anderson's protestations of innocence, of alibi, of impersonation and victimisation and his allegations of miscarriage of justice have to be seen in the light of this admission which, admittedly, he subsequently withdrew after the formal charge had been served.
  Mr. Fletcher: That is an important qualification.
  Mr. Ross: Of course it is. I have read Mr. Anderson's letter very carefully. If the hon. Gentleman wants to see it, he can ask Mr. Anderson.
  Mr. Fletcher: I have seen it.
  Mr. Ross: I was fascinated by the letter. But the hon. Gentleman has seen it. It was, as I have said, subsequently withdrawn after the formal charge and it was not submitted at the trial. But this admission must be regarded as bringing Mr. Anderson's veracity sharply into question. I suggest to the hon. Member
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  that he would be well advised to accept that, against the background of what has gone before, there are no grounds on which, as Secretary of State, I would be justified in setting up any kind of inquiry into the matter of Mr. Anderson's conviction. I can only say on this matter that if the hon. Gentleman has seen Mr. Anderson's letter, it is a pity that he did not quote it. It is a pity that he did not quote it. What is more, any other hon. Member may like to ask Mr. Anderson for a sight of the letter.
  That brings me to the second and more tangled strand in the argumentation. I refer, of course, to Mr. Anderson's supposition that he has been the victim of an elaborate conspiracy at the instance of Soviet interests to frame an innocent man on a succession of separate occasions.
  I may say that on Mr. Anderson's own showing it was not until 1969 that he first reported his account of the alleged ongoings of the KGB in his regard, and his resignation in March 1964, which he later said was more or less forced upon him, was five years before.
  From the memorandum circulated recently by Mr. Anderson and from his petition to my predecessor last December, a copy of which I have seen, it is apparent that the conspiracy, if there were one, was one of quite extraordinary complexity and continuity. I do not think that it would be in the least appropriate for me to pick out episodes from the lengthy history set out by Mr. Anderson.
  It seems to me that Mr. Anderson himself is highly selective in his use of material and of names and references to this and that. For example, he refers to a letter from Lord Reid of 6th December, 1969, and he quotes one sentence by itself On that he builds a measure of credibility of his story. However, I have the whole of Lord Reid's letter before me, and I have the authority of the noble Lord to quote it.
  It will be remembered that to support his allegations Mr. Anderson said that Lord Reid had written to him saying:
  "You were right in submitting the material."
  That was a reference to the memorandum submitted by Lord Reid to the Security

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  Service for examination. However, the full letter reads:
  "I have now heard from the authorities. It seemed that the head man has gone into the matter with the Department and decided not to take any further action. I am afraid not very satisfactory from your point of view, but you were right in submitting the material."
  That gives a very different impression from the one given by quoting a single sentence from the letter which was used in the memorandum to substantiate the case of Mr. Anderson—and I have the impression that it might have been very dangerous even to write "yours sincerely" at the end of a letter to Mr. Anderson.
  In much the same way, Mr. Anderson is very free in his use of other people's names—Prime Ministers, Lords Advocate, judges and many others. We all know that strange things can happen. But it is not for me to offer judgment. What I can say with the authority of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is that he has fully investigated Mr. Anderson's assertions but has concluded that there is no justification for further review or independent inquiry.
  There is one further point that I should make in this regard. In his circulated memorandum, Mr. Anderson says among many other things that he was given his post as Chief Reporter shortly after he had in February 1972 reported fully to the Security Service on the theme of conspiracy and victimisation. He argues that he could scarcely have been appointed as Chief Reporter in October 1972 unless his report to the Security Service had been considered to be of substance. He suggests that otherwise the implication would be that Ministers of the day had given what he calls "a top public post" to a man whose integrity was suspect.
  All this goes back long before I was returned to office. I cannot answer for my predecessor, of course, but I understand that Mr. Anderson had from time to time over the years conducted a number of public inquiries satisfactorily on a fee-paid basis before he was appointed to the Civil Service as a full-time Chief Reporter, and the obvious assumption is that he was considered by all concerned to have the qualifications for the job and to be a suitable person for a Civil Service appointment subject to the satisfac-
  698
  tory completion of a two-year probationary period of service.
  As I said at the outset, the whole business is sad and painful, and I have not been in the least concerned in anything that I have said to add to the inevitable distress which Mr. Anderson must feel. At the same time, where allegations of miscarriage of justice and so forth are put about, I have a public duty to comment since it is important that there should be full confidence in our system of justice in Scotland.
  Now that Mr. Anderson's claims and allegations have been brought under debate in this way, I hope that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and his hon. Friends will accept that no good purpose is served by calling for inquiries and so forth in a situation where the credibility of the individual concerned is wide open to question.

  CHILDREN (HEART DISORDER)
  2.45 p.m.
  Mr. Robert Kilroy-Silk: Like many thousands of parents, I am extremely disturbed by the queues and the waiting time for children with congenital heart disorders. My own inquiries suggest that although there are acute difficulties in certain areas this may well be a problem of national proportions.
  The figures for children with congenital heart disorders who are awaiting investigatory or surgical operations are very difficult to ascertain. There are no centrally collected statistics on queues or waiting times for this type of surgery. However, my investigations suggest that this could be a rather alarming problem.
  In Liverpool, for example, the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital serves a population of between 4 million and 5 million in the North-West. At the moment, 170 children are waiting for an investigatory operation, and they wait for a period of up to two years. A further 100 children in Liverpool wait for surgical operations, and they wait for a period of up to a year. In other words, for these very serious and urgent operations, children in the North-West may have to wait for a total period of up to three years.
  I am told that in Birmingham, 190 children are waiting for investigatory

  699
  operations, and they, too, can wait for a period of between three and 24 months.
  In Manchester, 28 children are waiting for investigatory operations, and they will wait for up to six months. A further 50 wait for surgical operations, and they will wait for a period of between 15 and 18 months.
  In Bristol 180 children are waiting for cardiac catheterisation, which seems rather strange. They may have to wait for seven years, and children are constantly pushed back on the waiting lists as others are added.
  At Hammersmith, 50 children are waiting for cardiac catheterisation, and they wait between three and 12 months. A further 27 wait between one and six months for surgical operations.
  All this in spite of the fact that many children are not on waiting lists, because of problems of definition. A pediatric case may be put into an adult ward. Many other children are not on waiting lists for the simple reason that surgeons know that they will never be reached and, so as to alleviate or prevent anxiety to parents, they do not even enter children's names on the lists.
  As I say, I have been unable to obtain figures from the Ministry, despite asking two Parliamentary Questions. If my figures are wrong—I hope that they are—the Minister may be able to say what the true figures are.
  What I seek first of all is an inquiry into the situation in Liverpool, which seems to be the most acute area. In Liverpool I include Manchester, from which Liverpool draws a large number of its patients. Second, I ask for a national inquiry to estimate the depth and scale of the problem, so that effective action may be taken.
  We need the full facts in order to be able to formulate a national plan to establish the correct number of units in terms of size and equipment appropriate to the population of the country. We also need to know the number of children born each year with congenital heart disorders. It is estimated to be about 5,000 a year. Some people may say that there are many other children and adults on hospital waiting lists and that there is a whole series of different specialties.
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  What is so different about this category is the consequence of having to be put on a waiting list for such a long time. These children clearly need urgent surgery, because they are more prone than others to chest and other infections.
  The testimony of Professor John Hay, of the Child Health Department of Liverpool University, consultant paediatrician to the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital, on television, quoted in the Lancashire Evening Post on 1st April, was that occasionally patients have died whilst on the waiting list. If that is true, it is scandalous. If not, it is for the Department to show it to be unfounded. I think that the Minister will agree that Professor Hay has a very distinguished career and is of high repute in his profession. On his testimony, occasionally patients on the waiting list have died for no other reason than the lack of adequate resources. I want the Minister to tell us whether that is true, and, if it is, what he proposes to do about it. I understand that even the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital has a mortality rate on its waiting list.
  Those children who do not die whilst waiting for investigation or surgical operations suffer—or may suffer—permanent injury. Irreversible changes can take place in vital organs, which will affect their lives as young adults and often turn them into people who suffer from a permanent disability. For example, children who suffer from what is colloquially called a "hole in the heart" often get an increase of pressure in their lungs. If surgery is delayed, heart failure can take place when they are young adults, even though the operation, performed on them as children, has apparently been successful. The longer they wait the more likely they are to be affected as children, to suffer permanent disability, and to die as young adults even after an apparently successful operation.
  The Mayo Clinic in the United States has clearly shown that the longer the operation is postponed the more likelihood there is that the pressure in the lungs will remain or will rise and result in a shorter and less full life for the individual concerned.
  The longer the operation is delayed the more dangerous it becomes. It causes inevitable anxiety and distress to the

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  parents of these children, as the correspondence that I have received in the last three weeks clearly demonstrates. Parents undergo a tremendous amount of psychological agony watching their children suffering, in many cases for no other reason than that the necessary resources are not available. It is not that the operation is not possible, not that techniques have not been developed, but that, for one reason or another, this area of the National Health Service has been given insufficient priority and has not been allocated the appropriate resources.
  I understand that in the Liverpool region parents are often told that an investigatory operation is urgent, yet they still see their children on the waiting list six to nine months later. Surgeons in clinics are constantly apologising to parents for the failure to provide surgery on the dates promised.
  I should like to go through some specific cases where this kind of thing has happened, and the consequences for some individuals in Liverpool.
  One mother who took her child to the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital before Christmas last year was told that the child would have to wait two years for surgery in Liverpool. She approached the Mayo Clinic in the United States, was offered an appointment on 1st February, and the child was operated upon on 8th February. The child is now back in England after a successful operation costing about 8,000 dollars. Putting it mildly, it seems a very poor reflection upon our National Health Service that parents, if they are wealthy enough to afford it, should be forced to pay for treatment abroad, where it can be undertaken much quicker than in this country.
  Another case was brought to my attention by my hon. Friend the Member for Chorley (Mr. Rodgers). Amanda Lawrence, of Chorley, is six years old and has attended the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital since the age of one. She waited until the end of 1972 for an investigatory operation which resulted in an acknowledgement that she had a hole in the heart and a serious valve disorder. Her parents were then told that there would be a surgical operation within nine months. In December 1973 the parents were told that it would be February or March this year. She is still waiting.
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  Another case, reported in the Lancashire Evening Post on Tuesday of this week, concerns Helen Watson of Leyland, who is 18 months old. She has a hole in the heart and desperately needs an operation if she is to lead a full and active life, yet she has been waiting since September for a two-day series of tests to locate the hole. Her parents were told that the tests would take place in six weeks. In January they were told that it would be another six weeks. They are still waiting. Mr. and Mrs. Watson still do not know the date of the tests, let alone the date of the operation.
  I could quote many other cases which demonstrate the distress of parents and children in this area, These are Liverpool cases. I could refer to others from different parts of the country.
  I now wish to refer to services in the city of Liverpool. I suggest that to maintain the existing number of beds over the next few years more funds need to be allocated to Liverpool. The board of governors of the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital has already made a temporary, once-for-all donation. We now need additional funds from the Department to ensure that the facilities can be made available.
  I ask for special funds on the basis of those given to Great Ormond Street several years ago. That money was given to finance a pilot scheme, but it enabled Great Ormond Street to have a throughput of 600 hole-in-the-heart operations a year. The same could be done in Liverpool. In Liverpool there is a clear demand for more nurses. The Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital reviewed its nursing needs in 1970, and still the recommendations await implementation. The hospital is still not up to the required intensive-care standards.
  Again, there is no time either at Liverpool or Birmingham to reinvestigate after surgery to see whether the pressure in the lungs is still there, or rising. We ought to know that. It is impossible to devote resources to a follow-up investigation because the resources available are in any case inadequate for those already on the waiting list. There is a need for more facilites, so that tests can be made on what appear to be successful operations.
  We should determine a national strategy. We need the full facts in order

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  to establish a national plan, to establish the correct number of units in terms of size appropriate to the population and to get the most efficient use of services in this field, as in anything else.
  That would seem to indicate that the units would have to be large to make the optimum use of the facilities required for this kind of surgery. Great Ormond Street Hospital is probably the only one that is making the optimum use of its resources.
  I suggest that the Minister should consider a reassessment of the present policy. There is a limited number of cardiac units of adequate size. There should be an amalgamation of the smaller units, and the Government should resist the tendency for small units to proliferate to try to cope with the overload on the big cardiac centres. What is needed is not a proliferation of new hospitals but an injection of resources and cash into the big units that are already performing a valuable function. More resources should be pumped into the big cardiac centres. There is a need to build upon the centres that are well established, and it would be extremely unwise to start new ones.
  Liverpool has a throughput of two or three operations per week. The figure should be at least four or five, and it is because Liverpool is not doing that number that it is wasting expensive resources in terms of machinery that becomes obsolete within 10 years. Just as with any production line or any factory, those resources and that capital investment are expensive, and should be used on a full-time basis if optimum use is to be made of them. Moreover, there is a need for more nurses, and an agreed training scheme for paediatric cardiac surgeons, which is not available at present.
  I should like the Minister to accept that this is an area of top priority. Even if action is taken now it will take a long time to clear the waiting list. In the jargon of the prices and incomes policy, these children have a special case. Their case is the right to live a normal life, and it is a right that we cannot and should not deny them.
  I end as I began by asking the Minister to set up an inquiry, first, to consider the services in Liverpool and, secondly, to discover the depth and scale of the problem
  704
  nationally. We want from my hon. Friend a commitment that he will treat the problems of children with congenital heart disorders as a special case, and that he will provide far more Government funds and earmark them for this very necessary and urgent surgery.
  3.3 p.m.
  Mr. Ian Percival: As every minute from which I speak comes out of the limited time left to the Minister, whom, I am sure, we all want to hear, I shall be brief. We all feel deeply, both for these children and their parents. I want to stress the need for co-operation. Our feelings are not in doubt.
  I am glad that some parents have formed an association to keep us informed about these matters, and I am proud that the first chairman of the Liverpool members of the association lives in my constituency. They brought one specific fact to the attention of some of us, and that matter has been dealt with. I hope that they will go on bringing these facts to the attention of those of us in that area, and that branches of the association in other areas will bring the facts to the attention of their Members, because only if we have all the information can we ever hope to do a useful job in this field.
  Of course, we all work in our different ways, but we have one objective—to combine to improve the situation. We do that best by addressing our minds to the bottlenecks at any moment. I understand from Professor Hay that the bottleneck at the moment is the shortage of trained nurses. The payment of those nurses, if they were available, has been overcome for three years. But we must not rest on that. We must look three years ahead to make sure that the finances will still be available when the endowment funds are no longer there to pay for them.
  The practical bottleneck is the shortage of trained nurses, and this can be dealt with only by the Department and the profession. All of us who are urging them to deal with it must recognise that they want to deal with it and provide the necessary quality. We should all be looking ahead—so far as possible in an unemotive way—at the realities of the situation and the practical requirements. I hope that we shall all be able to get information from this association and

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  from other sources and pool it so that, together, we may play some part in bringing about the improvement which all of us so dearly want.
  3.6 p.m.
  The Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr. David Owen): I think that the House will congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ormskirk (Mr. Kilroy-Silk). He drew attention to this problem in his maiden speech and he has pursued it since. It is a very important and in some parts urgent issue which deserves our attention. I can assure my hon. Friend that it concerns me deeply.
  Over 4,000 children are born each year with some form of congenital cardiac defect. Tragically, about a third die within the first few hours of life; the remaining two-thirds need treatment, often an operation. We are therefore discussing a subject of the utmost importance to several thousands of parents, who will not forgive any of us—Government, health service officials or doctors—if their children get anything but the most effective and prompt treatment possible. Inevitably and understandably this is an emotive subject, but it is one we must try to approach in as clear headed and rational a way as possible.
  My hon. Friend has spoken of lengthy waiting lists—and indeed some of the waiting lists are lengthy. I am advised that at present the waiting list for investigation at the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital is 185, while the waiting list for surgery is 84. I am advised that 14 children have been waiting for investigation, and six for surgery, since before January 1973—that is, over 15 months. This is an extremely worrying situation.
  But do these bare statistics represent the true position? They may overstate the problem. Some of these children on a hospital waiting list are waiting for treatment at the earliest possible moment, and we must see that they receive it. Others are on the list because at some future time, when they are older, bigger or stronger, they will need an operation which would be inadvisable now. In other words they do not represent a current demand for treatment, but must wait for sound medical reasons. Yet others may be on lists because their con-
  706
  sultants have not decided definitely on an operation, and it is a way of keeping in touch with them—they are called in for a periodic check-up and may never need treatment. Again, they do not represent a current demand for treatment. This is why we must consider the waiting list problem seriously.
  I cannot tell the House at present exactly how many of the children on the lists at the Royal Liverpol Children's Hospital really need investigation or treatment now, and whether the chance of successful treatment will diminish the longer they wait. The same is true of the waiting lists at all the other hospitals my hon. Friend has mentioned. I intend, however, to find this out urgently. We do not need a numbers survey, as my hon. Friend has asked, so much as an analysis in depth of the existing waiting lists to see what categories of children are on them. I have already asked officials in my Department to undertake an urgent review of the Liverpool waiting lists. I expect to know—before the end of this month—how many children are in need of treatment and whose chances of successful treatment will diminish if that treatment is delayed. This is the vital figure I need before making any decisions for the future. I also intend to look at the problem nationwide.
  Resources will always be limited in the National Health Service. I was glad that my hon. Friend stressed, in his maiden speech on the Budget and again today, the need to concentrate resources in a few major centres. In Liverpool, Professor Hay, to whose dedicated service I should like to pay tribute, has expressed his concern about the waiting lists for several years. A great deal has been done. The board of governors has been considering this problem with some urgency and agreed to develop the staffing of the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital in an effort to improve the output of work in paediatric cardiology.
  In June 1973, the United Liverpool Hospital approached my Department for £25,000 a year for five years towards a scheme of expansion of the paediatric cardiology service, at an estimated cost of £47,000 a year; the remaining £22,000 was to be found by the board of governors. This was to take account of the work from outside the region falling

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  on the hospital. This money was to remedy deficiencies in
  "nursing staff, technicians, operating theatre time and consultant sessions".
  This request was turned down in June 1973 by the Department. This decision was made by a previous Government.
  It appears that one of the main reasons for that decision was that a new paediatric cardiology facility was to be completed at Wythenshawe Hospital in the Manchester region. Since 25 per cent. of the Liverpool patients come from the Manchester region, it was expected that when these facilities were in full use, pressure on the Liverpool Children's Hospital would ease. Indeed, on 4th December my predecessor as Under-Secretary at the Department, the hon. Member for Barkston Ash (Mr. Alison) answered a Question from my hon. Friend the Member for St. Helens (Mr. Spriggs), saying that new facilities recently completed in Manchester would reduce the load on the Liverpool unit since many patients come from the Manchester area.
  Yet I am now told, as part of my inquiry following my hon. Friend's speech, that the new facilities at Wythenshawe intended for use in paediatric cardiology are not being used for that purpose. I am advised that 30 beds, which were to be made available for this use, and the appointment of an additional cardiologist, which had been approved by my Department, have not been used. I have asked for an immediate investigation why this surprising situation has occurred, and I intend to review the whole investment strategy for dealing with paediatric cardiology. We need a few centres of excellence ensuring that any child needing surgery urgently can receive it.
  The Board of Governors at the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital has done its best. I have no criticism of what it has done. It has used its endowment fund. If the facilities which it has now provided are still needed after the money allocated from the endowment fund has been exhausted, the extra cost for the new Area Health Authority (Teaching) will be met by my Department. This charge, which is being met from the endowment fund now, should not be a continuing charge on the endowment fund.
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  Reference was made to the question of children dying on the waiting list. I am advised that this has not happened in the case of the Liverpool Children's Hospital since 1971. But a word of caution in interpreting the matter. People do die while on waiting lists. This is not always due to the fact that urgent surgery is required. Some of these children are very sick and ill children. But I am not complacent about this. Paediatric cardiology is certainly not the only speciality where there are anxieties over waiting lists and where people feel that there are insufficient resources.
  The House has the right to know the new Government's general attitude to these problems. We cannot achieve miracles, but a great deal can be done by using existing facilities to the full, and planning sensibly. It is not always a question of more money—though this is a great help. A lot can and must be done within existing resources.
  On waiting lists generally, I am determined to introduce a nationwide programme substantially to reduce waiting lists, which in many important areas are indefensibly long. The Press, particularly the Sun, has rightly attached a great deal of importance to this area. I am grateful to the Press. But it is not a problem only in acute life-saving areas. There are long lists for other conditions, such as inguinal hernia, where men are unable to work or have to be moved to different jobs for more than a year, and gynaecological operations, where women are below par. We rightly attach great importance to the acute life-saving side of medicine, but there is also another side. These are complex issues. It would be dishonest of me to try to pretend that we can achieve immediate success.
  Waiting lists are one of the indicators of lack of facilities. We shall use these indicators to help determine the allocation of future resources. We intend to develop these indicators to identify areas which are relatively deprived of adequate health services. We shall then give them priority and switch resources into them. This will take time, but my target is to be in a position to start using these indicators when we begin allocating capital and revenue funds for the next financial year. I am looking urgently not only at acute paediatric cardiology, but at other areas.

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  I can only hope that by using rigorous methods we can switch resources to where they are most needed and redress the imbalance in health service provision that is so apparent today. At a time of financial stringency we shall all have to accept the need for greater selectivity in the use of skilled personnel—one of the scarcest of all our resources. The hon. and learned Gentleman was right to draw attention to that. We also have to face the consequences of the 20 per cent. cut-back in financial investment that was imposed in December 1973 by the previous Government. We are deeply concerned about these issues. I am determined that in Liverpool and in the country as a whole families with children suffering from cardiac complaints will get a service which will put the minds of the anxious parents at rest.
  We should not be too selective in considering this area. There are many areas which need more resources. My hon. Friend has drawn attention to a vitally important area. I promise to keep him informed of the facts that we discover in Liverpool and nationwide.

  NEWSPAPERS
  3.15 p.m.
  Mr. John Gorst: In drawing attention to the need for an inquiry into the methods of regulating Press practices—in short, to the inadequacies of the Press Council—let me say at the outset that I believe that the ideal for which we should strive at all times is that a free Press should be self-regulating.
  I quote words used by the Minister of State—who I am delighted is to reply to the debate, because I know that he has a most enlightened attitude to this subject—in his Minority Report to the Report of the Committee on Privacy:
  "It is only where the intruder abuses the freedom to enquire that the problem begins…
  When it conflicts with the commendable interest of privacy who must draw the line? At present it is the intruder himself."
  This is one of the problems with which the Press Council seems to have failed to deal in recent cases. I believe that it has also failed in its attitude to practices and techniques. In general terms I believe that the Press Council has fallen far
  710
  behind the times in terms of consumer protection.
  My purpose this afternoon is to examine the Press Council, particularly in relation to its handling of the Lambton affair, to draw certain conclusions from this, and to suggest that there are deficiencies in the Press Council that call for careful scrutiny.
  I regard the Press Council's findings on the Lambton affair as totally amoral. The council's report suggests that ends justify the means. I quote the phrase from the council's findings, that
  "Success is an acceptable excuse"
  for the methods which the News of the World saw fit to adopt.
  The News of the World has clearly shown the scant regard it has for the Press Council. This paper was rightly censured by the council but on entirely the wrong grounds. The council censured it for inadequate supervision. It did not censure it, as it should have done, for the methods it used.
  The contemptuous attitude of the News of the World was summarised in its editorial the following Sunday when it stated:
  "The censure need not be taken too seriously."
  The very fact that the News of the World could make such a remark calls into question the efficacy of the Press Council.
  On the subject of the Sunday People, which was the other part of the Press Council's inquiry, I believe that the council reached many conclusions for the wrong reasons. Indeed, some of the council's examination of the evidence was highly dubious. For example on page 27 of the report reference is made to the payment of £6,000 to some of the principal people involved. It says that an initial payment of £750 was made and the balance of £5,250 was to be paid on publication. Yet later on page 33 of the report, it is stated that
  "The Sunday People bought evidence with the intention of confronting Lord Lambton with it."
  Really! How naive and disingenuous can one be? If the purpose of buying the evidence was in order to protect the Sunday People, what on earth was the point of making a down payment initially and another one on publication? One

  711
  would have thought that the evidence would be bought outright.
  Later the Press Council Report deals with the Sunday People defence. It notes that
  "the Sunday People was uneasy about the diligence of the authorities"
  in carrying out investigations. Again the Press Council is totally naive. It went on to say:
  "It is not for the Council to investigate this question of diligence."
  One wonders why. After all, if the Press Council is not to probe the explanations which are put forward by people who are defending themselves, it is a very weak and dilatory form of inquiry. I think that the whole of the Lambton affair as investigated by the Press Council illustrates certainly that the council gives the impression of preferring to whitewash the Press rather than to defend the public. It gives the Press and not the public the benefit of the doubt, and, worse still, it seems to demonstrate a totally immoral attitude.
  In passing, it is interesting to note that the Prime Minister, when making a statement to the House a few days ago on the subject of land speculation, remarked:
  "For several days now she"—
  referring to Mrs. Marcia Williams—
  "has been subject to an intolerable degree of newspaper harassment on her doorstep, including an unauthorised entry into her car, and the incitement of children to hammer upon her door."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 8th April 1974; Vol. 872, c. 30.]
  Without going into the rights and wrongs or, indeed, any aspect of the Prime Minister's statement, what gives one very little confidence is the fact that the Prime Minister himself appears to lack confidence in the efficacy of the Press Council as a watchdog because neither he nor any of the other participants have apparently thought it expedient to refer the matter to the Press Council. Even if for very good reasons, which one can understand, they would prefer not to press the matter with the Press Council, I regard it as intolerable that the Press Council has not yet shown any inclination to take any action itself to make inquiries into the conduct of the Press on this matter.
  After all, the Prime Minister of this country, whether he is a Conservative
  712
  or a Labour Prime Minister, is at least entitled to some sort of regard in terms of the practices of the Press, irrespective of the merits of what is being investigated.
  I therefore turn now to discuss what should be done about this situation. Should the Press Council be abolished and should it be started again with some other machinery? Should it be reconstituted in some way; or should it be reformed; and if it should be one or other of these options, who should do it?
  I have made my position clear on that. I believe that the Press Council should be putting its own house in order—or that the Press, which is, after all, its paymaster, should be putting the council in order. However, if the Government, after looking into this matter, find that the Press is not willing to make improvements, they have a duty to conduct some form of inquiry into some of the criticisms which I have made and some of the questions which I am about to ask.
  I suggested earlier that the Press Council was behind the times. It is behind the times because, in this country and beyond, the consumer protection movement has overtaken the Press and the Press Council. In its activities, the Press Council is out of date. As a defender of the freedom of the Press, it does an excellent job, but as a protector of the consumer it is, I believe, less than even inadequate.
  I do not believe that the distinguished judges who have been its chairmen are in any way correct when they say that the Press Council has teeth. I quote here from what Lord Devlin, its first chairman, had to say when he gave up office in 1969:
  "The theoretical defect that the Press Council was without 'teeth ' was cured by the at first unco-ordinated decisions of editors invariably to publish adjudications against their newspapers."
  The attitude of the News of the World gives one good ground for doubting that.
  Lord Devlin's remarks were echoed the following year by his successor, Lord Pearce, who said:
  "To be compelled to print in your own newspaper an account of a matter … is a strong sanction."
  It may be a strong sanction on some newspapers, but it is not a strong enough sanction to deal with the situation which

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  arose, for example, over the Lambton affair.
  Ought there to be, as it were, an extreme long-stop? One wonders whether the Goverment will in the end have to consider whether there should be a licence to print newspapers—a licence to print, which a Press Council with real teeth, should have the ultimate opportunity, as a last-ditch sanction, to withdraw if a newspaper continually flouted the acceptable practices of the day.
  I come now to certain aspects and practices of the Press Council which, in my view, need examination, and I refer, first, to its independence. Admittedly, the Committee on Privacy encouraged the Press Council to have more lay members, and this has been done. I wonder whether the council has gone far enough. Indeed, I wonder whether there should be a much greater separation, in the interests of independence, of the Press Council from the Press.
  In particular, one thinks of the financing of the Press Council. First, one questions the origin of its funds, and second, whether they are adequate for the council to do all that should be expected of it. Is it working fast enough? Over the Lambton affair, there was a delay of nine months, which seemed quite intolerable, when other inquiries were able to produce results in a fraction of that time.
  The initiative which other consumer protection bodies take on behalf of consumers is singularly lacking from the Press Council as at present constituted. There is no protection afforded to the public unless a complaint is put forward by an aggrieved party.
  We know, and I have instanced the case of the Prime Minister, that many people who are aggrieved want only peace and to be left alone to forget what was perhaps an intolerable experience. Many of the actions which might have been the subject of complaint are not complained about. The Press Council should do more to initiate action of its own. It has done so on only a handful of occasions. On the Lambton affair it appeared to move only after pressure from myself and a handful of other people. The Christine Keeler memoirs and the photographs of the Queen are the only occasions on which I can recall
  714
  the council taking the initiative without a complaint having been made.
  I wonder whether the time has now come for a reconstituted Press Council to be given a greater protection of privilege for those it calls as witnesses. If that happened it would be a great step forward because some of its hearings could be held in public, particularly when they deal with general rather than specific matters in which there is an element of distress to the aggrieved participants. The Press Council must make a significant change in its attitude towards taking part in the public discussion of its activities. At the moment it seems to shun contact with the public. When I took part in a television discussion on this matter with the Minister of State the council was unwilling to take part. It shunned the discussion completely, and I have had similar experiences on other occasions.
  I therefore leave it with the Minister to say what action the Government can take and what steps he is prepared to initiate. I urge him at least to consider an inquiry into whether this body is adequate in the current climate as a protector, not just of the freedom of the Press but also of the rights of individual members of the general public.
  3.33 p.m.
  The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Alexander W. Lyon): The hon. Member for Hendon, North (Mr. Gorst) has done us a service by raising this issue for wider public discussion, and I intend to approach his remarks in the spirit of furthering that discussion. He began by saying that a free Press is a self-regulating Press. That is true. I hope that the British Press will remain free within that concept. I certainly have no intention of imposing upon it some kind of Government restraint and I am a little surprised that the hon. Member should have gone so far as to suggest that there could be a licence to print newspapers which could be withdrawn in the event of bad behaviour. He set that proposal in the context of administration by the Press Council, but in order to have that power the Press Council would require some kind of statutory backing and, although an independent agency, it would need to be created by statute with a statutory power before it could take that kind of action.
  Mr. Gorst: I regard that proposal as the ultimate long-stop in default of any action to put the affairs of the Press Council in order.
  Mr. Lyon: I shall consider that, but in my view the idea goes much further than I would want to go—and I have been regarded as being somewhat extreme on this point.
  I am about to come to the difficulty that lies before the Press. In our law the Press is no different from an individual citizen. It is free in our society only because the citizen is free in our society. It has the right to comment only in so far as the citizen has a right to comment. It has a right to investigate only in so far as the citizen has a right to investigate. Therefore, when we are talking of the freedom of the Press, or restricting the freedom of the Press, we are talking about the rôle of the citizen in relation to his fellow citizens in society.
  There is no such thing as absolute freedom in any society. Such a society would be a jungle. It would be a place where the powerful would be able to override the weak. The concept of law which governs our society is that when people have rights and freedoms, if they come into conflict the law should be an instrument for regulating that conflict in a way that is seen to be just and fair to all members of that society. That is the issue at the root of the problem raised by the hon. Member for Hendon, North this afternoon.
  The hon. Member hung the discussion on the Lambton case, and I should like to take that case as an illustration. For my part, I found it nauseating that the News of the World could set up a camera behind a mirror in anyone's bedroom—brothel or otherwise—in order to take photographs of what was going on in the bed. The Press Council completely evaded that issue in its discussion. It raised the general question which had to be decided in its findings about the News of the World when it said:
  "If there is a serious public ill to be exposed, whether by the Press or by a member of the public, methods may be justified which would be wholly unacceptable in some less serious case."
  That is the point, but the Press Council made no ruling, no determination at all, about this practice that I find so offensive, and it did not do so because it was
  716
  running away from the central issue in the case.
  It is true that later, in relation to its findings about the Sunday People and the purchase of the photographs from Mr. Levy by the Sunday People, the Press Council went on to discuss the whole privacy question much more fully. It said:
  "The issue of public importance looms just as large in considering whether or not the inevitable intrusion into privacy was justified as it does in relation to the matters already discussed. Obviously a person's privacy in a brothel whose inhabitants are such as wish to photograph clandestinely what is going on has to be regarded in a somewhat different light from the privacy of people in normal surroundings such as their own homes. But without the involvement of issues of public interest the new stories which were published would, of course, have been quite unjustifiable."
  It went on to say that because of the public interest in this matter, which was indicated by the remarks of the Security Commission, the conduct of the Sunday People was justified.
  The first question I have to ask about that is who, in his right mind, really believes that Rupert Murdoch and his men were concerned whether there was a leak of security? I, for one, utterly reject that suggestion. All they wanted was to arouse a prurient interest in the sex life—the deplorable sex life, in my view—of a Conservative Minister of the Crown.
  The fact that they were not primarily interested in drugs, and therefore the possibility of a leak of information, was indicated by the fact that in their initial account of what went on there was no suggestion of drugs. In the course of the debate in the House, when I raised the matter with the then Prime Minister, we did not know that there was any suggestion of drugs. The only issue was the sex life of a Minister—a sex life that was to be revealed to the British public in order to sell Mr. Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, and the other newspapers cottoned on to it.
  I reject the idea that there was any public interest in this story, in the proper definition of that concept. I may be wrong and the Press Council may be right. Who should make the final decision whether a reporter should be sent to do this kind of thing—whether he

  717
  William's house and ordered to pay children to throw stones at the door? Who should be able to decide whether Christine Keeler's memoirs reviving a sordid affair to the detriment of the man who tried to live it down, should be printed?
  At the moment it is the editor of the newspaper. The only sanction operating against him is the sanction of exposure to condemnation by the Press Council, which condemns in such an inoffensive manner. It has no power to penalise or to restrict the continuation in the profession of a journalist, because journalism is not a closed profession in the same way as is the legal profession, or accountancy, with a ruling body which can expel if there has been a breach of the code of ethics.
  The result is that having censured the News of the World in the Keeler case the Press Council finds that within 10 years it is back with another such case, in which the News of the World has behaved with the same lack of sensitivity for individual rights. I have to ask myself: is there any way in which one can regulate the conflict of interest and decide the issue not according to the interests of the intruder or the person intruded upon but according to a fair test by an independent and impartial body?
  I have argued this case in the Minority Report to the Younger Committee, which is available for the Press to reconsider. I have not changed my views since I became a Minister. I accept that this raises serious issues of principle, which have to be considered before any legislation can be embarked upon. At the moment I am involved in a reconsideration of the whole problem. We shall take into account all the interests involved when trying to define clearly where this balance ought to be struck. We have not progressed far, and it will take time. Like the last Government, we hope to issue a White Paper in due course, allowing proper time for a full discussion of the issues involved.
  Mr. Gorst: Will the Minister say whether, even if consideration is not likely to be given to the withdrawal of a licence to print along the lines I have suggested, he is indicating by his later remarks that he has in mind the possibility of the withdrawal of a journalist's licence to practice?
  Mr. Lyon: It would not be possible for the Government to make that kind of decision unless we were to enact legislation which would oblige the profession to set up an institution which could regulate its practices. We are a long way from that, and I do not contemplate that that would ever happen. I fear that the matter of journalistic ethics is one which has to be left to the profession, although sometimes it is lamentable in carrying out its obligations to the public under such ethics. The possibility of the aggrieved citizen having some kind of remedy which is not available to him now, other than the mere fact of a possible censure from the Press Council, is a much wider issue than the one which we are considering.
  I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the matter in the way he has. There is no concluded view in the Government. We are considering this and other matters in deciding our reaction to the Report of the Younger Committee on Privacy.
  The Press sometimes takes the view that the concern that has been expressed from both sides of the House today is concern by public figures about their own position in relation to society and the way in which they may be able to safeguard their peccadilloes from the general public. My view is that a much more serious issue is the effect upon ordinary individuals who are not in public life, who are treated in just the same way by the Press, and who have no redress. A figure of national repute, particularly if he is a Member of the House, at least has a vehicle of publicity to rebut what is said about him in the Press. A private figure has no such vehicle.
  Although the Press Council, in its report on Lord Lambton, indicated that it was his position as a Minister of the Crown, particularly in the Department of Defence, which gave the matter a public interest, I think of last year, when, in the gossip column in the Sunday Express, I read an offensive story of the relationships of the wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament, who was not a Minister and was not so much in the public eye that his name would be instantly recognisable, and one of his colleagues.
  The wife had left her husband some time before and had subsequently been employed by the other Member of the

  719
  House as his secretary. The innuendo of the story was unmistakable. It may have been defamatory, but it was clear, defamatory or not, that it was an intolerable intrusion into the privacy of those two men, not because they were public men but simply out of a nauseating desire to make capital out of what was implied, without being alleged, as a sexual relationship, of which there was none.
  When I raised with both Members the question whether I should send that matter to the Press Council, both said, "What is the good of sending it to the Press Council, which will do nothing about it beyond making the issue more public than it already is?" One reason for thinking that perhaps the use of the law would have been a more effective restraint is that that kind of story would never have been printed if there had been any legal remedy. That is one of the factors that has influenced my mind in the past in suggesting that there should be a change in the law.
  I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the matter.

  RATE SUPPORT GRANT
  3.48 p.m.
  Mr. Richard Wainwright: I should like to raise with the Government an urgent question which boils down to value for money. It concerns the effect on the public services in the oldest power-driven industrial area in the world from the way in which the rate support grant is being administered.
  Although I have no mandate from any other Members of Parliament representing constituencies in West Yorkshire, I am free to guess that hon. Members of all parties have received substantial numbers of well-argued letters from ratepayers in West Yorkshire who are indignant about the rate demands which are now dropping through their letter boxes. They are indignant not because of meanness—although there may be the odd mean-minded character even in Yorkshire—but mainly because they do not believe that they will get value for money.
  At best they are optimistic enough to think that the public services may be
  720
  maintained this coming year at about the same level as the past year. Many people in the area that I represent are suspicious that there will be a manifest drop in the level of certain public services that they used to receive from that remarkably strong body, the old West Riding County Council. That feeling has been fanned by the advertisements in the classified advertisement columns of the many West Yorkshire daily newspapers that have detailed the high salaries for new local government posts. Some of those posts have been taken up, to public knowledge, by people who have been doing similar work in recent years for half the money.
  The feeling is that under the cover of a great mist of secrecy, which in the Yorkshire valleys we know as "Moor grime", the rate support grant has to some extent been wangled under the previous Conservative Government, who were dismissed at the end of February, and under the incoming Government, who I grant have had extremely little time in which to attend to these matters owing to the unfortunate date that was chosen by the former Prime Minister for the election—wangled in the interests of districts which respective Governments have wished to please. That is particularly so in respect of the benefits to big cities, and, above all, London.
  Local ratepayers in the industrial districts of West Yorkshire outside Leeds are being made to cough up the difference between what they paid last year and what they are being required to pay this year, out of their savings or else by working excessive overtime. This is not a parochial matter that is confined to my constituency. Everything that I say applies, with some small adjustment in the figures, to a great city such as Bradford, for example, in which I would expect Government hon. Members to have a particular interest as it was at Bradford that the Independent Labour Party was born. That was to them one of the brightest events in Bradford's long history.
  This is no longer a matter for county councils or town halls. One of the many regrettable results of the Local Government Act 1972, which I can never bring myself to describe as local government reform is that a great protection for ratepayers in the North of England has been lost. There were days when truly powerful bodies such as the former West Riding

  721
  County Council and, on the other side of the Pennines, the great Lancashire County Council, had chief officers with vast authority, who had enormous public respect, who had long experience and great back-up staffs. When they went to Whitehall, no matter who might be in power, they were capable of making the top echelons of the Civil Service quake and tremble. That I have seen when, accompanied by the representatives of constituencies, I have been on deputations to Whitehall. The deference paid to the chief officers of great county councils as well as to hon. Members has been striking.
  The chief officers were men who worked from a strong base which has now disappeared. The West Riding has been fragmented into no fewer than 14 separate authorities. The former clerks to the great authorities can be described as princes of the public service. They lived their working lives amongst the people whom they were serving. They lived away from the fevered and unreal atmosphere of central London. They did not work with half an eye on the future chairmanship of some big bank or insurance company. But they have gone with the fragmentation of local government which, as everybody knows, was done at the behest of the civil servants in London so as to make their life easier in controlling local government.
  In areas such as West Yorkshire, we shall live very soon to regret the day when this change in the local government system came to pass as a result of a weak Government surrendering to pressure from the Civil Service. Instead of having the protection from Parliament which he has had up to now, the ratepayer has become a victim of panic manipulation of certain aspects of the rate support grant by Ministers who, in the present political atmosphere, must be seeking votes.
  Speaking on behalf of my party, I condemn the form of domestic rate support system introduced by the Conservative Government last year and now seized upon by the Labour Government in the short time which they have had at their disposal. It enables the Secretary of State to make an order settling the amount of taxpayers' money which is to be doled out to each separate council individually, and to discriminate between
  722
  one council and another throughout England.
  The master of a Victorian workhouse at its worst did not have as much power over his victims as the Secretary of State has as a result of legislation passed by the Conservatives. It enables the Secretary of State to push £215 million of public money towards specific places. I think I need go no further than to draw the attention of the House to the political dangers involved, which I believe are now a regrettable feature of our system.
  The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Gordon Oakes): Perhaps we can clear this matter up now. It is true that the Conservative Government favoured a variable domestic element. We preferred a fixed domestic element. The Liberal Party voted against our proposal that there should be a fixed domestic element for each authority rather than the variable amounts which the Conservatives proposed, which would lead to great disparity between authorities—the very situation about which the hon. Gentleman is now complaining. Why did the Liberals oppose us at that time?
  Mr. Wainwright: I was not in this House at the time. My point is that any discrimination between one council and another should be done after debate in the House. It should not rest with the Secretary of State by order to be able to decide that everywhere, regardless of the enormous variations of need, shall receive the same domestic rate relief. Nor should it rest just with the Secretary of State to allocate, as Conservative Ministers did, vastly differing sums to different areas. There is an element of autocracy here which is wholly contrary to the country's democratic political traditions.
  The rate support grant in toto, about which hon. Members have often spoken but about which very little has been done, needs completely redesigning. One cannot touch on this topic without reiterating regret that the Conservative Government got things in completely the wrong order. By the Local Government Act 1972 they reshaped the boundaries, reducing the number of local authorities, and then only at the very last minute, when all the framework had been set up, did they get round to some hotch-potch of financial arrangements.

  723
  I suppose, incidentally, that the Conservative Party is still in existence. One must give it the benefit of the doubt on that, but not a single Conservative Member is present. One would have supposed that some of them at least might be interested in their ratepayers. After all, it is only the middle of Thursday afternoon, and the weather is not quite as attractive and warm as it was earlier this week.
  One would suppose that an administration who prided themselves on being comprised of business men—the party which is the self-styled party of administrative and managerial skills—might have accompanied their Local Government Bill of 1972 with financial provisions. But not a bit of it: the finance was thought up in haste, in a most ill-judged manner and at a very late stage after all the rest of the local government changes had been put into effect. That was the inheritance which the incoming Government found and which I agree has put them in a difficult position.
  The system which resulted from this last-minute introduction of the financial arrangements for local government calls out for urgent re-examination, but it is to this point that I draw the Minister's special attention. In the Liberal view, he has a duty to try to clear up some of the mess that the Conservatives left.
  I take briefly the three main elements of rate support. First, on the needs element, the Conservatives' White Paper of January 1974 said:
  "For the present the Government consider that the best available indicator of spending need is the pattern of recent past expenditure. This does not mean that each authority's grant should be directly related to its own past expenditure. But authorities with similar population and other characteristics will have the need to spend the same amount per head."
  Have Governments, of any political colour, not heard of sudden local slumps, of sudden local difficulties and of sudden emergencies? The quotation is:
  sudden local slumps, of sudden local difficulties and of sudden emergencies? The quotation is:
  "…authorities with similar population and other characteristics will have the need to spend the same amount per head."
  This is reducing people to an index, to being plastic people who must be sup-
  724
  posed, because they are "pollution units" living in "residential units", not to be real live people living in homes.
  Then I come to the resources element. The White Paper of January 1974 said:
  "The Government consider that the majority of rating authorities should qualify for the resources element next year, and under the Local Government Bill therefore"
  —the Bill of 1973—
  "the qualifying level is to be a national standard rateable value per head."
  That makes nonsense of the very title of "resources element". It is absurd to suggest that over this very disparate country where it is a comomnplace that for years resources have been grossly unevenly spread, mainly as between the South-East and parts of Cheshire, and the old industrial areas, the majority of rating authorities should qualify for the resources element.
  As to the domestic element, I have referred already to the arbitrary power which the present law puts into the hands of Ministers.
  I come then to the actual effects which are now becoming felt. The present system is seriously depriving some of our oldest and most important industrial areas, which still provide a great part of our solid and reliable export trade, of the public services which they badly need. On the other side it is heavily subsidising prestige projects which have become objects of public abhorrence, mainly in the big cities. I have in mind loss-making Olympic swimming baths which have been built where a network of smaller suburban swimming baths would have been more serviceable. I have in mind miles of inner urban motorway which I understand now costs £100 an inch to build, let alone to maintain. I have in mind the danger of attracting more people into the London area instead of encouraging them by economic means to spread out and to take their talents to other parts of the country which need them.
  In return for all this inequity some of the hardest-working and least-strike-prone people in this country will this month face in some instances twice the amount of the rates bill that they paid a year ago. I hope that my fellow professional accountants working in the new

  725
  local government offices have made large reserves for bad debts for rates which will be impossible to collect or will take a long time and great expense to collect. Larger reserves than have ever been put aside before will be needed for that purpose this year.
  The finance officer of one of the districts in West Yorkshire in which I have a constituency interest, although it is not my only district council, has again gone over the ground this week. He said:
  "The major item is that Kirklees has been very unfortunate in respect of its rate support grant and received much less than was expected on the basis of previous grants. This accounted for an increase in the rates of 8p."
  That statement was made without any reference to the alteration in the domestic rate relief which has further altered the domestic rate upwards by 7p compared with what had previously been expected. All this in Kirklees has been made much worse by the raising of false expectations.
  A few months ago the ratepapers of Dewsbury, Huddersfield, Cleckheaton. Batley, Colne Valley and the rest received a free leaflet, Issue No. 1, "Your new council Kirklees." In the middle of that leaflet, made available free to the public, are these words:
  "The new authority will now be 'masters in their own camp' and will have the financial and staffing resources available to cope with the expected demands for improved and extended services for the next hundred years."
  That was said to the ratepayers of Kirklees in the free brochure from their new authority.
  They are already becoming very disappointed. Their former library service, which was one of the finest in the country, has been largely dispersed so far as Kirklees is concerned, but not so far as Wakefield is concerned. There are already increasing difficulties in getting home helps and there are great fears that the envy of the world, the West Riding county primary schools, will suffer a reduction in standards.
  It is no wonder that the chief officer of the Bradford District Council, under the new system, Mr. Gordon Moore, has recently been quoted as saying that the new councils are unlikely to survive for more than 15 years. I submit that unless we in this House get down to a complete recasting of the whole system of raising
  726
  local revenues, the prophecy of the chief officer of the Bradford District Council, that the new system will have a very short life, is likely to some true.
  4.9 p.m.
  The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Gordon Oakes): The House is obliged to the hon. Member for Cottle Valley (Mr. Wainwright) for raising what is certainly a most urgent matter in the minds of the electorate. I know from letters that I, as Minister specifically responsible for dealing with this problem, receive from hon. Members on both sides of the House, from the number of deputations that I have received—including two by the hon. Gentleman when he and some of my hon. Friends from the West Yorkshire area came to see me—and from discussions with hon. Members in the House, that it is of burning concern to the electorate.
  I join the hon. Gentleman in expressing astonishment at the fact that throughout the debate, about which the House knew a considerable time ago, not one Conservative Member has been present. Some of my hon. Friends from Yorkshire are present in the Chamber. I see my hon. Friends the Members for Wakefield (Mr. Harrison), Sowerby (Mr. Madden) and Goole (Dr. Marshall), and my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Central (Mr. Cook) who is waiting for the next debate. I repeat that not one Conservative Member is present, yet it is the Conservative Opposition who have criticised us for one thing that we did when we found ourselves in the unenviable position of having to take over their system of grant at a moment's notice so that local authorities could get their money on 1st April 1974.
  I agree with much of what was said by the hon. Gentleman. He attacked the reorganisation of local government, just as many people are doing. He looked nostalgically back to the days of the West Riding. As a North Country Member, I look nostalgically back at what used to be Lancashire, the hon. Gentleman's rival county. I now represent a constituency that is half in Merseyside and half in Cheshire. I think back to the days when I could say that I was a Lancashire Member and the hon. Gentleman was a Yorkshire Member. I can no longer say that.

  727
  The reorganisation of local government that was pushed through the House in 1972 by the Conservative Government was, in many respects, a complete hotchpotch, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman will agree.
  Mr. Richard Wainwright: Yes.
  Mr. Oakes: Attempts were made by the Conservative Government to move away from the considered proposals of the Redcliffe-Maud Committee which had substantially been agreed to by the Liberal and Labour Parties. We took the view that those recommendations represented a considered judgment of how the framework for local government should be set up.
  The Conservative Government introduced a Bill that was considerably amended in Committee, both from a large-scale and a small-scale point of view. As an example of what I mean by that, let me tell the House that the Isle of Wight—a tiny island—became a county in its own right. All sorts of peculiar things happened to the Bill during its passage through the House. Much of the hon. Gentleman's attack on the way in which the reorganisation was carried out is justified. The hon. Gentleman was not a member of the House at the time, but I remind him that we opposed the Bill.
  The other matter which the hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned, and which many people who write to us about the rates do not fully appreciate, is that local authorities themselves are faced with the effects of inflation and are having to provide for essential services at greatly increased cost. Time and again local authorities write to say that they have pared their services to the bone—and this applies to Kirklees—and there is nothing further that can be cut, but still, having done that, their ratepayers have to find an enormous extra amount of money for rates. That complaint comes from local authorities of all political complexions.
  Two things could be done. The level of rate support grant now covers just over 60 per cent. of all expenditure of local authorities. That figure could be increased, or ratepayers could be asked to bear the cost of inflation. Perhaps I should explain to the House and to the
  728
  hon. Gentleman the difficult situation in which we found ourselves in connection with the total amount of money involved.
  The hon. Gentleman said that one difficulty was the date that the then Prime Minister chose for the election. The difficulty was not the date; it was that the then Prime Minister ought to have tackled local government finance at the same time as he dealt with local government reorganisation, or perhaps even before then, but did not do so. The Conservatives did not do that. They did not even do it in the next year. They waited for the year after that, and their Bill came before the House in November. That is the Bill under which this rate structure is determined.
  Because of the difficulties of rating authorities in fixing their rates, we, as the Opposition, were more than accommodating in Committee to get that Bill put down for discussion the first week in January, so that local authorities could make up their minds. The Government did not bring in the Bill that week. They left it for several weeks, with the result that it passed through the House on the very last day of the last Government's reign in power. Some of the orders under that Bill came after that date, and the General Election meant that no hon. Member could discuss them or even make representations about them. That was a shocking state of affairs. But it is not the date of the election that was relevant but the tardiness of the previous administration in not giving sufficient time for these vitally important matters to be discussed.
  Mr. Richard Wainwright: I am obliged to the Minister for reminding the House so clearly of the facts. Does he agree that the very fact that the former Government were able to proceed by order on the last day of Parliament illustrates the disadvantages of being enabled to do these things by order?
  Mr. Oakes: That may be so. Previously, these things were done at least by affirmative order under previous rate support grants. I cannot say that for certain, however. In fairness to the previous Government, they were dealing only with something that they had inherited. I would accept what the hon. Member says—that we should look at this aspect of

  729
  the matter. This is a touchy subject for electors.
  We have already had a full debate on the rate support grant settlement for this year. Many right hon. and hon. Members spoke in that debate—particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Mr. Ginsburg) who discussed West Yorkshire. In that debate, unfortunately, we concentrated on the fact that my right hon. Friend decided to abandon the previous Government's proposals for a system of variable domestic rate relief in favour of pooling all the money and making one sum—13p—available to each authority.
  I think that the hon. Gentleman accepts that that was a fairer way of dealing with the matter, in principle, than the situation which we had inherited, with some Cornish towns obtaining 40p and some inner cities obtaining 7p, with no rationale for the difference. We subsequently discovered that some of the figures had been worked out incorrectly.
  Unfortunately, by concentrating on that matter in the debate, we omitted to deal with the fact that the domestic element of the grant is in fact only 14 per cent. of the total. A more important aspect is the resources element, but far more important than that is the needs element. That is the element that carries the bulk of the money, so it is the needs element that we must consider carefully when dealing with the resources, especially in areas like Colne Valley and Kirklees, which I know so well, representing a northern industrial seat myself.
  As the hon. Member said, we were in an unenviable position, since we had inherited this global sum and this formula. The only thing that we could touch was the variable domestic element. On balance, I think that my right hon. Friend was absolutely right to make it a fixed amount, but it meant that some authorities, including that of the hon. Gentleman, were immediately affected by getting less than 14 per cent.—although they did not lose that element altogether.
  Turning to the subject of our absentee Opposition friends, the right hon. Member for Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) told the House that the Government were gerrymandering with the rates. I find it difficult to resist mentioning that in a letter just before, which he sent to my
  730
  right hon. Friend, the right hon. Member asked why Bexley was to get only 7p in the pound as against 14p for Bromley. So he himself was very concerned about the effect of the situation on his constituents—an effect that we then corrected for the inhabitants of Bexley. When one realises that at the same time Worcester received a high-cost weighting which was denied to Birmingham, and that Buckinghamshire got a bigger weighting than Barking, one has certain doubts about the way in which the previous Government had worked out this formula.
  Be that as it may, I recognise that a serious effort was made by the previous Government to create a new formula. I do not think that they succeeded. I hope that we can do considerably better for 1975–76, but we must all recognise that perfect equity in this matter is an unobtainable ideal. There are over 400 local authorities, at district level and above, each with its separate problems. It would be a total impossibility to make 400 separate grant settlements each year. Indeed, if we did so we might be open to greater unfairness than exists at present. As the hon. Gentleman has said, it could then be the Government of the day making a special pleading for a special area, and that would be entirely wrong.
  This means, however, that one is forced to rely on a national formula applied more or less uniformly across the board. Inevitably, this means that some authorities will receive a smaller grant than they would in an ideal world, and others would receive a higher one. I feel that we shall know when we have arrived at the limits of human ingenuity in the year when we receive complaints from every local authority in the land that its share of the grand total is insufficient. Those who are treated generously by the system are always strangely muted in their expressions of gratitude, to any Government.
  I have mentioned the need for a manageable national formula as one constraint on the equity of the grant distribution. This, in turn, involves a further constraint. The formula must be related to data which are available on a consistent basis and without excessive time lags for local authority areas right across the country. There are all sorts of needs which are of demonstrable

  731
  importance for local authority spending, and yet which are difficult to measure objectively. Environmental problems are a prime example. Indicators of social need are also in short supply, though here we hope to make real progress in the coming months.
  Many of the factors which seem promising at first sight—such as unemployment levels—turn out to be very difficult to apply, because the data are available in an unsuitable form, or for the wrong areas, or show big seasonal variations in some places and not others. Improvement in the availability of statistics can only be a gradual process.
  I want to mention one effect. I think that it applies to Kirklees; it certainly applies to Calderdale and many parts of West Yorkshire. That is what I call botanically the rhizome effect. That is a botanical thing which dies at one end and grows at the other. There are some local authorities which have one end that is dying and losing population and which are growing in population at the other end. But the statistics show no change. In such an authority, however, this involves a very high expenditure. Many northern authorities—indeed, authorities throughout the country—find that it is a difficult thing to measure, but I am hoping that we shall be able to look at it in the next rate grant support formula.
  West Yorkshire may then have good grounds for feeling that the 1974–75 grant arrangements do not reflect adequately its particular problems. But frankly, until our review of the system is further advanced I am in no position to take a view on this. But I have an open mind.
  On the one hand, comparing the grant per head payable for 1973–74 to authorities in the area without estimates of what is to be paid in 1974–75, West Yorkshire seems to be doing at least reasonably under the new arrangements. But I bear in mind the effects of inflation. Bradford, for example, was getting nearly £78 per head in 1973–74; Bradford district will receive nearly £90. This is per head of population, which is the only fair way of working it out because of the boundary changes. We have paid £54 per head to Wakefield for 1973–74; we shall be paying about £82 to Wake-
  732
  field district for 1974–75. Huddersfield's £69 last year compares with Kirklee's £80 this year. In making this comparison it must be remembered that from this year local government will not be responsible for the local health or school health services and that 90 per cent. of the cost of mandatory student awards will be met by a new specific grant for education.
  Mr. Richard Wainwright: Quite apart from inflation affecting the comparisons from year to year that the hon. Gentleman has quoted, is he not obliged to compare former authorities which were limited to the boundaries of the city of Bradford and the city of Wakefield—county boroughs—with the new districts which have different needs?
  Mr. Oakes: I hesitate to give figures. That is why I have made the comparison on a head of population basis. Some small authorities had very differing rates from other authorities with which they have now been combined. Attempts were made to deal with that in differential rating, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Harrison) knows to his cost. Things can go wrong with differential rating. The position with Wakefield is under active consideration by my right hon. Friend.
  On the other hand, as the hon. Gentleman said, the local authorities can point to big increases in the rates that they are levying this year as evidence that the grant is still far from adequate. They may argue that they have all the social and environmental problems usually associated with population decline which features in this year's needs element formula, although in their case, with the exception of Calderdale, their population is on the increase. We have had to base that judgment on last known statistics because we do not know exactly what is going on on the ground. Further, the massive reorganisation of local government in the area will also have added to their costs.
  At the kind invitation of my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield, West (Mr. Lomas), I shall be visiting West Yorkshire on 17th June to see something of the problems there at first hand, particularly in Kirklees and Calderdale, in response to their invitation to me so to do when they came on the delegation.

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  My hon. Friends the Members for Hudderfield, West and for Huddersfield, East (Mr. Mallalieu) present their apologies to the House. They are both in Huddersfield today fulfilling previous engagements.
  Meanwhile, hon. Members will not expect me to be able to forecast the results of a review of rate support grant that has hardly yet begun. I promise the House that we intend to involve ourselves at Ministerial level in discussions with local authority interests at a very much earlier stage than has been customary hitherto. In our view, consultation should mean more than telling the other side what one has decided. It was no fault of ours that the circumstances of the 1974–75 settlement prevented us from realising this ideal.
  We hope, therefore, to have our first member-level meeting with the associations next month, and we have it in mind to suggest to them also that there might be advantages in arranging for discussions on some of the issues to be held with a sample of individual authorities. This is one of the reasons I am going to Kirklees and Calderdale. That implies no diminution of the role of the associations. They are, and must always be, the representatives and spokesmen of local government as a whole in these negotiations. However, in my view it would help to bring home to us the particular problems and interests of local authorities if the associations were able to arrange for us to meet a small selection of their members for separate talks. This is what we hope to arrange.
  The House will be very grateful to the hon. Member for Colne Valley for raising this matter, which is of urgent public concern in the area. I hope I have been able to satisfy the House that there was nothing this Government could do, because of the time factor when we came to office. However, for next year's rate support grant we shall work out a better, fairer, more sensible and more sensitive formula than that which we inherited from our predecessors.

  LICENSED PREMISES (TENEMENT PROPERTY)
  4.30 p.m.
  Mr. Robin F. Cook: I am grateful for the opportunity provided by this Adjournment debate to raise an issue of very grave concern to many of my constituents. I represent an inner city constituency and the overwhelming majority of its residents live in traditional Scottish tenements—solid stone buildings four or five storeys high and containing a dozen to 20 flats opening off a common stair.
  There is a lot to be said for the traditional Scottish tenement. It has undoubtedly helped to foster within our city centres a strong sense of local community spirit. This is partly because the building provides reasonable access to facilities near by. It is also a remarkably efficient way of combining reasonable privacy with a high building density. It provides convenient access to local facilities such as corner shops, post offices, cafés and newsagents which are the mortar of a successful society and community. It is, no doubt, largely because of these three advantages that my constituents have such a strong attachment to their area and have increasingly and rightly demanded that the corporation revise proposals for road and other developments which would otherwise involve the demolition of many sound tenement dwellings.
  Unfortunately, in the commercial character which is common to the ground floor of many tenements there is always the danger that there will arise a new business which is not suitable within a building which is mainly residential. My constituents are particularly concerned by the growing pressure from the licensed trade to open new public houses on the ground floor of their tenements. It is now more common than not when a comparatively innocuous shop or warehouse falls available for sale that the local authority will be confronted with an application for planning permission for change of use to a public house.
  It may give some idea of the scale of the problem if I tell the House that I understand that there were five such applications before the Edinburgh planning committee last week alone. Each of these

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  applications illustrates a serious weakness in our planning procedure, namely, that there is no obligation on the applicant to inform his neighbours of the impending doom of their property. If I want to erect a boundary wall, if I even wish to insert a new window in the gable end of my building, I am obliged by the building regulations to apply for permission to the Dean of Guild Court and first to serve notice on my neighbour. If, however, I propose to open a pub immediately below my neighbour's home there is no obligation on me to notify him that I have applied for planning permission. even though the consequences for him are far greater than the minor building works about which he has every right to be informed.
  This is a serious anomaly in our procedure, and I would draw the attention of the Minister to a letter from the Scottish Development Department to all planning authorities in June 1971, which announced that the Secretary of State proposed "shortly" to give planning authorities the power to require applicants to inform those neighbours who were likely to be affected by any contentious proposal. This order was never made by the last Government, and I would strongly urge the Minister to bring it in at an early date and to end the situation where residents of a tenement do not even have the right to know that an application has been made to open a pub below them.
  In any case, there can surely be no doubt that the development of new pubs is not suitable within the very same building as that in which ordinary families, often with young children, have made their home. I know from having spoken to many such residents the very bitter sense of betrayal and shock which they experience when such an application is granted. They face a very real loss of amenity. There will now be a continuous noise within the property, perhaps from the very floor below, and this will be at its worst in the evenings when the whole family is at home and seeking some peace.
  Moreover, a modern pub where considerable expenditure has been made on providing music and possibly live entertainment, adds to the discomfort of its immediate neighbours. In addition, however quiet the pub, however localised its
  736
  noise, the whole street is liable to be shattered for half an hour late at night as the revellers disperse, say their goodnights and bang their car doors. Finally, no matter how good the management of the pub and no matter how hard they strive to maintain a respectable clientele, it is virtually certain that every morning when the neighbours come down to work they will regularly encounter a stair and a passage which was fouled the night before.
  In saying this, I do not wish to imply any criticism of those who make their living out of running a pub. I should perhaps declare a personal interest in the subject. I myself live in a tenement at the foot of which there is a café whose owner has repeatedly applied for change of use to a public house. I have every confidence in the owner of the café, and I know that if she did receive permission to open a public house it would be a decent and respectable house. I concede also that the licensed trade involves hard work and very long hours for those who work in it, and it provides a service which is much appreciated. Nevertheless, I and my neighbours, and my constituents, have every right to demand that this trade be carried on in premises where it will not interfere with the privacy and peace of our homes.
  I, therefore, seek a clear statement on how the Government stand on this issue. I do so in the hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to say that he intends to protect the amenity and privacy of residential property against this kind of intrusion. It is important that we have such a clear statement of policy at the start of this new administration.
  In recent years, the planning committee of Edinburgh Corporation, of which I was privileged to be a member before my election, has taken a consistent line in refusing applications for change of use within tenement properties because of the considerations to which I have referred. In fact, we have refused 37 such applications within the past two years.
  However, each applicant has a right of appeal to the Secretary of State, and I am sorry to say that, under the Tory Government, we found that some of these appeals were being upheld. Of the four most recent such appeals, two succeeded and two failed.

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  This half-hearted attitude to the amenity of residential property can only encourage licensees to appeal. Indeed, there are at present nine such appeals pending against decisions of the Edinburgh planning committee alone, including one very controversial application within my own constituency, at Montpelier, where any pub would be wholly out of character with the peaceful and entirely residential nature of the area.
  Such appeals are very trying for the neighbours involved, for two reasons. First, an appeal means that they have to live for over a year with a serious threat hanging over their property. Second, they face the considerable trouble and expense of arranging to be represented at a public inquiry.
  I strongly urge my hon. Friend, therefore, to give us an undertaking that he will consistently use his planning powers to protect the amenity of the homes of my constituents, both because such an undertaking would discourage the substantial rate of appeal which has been created by the inconsistent policies of his predecessor, and because it would compel the licensed trade to concentrate its search for new premises in buildings which are primarily commercial, where it would not detract from the amenity of citizens' homes.
  4.38 p.m.
  The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Mr. Bruce Milan): I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Central (Mr. Cook) for raising this matter. The location of licensed premises may not be a major planning issue in the sense that we commonly understand the matter, but it is one of great local interest and sometimes of considerable local concern. I know that it is a matter of particular concern in Edinburgh, where there have been a large number of applications of the kind which my hon. Friend described.
  Perhaps I should start by setting the appeals which come to the Secretary of State in the context of our general planning procedures. As my hon. Friend knows, planning begins with the development plan prepared by the local planning authority, setting out the proposals and policies of the authority. At present, all development plans and all amendments to development plans must be approved by the Secretary of State. The situation
  738
  will change following local government reorganisation, but that is how the matter stands at the moment.
  However, it is impracticable for any development plan to cover every detail. The plan sets out the land uses for each area, but in many cases these can be only predominating uses, not sole uses. Common sense and the needs of the situation dictate that uses other than the predominating one in any area will have to be allowed to intrude to some extent. It is a matter of judgment for the local planning authority whether any particular intrusion is so significant as to alter the character of the development plan and hence to breach the policy stated or implied by the plan.
  This problem of predominating rather than sole use particularly affects residential areas in the inner areas of cities, as my hon. Friend has explained. It is inevitable that in these areas houses must to some extent be mixed up with shops, cafés, laundries, petrol filling stations, commercial garages, pubs and other commercial premises.
  The development control system provides machinery for the submission, consideration, approval or, for that matter, rejection of planning applications as a means of implementing the development plan system and dealing with points of detail which cannot be included in the development plans themselves. Generally, local planning authorities have regarded pubs as matters which could not sensibly he covered in development plans and have relied on the development control system. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State sees no reason to dispute this view. Control of the location of pubs seems to be very much a local matter, and we should be chary of laying down principles about it from the centre unless a very clear need to do so emerged.
  My right hon. Friend becomes involved in some individual planning applications including planning applications involving pubs. Anyone refused planning permission, has the right of appeal to my right hon. Friend and in effect his only responsibility in relation to the siting of pubs arises in the context of planning appeals. Although few, if any, local planning authorities have policies for pubs in their development plans, planning committees, as in Edinburgh, sometimes frame policies about the location of pubs for their own

  739
  guidance in handling planning applications.
  Where a planning appeal concerning a pub comes before the Secretary of State the local planning authority's evidence will of course include a statement of this policy and the Secretary of State's decision letter will contain an indication whether or not he accepts the policy. Even when he accepts the policy, that does not mean that in every case he will agree with the planning authority about the matter of the appeal. Overall circumstances have to be taken into account, but the Secretary of State would not readily go against a strictly local policy in a matter of this kind. Nevertheless, he must take account of the evidence put before him on each appeal, as is his statutory duty, and that evidence includes among other things, the apparent degree of local objection to the policy.
  My hon. Friend mentioned a number of cases in which the Edinburgh Corporation had refused planning permission for the change of use to licensed premises of former commercial premises situated below residential flats. Both the applicants in these cases exercised their right of appeal to the Secretary of State—in these cases the previous Secretary of State —and after a local public inquiry with an independent Reporter the Secretary of State decided to sustain the appeals and grant planning permission. My hon. Friend is aware that there were two subsequent cases where the appeals were turned down.
  The decisions of the Secretary of State on planning appeals are by law final, subject only to any challenge which might be made at the court of session on points of law. That being so, it is improper for me to elaborate on the reasons why the Secretary of State allowed the two earlier successful appeals that I have mentioned. It would be improper for me also to go over the merits of the proposals. In these cases, a full range of evidence was given on traffic and amenity issues and in neither case did any objector come forward at the inquiry. In both cases the then Secretary of State's decision accorded with the recommendations of the Reporter.
  The cases my hon. Friend referred to specifically came under the previous ad-
  740
  ministration and I do not seek to import any particular significance into that. However, I can assure my hon. Friend that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State shares the view that in modern conditions it is generally undesirable for licensed premises to be located immediately beneath residential property.
  This, of course, was once common practice in Scotland. It dates from the days when towns were much more cramped than now, and perhaps from the days when the wish for privacy was less marked than it is now. But even now it cannot be altogether avoided, as in certain circumstances pubs may be located under tenement property. The situation in a particular area may make that an exception to the kind of general view that I have expressed.
  I have to stress that my right hon. Friend is bound to found every planning appeal decision on the evidence taken at the inquiry, against the background of any policy affecting the issue. However, I do not wish to derogate in any way from what I have said about the general undesirability of having licensed premises located immediately under residential property, and I state that on behalf of the Secretary of State.
  I come to the other subject raised by the hon. Member—the notification of neighbours. This is a familiar problem, affecting a wide range of planning applications, not just specifically applications for public houses. Over the years, there have been many attempts to argue that neighbours should be individually notified of planning applications as they are of applications under the building regulations.
  However, there are differences in the character of these applications. Building regulations applications affect neighbours because the manner of building may affect the specific legal rights of a neighbour. It may cause flooding on his land, or deprive his structure of support, or have other deleterious effects on his existing interests. Further, these possibilities can affect only immediate neighbours.
  However, planning applications raise different and wider issues. They may well affect far more than immediate neighbours. Indeed, there are some circumstances in which people rather further away from the proposed development are

  741
  affected more than those who are closer to it. There therefore arises considerable difficulty in defining the kind of people who should be individually notified on applications of that sort.
  That being so, given the problems in this respect, it may be rather more profitable to consider the general advertising of planning applications likely to be controversial. Two problems arise: the first is to ensure that the right applications are advertised, that is, those likely to give rise to controversy ; the second is to ensure that the right people see the advertisements. On the first problem—local authorities may already advertise any applications that they think should be advertised, and by law certain kinds of applications have to be advertised by the applicants. I am glad to say that the Government intend to add licensed premises to that last category.
  That will require a general development order. I am not yet able to say precisely when that will be available, but it will not be long delayed, and licensed premises will then be added to the category of compulsory advertising.
  We shall be introducing proposals for posting on site notices of applications to ensure that the right people see the advertisement. It is difficult to work out
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  a satisfactory definition of the classes of case to be covered. I assure my hon. Friend, however, that licensed premises will be included and that notices will have to be posted on site. In the kind of cases about which he is concerned that is just as good as individual application because, obviously the tenants and neighbours will be able to see the advertisements. These changes will come about quite soon, I hope, although I cannot give a specific time.
  I think my hon. Friend can accept that my right hon. Friend and I are in substantial agreement with what he has said. We are reluctant to prescribe a policy to local planning authorities in such a matter, but this is something we can keep under review. One of the considerations to be borne in mind is the number of applications and appeals that come in on such matters. As for giving people notice of what is happening and making rules about objection, and so on, much more effective, I hope that the changes I have said we are to introduce will bring about a considerable improvement.
  Question put and agreed to.
  Adjourned accordingly at eight minutes to Five o'clock till Monday 29th April. pursuant to the Resolution of the House of 9th April.