Sitting of 16 July 1998

Preamble
The House met at half-past Two o'clock
PRAYERS
[MADAM SPEAKER in the Chair]
PRAYERS
  PRIVATE BUSINESS

    LLOYDS TSB BILL [Lords] (By Order)
    Order for Third Reading read.
    To be read the Third time on Tuesday 28 July at Seven o'clock.

    ALLIANCE AND LEICESTER PLC (GROUP REORGANISATION) BILL [Lords] (By Order)
    Order for Second Reading read.
    To be read a Second time on Thursday 23 July.

Oral Answers to Questions
  TRADE AND INDUSTRY
  The President of the Board of Trade was asked—
  TRADE AND INDUSTRY

    Manufacturing Industry
    Sir Teddy Taylor: What recent reports she has obtained on the state of business confidence in manufacturing industry. [49371]
    The President of the Board of Trade and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Mrs. Margaret Beckett): I receive numerous reports from business about many aspects of economic performance, including the state of business confidence in manufacturing industry. I recognise that some sections of manufacturing have strong concerns at present, but that it is a more mixed picture than is sometimes suggested. For example, the Confederation of British Industry continues to forecast that manufacturing output and investment will grow both this year and next.
    Sir Teddy Taylor: Will the Secretary of State study the alarming report published this morning by the British Chambers of Commerce, which tends to be a more reliable organisation than the one she mentioned? It shows that home sales are at their lowest for six years and that export activity is falling sharply on the last quarter, which was a record low, probably because of the problems in the European Union. Will the right hon. Lady remind the Chancellor that manufacturing activity is vital to the economy and that trying to make himself popular with a spending spree is a great danger if the only result is a further increase in interest rates, which would have a devastating effect on manufacturing industry?
    Mrs. Beckett: First, while I bow to no one in my respect for the British Chambers of Commerce and I am
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    aware of the survey, I cannot share the hon. Gentleman's view that the CBI is in some way an unreliable organisation. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor is extremely well aware of the position in manufacturing industry, about which we continue to liaise closely. Far from seeking merely to make himself popular with his announcements on Tuesday, he is laying a sound basis for reform, modernisation and investment in Britain's future. Far from embarking on some sort of spending spree, he is showing considerable responsibility and prudence, but he is also making the right choices to lay the right path for Britain's future.
    Mr. Martin O'Neill: First, is not it the case that our right hon. Friend the Chancellor's announcement on Tuesday has gone some way to encourage British manufacturers because, in the public expenditure increases, the emphasis will be on manufacturing and capital matters and we will see the beginnings of a turnround in those areas? Secondly, I do not think that any of us assumes that interest rates will reduce dramatically in the short term, but can we assume that in the weeks and months ahead, as the Government plan for the next Budget, a case will be made for investment incentives so that manufacturing industry can use the space that it has to plan for the future and take advantage of what we assume will be the better trading prospects throughout the world next year?
    Mrs. Beckett: My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the fact that trading prospects throughout the world and the impact of the Asian crisis are in part impinging on manufacturing. He is also right to say that it is important that the manufacturing sector of the economy continues to invest and plan for the future. I am confident that he shares my view and that of the whole Government that some of the announcements made this week—not merely the announcement for investment in the science and engineering base, for example, but the whole basis of the public spending settlement, with its three-year rolling programme approach and the split between capital and current spending—will help to create a climate in which everyone, including business, will feel better able to plan sustainably for the future.
    Mrs. Ann Winterton: Is the right hon. Lady aware that the north-west chamber of commerce has consulted its manufacturers, who believe that the outlook is extremely gloomy and that the country will slide further into recession, for which they blame the strong pound, six interest rate rises and an increase in business taxation? Is she concerned that they are reducing the number of people in their work forces and that that will have an adverse effect on the plans announced in the House on Tuesday?
    Mrs. Beckett: I am, of course, familiar with the some of the work of the north-west chamber of commerce, and I understand its wish to reflect the concerns and anxieties of its members, but I hope that the hon. Lady, who I know takes a great interest in these matters and wants to be accurate, will remind the House that three quarters of the increase in the rate of sterling took place before the general election and before interest rates were increased. Indeed—although I do not expect her to convey this information—the previous Chancellor should have

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    increased interest rates before the election. People are aware of the concerns of manufacturing, but they are also conscious that the difficulties that are being experienced are a result of what is happening in Asia and of pressures on sterling because of concerns about the euro. The picture is much more mixed than the Conservative party pretends.
    Mr. Michael Clapham: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the fact that there were 618 inward investment projects last year—the highest number ever—shows that foreign investors believe that the British economy has a stable future? Does she also agree that the £1.1 billion that has been made available to the university science base will help to anchor the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, for example, which rely on their collaboration with universities, and that that will lead to a strengthening of confidence in the British economy?
    Mrs. Beckett: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is entirely right. There is indeed an all-time record in inward investment projects. As he correctly said, 618 new projects were signed last year, which is the first time that the number has been above 500. That substantial increase is a sign of the confidence of inward investors in the future of this country; that confidence will be strengthened by the Government's announcement of long-term investment to create the basis for prosperity in manufacturing in the future.
    Mr. John Redwood: The British Chambers of Commerce survey that was published today shows meltdown in manufacturing. Meanwhile, private sector earnings are going up by more than 6 per cent. a year. Labour has created a boom-and-bust economy—bust for manufacturing, boom for most of the other businesses. Will the right hon. Lady say how much of the money the Chancellor announced this week will be swallowed up in large, inflationary pay awards as the public sector seeks to catch up with the private sector? What impact will that have on manufacturing prospects? Will she urge the Chancellor, as Conservative Members have repeatedly done, to change policy on tax, interest rates and savings to give manufacturers some relief?
    Mrs. Beckett: The right hon. Gentleman has failed to notice that commentators, who have some genuine concerns, have pointed out that recent statistics—on confidence levels and so on—are a repetition of what was shown some five or six years ago. At that time, of course, not only was the Conservative party in power, but I rather think he was in the Government and perhaps even in my Department, so I find his use of the word meltdown interesting, even though it is, of course, nonsense. There are real concerns, which is understandable, but, as I said, the picture is rather more mixed than his extravagant claims suggest.
    Output in manufacturing has been broadly flat over the past year—for the past three months it is up 0.1 per cent. on the previous three months, and the volume of exports grew in each of those three months.
    Mr. John Bercow: Do not write home about it.
    Mrs. Beckett: The hon. Gentleman may think that 0.1 per cent. is not a massive increase, but I should point
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    out that over the whole history of the previous Government manufacturing output grew, on average, by only 0.5 per cent. a year.
    Mr. Andy King: What action her Department has taken to improve the competitiveness of manufacturing industry in Europe during the British presidency of the European Union. [49372]
    The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Mr. Ian McCartney): My Department's priority during our presidency has been to promote policies, in partnership with industry, to improve European competitiveness and I believe that we have made a real impact. Key areas in which we have made progress include the single market, research and development, telecommunications and electronic commerce and promoting entrepreneurship and trade liberalisation. Competitiveness is now firmly embedded in the language of Brussels, helped in no small part by our efforts, and I am especially pleased with the profile given to economic reform at the Cardiff summit.
    Mr. King: Does my hon. Friend agree that Britain's new relationship with our European partners is already bearing fruit and that it is in stark contrast with the miserable legacy that we inherited from the Tory Government, who succeeded only in reviling Europe and alienating Britain from the rest of the continent? We have a much better future for manufacturing in Britain under the new Labour Government.
    Mr. McCartney: I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks. It is absolutely correct to say that the Government have begun to turn round the appalling legacy of that rabble over there, who spent most of their time trying to close down British industry, and that we are spending our time building it up. Yesterday, it was announced that Britain is the No. 1 nation for inward investment for the first time ever, and the more than 500 new investment projects are a clear sign that we have the confidence of both the national and the international business community.
    Miss Anne McIntosh: Why was no progress made on the chocolate directive, which has damaged the competitiveness of British chocolate manufacturing?
    Was there any discussion during the British presidency of the Commission proposals for compulsory consultation of employees in all companies with 20 or more employees? Does not he expect that to damage the competitiveness of British manufacturing industry?
    Mr. McCartney: I cannot give the hon. Lady a definitive answer on the directive but, as someone who enjoys chocolate, I can assure her that nothing will be done under this regime to damage the British chocolate industry. A Mars a day keeps me at bay.
    To answer the hon. Lady's clever question, we have made it absolutely clear both in opposition and in government that we will apply subsidiarity. If a Commission proposal places requirements on companies that operate solely within a country's own boundaries, we will oppose it. We are in favour of information and

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    consultation, and the "Fairness at Work" White Paper is a step forward in that direction, guaranteeing employment rights, but if the Commission proposals are made in the form that has been suggested, the Government will oppose them.
    Mr. Barry Sheerman: We may no longer be president of the European Union, but we can still set an example. In a threatened global economy, have not we set a good example this week? I may or may not be a parliamentary poodle, but I am an unreconstructed Keynesian. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need good old Keynesian investment? The United Kingdom showed the way this week by putting nearly £50 billion into our economy. If that does not stimulate our manufacturing industry, and European industry, nothing will.
    Mr. McCartney: Our No. 1 priority both here and in Europe has been employability: co-ordinating policies to deal with the 18 million people who are unemployed in Europe, more than half of whom have been out of work for more than a year. While we have been developing those policies with our European colleagues, the Opposition have fought tooth and nail against the windfall tax and the introduction of the new deal to get young people and older workers back to work. Once again, the Government are doing effective work throughout Europe and in the United Kingdom to get down the appalling levels of unemployment left by the previous Government.

    Euro
    Mr. David Watts: What action her Department has taken to improve awareness among British companies of the introduction of the euro. [49373]
    The Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (Mr. Nigel Griffiths): We have set up the euro preparations unit and DTI Ministers have taken part in a wide range of events to help business prepare for the single currency. Our officials are working to assist companies.
    Mr. Watts: I thank my hon. Friend for that response. May I draw to his attention the fact that many companies in St. Helens have still taken no action to prepare for the introduction of the euro? What action will the Department take to make those companies more aware of the problems and opportunities that will exist once the euro is introduced? Does my hon. Friend share my view that it is crucial that we show world leadership on this issue and that the divisions on the Opposition Benches on it are damaging to Britain and British industry? Does he agree that it is time the Leader of the Opposition came off the fence on this issue and showed real leadership qualities?
    Mr. Griffiths: I agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, he echoes the words of Sir Leon Brittan, who ridiculed the Opposition's view of the preparations for the euro. The euro preparations unit has been able to assist companies in my hon. Friend's constituency and all others. It has taken several measures to raise awareness among United Kingdom businesses about the practical changes that will come with the introduction of the single
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    currency on 1 January. They include a series of fact sheets, a business-friendly diagnostic pack and an internet website, all backed by a dedicated phone line.
    Mr. Ian Taylor: Given that the euro is not just another foreign currency, but the currency that will dominate 80 per cent. of the European single market and will increasingly be used as the base currency for business transactions in this country, will the Minister have a word with the various people involved in the business for sterling campaign that, much as we respect their right to express opinions and stir up debate, their companies must also prepare for the euro? Otherwise, there will be grave competitive disadvantages to the United Kingdom economy.
    Mr. Griffiths: I am keen to endorse those sentiments on behalf of the Government and, indeed, to encourage the route that the hon. Gentleman so rightly advises. That is why we have set up a euro preparations unit. We are doing all we can to ensure that British businesses, in a market where, as the hon. Gentleman said, 80 per cent. of the countries and businesses will be operating in the euro, are well geared up to ensure they are not damaged by that prospect. It is important that they take advantage of the advice that is given through the Government's agencies without delay.

    Low Pay Commission
    Mr. Russell Brown: If she will make a statement about the future of the Low Pay Commission. [49374]
    The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Mr. Ian McCartney): My right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade announced to the House on 18 June that the Low Pay Commission will be asked to continue its work, monitoring and evaluating the introduction and impact of the national minimum wage.
    About 2 million workers will benefit from our proposed minimum wage rates: some 1.4 million are women, over 1.3 million are part-time workers, some 200,000 are young people, around 110,000 are home workers, approximately 175,000 are lone parents who work and some 130,000 are ethnic minority workers.
    Mr. Brown: I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. More than 1,600 families in my constituency are delighted that at long last we shall see an end to poverty pay, which was the trademark of the previous Government. Will my hon. Friend explain how long he believes the Low Pay Commission will remain in operation? Does he agree that this is the real way to encourage people off benefits and into work?
    Mr. McCartney: The Low Pay Commission will continue and the best way to ensure that it does is to ensure that at the next election that lot on the Opposition Benches do not get elected again. [Laughter.] I say that in all seriousness because in our debate on Monday evening, the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) made it absolutely clear that the Conservatives would review all the new employment rights that we will provide under our fairness at work proposals, including the minimum wage. We assume that

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    they will go into the next election fighting for wage cuts for the 2 million lowest-paid workers in Britain. What a shambles. What a rabble.
    Mr. Eric Forth: If it were discovered as a result of the monitoring exercise that the Minister has mentioned that one of the results of the introduction of the minimum wage was a loss of employment opportunities, a loss of jobs and, due to a maintenance of differentials, a general increase in wage costs, what conclusions would the Minister, the Low Pay Commission and the President of the Board of Trade draw?
    Mr. McCartney: The right hon. Gentleman should opt for sackcloth and ashes. As Minister of State, Department for Education and Employment, he was one of those responsible for getting rid of wages councils—thus ensuring that 2 million low-paid workers in Britain received no protection—and putting 3 million people on the dole. What nonsense. The Low Pay Commission was established to ensure that the minimum wage is implemented in a fair and effective way. Since the announcement of the rate, no one, except the Conservative party, has made other than positive remarks about the way in which the Government have gone about the matter.
    Mr. David Chidgey: Will the Low Pay Commission be a permanent body? Will its remit include monitoring and evaluating the variable rates for those under 18 and those in training? When will the Low Pay Commission next report? Will its conclusions be introduced free from political interference or influence?
    Mr. McCartney: First, I make it absolutely clear that the Low Pay Commission will continue because it has a job to do in monitoring and evaluating the introduction of the national minimum wage. From time to time, it will report to the Government on those matters. It is an important partnership body and it is central to the effective introduction of the national minimum wage. We went out of our way to make clear the commission's independence, and that independence led the Government to agree to its 24 recommendations—and they will be implemented.

    British Industry
    Mr. Ross Cranston: If she will make a statement about her Department's policy on increasing the productivity of British industry. [49376]
    The President of the Board of Trade and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Mrs. Margaret Beckett): Improving productivity is at the heart of the Government's drive to improve the competitiveness of UK companies. The responsibility for that lies largely with business itself, but the Government have a key role to play, which is why I set up six business-led working parties last year to make recommendations about how the Government and business could work together in partnership to promote competitiveness.
    I am also co-hosting, with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a series of seminars on the UK's productivity gap. That work will contribute to a
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    White Paper on competitiveness, to be published in the autumn, which, for the first time, will have been prepared in partnership with the business community.
    Mr. Cranston: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on her partnership approach and on bringing industry to the heart of government. Do not the productivity figures produced by Professor Siebert of the Kiel institute in Germany, demonstrating that labour productivity in Britain is only 70 per cent. of that in Germany, give the lie to the Tory Government's claim that they left us a golden economic legacy? Does she further agree that British industry must lift its game, for example by improving research and development to the levels that obtain in, say, the pharmaceutical industry?
    Mrs. Beckett: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I share his view, which is shared widely throughout British business and industry. It is necessary to raise our game and for British companies to become more productive and competitive. My hon. Friend is also entirely right to point out that the legacy of the productivity gap gives the lie to the propaganda put out before the election by the Conservative party. I fear that there will be more than one stark difference between our competitiveness White Paper and those produced by the previous Government. Not only will ours have been prepared in partnership with business, it will look at the whole picture—both sides of the balance sheet—instead of being simply a leaflet that says what a wonderful job the Government are doing.
    Mr. John Wilkinson: Would not it have been more helpful in terms of increasing British industry's productivity if, instead of hitting the boards with the Chancellor, the President of the Board of Trade had persuaded him to introduce a package of expenditure measures that were appropriate to the increase in industrial productivity, rather than the contrary? Will not the spending splurge that he announced to the House, particularly the vast increase in social security spending and the likelihood that interest rates will have to go up from their present high levels as a consequence, gravely damage British industrial productivity, rather than the contrary?
    Mrs. Beckett: That is a load of rubbish. My right hon. Friend made it absolutely plain that modernisation and reform in the public services and beyond are the basis of his programme. Competitiveness and productivity are matters for companies, although the Government have a role in ensuring that the legislative framework does not impede them. The Chancellor's announcements, particularly on science and engineering investment, will help British business. The pharmaceutical industry had urged such steps before my right hon. Friend published his proposals, and it has welcomed them since.
    Mr. Bill O'Brien: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on helping to increase United Kingdom productivity. Yorkshire was devastated by pit closures caused by the previous Government, and that has left pockets of pain. When my right hon. Friend creates partnerships, will she have regard for west Yorkshire in particular and for Yorkshire in general as the region

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    requires the encouragement of partnerships with engineering and manufacturing industry to regenerate jobs?
    Mrs. Beckett: I have the highest regard for west Yorkshire and for its people. I am mindful of its glorious history and of the need for the Government to do all we can in partnership with business to ensure that it has a glorious future. A great deal of our work is focused on the need for investment, for innovation, for the spread of best practice and for British industry to be encouraged to raise its game to create greater opportunities for employment that would help to relieve the difficulties to which my hon. Friend drew attention.
    Mr. John Redwood: May I wish the President of the Board of Trade a happy holiday during the summer recess? Before she goes, however, does she agree that she needs to raise her productivity for the sake of British business? With her in tray stretching to the ceiling, British business does not know the answers to fundamental questions about Government policy, which it needs to know if it is to raise productivity and investment. Will she promise us an energy policy? Will she promise us a competition policy that can work in detail? Will she promise us a policy that will allow the Post Office to expand? Will she promise us a water competition policy that will allow new entrants to the markets? Will she promise statements on all those things before she goes away? After a year of her dithering, industry needs the answers.
    Mrs. Beckett: In the spirit of cross-party co-operation, I wish the right hon. Gentleman a happy holiday—unless he is going to waste his time giving more misleading information to the press. I shall not be taking a two-month holiday, as he alleged I did last year. I have never had a two-month holiday in my life. Perhaps I might look forward to such a thing when I retire.
    As for the litany of nonsense that the right hon. Gentleman churned out for the 55th time, I do not know where he has been for the past year. My Department has had a hand in or produced eight pieces of legislation in the past 15 months. During the previous three years, under the Conservative Government, there may have been one. Certainly there was none in the previous two years. We have made statements on energy policy. We have changed competition law. Discussions are under way with the Post Office about how it can exploit its competitiveness. We are addressing all those issues. We inherited nothing from the Conservatives—no energy policy, no Post Office policy likely to succeed and a competition policy that they had been discussing for 10 years before a Labour Government brought in a Bill. We need no lecture from the right hon. Gentleman.

    Regional Assistance
    Dr. Tony Wright: What proposals she has for the future of regional assistance. [49377]
    The Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (Mr. Nigel Griffiths): Regional selective assistance can play an important role in regional regeneration. We want to ensure that we use it most effectively.
    Dr. Wright: The future of regional assistance from Europe and from home is under review. Will the Minister
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    say something about the report of the coalfields task force? We owe a particular debt to coalfield areas. The Government deserve congratulations on setting up and welcoming the report, which provides a framework for regeneration for all the pit closure areas. Will my hon. Friend ensure that regeneration of the coalfield areas is central to regional policy and that it is a central objective of the new regional development agencies?
    Mr. Griffiths: The coalfields task force has brought together three Government Departments with coalfield representatives, English Partnerships and the chief executives of local authorities. The task force has recommended a wide-ranging plan of action to help coalfield communities, including continued objective 2 and RECHAR funding. The Government strongly support those objectives.
    Mr. John Bercow: Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the view of the Trade and Industry Select Committee that, as the proposals stand, the UK's share of the European Union structural funds is set to fall further? What guarantee can he offer the House that he would resist any reduction at all, and that he and his right hon. Friends would readily apologise to the House if they had to concede such a reduction?
    Mr. Griffiths: I fear that the hon. Gentleman has confused selective assistance with European structural funds. In that confusion, he undermines the case that the British Government are putting to Europe to ensure that as many jobs and as many areas as possible are protected. That is the priority of the Government.
    Mr. Gwyn Prosser: When my hon. Friend considers ways of using regional funds to support the former coalfields and the recommendations of the coalfields task force, will he take particular note of the problems of the east Kent coalfield and the closed pits of east Kent, which were closed by the Conservative Government without apology or compensation? Will he take note of the isolation of the east Kent coalfield and of the fact that, in the past, the area missed out on RECHAR and on the Conservative Government's measures of support?
    Mr. Griffiths: I have visited my hon. Friend's constituency more than once and I know of his concern, which he continues to press on behalf of his constituents. In the light of what he has said, it is important to ensure that there is an integrated approach to the matter by Government Departments, if we are to be as helpful as possible to industries that have suffered, such as those in his constituency.

    Coal Industry
    Mr. James Gray: What assessment she has made of the implications of her energy policy for employment in the coal industry over the next three years. [49378]
    The Minister for Science, Energy and Industry (Mr. John Battle): Purchasing and sourcing coal are commercial decisions for the coal-fired generators. Obviously, it is up to the coal industry itself to respond

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    to market opportunities. Our task as a Government is to ensure a level playing field and fair market conditions for competition in coal. That is exactly what we are now delivering.
    Mr. Gray: I am grateful to the Minister for that answer, but does he agree that one of the greatest threats facing the coal mining industry comes from cheap imports of coal? Will he tell us what he has done to speak to the German and the Spanish Governments in particular to stop their unfair subsidies to their coal mining industries?
    Mr. Battle: Yes. We have supported the claims of companies that have protested about unfair imports, whether from Germany or elsewhere, through the European Commission. That is rather more than the previous Administration did. The hon. Gentleman talks about threats to the coal industry; I think that the previous Government was the greatest threat to the coal industry.
    Mr. Dennis Skinner: Is my hon. Friend aware that one of the reasons for his having to deal with the remnants of the coal industry—a maximum of 24 deep-mined pits—is what happened during those past 18 years, especially since 1992, when the previous Government, for the first time ever, actually closed pits themselves? Is my hon. Friend aware that, as a result of the closures made by the previous Secretary of State—who now sits somewhere on the Back Benches, when he turns up; he must be on some sort of productivity drive—there are still pit villages with more than 30 per cent. unemployment? The only way in which we can deal with that problem is to ensure that we keep those 20-odd pits working. We must also ensure that, in the process, we do not stuff the pockets of Mr. Richard Budge, who had his pockets filled by the previous Tory Government, when they handed over the remnants of the coal industry.
    Mr. Battle: We have no intention of stuffing anybody's pockets. We inherited a deeply flawed market for power generation. We have tackled that flawed structure and proposed a programme to reform it, which is out for consultation. That reform will ensure that there is a genuinely fair market for coal. To be fair to the coalfield communities, they asked us not for favours, but for fairness. We are delivering that fairness and it will ensure that there is a place for coal in the market. Where communities have suffered as a result of policies in the past, our actions such as those in respect of the task force on regeneration, to which my hon. Friend the Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs referred, should make some practical, positive contribution.
    Mr. Tim Boswell: We have some sympathy with the Minister and the Department for having the coal deal fixed for them by the Paymaster General. Now that the Minister has had a month to reflect on the deal, will he tell the House whether the proposals in that consultation document will affect the mining of one additional tonne of coal? If so, what will be the implications for the Government's Kyoto and domestic emissions targets?
    Mr. Battle: One week, Opposition Members are in favour of public spending; the next week, they are against it. One week, they are against the coal industry; the next
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    week, they are in favour of it. We inherited from the hon. Gentleman's Government, who privatised the coal industry and the whole of the energy sector, a deeply flawed market which was not working.
    What have this Government done? We have undertaken a review of energy sources for power generation to ensure that we shall have secure supplies in the future—which is paramount—rather than managing supplies day by day. We have asked the Director General of Electricity Supply to examine the energy-buying market for power stations. We have found that the market was rigged against coal by the previous Administration. We have also introduced a review of utility regulation because the framework that we inherited for consumer regulation was deeply flawed and rickety. In all that work, we shall ensure that there is fair competition in energy policy, that there is room for coal in the market and that it is not unfairly squeezed out as the previous Administration intended.
    Mr. Kevin Barron: I thank my hon. Friend for all the work that he has done in his ministerial position over the past 12 months to achieve a fair market for coal. We have never asked for anything other than a level playing field. Last May, our Government inherited a market that was rigged against the coal industry as a result of political decisions taken by the previous Government. Those coal miners who are left are thanking God that we have a Government who want to restore fairness. My hon. Friend should take no notice of Opposition Members who talk about coal miners' jobs, because they got rid of thousands of jobs in my constituency in a short period.
    Mr. Battle: I am grateful to my hon. Friend and other hon. Friends who made representations on this matter. The new energy markets are incredibly complex. We accept that, but we have calmly and quietly injected a dose of common sense into the debate. It is important that we consult, not the Conservative party, but industry and people working in the sector so that their views are considered. We can then make proposals for long-term sustainability to ensure that we shall have diverse, secure supplies at competitive prices well into the next century.

    Information Technology
    Dr. Vincent Cable: What steps the Government are taking to ensure that there is effective competition in the market for directories for information technology. [49379]
    The Minister for Small Firms, Trade and Industry (Mrs. Barbara Roche): I believe that there are no comprehensive directories available for electronic mail and internet website addresses. They are typically obtained by means of special search engines which can be easily accessed on-line. They are numerous and independent of companies that provide the most popular web browser software packages. The market for information technology directories is emerging and barriers to entry are low, and at present we are not aware of any evidence of anti-competitive behaviour.
    Dr. Cable: Will the Minister acknowledge that there is a potential threat to the public interest from private

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    monopolies being established in information technology, as we have already seen from the software standards of Mr. Gates's companies and the decoding of satellite signals by Mr. Murdoch's companies? Will she further acknowledge that the company that first develops an effective directory system will effectively have control over access to the whole e-mail commerce system? Will she reassure the House that the Department has the capacity to anticipate and react quickly to threats to the public interest and competition in the information sector?
    Mrs. Roche: May I assure the hon. Gentleman that the Government treat competition issues in this area very seriously? He will know that, under existing United Kingdom competition law, the Director General of Fair Trading is responsible for investigating claims of anti-competitive behaviour. If the hon. Gentleman has any evidence in that regard, he should notify the director general. These are clearly the industries of the future, and we want to see more and more entrants because that must be good for consumers and for business.

    Cycle Industry
    Mr. Alan Simpson: What assessment she has made of the barriers to fair competition facing the UK cycle industry in the domestic market. [49380]
    The Minister for Science, Energy and Industry (Mr. John Battle): My Department makes every effort to ensure that fair and competitive markets are maintained for all sectors of industry in the United Kingdom, including the bicycle industry, which my hon. Friend champions.
    Mr. Simpson: I know that my hon. Friend is aware that the Raleigh Cycle Company is located in my constituency and provides some 90 per cent. of United Kingdom bicycles. Is he aware of the legacy of unfairness left to this Government as a result of the Tories' treatment of the United Kingdom cycle industry? First, they refused to tackle the abuse of the quota system, which allowed foreign competitors to dump bicycles from south-east Asia on the United Kingdom market. They refused to take action equivalent to that initiated by the French Government to end that practice. Secondly, the previous Government refused to tackle the unfairness in the tax system, which requires United Kingdom manufacturers to pay tax on imported gearing systems while competitors are not required to do so.
    Madam Speaker: Order. What is the hon. Gentleman's question to the Minister?
    Mr. Simpson: I am asking whether the Minister is willing to re-examine the legacy of unfairness in the tax and subsidy systems, which saw the Tories subsidising competitors for the provision of screwdriver assembly sites for bikes while disfavouring United Kingdom manufacturers.
    Mr. Battle: Raleigh is a world-renowned company, and we want it to remain so. The United Kingdom bicycle industry has been under pressure from far eastern imports. As a result of complaints and investigation, action was
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    taken recently against bicycle imports from China, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia and duties have been imposed. I understand that the European Commission is investigating the dumping of bicycles by Taiwan. That issue was discussed at a member states meeting in an advisory committee in July. Once it is proved that there is a clear case of substantial damage, measures will be taken. We shall continue to oppose unfair trading practices in an effort to ensure that Raleigh has a successful future.
    Mr. Edward Garnier: The Minister anticipated my question by referring to cheap far eastern bicycle imports. What instructions have the President of the Board of Trade and her team and Foreign Office officials given to our commercial attachés in the People's Republic of China and other far eastern countries about keeping a close look-out for the dumping of cheap far eastern bicycle imports, which skews the market for home-made bicycles in this country?
    Mr. Battle: Commercial attachés are under instruction to keep a "close look-out", as the hon. and learned Gentleman puts it. In order to prove a clear case of substantial damage and dumping, we must do our homework. We shall look out for unfair trading practices to ensure that our industry is not damaged unfairly. I cannot say more than that.

    Consumer Protection
    Fiona Mactaggart: What measures she has taken to enhance protection for consumers; and if she will make a statement. [49381]
    The Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (Mr. Nigel Griffiths): My right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade and I have taken a number of measures to put consumer interests and consumer protection at the heart of Government, from banning dangerous laser pens to tackling time-share touts and protecting British loaf weights. Among other things, we have targeted rogue directors, introduced a Competition Bill, moved to allow consumers' organisations to take representative actions in our courts and improved protection for low-income consumers seeking credit.
    Fiona Mactaggart: I know that my constituents welcome this active approach to consumer protection, especially the swift action that the Minister took last autumn to tackle unsafe fireworks, which led to the largest fall in firework injuries in 23 years. However, will he share my disappointment and anger at those Opposition Members who, by talking out the Fireworks Bill, stopped him building on that track record, and thus put their petty politics before public safety?
    Mr. Griffiths: I certainly share, as do firework safety campaigners and the Confederation of British Industry, my hon. Friend's anger at the activities of the former Conservative consumer spokesman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), and his Conservative friends in talking out that measure. When the hon. Gentleman was a Minister, the number of firework injuries rose by

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    46 per cent. and 335 more people ended up in hospital. Fortunately, the Government are able to use secondary legislation to outlaw bangers this year.
    Mr. Richard Allan: The Minister will be aware of the problems faced by consumers who purchase home-working packs with the promise of making large amounts of money and then find themselves ripped off as the income does not materialise. Does the Minister have any plans to tackle the problems faced by such people, including my constituents in Sheffield, who have found themselves ripped off by unscrupulous home work offerers?
    Mr. Griffiths: The Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney), and I have launched a national campaign on home working. We share the condemnation of the abuse of home workers and we believe that the national campaign will offer real protection by ensuring that people are steered towards projects of proven worth, not projects such as the hon. Gentleman refers to.
    Mr. Andrew Reed: I know that the Minister is aware of the difficulty that many of my constituents have had resulting from international lottery draws, whereby individuals are targeted from abroad for lottery winnings. Those are, of course, largely fraudulent acts. I believe that the Advertising Standards Agency has no rights in that regard. Will the Minister turn his attention to such acts originating from Australia, the far east and eastern Europe, to protect consumers in my constituency and throughout the country?
    Mr. Griffiths: I am glad to have the opportunity to warn every member of the British public against falling for these unfortunate scams. We are seeking international co-operation on advertising, and in this case the abuse of advertising, to ensure that such scam schemes are prohibited from entering Britain and are put out of business altogether.
    Mr. Christopher Chope: Why is the Minister so sickeningly self-satisfied? May I draw his attention to two examples of failure—first, his refusal to respond to the request of the Consumers Association to add consumer issues to the remit of Action 2000 and, secondly, his absolutely supine attitude in Europe? Not long ago, he boasted at a conference that he had contributed strongly in the Consumer Council towards the aim of creating a people's Europe. How is that rhetoric consistent with today's European Court of Justice ruling preventing ordinary people from having access to the designer clothes so beloved by Labour MPs?
    Mr. Griffiths: I suppose that the hon. Gentleman is entitled to two questions because both were so poor.
    To tackle the first question, given that the present Government have spent 70 times the amount that the previous Government spent on the Action 2000 campaign and on fighting the millennium bug, it is ridiculous that the hon. Gentleman should criticise us on that.
    As for today's decision of the European Court of Justice, one of my first acts as a Minister was to invite some of Britain's leading retailers, some of our most successful companies—people who had never been
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    invited under the previous Administration—to come to the Department of Trade and Industry to discuss the very issues that have come up today. We deplore any action that prevents British retailers from providing British consumers with foreign-manufactured goods at reasonable prices. Although it is important that trademarks are protected, a balance must be struck between the right of those who hold trademarks and the right of consumers. It is unfair that British consumers should have to pay inflated prices, and we have taken action to get the European Commission to investigate pricing across all the EU states, because we believe that, in too many areas, British consumers are paying far too much.
    Mr. Richard Burden: Does my hon. Friend agree that the criticisms of Opposition Front Benchers would have rather more weight if they had not sat on their hands and allowed their Back Benchers to derail the Fireworks Bill? The CBI said that the derailing of that Bill was likely to lead directly to an increase in firework-related injuries. Will my hon. Friend ask Opposition Front Benchers whether they will now co-operate in ensuring that the Bill comes back to the House and is given a "fair wind", to use their words, so that the number of firework-related injuries continues to go down, rather than going up again as a result of their irresponsible actions?
    Mr. Griffiths: This should not be a party political matter. I invite Opposition Members to reflect on it and to support any such Bill. It is noticeable that there were more Opposition Members in the House to block that Bill than the 13 or 14 Back Benchers present this afternoon to discuss that issue and other important matters, such as British manufacturing. They simply do not care.

    Defence Industry
    Mr. Michael Colvin: What assessment she has made of the impact of the strategic defence review on Britain's defence industries. [49382]
    The Minister for Science, Energy and Industry (Mr. John Battle): Our Department was closely involved with the strategic defence review so that we were able to analyse carefully the implications for the UK defence industry of the emerging proposals. Industry was also closely involved, which led to widespread agreement on how to modernise our defence procurement processes and the White Paper, which has been warmly welcomed.
    Mr. Colvin: I thank the Minister for that reply. Did he see in the SDR reference to the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency? Has he had time yet to read the report on the agency by the Defence Select Committee, which concludes that, in view of the sensitive work that it undertakes and the importance of preserving its impartiality and critical mass, it is a part of the public sector that should not be privatised?
    Mr. Battle: I thank the hon. Gentleman for those comments. I have read the Defence Select Committee report and the Government have announced proposals, as was set out in our manifesto before the election, to set up a defence diversification agency within DERA to foster, in partnership with industry, a greater two-way

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    technology transfer between the military and civil sectors. Decisions on the way ahead will be announced when the results of the consultation process have been assessed. I understand that industry is involved in that consultation, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman's comments and those of the Select Committee will have been noted.
    Mr. Denis MacShane: Is the Minister aware how much the strategic defence review has been welcomed by those in the steel industry, because of course steel is the raw material to be used in the new ships and aeroplanes discussed in the review? Has my hon. Friend seen early-day motion 1563 on the Order Paper today, in my name and the names of about three dozen other hon. Members, which draws attention to the productivity record of the British steel industry? Does my hon. Friend agree that, as the steel industry prepares for our new defence procurement programme, it is getting little help from the Conservatives, who did nothing for that industry while they were in power and do everything to talk down the steel industry and manufacturing now that they are in opposition?
    Mr. Battle: My hon. Friend champions the steel industry at every opportunity, and he is welcome to do so. He represents his constituents and the industry well in doing that. The Defence Industries Council welcomes the partnership that was offered by the strategic defence review. It stated:
    "The defence industry welcomes the Government's firm commitment to a partnership with UK industry to acquire equipment and services for the armed services more cost effectively."
    More important, there will be benefits for companies throughout the country—not only those that supply the gear, but those in the supply chains that back up that equipment.
    Rev. Martin Smyth: I welcome the modernisation of the defence procurement plans. Does the Minister agree that the Raytheon project, which is a combined project involving large parts of British industry, is important, and will he support it as it progresses?
    Mr. Battle: Contracts are out for procurement and I obviously cannot comment on them. The defence review
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    is good news for industry as a whole and has been welcomed by industry. In combination with the work of DERA and the defence diversification agency, it will contribute to manufacturing success in the UK in the future.

    Arms Sales
    Mr. David Heath: What considerations she took into account in formulating her proposals to amend procedures on arms export licences. [49383]
    Mrs. Roche: The White Paper on strategic export controls was published on 1 July. In drawing up the proposals contained in it, the main consideration has been to develop the right legislative and procedural framework for effective, clear and accountable strategic export controls. The Government have taken account of the recommendations contained in the Scott report and the views expressed by the 38 respondents to the consultation document published by the previous Government. Views on the proposals are invited by 30 September.
    Mr. Heath: Does the Minister recognise that there is deep concern about the confusion of having six Departments of State involved in arms control, that we have succeeded in selling arms to regimes that are deeply unpleasant and sometimes deeply insolvent, and that there is a lack of transparency and clarity which means that the outside world cannot tell whether a licence is issued for an armoured car or a packet of washers? Is it not time to review the arms control regime completely and produce something that is open to proper scrutiny, and particularly scrutiny by Members of this place?
    Mrs. Roche: I should be grateful if the hon. Gentleman would take the time to read the White Paper in detail. It responds to the criticisms made in the Scott report, which the Government are committed to dealing with. That is why my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary published the criteria that he did a year ago and why the Government are committed to much more transparency, which is why we are committed to publishing an annual report on this vital work.

Health Expenditure
3.31 pm
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Frank Dobson): With permission, Madam Speaker, I wish to make a statement. The Government's top priorities are to renew and modernise our country's health and education systems. On Tuesday, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer was able to announce that, as a result of our comprehensive spending review, an extra £21 billion will be invested in the national health service in the United Kingdom over the next three years—approaching £18 billion in England. This is an average annual real-terms increase of 4.7 per cent. over the three years—starting off with 5.7 per cent. next year. It will kick start the Government's 10-year programme of modernisation for our national health service.
This is the biggest cash increase ever announced for the NHS. The step change in funding will be matched by the biggest programme of renewal and modernisation since the NHS was founded—investment for reform. £21 billion is a large sum of money. It was welcomed by the representatives of all the people working in the NHS and described by the National Health Service Federation as beyond their wildest dreams. However, when set against the rundown state of the NHS which we inherited, when set against the improvements which the staff and the public are seeking, and when set against the scale of our ambitions for the service, even £21 billion is a settlement which will have to be tightly managed and properly targeted.
Not all the problems that we inherited in the NHS will be solved over the next three years. They are too deeply entrenched for that. Not all the improvements that we seek can be delivered in that time. But what both staff and the public will see is demonstrable year-on-year improvements in all parts of the health and social care systems.
Staff and patients alike want to see a modern and dependable service. A modern health service requires high and stable levels of funding. In all its long history, the NHS has never before had a three-year settlement. The NHS has never been able to plan beyond the short term. Modern organisations have to plan for the longer term. The NHS can now do that for the very first time
A modern health service requires enough staff, well trained and highly motivated. With the extra money that we are making available, the NHS will be able to take on more doctors and more nurses—up to 7,000 more doctors and 15,000 more nurses over the next three years. Earmarked funds will be provided to allow staff to update their skills to keep up with rapidly changing technology. I can tell the House today that, over the next three years, there will be an extra 6,000 nurse training places, and I will shortly be announcing a large increase in the number of places in medical schools. With those extra staff, NHS hospitals will treat an extra 3 million patients.
Expanding staff numbers, in particular to deal with some of the shortages that we know exist, depends on pay rises being fair and affordable: fair, to allow us to recruit and retain motivated staff; affordable, to allow us to make the modernisations that patients demand. Fair pay and modernisation must go hand in hand, and that is why, for the first time, we are asking the pay review bodies formally to take into account the service improvements
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that we want to achieve, the resources available to the NHS and the Government's inflation target, as well as recruitment and retention.
The three-year settlement allows the NHS to take a longer-term view. Now that funds are guaranteed for three years, there should, for example, be no more systematic use of short-term contracts of employment for nurses and other staff. That will provide security that they do not have at present.
A modern health service requires modern buildings and modern equipment. Over recent years, the NHS has been starved of capital. We are putting that right. That is why, as part of the modernisation programme, £8 billion will be invested in new hospitals, clinics and GP premises. Thirty new hospitals are already planned, and work is already under way at eight: Dartford and Gravesham, Norfolk and Norwich, Carlisle, High Wycombe, Durham, Sheffield, Amersham and Greenwich. There will be more to come, and new and better buildings will not be confined to the places that are getting new hospitals. We will be increasing public sector capital by 50 per cent., and hospitals in every part of the country will benefit. Hundreds of wards, accident and emergency departments and operating theatres will be refurbished, and, every year, outdated equipment will be replaced with the newest and best that medical science can offer.
We are investing in primary care. Over the next three years, more than 1,000 GP surgeries will be improved or rebuilt. A modern health service requires earmarked cash to make change happen. I can announce today that the £18 billion settlement for England includes a £5 billion-plus modernisation fund. That money will be strictly targeted on helping NHS staff to transform the NHS into the kind of service that they and we want to see—a service that is fast and convenient, has uniformly high standards and is moulded to the needs of patients.
The modernisation fund will fund an information technology revolution in the NHS. It will go towards making sure that we meet the reductions in waiting lists to which we are committed. We will also use money from the modernisation fund to make a start this coming year on introducing booked admissions, so that when patients are told by their GPs that they need to attend an out-patient department, they will be able, there and then, to book an appointment that suits them. Similarly, if people have to have surgery as a day patient or an in-patient, they will be able to book an admission date that suits their needs, and their family and work requirements.
Besides contributing to the refurbishment of hospitals and the building of new GP premises, the fund will help to buy new equipment, support the promotion of good health, pay for better training of NHS staff and provide modern and effective mental health services. The modernisation fund will be allocated to finance well worked-out plans and proven mechanisms for improving services. It is investment for reform.
A modern health service requires modern ways of working. By getting rid of the wasteful and divisive competitive internal market, we are taking money out of the Tory-created bureaucracy and putting it into patient care. Primary care groups involving doctors, nurses and social services will replace the maze of commissioning and fundholding organisations. NHS trusts' managements will be amalgamated, and competition between hospitals is being ended; they are working together again, and they will continue to do so.

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The NHS is, proudly, already the most cost-effective health care system in the world, but there are still unacceptable variations in performance, and management effort will be targeted on hospitals where costs are above the national average. A new performance framework will help to measure progress. Our value-for-money improvements should release a further £1 billion for patient care. There will be a tough drive for genuine efficiency. That means more money for patients and staff, and better value for taxpayers.
A modern health service requires a new relationship with social services. We have made a start on breaking down the Berlin wall between the NHS and social services. To back that up, over the next three years, we are providing an extra £3 billion for social services so that they can match, complement and augment what the NHS is doing. That is an increase of 3.1 per cent. in real terms, year on year on year. For the first time, they will be able to produce joint, local, long-term plans with the national health service and then implement them.
For the first time, we will be setting tough efficiency targets for all social services authorities to help them deliver the goods for vulnerable people. It will mean better help for the elderly, and better and more help for carers. There will be new measures to allow tens of thousands of old people to live an independent life, where, at present, they end up trapped in nursing homes or hospitals. It will mean more help for people with mental health problems to match the extra NHS commitment to mental health.
Arrangements for looking after children in care have far too frequently been deplorable, with children being molested and with low levels of school attendance and educational attainment. Many of them have been turned out of care to fend for themselves when they are little more than children. We are determined to give them a new deal, and the extra social services money will provide the funds necessary to improve the quality of care received by children living away from home—and not before time.
All that effort and all that investment is intended to deal properly with people when they need treatment and care. But the Government are not satisfied with a health policy just for treating the sick. We want to stop people getting ill in the first place and stop people dying prematurely. We want to tackle the growing inequalities in health. That is a job for the whole Government, not just the Department of Health.
The comprehensive spending review settlement is not just a good settlement for our health service; it is a good settlement for our people's health. We have provided £540 million for the Sure Start children's fund, almost £4 billion to invest in decent housing and improved insulation, £3 billion for deprived communities and £1.7 billion for transport, particularly public transport. That is on top of our earlier commitment to the £3.5 billion new deal for jobs and our introduction of a national minimum wage. All that amounts to the biggest health crusade the country has seen since the NHS was born 50 years ago—a modern, Government-wide crusade.
The NHS was founded on the simple principle that care should be provided on the basis of need. That principle has served the NHS well for 50 years. While we were considering the comprehensive spending review we
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were urged by all sorts of people to abandon that principle. We were urged to do so by some Conservative Members, by the Social Market Foundation, by the Adam Smith Institute, by many of our newspapers and by various pointy-headed professors. They wanted us to charge people for going to the doctor. They wanted us to charge people for going to see their GP, for attending out-patient departments and for going into hospital. We have looked at all that very carefully. We have looked at all the pros and cons, and we have spent the best part of a year doing it. We utterly reject those ideas. We have rejected them because they would not work and they would harm the worst off. Charges would be expensive to collect and would glean little overall revenue. Most important, charges would deny treatment to those who need it most. I can announce today that there will be no new NHS charges in this Parliament.
We have not stopped there. From next April, the NHS will provide free eye tests for pensioners. That will be good for their purses and pockets, good for their sight, and good for their general health.
This is an historic financial settlement. It will enable the hard-working and dedicated staff of the national health service and social services to provide the treatment and care that people need, and to provide it to a higher standard than ever in every part of the country. It will modernise and renew the national health service. The extra money will be matched by enormous changes and improvements.
Over the past few weeks, we have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the national health service. That was right and proper, but now we must do as the founders of the NHS did—we must look forward, find the resources, and make the changes that are necessary to relaunch the national health service so that it serves our country well for the next 50 years. Nothing less will do, and that is what the Government are doing.
Miss Ann Widdecombe: May I start by regretting that the Secretary of State for Health did not manage on this occasion to observe the usual courtesies and conventions and that I did not have sight of his statement until 3.17 pm? I am returning his discourtesy with a considerable courtesy of my own. Even at this moment, the questions that I am about to ask are being brought to him so that he will have them in front of him and I shall not have to ask him to remember all that I have asked. Therefore, he will be able to address himself to every question.
The Government figures on Tuesday claimed that £21 billion of extra money for our health service was being made available, of which some £18 billion was for England alone. Closer inspection of the make-up of those figures suggests an exercise in accountancy so creative that if it were in any other context one would be sorely tempted to call in the Yard. I have some brief questions for the Secretary of State, and I would appreciate his answering fully and frankly. The questions are in front of him now.
First, can the right hon. Gentleman confirm that the difference in overall UK health spending between 1998–99 and 2002 is £10.5 billion, of which £8.8 billion is for England? Does he accept that independent figures that have been produced by the House of Commons Library show that the extra money from the

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comprehensive spending review over the Conservative real-growth trend of 3.1 per cent. is just over £2 billion and that, although it is welcome, it is a long way from Tuesday's hype and hyperbole? Does he accept that there is an enormous difference between what can be purchased for £2 billion extra and what can be purchased for £18 billion extra?
I am happy to approach the figures either on the double-counting, triple-counting basis of the right hon. Gentleman's £21 billion or on the Opposition's straight increase basis, provided that the same method is used to calculate both his extra spending and our extra spending. Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that, no matter which way he does it—on his basis or on mine—it results in a £2 billion difference for England, not an £18 billion difference? I shall now move to the main body of his statement. [Interruption.]
If the Secretary of State would look me in the eyes, we might believe that he was as happy as he is trying to suggest. Will he confirm that the independence has now been taken out of the independent pay review body and that its recommendations are now subverted to Treasury consideration? Is not that a betrayal of the very principle of such review bodies? What is the right hon. Gentleman's response to the comment by the British Medical Association that it objects to any unilateral attempt to undermine the even-handedness of the pay review body? Will he undertake to honour the recommendations of any such body in future?
Will the Secretary of State confirm that the announcement is not of the largest real-terms three-year increase in the history of our health service, as the Chancellor so glibly asserted on Tuesday? All he has to do is to read the editorial in The Independent today. If he does, he will find that even that paper agrees. It is below the 5.6 per cent. that we spent between 1990 and 1993. I ask again: will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that this increase is below the 5.6 per cent. increase that we spent in the first three years of this decade? Does he accept Peter Riddell's comment that the Chancellor's public spending statements are like the words of Lewis Carroll: nothing is quite as it seems and the cat's smile vanishes on closer inspection?
Certain specific items of expenditure will have to be taken from the extra money that the right hon. Gentleman has announced. Will he tell me what each one will cost? How much has he made available or set aside for the millennium bug—is he aware that his own Audit Commission said that the cost could be as high as £850 million? How much is he setting aside for the additional costs of the minimum wage to the health service? How much is he keeping for the abolition of compulsory competitive tendering? How much is he allowing for the abolition of tax relief on private medical insurance for the over-60s?
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, by the time that he has set against all his figures the Government's inflation targets—I will be kind and assume that they will be realised—the rate of increases that we managed over our term of office, the costs of the minimum wage, the costs of the millennium bug, the costs of abolishing private medical insurance and compulsory competitive tendering, and the costs of administering each primary care group, his extra £2 billion, welcome though it is,
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is worth little more than a few hundred million? Finally, is he aware—Will he look at me at this point? [Interruption.] He will not look at me, and I suspect that he will not face the employees of the NHS, among whom initial high hopes on Tuesday are now turning to disbelieving anger.
Mr. Dobson: At Department of Health Question Time as recently as last week, the right hon. Lady said that an increase of £9 billion would be the minimum that would be required to meet the Tory level of spending for the NHS. We have increased the sum by £18 billion, double what she asked for—and, for that matter, double what the Liberal Democrats were asking for. If they do not understand the figures, let me give some simple arithmetic, rounded for purposes of argument. Next year, there will be an extra £3 billion. The year after that, there will be an extra £6 billion. The year after that, there will be an extra £9 billion. Even in the Tory arithmetic book, 3 plus 6 plus 9 amounts to 18.
I know that the right hon. Lady claims that the £21 billion is £2.1 billion, and I know that she is not yet old enough for free eye tests, but the figures show that it is £21 billion; there is not a decimal point between the 2 and the 1.
As everyone knows, the pay review bodies have always considered all the other aspects that we have referred to, but those aspects have never been on the face of their terms of reference. All we have done is make it explicit—we think that that is right and proper—rather than trying to do it furtively, as previous Governments have done.
It is bare-faced cheek of the highest order for any Tory to ask what provision we are making for the problems of the millennium bug. When we got in, the Tories had made no provision, although, even for a collection of witless loons like them, the fact that the year 2000 was only three years ahead must have been fairly obvious.
On the national minimum wage, I can confirm that we have made provision for £21 million towards meeting its cost. Even £21 million is too much, and it is a national disgrace that, after 18 years of Tory rule, people working in the health service are getting paid less than the minimum wage.
The costs of primary care groups will cover every general practitioner in the country, and their running costs will equal those of the fundholders who used to represent half the GPs; so we have doubled the efficiency of the system in one fell swoop.
To return to my first point, whatever the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) may do, whatever questions she may have asked the House of Commons Library to answer—questions and, therefore, answers for which the Library staff are not responsible—and whatever answers she may have been given, people representing those who work in the health service have told me personally or have said publicly that the settlement is beyond their wildest dreams. It is a huge sum of money, which will have to be spent carefully, so that we get full value for money.
The right hon. Lady normally prides herself, or so she claims, on being straightforward. Last week, she said that if we found £9 billion she would thank us for it, but she cannot even thank us for £18 billion.
Mr. Simon Hughes: The Secretary of State knows that cash for

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health is welcome. The Liberal Democrats and others have been urging the Government to take that step since before they were elected and now they have acceded to our wishes, so we are grateful. Without getting into a debate about the billions, can the right hon. Gentleman confirm that 4.7 per cent. for the next three years, which is his figure, means 3.7 per cent. over the five years of this Parliament? Given that everyone accepted that 3 per cent. was needed in the national health service to keep up with inflation, although the additional money is additional and welcome spending money, it is hardly the lottery jackpot.
On staff, can the Secretary of State tell us whether his announcement and the figures today mean that the 8,000 nursing and 2,500 doctor vacancies in the health service will all be filled by the end of the three years? How many additional staff will there be in the service in three years' time, over and above those who are there today? When the pay review body recommends increases in future, with its tighter remit, will those always be implemented immediately and in full rather than staged, which is what the Secretary of State and his colleagues have done in the past year?
Really, it should not be a cause for celebration that a Labour Government tell the House that there will be no more charges. Surely the Secretary of State must answer why a policy that prescription charges will increase for the next three years, as they have done this year, is consistent—that is the Government's policy—when two years ago the Labour party said that increasing such charges was a tax on the sick.
On waiting lists and waiting times—the right hon. Gentleman's own target—at the general election, £100 million was to produce 100,000 off waiting lists as an early pledge. Now that we have £21 billion, will more people come off waiting lists or will it still be only one in 13 by the end of this Parliament? When will everyone know that six months will be the maximum time that they have to wait? If we are trying to keep pressure off the health service, why continue to cap social services budgets when such services can often provide cheaper care?
Does the money that the Secretary of State announced today mean that a hospital such as the Freeman cancer centre in Newcastle can know that, at the end of the three years, it will have curtains round the beds, a shower as well as a 30-year-old bath and separate toilets for men and women?
In my constituency, will the mentally ill know that support services will be available at the weekends and at night, as well as during the day? Will we have a 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week health service that is equal and available to all, which is what the people of Britain expect a Government to provide?
Mr. Dobson: For a start, it is worth saying that the national health service is a 24-hour-a-day service. Countless numbers of our fellow citizens deliver that service 24 hours a day, and we should thank them for it, rather than suggest that they are not there some of the time. I say to the representative of the Liberal party what I said to the representative of the Tory party. As recently as last week, the Liberals asked us to guarantee to deliver £9 billion extra. When we deliver £18 billion extra, they have the gall to start whingeing and moaning as usual—which is, I suppose, what qualifies them as Liberals.
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Yes, we want to recruit up to 7,000 extra doctors and 15,000 extra nurses, but we obviously cannot guarantee that every shortage in every part of the country will be wiped out over the three years, as sudden acute problems arise in some places and not in others. All that I believe is that we shall be able to go a long way towards resolving those problems, and we shall recruit additional staff so that hard-working doctors, nurses, midwives and other staff are not run off their feet. I really hope that we shall be able to achieve a pay settlement that does not involve staging. That is all that I can say at the moment, but I hope that we can create a system that is fair to the staff and affordable to the country.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the social services budget. He must have prepared his question before I spoke, as I explained that there would be a £3 billion increase in the amount available to social services, so that they can match the extra money and effort from the NHS to provide an adequate mental health service for people in his area and in every other area.
We are determined to bring down waiting lists. They are coming down, and will continue to come down. Waiting times will also come down; by reducing waiting lists on the scale that we are, we shall ensure that waiting times come down, too.
We hear yet again the Liberal obsession with the extra 1p on income tax, which is spent on practically everything that one can think of. The Liberals must be the only party in history whose slogan is, "I want to spend a penny."
Mr. David Hinchliffe: May I be the first to welcome warmly my right hon. Friend's announcement, which I am sure the population as a whole will recognise as the best possible way in which to celebrate 50 years of the national health service? I have two practical questions. First, does he share my experience that a common thread of the representations and complaints that we receive on the NHS relates to immense pressures at ward level on hard-pressed doctors and nurses? What, in practical terms, will the global amount of money mean at ward level in constituencies such as mine?
Secondly, may I warmly welcome the announcement on personal social services, which I believe has been a forgotten area of the caring professions for many years? Will my right hon. Friend give practical examples of the way in which the money will impact on personal social services and, indirectly, on the NHS locally?
Mr. Dobson: I thank my hon. and hard-working Friend for welcoming my statement and that of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor on Tuesday. I agree that, in many ways, the worst aspect of the national health service—it is felt by many patients and people who visit them in hospital—is the fact that the staff are overstretched and run off their feet, and we want to reduce the impact of that by spending money on modernising wards.
That will help in some cases, because the layout of some wards—and the fact that they are clapped-out, ruinous and awful—means that the work is harder than it ought to be. We intend to recruit more nurses and doctors, which should relieve the pressure. We intend to try to extend the role of nurses, so that they can make a bigger professional contribution, which will also bring some relief.

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We hope that NHS Direct, the nurse-led 24-hour helpline, will employ nurses who have had to leave nursing, for instance because of a back injury acquired at work, to provide advice over the telephone. That will be a good way of making use of their nursing skills, and will reduce pressure.
We must try to stop people having to come into hospital when they do not want to and it is unnecessary. People in the health service, with our encouragement, have made substantial steps in that direction, especially last winter. I give again the example of Halton general hospital in Cheshire, where, when old folks who were admitted with a bad chest were discharged, a respiratory nurse team picked them up and looked after them at home. That worked so successfully that the GPs in the area started referring old folks who were having a bad chest at home to the respiratory team, so that they could be treated at home and did not have to go into hospital at all. A hospital is a dangerous place, and is the last place where frail old people should be, if it can possibly be avoided.
All those changes are intended to relieve the pressure on the hard-working people in the health service. It cannot be done overnight, but we have to recognise that those people are the health service.
Mrs. Marion Roe: I welcome any additional funding for the NHS, although it is not as much in real terms as the Secretary of State would have us believe, but how does he intend to deal with the serious GP shortages that currently exist, with approximately 1,000 vacancies, especially as evidence published in the past two weeks shows that GP list sizes, so effectively brought down by the previous Conservative Government, are rising again?
Mr. Dobson: It is a bit difficult for a Government who have been in power for only 14 months to take responsibility for the supply of doctors, when a doctor only now leaving medical school and beginning to do something useful probably started about 10 years ago—or did not start, which is one of our problems. We are dealing with the shortages, and, for the first time in ages, there has been a rise in the number of doctors becoming GP trainees, which is a step in the right direction.
Using the facilities made available by the previous Government, we are encouraging the appointment of salaried GPs in some of the areas where the shortages are worst, and we intend to continue, with other schemes that we are working out with the profession, to try to relieve the problem, but if we are to succeed, and to tackle health inequalities at the same time, our principal target must be to get better GP practice in those inner-city and other rundown areas where people are currently not getting a fair share of the resources.
Mr. Gordon Prentice: I warmly welcome the statement and the extra 7,000 doctors and 15,000 nurses, but north-east Lancashire has been described as a dental desert, and, only this week, East Lancashire health authority is advertising in Scandinavia for additional dentists. Does my right hon. Friend have indicative figures for the number of additional dentists that we could expect to have in post at the end of this three-year period?
Mr. Dobson: The straightforward answer is no, I do not have those figures at the minute, but I can tell my
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hon. Friend that, as a result of the initiatives that we have taken in our short period in office, an extra 250,000 people have been able to become NHS dentistry patients.
Mr. Nicholas Winterton: May I tell the Secretary of State that, only yesterday, as a result of an unfortunately heavy fall in Trafalgar square, I experienced the expertise and care of not only the London ambulance service, but the junior doctors, nurses and staff at St. Thomas's hospital? It was brilliant. I have no complaint. It was first class, but they were overstretched and under stress. Does the Secretary of State's announcement, particularly in respect of additional doctors and nurses, mean that that sort of stress and overstretch in an accident and emergency department at a hospital such as St. Thomas's will improve and that those who genuinely need more money for the wonderful work they do, particularly junior doctors and nurses, will get what they deserve—bigger remuneration?
Mr. Dobson: The hon. Gentleman rightly pays tribute to the people who looked after him, and I am sure that he is right in his observation that they are overstretched and under stress. With the proposals that I have outlined today I want to reduce that stress. Obviously, it will take a considerable time to bring that about in every part of the country, but that is what we want to do. I also want to see people who work in the national health service getting fair pay for the huge contribution that they make to the welfare of our people. I hope that we can manage that. We shall work hard to achieve, it. Certainly, the extra money will assist us in that.
Audrey Wise: May I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the success of his efforts to improve the national health service? In particular, may I welcome his intention to improve services for children? I was pleased that he mentioned children being looked after by local authorities. Although he will not yet have had time to study the report on this subject issued today by the Select Committee on Health, will he ensure that he and his Department give it careful attention, because our recommendations will undoubtedly help him achieve his stated objectives? Finally, will he make sure that he never forgets the need to improve choice and continuity of carer for women in pregnancy and childbirth?
Mr. Dobson: Dealing with my hon. Friend's questions in reverse order, I shall do my very best not to forget what she has said about choice and continuity of carer for women in pregnancy and childbirth. In many parts of the country children's services have been a national disgrace. Children who, in effect, have had the state as their parent—
Mr. Philip Hammond: Ealing.
Mr. Dobson: It is all very well shouting out a place name because it happens to be Labour controlled at the moment, but there are plenty of examples from all round the country. As all hon. Members know, if they are not just making stupid party-political points, there has been a group of organised child molesters getting appointments in all sorts of children's homes, some of which are run by

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charities, or Labour authorities, Tory authorities and Liberal authorities. It is a disgrace that it has not been dealt with. We are trying to deal with it now.
Before I was interrupted, I was pointing out that if the children who, in effect, have had the state as their parent had been looked after by ordinary parents, those parents would have been prosecuted and gaoled for neglect. That shows how some children have been treated in children's homes; it must end. The Utting report made a large number of recommendations. I have been chairing a working group which has been going through them. We shall find the money to implement virtually all of them, and I hope to make announcements on that shortly. We shall certainly bear in mind the additional scrutiny of the Select Committee on Health.
It is intolerable that in many parts of the country, on reaching the age of 16 some children are just turned out by the local authority to fend for themselves. No hon. Members would have wanted that to happen to them or to their children or, possibly, in view of the age of some of us, grandchildren. That would be an intolerable concept. But that has been going on in our name as recently as last month, and it cannot go on any longer.
Mr. John Wilkinson: It would be churlish not to congratulate the Secretary of State on securing from the Chancellor a financial settlement which goes at least a little of the way to matching his grandiloquent rhetoric, but may I bring him from the euphoria of the general to the specifics, because it is on the specifics that he will be judged by our electors? Will he ensure, as evidence of his good faith, that the Mount Vernon hospital at Northwood, the largest cancer hospital on a single site in the south of England, will not see its supporting burns, plastics and oral surgery, general medicine and general surgery removed, because, if they are, that cancer centre, with its outstanding research facilities, will go into a decline from which it may not be possible to recover?
Mr. Dobson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his welcome for what I have said. Like most people, I respond rather better to encouragement than criticism. I shall bear in mind the points that he makes about the Mount Vernon hospital, because the last thing that we want to see is good and effective treatment and care being taken away from anywhere.
Ann Keen: As a nurse for more than 20 years, I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend on his amazing achievement in giving back to the people our health service and the security that it entails. All the professions respect him so much because he always demonstrates such a wide understanding of their work. But, looking at nurse recruitment, particularly in my constituency of Brentford and Isleworth in west London, does he agree that the problems facing people who want to recruit or retain student nurses, which we must address seriously, include accommodation and the cost of accommodation? The previous Government sold off nurses' homes, and that was encouraged. We now need to revisit the question of accommodation for our student nurses.
Mr. Dobson: I thank my hon. Friend for her kind welcome. Nurse recruitment is a major issue. Pay is one
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consideration, and accommodation is another. This is one of those circumstances where it is not easy to turn back the clock. The previous Government having sold off so many nurses' homes, it takes quite a bit of time to find alternative accommodation, if that is the right way to deal with the problem.
Mr. Alan Duncan: If?
Mr. Dobson: In some areas it might be the right way, but in some areas it may not. The problem is that the previous Government pursued that policy in those areas where it might have been a sensible policy and in those areas where it was not. We are trying to address matters, such as accommodation, which either make nursing unattractive to someone who might be thinking of becoming a nurse or increasingly unattractive to people who are already nurses.
We are trying to establish more family-friendly employment policies so that nurses, whether men or women, with family responsibilities, can work the hours of the day, the days of the week, or, in some cases, because of school holidays, the weeks of the year that suit those responsibilities. Some hospitals manage to do that, and I do not understand why others cannot. They are, shall I say, being encouraged to follow the good examples.
We are also putting a great deal of effort into something else that is putting people off working in the health service: we are taking seriously assaults on and abuse of staff. We have taken steps within the health service to try to reduce that. My right hon. Friends the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary are also doing their bit through the judicial system and the police to ensure that if people commit offences, they are caught and prosecuted and, if they are successfully prosecuted, they get a rattling bad sentence. They should. It is quite wrong that the people working for us, trying to look after us, our friends and our neighbours, should be beaten up by anybody. There is no excuse for that, and we shall accept no excuse for it.
Miss Julie Kirkbride: The Secretary of State has made much of the Government's spending plans, and I want to encourage him rather than criticise him, by saying that I broadly go along with them. However, the people of Worcestershire have three general hospitals, but face the axing of one of them. Kidderminster general hospital, which serves my constituents and those of the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mr. Lock), is excellent and efficient, and it has won a chartermark, but its proposed closure is on the Secretary of State's desk. If his spending plans are accurate, can he promise my constituents and the people of Worcestershire that he will put a stop to that closure?
Mr. Dobson: I believe that we do not yet have the proposals on our desks, but I will use the excuse that they might be there, which means that it would be improper for me to make any promise one way or the other because it could be challenged in the courts. I shall carefully consider all the evidence. Unlike some of our predecessors, we are not supine when it comes to hospital closures, and we are not approving some of them.
Dr. Howard Stoate: May I tell my right hon. Friend that his statement will be warmly welcomed by general practitioners and primary care nurses

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throughout the country, and particularly in Dartford? How will the welcome modernisation fund be channelled into improving GP premises, some of which are sorely in need of modernisation?
Mr. Dobson: The funds will be channelled into areas where people say they are needed. We want to be positive, and to improve appalling GP premises in areas such as the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore). We have set the test of whether we would go to a GP who had premises like some of those in that constituency. The answer is no, and we should not tolerate the long-term existence of places that we would not use ourselves.
Mr. Robert Walter: Health care is expensive, and costs are ever expanding as we live longer and technology advances. I read some research this morning that suggests that costs are growing at between two and two and a half times the rate of inflation in the United States. The assumptions underlying the Secretary of State's figures are based on a Treasury GDP deflator of 2.5 per cent., which is very optimistic and higher than this year's 2.9 per cent. Can the Secretary of State tell us what assumptions he has made for increases in staff costs over the next three to five years, and which NHS costs are likely to rise well ahead of the rate of inflation?
Mr. Dobson: The hon. Gentleman should remember that his party asserts that a 3 per cent. year on year real-terms increase is satisfactory. We are proposing 4.7 per cent.
Mr. Hammond: It is 3.7 per cent.
Mr. Dobson: It is 4.7 per cent. over the next three years, and 3.7 per cent. over five years. If we take a five-year average, the Tory figure falls to 3 per cent., not 3.1 per cent. I do not want to get into that kind of nonsense. The increase is 4.7 per cent. over the three years in question, which is a massive and steady improvement on anything that happened under the Tories. We are ensuring that the money is directed into providing necessary services.
We should not challenge assumptions on UK health costs by comparing them with figures from the United States, which spends twice as much of its national wealth on health, but where neither women nor men live as long as British women and men.
Mr. Richard Burden: Judging by the questions posed by the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), does my right hon. Friend agree that, in comparison, pointy-headed professors might have a reasonable grasp of what is going on in the health service?
In respect of primary care, today's announcement will be widely welcomed across the country, because we have a great deal to do to put the legacy right. Is my right hon. Friend aware that, in Birmingham, between 35 and 40 per cent. of GPs in the most deprived areas will be retiring in the next 10 years? We desperately need not only to increase the number of GPs but to make the necessary
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investment in primary care to ensure both that people have the quality of health care that they deserve, and that accident and emergency departments are able to provide an A and E service, instead of becoming, as happens all too often, a substitute for inadequate primary care.
Mr. Dobson: I certainly accept my hon. Friend's points. Clearly, we have to use all human and other resources possible both to try to improve the state of primary care in the most deprived parts of the country, and to put ourselves in readiness for the retirement of some GPs.
That is certainly one reason, albeit not the only one, why extending the role of nurses and district nurses to being nurse practitioners and other, similar measures will clearly make a contribution. We have a system in which large numbers of highly trained and skilled people are not permitted, under our present arrangements, to make full use of their skills and training to the advantage of the rest of us. That certainly applies to nurses and midwives, as well as to local pharmacists. Pharmacists do a four-year course, but frequently do little more than hand over pills in the local pharmacy. We want them to play a bigger role in primary care, which would be another way of getting more out of them, making their jobs more satisfying and, at the same time, providing a better all-round service.
My hon. Friend referred to the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald and I should come back to her.
Miss Widdecombe: Ah.
Mr. Dobson: I am going to apologise. I always do my level best to comply with the courtesies of the House in respect of informing the Opposition about things, so I am sorry that my office did not manage to get the statement to the right hon. Lady. I certainly cleared it before 3 o'clock, and I assumed that she would get it then.
Rev. Martin Smyth: I welcome the statement, especially the fact that we are looking three years ahead. Bearing in mind the fact that the Secretary of State, like myself and others, grew up with the old saying that half a loaf is better than no bread, may I nevertheless press the issue of the recruitment of staff? If we had new medical students going in this September or October, before they were fully qualified, that would be almost the 10 years up. At the same time, may I ask about the recruitment of nurses? Do we intend to advertise to bring nurses from overseas? What about therapists? We are putting cancer treatment high on our list, but there is a shortage of radiotherapists and radiographers.
Mr. Dobson: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his welcome for my statement. Most of what I have been saying applies to Northern Ireland, and my colleagues will be trying to apply it there. He raises the issue of the difficulty in recruiting staff and it is no good my pretending that there is no difficulty in recruiting staff, be they doctors, nursing staff or, as he says, therapists, many of whom are in extremely short supply. It is difficult, because one cannot turn on a tap and have qualified therapists come out.
However, there is a substantial number of people who used to work in the national health service, but who left for one reason or another. There are about 140,000 nurses

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and a substantial number of doctors. Dr. Ian Bogle, who has just become chairman of the British Medical Association and whom I congratulate on his election, was saying this morning that he thought that, given the right circumstances, we would be able to recruit doctors who had left the service back into it. I believe that that would apply also to nurses and to the professions allied to medicine. However, it will be a long, difficult and laborious task, which will have to be done locally in response to local circumstances.
Shona McIsaac: Will my right hon. Friend send his congratulations to the staff at Grimsby hospital who have worked phenomenally hard to reduce its waiting lists? They are on target to reduce them by about 1,400 by next year. Before the general election, that hospital was in danger of being downgraded because the health authority was severely underfunded, thanks to the previous Government. I know that Grimsby hospital and all the residents of Grimsby and Cleethorpes will be delighted with my right hon. Friend's announcement today.
Mr. Dobson: I thank my hon. Friend for her welcome for our actions. I certainly congratulate all the staff of Grimsby hospital on their work. I hope that they will receive their fair and proper share of the extra funds and that they will continue to be as efficient and productive as they are today.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Speaker: Order. We shall now move on to the business statement.

Business of the House
4.30 pm
The President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mrs. Ann Taylor): I should like to make a statement about the business for next week.
MONDAY 20 JULY—Second Reading of the Northern Ireland Bill.
TUESDAY 21 JULY—Opposition Day (18th allotted day). Until about 7 pm, there will be a debate on the relationship of Government to Parliament, followed by a debate on the European single currency. Both debates will arise on motions in the name of the Liberal Democrats.
WEDNESDAY 22 JULY—Until 2 pm, there will be debates on the motion for the Adjournment of the House.
Consideration of Lords amendments to the Government of Wales Bill.
Consideration in Committee of the Northern Ireland Bill.
THURSDAY AND FRIDAY 23 AND 24 JULY—Consideration in Committee of the Northern Ireland Bill.
The provisional business for the following week will be as follows:
MONDAY 27 JULY—Conclusion of consideration in Committee of the Northern Ireland Bill.
TUESDAY 28 JULY—Consideration of any Lords amendments that may be received.
The Chairman of Ways and Means has named opposed private business for consideration at 7 pm.
WEDNESDAY 29 JULY—Until 2 pm, there will be debates on the motion for the Adjournment of the House, which will include the usual three-hour pre-recess debate.
Opposition Day (19th allotted day). The subjects for debate have yet to be decided and announced.
THURSDAY 30 JULY—Progress on remaining stages of the Northern Ireland Bill.
FRIDAY 31 JULY—Conclusion of remaining stages of the Northern Ireland Bill.
The House may also be asked to consider any Lords messages which may be received.
I confirm that, subject to the progress of business, I expect the House to rise for the summer recess on Friday 31 July, and in the business statement next week I shall announce the return date in October.
Sir George Young: The House is grateful to the right hon. Lady for next week's business, and for an indication of the business for the following week.
The House expects a number of announcements in the next few days, so will the Leader of the House tell us when we can expect, first, the statement on the transport White Paper and, secondly, that on local government finance? Will the right hon. Lady tell us also what other statements the Government plan to make before the recess? Will she ensure that Members whose constituencies are affected by the transport White Paper and the roads review are told about them before the media find out?

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The right hon. Lady has made no provision to debate the Legg report into the Sandline affair, which I understand is now expected before the House rises. Does not that warrant a statement and an early debate, not least because the Foreign Secretary is reported to have told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee this morning that he was certain that the report would support his claims of non-involvement? How can he make that assertion if the independent report is not available?
Last week, I asked the right hon. Lady when we might see the new guidelines on lobbying that the Cabinet Secretary has been asked to prepare. What is the position on those guidelines? Could we debate the Select Committee's report on London Underground, and could the House help the Deputy Prime Minister to find a workable way of privatising London Underground to replace the unworkable proposals on which he has embarked?
Finally, I refer the right hon. Lady to reports in today's newspapers that the Prime Minister has ordered Ministers to come up with policy announcements in August
"in an attempt to stop the government falling apart while he is on holiday."
The reports state that Alastair Campbell has
"sent an edict to all departments telling them to save up stories for the 'silly season'."
Can the right hon. Lady confirm that there is no question of delaying announcements so that they can be made when the House is not sitting?
Mr. Dennis Skinner: A very good idea.
Mrs. Taylor: I must take issue with my hon. Friend on that point. We are not saving up announcements that should be made, or are ready to be made, in the House so that they can be delivered at another time, such as during the recess.
The right hon. Gentleman asked specifically about certain statements that may be made while the House is sitting. I expect various statements to come before the House in the next two weeks. I hope that the statement on the transport White Paper can be delivered next week. It is pencilled in for Monday, but, as I have explained before, we make provisional arrangements that must sometimes be changed. That is why we do not often announce statements in advance. If specific hon. Members are concerned about any Government decisions—whether they are announced by statement or through written parliamentary questions—I think that it is important that Ministers ensure that those hon. Members who are most affected are informed directly of the decisions that have been made.
The right hon. Gentleman also asked me about the Legg report, and whether there would be time to debate it before the House rises. He will know from my announcement that it is very unlikely that there will be time for such a debate. We do not know precisely when the Legg report will be published. It is an independent inquiry, and it is anticipated that its report will be produced in the House's final week of sitting. I hope that there will be at least a statement to the House following the publication of that report.
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The right hon. Gentleman inquired about lobbying guidelines. I do not think that I have anything to add at this stage to my comments last week. We inherited guidelines, and we are considering whether they need to be tightened and improved. The Prime Minister has made the arrangements clear, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that the process should be rushed. It is important that we get any guidelines right.
On the right hon. Gentleman's point about London Underground, I reject completely his suggestion that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister has come up with unworkable proposals. As a member of the previous Government, who let investment in the London underground decline so badly, I think that the right hon. Gentleman has a cheek to ask that question.
As to the right hon. Gentleman's final point about policy announcements in August, although that suggestion might be welcomed by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner), who thinks it is a good idea, I have received no such edict about withholding stories until August.
Mr. David Winnick: In view of reports that the BBC wants to increase licence fees, will my right hon. Friend ensure that a statement is made to the House before the Government make any final decisions about the matter? It is also important to bear in mind the feelings of a large number—indeed, a majority—of Labour Back Benchers, leaving aside Parliamentary Private Secretaries, who have signed my early-day motion 1483.
[That this House calls on the Government to give sympathetic consideration to a concessionary television licence scheme for pensioners; and hopes that such a scheme can be brought in within the lifetime of this Parliament.]
In the light of the calls for restraint in public sector pay, is it not rather alarming that the press have reported today that the Director-General of the BBC, John Birt, has received a large pay increase, bringing his salary to nearly £390,000 a year? Many matters must be considered—quite apart from the agreement reached previously—before there is any question of increasing the licence fee again.
Mrs. Taylor: I think that my hon. Friend is requesting a debate on the licence fee rather than the other issues involved with it. The level of television licence fees for the years 1997–98 to 2001–2 is determined by a five-year formula, which takes into account the BBC's spending needs over the whole period. The Government have no plans to change that formula, so I think that it would be inappropriate to give priority to a debate of that nature at this stage.
Mr. Andrew Stunell: I am sure that, especially as the Leader of the House comes to this session every week, she is well aware of the pressure from Back Benchers for increasing time for business, but may I draw her attention to the pressure from Ministers, who are becoming so frustrated by the lack of time in the House that they are absolutely forced to go to the media in default of coming to the Chamber? Will she give the House an assurance that some of the ideas that are being canvassed for improving the speed and effectiveness of

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the work of the House will see the light of day before the recess, and that, soon after the start of the autumn session, we shall have an opportunity to debate those matters and improve the accountability and effectiveness of that work?
Mrs. Taylor: Without accepting all the points that the hon. Gentleman makes, I hope that we shall be able to make further progress in modernising the workings of the House. He asked whether the next Committee report could be published before the recess. Ideally, I would like that to be the case, and I know that members of the Committee will work hard over the next few weeks, hopefully meeting whenever it is necessary, to try to make progress and agree a report. If that were to be possible, we might well be able to hold a further debate on modernisation in the spillover period, but I believe that some work remains to be done by the Committee before a report is ready.
Mr. Paul Flynn: When may we debate the recent report by Age Concern and the Alzheimer's Society on the huge problem of the over-medication of the elderly, especially the evidence that one in five hospital admissions of elderly people results from the misuse of medicinal drugs, and the evidence from Glasgow and the north of England that in one case 54 per cent., and in another case 88 per. cent. of residents of care homes were being prescribed very powerful neuroleptic drugs inappropriately? A very effective review by the school of psychiatry in Manchester reduced the number of drugs used by the elderly, thereby greatly improving the quality of their life, extending their life expectancy and saving money for the health service. When shall we replicate those studies nationally?
Mrs. Taylor: My hon. Friend will understand if I cannot promise him time in the near future for the debate he requests. I hope, however, that the reforms that the Secretary of State for Health announced only a short time ago in respect of Social Services and help for the elderly may assist with some of the problems that concern him. If my hon. Friend wants to pursue the matter further, he could apply for an Adjournment debate, but I do not think that there is a possibility of holding such a debate in Government time before the recess.
Mr. Peter Brooke: I imagine that the Leader of the House will not yet have had an opportunity to read the Wyndham report, written by Tony Travers and published yesterday, on the economic impact of London's west end theatre, one of the great successes of my constituency, but may I hope that we might hold a debate upon it while it is still fresh in everyone's mind?
Mrs. Taylor: The right hon. Gentleman is right—I have not read the entire Wyndham report. However, I understand that the report reveals a vibrant industry and a British success story as far as London's west end theatres are concerned, and I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on having them in his constituency. They are clearly very important to the British economy as well as to the British Tourist Authority. He too will understand why we cannot have a debate in Government time before the recess.
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There is always the opportunity for an Adjournment debate. There is also the pre-recess three-hour Adjournment debate, which hon. Members find extremely useful for raising topics that they have not been able to weave into our parliamentary timetable on other occasions.
Mr. Tam Dalyell: Given the pressure on time, and parliamentary realities, would my right hon. Friend ask the Foreign Secretary, who will open tomorrow's debate on the expansion of NATO, which some of us, including ex-Senator Sam Nunn and other serious Americans, regard with foreboding and dismay, whether there could be a statement on the military position in Kosovo? May I hark back yet again and nag my right hon. Friend that the House of Commons should be consulted before there is any commitment to military action?
Mrs. Taylor: I am happy to bring my hon. Friend's comments to the Foreign Secretary's attention. I have previously said that we cannot give an absolute undertaking that an oral statement will be made before any decision to deploy troops, but I can confirm that, operational circumstances permitting, we would do so. I have said that on other occasions; I repeat it today, but I shall again remind the Foreign Secretary of my hon. Friend's concerns.
Mr. Paul Burstow: Given hon. Members' intense interest in the statement earlier today by the Secretary of State for Health, and the understandable focus on the extra expenditure within the NHS, I express a hope that the right hon. Lady will share my concern that personal social services and the extra expenditure that was being targeted on that area were not adequately covered in questions on the statement.
I therefore wonder two things. First, will a statement be made before the recess on the White Paper on social services, to enable us to explore the Government's approach to social services in the medium to long term? Secondly, will there be an opportunity for a debate in Government time on personal social services? I understand that most of the debates on that subject in recent years have been Adjournment debates. Surely there should be time in which we might test the Government's views on that subject in Government time.
Mrs. Taylor: In Government time, we had a wide-ranging debate on the Health Service last week, when some of those issues were relevant. I cannot add anything to what I said about statements. I remind the hon. Gentleman that the Liberals have an Opposition day next week; had they felt that that issue should have priority, it would have been open to them to choose that instead of the subjects that are on the Order Paper.
Mr. Nicholas Soames: The right hon. Lady is aware, as I have raised the matter with her several times, that West Sussex county council has been obliged to go to the High Court to seek redress against an over-mighty and overbearing Executive which is seeking to place upon the people of West Sussex, and especially upon my constituents in Mid-Sussex, substantial numbers of extra new houses over and above that already budgeted for. Is she aware that the judge is now considering his view of the matter, the representations having been made?

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Would the President be good enough to say whether she might be prepared, when the House returns, to grant time for a debate on the outcome of those deliberations, as they will fundamentally affect the planning law and legislation on the building of new houses throughout the country for the foreseeable future?
Mrs. Taylor: It is difficult enough at this stage to plan the next two weeks, and I cannot at the moment make any commitments such as those that the hon. Gentleman is asking me to make.
Mr. Edward Garnier: Will the Leader of the House tell us whether the regulations extending conditional fee arrangements will be debated in Committee upstairs or on the Floor of the House, and when such debate will take place? The delay in introducing these proposals, ill thought out though they may be, is causing difficulties for the insurance market. Unless the extension of CFAs, as they are called, is underpinned by insurance, it simply will not happen.
Mrs. Taylor: There are no plans at the moment to debate those regulations on the Floor of the House. I cannot be specific about timing, but I shall ensure that, once a decision is taken, the hon. and learned Gentleman is informed.

ROYAL ASSENT
Madam Speaker: I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

Appropriation Act 1998.

Data Protection Act 1998.

Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998.

Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council Act 1998.

Public Expenditure
[Relevant documents: Minutes of Evidence taken before the Treasury Committee on Wednesday 15 July (HC 960-ii).]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Pope.]
Madam Speaker: I understand that many right hon. and hon. Members wish to speak in the debate. For that reason I have announced that Back-Bench speeches will be limited to 15 minutes.
4.48 pm
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Mr. Alistair Darling): This is the first opportunity that the House has had to debate the Government's public expenditure plans. I shall set in context the announcement made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Tuesday, which represented a further step by the Government in implementing their manifesto commitments.
In his first two Budgets, the Chancellor had to deal with the structural problems that we inherited. Last month, he set out his fiscal strategy in the economic and fiscal strategy report which laid out a prudent and cautious approach to public spending that was widely welcomed. This week, he set out our spending strategy—increased investment, but money in return for modernisation. Investment is conditional on reform. Every Department will be bound by an agreement to deliver key outcomes on which it will be judged.
The Government's central objectives are high and sustainable levels of growth and employment and sustainable public services, built on a platform of long-term stability. We have put in place two fundamental long-term economic reforms to ensure that we get long-term sustainable economic growth, and to ensure that public spending is affordable.
First, we had to deal with the previous Government's failure to deal with inflation, which was left rising out of control, so we gave independence to the Bank of England, with the result that our long-term interest rates are the lowest that they have been for 33 years. Secondly, to impose a new framework of financial discipline, we have adopted fiscal rules that achieve a current budget balance and a prudent level of debt to national income.
It is interesting to note that even the most pessimistic of the 45 independent economic forecasts that we surveyed show that our strict rules will be met over the next three years. We have kept to the two-year spending limits that we promised at the election while we sorted out the mess that we inherited. We have imposed a significant fiscal tightening—£25 billion—which is some 3½per cent. of national income.
We have reduced the borrowing that we inherited. During the 1990s, national debt doubled. As a result, we were faced with a bill of £25 billion a year just to service that debt. That was the golden economic legacy to which the Opposition keep referring. We inherited a situation of boom and bust. Under the Conservatives, interest rates reached 15 per cent., and inflation doubled in two and a half years to almost 10 per cent. in 1990. We will not repeat the mistakes of the late 1980s—the Lawson boom—the economic miracle of the 1980s that became the economic nightmare of the 1990s, when the shadow Chancellor was at the heart of the Treasury.

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Over this economic cycle and for the first time in decades, Britain is set to have both a current budget in balance and a sustainable approach to debt. Over the three years 1996–97 to 1999–2000, public sector net borrowing will fall by 3½ per cent. of national income, just as set out in the Budget figures. The ratio of net public debt is projected to fall below 40 per cent. of GDP.
Although we are boosting spending on capital, which we believe is important, we plan that the debt ratio will remain below 40 per cent. Our approach is among the most prudent of our G7 partners, and far more prudent than that of the Government from whom we took over.
Mr. Nick Gibb: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Many definitions have been changed. Can he confirm that, on the basis of what was called the public sector borrowing requirement, the Government are running a PSBR of £4 billion next year, £5 billion the following year, and £6 billion in each of the two years after that?
Mr. Darling: That is the point that the hon. Gentleman put to the Chancellor yesterday at the Treasury Select Committee. My right hon. Friend made it clear that, unlike the situation under the previous Government, we are determined to reduce the amount of borrowing so that we can have sustainable public finances in the future.
In the economic and fiscal strategy report that we published last month, the hon. Gentleman will have seen that we have a far stricter and more open discipline than ever existed under the previous Government. There is a further innovation. The new regime breaks with the old-fashioned culture of short-termism and uncertainty. We believe that moving away from the annual negotiating cycle and the annual spending round, and introducing fixed three-year budgets, will give Departments, and therefore the public service, far more certainty than they ever had in the past.
The Government have set tough new long-term fiscal rules. To ensure that those are met and to ensure long-term investment in our infrastructure, we have separate current and capital budgets for each Department, which will ensure that capital investment is sustained.
The fiscal rules that we have adopted are rigorous. Over the economic cycle, they will bring the current budget into balance. To meet our fiscal rules, and in line with cautious and published assumptions, we plan current surpluses in the next three years of £7 billion, £10 billion and £13 billion.
We have adopted an approach that is cautious and prudent, in contrast to the previous Government's approach. In the last economic cycle, the average current budget deficit was more than 1½per cent. of GDP—the equivalent of £12 billion a year.
Mr. Francis Maude: If, as the Chief Secretary says, the Government intend to reduce borrowing, why does he plan to increase it?
Mr. Darling: I explained to the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) that, under the Conservative Government, over the economic cycle there was a current deficit equivalent to more than £12 billion a year. We have taken a deliberately prudent and cautious approach and budgeted for a surplus in
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each of the next three years. That demonstrates this Government's commitment to being prudent and cautious, which is in complete contrast to the position adopted by the previous Government, who even in the good times, ran up debts that were unsustainable.
Sir Michael Spicer: What is the point of the right hon. Gentleman banging on about a current surplus, when the total figures add up to a deficit? Every newspaper that the Government spin to says that we have a surplus, but the surplus is in the current spending. The total figures add up to a deficit.
Mr. Darling: We are budgeting for a current surplus because we believe it is important that current expenditure is covered by taxation. That was not happening under the previous Government. They were running up debts far greater than they could ever reduce. We believe that if we are to have sustainable public finances, current expenditure ought to be financed by taxation.
With regard to investment and capital expenditure, we believe that the Government should be prepared to borrow, because the benefit will come over a number of years. Even so, the total amount that the Government borrow will reduce. That is in contrast with what happened over much of the previous 18 years.
Mr. Maude: How on earth does the right hon. Gentleman arrive at the conclusion that he is reducing borrowing, when his own plans, based on very optimistic assumptions, show borrowing going up every year and the absolute size of the national debt increasing every year? Let him not mislead the House in this way.
Mr. Darling: As I was explaining to the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Sir M. Spicer), the Government believe that we should be prepared to borrow when we are investing for capital, but we believe that current expenditure ought to be covered by taxation. Conservative Members are in no position to lecture us. Because of the irresponsibility of the previous Government, we were left huge levels of debt, which we have had to reduce.
As for the remarks of the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) about optimistic forecasts, we have taken a deliberately cautious and prudent approach to how much the Government can spend over the next few years. I know that there are some who wanted us to spend more, including, it seems, some Tory spokesmen. However, we are determined to take a prudent and affordable approach.
It is only because we are taking that approach and setting ourselves a tough framework that we can take the necessary action to reverse the chronic under-investment in our country's health, education, transport and housing infrastructure. As I said, the key difference from the past is that we are making additional investment, but we are demanding reform in return for that.
All new resources will be conditional on the implementation of essential reforms. We have set ourselves a clear target for modern, efficient and effective services. The House will see that in each chapter of the White Paper, departmental objectives are set out. It is money for modernisation. Every Minister knows that he or she is working to deliver those objectives. There are

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new targets for each area of public service, new standards of efficiency that will have to be met to ensure that every penny is well spent.
Mr. Quentin Davies: Does not the right hon. Gentleman realise that he is deceiving himself when he says that his projections for deficit and debt are based on prudent forecasts? They are not at all. If the forecasts for growth—the right hon. Gentleman knows that such projections are extremely sensitive to growth assumptions—are those set out in the Red Book of 1.75 per cent. this year, 2 per cent. next financial year and 2.25 per cent. in the following two years, they are extremely optimistic. They are desperately over-optimistic at a time when the economy is turning down and manufacturing is already in recession.
Mr. Darling: The hon. Gentleman should be aware that we have taken a more pessimistic view than the Government whom he used to support. We are not taking credit, for example, for asset sales which the previous Government assumed and never had any intention of realising. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was in the Chamber earlier when I made the point that there have been about 45 independent economic forecasts in the past few weeks, and that in respect of every one of them we shall meet the objectives set out in our fiscal rules. We are taking a cautious and prudent approach, which stands in stark contrast to what happened—
Mr. Gibb rose—
Mr. Darling: No, I shall not give way at the moment.
Our approach stands in stark contrast to what we had for 18 years. Something else that the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who I think is now a member of the Opposition Front Bench team, should bear in mind is that although the Conservative party is criticising us and suggesting that we are spending too much, a number of Opposition spokesmen and spokeswomen—for example, the Opposition spokeswoman on health—are demanding that we should be spending more. They cannot have it both ways. However, I note that the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer had a go at that. Yesterday, on the "Today" programme, he was asked:
"Mr. Maude, can you really have it both ways—asking for increased spending but opposing overall increased spending?"
The right hon. Member for Horsham replied, "Of course we can." The truth is that the Opposition cannot have it both ways. We are either spending too much or too little. The Opposition should work out which side they are on.
Mr. Alan W. Williams: The interest payments on the national debt are about £25 billion, and that sum is based on present interest rates. What if over the next two years interest rates fall from 7.5 per cent. to 7 per cent. and perhaps to 6 per cent? Does that mean that the £25 billion devoted to interest payments will fall to less than £20 billion? If so, does not that mean that an extra £5 billion could be released and made available again for public expenditure?
Mr. Darling: My hon. Friend should be aware that we believe that we shall be spending about £5 billion less a
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year in servicing debt as a result of the programme that we have set out than we would have been if we had just left the situation as we inherited it.
I was referring to the importance of securing reform in return for investment. I shall give a couple of examples of what I mean. First, let us take health. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health made clear in his statement earlier this afternoon, we are increasing investment in health but in return for that we are looking to improve the value that we derive from spending on medicines. We are looking for improved efficiency. Already £1 billion of savings over the Parliament will be transferred from red tape, following the abolition of the internal market, to front-line patient care.
Mr. Tim Boswell: Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Darling: In one moment.
It is worth noting that some hospitals are 20 per cent. more efficient than others. We want to ensure that that discrepancy in the performance of national health service trusts is tackled so that we get the best possible value for the money that we are spending.
As for education, in 1996 only 57 per cent. of 11-year-olds met literacy standards while only 54 per cent. met numeracy standards. We set new and higher targets to be delivered by the year 2002. That is a clear example—
Mr. Robert Sheldon: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Darling: I am about to give way to my right hon. Friend.
In education there is a clear example of where we are increasing investment but demanding a far higher return and higher standards in return for it.
Mr. Sheldon: My right hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the importance of making sure that we get value for money before we release further moneys. That turns on how previous investment has been progressing. I note that there will be a Cabinet committee to deal with these matters, presumably chaired by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Will my right hon. Friend say something about this committee? It is obviously going to be a very important committee and something akin to the Star Chamber committee that we had under Willie Whitelaw. How does that leave my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary in connection with such a powerful committee? I know that my right hon. Friend's position will not be diminished because I expect him to move to many higher things. However, will he say something about the process itself?
Mr. Darling: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I will not speculate on where the Chief Secretary may be left after all this. That is for somebody else. The important point that my right hon. Friend makes relates to the audit of what happens to the additional investment. During consideration of the comprehensive spending review the Public Expenditure Committee, which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister had set up, came to the view that if we were to increase spending, especially where

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there was to be quite a significant increase, as in health and education, it was crucial to ensure that we obtained some real benefit and real gain from it.
There have been occasions in the past—Conservatives may point to this—where expenditure was increased on health, for example, but it did not necessarily result in a better outcome in terms of improved health care. Indeed, part of the increase in spending on health under the Conservatives was to set up the internal market. We want to keep investment under review, which is why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has agreed that there will be a committee, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, that will carry out a constant review of performance so that we will see that we are getting the value for money that we want and all the reforms that have been set out. That is something that Governments in the past have neglected. It is very important that we are satisfied that if we increase spending, as we are doing in health and education particularly, as well as across the board, we can see some gain from it.
Mr. Malcolm Bruce rose—
Mr. John MacGregor rose—
Mr. Darling: I hope that the hon. Gentleman and the right hon. Gentleman will not be put out if I give way first to the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell).
Mr. Boswell: As the right hon. Gentleman sets great store by investment and as he has said, plausibly enough, that he wishes to receive greater benefit from public investment, will he tell the House what his estimate is of the increased annual rate of return that he is seeking from a marginal increase in investment?
Mr. Darling: The hon. Gentleman will be aware that each Department is responsible for delivering the improvements in standards and so on that have been set out. [Interruption.] As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor made clear, the public service agreements that have been reached between the Treasury and the Departments will be published. At that time the hon. Gentleman and the entire House will be able to see the nature of these agreements and then judge the progress that Departments make.
Mr. MacGregor: When the public service agreements are published, I hope we shall see that they are quantified in considerable detail. If that is the position, what will happen in the proposed committee's reviews if a Department fails to meet the targets? Will money actually be withdrawn from that Department?
Mr. Darling: As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor made clear, in both health and education money will be released only if the Government are satisfied that we are getting the returns that we want. One of the advantages of having a constant review of expenditure is that it should be possible at a far earlier stage than in the past to identify if we are not getting the reforms and improvements that we want to see.
Mr. Malcolm Bruce: That sounds as if the Chancellor of the Exchequer has the right to claw back money if things go wrong. I wanted to press the right hon.
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Gentleman on why the Government will not give an inflation-proofing guarantee. They are very confident in their forecasts, but if things go wrong because of inflation, that is outside departmental control. They can do nothing about inflation. The Prime Minister said that the forecasts were good, irrespective of the economic circumstances, but the Chancellor told me that these are cash limits and there will be no change even if inflation goes outside the forecast. Why will the right hon. Gentleman not give a guarantee on things that Departments cannot control?
Mr. Darling: The hon. Gentleman might have started by congratulating us on giving a significant, above-inflation increase to investment in health and education. The health service will receive a £21 billion increase while the Liberals wanted an increase of only £2½ billion. They wanted £6 billion for education, and we have increased expenditure in that area by £19 billion. The point that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor was making to the hon. Gentleman yesterday, I think, at the Select Committee on Treasury Affairs, is that Departments have been given their departmental expenditure limits and they are expected to live within them. Certainly in the cases of health and education they have a significant increase in expenditure, and that allows them to plan their provision for the next three years. They are real-terms increases.
Mr. Kenneth Clarke: Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify that he meant what he appeared to be saying to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor)? Put in practical terms, did he mean that the Treasury will withdraw the promise of additional funds for the health service and reduce provision to it if the Chancellor's Committee discovers that health waiting lists have gone up and the Secretary of State has not achieved the reductions that he is promising?
Mr. Darling: I was not suggesting anything of the sort, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman well knows. I said that we have made it clear that the sums that we have allocated to health and to education will be released in return for reform. The point of the Committee is to ensure that we are making steady progress in reducing waiting lists, among other things. One of the advantages of considering these matters constantly, and not waiting until the end of an annual review, as in the past, or a three-year period, is that problems, for example in reducing waiting lists, can be dealt with far earlier and more effectively.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman, who was Secretary of State for Health some years ago, knows that many things contribute to reducing waiting lists in the health service—not only money, which is clearly important, but management, because performance can vary substantially between different hospitals and trusts. Over the past few months, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health has, among other things, been using some of the additional money that we have already allocated to identify management failures and administrative problems in getting waiting lists down. The point of having a Cabinet Committee to review these things is to ensure that we can take action to achieve improvements where performance is not coming up to the mark.
My point in respect of the modernisation fund is about incentive. We can effectively encourage hospitals to improve standards if they know that they can get

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additional funds to improve their performance. We have been doing that over the past few months, and it has worked extremely well.
Mr. Andrew Tyrie: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling: No, I want to make progress. I shall try to give way to the hon. Gentleman later, but Madam Speaker has said that many hon. Members want to contribute and Back Benchers tend to complain if Front Benchers take up most of the time. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] I have sensed the mood of the House quite well.
It has struck us over the past year that many Departments could be far more efficient than they have been in the past. On defence, there are savings to be gained from improved procurement measures, and the agreement on targets will enable the Ministry of Defence to do that. The Government have not only put in place firm spending disciplines, but will ensure that they deliver the results that we want to achieve.
We have considered whether resources are targeted effectively, and over half the additional resources have gone to our priorities, health and education. We are getting rid of assets that we do not need and the MOD, for example, is selling property in central London so that resources can be diverted to the front line. The Foreign Office is to sell property that it does not need to finance services elsewhere, and we are making increasing use of the national asset register which, for the first time, showed what the Government own.
Far greater emphasis has been put on prevention, because it makes sense to tackle the causes of crime and the causes of poor health rather than leaving the public purse to pick up the pieces. We are helping young children to get the best possible start, we have introduced a new crime prevention strategy and we are dealing with the problems of drug misuse.
In addition, public spending has an important role in raising the rate of sustainable growth. In the global economy, the skills and training of the work force will mark Britain out as a place to invest. As we have shown, our priority in education is absolutely clear: we have achieved a record 5.1 per cent. average increase in spending over the next three years, which contrasts extremely favourably with the previous Government's record.
To deliver a more efficient economy, we need to invest in a first-class science base. As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor made clear, the Government have increased science spending by £1.1 billion and we have set up a public-private partnership with the Wellcome Trust to create a pool of £600 million which will be available to further scientific research. That is, of course, in addition to the £50 million challenge fund announced in the Budget, which will bring science and industry closer together so that good research ideas can be converted into good business ideas. That clearly demonstrates the Government's commitment to the future.
Mr. Mike Hall: My right hon. Friend will be aware that the Daresbury laboratory is in
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my constituency. Since 1993, I have been pressing Governments to invest in the next generation of synchrotron radiation research, and £100 million of expenditure has been announced to replace the synchrotron radiation source at Daresbury. We have not yet convinced the Government that the next £100 million should be invested at Daresbury, but I press on my right hon. Friend the fact that that investment is needed. If it comes to my constituency, I shall be absolutely delighted.
Mr. Darling: My hon. Friend is right to stress the importance of scientific investment, and he will no doubt press my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade on that point.
Mr. Tam Dalyell: Will all the Wellcome funds be independently refereed? Will the Treasury exercise such pressure as it can to get rid of the dreadful system of short-term, postgraduate contract research posts, which are causing such agony? People spend their lives going from year to year on such contracts, without knowing what their future will be. If pressure could be applied to do something about that, it would be a great help and vastly more efficient in terms of science.
Mr. Darling: My hon. Friend knows that I represent a city that has three universities, and I am well aware of the problems to which he refers. I hope that my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade will be able to make a further announcement in due course. I cannot promise that all the problems that have been visited on us will be resolved, but most people working in the scientific field will welcome the additional investment here.
Also important is the need to invest not only in education, but in transport. My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister will publish his White Paper on transport—the first for a generation—next week. It will set out the importance that the Government attach to public and private sector partnerships, which will increase investment in public transport. We are also increasing investment in housing repairs. Each Department will draw up an investment strategy by early next year, and they will be published so that people can see the difference that the investment will make.
Dr. Lynne Jones: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Darling: Once more, then I shall make giant strides towards the end of my speech.
Dr. Jones: On Tuesday, I said that the Government deserved to be praised through the roof for the extra money for science, but I am a little disappointed on housing. I am concerned about the amount of investment that is going into housing, and I have figures from the Library showing that we spent £4 billion on housing investment in real terms in 1985–86. In the current year, even with the capital receipts, the total is about £2 billion—half that figure. What will be the figure next year? Will it get up even to the poor showing of 1985–86?
Mr. Darling: May I acknowledge my appreciation of my hon. Friend praising the Government? It is perhaps worth a few moments of silence to savour that. It was perhaps too much to hope that my hon. Friend would sit down without going on to make a further point.

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There are two points to be made in respect of housing. First, as in all matters, the Government had to start from the point at which they took over—investment in public sector housing had reduced substantially. Secondly, we have to be consistent with the fiscal rules to which I referred, so that growth in current expenditure and in capital investment are sustainable and affordable. I believe that the increase in housing investment is affordable and will be sustainable. It will be very much welcomed, not only by local authorities and housing associations, but, more important, by those who live in local authority and housing association property. There are major renovation and improvements initiatives and increased maintenance. I appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Dr. Jones), on this and other matters, might like to have seen much much more, but the Government had to take a view on how much they could afford across the whole pattern of Government spending. The £3.6 billion increase over the period will be widely welcomed.
I want to deal with welfare reform to which the Government attach a great deal of importance. We have introduced the new deal, we have reformed the Child Support Agency and student finances and we are reforming legal aid. We said two things in our manifesto. We said that we would increase the share of national income spent on education—we have done that—and we said that we would reduce the bills for economic and social failure, which we are doing. By any view, the rate of increase in the amount that the Government will be spending on social security will be half that of the previous Government. By the end of this Parliament, it will be lower as a proportion of national income than the level we inherited.
I find the Conservative party's attitude rather curious. Yesterday—no doubt it will be the same today—Conservative Members criticised us because they said that social security spending would be increasing by £27 billion. We should look at where that increase is going. Help for pensioners accounts for over half the increase, help for the disabled and the provision of sickness benefit is taking up about a quarter and the increase in child benefit accounts for the bulk of the rest.
If Conservative Members say that we are spending too much, what would they cut? Would they cut pensions, disability benefits or the extra money for child benefit? There is a distinction between spending on pensions, disability payments and on child benefit for children most in need and the money we have been spending in the past because we have had far too many people on the dole when they could have been in work. The new deal, which the Conservative party opposes, has seen 60,000 young people go into work or take up other opportunities and nearly 40,000 lone parents are now in work rather than being dependent on benefit.
Mr. Tim Loughton: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling: Not just now.
The number of lone parents on benefit is now below 1 million for the first time in many years. We have tackled the waste that we said we would tackle. In our manifesto we promised to do more for families in need and that is why we increased child benefit by a record
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amount. At the same time, we have been able to improve the position of many pensioners, which is something else that we promised in our manifesto.
Conservative Members cannot have it both ways. If they think that we are spending too much on pensions, child benefit and on helping the disabled—all the things we said we would do—they have to say what they would cut.
That is not the only thing that Conservative Members have to explain. Conservative Members are saying that we are spending far too much money—that is the view of the shadow Chancellor—while, at the same time, some Opposition spokesmen and women are saying that they want to spend more on health, education, pensions and defence. They must explain which view is right. Do they want more or less money to be spent? I am inclined to believe the view of the shadow Chancellor because he is an extremely important person in the Opposition and because the Leader of the Opposition was saying the same yesterday.
Mr. Loughton: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Darling: Not just now.
Over half the increase in spending is going on health and education. If we are spending too much, we are entitled to ask which schools and hospitals, up and down the country, the Conservative party would close. If Conservative Members believe that we are spending too much on pensions, by how much would they reduce that spending? If we are spending too much on child benefit, would they cut that? The shadow Chancellor and the shadow Chief Secretary have to explain how they can reconcile their criticism about us spending too much with the fact that during proceedings on the Finance Bill they moved amendments which would cost £6 billion to fund. How on earth can they justify that?
The Opposition are beginning to make their position clear. The shadow Chancellor, and the Leader of the Opposition yesterday, showed that the Conservative party is again lurching further to the right. Last year at the Tory party conference fringe the shadow Chancellor said:
"When a right of centre party moves to the right, it can become more popular."
I do not know whether that view is shared by the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), but it is clearly the way that the Front Bench representatives of the Conservative party want to go. The shadow Chancellor has made it clear that public services should depend more on charity and private provision. He sees a reduced role for the Government and the state in providing a decent service in the NHS or an education service that gives every child the opportunity it deserves.
We believe in public services because education is the key to our country's future. We believe that the NHS is the mark of a civilised, decent and fair society. We believe in the value of public transport because it is good for people, good for the environment and good for the country. We believe that the Government have a role to ensure that we do everything we can to reduce crime.
The comprehensive spending review has shown how the Government have been able, against a sound and prudent fiscal background, to provide for sustainable

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public finances in the future. It has also shown how we can divert finances to our priority areas so that we can build a strong and fair society and so that we can have spending based on long-term economic stability and affordable public services. The comprehensive spending review has also shown how the Government, step by step and line by line, are delivering on all their election promises.
5.25 pm
Mr. David Heathcoat-Amory: We can always tell when the Chief Secretary has lost the plot, because he returns to completely phoney allegations about what we are alleged to have done during the Finance Bill proceedings. We make no apologies for resisting Labour party tax increases. If the right hon. Gentleman cannot distinguish taxation from expenditure, it explains a lot about the mess he got into over the comprehensive spending review.
On Tuesday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the biggest increase in public expenditure ever contemplated by a peacetime Government. Spending, particularly spending other people's money, is the easy part of politics. The difficult task is to increase and improve the productive potential of the economy or, perhaps at the same time, to find offsetting savings to match areas of expenditure that need to be increased in line with changing political priorities. That was the task that the Government should have set themselves and it was the task they failed.
Instead, the comprehensive spending review is not really a review at all; it is a comprehensive spending increase. The Government have locked into the expenditure for three years hence and, at the same time, they are taking a huge and unnecessary risk with the performance of the economy.
To be fair, the Government showed considerable ingenuity in dressing up the figures.
Mr. Geraint Davies: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I shall give way in a minute, but I should like the hon. Gentleman to listen to this point.
As much is concealed in these figures as is revealed by the document. Spin doctoring has given way to spin accounting. That is hardly surprising, as the Paymaster General—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Oh, yes. The Paymaster General is quite happy to publish accounts showing disbursements, but then somehow the payments never get made. That is not my view; it is the view of the Committee on Standards and Privileges. Perhaps the same thinking suffuses the documents before us. Perhaps the accountancy figures will never be paid. Perhaps the public services will never see the money supposedly allocated to them on Tuesday.
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The other big disguise was over what is perhaps the central failure, which was to find those offsetting savings in welfare reform—I shall return to that.
Mr. Mike Hall: If the right hon. Gentleman thinks that the social security bill is too high, will he tell us what parts of it he would cut?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I shall come on to welfare reform specifically and come back to the point raised by the hon. Gentleman.
The Government have put up a smokescreen of changed definitions and accountancy changes which is designed to make comparisons difficult. We have had to enlist the help of the Library to find out what is really happening to the public accounts. Ingenuity in presenting the figures is not enough. The Chancellor has committed himself to a three-year programme of expenditure just as the economy is faltering. It is beyond dispute that manufacturing and exporting are going into recession. The growth projections in the Government's documents, the strategy report and others are a fantasy for those sectors.
Mr. Geraint Davies: Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that the long-term growth rate for the past four years was 2.3 per cent. and that the growth rate in the past year was 3 per cent. above the 2.25 per cent. medium-term forecast? Does he also accept that the assumed rate for 1998–99 is 1.75 per cent., which is not particularly high, and that the following year it will rise to 2 per cent. and then go to 2.25 per cent? Record inward investment last year created 46,000 new jobs and retained 100,000. That shows that we are in good shape and that the Government's assumptions are prudent and cautious. What is more, they will lead to a current account surplus of £30 billion in the three years.
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I suggest that the hon. Gentleman ask some manufacturing firms in his constituency whether they will grow by 2.25 or 2.5 per cent. this year. They will tell him, as they are telling us, that they are already in recession. The projected growth figure of 2.25 per cent. is for them already a fantasy, and we have not even begun the three-year period. On that matter, the Government are going wrong already.
As I have said, manufacturing and exporting are in recession. That will get worse, because there is a growing mismatch, a conflict, between the Treasury's tax and spending decisions, which by and large are inflationary, and the Bank of England's tight monetary policy, which is designed to get down to the inflation target of a Government who have raised interest rates and the value of the pound.
Mr. Andrew Miller: I cannot understand what fantasy land the right hon. Gentleman is living in. Why has Vauxhall in my constituency just taken on 1,000 new workers? In two weeks, members of the royal family will visit the latest major investment in my constituency. I cannot see where the right hon. Gentleman's logic is taking us. In the real world, there are real jobs. Why does he not get back to the real world?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: The hon. Gentleman has probably noticed that the claimant count for

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unemployment has started to go up. That will soon affect his constituency: it has certainly started to affect mine. If he does not believe the figures that I have quoted, perhaps he will agree with those that have been produced by the Office for National Statistics, which has reported that the manufacturing and exporting sectors of the economy are now in recession and that output has fallen for two successive quarters. Does the hon. Gentleman accept those figures, which emanate from his Government?
Mr. Oliver Letwin: Does my right hon. Friend agree that, if the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller) does not believe the statistics, he could ask the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner)?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Yes, they should sort it out between themselves. The Opposition are entitled to rely on official statistics that have been published by the Office for National Statistics. They confirm beyond doubt that those sectors of the economy are in recession. If that has not hit the hon. Gentleman's constituency, all that I can say to him is, "Watch out," because it soon will.
It is not an opinion but a fact that the economy is distorted and manufacturing is affected by the high pound and high interest rates. Meanwhile, the extra spending that is signalled in the review will add to pressures on the Bank of England. A looser expenditure policy will cause interest rates to remain high for longer than would otherwise have been the case and it may increase them further. The increases that were signalled by the Chancellor on Tuesday could drive the economy further into recession.
Mr. Christopher Leslie: I am trying to grasp the right hon. Gentleman's meaning. The Opposition say that public expenditure is too high. Which of the public services of health, education and anti-crime policy would the right hon. Gentleman cut?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will contain himself until I come to deal with the details in the public expenditure document. At this point in my speech, I am setting out the economic background and showing that the entire strategy rests on foundations that the Government are removing one by one.
It may be unfashionable to rely on the claimant count as a measure of unemployment, but it is an arithmetic fact that that count has risen for two months. Even if the Government dismiss that as being an accurate estimate of unemployment, the increase is already adding to expenditure from the social security budget. Under the Government, social failure bills are going up. It is remarkable that the Government's strategy report assumes no increase in unemployment. That is not just unusual; it is extremely foolish. Page 42 of that report states:
"Unemployment is assumed flat at its April level."
The Government assume that, throughout the three-year period, unemployment will remain at what might be the all-time low that was achieved in the spring or summer of this year. That is a totally unrealistic assumption, and it means that the social security projections in the documents are already unrealistically low.
Mr. Geraint Davies: Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that alternative statistics show that, in the past
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three months, the claimant count has gone down by 54,000? What is more, when the previous Chancellor, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who is in his place, carried out this analysis, instead of assuming stable unemployment he assumed that it would fall. [Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman should ask his right hon. and learned Friend. It is true. The Conservatives say that we are imprudent. When they were in government, they were imprudent.
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: We bequeathed to the Government a golden economic legacy of sustainable growth, steady inflation and falling unemployment. It is an arithmetic fact that the claimant count has started to rise, and that adds to the Department of Social Security bills.
Sir Michael Spicer: What conclusions would my right hon. Friend draw if unemployment went up in the way that he suggests just as the new deal came into play?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Of course, the new deal is yet another burden on the social security budget. I shall come to that. All the Government's welfare reforms have cost money, and that one is no exception. Despite the promises by the Prime Minister and others before the election that all the extra expenditure on health and education would be paid for by social security reforms, those reforms have all cost money and have not saved it.
It is not just growth and unemployment that are already going wrong under the Government. Savings are a vital component in the economy if expenditure is not simply to be paid for by increased taxation. The Red Book that was published in March shows that the savings ratio is due to fall from its record level in 1997 when we lost office. It shows that it will fall in 1998 and that it will fall further in 1999 and further in 2000.
The Office for National Statistics recently published its arithmetic, which shows that the four-year fall in the savings ratio has been achieved in less than one year. That is not surprising. We warned the Government that, if savings were taxed, savings would fall. That is not a complicated matter: it is easy to understand. In their first Budget, the Government carried out a £5 billion raid on pension funds. When one adds to that the abolition of personal equity plans and tax-exempt special savings accounts, the two most successful savings vehicles of all time, it is hardly surprising that people save less. That was recorded in the Red Book. What we did not know at the time was that that four-year fall would be achieved in less than 12 months.
It is not just savings that are falling; investment is down as well. There was much hype about public sector investment in the Chancellor's statement, but, again, we have only to go back to the Red Book—which is, after all, only three months old—to find that, despite everything that the Government are trying to do, investment in the whole economy is due to fall again next year and to fall further the year after. Business investment has fallen from its peak in 1997, when we lost office, and is due to fall further this year, next year and the year after, so the Chancellor has locked into this three-year expenditure programme while knocking away the foundations on which that economic revenue depends, and it is irreversible.

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The Chief Secretary told us about some marvellous new Cabinet Committee, which will get all this money back if Departments do not perform. If class sizes fail to fall, all the money will be clawed back from the Department for Education and Employment. If waiting lists go on rising, the Department of Health will be punished by having to return the money to the Treasury, so this is a recipe not for prudence, but for ruin. What we are faced with, and what the Government should worry about, is unemployment already going up, manufacturing output coming down, savings coming down, investment coming down and debt going up.
The Chief Secretary got into a most awful muddle about debt, but I think that he did finally admit that debt is going to rise. He was perhaps somewhat confused by the fact that, in the Red Book that was published at the time of the March Budget, projected debt was due to fall over the medium term—that was promised on page 121—but, a few months later, all that was thrown away and replaced by what one might call the Blue Book, which stated on page 43 that public sector net borrowing was due to go up every year. I think that we did finally get him to understand that, but that rise contrasts sharply with the record of the previous Government, who, at a similar time in the economic cycle, repaid massive quantities of debt.
I have not even mentioned the balance of payments. The Chancellor certainly did not mention it during his statement, but it is again a fact that the balance of payments is now going into alarming deficit. The Red Book did at least have the grace to note that the balance of payments was moving from a surplus of £4.5 billion last year—when we were in office—to a deficit of £6.5 billion next year, so that is another thing that is going wrong for the Chancellor and the Chief Secretary, just at the moment when they are making these irreversible commitments for up to three years hence.
Who will pay for all this? One group is public sector workers. Their pay is already lagging behind. Average earnings in the public sector in the year to April—again, I rely on the Office for National Statistics for these figures—rose by 2.8 per cent. In the private sector, they rose by 6.2 per cent.
Mr. Leslie: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman again because I am going to come to his point. I know that he is very excitable, but, if he will just contain himself, I will come to the point about expenditure on the health service and social expenditure generally.
In the face of that distortion, the Government have announced that their so-called independent review bodies will now tie that same group of workers to a 2.5 per cent. inflation target. The Government are missing their target, but they want the public sector to be paid as though they had met their inflation target. In each Budget, and we have had two already, the Government will go on putting up duty on tobacco, drink, road fuel and heating fuel; all those will be increased way above inflation. Then up will go the cost of borrowing and of mortgages. Up will go council tax. All those will increase by far more than 2.5 per cent. The Government are putting up the prices,
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and it is public sector workers who are expected to accept wage increases of 2.5 per cent. That is a true reflection of how this Government value the public sector.
Mr. Darling: I am sure that public service workers will be very grateful that comrade Heathcoat-Amory is riding to their rescue. If I understand his argument correctly, he is saying that public service workers should be paid more and that the Conservatives welcome the spending on health and education, yet the whole thrust of his argument is that we are spending too much. Will he now tell us how much less he would spend and what he would cut?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: That distortion in the economy is entirely of the Government's making. It was they who put up prices in their Budget. We had two Budgets in the space of eight months which increased indirect taxes way above inflation, and now they have the brass neck to say to public sector workers, "We missed our target and we want you to be paid at the rate of the inflation target that we missed."
Mr. Leslie rose—
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I am coming to the hon. Gentleman's private obsession, which is the public services, and health and education in particular.
We did find extra money for those priority services, particularly health and education, throughout our time in office, and we do welcome the fact that the Government are belatedly trying to keep their promises over class sizes and waiting lists, which they broke in their first year of office. They have a good deal of ground to make up because, last year, real expenditure fell below what our plans were: they inherited and kept to our cash totals, but higher inflation in the public services meant that real expenditure on health and education fell below what we had planned.
In addition, we know that the extra money that we are glad the Government are putting into the priority services will be soaked up by the damage and destruction that have already been caused in those services by, for example, the abolition of compulsory competitive tendering, the abolition of tax relief on private health insurance, the introduction of the minimum wage, and so on. Therefore, we know that the money that is going in will not all go towards patient care—[Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) should not be reading a book in the Chamber.
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory rose—
Mr. Darling: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I give way.
Mr. Darling: I am listening to the right hon. Gentleman's argument, even if Liberal Democrat Members are not. So far, the right hon. Gentleman has said that he welcomes our increased spending on health

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and education. He wants more pay for the workers, so what is he going to cut if we are spending too much overall?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I am coming to that next.
We did increase expenditure on priority areas, but in the context of an affordable and disciplined total. We did not draw cheques on the future three years hence and just hope that something would turn up. Our spending reviews—this answers the right hon. Gentleman—were genuine, finding money from one programme to spend on another.
That is what the Prime Minister himself promised. It was he who spotted that he was going to have difficulties if he won an election, so he said:
"as we get the welfare bills down … then we can release more money into education and health".
That could hardly have been clearer. Not only did he promise to get the welfare bills down, but he made it clear that the order of things was that that had to happen before he released more money into education and health.
Not only have the Government now got that the wrong way around—they are spending money on health and education before they have touched the reform of the welfare state—but the Prime Minister is wriggling off that promise about welfare reform. In Prime Minister's Question Time yesterday, the right hon. Gentleman started to temporise and to say that he did not mean to cut anything or do anything nasty like reducing anything; he just meant that he wanted to study everything and perhaps to increase spending—by a little, or possibly a lot. That is exactly what he is doing.
The splendid glossy document which I have here—the comprehensive spending review—and which was published on Tuesday gives us a glimpse of what is really happening to welfare and social security expenditure. One has to look hard for the figures and it is odd that by far the biggest item of public expenditure—nearly one third of the total—is relegated to near the back. Sandwiched between the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the cross-departmental review of provision for young children—both titanic items of expenditure—we find out what will happen to nearly one third of public expenditure. Just as we suspected, it will go up and up. Once all the fiddles and changed statistics are added back in, it will increase by £37.5 billion.
That was not an easy calculation for the House of Commons Library to make, but it was done by adding back the tax credit that had been reclassified. If one adds back the 80 per cent. of working families tax credit, one arrives at an increase that is almost as great as the total extra that the Government plan to spend on health and education together—the extra was disguised as an accounting adjustment.
The Chancellor and the Government more generally make great play of their commitment to transparency. A few months ago, they published a ludicrous document entitled "Your Right to Know"; they talk endlessly about accountability and openness; and they said that all the figures were to be transparent and easy to understand.
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However, buried in the accounting adjustments we find working families tax credit and the true picture emerges if that is added back.
Mr. Mike Hall: To demonstrate the transparency of the right hon. Gentleman's policies to the House, will he say which part of the benefit bill he will cut?
Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: The Prime Minister and his Ministers promised to reform the welfare state, but I have a suggestion for the hon. Gentleman: the Prime Minister should carry forward the reforms that we implemented. If the hon. Gentleman glances at the figures, he will see that, in the past three years, spending on social security increased in total—not year by year—by only 1.5 per cent. in real terms. That budget was virtually flat. If the Government are serious about welfare reform, why did they not take over the reforms and the spending profile that we bequeathed them? Because of the savings, which we were implementing and not merely talking about, we were able to spend on other priority areas, such as health and education.
The Government have failed on a central plank of their expenditure strategy. The true picture is of a colossal and continuing failure to reform the welfare state. As a result, the Government have embarked on a three-year commitment to spend money that they do not have and to pledge to the public services money that may never be earned.
The comprehensive spending review was billed as a Budget—it was that important. If so, it is the fourth that the Government have presented in a year. We have had the July Budget last year, a pre-Budget in November, the March Budget this year and now the spending review. Each time, the Government have increased their spending commitments and weakened the ability of the British economy to deliver the money on which those depend. Now they will have no chance of repaying national debt—they will not even balance the budget. They are going on a four-year spending spree with the public's money and, as usual, the public will end up paying.
5.54 pm
Mr. John Hutton: I am grateful to have the opportunity to make what I hope will be a short contribution to the debate. I must first warmly welcome the conclusions of the comprehensive spending review, which sets out a sensible direction for the Government to take in meeting their objectives of promoting social cohesion, maintaining strong public finances, investing in modern and effective public services, and ensuring real value for money for the taxpayer by new disciplines over public spending, with proper efficiency targets and effective monitoring of public service outcomes.
The prudent decisions that we have taken on spending in the first two years, together with our actions to get public borrowing under control, have helped to lay the foundations for the new three-year spending plan announced on Tuesday by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor. The Government's spending plans are based on cautious estimates for economic growth, which is right. It is good that the fundamental assumptions that underpin the comprehensive spending review have been verified by the National Audit Office, which will give them

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considerably more weight than previous Government attempts to predict economic trends. Labour Members certainly came to treat with extreme caution the figures of the previous Government in all those areas.
I also have no doubt that the new spending plans fully reflect the priorities of the British public, who want our national health service to be put on to a secure, long-term growth trajectory, and our schools and colleges to be modernised and brought up to date with the best technology, teachers and facilities. The British public want a better deal for Britain's pensioners and improvements in our public transport infrastructure.
My constituents, in particular, want the Government to renew and redouble their efforts to deal with the problems of economic regeneration in those areas that have suffered through major job losses in traditional industries. We also want major improvements in our housing provision, in particular social housing, which was deliberately allowed to fall into decline by the previous Administration.
Those are the public's priorities, and, at long last, they are also the priority of the British Government. It is the measure of public support for those proposals that is the root cause of the Opposition's present difficulties. Their response to date can be described only as chaotic. They have three main arguments against the proposals in the comprehensive spending review. First, they allege that spending is too high and will propel us into a recession—that was the view of the shadow Chancellor on Tuesday. Yet, secondly, the Tories want to claim that they support the extra spending on the national health service and schools. As my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury said clearly from the Dispatch Box, they cannot have it both ways. Their third line of argument is that the new spending plans are all a con. I understand that the shadow Health Secretary was yesterday trying to persuade lobby correspondents that the £21 billion of additional expenditure for the NHS amounted only to four shillings and nine pence, that we were fiddling the figures and that they could not rely on our estimates.
The Opposition cannot have their cake and eat it. If they are claiming that the figures are fiddled and that we are spending less, how can they be propelling us towards recession? To add insult to injury, the Conservatives are also claiming that their spending record was better than ours and that they spent more than we are proposing on all those key areas. Those arguments simply do not add up.
The Opposition could best be described as going through some sort of collective psychotic episode about the figures, which has been marked by hallucinations and delusions. They cannot separate fact from fiction. In truth, they are in a complete mess. They do not know whether to support the additional spending or oppose it.
If my arithmetic is correct, the shadow Chief Secretary was asked on three occasions tonight to say where he would cut the expenditure that we are proposing. He simply failed to answer the question. The Conservatives cannot agree among themselves whether we are spending too little or too much, and they are attempting to deny
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any personal responsibility for the dire state of many of our key public services, despite the fact that they formed the Government for 18 years.
Mr. Loughton: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Hutton: No. This is a serious debate, so I have no intention of giving way to the hon. Gentleman.
The Conservative party's behaviour has been an unedifying display, providing further vivid confirmation—if any were needed—of the wisdom of the electorate's decision on 1 May last year to throw it out of office. I am sure that when the Conservatives begin their listening to Britain exercise, the public will spell out their support for the measures that the Government have announced. In that way, the Conservative party will be able to undergo the necessary therapy and counselling that it so obviously needs. Given its record in office, I cannot think of one good reason why we should listen to any of its criticisms of the comprehensive spending review.
On the detail of the review, I particularly welcome the additional spending on education, the national health service and the science base. The new money is an investment in our future as a modern, healthy and prosperous society, and I look forward with great anticipation to seeing how the new policies will bear fruit in my constituency.
The new commitments on further and higher education are also very good news, and I am glad that the cap on students entering higher education has been lifted. I particularly welcome the additional £200 million for further education. Further education colleges have a major role to play in helping to develop local economic regeneration initiatives—that has certainly been the experience in my constituency. I pay tribute to the excellent work of both Furness college and Barrow sixth-form college in helping people in my constituency to come to terms with the economic shock wave that hit us a few years ago. During that difficult period, both the colleges provided new opportunities and career options to hundreds of my constituents. They have done a fantastic job, and the new money should make the services that they provide even better.
On economic regeneration, the Government's new deal for communities initiative, under which a further £800 million will be invested in economic support to areas of high deprivation over the next three years, will be welcomed across the country, as will the proposals on the single regeneration budget. That is a hugely important area of Government responsibility, which will promote social cohesion and social inclusion—it goes right to the heart of what we should be doing in government.
My constituency suffered especially badly between 1990 and 1995 owing to the rundown in defence spending under the previous Government and the latter of the two Tory-inspired recessions. Over that period, 13,000 jobs were lost in the Furness area—in more stark terms, one in three of the work force in the area lost their jobs. Parts of my constituency remain unemployment black spots, particularly Barrow island, Hindpool and Central wards, where unemployment is almost twice the national average. That is totally unacceptable.
Barrow scores highly on the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions measurement of economic deprivation. The Department's figures reveal

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serious social and economic problems, which we must begin to tackle effectively. In the 1998 DETR ranking of deprivation, Barrow and Furness came 55th out of 354 local authority areas; in 1991, it had been 94th. The 1998 figures show that Barrow is the most economically deprived part of Cumbria and that it is in the 15 per cent. of most deprived areas nationally.
I believe that the new spending priorities in the comprehensive spending review will allow us to make a new beginning. I fully understand the case for tying the new resources to innovative and well-focused initiatives, and I entirely agree with the proposals on money for modernisation. I believe that local agencies in my constituency will be able to participate actively in successful regeneration programmes—we have an established track record of doing so. Like many of my hon. Friends, I look forward to hearing details of the pilot scheme for the new deal for communities; I understand that we shall hear them from my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister next week.
My constituency is directly concerned with the defence procurement budget; everything that the Government spend on defence directly affects its economic well-being. I am absolutely delighted with the conclusions of the strategic defence review. In particular, I think that the decision to proceed with a replacement for the Invincible class of aircraft carriers—two new 40,000 tonne aircraft carriers will be built—is exactly right. It will allow Britain to continue to deploy forces around the world in support of the United Nations and our NATO allies or, if the need arises, independently. It will also allow the current amphibious capability of the Royal Navy to be fully effective; I remind the House that, in my constituency, we are building the replacement amphibious landing ships for the Royal Marines. When the carriers come into service, the Royal Navy will once again have a truly effective, modern and capable amphibious force.
I also strongly welcome the decision in the strategic defence review to proceed with the procurement of two new Astute class hunter killer submarines. I appreciate that difficult decisions have had to be made about the Royal Navy—I am thinking in particular of the decision to reduce the number of strategic submarines nuclear from 12 to 10. I understand why the Government found it necessary to make that decision, but it is hugely important that the reduction is not made at the expense of a new and capable class of submarines. We should by all means consider taking out of commission the older SSNs, but the Government would have made a serious mistake if they had decided not to proceed with the procurement of the two new submarines.
Taken together with the existing order book, the decision to build the new carriers and submarines means that my constituents who work for GEC Marine at Barrow can look forward to 15 years of job security and stability. That is in stark contrast to what happened under the Conservative Government, when two thirds of the work force at GEC Marine lost their jobs, because the Government had no long-term commitment to the future of shipbuilding and had a completely ineffective strategy on procurement decisions. Many of the key procurement decisions that my constituents were waiting on were delayed and delayed, but I am now absolutely confident that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence and his colleagues in the Ministry of Defence will take the decisions on time and in a competitive
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context, so that my constituents can look forward to the solid future that they were denied by the Conservative party.
I believe that the comprehensive spending review will provide the Government with a solid platform on which we can build a modern, fair and decent society. It has my very strong support.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Before I call the next hon. Member to speak, I remind the House that Madam Speaker has set a 15-minute limit on all Back-Bench speeches. Of course, hon. Members do not need to take the full 15 minutes.
6.6 pm
Mr. Malcolm Bruce: I welcome the Chancellor's Tuesday statement, particularly the extra funds for the national health service and for education. I do not think that the Chief Secretary was expecting me to say that, but I said it on Tuesday and I am very glad again to put it on the record. I also said on Tuesday that I knew that the Chancellor would eventually find the war chest if only he had the will to look for it.
I believe that the Chancellor is right to leave a current budget surplus over the next few years until the outlook for economic growth is clearer, and I accept the Government's case for adopting a more cautious forecast. However, there are many uncertainties and some real clouds on the horizon, as today's chambers of commerce report confirms. The Government must take seriously the threat to British competitiveness and the possibility that investment will leave the country because of the strength of the pound. I hope that the Chancellor will avoid the boom-bust approach to financing public services, which is bad for our schools, hospitals and economic stability.
I suspect that the Chief Secretary would not expect me to concentrate on areas of agreement; constructive opposition requires me to focus on some of the statement's deficiencies and on what I believe the Government could and should do. The Government's use of cumulative cash figures and their blind eye to the effects of inflation must delude no one about what is really going on.
Overall, current Government spending will rise only 1.4 per cent. in this Parliament. That is half the 2.7 per cent. rise under the Tories in the previous Parliament, so it is no bonanza, and I have no idea what the Tories are talking about when they accuse the Government of profligacy for proposing half the increase that they delivered—which did not exactly secure re-election.
The fact that no extra money was announced for 1998–99 tends to be overlooked in the euphoria. It is no foregone conclusion that progress will be rapid on class sizes and hospital waiting lists this year. There is certainly no jam today, and perhaps not even tomorrow. The supertanker may prove extremely slow to turn round.
In the light of the extra money allocated, it is surprising that the Government have not been able to promise more solid service improvements. We are told that the extra £40 billion for health and education will allow the early pledges to be delivered. Well, I hope so, but I seem to remember that that was supposed to cost a mere £100 million for each service. We do not seem to be getting very much for our money.

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The Liberal Democrats would like a cut in class sizes for eight to 11-year-olds, in which age range 40 per cent. of children are in classes of 31 or more; a target of reducing maximum average primary school class sizes to 25 or fewer; early-years education for all three-year-olds whose parents want it—I acknowledge that the Government have made some commitments on that; a cap on hospital waiting times of six months; and the abolition of all eye and dental check charges. I am sorry that more of those substantive policies did not find their way into the Chancellor's statement or emerge from the Departments.
The Government publication, "Modern Public Services for Britain", promised
"4.7% a year, above inflation, for three years"
for the NHS, and
"an increase of 5 per cent. a year on average above inflation between 1998/99 and 2001/2002".
for education.
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: I assume that the hon. Gentleman's wish list represented new Liberal Democrat spending commitments. Will he be kind enough to tell us what those would cost and what the overall spending target would be if his party ever got anywhere near power?
Mr. Bruce: Yes, I will, as I always do, when we produce our alternative Budget and our annual statement. Indeed, we published a statement on spending a few weeks ago, but it has clearly not yet reached Conservative central office.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that Labour's promises held good, whatever the economic circumstances, and even if inflation went up. That is misleading, because the Government have promised cash figures based on their 2.5 per cent. inflation forecast, which may be overshot, as it has been for the past two years. An overshoot of only 1 per cent. would wipe out £5 billion of health and education spending over the three years.
Many economists, including those who advise the Government, think that inflation will overshoot. In the economic and fiscal strategy report, the Treasury promised that extra cash would be available to compensate for inflation,
"if inflation varies substantially from forecast"—
what "substantially" means is unclear—but yesterday, in the Treasury Select Committee, the Chancellor told me that there would be no more cash, no matter how much inflation went up. With respect, that means that the Government's pledge is so much pie in the sky. It also means a potential for more black holes to open up in the Government's spending promises.
As the Government's nominal revenues are boosted from higher inflation, and given the sorry state of education and health funding, which we are now trying to remedy, I believe that the Chancellor should protect those two areas from the consequences of higher inflation during this Parliament.
Mr. Leslie: On the subject of black holes opening up in finances, the hon. Gentleman will remember that the
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Liberal spokesperson on tax, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), said that their party would increase the personal allowance for income tax to equalise it with capital gains tax, which the Library has costed at £17.5 billion, equivalent to 8p on income tax. How would he pay for all his promises?
Mr. Bruce: The hon. Gentleman is new to the House and he is a bit repetitive. I knew that it was a mistake to give way to him. My party produced a costed manifesto, acknowledged by independent people as the most honest and objective account of party intentions from any party, and his party did no such thing. We will do what we always do and produce an annual alternative Budget and a clear, costed programme.
The Government have only small reserves to accommodate any need for more cash: a mere £1.5 billion for departmental budgets next year, out of a spending total of £175 billion. I only hope that we do not have another BSE crisis, never mind an overshoot on inflation. I am registering a genuine, serious concern about the Government's ability to deliver, and I hope that they will think again.
This has been an incredibly secretive, centralised and non-consultative process. On Tuesday, the Chancellor announced the allocation of £1 trillion of public money, without so much as a sniff of consultation with the House, the public, or even the Labour party. Indeed, as far as I can tell, half the Cabinet were not consulted.
The outcome was presented in reverse. We were not told what the costed policies were; we were told how much will be allocated, and the policies will come later. Apparently, what the people think has already been quietly digested in secret. We believe that the performance contracts, which are in principle a good and interesting development, should be with Parliament, not with the Treasury, and that there should be much more public consultation on spending priorities and departmental targets. It is our money and we, the public, have a right to some say in what the priorities should be.
The Government seem to be taking a very restrictive attitude to public sector pay, but that is not the current inflationary threat, as pay rises in the public sector are at 2.5 per cent., below inflation, whereas private sector rises are at more than 6 per cent., yet the Government say that pay review bodies must take into account the need for efficiency savings; the need to hit the Government's 2.5 per cent. inflation target; and affordability against budgets. Public sector workers appear to be being used as the Government's shield against fears that there is too much loosening of policy.
The practical concern is that good education, for example, depends at least as much on attracting and retaining good teachers as on replacing dilapidated buildings. We accept that the Government must be responsible about pay, but responsibility also implies that we must encourage some of our best people into the public services and not end up, as I fear we will, in a vicious circle of lower pay and lower than desirable standards.
Let us consider some of the Government's specific boasts. The Secretary of State for Health was certainly being boastful on the radio this morning. The increase in spending on health of about 4.75 per cent. over the next three years will take the average real rise over this

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Parliament to about 3.7 per cent. a year, assuming that the Government stay within their inflation target. That compares with 4.1 per cent. in the previous Prime Minister's first five years; 3.3 per cent. over his entire premiership; and 3.1 per cent. on average over the 18 years of Tory government. It is healthy growth, but it is not unprecedented, as is being claimed. Indeed, in the three years from 1989–90 to 1992–93 average health spending rose by 5.5 per cent. per annum, yet waiting lists rose during that period, although the number of people waiting for more than a year fell. Therefore, the Secretary of State for Health is misleading us when he says in his press release that this is
"the biggest cash injection in the history of the National Health Service."
In the only meaningful terms—real money—the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) did better seven or so years ago.
The budget on education will rise by 3 per cent. a year in real terms over the Parliament, with 5 per cent. rises over the next three years. During the last Prime Minister's first five years, the rise was 2.6 per cent. a year on average or 1 per cent. over the entire period in office. Therefore, this rise is much better, but it is certainly not a bonanza.
Yet again, the Government are paying the price of two years of going backwards on standards. I remind the Chief Secretary what the Secretary of State for Education and Employment said on 11 April 1994 when he was in opposition:
"It is a scandal that over a million of our children in primary schools are taught in classes of over 30."
Since then, the percentage in such classes has risen from 28 to 34.8 per cent., and to 40 per cent. in the eight to 11 age group. If inflation rises by more than the Government forecast, these real rises, impressive as they look initially, will soon melt away.
Mr. Darling: I wonder what the leader of the Liberal party meant when he said in the debate on the Queen's Speech:
"If we tighten our belts now, we have a real opportunity to get to grips with the huge hangover of debt left behind by the Conservatives."—[Official report, 14 May 1997; Vol. 294, c. 74.]
That seems to be a rather different story from the one advanced by the hon. Gentleman today.
Mr. Bruce: Absolutely not. What my right hon. Friend said then and what we said in our manifesto was that we had to start investment in health and education on day one of this Parliament. That is what we 46 Liberal Democrats have been elected to fight for, and that is what we are doing. Of course, we are in favour of ensuring value for money and agree that it is necessary to finance, not borrow, the extra expenditure. That is why we committed ourselves to putting an extra 1p on income tax, which the other parties were not prepared to do.
You, Mr. Deputy Speaker, the Chief Secretary and I all have an interest in what happens in Scotland. According to the Government's own figures, the Scottish departmental budget will be 1.5 per cent. lower in real terms in 2001 and 2002 than it was in 1994–95 when Ian Lang was Secretary of State for Scotland. He was not conspicuously popular. Over the entire Parliament, the real budget for the Scottish block will grow at an anaemic 0.6 per cent. a year in real terms. That is a fraction of the
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4.7 per cent. annual real growth rate in the first five years of the last Prime Minister or even the 2.9 per cent. real rate through his entire period in office. That is no bonanza for Scotland.
Can the Chief Secretary confirm that the health budget in Scotland will rise by only 2.8 per cent. in real terms this Parliament, compared with an average 3.1 per cent. during the 18 years under the Tories? As I said in the House on Tuesday, that is not John Major plus, but John Major minus.
On other occasions, I have raised issues relating to my constituency. I live in an area of strong population growth where, for example, we need a new secondary school—a new Garioch academy—and new primary schools in growth points such as Kintore. I hope that the Government's injection of funds will allow those projects to come to fruition. So far, we have made only limited progress. In the small town of Ellon, the health board promised more consultant clinics in the town, but it has not been able to find the resources to deliver that, let alone resources for the community hospital that the majority of people in the town think is necessary.
It is on such specific performances that the Government will be measured, not on the billions of pounds or on comparisons of who invested more and who less. It is on what will translate into real, measurable terms. Naturally, we welcome the public sector boost that was announced on Tuesday. However, we are entitled to say that there is a big difference between attractive headlines about big numbers and the real palpable transformation of Britain's public services. We will not be impressed by the former until the Government make real progress on delivering the latter, and I am sure that the British people will give the same verdict.
6.24 pm
Mr. Andrew Miller: Before I come to the substance of my remarks, I cannot help but comment on the speech of the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce). Given that the Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties have been screaming for months about when the review was to come, if they had something of substance to say in the context of the review, it would have been helpful if they had submitted it to the Treasury.
Mr. Malcolm Bruce: We did.
Mr. Miller: If so, what is the complaint about? How can the hon. Gentleman say that he had no opportunity to comment? Obviously, he has commented, but now whinges because he has not got exactly his way. It is hardly surprising that we did not follow the Liberal Democrat party's advice, as the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie) made clear.
It is clear from Conservative Members' comments that there is a fundamental lack of understanding about prudent investment in the public sector. It is clear from constituencies such as mine how a lack of prudent investment in the public sector has led to social exclusion, which in turn has increased costs to the public purse. That was clear throughout the term of the previous Administration.
There was an investment programme in housing estates constructed in the pre-cast reinforced concrete—PRC—style which was designed to modernise them and bring

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them up to a decent standard, but the Conservative Government stopped it. As a result, some houses run the risk of having to be demolished. That was a crazy, short-sighted approach to public expenditure. Since my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister released some capital receipts as part of his commitment to public sector housing, that programme is back on track. As a result of the programme, we have citizens living in decent homes and the housing stock will have a longer life expectancy. That is prudent use of public money.
I do not entirely blame the previous Administration for the decline in employment because some job losses were technology driven. In my constituency, massive numbers of people who previously worked in the vehicle and petro-chemical industries found themselves unemployed and, under the Conservative Government, unemployable. No attempts were made, except for the occasional Mickey Mouse scheme, to get people back into real, permanent jobs. As a result of this Government's initiatives, starting with the new deal and including the many steps to integrate programmes across departmental boundaries, people are getting back into real jobs. That is prudent use of public money.
I am thinking, in particular, about a discussion I had with THI, which is developing a large leisure complex in my constituency adjacent to one of the poorest communities. The developer is already prepared to work with public sector partners—training and enterprise councils, schools, further education and the Employment Service—to ensure that the jobs that emerge from its investment will benefit people from the poorest part of the community. It is responding positively because it is clearly to its advantage to have people trained locally to meet its needs. It is responding to an initiative by this Government which, again, reflects prudent investment.
I intervened earlier to touch on my lack of confidence in the Conservative party's description of what is happening to the real economy. The investment that I have just spoken of will create 900 jobs next year, and enormous strides have been made in partnership with the local authority and the Department of Trade and Industry to create many other jobs in the area.
I am particularly encouraged by a photograph on the front page of my local paper, which bears a remarkable similarity to that rotten and misleading Tory party poster of 1979, "Labour isn't working". That was the lie then and that is the lie now. The photograph shows people willingly queueing up to apply for jobs available at Vauxhall Motors in my constituency—jobs that have come to Britain as a result of the Government's prudent public investment.
Had the Conservative party's analysis of what is happening to the economy been accurate, those jobs would have gone to Russelsheim in Germany, to Belgium or to Spain. That did not happen. They came to the United Kingdom as a result of the Government presenting the best case in partnership with the company, the local authority and many other private sector players. Again, that is prudent use of public money.
Mr. Oliver Heald: Tell that to Dunstable.
Mr. Miller: I remind the hon. Gentleman that, as a result of the Government's initiative, the plant at Luton
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has been saved. Under the Conservative Administration, the Dunstable van plant closed. The hon. Gentleman should get his facts right.
I come now to the substance of my remarks and, in particular, the aspect of the comprehensive spending review that gives me a great deal of pleasure—the reference on pages 77 and 78 to investment in and promotion of science and innovation.
Under the previous Administration, since about the mid-1980s, there has been a gradual and systematic decline in investment in research and development in Britain. There is no doubt about that. The House discussed that earlier this week when debating a report from the Select Committee on Science and Technology. The Chairman of that Committee, the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Dr. Clark), set out the case succinctly.
As a result of the comprehensive spending review, there is a massive commitment to British science, something for which the Labour party has been pressing for many years. We are delighted with that investment because we believe that it will be the seedcorn for future investment in Britain
My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mr. Hall) referred in an intervention to the Daresbury laboratory in his constituency just down the road from me. I was delighted to see £100 million being committed to synchrotron radiation in the comprehensive spending review. My hon. Friend has pressed for that investment since 1993. It did not happen under the Conservatives, but as a result of the comprehensive spending review, subject to the business case, and as we are talking about prudent investment, we shall now see that investment.
The case for that investment is solid. This is the laboratory that helped Dr. John Walker to win the Nobel prize for molecular biology last year. He worked from Cambridge, but he used the X-ray facilities of the Daresbury laboratory. That is the business case for the laboratory, and I hope that when the Department of Trade and Industry and the science councils consider that programme, the project will promote science in the north-west of England. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary will pass those comments on to his right hon. and hon. Friends in the DTI.
Mr. Peter Brooke: Before the hon. Gentleman goes overboard with euphoria about the injection of money into university research, will he accept that, until we see the small print, we shall not know what matching funding will be required and, therefore, what distortion may also occur in research into the humanities?
Mr. Miller: I was not referring to university research; I was referring specifically to the Daresbury project. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman understands that that project creates a three-way partnership between the research councils, the universities and the private sector, producing not only an expansion of knowledge in pure science for Britain, but massive results that are transforming themselves into innovation—just the sort of thing that the Government are seeking to promote. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will support my comments in that respect.
All those developments—the local ones relating to investment in housing and jobs, the crossing of boundaries bringing together social services and health and new deal

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partners in the poorest parts of my community, what is happening in the manufacturing sector in my constituency and the seemingly esoteric research which is, in reality, the practical way of rebuilding Britain—are examples of the prudent use of public money. I am delighted to see commitments towards the continuation of such programmes in the comprehensive spending review. I am sure that in my constituency and in the north-west of England, we shall see substantial benefits as a result of that review.
6.36 pm
Mr. Kenneth Clarke: The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his Treasury team, including the Chief Secretary, are proving increasingly incompetent in discharging their main role, which is to provide a stable economic background against which the country can achieve a reasonable level of growth without excessive threat from inflation or other shocks. We should always judge the economic statements made by a Government to the House by the likely impact in the medium term on the ability of business men to manage the growth of their businesses, and the effect that they will have on job creation, job security and living standards in the country.
That point is always emphasised in most of the speeches by Treasury Ministers, but I become ever more doubtful about whether they will achieve it. Ministers who frequently use the word "prudence" in every speech that they make are proving ever more imprudent in practice. They talk about a stable, medium-term view of economic policy, but now we have the fourth set of figures—the fourth policy announcement—presented as if it were a Queen's Speech, with the most surprising lurch of policy and tone that we have seen so far.
The iron Chancellor has gradually moved nearer to being an open-handed man, but the transformation to Santa Claus shows that there has been a dramatic change of direction, and that is what we criticise. It is imprudent, it will be regretted before the end of the Parliament and it is time that the House addressed it, as Conservative Members are, from a serious standpoint, rather than joining in the inevitable celebrations that take place on the Government Back Benches when largesse is being handed out to every lobby in sight.
Let me make clear precisely my position about some of the welcome increases in spending. There has never been a Chancellor or Chief Secretary who did not come here with some announcements that increased spending. It is the totality of public spending that we are criticising. There has not been an adequate choice of priorities. To commit to an excessive total over three years enables all the numbers to sound like telephone numbers, but it is reckless to do so regardless of what economic circumstances may bring.
Labour Members have asked for our position. Let me deal first with the priorities. The Chief Secretary should have used the comprehensive spending review to make hard choices on the priorities about which the Prime Minister talks. The Government's first priorities are health and education. Not surprisingly, I welcome that; they have been the first priorities of Governments for as long as I can remember—they were for the previous Government. Increased spending on the national health service is welcome, and I trust that it will be delivered over the next three years. I also welcome increased spending on
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education, including higher and further education, and I and my right hon. and hon. Friends trust that that, too, will be delivered.
I listened carefully to exchanges earlier between the Secretary of State for Health and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe). She did not demand that less be spent on health, but she put the spending increase into proportion. As the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) has rightly said, the figures were grossly exaggerated by the way in which they were presented. They are, in fact, fairly normal. The Secretary of State was wrong to claim that his increase was unprecedented, unless he was simply claiming that there had never before been a three-year increase. The growth in real terms that he announced is lower than the level during my last year as Secretary of State for Health, and lower than in the following year, when my successor, William Waldegrave, was Secretary of State. There have been previous increases just as large, as there should be when health is the priority.
Nor are the education figures exceptional. The Government have just about managed to deliver their election promise—I congratulate them on that—of increasing the proportion of gross domestic product spent on education. However, they have done so by a tiny fraction. I do not go along with the hon. Member for Gordon when he takes over from the left of the Labour party by demanding more big spending, but he was right to say that by the end of the Parliament, education will creep just above the proportion of GDP spent by the previous Government. The Government have just about delivered that pledge.
No one on the Conservative Benches—unless some particularly hard-line colleague is yet to speak—is going to demand that we spend less on the NHS or education. However, the rest of the Government's spending makes the review difficult to contemplate. We, too, gave priority to education and health, and our record bears comparison with the Government's new figures. However, we examined other priorities, and we restrained the growth of other Departments so that it was affordable. That has not been done in the comprehensive spending review.
It is easy for Government Back Benchers to welcome every increase. Most propositions advanced by spending Departments are desirable. The duty of the Treasury team—particularly the Chief Secretary—is to decide which of them we can afford this year, which to postpone and where more efficiency savings can be sought. That is what happens in an annual spending review, particularly in a fundamental review. The comprehensive review is not a new idea; when Michael Portillo was Chief Secretary, he and I produced big increases for health and education from a comprehensive review, but we also produced what turned out to be the beginning of control of public expenditure. That produced a steady decline in excessive borrowing during the last years of the previous Parliament. The control established then is now being thrown away.
Scarcely a Department of State has failed to get a pretty good settlement. Only the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food appears to have done badly, and that is mostly because of the ending of compensation payments for BSE. Total expenditure over the next three years is due to rise by 2.75 per cent. in real terms above the rate of inflation. That is a tremendous loosening of public spending, and it bears no relation to what the

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Chancellor and the Chief Secretary said when they launched the CSR. It certainly does not resemble all the prudence that we were told about before the election, when we heard that new Labour would abandon the old high-spending approach and would no longer throw money at every problem. The rejoicing on the Labour Benches is because new Labour is doing exactly that.
It is almost impossible for the Chief Secretary to defend the 2.75 per cent. figure. Only three months ago, while he was in the middle of his comprehensive spending review, the Red Book revealed that the Government planned a much lower growth in public spending than they have been able to deliver. The increases are not some great economic breakthrough, but a total relaxation of what was intended to be controlled public spending.
The Government clearly know that that is so. They are trying to present their review in such a way as to minimise the impact on the outside world of their spending. The documents that we have received have reduced the amount of information available to the House about future spending. The Government have taken over our well-advanced move to resource accounting, and have taken the opportunity to change many definitions and seek to obfuscate what is happening.
The biggest increases are in accounting adjustments. No Labour Back Bencher has yet leapt to his feet to praise the massive increase in accounting adjustments, but I do not doubt that we shall hear from one sooner or later. The reason for that is the working families tax credit, which has quite wrongly been tucked away in the accounting adjustments. That is an attempt to reduce the otherwise appalling impact of a huge increase in the welfare budget. I was extremely critical of the working families tax credit during the Budget as I believe it to be inferior to the family credit that it replaced, and which used always to count as social security. It will prove a nightmare to apply working families tax credit. In America, it has proved extremely expensive, and it is easy for people to obtain it fraudulently. When the Government first announced the credit to the House, they had not done their sums properly. Now they have discovered the real costs, and they have tucked the credit away into the books, just as they have with other matters.
I welcome private finance, having helped to develop the private finance initiative during our last three or four years in office. I am increasingly suspicious about the Government's approach to the PFI, however, as they are going in for off-the-books accounting. Risk transfer is not being given the importance that it was given previously. How can the Chief Secretary justify not including the guarantee for the channel tunnel link as public expenditure? We are talking about £3.75 billion. No previous Government have regarded a guarantee for a debt—a taxpayers' guarantee—as not counting as a liability in public expenditure.
There is also talk of finding more areas in which receipts can be netted off against expenditure, which means not counting taxation as taxation, but using it to reduce the apparent costs of providing public services. Assumptions are being made about fraud, and about asset sales, which I do not think will be realised. The books have been altered to try to reduce the impact, and to bring the increase down to 2.75 per cent. in real terms over three years.
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I was impressed by an article by David Smith in The Sunday Times on 12 July about the effect of changing definitions for apparently purposeless reasons when presenting spending. He gave more detail than I have time for, but the most important point is that the Government have given up what we used to call the control total, our principal instrument for controlling public expenditure. We left out cyclical social security expenditure because we could not control it, but we bore down on the rest of expenditure, which was within the control of Departments.
Of course the Government have abolished the control total. In this year alone, it is going up by 1.2 per cent. in real terms. Over the next three years, the control total, which we used as our principal instrument for controlling public expenditure, is set to rise by 3.4 per cent. each year over and above inflation—in other words, in real terms. That is a relaxation of total public spending at an extraordinary time.
Why are we concerned? Most politicians are happier when they are spending money, our constituents are happier when we are spending money, and it has never been part of my approach to life to wear a hair shirt too readily. However, as I said, I am concerned about job security, living standards and the state of British business and commerce, which ought to be our principal concern. They will be the Government's concern before long, because the position is deteriorating. The Government have taken the extraordinary decision to abandon their control over public spending when everybody knows that the economy is slowing down fast and when there is increasing sign of pain.
Mr. Miller indicated dissent.
Mr. Clarke: I am glad that things are fine in Ellesmere Port, but one does not have to go far from Ellesmere Port to find engineering and manufacturing firms that are having a hard time.
Mr. Miller: He is talking down Britain.
Mr. Clarke: I am not talking down Britain. I want Britain to be a successful enterprise economy, but it will not be if it is run incompetently by the Treasury team.
Our constituents will understand why we ask where the money is coming from. That is a sensible question, which has been asked of Governments in the past and which we have asked when we have been in opposition. What do we get by way of an answer? The answer now is the same as Harold Wilson used to give—it is all going to come from economic growth—but it comes when people are more worried about economic growth than they have been at any time since the Labour Government took office, and they are right to be worried. The Government are anticipating a not terribly spectacular level of growth, and I agree with all my right hon. and hon. Friends who have spoken so far in believing that the Government are counting their chickens before they are hatched. That is an extremely reckless thing to do in economic policy.
I am by no means sure that the Government's forecasts will be achieved. I have no time to go into my usual arguments about why I think monetary policy is slowing down growth too fast. I agree with Dr. DeAnne Julius that, at the very least, policy should now be going into

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neutral. I think that the economy will slow down more than the Bank suggests and more than the Government suggest. Once the impact of the Asian crisis has arrived, it will slow down extremely rapidly. The result will be that the Government cannot pay for what they are promising today unless they tax more and borrow more. It is no good talking about the golden rule—borrowing, which is planned to rise now, will go up to a level that will cause the Government great political difficulties.
6.51 pm
Mr. Paddy Tipping: I am extremely pleased to follow my neighbour, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke). I join him in recognising and praising the importance of a Government who are going to deliver on their election promises. The right hon. and learned Gentleman might not be sitting on the Opposition Back Benches now if he had been a member of a Government who could persuade people that they meant what they said and delivered what they promised. The comprehensive spending review and the document "Modern Public Services for Britain—Investing in Reform" give the Labour party an opportunity to forge a new contract with the people—a Government who deliver on their promises.
I start by praising my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary for one promise that has had no publicity at all: in opposition, we made the promise that we would stop the large-scale sale of Forestry Commission woodland. Under the Conservative Government, a third of a million acres of woodland was sold; that environment declined, and public access opportunities were lost all over the country. When we came to power, we imposed a moratorium, and the Government have now made it clear that large-scale sales of Forestry Commission land will cease. That will enhance the environment and improve the landscape.
That decision has been generally welcomed, but the review goes further. I am pleased that a middle way has been found for the Forestry Commission. The lodges where people stay on holiday are to be refurbished and brought up to modern standards by using private sector finance. We are enhancing the environment and giving people more and better recreation and leisure facilities.
Much of the debate on the spending review has concentrated on the extra spending—the inputs on education, health, crime and disorder measures and transport. The shadow Financial Secretary acknowledged that this was the biggest spending bonanza since the war, but he did not seem clear about where he stood; he was not sure whether he was for it or against it. I liked the tack he took—talk about the cavalry charging down the hill to protect and enhance the pay of public sector workers. Cleaners and dustbin men will remember the 18 years under the Tories, and will never see them as saviours.
Unlike my colleagues, I want to focus on the processes in the comprehensive spending review, because it is apparent that it contains several measures that are good public and economic policies. When the glitz and presentation has been cut away, what is left is a spending plan over three years that brings consistent and steady growth to public services, especially education and the health service, of about 4 per cent. a year in real terms.
That does not sound like a lot, but head teachers, hospital managers and people who work in the public services acknowledge that there is light at the end of the
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tunnel. What they cannot live with is uncertainty, so having a planning framework of steady, cumulative growth over three years is important to them. Of even greater importance would be to try to ensure that the three-year spending plans were constantly rolled forward, so that there is always a third indicative year. People would then have the opportunity to plan to take on new staff, to take decisions about capital expenditure, and to engage in long-term planning, rather than 12-month planning.
I also welcome the set of cross-departmental reviews, on the under-fives, asylum and immigration, crime prevention and the justice system. Those are important, because they show that the Government engage in joined-up thinking and joined-up government. We shall do more of that, and continue to pull Departments together, so that, in crude terms, by adding value to each Department, we get better bangs for our buck.
I am delighted that the comprehensive spending review speaks of a regeneration budget, new deals for communities and a revamp of the single regeneration budget that will bring extra resources to our most deprived areas. I say to the Minister: look closely at coalfield communities and at the coalfields task force, which has made 80 recommendations for Departments across Government. Let us use that as a vehicle to bring real change, new investment, new jobs and a new future to coalfield communities.
As well as inputs and extra spending, outputs and outcomes are important. I look forward to seeing the detail of the spending agreements and to there being some, shall we say, creative tension among the centre, the Treasury, and the spending Departments. I hope that we will look to spending Departments to make savings, and give them the opportunity to keep some of those savings, because the language of government is the language of priorities. We need to acknowledge that not all public spending is good public spending; we need to ensure that public spending is modern, and goes to the areas of most need.
That is why I am keen that we set targets not only for Departments, but for public spending all the way down the scale. I hope that we shall have local contracts between divisional police commanders and their communities, and between head teachers and the community that uses the school, so that people know who is accountable for the services. Targets and timetables should be set, and questions should be asked if they are not delivered.
The citizens charter made a good start on that, but the measures were not very sophisticated. They included the number of rings of a telephone and how quickly a report could be produced. We should get out and talk to people about the public services they demand and aspire to—and, what is more, pay for. We have an obligation and a responsibility to provide better services than people are receiving at the moment.
I hope that we shall ask hard questions, for example, of police authorities. How many of us, in the Chamber or outside, can name the members of the police authority that shapes our community? Very few of us can do so. We must identify stakeholders and the providers of public services, and set them hard targets.
We must also examine mistakes. I have mentioned the police. A great deal needs to be done to make our police force modern. I am ashamed at the amount of sickness in

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many police forces in this country. It cannot be right that, on any one working day, 1,500 police officers in the Metropolitan police are on sick leave. It cannot be right that there is so much early retirement, not only in the police but in the education service. We need to examine that problem, and manage it much more forcefully than we have done in the past.
I sometimes think that public servants are good at managing problems. The issue is our lack of social and public service entrepreneurs—charismatic figures who can find solutions. We must strive to identify the people and organisations that can implement good practice. We need to praise good public services and contrast them with the worst. The problem in recent years is that we have picked on the worst services—we have named and shamed—but we all respond better to praise and reward. I want us to examine public services, reward and support the best, and make them beacons for change. Public services in this country would then be transformed.
That leads to implications for the inspectorate—the people who monitor our public services, such as the Audit Commission and the Office for Standards in Education. I have great praise for the Audit Commission, and it does not need to hire a lobbyist to find that out. It is very good at identifying problems, putting forward solutions and suggesting outputs, but it is not good at delivering outcomes. We must set up organisations that support people, love public servants and give people who can achieve the opportunities to do so, such as seminars, extra training and extra resources for their organisation. By praising the best, we can enhance the rest.
Ofsted has a great deal to achieve. I note that one of the documents accompanying the comprehensive spending review sets out aims and objectives that Ofsted has set itself, including the objective of getting Investors in People status. I hope that it can move from a negative, Lone Ranger, destructive approach to school inspection towards one that considers and enhances the good aspects and acts as an agent for change.
I believe that public services are important, and the public agree, but they must be persuaded that those services are theirs, that they meet their needs and that they are stakeholders in the services. I praise the comprehensive spending review, because it is investment for reform and an opportunity to achieve modern public services. It is a challenge for change. I hope that we shall meet that challenge and make that change.
7.4 pm
Mr. John MacGregor: Before I come to my main theme, I want to address an issue of great interest to me as a former Chief Secretary. It is dealt with in section 4 of the comprehensive spending review, which is all about efficiency and modern public services. The Chancellor spent a good deal of time talking about that in the early part of his statement on Tuesday. The document says that new public service agreements for Departments
"will include their new objectives and measurable efficiency and effectiveness targets."
I had a great sense of deja vu when I heard the Chancellor's speech and read the document, because when I was Chief Secretary we had documents saying
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exactly the same things—we were measuring not by inputs but by outputs. We were having annual reports and checks.
Throughout our period of government, we took huge strides forward in efficiency measures and cost savings in the civil service and the delivery of services. There is absolutely nothing new about that, although the document tries to claim that there is. It is a huge travesty in its treatment of the 18 years of our Government. There was substantial capital investment, not least—indeed, particularly—in transport.
The Chancellor referred on Tuesday to
"an education system that advanced only the ambitions of the few".—[official report, 14 July 1998; Vol. 316, c. 190.]
He gave the impression that that is what we had done. Our period in government was one in which the numbers of people going into higher education were greater than ever before and there was a huge extension in the opportunities for higher education. When we took office, one in eight people went into higher education; when we left office, the figure was one in three.
The health and education measurements that are so heavily emphasised in the document are precisely those that our Government introduced, which were frequently criticised by the Labour Opposition. Labour now relies very heavily on the reforms that we put in place. I do not object to those reforms—they are good Tory measures, so I welcome them. However, the Government should not suggest that they are new, or that they will revolutionise public expenditure programmes.
That brings me to my point about public service agreements. I want to understand their significance, and I hope that the Financial Secretary will deal with this point in great detail when she replies. The emphasis is on measurable objectives. I do not know what the new public service agreements will be. I certainly hope that they will not use the objectives set out in this document—very often in the light blue passages at the beginning—because most of them are too unclear to measure, and many are pious hopes. They are certainly not quantified. I hope that the objectives will be quantified.
That brings us to the key question: what will the Government do if the targets are missed? We are told that the services will be regularly monitored, not annually but much more often. Are the Government saying that they will not give more money over the three-year programme to various Departments if they miss a particular target—we understand that the targets will be not only quantified but timetabled—and if so, do they really believe that that is realistic?
As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) pointed out in an intervention following a question that I asked, if the health service targets for waiting lists are not met, will that mean that the money for the health service will be reduced? If class sizes are not met, does that mean that the education budget will be reduced? That is not realistic, so I wonder what the reform amounts to.
There is a likelihood of increased expenditure in other parts of the Government's programme and of unexpected further expenditure requirements, so, if the Government are relying on such an approach to make compensating savings when Departments do not meet their targets, all I can say is that I do not believe they will deliver their pledges.

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The early auguries are not good. One of the delivery measurements listed is
"requiring outstanding reviews to deliver against tight timetables".
A number of reviews have missed tight timetables by a mile, so there has not been a good start. On efficiency, I notice that one of the biggest increases—in cash terms—in all the programmes is the social security running costs administration programme. That is not a sign of tight control, either. I want to know how it will work, and whether it will lead to major reform.
I come now to my main theme. Like other Conservative Members, I believe that the Chancellor has thrown caution to the winds, and is taking a huge gamble. His departure from caution is the increase in average annual spending to 2.75 per cent. in real terms. However, I believe that it is more than that. If one takes into account the private finance initiative and accounting changes to which my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe referred, the figure is more than 3 per cent. in real terms, measured like for like with the past. That figure is way beyond the Chancellor's earlier prudent statements.
The gamble is that economic growth in the next three years will be able to sustain that figure, which is above the long-term growth rate of the economy, and is unlikely, in the view of most in the worlds of industry and commerce, to be achieved in the next year or two. Like my right hon. and learned Friend, I always get suspicious when the word "prudence" appears so often in a statement—I think that it was used 14 times in the Chancellor's statement in June. I become even more suspicious when he starts to drop the word and it appears only rarely. That is the gamble, and I shall concentrate tonight on what I see as the traps facing the Treasury in this area.
The first trap—which I shall deal with briefly, as others have referred to it—is the relationship with growth in the economy. Table A6 on page 113 of the comprehensive spending review reveals the record of past expenditure. It shows that public spending as a proportion of gross domestic product came down fastest and moved to its lowest level on the chart during my period in office as Chief Secretary and shortly after I had left. That rate was achieved because, although it was a time of economic buoyancy, we kept strict control over public expenditure increases, because we did not want to anticipate future growth.
The public sector borrowing requirement and public expenditure as a proportion of GDP have decreased sharply because of the strong economy—a legacy from our period in government—because of revenue buoyancy, and because of Labour's adherence to our strict public expenditure limits. However, history has shown that that situation could change quickly. The swing-around on the current account surplus and the PSBR could be very substantial if some of those factors change. The Chancellor has let go a key element by agreeing to very substantial increases in total public expenditure over the next three years, irrespective of the development of the economy. That is trap No. 1.
Trap No. 2 follows from that: the fact that the programme will span three years instead of one. If one compares tables in the comprehensive spending review with previous public expenditure tables, one will see that they look very similar. The Conservative Government also had three-year programmes, but there were two crucial differences.
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Under our programmes, only the first year was absolutely key. Years two and three were indicative, and spending did not increase as substantially as we see in this document. We also had a substantial reserve in years two and three. We see here a substantial increase in years two and three in order to boost the size of the total programmes on health and education. Those figures have been lumped together in order to give what appears to be a much larger figure. However, I notice that the reserve in years two and three is also very slim and small. That is one of the particular dangers facing the Government.
Every Chief Secretary knows that there are always large, unpredictable demands during the year. In this case, they will occur over three years. If the limits are to be kept, where will the money come from? The reserves are not big enough, so it seems inevitable that there will be a clawback from elsewhere, or the figures for years two and three will rise unless savings are made in the existing three-year programmes. I have a feeling that this is a reform—like giving independence on interest rates to the Bank of England—that the Government may regret in due course. I warn that I think that the reserves are too small.
Trap No. 3 is the social security budget, which is outside the three-year programme. As some of my right hon. Friends have pointed out, on a basis of like for like and taking the working families tax credit and other factors into account, the increase in the social security programme is actually £37 billion. That is the big increase in the programme—it is much larger than education and health combined.
The Prime Minister's comments before the election—to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) referred—bear repeating. The Prime Minister said:
"We have said as we get welfare bills down, then we can release more money into education and health services."
It is no good the Government's indicating where they would make cuts; the point is that, in order to demonstrate their prudence, the Government planned to increase education and health spending when the welfare bills were reduced. We all know that the reverse has happened: the welfare bills will increase substantially. That was the Government's policy, but it has been abandoned.
The situation is even worse than that. I believe that, if unemployment rises, that £37 billion will rise considerably—and it is still part of the overall total. I note that the Chancellor confirmed to the Treasury Select Committee yesterday that his forecasts were based on stable levels of unemployment. When those levels rise, the social security bill will also rise considerably.
Trap No. 4 is public sector pay. I was amused to hear the Chancellor say on Tuesday that there would be new developments in public sector pay. He cited three new responsibilities: affordability, inflation and efficiency. As I am sure my right hon. and learned Friend will confirm, in giving the Treasury or Government view to various pay review bodies, the previous Conservative Government always emphasised precisely those points; so the Government's developments are nothing new.
The Chancellor said on Tuesday that the Prime Minister had spoken to the chairmen of the pay review bodies, and he was satisfied that they would take those issues into account. As Chief Secretary, I remember talking to the chairmen of pay review bodies and emphasising precisely the same points. They then advanced what they regarded

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as powerful arguments for ignoring my views entirely. I believe that the Government will find a similar outcome.
We all know that there are serious recruitment and retention problems in relation to nurses and, increasingly, general practitioners and teachers. Recent surveys that I have seen show an alarming drop in the number of students entering teacher training, particularly in areas such as physics. Therefore, I am quite sure that, over the next three years, pay review bodies will believe that they should put greater emphasis on recruitment and retention. That will blow another hole in the three-year programme.
Trap No. 5 is asset sales. Quite a large part of the public sector net investment—or what I would regard as capital expenditure—which is quite low at 1.4 per cent. of the total, is dependent on asset sales. Those asset sales are highly unpredictable. The Conservative Government knew that we could deliver with the many asset sales and privatisations that we undertook. I am very much in favour of privatising National Air Traffic Services, but I doubt whether it will be achieved easily. That dependence on asset sales is another danger.
When the Chancellor abolished advance corporation tax, he expected that it would encourage the private sector to invest substantially. That was part of the rationale behind his move. A survey produced by the Confederation of British Industry and the Association of Consulting Actuaries revealed that only 2 per cent. of companies thought that ACT changes would increase the amount of capital available for investment. Look at the damage that that measure has caused to pension funds and pensioners, and it has not produced the desired result. The same could happen with asset sales.
Trap No. 6 involves how the Government will pay for the programme if they cannot hold to their figures, or if they find that revenue buoyancy disappears. The Government have probably exhausted all the tax squeezes—such as the ACT measure—in order to bring in big extra revenue, so which tax pledges will they have to reverse? Will the strain be taken by higher borrowing and higher interest rates?
I believe that old Labour is back. It was old Labour that applauded the Chancellor on Tuesday. Perhaps that is why the Prime Minister appeared so strained and tense during that session, and why this review will be short-term gain for long-term pain.
7.19 pm
Mr. Jim Cunningham: In this debate we have heard the old Tory tales of woe—it was tales of woe when they were in government, and it is tales of woe now that they are in opposition. Phrases such as "incompetence", "people are not in charge", "people are too much in charge" and "we have always done better in government" have punctuated Tory speeches tonight, but we all know that their stewardship of the British economy during the past 18 years does not bear comparison with our stewardship of the economy. I should have thought that the last thing that those gentlemen over there would want to do was to talk about their stewardship and to compare their stewardship with ours.
Let us remind ourselves of some of the things that those people across from us got involved in during the past 18 years. Let us examine their record. Who remembers
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the negative equity under those people over there? Do you remember how the previous Chancellor had to try to devise a scheme to help those in negative equity? There is no talk about that tonight. Do you remember the record of unemployment, at 4.5 million? No one knew the accurate figure.
We also remember, in the area that I come from, Coventry and the west midlands, how the industrial base was eroded. There is no talk about that tonight. Do you also remember the record number of bankruptcies? That was the economic record that the Tories foisted on the British people. Do you remember the speedy withdrawal that they had to make from the exchange rate mechanism, and the devaluation of the pound? Do you remember when interest rates reached 22 per cent.? Again that was their record.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Some of these things I remember, some I do not, but it is best not to ask me what I do or do not remember.
Mr. Cunningham: I am actually asking the House, not you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am sure that my honourable colleagues will remember some of these things.
I am sure that colleagues will remember a generation of young people who never had a job, who were probably unemployable. We must now start to pick up the tab for that and try to train them and get them employment.
Do you remember record crime levels? I am sorry, Mr. Deputy Speaker; I hope that the House remembers the record levels of crime under the Tories.
We also remember the fact that the Tories created a situation in which people were being paid poverty pay. We also had the 22 tax increases. What did people get out of that? The Tories squandered North sea oil revenues. They do not want to talk about their economic record.
The Tories talk about public sector workers. I seem to remember that, in one Budget, the previous Chancellor talked about zero increases, but said that if there were to be any increases, they had to be allied to increases in efficiency. Does the House remember? Perhaps I am wrong. I shall give way to the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) if he wants to put me right.
I welcome the comprehensive spending review because it frees the British people from recession and stagnation. In other words, it offers them hope after they have had 18 years of no hope. Among the things that I welcome is the £21 billion over the next three years for the national health service. That will help us to honour our commitments, not only to start shortening waiting lists, but to start to deal with the capital investment that the national health service needs.
We shall spend £19 billion on education over the next three years. Remember the overcrowding in classrooms? In addition, more than a million kids still have to be educated in schools that were built before the first world war, in the conditions that that implies.
I especially welcome the Government's commitment to pensioners. Obviously, one of the commitments is to provide a better health service but, more important, we are removing for pensioners the iniquitous eye test charges that the previous Government introduced. Some Conservative Members opposed the introduction of those charges; I remember talking to some of them at the time.

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I welcome the transport White Paper. I hope that it is published very soon indeed, because one of the most contentious items for us in the west midlands and for people throughout the country has been the fact that some authorities pay for free transport for pensioners and some do not. One often finds that Tory areas do not.
I welcome the cut that was previously made in VAT to help, not only pensioners, but some of the most needy families in Britain, on the poverty line, to pay their fuel bills. Equally, I welcome the further announcement made by the Secretary of State for Social Security that further funds will be provided to help pensioners with their fuel bills. About 1.7 million pensioners are on the poverty line in this country.
The Secretary of State for Social Security will also announce that, by next April, every pensioner will have a minimum pension guarantee. That is very important because many pensioners feel that they do not get an adequate pension.
The £2.5 billion set aside for tax guarantees means that pensioners will be allowed to retain up to a certain level of any income. We are still waiting for an announcement of what the taxation might be beyond that level, but at the moment many pensioners feel aggrieved by virtue of the fact that, if they take a part-time job to supplement their pension, they very often find that it is taxed away.
I welcome the commitment to do something for third-world debt. Colleagues will remember that, in our election manifesto, we committed ourselves to an objective of devoting 0.7 per cent. of gross national product to alleviating third-world debt. The Chancellor's announcement shows that we are halfway there. I believe that very many people will welcome that. We also committed ourselves to consider the whole issue of third-world debt and third-world poverty. There certainly will be some negotiations, but under the previous Government, the amount devoted to alleviating third-world debt actually fell by 2 per cent. a year.
The £21 billion funding for the national health service will certainly start to shorten waiting lists. There will be a 50 per cent. increase in capital investment in buildings and equipment, and £5 billion will be made available for national health service modernisation, which will give us the largest building programme of the past 50 years.
Other hon. Members, like myself, will know of drug abuse problems in parts of their constituencies. In my constituency, we have major problems with drug abuse. Allied to that, in certain instances, we get crime, but more important, we get murder associated with crime. We also get intimidation, if not murder, and that creates major problems for our young people. Unlike the previous Government, we shall increase by about 25 per cent. the budget for the unit that deals with drugs and crime.
I welcome the fact that we shall spend about £3.6 billion to renovate 1.5 million homes and, equally, to help the homeless. Some hon. Members probably spend at least one night a year sleeping out, to draw the nation's attention to the fact that hundreds—probably thousands—of people are homeless, destitute and without hope.
This is a Budget of hope. It shows fairness, but equally strength. I believe that it is a Budget that sets us on the road to enhance our reputation in the world
7.26 pm
Sir Michael Spicer: Later in my speech, I shall ask the hon. Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham) whether he remembers the run on the pound and the Government going with a begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund.
First, I shall turn my attention to the word "prudent". It is a rather recycled word, because it has been bandied around the Treasury for some time. My friend, Norman Lamont—we shall very soon call him Lord Lamont—often used the word "prudent". The question is, what does it mean?
The present Chancellor has defined the word strangely. He has defined it in terms of the golden rule, by which one is prudent on the capital account but can be imprudent on the current account. That is a strange concept. Professor Buiter of the Monetary Policy Committee has rubbished the idea of the golden rule in that context—certainly in the context of trying to define prudence. He has pointed out the relationship, which has existed since time immemorial, between capital expenditure and current expenditure. In the public sector it is difficult, in many cases, to define what is capital expenditure and what is current expenditure. Is road maintenance capital or current? It happens to be defined as capital expenditure, but it might just as easily be defined as current expenditure. Everyone knows that, the more capital expenditure one has, the more current expenditure one has, so it is a nonsensical distinction.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) said yesterday in the Treasury Select Committee, it is doubly nonsense in the context that we are discussing at the moment. I noticed on the front page of The Times today that old canard, the effect of spin, in the sense that the front-page article spoke of surpluses ahead, defining the surplus merely in terms of the current account. I do not know whether the author of the article realised that.
The actual position is very different. If we are considering prudence, we need to consider affordability. That is partly a political perspective. I have a view about the affordability of public spending in terms of the need for limited public expenditure which allows the private sector to flourish and generate the products that allow the public sector to spend. That is a political view.
Another aspect of affordability that interests both sides of the House is the management of the macro-economy. Affordability is directly related to fiscal policy, which must be seen in terms of its relationship with monetary policy. Given the Bank of England's independence on monetary policy, if public spending rises out of control, as may well happen, and if inflation is the outcome of the expenditure release, interest rates will go up. That will result in a conflict of policy for the Government, with inevitable implications for affordability.
The Government's programme and their claim of prudence must be judged against the facts. Total public expenditure will rise by 2.75 per cent. Under the Government's own projection for the next three years, gross domestic product will go up by 2.5 per cent.—that is, less than the projected level of public expenditure. Public spending as a percentage of GDP will therefore rise. There are no ifs and buts about that: it is a fact.
As my right hon. and hon. Friends have pointed out, the Government's assumptions are extremely optimistic. The growth rate figures are substantially different from

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the growth rate figures produced in the Budget just four months ago. The projections in the Budget ranged from 0.75 per cent. to 2.25 per cent. The central projection of the Government's latest programme assumes a rate of 2.5 per cent. I asked the Chancellor yesterday what enormous changes had occurred in the economy over the past four months to produce such a substantive change in the Government's assumptions about GDP for the future.
The Government's forecast is optimistic in other respects as well. Unemployment figures appear to be almost static. If that turns out not to be the case, the effect on public expenditure in terms of unemployment benefit and so on would be much greater than is implied. That is why the Government's figures show public expenditure as a percentage of GDP rising from 1999 onwards.
When I asked the Chancellor about that in the Select Committee yesterday, he spent a long time talking about the fact that next year the figure would go down. He failed to mention a pretty fundamental point—that next year is the last year in which the Conservative expenditure totals will apply. After that we will see Labour's true colours and the Government's real programme, in which public expenditure as a percentage of GDP increases.
We are getting back to business as usual on the political scene. The old-fashioned Labour-inspired vicious circle is emerging in the management of the economy. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor) mentioned, high expenditure must be followed by higher taxing, unless there is to be the printing of money and higher borrowing. Higher taxes will mean higher interest rates than are good for the economy, which will lead to inflation or higher taxation to pay for the higher expenditure, which will then have to be paid for out of higher taxation.
We are leaving the good old days of sensible Conservative budgeting and moving, after 1999, into the classic Labour territory of high tax and high spend. Those of us who were Members of Parliament when a Labour Government had to suffer the humiliation of going cap in hand to the IMF know that it was those policies that led to that result. If we are going down memory lane, let us go back to the last Labour Government, who had the same economic policies as the present Government. The prospect of a run on the pound and of the Government eventually having to seek help from the IMF are not fantasies. That is the logical outcome of what always happens under a Labour Government.
The Government are leaving behind the anchor of Conservative policies, which they accepted. The controls will apply next year, but we know from the Government's own figures that after that, public spending as a percentage of GDP, and therefore taxation, will rise. They have boxed themselves in by making the Monetary Policy Committee independent, no doubt because they did not trust themselves on the matter. The concomitant interest rate rises will make matters more difficult for the Government and the country.
The electorate was warned at the last election, but was not in a mood to accept those warnings. It was as clear as day that, despite all the froth and the spinning that went on at the beginning, as long as the Labour Government kept to Conservative policies, we were in fairly safe territory. They promised the country at the time that
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Conservative expenditure controls would be maintained for a year or so. We foresaw what would happen, but the country was not in a mood to accept it.
I expect that it will not be long before the mood in the country changes, as people recognise what they will get from a Labour Government. It is a great irony that just as the Government's new deal—a typical Labour programme for spending money on trying to overcome the unemployment problem—comes into effect, unemployment will begin to rise inexorably. No doubt there will be all the interventions that we get from a Labour Government, and certainly higher taxes. There is misery ahead for the country under this Administration. The quicker they are changed, the better.
7.37 pm
Mr. Neil Gerrard: I shall begin with some general comments about the comprehensive spending review and the Government's approach. It is not always easy to question where money is spent and whether it was spent on the correct priorities in the past. The review has tried to do that and has come up with some different answers. We should all welcome that.
I shall not dwell on specific outcomes. Everyone is aware of the extra money for health, international development, science and so on. I am particularly happy about the extra money to be spent on education, much of it on capital programmes in schools. The condition of buildings is not the only aspect that matters, but it is important. After years of cuts, the increase in spending will do much for teachers' morale. If my right hon. Friends at the Treasury want to finish the job of improving teachers' morale, perhaps they will suggest to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment that he rapidly terminate the contract of Her Majesty's chief inspector of schools.
Further education will have an extra 8 per cent. funding. I used to work in further education area and I very much welcome the increased funding. That sector has been grossly undervalued. There is low morale among those who work within it and a need for recovery. If we are to deliver on our training objectives, we must improve on what is happening in FE.
I very much welcome one of the smaller items in the comprehensive spending review which relates to further education—the piloting of an education maintenance grant for 16 to 18-year-olds, with the purpose of improving the staying-on rate among students from poorer families. I am sure that the pilot will work and that we shall thereafter extend the grant nationwide. I gently suggest to the Government that the principle of maintenance grants to help poorer students go into education is one that they might consider for higher education as well as further education.
Housing is another part of public spending where many important decisions still need to be made. That links with the welfare benefits review. A housing inspectorate is being set up to oversee management in local authorities. Clearly there is nothing wrong with improving standards of management; tenants deserve good management. However, I question whether we should focus only on management in local authorities. My experience of increasing contact with housing associations is that some are very good, but the management practices of others leave quite a lot to be desired. I do not believe that the

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Housing Corporation provides effective oversight of associations' management practices. There is a gap in public accountability, especially as increasing amounts of money are going in that direction.
Housing is not only about good management. Clearly we cannot provide a good-quality physical housing environment without money, without investment. We know—it has been mentioned earlier—the appalling record of housing investment over the past 10 to 15 years. Investment is now far lower than it was 20 years ago. There is an appalling problem of supply in the social housing rented sector, especially in large cities. The situation in London is probably the worst of all. The problem of supply cannot be met by better management. It cannot be met without money, without investment.
Of course I welcome the £3.6 billion that will be put into the social housing rented sector, but I have the impression that it will be very much targeted at refurbishment. There is obviously a job to be done in refurbishment—there are extremely serious problems of disrepair—but that approach will not fundamentally affect the supply side of the equation. Oddly, it could make things worse in the short term. My experience of large-scale local authority and housing association refurbishment schemes is that often they require a decant—tenants being moved. Often these schemes take away part of the supply which might be used for other purposes.
There is nothing wrong with refurbishment, but there is still the question of what public expenditure is directed to the supply side. We know that it is not just a matter of throwing money at these projects. All the evidence suggests that we cannot engage successfully in refurbishment and redevelopment without proper tenant involvement and support. That was mentioned specifically in the statement made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Tuesday. If tenants feel ownership of an improvement scheme, the scheme is much more likely to be successful.
There are clear limits on spending in the new deal. It has been announced that £800 million will be spent on regeneration. That can be a good way of creating employment and training opportunities if it is tied in with housing regeneration. There is real scope, with imagination, for having housing regeneration linked to training and employment.
Other unresolved housing cost issues relate to public expenditure on housing benefit—about £11 billion—and rent levels. There is much evidence that rents are a major consideration in people's minds when they are considering whether they can get off benefits and move into work. I recall what was said in my right hon. Friend's statement on Tuesday about the minimum guaranteed income for pensioners. That implies a close look at the links between, for example, pensions, the tax system and the benefits system. It seems to me that the same approach is necessary when looking at people's housing costs and whether public money is spent in the best or the right way, whether we are getting the best value for that money and whether it fits in with other Government objectives. We need the comprehensive spending review and the benefits review, when it comes along, positively to interact with housing costs. That relates to social housing rents and subsidies.
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The working families tax credit improves matters. There is no doubt that a taper of 55 per cent. compared with one of 70 per cent. for family credit is a big improvement; it means that the poverty trap will not be so deep. Such reforms will substantially reduce the numbers of households that pay high rates of marginal tax at the stage when they are getting into work. However, the improved incentives for tenants on the current proposals will depend critically on their rent levels. Tenants at the lower end of the rent scale will be taken out of housing benefit and council tax benefit. The higher the rents, the more extensive the overlap will be, as things stand, between tax credit and existing housing benefit tapers. That is because the tax credit scheme is more generous than existing schemes, extending further up the earnings scale.
We could end up with—we end up with this under present housing benefit systems—a wider overlap that extends much further up the income range, where significant marginal deductions occur. When we come to the benefits review, that needs to be addressed in relation to what is done under the comprehensive spending review.
Rents relate to public expenditure on subsidies. We know what the previous Government did. Their policy was quite simple: cut subsidies and force up rents in social housing. That was a clear policy. As a result, we have seen some developments, especially housing association developments in big cities such as London, become virtual ghettos. Tenants cannot afford to continue living in them unless they receive housing benefit. They are virtually dependent on that benefit.
In the private rented sector, where cuts were made in housing benefit by the previous Government, there was the ridiculous philosophy that tenants would somehow be able to bargain with landlords about their rents. Certainly in the big cities, tenants in the private sector, such as elderly people and people from minorities, are often the most deprived and the least likely to be able to bargain. They live in awful conditions. We need to examine how some of the £3.6 billion that will be spent on housing improvement will reach some of the people who live in terrible private rented conditions as well as the people on major estates.
That is another challenge for the use of social exclusion money. It may be true that larger estates have major concentrations of youth unemployment and deprivation, but many other deprived people are living, scattered, in the private rented sector.
I return to the issue of rents. It could be argued—I am sure that there is some truth in the argument—that merely lowering rents is not a panacea; in other words, lowering social housing rents does not solve all the problems. Of course it does not, because that does not do anything to address the condition or supply of housing. Increased rents, however, would conflict with other Government intentions, and we need to consider that carefully within the context of the comprehensive spending review. We do not want welfare to work or policies to combat exclusion to be affected adversely by what is happening to people's housing costs.
Housing costs matter because they are up-front costs and people do not always appreciate the impact of in-work benefits such as housing benefit. Housing costs are at the forefront of people's minds when they consider whether they can afford to get off benefits and into work or to take a particular job.

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Those are areas of unfinished business surrounding the comprehensive spending review and forthcoming announcements. There has been a great deal of good in this week's announcements, but I hope that the Government will consider those other issues and, as further announcements come, take great care to ensure that they fit in with the good intentions in the comprehensive spending review proposals.
7.50 pm
Mr. Tony Baldry: A number of hon. Members want to participate in the debate, so I shall try to be as brief as possible.
In 15 years as a Member of the House, this is the first time that I have felt compelled to take part in an economic debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Sir M. Spicer) said, the debate is an occasion of some importance, because it marks the end of the Labour party at least paying lip service to some sort of financial rectitude and responsibility and the start of a classic Labour binge.
My constituency in north Oxfordshire is classic middle England, and I am concerned that middle England is simultaneously conned and ripped off—conned, because people are led to believe that far more money will be spent on health and education than will actually be spent; ripped off, because, as a consequence of the Government's obvious failure to control public spending overall, taxes will inevitably rise. I shall make a number of predictions, and will be happy to be tested on them at the next general election: as a consequence of this failure of a spending review, taxes and interest rates will be higher than they need be and higher overall. Mortgage interest rates will also be higher, as a result of higher interest rates.
We can test the Labour Government by their own words. What is clear beyond peradventure is that they have already failed to control social and welfare spending. Before the general election, we heard a lot from the Labour party about its intention to cut welfare bills by getting people off social security and into work. It also said that it would reduce the proportion spent on the welfare bills of social failure. In a comprehensive spending review at this stage in the Parliament, one would have expected an attempt to be made to show some kind of control over welfare spending. After all, each and every person in work spends £15 a day on taxes for welfare spending. That has not happened; indeed, every single item of welfare spending in the review increases social security spending.
In 1992, in the depths of the previous recession, when unemployment was 50 per cent. higher than now and thousands of home owners were receiving help with mortgage repayments, the social security bill was £60 billion. After six years of economic growth and increasing economic prosperity, the bill is £100 billion. In two years, it will be £120 billion. Health and education will supposedly receive an extra £40 billion over three years from the increase in public spending. Social security spending alone will take an extra £20 billion in only two years, and those figures would increase if unemployment returned on any scale.
The Labour Government have already completely failed to tackle welfare spending and the social security bill, and they have clearly acknowledged that. When the
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Prime Minister was challenged on that yesterday, and when other Ministers have been challenged, they have simply said to us, "What would you reduce?" The Government were elected on a manifesto that said that they would reduce spending on social security, but the review will substantially increase such spending, and that new Labour would be wise spenders, not big spenders, but the review totally fails to control spending.
The image that the Government present is that we can achieve the improvements that we want in health, education and every other area without having to dig deeper into our pockets for taxation, but history shows that that just does not happen. If the Government are to spend more money, it will inevitably come from higher taxes and higher interest rates—binge now and bill later.
As every commentator has pointed out, the public spending review is based on the assumption that there will be continuing high rates of growth. I do not know where Ministers have been recently, but, as a member of the Trade and Industry Committee, I have been out visiting businesses up and down the country and talking to business men. Ministers may not have noticed, but I should have thought that the hon. Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham) would tell the House that there is already recession in large parts of the United Kingdom—for example, in manufacturing industry in the west midlands.
The high level of sterling has made life extremely difficult for exporters and for other sectors of the economy. The idea that we shall have high economic growth on the most optimistic figures that will continue year on year is a pipe-dream, but we do not have to look far for Labour party pipe-dreams. Before the general election, we were told of two early pledges. We now learn that the word "early" means not that they will be delivered early, but that they were made before other pledges. How much can one trust a party that plays that sort of word game?
Two impressions were given to my constituents and to people up and down the country. The first was that class sizes in primary schools could be reduced to 30 or below by abolishing the assisted places scheme. That has clearly been shown to be nonsense, hence the rush to give the impression that extra money is being given to education. The second was that national health service waiting lists could be reduced by 100,000 by removing general practitioner fundholders and some of the administration that goes with that. That has been shown to be bunkum, as waiting lists have increased substantially.
My constituents are being conned, because the impression is being given that health and education are receiving a bonanza in new spending, but the rise in NHS spending is only little more than is needed to maintain existing standards of provision. There has been quite a lot of triple counting and taking no account of inflation. As this Parliament proceeds, there will be increasing pressures in health and education as people begin to appreciate that the amount of money put into those two services is not as great as the Government spin to us and would have us believe.
What is especially significant is that those two areas are dependent on the people who work in them. Nowhere in this spending review has any proper account been given to how to deal with public sector pay, except to say that public sector pay review bodies will have to have regard

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to spending targets. I will make another prediction that, between now and the next general election, as their growth targets are not met, we will see the Government seeking to meet the shortfall in health and education spending, by putting the squeeze on those who work in health and education. That will be dispiriting for them.
When all the froth of the public spending review is settled and people have really had a chance to look carefully at the figures, they will see that many people are in danger of simultaneously being conned and ripped off. Conservative Members are determined to ensure over the coming months and years that people appreciate the extent to which they are in danger of being conned and just how much they are ripped off. We will ensure that, at the next general election, people really appreciate that the Government have sold out on the economic management of this country in a way that is greatly to the detriment of every citizen in our land.
8.1 pm
Ms Rosie Winterton: I am glad to have an opportunity to speak because I want to reflect the widespread support felt in my constituency for the Chancellor's statement on Tuesday. That support comes because of the clear commitment to invest in public services. My constituency is in the heart of South Yorkshire and has suffered from years of decline in the coal, steel and railway industries and from years of undermining of public services by the previous Government.
As we all know, massive industrial decline leads to poverty and social exclusion. Providing a decent education for young people is vital if we are to give them any hope of overcoming the problems that go along with industrial decline. That is why the extra resources announced in the last Budget were so welcome. It meant that £5 million went to schools in the Doncaster area. That put into reverse years of cuts and years of reductions in teacher places. Schools were able to pull themselves out of the crisis that had been created by the nursery voucher scheme. When we put the money available then together with the money announced on Tuesday, it will make a real difference to so many young people in my constituency.
The regeneration of an area such as Doncaster depends on good public transport. Put simply, many of my constituents cannot afford a car and depend on public transport to get to work. About 40 per cent. of them do not have access to a car and investment in public transport Is vital for them. The Government have already given the go-ahead for a new transport interchange in Doncaster, but the announcement of a further £1.7 billion to invest in public transport will improve the employability of many people in my area and will provide much-needed jobs.
My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) talked about the need for accountability in housing associations. We also need to ensure that we have accountability in the provision of bus services, which are important in my area if people are to get to work. Services need to be planned and dependable, and there needs to be accountability. At the moment, companies often withdraw services without any consultation with local people and that can put jobs in danger because people cannot always get to their workplace.
I know that many hon. Members have talked about housing, and I want to touch on that. The announcement of a further investment of £3.6 billion to improve council
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housing stock has been greatly appreciated in my area. Nothing better illustrates the Chancellor's principle of money in return for modernisation than housing. The release of capital receipts that has already taken place has meant that we have been able to rewire 503 properties in the Doncaster area. A total of 834 properties will have central heating installed, and 571 will have double glazing put in. That means that more than 2,000 properties will be modernised, and 2,000 families will have their lives directly improved by the actions of this Government. Also, as those properties are handed on to others, the effect will become more widespread.
There is more to be done. We have a housing stock of 29,000 of which more than 7,000 still have no central heating, more than 500 still have outside lavatories, nearly 18,500 need rewiring and nearly 25,000 do not have double glazing. We must give emphasis to modernising housing because we all know that poor housing leads to poor health. Rundown estates suffer high levels of crime and drug problems, as was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham). People give up hope and opt out of society. Whole estates can become isolated and those who live on them have no hope.
Investing in housing not only improves people's lives directly, but improves their health and provides jobs and skills training. That is why the Government's move, which will be carried out in partnership with local government, is so welcome. We are looking at how we can regenerate those areas.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr. Tipping) talked about the report of the coalfield communities task force. The task force was set up by my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister. Its report shows how important it is to co-ordinate departmental initiatives if we are properly to regenerate areas of industrial decline. Improving the housing stock leads to better health, reduced crime and more jobs. Raising educational standards and developing skills means that young people are more employable and that breaks the cycle of despair that has been only too prevalent in my constituency over the past 18 years.
The Chancellor's statement on Tuesday was important because it recognised the importance of integrating all the different areas of Government responsibility and how we can bring about regeneration through Government action. It was not a piecemeal approach. It put the pieces of the jigsaw together and the picture it presented was one of a much brighter future for many people in my area who have suffered for too long. That is why I welcome the statement and why it has been so welcome in my constituency.
8.9 pm
Dr. Vincent Cable: There has been much discussion of the comprehensive spending review's arithmetic. I should like to return to some of the issues that were raised helpfully and lucidly by the right hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor). They are what could be called the chapter 4 issues relating to public sector management.
In many respects, the Government's contribution in that area has been positive in the paper and more generally. In some areas, we strongly endorse their actions; the first of those endorsements is for the adoption of fiscal

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responsibility targets. The Government have committed themselves to fiscal objectives that may ultimately prove embarrassing for them, but the fact that they have openly accepted them is credible and sensible.
There are good examples in the document of inter-departmentalism. Chapter 21, which has not so far been mentioned, deals with the way in which children's concerns will be meshed across Departments. That is exemplary. At this stage, it is rhetoric rather than delivery, but the principles are good. Such positive thinking is taking place on the problem of domestic violence. The third and most positive aspect is that the Government have adopted medium-term financial planning in the public sector.
I used to prepare comprehensive spending plans for the private sector, and it was often difficult to persuade colleagues that it was desirable to escape from the constraints of the short term. People said that, as the future could not predicted, we should not make plans. The result was living from hand to mouth with spurts of expenditure at the end of each financial year and massive inefficiency. It is good practice in the private and public sector to have the kind of medium-term planning that the Government have introduced.
In some ways, success is likely to be marred by two failures. The first of those is excessive secrecy and the other, which is more important and has not been discussed, is over-centralisation. My hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) spoke about secrecy in the context of the democratic principle. There have been good examples of consultation, one of which was the Independent Schools Information Service paper, where public consultation led to response and improved policy. In this debate, we are dealing with an issue on a vastly greater scale that has simply sprung out of the Government machine and been presented as a final product. That is not a good way to conduct public business.
As a result of such introverted decision making, the Government have created for themselves more problems than are necessary. For example, the credibility of the comprehensive spending review depends on a single-line Government forecast of the future. There was no reason for the Government to box themselves in like that. If inflation or output are worse than expected, the Government's programme will be difficult to sustain. One way of dealing with the public would be to discuss, in a spirit of open government, the logic of some of the future scenarios and possibilities. That happens in good public and private sector organisations. The Government could rehearse some of the problems that may arise if there is higher inflation or lower output. They could state how they would deal with it, whether through taxation, borrowing or by reduced expenditure.
We have been pressing the Government to make it clear that the spending targets are inflation-proof and recession-proof. Of course we want them to be, but it is right to be clear about whether that is implied in the review. It is essential that those who will work with the public expenditure figures should be clear about the assumptions on which they are based. Secrecy does not help the process, and it is unnecessary and damaging.
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In terms of centralisation, the Government have drawn many of their ideas about public sector contracts from New Zealand. We welcome that and, indeed, advocated it because New Zealand is a good model. There are many useful lessons, but New Zealand is a different country. It not only has more open government but is small. It is smaller than Scotland or London and in a country such as Britain it is important for public sector management to be much more decentralised.
Most of us who deal with councils are aware of the problems that will arise because of the relationship between a centralised system of public sector contracts and a highly constrained, capped local council. I have a vision of how the system will be driven. Bright, young people, probably technocrats, in the Treasury will set broad targets rather like those that are set by inspecteurs de finance in France. They will be set at the top with little participation from the grass roots. I shall give a few examples of how that top-down system of public sector planning goes wrong.
I am sure that hon. Members have experience, as I have, of a council that takes education seriously and tries to raise its game and meet or exceed the Government's objectives. The council hits capping limits and tries to draw resources from other parts of its budget such as social services. Because that budget has been drawn down, the problems of bed blocking in the local hospital are increased. The Government's answer is to point to the section in the review that says that social services and the health service will pool and co-ordinate resources. However, while councils are constrained by tough capping limits, it will be impossible to build in such flexibility.
The other problem with over-centralisation is that all the output targets, which sound plausible in conceptual terms, become crude when applied locally. We favour moving away from the idea of a public sector that is driven by inputs of money to one that thinks about service output. However, that must be considered locally in a way that responds to the market and the local environment. I shall give one or two local examples of what goes wrong when centralised targets are used as the basis for public sector planning.
To improve their standard assessment test ratings, many schools are increasing school exclusions. School performance is improved because people are driven by targets, and the troublemakers are put out on the streets. That is understandable, but kids on the streets get into petty crime and that fouls up the local police performance targets. The police make arrests, clear up the problem and the kids go into a young offenders institution. The school and the police are happy, but the kids may be learning a life of crime. In my area, an institution that was doing valuable preventive work was closed. It worked with families and tried to stop the problems that lead to social exclusion in the first place. Because the output of such institutions cannot be measured and because they are not high priority bits of the bureaucracy they are being cut.
Exactly the same is happening in the health service as a result of top-down, centralised directives. We all support the objective of cutting waiting lists. Sometimes, there are directives from the regions or from the Secretary of State to hospital trust managers to cut waiting lists. The careers of those people will be impaired if they do not succeed, so they shuffle the pack and acute cases are pushed further

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down the line. The funding for local family planning clinics, which have a low priority and no measurable output, may be cut instead.
The underlying problem in public sector management is over-centralisation and targets driven from the top. Such problems were extreme in the Soviet Union, but they have been produced even in this democratic, market society. The Government must think more clearly about how the management of the public sector—many of their ideas are admirable—is to be decentralised.
The right hon. Member for South Norfolk hit on a valuable point when he spoke about the growing difficulties of the public sector labour force. There is particular experience of that in London. I think that the hon. Member for Dagenham (Ms Church), who is Chairman of the Select Committee on Education and Employment, produced some devastating figures on the shortage of teachers in London. There are growing problems over the shortage of nursing staff because nurses are being attracted to much more lucrative occupations.
Over the past few days, I have discovered that there is an acute, chronic recruitment crisis in the police force. That can be met only by recognising that the labour market in the public sector operates in different ways throughout the country. There has to be flexibility. The system must be decentralised. Different occupations and different regions have to be able to offer different returns. As long as public sector pay, as well as other sectors of public sector management, are driven from the top and are over-centralised, the system is simply not going to work.
8.19 pm
Mr. Keith Darvill: I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends and the Government on the comprehensive spending review, and on the emphasis on raising standards in schools, rebuilding the NHS, improving public transport and tackling crime. I am tempted to say that those are the people's priorities. They are certainly my constituents' priorities, and were the priorities on which I campaigned in the general election.
I believe that the priorities are right and are what the electorate voted for in May 1997. They have been planned and introduced in the review soundly and, yes, prudently. By announcing three-year spending plans, agencies that are involved in delivering public services can plan to improve those services—a more sensible approach than hitherto—and aim to deliver the modernisation that is required.
There have, of course, been many notable achievements by the Government in the first 15 months. Notwithstanding those achievements, one of the outstanding aspects of the Government and their policies is that they are laying down firm foundations for the future. Their policies are for the medium and long term, in stark contrast with the Conservative party, which was almost entirely short-termist when in government, to the detriment of us all. In fact, the only long-term aspect about it was its 18 years in power—18 wasted years.
How good it is to have a Government who will deliver improved public services and are delivering on their manifesto pledges, providing much-needed resources and addressing infrastructure requirements. However, while heaping praise on the Government, I should like to express a concern that derives from my experience as a new Member and from the close observation of the
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circumstances of a sizeable minority of my constituents. The one concern that I have is in relation to social housing; it is shared by my hon. Friends the Members for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) and for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton).
What I am about to say is not a special constituency plea, although I will not object, of course, to any particular help being given to my constituents. I raise the issue because I believe that it is important throughout the nation. It has got out of hand largely because of policies that were pursued by the Opposition when they were in government. We must start to address it urgently.
I recognise that the Government will provide extra investment of £3.6 billion to begin to tackle the backlog of investment in council housing inherited from the previous Government. More than 1.5 million council houses will, I read, benefit from that additional investment. I welcome those additional resources as well as the housing inspectorate, and the obligations on local councils to account for their investment decisions, and to give tenants more say in how their homes are managed and maintained. However, my concern is that those welcome measures may not go far enough. If the problems that undoubtedly exist are not dealt with, other public expenditure may be required which could, if the right decisions are made now, be avoided.
Upminster has more than 6,300 local authority houses. More than 90 per cent. of them were built immediately after the second world war, largely in Harold Hill, a London overspill estate that was planned and built cheaply by London county council. Many of the houses are now privately owned—about 60 per cent. of the original stock has been sold under the right-to-buy scheme, leaving the council with a depleted stock with which to address social needs. There is only minimal provision from housing associations.
More than 2,000 people are on the London borough of Havering housing waiting list for transfers and accommodation, usually because of growing families. About half of those on the waiting list are my constituents, and the others are shared between my hon. Friends the Members for Hornchurch (Mr. Cryer) and for Romford (Mrs. Gordon). Of the issues that are referred to me in my advice surgeries, approximately 60 per cent. are housing related. Most of the issues of social exclusion, crime and poor health have at their root inadequate housing. I have no doubt about the need to improve social housing stock.
For far too long, the links between poor housing and poor health have not been not officially recognised. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health said last year in a speech to the London Housing Federation:
"anyone with a shred of common sense knows that housing affects people's health".
Housing conditions affect both mental and physical health. Dampness, condensation, cold housing, mineral fibres, carbon monoxide from gas appliances, infestation and poor layout and design all contribute to poor health. In the UK, an estimated 1.6 million homes—one in 14—are officially unfit for human habitation.
Recent research referred to in the July edition of London Age, the magazine of Age Concern in London, and undertaken in the London borough of Hackney provides very good evidence of that. It showed that improvements in a particular housing estate in that borough resulted in residents making 30 per cent. Fewer

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visits to general practitioner surgeries and in more than 20 per cent. fewer attendances at hospital out-patient departments. On a Stepney estate, more than 60 per cent. of residents considered their illness to be housing related.
It is estimated that 169,000 households in London are overcrowded. Much of the housing stock is also old, with 65 per cent. of houses built before 1945. London has the highest figures for homelessness, continually escalating social housing waiting lists and an increasing number of old people living alone. There is also proportionately less residential care than elsewhere in the UK, yet investment in the capital's social housing is rapidly decreasing. The London housing survey suggests that there are more than 99,000 households in which older or disabled persons require some form of adaptation to their property.
Apart from health and social exclusion, the consequences of inadequate housing go further. It is obvious from crime statistics that poor housing often leads to increasing crime rates and, obviously, an adverse knock-on effect on public expenditure. The launch of the new regeneration package to tackle the multiple problems of the most deprived areas will help, but I am unsure whether the new focused single regeneration budget will reach areas such as Harold Hill where it is needed most. If areas such as those that I have described do not benefit from the SRB and do not receive a sufficient share of housing investment, I foresee difficulties and, indeed, an adverse effect on public expenditure.
I warmly welcome the comprehensive spending review, but I felt it right to flag up, with my hon. Friends, the concerns that I genuinely hold, in the hope that further consideration will be given to those issues. If long-term investment is made in housing, it will have positive benefits for other sectors of public expenditure. Therefore, I am sure that it will be worth while not only for those who directly benefit, but, in the long term, for all taxpayers.
8.27 pm
Mr. John Swinney: In many ways, I welcome the direction of the Chancellor's statement on Tuesday. I should like to concentrate on the impact of his announcements on Scotland, and to raise several issues consequent on the announcements by the Secretary of State for Scotland on the impact of the comprehensive spending review on Scotland.
May I begin with some compliments for the Government. I am sure that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury will be horrified to hear that, but I assure her that it will not last for the entirety of my speech. First, I compliment the Government on the three-year spending plans. They will give some stability to planning and allow an eye to the medium term in programme development for a variety of Government Departments. Local authorities will be able to see over the medium term the impact of the Government's financial settlement, which has a substantial bearing on the income of local authorities. However, issues are raised by three-year spending plans and commitments. Many indicators need to remain on track for Departments and local authorities to gain the full value of those three-year spending commitments.
There is a need for some protection against unexpected or higher than expected inflation. Some guarantees should be given to protect the hopes that have been raised by
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this spending settlement, a point that was raised by the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) in his contribution. Perhaps it should lead to an increasing emphasis on building a reserve to ensure some protection against the benefits of the spending plans being undermined if inflation were higher than expected.
Obviously, a heavy caveat to the settlement is the controlling of public sector pay. Investment in health and education is welcome, but for it to be effective, the nurses and teachers who are the backbone of our health and education systems must share the benefits. I am concerned that the programme may be based on an element of pay constraint, which will further undermine the confidence of public sector employees.
The final point that must be borne in mind about the three-year plan is the basic condition of the economy. Failure to deliver the economic growth implicit in the assumptions behind the comprehensive spending review will undoubtedly lead to pressure on the package of proposals. Higher interest rates, a more severe impact on our economy as a result of the Asian financial crisis and the impact of the strong pound could all undermine economic conditions. A fall in tax revenues and an increase in the benefits bill will put pressure on those welcome public expenditure statements.
My second compliment to the Government is on the direction of the additional public expenditure that has been made available. On education, the Scottish National party supported the commitment to provide a nursery place for all three-year-olds in Scotland during the 1997 general election. We welcome the appointment of up to 5,000 classroom assistants to assist in developing standards in our schools. However, much of the explanation of the announcements given by the Scottish Office depends on the application of a better adult-to-child ratio in our schools, which is somewhat different from the pupil-to-teacher ratio that we had tended to consider. However, if the proposal can succeed in raising standards in our schools, it is to be welcomed.
The commitments on health expenditure to reduce waiting lists guarantee that the pressure will be on to ensure that the Government's pre-election commitments are honoured during their term of office. Like other hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Upminster (Mr. Darvill), I think that the commitments on housing expenditure are important because of the desperate amount of work required in that sector. In many Scottish authorities, it is predicated on the volume of housing debt carried, from which it is difficult to escape.
Undoubtedly, the new spending is welcome, but it must be put in the context of what has happened to public expenditure in Scotland in recent years. We have had four consecutive years of real-terms cuts—two under the Conservatives and two under new Labour. Clearly, the public voted for a renaissance of public services in the general election last year. It has taken some time for that to be forthcoming from the Government. It will start in April 1999, at the beginning of the next financial year, when all the commitments will come into effect. Of course, the Scottish Parliament will be elected in May 1999, so we shall have to await the impact of the proposals on the electoral fortunes of our various parties in those elections. The key is that public services have declined in the past four years in Scotland as well as in other parts of the United

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Kingdom. The Chancellor has recognised the need to invest in those public services—and the fact that investment was unavoidable.
I have a couple of concerns about the Government's announcement within the context of the past four years of real-terms cuts in public expenditure in Scotland. Page 109 of the White Paper on the spending review, which was issued on Tuesday, gives comparative data on departmental expenditure limits in real terms from 1993–94 to 2001–02. In that period, Scottish public expenditure reached a high point of £13.8 billion in 1994–95 and a low point in the present financial year of £12.7 billion. In the next three financial years of the comprehensive spending review, it will climb to £13.1 billion, £13.4 billion and £13.6 billion. Even by the end of the period covered by the review, 2001–02, Scottish public expenditure will still be £200 million lower than it was in 1994–95 in real terms, when Ian Lang was Secretary of State for Scotland.
When I checked through the parliamentary record of the announcement of the 1994–95 public expenditure settlement in Scotland, I was amused to find that the opening words of the right hon. Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Robertson), who is now Secretary of State for Defence, but who was at the Dispatch Box opposite Ian Lang then, were:
"When we look behind the figures, expose the creative accountancy and blow away the blizzard of hype, the truth is a whole lot different and much nastier."—[Official Report, 8 December 1993; Vol. 234, c. 313.]
We have heard many such sentiments from the Conservatives about the creative accountancy of this settlement, which shows that that can be said by both sides of the House.
I must also compare the Scottish Office departmental expenditure limit with the total limits for the United Kingdom. The Scottish Office level in the table was 7.97 per cent. of the UK total in 1994–95. In the following year, it rose to 8.04 per cent., but in every year since, it has fallen. At present, it stands at 7.74 per cent., next year it will fall to 7.71 per cent., and in following years to 7.63 per cent. and then to 7.53 per cent. in 2001–02. Year by year, Scottish Office public expenditure is steadily eroded in comparison with the total for the United Kingdom. I assume that that is due to the impact of the rigorous application of the Barnett formula, which is often misrepresented in the House. As we all know, rather than being beneficial, it is an expenditure-reducing formula in Scotland and it is population driven, but the Economic Secretary may want to say something about that in her reply.
I can offer the new spending a straightforward welcome because it is welcome in our public services, but we must acknowledge that the Government, in making difficult decisions, have come to conclusions about public services in Scotland that may not all be beneficial. First, the budget available in the Scottish Office to support industry and enterprise will be cut in real terms next year by £56 million or 9 per cent. At a time of rising unemployment, when business confidence is uncertain, I am far from sure that such a cut in enterprise support is appropriate.
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An article in The Scotsman on Monday by Jeremy Peat, the chief economist of the Royal Bank of Scotland, assessed where the manufacturing sector, which is fundamental to the Scottish economy, is. He writes:
"The total economic picture is the sum of disparate parts. For the 20 per cent. plus of the economy that is represented by manufacturing, the picture is clear. After many moons of expecting major problems, as a result of strong sterling, Asian chaos and the like, these are now with us. Whether you take historic official data or forward looking survey data from the CBI or chambers of commerce; whether you look at the domestic scene or exports, output or orders, the trends are stagnant at best and downwards overall."
If that is the assessment of one of the foremost economists in Scotland of the economy there, I wonder about the wisdom of cutting the budget for industry and enterprise.
When a 15 per cent. cut in that budget was rumoured in 1995–96, under the Conservatives—it transpired to be 7.5 per cent.—the hon. Member for Dumbarton (Mr. McFall), who was a Labour spokesman at the time, asked:
"how can we deliver economic prosperity, jobs, and training with such a savage cut? It can't be done."
I was reminded of those sentiments today.
My second concern is the impact on the agriculture budget of a 10 per cent. cut in real terms. I suspect that the cut is due to the BSE factor. We will need to look into other concerns in detail, such as hill livestock compensatory allowances. I see a member of the Select Committee on Agriculture, the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd), on the Labour Benches. As we all appreciate, the rural economy, which is integral to my constituency, has suffered immensely in recent years.
I welcome the investment in public services, but we must recognise that we need to invest in people as well as in services. The introduction of independent review bodies to regulate public sector pay was welcomed by all parties; the Labour party used to attack any restraint on their recommendations.
In Scotland, one in 10 employees operate in the public sector. In the past year, pay increases have, on average, been 2.6 per cent. in the public sector, whereas they have been 5.6 per cent. in the private sector. However, the Prime Minister's comments on the obligations of the pay review bodies—that they must operate on a basis that is fair, affordable and within Government spending limits—mean, I suspect, that the bodies' independence will be constrained; that is also what I infer from the Chancellor's statement on Tuesday. I fear that the bodies will be limited in their ability to reward public sector workers for the important tasks that they do.
I reiterate that the new money that is being invested in public services is welcome. In the past few days, commentators and journalists have done the public a great service by probing the Government's largesse and dismantling the cumulative expenditure totals to try to explain the phenomenally large telephone-number increases that the Government have suggested. I believe that we are, especially in this debate, getting to the nub of the real impact of the spending. However, there is a real-terms increase, which is welcome in some key areas.
As I said, I am concerned that Scottish departmental expenditure will not reach its level under the Conservative Government. The settlement has been made possible by cuts in public services, and I fear that those cuts will undermine our economic base. Time will tell whether the statement represents a success.
8.41 pm
Mrs. Helen Brinton: Most hon. Members—certainly all Labour Members—and many more people in the country will have welcomed the Chancellor's spending announcements on Tuesday, which contained generous resources for health and education. That is excellent news for my constituents. I particularly welcome the allocation of £3.6 billion to renovate 1.5 million homes, and the new programme for home energy efficiency.
However—this is a gentle nudge to the Front Bench—I look forward to hearing more from the Chancellor about what we are assured is the Government's commitment to the environment. I am sure that the House is aware that both the first and second reports of the Environmental Audit Committee, of which I am a member, praised current excellent progress, but urged greater speed in fulfilling the Government's pledge to put the environment at the heart of policy making. Yes, a large boost for transport has set us on the right road. Moreover, home energy efficiency will play an important role in achieving sustainable development, not only in environment protection and improvement.
Two other strands of sustainable development will also be promoted by home energy efficiency: the economic strand and the social strand. On the economic strand, jobs will be created and household budgets will be eased, which is especially important for people on very low incomes—such as those in parts of my constituency—and for those who are more confined to their homes, such as disabled people and elderly people. The social dimension will also be enhanced, as homes become warmer, healthier and more pleasurable places in which to live, rather than merely to exist.
Energy efficiency is only part of the story, however. To achieve the development we want, we must not only reduce the use of non-sustainable forms of energy, but promote the development and use of renewable forms. Financial measures are necessary to encourage not only efficiency, but renewables. Last autumn, as hon. Members may recall, I asked the Prime Minister to make a statement on Government policy on solar energy.
I welcomed the announcement of the United Kingdom target that 10 per cent. of our electricity needs would be met from renewables by 2010. According to the most recent figures that I have seen, however, only 0.7 per cent. of our needs are met by renewables, which is the lowest percentage in Europe. Friends of the Earth has estimated that 18 per cent. is a realistic target.
I look forward to the Green Paper on renewable energy, which is due to be published shortly. I understand from a recent parliamentary answer by my hon. Friend the Minister for Science, Energy and Industry that the Department of Trade and Industry is considering what support the Government could give to encourage the development of all forms of renewable energy, including solar power. Believe it or not, the United Kingdom has a significant solar energy resource.
Like hon. Members from, I am sure, both sides of the House, my concern is that we may do too little, too late. In Britain, we have not only enough sun—given the weather during the past couple of weeks, that may be difficult to believe—but the expertise, and industry now has major opportunities. We lead the world in combined heat and power; we could lead in solar power
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Business in solar energy is booming worldwide but, while other countries—including the United States, Japan and Germany—are busy priming the pump, we are in danger of missing out, not least in jobs and exports. Solar energy will be particularly important in currently underdeveloped regions where there is no access to a national grid.
Moreover, consumers are paying more than they need for energy; as I read recently, it is already cheaper to heat a house with solar power than with gas—if householders generate excess solar power, they can sell it back to the grid. Local grid systems are an attractive option, which would increase local accountability. By failing sufficiently to exploit solar power, we are losing out on a major way in which to meet our renewable energy targets—up to a third of our needs could be provided by solar energy.
The Government could adopt a variety of measures to encourage the development of renewables, especially solar energy. However, investment will be essential, and time is not infinite. We all sign up to wanting a healthy environment. In the comprehensive spending review, the Government have made an excellent start in creating one, with resources for transport and home energy efficiency. I look forward to—indeed, I expect—further progress along the lines that I have suggested. If the Government—any Government—invest in the environment, they not only protect the present, but safeguard the future, which is what I believe we all want.
8.47 pm
Mr. Andrew Tyrie: I welcome some of the spending increases, especially those on the health service, which was, after all, a Conservative priority for 18 years—spending increased steadily throughout our period in office. I have strong doubts about the affordability of the Chancellor's announcement, but I shall not dwell too much on that; I want instead to talk about the economic credibility of the economic numbers that lie behind the spending forecast.
That credibility depends on two things: first, whether the economy performs as the Chancellor hopes it will; and, secondly, the plausibility of the arithmetic that the Treasury has used to derive the detailed tax and spending numbers. The forecast is optimistic to say the least. It predicts growth falling to 1.75 per cent. and then going back to trend and running at 2.25 per cent. in subsequent years; steady unemployment, when all the indications are that it will rise, with added costs; and inflation steady at 2.5 per cent. The forecast suggests a very soft landing. The Government have made very little provision for the eventuality of a downturn. They are spending money before they have it.
The contingency reserve, at just over 1.4 per cent. of general Government expenditure, is far smaller than the reserve set for the outer years by any of the previous six Chancellors; in fact, it is less than half the average that they provided. I have asked the Library to check whether it is the lowest reserve for the outer years since Denis Healey's first Budget, and I think that the answer will be yes.
The forecast ignores the business cycle: the Government talk as though they have abolished it, with their references to an end to boom and bust, but of course they have not. The cycle certainly continues to exist, and may well come back to bite Labour. When I asked the

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Chief Secretary a few weeks ago whether Britain was in an upswing or a downswing or at a turning point, he had no idea. Far too little consideration is being given to the effects of the cycle. We need to examine the cyclically adjusted level of spending to determine whether the plans are affordable.
To give the forecast an air of respectability, the Government have asked the National Audit Office to comment on some of the assumptions. That sounds like a good idea, and some people, including myself, have argued for it for several years, but we should not be deceived: the NAO is merely being asked to look at a few assumptions behind the forecast, and has no remit to look at the forecast itself. For example, it does not analyse what a change of, say, 0.5 per cent. in nominal gross domestic product might do for spending and unemployment, or whether the Government have calculated roughly the right figure for it.
At present, the NAO is not even remotely equipped to try to take on such work. It is not an economic forecasting service, and it is not experienced in the field. No wonder it has come up with little more than vague phrases in its reports. It says that the assumptions are
"broadly consistent with past relationships"
or
"reconcilable with the available evidence",
and no more. That does not lend any credibility to the forecast.
If anyone is in any doubt that the NAO is merely scratching the surface of the job of vetting the forecast, it is worth looking at what resources it is employing to do the job. I asked the Comptroller and Auditor General that question in a Select Committee recently, and he told me that it was spending between £20,000 and £30,000. A fortnight ago, I asked him what resources he would need to do a proper job of vetting the forecast and examining the Treasury's arithmetic behind the assumptions. He will write to me with the answer, but he made it clear that it would be many times the resources that he employs now.
Doing a proper job means doing some of the work that the Treasury undertakes at present, so a fortnight ago I asked the Economic Secretary how much the Treasury spends on that. The answer is nearly £500,000. I have been in touch with the Bundesbank, which vets the German Government's fiscal forecast, and gives its views internally, with the president of the bank sitting in on German Cabinet meetings. The bank spends between DM1.5 million and DM2 million—a little bit more than the Treasury spends—on the task. I asked a consultancy firm, London Economics, what resources it would want to employ to do a proper job of vetting the forecast, and it said that it would take many hundreds of thousands of pounds.
If the NAO is to be prayed in aid to make the Treasury figures look respectable, it needs to be given a much wider remit, and the resources to do the job well. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that we can have an end to all the nonsense that we have been hearing from the Government about the forecast being somehow beyond reproach because the NAO examines it.
Only yesterday, the Prime Minister, in what I consider a disgraceful fashion, went as far as saying that the economic forecasts "have been agreed" by the NAO. That is complete nonsense. The NAO has been asked to
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examine not the forecast itself but only the assumptions that lie behind it, and it has never alleged otherwise. It has also never said that the forecasts were "careful and cautious", as the Prime Minister said. That is shameful nonsense from the Prime Minister.
If the NAO got to work on the detailed numbers, it might uncover quite a lot. For example, it might challenge the credibility of the golden rule, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Sir M. Spicer) said, has been comprehensively rubbished by Willem Buiter, the Government's own appointee to the Monetary Policy Committee.
The House may be interested to learn that the definition of the golden rule has been the subject of a Supreme Court case in Germany, which forced the Government to make more effort to define what it meant. Apparently, the court concluded that the concept was too vague for the Government ever to be accused of breaking it. That tells us something about its credibility. The German Government have now come up with a more detailed definition, but still very few commentators in Germany take it seriously. A senior member of the Bundesbank recently described it to me as completely meaningless.
I would not mind all this hogwash from the Chancellor and the Prime Minister about auditing the accounts, if they described it as making a start, and if they were making a real bid to bring more transparency to the Government's accounts; but that is not what was in the statement.
When it comes to transparency, the spending review document is inexcusable. The Government have hidden the true treatment of the increases in social security spending in an annexe, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) pointed out.
Several definitions have been altered without proper explanation. A most basic definition, general Government expenditure—it sits in importance alongside the control total, which my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) was talking about earlier—has lain at the heart of Government accounts for a long time, but now we have to grapple with a new concept: total managed expenditure.
Does anyone—the Economic Secretary, perhaps—know the difference between the two numbers? Can she tell me now? Can someone from the Box tell her? I cannot find the answer in the Government's publication; it may be hidden there somewhere, but I have not been able to find it in the past 48 hours. I note that no one is rising to answer my questions. Far from enjoying increased transparency on these crucial numbers, we now have to peer through a fog of changed definitions.
We might be at a defining moment in this Parliament. In the past few weeks, the air of moral superiority has been dealt quite a blow by allegations of cronyism. In the past few days, a big divide has opened up between the parties on tax and spend. We on this side of the House believe in affordable spending and lower taxation. On the other side, they believe in higher and higher spending.
Labour has now rolled the dice. A recession may come before the election or after it, but there will be no going back to what amounts to the beginnings of a spending binge. Quite the opposite: spending Ministers will want more before long. The puny reserve that I described earlier will shortly be exhausted, and, with cash limits also swept away, Departments will not even try to absorb inflation. They will just bid for more if inflation rises.

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This week may also be a defining moment in a political sense. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is staking a claim to lead old Labour. Perhaps his announcements on eye testing and his references to Nye Bevan had something to do with that. His was a rallying call to all those on the Government Benches who find the crony-ridden behaviour of the modernisers somewhat distasteful. It was a call to those who have never been wholly comfortable with the apparatchiks who surround Tony Blair. If the statement was partly the Chancellor's bid for the soul of his party, it was also a gamble on the economy and with our public services—a gamble he need not and should not have taken. I think that he will probably regret it.
8.59 pm
Mr. Mark Todd: I want to confine my remarks to a dry subject—the methodology of reviewing and controlling public expenditure, rather than the outcome itself. That is partly because, like the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), I made my way in the private sector, in a smaller way than he, doing that task.
I spent some time in the early stages of the comprehensive spending review attempting to establish a framework for how that review would operate, at least in my own mind, and seeking—and being courteously treated by Ministers—to get those messages across to the Government. I want to share some of those thoughts with the House this evening.
First, it is critical in a review of this kind to establish clear, demanding targets for the review process. I fear that in this particular case that has been lacking and I commented on it right at the start. Secondly, it is important to define the assumptions and forecasts on which the review will be based. This debate has shown how some of the issues around those assumptions and forecasts might be questioned. Thirdly, it is necessary to decide on the criteria for the process: what is in, what is out and what the fundamental guiding philosophies are of the process itself. The Government ran into difficulty with this at an early stage and fortunately corrected it, for example, on issues relating to charging for visits to doctors and speculation along those lines.
It is necessary to establish clear leadership and decision-making processes for the review. The Government succeeded in that in the end. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer clearly owned the task of ensuring that the outcome was delivered and that was critical. There needs to be a clear division of the activities of Departments into programmes and processes—the things that are spent and the ways in which that spending is supported. It is necessary to analyse those processes into shared processes that run across more than one Department and common processes which are individual to each Department but identical in each place. It is necessary to look at the customer and client base—the people who are to be served through the services and programmes defined—and to decide whether some are impacted in several different ways by different programmes and different processes, and whether there is a need for coherence. Again, the Government's initiative to identify a range of programmes that clearly fit the bill precisely is to be welcomed. They include attention to asylum seekers and dealing with children in care.
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It is necessary to establish joint teams on the shared processes between Departments. I met with considerable resistance there on the understandable grounds of the need to protect departmental independence in the review of spending decisions. I shall briefly return to that later. It is necessary to establish joint teams on the programmes serving the same customers and that has been done. There are several initiatives of that kind—I should have liked to see more—which are welcome and look as if they will deliver substantial gains.
It is necessary to use the people who are closest to the customers and taxpayers who are being served. I have always believed it fatal to delegate a task of this kind to a senior management team who are remote from the end result. They are often keenest to protect the hierarchies that lie between. That may have happened in some instances. It is difficult to identify people lower down the chain who can provide the expertise in serving the individuals we want to reach with the programmes.
Those people need to be empowered. It is a hard job to do that because they are remote from the hierarchy above them who are often concerned about the kind of things that they will propose in terms of spending reviews.
Finally, one needs to establish clear ways to monitor the outcomes and criteria for deciding on the success of those outcomes. Again, the Government have made good progress there, certainly greater progress than I have seen in the evidence of other spending reviews, to try to define how to test whether what one says will happen has happened and what one does about failure.
There is much to applaud, but further work needs to be done to review public spending, in the ways that I have outlined, to achieve more rigorous control of the spending process.
Deferring to Departments to manage their own reviews will fail to identify all the key shared points of process and programmes. Expertise and commitment is unevenly spread between Departments, and it is particularly critical that non-core bureaucracy identifies opportunities for savings. It is easy to dismiss bureaucrats as being unhelpful and a waste of resources, but they are critical to the process, and how to motivate those individuals to deliver what is needed is an important task in establishing a review.
Respect for departmental primacy seems curious when we are so free with the mergers and demergers of Departments. After all, the processes that serve our citizens last a lot longer than the departmental structures that we chose to impose upon them.
Information technology has been used as a mantra in this review, as it has elsewhere. IT plays a critical role, but one that must be based on rigorous and harsh adherence to basic rules. First, we have to modernise processes and review programmes based on them before buying new systems. Secondly, we need core common processes which should use core common IT systems. It is criminal to invest in new information systems when an existing package will do the job just fine with amended human processes in the Department concerned.
I have found examples of investment in new payroll systems in Departments. Payroll is a commodity process and a commodity system in IT terms and to invest in new systems, in some cases developed by an IT department within the Department itself, would be prima facie evidence to me of poor management judgment.

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We establish common methodologies for managing IT projects and we operate within a clear strategy on data, software and technology. How often in the House do we hear Ministers blame incompatible systems and data for delays in delivering programmes? I have heard that two or three times already in my brief period as a Member of the House, and I am sure that many others have heard it far more often than that.
I have concentrated purely on how reviews might work and how spending should be managed. Other hon. Members have rightly paid tribute to the achievements in terms of delivery of resources to key policy objectives. That is the goal that we all seek, but I hope that my suggestions will help us to build on what has been done.
9.7 pm
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: This evening we have seen the new Labour iron Chancellor ravaged into the old Labour poodle of his party. Every Labour Member who has spoken this evening has called for higher expenditure or welcomed these expenditure announcements. One even called it craven; they were craving for higher expenditure. Here we have it. We will hold the Government to account.
We will see whether the higher expenditure achieves its results. Will it result in lower class sizes and shorter hospital waiting lists? So far, under the Government, the number of those on hospital waiting lists for more than 12 months has doubled and, as for class sizes over 30, the number of five, six and seven-year-olds has risen by some 450,000. So far, the results are not encouraging.
We thought that new Labour was taking on some of our philosophy, and that wealth creation, small and medium enterprises, low inflation and low taxation were among their new ideas. However, the comprehensive spending review is, in truth, a comprehensive spending increase. Time after time, Labour challenges us on the level of public spending. Well, prudent economics demands that the national economy should be able to afford what we spend. We shall increasingly see that Labour's announcements are unsustainable. Interest rates will rise, borrowing will rise, inflation will rise. The economy will begin to run down.
Not everything was wonderful in the 18 years of Conservative Government. Fundamental problems remain to be addressed, such as productivity, which is 20 per cent. below that of the United States, and 30 per cent. lower than that of Germany. I expected the CSR to deal with such matters, but it did not. Every economic decision that Labour has taken since coming to power has been wrong. The Government gave monetary policy to the Bank of England, but asked it to control inflation with only one economic lever. The Bank has not been given an overall economic remit.
Had we been in control of monetary policy, we would have raised interest rates sharply after the election instead of doing it in dribs and drabs. Our two Budgets would have raised taxes. Monetary policy and fiscal policy would have been tightened a year ago, and we would not have the inflationary pressures that are affecting our economy, or pressure to raise interest rates at a time when manufacturing industry is going into recession, and when world demand is slowing down. Labour's policy will lead us into deeper recession.
Anyone who speaks to those who run manufacturing businesses will know what the Government's economic policy has done to them. Many of them have told me
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during the past couple of weeks that the last quarter has brought a sharp downturn. Interest rates are too high, resulting in a pound that is too high. Exports have dried up, and our balance of payments is rising. The picture is not good.
We cannot ignore the world macro-economic situation. The world's second largest economy, Japan, has run into general recession, and that is bound to affect our economy. First, it will weaken demand for our goods, which are difficult to export at the best of times. Secondly, as the far east recovers, huge currency devaluations of up to 40 per cent. will give a big competitive advantage to export goods coming into our markets. In reaching their assumptions, the Government have not taken into account the recession in manufacturing industry and the world economic position.
Labour has challenged us on how we would reorder spending. Total managed expenditure will rise from about £330 billion to roughly £389 billion. However, the social security budget will increase by a staggering £37 billion, to rocket through the ceiling of £100 billion for the first time. I calculate that to be £20,000 for every man and woman next year. If the Government's assumptions on unemployment or inflation are wrong, the amount will be even larger. Many benefits are linked to the retail prices index, so any increase in RPI will increase social security costs. If the assumption that unemployment will not rise is incorrect—I fear, sadly, that unemployment will rise—unemployment benefits will also go up. Here we have a comprehensive spending review that is said to be based on prudent economic assumptions, but I am not at all sure that it is.
We have watched a golden legacy inherited by the Government slowly being squandered. I want the economy to continue to perform and our country to continue being one of the world's leading manufacturing and industrial nations. I do not want us to be shackled by the bureaucracy coming out of Europe, because I want us to have a real enterprise economy. However, I am afraid that, because of the monetary and fiscal policy adopted by the Government, that will not happen.
Today, consumer demand is still very high and inflationary pressures are strong. The Government could have choked off that demand by proper and prudent fiscal and monetary policy, as I have described, but they have failed to do so. They have failed to encourage saving and the savings ratio is falling alarmingly. In the last Budget, measures were introduced to abolish PEPs and TESSAs and to replace them with the bureaucratic ISA regime. For the long term, that was not a good Budget, and this is not a good comprehensive spending review.
The Government recognise that their assumptions are not robust. At page 48 of "The Economic and Fiscal Strategy Report 1998"—the new blue book, as I call it—paragraph 4.3.7 states:
"the demand for public spending can vary unpredictably due to evolving needs and opportunities."
That is an admission that the Government are not sure that their assumptions are right. At the end of that paragraph, they add:
"However, unexpected shocks due to other influences, such as developments in the world economy, will continue to impact on the British economy."
The Government are not certain that their assumptions are robust. If growth rates are not maintained at the extremely modest levels assumed, if inflation targets are not met and

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if unemployment starts to rise, the economy will suffer a serious slow down. As has always happened with every single Labour Government of the past, the economy will be in a mess and the new incoming Conservative Government will have to sort it out and recreate the enterprise culture of the world.
9.16 pm
Mr. Tony McNulty: I congratulate the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) on having brought some passion to our proceedings. For much of the evening, and certainly during the contributions from Opposition Members, I thought that I had stumbled into an accountancy seminar at KPMG, or something just as boring. Sadly, most of what the hon. Gentleman said was arrant, albeit golden, nonsense, but at least it was delivered with a degree of passion.
It struck me as interesting that, when the right hon. Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) opened the debate—it feels like that was three days ago—he spent about half an hour ranting on, but never, unless I missed it, mentioned schools, pensions, hospitals or health; his speech was just a miserable little rant. Let me ask the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Cotswold this question: what should we cut? Do not come here with jargon about dampening this or that down—let us put it in front of the people who matter, the electorate in our constituencies, and ask them, "What, of all that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced on Tuesday, would you not do?" Would they halve the billions spent on education, or the billions spent on health? When it comes to the detail and what matters to real people, the Opposition suddenly fall quiet.
I do not want to be overly unkind. It might appear that I castigate Opposition Members, but I do this more in sorrow than in anger. What we have seen over the past couple of days is an attempt by the Conservative party to understand where we are coming from, but they do not understand the language, because they have never been here before, and it is alien to them, so it is not entirely their fault. Perhaps, as my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton) said, we should suggest a degree of therapy for them and castigate them gently, rather than in detail.
The Conservatives are not used to the language of priorities, the language of prudence, not profligacy, or the language of reform and modernisation. To be fair to them, they have not missed the plot; they never knew what the plot was in the first place.
The Conservatives do not understand the plot because it is not about stop-go, the quick fix, short-term vandalism for political expediency, splurging—as an hon. Member said earlier at Question Time—or making the poor pay, which is their usual trick. It is about the long term and more resources for modernisation throughout government, which is crucial, with reform at every stage.
There are—I do not say this glibly—59 billion solid reasons why people should be happy about all areas of public spending. Interestingly, the right hon. Member for Wells chose not to mention any of them. They include health, pensions, services for children, social services and education. We have had no substantive response and no answers from the Conservatives—just, God bless 'em,
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utter confusion. It is not spend, spend, spend; the Conservative response, rooted in that confusion, is whinge, whinge, whinge.
The Opposition's response is chaotic. We listen to one Conservative Member and the response is that the comprehensive spending review is, "An irresponsible electoral binge, and the country cannot afford it." We listen to another, and the response is, "It is not real. It is all smoke and mirrors. It is all hype." One group is saying that we are spending far too much money and the other that we are not spending money at all because there is no money. Even the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb), who bores the world with a column in Accountancy Age every month, has no idea.
Some Conservatives Members say that too much money will cause major economic difficulties, but their hon. Friends say that there is no money, so how can too much money cause economic difficulties? Some Conservatives Members say that there is not enough money and we should spend more. Depending on which radio interviews one listened to, they have probably spent another couple of hundred billion pounds in their responses since my right hon. Friend the Chancellor sat down on Tuesday. So there is no money at all, just smoke and mirrors, but the smoke and mirrors are being spent and causing inflation. How does one spend smoke and mirrors?
Opposition Members say that we are spending too much on welfare, but they never tell us which aspect of welfare spending they would cut—child benefit, pensions or disability benefits. We get no answers.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. McNulty: No, time is short, so I shall not. If the hon. Gentleman wants to tell me later what he was going to say, I will have a cup of tea with him.
At Prime Minister's Question Time, the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) could not answer—which is not unusual—when asked what cuts he would make in welfare spending.
I know that the people of Harrow, East will be listening carefully to Opposition Members. The 21 per cent. of my constituents who are on income support will be listening, but they will hear no answers. The 16 per cent. who are over retirement age will have heard nothing from the Conservatives about pensions today, yesterday or the day before. The 23 per cent. of households in my constituency that are pensioner only—a very high figure—will not have heard the Conservatives welcome a single aspect of the review.
The 21,000 people in my constituency who have a limiting long-term illness—also a significantly high figure—will benefit from our spending on health, social services and pensions, but Opposition Members have offered them nothing. What does the Conservatives' response to the comprehensive spending review offer the 22,000 carers, the 4,000 refugees and asylum seekers and the 37 per cent. ethnic minority population in my constituency? Their only response was to raise vacuity and fatuousness to an art form, not only in stereo but in triplicate or quadruple—
Mr. Leslie: It was quadrophonic.
Mr. McNulty: I thank my hon. Friend. "Quadrophenia"—I should have remembered that.

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The people of my constituency will welcome the comprehensive spending review and how it fits in with earlier pronouncements. The people of London will welcome the statement. The streets of London are not paved with gold and it is not all milk and honey. Members on both sides of the House have implied that London has had it far too good and been cosseted recently. According to the 1998 index of social deprivation, 14 of London's boroughs are in the 20 most poverty-stricken local authorities. They will benefit considerably from the comprehensive spending review. London contains some of the richest and poorest areas of the country, but far too often Members forget about the poorest. Even Harrow, which is supposedly an affluent suburban borough, has its pockets of serious relative deprivation.
Mr. Edward Davey: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. McNulty: No, I am afraid not. I have been wound up all night and now I am winding down.
I am convinced that London will receive its fair share from the comprehensive spending review and we shall see the spending and investment that both this great city and the country need. The comprehensive spending review will be a success precisely because it is rooted in modernisation and the reform of public services. It is grounded in caution, prudence and efficiency and underpinned by a sharp reality and a vision and strategy that Opposition Members cannot comprehend because they do not understand where we started from. Perhaps they will disavow that notion later.
Mr. Davey: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I agree that many people believe that London has been feather-bedded in the past, and he is correct in saying that they are wrong. Will he comment on reports that, following the comprehensive spending review, the Government are examining the additional educational needs index and standard spending assessments? The reports suggest that London will lose £200 million from school spending. Will the hon. Gentleman join me in condemning those reports and agreeing—
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Gentleman is making a mini-speech. That is quite sufficient.
Mr. McNulty: I was about to ask the hon. Gentleman to give way, but then I remembered where we were. That is another issue to discuss over a cup of tea afterwards, but I urge the hon. Gentleman not to believe all that he reads in the Evening Standard. I am afraid that I cannot take any more interventions, as I must wind down my remarks.
The Opposition simply do not understand our starting point. They do not understand what we are trying to do and they do not understand the desperate need for this comprehensive spending review. They do not understand those things because this is not about their spiv economy, with candyfloss short-term plans before each election, followed by singing in the bath with no regrets afterwards and hoping to struggle through to the next one.
The Opposition can listen for ever—they started to do that this week. They can be Billy Whizz on tour, but they will find that no one wants to speak to them. Happily, not least because of the comprehensive spending review, for Conservative Members yesterday beckons.
9.26 pm
Mr. Peter Brooke: The hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) was as colourful, vehement and Harrovian as ever. I am sorry that he was disappointed by the speeches of Conservative Members, but I think that they will stand the test of time better even than his own.
My late noble father was the first Chief Secretary to the Treasury. When Harold Macmillan offered him the job, he made it clear that he wished to offer it to someone who had run a great spending Department before. John Boyd-Carpenter, who died in the past week, was the second Chief Secretary. That tradition was not maintained for the next 30 years until my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) had the great intelligence to suggest that Mr. William Waldegrave should become Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the closing period of the last Government.
I do not hold it against the incoming Government in 1964 or the incoming Government in 1997 that they did not follow the same procedure, because it was obviously not within their power to do so, but the tradition of control of public expenditure is continuous and has some eternal verities. In reverse alphabetical order, there was continuity between Plowden and Pliatsky. In the far-off days, when Charles James Fox was the Member of Parliament for my constituency, the poet William Blake—who was not of a Conservative disposition—was his constituent. Among the latter's literary works was the "Proverbs of Hell" and, among those proverbs, is the line:
"Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by Incapacity."
I am not wholly surprised that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has retired her from his retinue. I noted another line that is not far away in the same "Proverbs of Hell". It states:
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
The sad thing about this Government is that they never needed to leave the palace of wisdom. They borrowed our policies, but they should have borrowed too from our philosophy: the past can inform and illuminate the present and the future.
In that context, I shall quote briefly from Lord Barnett's book about his time as Chief Secretary in the last Labour Government. Referring to 1974, he writes:
"We did not know at that time how often the forecasts would prove to be inaccurate. On this first occasion, the figures that proved to be disastrously wrong were company liquidity, which was vastly overstated, and the PSBR, where the margin of error turned out to be a colossal £4bn short of the real figure."
I remark parenthetically that that figure was in 1974 sterling.
"In both cases there can be little doubt that different decisions would have been reached had the forecasts been less wide of the mark."
When I entered the House, in March 1977, those on the Government Benches were still reeling from the effect of the cuts that the Chancellor had had to impose in 1976. I have a strong suspicion that, as a result of the announcements that have just been made, we shall in due course see the same reaction on the Government Benches this time.
Because the Chief Secretary again quoted the mantra about national debt in the 1990s, I conclude with a comparison between general Government net debt as a

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percentage of gross domestic product in 1978–80 and 1995 in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. In only two of those countries was the debt ratio down between those years. One of those countries was the United Kingdom; the other was Japan, which is a special case because of the real assets in the Japanese social security arrangements. Those figures give the lie to the frequent quotations that the Chief Secretary gives us.
9.30 pm
Mr. Michael Fallon: I declare the interests recorded in the Register of Members' Interests.
The debate has been lop-sided. From the Labour Benches, a succession of speakers either ignored the condition of the economy or were complacent about it. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller) had not even heard of the manufacturing recession. A series of speakers asked for more public spending than they were given on Tuesday. The hon. Members for Upminster (Mr. Darvill), for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton) and for Peterborough (Mrs. Brinton) each demanded yet more public expenditure than was allocated on Tuesday. Not one Labour Member showed any understanding of how that spending will be funded.
By contrast, in forming its judgment on the balance of the spending review, the House had the benefit of the advice and experience of three former Treasury Ministers from the Conservative Benches.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) condemned the spending total as "reckless", exposed the various fiddles on which it was constructed and asked the key question, "Who pays up if growth falters?" My right hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor), with the additional authority of having served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, pointed out that there was nothing new about the search for efficiency savings. He, too, asked an important question about public service agreements and the sanctions that would be available if they were broken. Finally, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke) gave us, from a filial stance, an historical perspective on the importance of that office.
During the past two days, it has become even clearer that the comprehensive spending review was not a serious review. It was not a root-and-branch examination of public spending. It was not the reordering of spending priorities that one would expect from a new Government, switching spending from one Department to another. In fact, the review was called off. This was an old-fashioned spending splurge—fiddles, fudges and a great deal of hope, the spraying around of extra billions, every Department turning out to be a winner.
Several of my hon. Friends mentioned one casualty of the spending review. We heard a little less of poor old Prudence. She had been paraded in public and pushed forward in every photo-opportunity. She had been sent out to escort the Chancellor on every trip down to the square mile. Now it is all over. These days, we read of high-profile romances being ended by fax. Well, poor old
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Prudence was dumped by press notice on Tuesday. Now she is just another ex. With her goes all the rest: the reserve, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk pointed out, is shrunken away in years 2 and 3; cash limits are now flexible again, as we see from page 116; repayment of debt, promised in March, is already forgotten by July; and there is no balanced Budget. The Government stated:
"By 2000, the Budget is forecast to be in balance."—[Official Report, 17 March 1998; Vol. 308, c. 1099.]
Just three months later, that promise, too, is abandoned.
Even on the Government's own figures, not in the spending review but in the earlier economic and fiscal strategy report, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Sir M. Spicer) well illustrated, the public sector net cash requirement is shown at upwards of £4 billion for every year after 2000. We are back to extra spending and old-fashioned borrowing, all held together by the fiddles, fudges and heroic assumptions that underline the document presented to us.
I begin with the fiddles. A number of my hon. Friends have pointed out the absurdity of classifying working families tax credit as tax forgone, rather than the benefit that it replaces. That is not a view endorsed by the Office for National Statistics; on the contrary, the ONS has contradicted the Government. It will allocate working families tax credit as a benefit in the national accounts.
The fiddled figures are all tucked away. At the back of the document, on page 107, we read:
"Accounting and other adjustments"
rising from £13.4 billion this year to £20 billion in 2001. "Accounting and other adjustments" is now the fourth-biggest spending line, higher even than the Department for Education and Employment, whose budget received such attention yesterday, and higher than the budget allocated to the Scottish Office. Perhaps it is to be a Department of State, all on its own. There is certainly a candidate to run it—the Paymaster General himself. If he can magic away £200,000 in remuneration, who knows?—with a little extra tuition, he may be able to magic away £20 billion of accounting adjustments.
All that comes from a Government who promised us openness and transparency. A rather excited press release on Budget day stated:
"For too long, economic policy-making has been conducted behind closed doors".
A few weeks after that, the permanent secretary resigned, allegedly because policy making was indeed being conducted behind closed doors—behind the closed doors of the Grosvenor House hotel by the Chancellor and his spin doctors.
So much for the fiddles. I shall deal with the assumptions on which so much of the spending review depends. It depends on efficiency gains, which are not yet delivered. The Government have made it all the more difficult to realise those gains, by abolishing the compulsory competitive tendering that we set in place across the public service.
The spending totals also depend on savings from fraud busting. We were much mocked by the Prime Minister for claims that there was £2 billion worth of fraud. We were told that that was an Alice in Wonderland figure. In March, the Government gave the figure of £4 billion. On Monday, by a happy coincidence, the day

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before the spending review, the Minister for Welfare Reform totted up £7 billion of fraud, and none of it busted yet.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk said, a large part of the Government's assumptions depends on asset sales not yet realised, with all the uncertainty of the commercial property market lying ahead. My right hon. Friend told us from his experience that asset sales usually take years.
Above all, the delivery of all the Government's extra spending depends on the savings from welfare reform to which they were originally committed. They said that they would cut the bills of social failure. Instead of cutting welfare spending, they have increased it. They have funked the radical reform that they promised. They have fudged the firm controls on its growth. They have postponed the reviews that they have in hand of housing benefit, the state pension and disability benefit. Above all, they are now gambling with all our futures. Every external commentator has now pointed out—this was done by the Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee in his question to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—that everything depends on the level of growth that the Treasury assumes. I shall quote just one external commentator, the leader writer of The Independent:
"How often before have we heard spurious claims that spending is to be financed out of growth? By tying the public finances to a three-year plan he is banking on today's economic prosperity lasting for at least another 36 months. Many sober judges argue that this is at best unlikely."
That is the verdict of The Independent.
When the Chancellor appeared before the Treasury Select Committee yesterday, he, too, had to admit that his figures do not take account of the recession. They do not take account of rising unemployment, and they will not take account of falling tax revenue.
We are faced with a huge gamble. For all the cheap applause now for the triple-counted figures bundled together into three-year totals to give us this billion pound bonanza, it is becoming clearer that sooner or later the Chancellor will have to borrow or he will have to tax.
The spending review has been a failure. It takes us back to old-fashioned Labour public spending. I shall answer the question that was put earlier. Of course we welcome any new money for schools and hospitals. If there is still confusion about this, let me put it even more explicitly. Genuine extra spending for schools: good. Genuine extra spending for hospitals: good. A three-year locked-in overall spending total: extremely reckless. There it is, clear as a bell.
By locking us in to three-year fixed totals without the savings or the reforms to finance them, the Government are putting at risk the future of the public services, by which they set so much store, and the future of the economy as a whole, on whose success those public services depend.
Mr. Miller: Let us just be clear. The hon. Gentleman is in favour of what I think is about £40 billion of expenditure, but he is not in favour of all the rest. What would he cut? Be straight, what would the hon. Gentleman cut?
Mr. Fallon: The hon. Gentleman's Government came into office pledged to cut welfare spending. We have
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pointed out tonight that any genuinely additional spending for schools and hospitals is thoroughly welcome. It is the overall spending total, locked in for three years without the savings and the reforms to fund it, that we think is endangering not only the economy but the future of those very public services that we support.
Mr. Leslie: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Fallon: I have sat down.
9.42 pm
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Mrs. Helen Liddell): It is quite easy to understand now why the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) was sent by the electorate previously to spend more time with his family. We began with a declaration of interest by the hon. Gentleman, which tempted us to all to check his interests, one of which is a directorship of Just Learning Ltd. I think that it has been proved this evening that the only things that he is learning to read are the diary columns. The hon. Gentleman has not managed to get round to any independent economic analysis.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) summed up what we have seen from the Opposition Benches this evening—vacuity. Opposition Members do not know whether they are coming or going. Even the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who I admit is a gentleman I admire because he is in the round in his activities in the House—and I am not talking about his avoirdupois; he is a true renaissance man of independent mind—began by saying that we were being reckless. Then he said that we were not spending enough.
Obviously, the shadow Chancellor has taken a leaf out of the book of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe. On the "Today" programme yesterday, the shadow Chancellor was asked whether he could have it both ways about whether we would be spending more or less. The only thing that he could say was that he could have it both ways. That is the man who is pretending that he knows how to run the country.
The right hon. Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) most displayed the complete lack of imagination and credibility of Conservative Members. They have had since Tuesday to work out their line on the comprehensive spending review and tell us what they would cut. They have not told us what they would cut.
Mr. Kenneth Clarke: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Liddell: I shall give way to the right hon. and learned Gentleman in due course.
The hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) gave the game away, because we discovered from him what Conservative Members would cut—pensions, child benefit and help for the disabled. From this day on until the next general election, we can point to Conservative Members and say that they are the ones who will cut pensions, cut help for the disabled and cut child benefit. We see the true, right-wing members of the Conservative party on the Opposition Benches.
Mr. Clarke: Following the hon. Lady's kind remarks, I shall try to give an intervention in the round.

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I welcomed the spending on health and education, although I said that the total was too much, and I mentioned the working families tax credit, which I opposed when it was announced in the Budget. After the Budget, it turned out that the Government had underestimated its cost by £18 billion over this Parliament. Now they are tucking it away in the accounting adjustments to try to get rid of its cost. What kind of welfare reform brings in an innovation that costs far more than the Government intended and which has to be secreted away in the books?
Mrs. Liddell: What kind of former Chancellor cannot make his mind up about whether we are spending too much or too little? The working families tax credit is aimed at getting people from unemployment into work. [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) says that I cannot listen. Conservative Members are supposed to be listening, but they did not listen on 1 May when the electorate said that they were a shoddy apology for a Government, who had betrayed the people of this country for 18 years.
Tonight, we have seen—[Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) says, "It's a disgrace." The disgrace is the performance of Conservative Members throughout the debate. Time after time, we asked, "What will you cut?" Time after time, we were told that that is not relevant to the debate. The people of this country want answers.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: Will the Economic Secretary give way?
Mrs. Liddell: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will explain how much he wants to cut from pensions, child benefit and the disabled.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: The Economic Secretary has totally misrepresented what I said, which was that I would control the social security budget better and that I would control the £7 billion of fraud that takes place—that is £150 for every man and woman in this country. What will she do about that?
Mrs. Liddell: We had 18 years of government by the Conservative party; to use an expression of my own Lanarkshire, "They couldn't run a menage." The right hon. Member for South Norfolk will understand what that means, coming from where he does. Conservative Members should be telling us where money could be better spent in the economy—they had 18 years to come to their conclusions.
The hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Sir M. Spicer), who seems to be suffering from short-term memory loss, talked about the mid-1970s and the International Monetary Fund. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie) pointed out that he was two at that time. The short-term memory loss of the hon. Member for West Worcestershire causes him to forget what happened on black Wednesday, which showed how good Conservative Members were at running the economy.
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In a pointed speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham) referred to the failures of Conservative Members. One critical failure is their loss of short-term memory about their time in office: manufacturing output fell by more than 7 per cent., investment in the whole economy fell by 16 per cent., business investment fell by 20 per cent. and manufacturing investment fell by 27.7 per cent. Do they really want me to go on with their catalogue of failures?
Mr. Gibb: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Liddell: I am not prepared to give way any more.
We have heard many views from Opposition Members, and I shall deal with some of the remarks made by the other opposition parties. The hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) recognised that the Labour Government are living up to the commitments we made during the general election. The comprehensive spending review has meant that we have delivered benefits that are three times greater than the Liberal Democrats were talking about at the general election. He cannot acknowledge that.
The hon. Gentleman went on to discuss the situation in Scotland, which is something in which he and I have a common interest. I seem to remember that, during the referendum campaign, the hon. Gentleman joined the Labour party in supporting the Barnett formula, but his arguments tonight were against the operation of that formula.
I should tell the hon. Member for North Tayside (Mr. Swinney), that the Barnett formula is not about cuts but about convergence. It is about the convergence of the economies of the less prosperous parts of the United Kingdom with the economies of more prosperous parts of the United Kingdom.
The right hon. Member for Wells said that the comprehensive spending review does nothing to improve the productive potential of the economy. The hon. Member for Cotswold condemned his own Government for their failure to act to increase productivity.
This Government are improving the productivity potential of the economy by investing in education, skills and infrastructure and by our strong belief in value for money. All those things will enhance the productive potential of the economy significantly. When Conservative Members were in government, they should have been doing that. If they had, our manufacturing industry would not be experiencing some of the difficulties it is experiencing now.
Another example of short-term memory loss concerns the fact that sterling had appreciated by 66 per cent. on 1 May last year—before the general election. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe is very quiet about that. The hon. Member for Cotswold said that we should have seen an increase in interest rates 18 months ago. Who was in government then? We know that it was the Conservatives.
Mr. Clifton-Brown rose—
Mrs. Liddell: I want to make some progress.
The right hon. Member for Wells accused us being inflationary in our tax and spend policies. How so? If we look at the current surplus figures and the debt-to-GDP

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ratio for the next three years, and we consider net borrowing and the net cash requirement, we can see that they are all extremely prudent. Prudence has been much maligned tonight, but prudence can be found within the economic and fiscal stability report, which was published a month ago, and within the CSR.
A key aspect of the paucity of Opposition Members' arguments is that they have completely failed to address the real issues contained within the comprehensive spending review.
Mr. Tyrie: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Liddell: In due course.
If the Opposition really cared about the operation of the UK economy, they would not be sitting whingeing as they have tonight, but would be entering into a constructive dialogue to see how the benefits that will accrue in health and education—[Interruption.]
Mr. Gibb: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Liddell: Will the hon. Gentleman shut up? He spent all his time in the Finance Bill Committee trying to find ways to ensure that £6 billion of revenue would be left out of the Exchequer. That money would go in tax cuts and would be taken away from the pensioners, the disabled and from child benefit.
The hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) did some of his more interesting arithmetic gyrations. I commend to him page 116 of the CSR which will set out for him the difference between total managed expenditure and central Government expenditure. I will not take up time now going through something that the hon. Gentleman should have had time to read.
Mr. Tyrie rose—
Mrs. Liddell: No, I will not give way. I want to make some progress.
The right hon. Member for Wells talked about the Tories' golden economic legacy—
Several hon. Members rose—
Mrs. Liddell: I am not giving way.
That golden legacy is fool's gold. They gave us boom and bust. The hon. Member for Chichester accused us of ignoring economic cycles. Our economic policy is designed to even out the worst impacts of those cycles on ordinary men and women who suffered because of the economic illiteracy of the Conservatives during their 18 years in government. We inherited a history of excessive Government borrowing and rising public debt. Public investment was neglected. The true benefits to the economy will flow from investment not just in our infrastructure but in our people.
The Conservatives say that they are a listening party, but they cannot listen. They are afraid that, if they listen, some of the errors of their ways may come back to them.
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They should have invested in Britain' s infrastructure and in its people. The Labour Government will do that. I shall now deal with the ratio of GDP to debt.
Mr. Tyrie: Will the Minister give way?
Mrs. Liddell: No. I do not intend to give way again.
Mr. Maude: We want constructive dialogue.
Mrs. Liddell: The right hon. Gentleman has not been here for much of the debate. All he can do is shout from the sidelines rather than contribute.
The hon. Member for Gordon spoke about monetary policy and inflation. He, of all people, should recognise the reason for our changes to the Bank of England. Some of his hon. Friends recognised the wisdom of those changes to ensure achievable inflation targets and a consistent monetary policy. How many times did the previous Government manage to achieve their targets? We have been in government for 14 months. The Conservatives were in government for 18 years and their governance was a saga of missed targets.
During debates on the Finance Bill, the hon. Member for Gordon and his hon. Friends proposed amendments that would have led to an 8p increase in income tax. That would have been ludicrous. He claims that there was no consultation on the comprehensive spending review. The parameters under which it was conducted were announced by the Government, and there was adequate opportunity for him to make known his views. He asked how we chose our priorities. The people elected us on specific manifesto pledges and Tuesday's historic statement means that, for the first time in 18 years, Britain has a Government who live up to their manifesto pledges.
Mr. Malcolm Bruce: Will the Minister give way?
Mrs. Liddell: No. I am running out of time and there are other points to which I would like to respond.
The right hon. Member for Wells complained about welfare spending, again revealing that that is what the Conservatives would cut. We are cutting the impact of economic failure, thus freeing the money that will allow us to give a decent living to our pensioners, pay decent child benefit and provide decent help for the disabled. The Opposition know little about that.
The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe spoke about the net cash requirement and how it differed from that of the previous Government. They called it the public sector borrowing requirement. In 1992–93, it was 6 per cent. of GDP; in 1993–94, it was 7 per cent.; and in 1994–95, it was 5 per cent. Under this Government it will be 0.4, 0.4, 0.3, 0.5 and 0.5 per cent.
The right hon. Member for South Norfolk spoke about public service recruitment and retention. That is rich from an Opposition Member. Does it not occur to the Opposition that the fact that they made public sector workers pariahs had some impact on public sector morale? We will not take any lectures from them about public sector pay. The right hon. Member for Wells had the audacity to complain about the level of public sector pay, although his Government were responsible for it, and

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in the next breath he attacked the national minimum wage. The Opposition do not know whether they are coming or going.
Mr. Leslie: Is my hon. Friend aware of the example set by the shadow Chancellor as a director of Gartmore shared equity trust? This year, he awarded himself on the board a pay rise of 13.3 per cent. in one year.
Mrs. Liddell: There is no answer to that. I think that that reveals the hypocrisy of Conservative Members.
Mr. Swinney: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Liddell: I am sorry. I have less than a minute left, but I will turn to the point that the hon. Gentleman made. He criticised the settlement for Scotland. That settlement will deliver outputs that are three times better than his party offered in its manifesto.
Mr. Swinney rose—
Mrs. Liddell: I do not have time to give way. This is the hon. Gentleman who believes that economic policy should be based on crossing one's fingers and hoping for the best.
I commend the comprehensive spending review to the House.
It being Ten o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Community Hospitals (Powys)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Robert Ainsworth.]
10 pm
Mr. Richard Livsey: It is my privilege to introduce this Adjournment debate. I am grateful to be given the time to look at the future of community hospitals in Powys.
This debate focuses on Powys. In the past 10 years, it has lost its health authority, its ambulance service and its fire service, and now there is the final nail in the coffin: a proposal for Powys to lose its health care trust. That is totally unacceptable to the people of Powys.
Powys occupies a quarter of Wales. The people of Powys believe that the fact that it has 10 community hospitals and 18 general practitioner practices within its boundaries gives it a comprehensive service in the NHS. I advise the House to remember that Powys is 130 miles in length. If one visited all 10 community hospitals, one could clock up in excess of 300 miles in a car.
Powys is a vast, sparsely populated area. The only other area with which it can be compared for sparsity is the highlands of Scotland. There is only one town in Powys—Newtown—with a population in excess of 10,000 people. Half the population live in the countryside. Those facts dictate why there is no district general hospital in Powys.
The strategy of the present Powys Health Care NHS trust and its predecessors has been to develop a successful network of community hospitals. Those hospitals now carry out about 40 per cent. of all patient operations, mainly through GPs. They provide a superb service and, because of that, attract intense loyalty from people in local communities.
Each hospital has an active league of friends: two in my constituency have raised £500,000 and £750,000 respectively in the past 10 years for capital projects to expand their hospital services. Local communities feel that they have ownership of those hospitals, and rightly so. That is demonstrated by the creation of Powys Action for Patients, which represents GPs, community health councils, nurses and communities in Powys in the fight to maintain our NHS trust in Powys.
I am sure that the Minister will remember recently opening Ystradgynlais community hospital's celebration of 50 years of the NHS a week ago last Saturday. I was there in the afternoon later on, and I know that he enjoyed himself. The hospital is the pride of local people. It is an excellent example of a modern community hospital.
Acute services in Powys are provided by 12 district general hospitals outside the county, with patients going to the nearest DGH. Services are delivered from many contrasting points—for example, Shrewsbury in the north-east and Swansea in the south-west. Only 8 per cent. of Powys patients travel to the district general hospital at Aberystwyth, while 92 per cent. are treated elsewhere. Patient referral patterns are widespread indeed. Frequently, patients have to travel 45 miles by ambulance—a 90-mile round trip—to get to a district general hospital. That happened to my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik) when he had his recent accident.

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Mental health care is delivered from within Powys by the current Powys national health service trust. Mental health services are not, for example, delivered within Ceredigion, but accessed via the Pembrokeshire and Derwen NHS trust, outside that new county.
A major paradox in the planning of health care is provided by the present state of community hospitals. At a time when their value is increasingly recognised by central planners in the Department of Health and the national health service executive, there are more threats to their role and existence than at any time in the past 50 years of the existence of the NHS. Thirty five out of the 350 community hospitals in England and Wales are under threat of closure. By contrast, in Scotland, the status of the 70 similar hospitals is relatively protected by the Scottish Office.
All threats are on financial rather than clinical grounds, as less conscientious authorities and trusts attempt to balance their budgets by withdrawing services. In no case that has been critically appraised will savings ultimately result, as the cost of re-provision of services at a distance from the community is invariably higher, and issues of quality, including access in time and place, are habitually ignored. The tensions inherent in sharing a limited health care budget are responsible for that.
The view that community hospitals are expensive to run and under-utilised, which is frequently aired by detractors who want to devote increased resources to district, general or regional hospitals, must be questioned. The demands for high-tech care of all forms, with inevitable centralisation of services, must be met on the clear understanding that that represents only a minority of in-patient care, and that it is a mistake to admit any patient to a level of hospital care that is higher than necessary. Indeed, one can envisage a situation in which in Powys, with its 12 adjacent DGHs, telemedicine might come into its own and more patients could be treated in community hospitals in the future.
Why does the Welsh Office want to reorganise health care in Powys? Why sideline the Welsh assembly before it has a chance to contribute to the debate? We are told that the status quo is not a runner, but Powys rejected the model of a combined single district general hospital and community hospital service 10 years ago. The adopted strategy, rightly, was to develop the network of community hospitals and upgrade the services available, which made a great deal of sense with such a sparse population—it was the most appropriate type of development.
The proposal for amalgamation with Ceredigion in the reconfiguration exercise is intended to save money, not to save lives. It is driven by Welsh Office civil servants and by managers in the Dyfed Powys health authority, who want solutions that are just that much too neat. Clearly, Mr. Peter Gregory, the senior health civil servant in the Welsh Office and Mr. Peter Stansbie, the chief executive of Dyfed Powys health authority, have their own agenda of imposing models of health care that are totally inappropriate for the extreme rurality of Powys. The outcome will be patient disadvantage. Rural Wales does not lend itself to the DGH-type model, which is too simplistic and far too expensive for our area. The existence of 10 community hospitals in Powys proves that. Hospital beds in those community hospitals cost £115 per night, compared with £250 in a DGH.
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The Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mr. Griffiths), has told us that he wants to reduce the number of quangos. I understand that, but why does he not abolish the health authorities in Wales and have only one? That would save a lot of money—£4.5 million per annum by axing Dyfed Powys health authority for a start.
The people of Powys were outraged when they realised that the Powys and Ceredigion project team had a budget of £40,000 to promote the proposed amalgamation. That is taxpayers' money, whereas Powys Action for Patients has had to collect £15,000 of Powys people's own money to fight against the amalgamation with Ceredigion. Even the proposed name of the amalgamated trust—Canolbarth Cymru—will not be understood in many parts of Powys, which I regret: for example, only 2 per cent. of the population of Radnorshire speak and understand Welsh.
The experiment was put in motion because of the cumulative deficit compounded by the Ceredigion trust, which amounted to more than £1 million. The cumulative deficit in Powys was originally only about £50,000. The health authority financial projections in the document "Effective Care and Healthy People" showed that, if the two trusts were run separately, the annual deficit for Ceredigion would be £1.23 million in 2003, whereas that for Powys would be £420,000, which would be written off in six years. The plan to force Powys to amalgamate with Ceredigion would result in a total mismatch of functions. Moreover, the finances would not add up.
Conditions in rural areas are not conducive to such a model. There is no duplication of services and no competition between services—certainly not between Bronglais district general hospital and our 10 community hospitals. A city dogma is being applied to the countryside. The Welsh Office has a mindset that the urban model of health care applies to the whole of Wales, no matter how rural an area. Conditions in the M4 corridor and the valleys are very different from those in rural Powys.
The Welsh Office estimates that annual management savings from each trust merger will be £500,000 a year and that the cost of the merger will be equivalent to approximately two years' savings, or £1 million per merger. Those figures are a bit too convenient and need to be challenged. In the first draft of its merger document, the Ceredigion-Powys project board estimated a reorganisation cost of £2.79 million. Lo and behold, in the final draft, after Welsh Office persuasion, that figure had been massaged down to £1.2 million, so as to fit in with two years of savings at £500,000 a year.
We believe that those figures have been cooked. They are all guesstimates which have been plucked from the air. What about redundancy costs, for example? I know someone whom it would cost £300,000 to make redundant, but many others would attract redundancy costs. In Powys, redundancy costs alone could be more than £1 million. Those costs apply across Wales, where the trusts are of wildly different sizes and natures. It is projected that the 26 trusts will be reduced to 15. Does the Minister really believe that he will save £10 million by that exercise? I think not.

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The costs of integrating IT systems between Dyfed and Powys would be enormous—two completely different computer systems would have to be married. Imagine the costs of employing one IT consultant to straighten that out. Studies in the USA have shown that savings from health mergers are usually only a seventh of what was estimated, so if the reorganisation costs £2.79 million and the savings are only £70,000 per annum, the new trust will be in for a shock and services will need to be reduced. We should also take into account the massive deficit that it is estimated the new merged trust would have.
The major reasons for opposing a trust merger in a rural area are that it would do no good and save no money—it would not solve any problems; indeed, it would bring its own. All that we need is a reorganisation and more local management. Health care in Powys would improve far more if the Minister said—as I am sure he did in Ystradgynlais—how proud he was of our community hospitals. A merger will not solve the problems of Bronglais hospital. I have a great deal of sympathy with the situation in Ceredigion, where I lived for 14 years—my youngest son was born in Bronglais hospital and I have many friends there. However, the two trusts do not match up.
All the pointers are that, if the merger goes ahead, at least three community hospitals in Powys will have to close. That is clearly shown in the Dyfed Powys health authority document "Effective Care and Healthy People", published this spring.
The document says that groups of hospitals are viable, but does not say which ones will close. Brecon is twinned with Bronglais, and Welshpool with Newton and Llanidloes, suggesting that some will have to close. We believe that that is a disaster course and that the situation in Powys is, indeed, perilous. We stand to lose an enormous amount.
A merger of the Powys and Ceredigion trusts is a mismatch of serious proportions. Transitional costs are likely to be high, the district general hospital model is not appropriate and Powys delivers mental health services, which Ceredigion does not.
Mr. Lembit Öpik: Does my hon. Friend agree that the people of Powys are united against any prospect of a merger and that hospitals such as Llanidloes, which helped to save my life, are under a serious threat that has not been democratically sanctnioned?
Mr. Livsey: Indeed, I agree completely. The merger is opposed by all GPs in Powys—that is, all the 151 British Medical Association members; all the consultants who treat Powys patients; Powys county council, which wants to co-operate further with the NHS through social services; both community health councils, in Montgomery and in Brecon and Radnor; both Members of Parliament; all nurses; and all trade union members in the NHS in Powys.
The Minister has a straight choice: allow the community hospitals in Powys to collapse, or use this opportunity—I hope that we are convincing him tonight—to build a superb NHS service, based on primary care and
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locality groups. That would be the ideal clinical model for Powys, the most remote and sparsely populated area in England and Wales.
10.16 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Mr. Win Griffiths): I congratulate the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Livsey) on securing this debate. I thank him for giving me the opportunity to consider some of the issues that he has raised.
Community hospitals have for 100 years or so played an important role in all our communities. Over the years, their place in the national health service and their relationship to the larger and more specialised district general hospitals have fluctuated, but there is now a wide acceptance that such hospitals, and other related local facilities, can provide an important complementary range of services.
Traditionally, the care provided in community hospitals is intermediate between care at home and that requiring specialist resources in large acute hospitals. They relieve pressure on acute hospitals by admitting and treating patients who otherwise would have to be admitted to general hospitals, by allowing the early discharge for rehabilitation and recovery of patients not yet ready for home care, and by providing respite and rehabilitation in a planned way.
Within that broad understanding of the services that may be appropriate in community settings, a number are particularly important: out-patient clinics with specialist clinicians, to avoid patients having to travel long distances; in-patient beds with care provided by local doctors, specialist doctors and nurses; minor injury services provided by local general practitioners with access to a wider range of facilities and support services than are available in surgeries; and, in some places, maternity services provided by local doctors and midwives.
In all those services, a balance needs to be struck between the convenience, practicality and efficiency of having them available locally, and the economy and clinical security of concentrating them in larger centres.
Community hospitals can also act as a resource and a focus for wider health activity in the area. The hon. Member rightly praised the work of hospital leagues of friends, which can coalesce around a hospital and help to improve not only the hospital service but the community spirit of an area. Community hospitals can provide a base for out-of-hours GP services; be the home of community mental health and learning disability teams; be a base for the provision of therapy services and community dental health services; and the list goes on impressively.
It is for health authorities, working with NHS trusts, local primary care professionals, local government and other interested local agencies and groups to decide what range of facilities is appropriate locally, and how they should be run. Yes, I very much enjoyed my visit to the Ystradgynlais community hospital and I am impressed by the service provided there. I have not forgotten that the hon. Gentleman is concerned about the provision in Powys and the need for a range of facilities and services that reflect its particular character. Community hospitals and other related health facilities have a distinctive role to play, but we need to make sure, too, that they reflect

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healthcare provision for the 21st century, are in the right places, are the right size, and provide the right range of health and other services.
Dyfed Powys health authority is responsible for assessing the health needs of the people of Powys and, in consultation with its partner agencies and local people, for planning and commissioning services to meet the needs of the people in Powys. In future, much of that responsibility will pass to the Powys local health group, which is being introduced following the publication of the White Paper "Putting Patients First", with the Dyfed Powys health authority providing a strategic overview and ensuring that services are matched to need and available resources, and reflect best clinical and operational practice.
Yes, it is true that, under the trust reconfiguration, the Powys healthcare trust may disappear, but Powys will gain a local health group which will have a far greater say in the provision of services in Powys than has ever happened before. It is important to bear that in mind. There will be far greater local management. Local GPs, the local Powys county council, local voluntary groups connected with the health service and other primary health-care professionals will make the decisions about commissioning healthcare in Powys. They will decide where the community hospitals will be.
Let us make it absolutely clear right now: there is nothing in the trust reconfiguration process which will affect the services provided by community hospitals in Powys.
Mr. Livsey: I understand what the Minister says. Our proposals, which are new proposals for Powys with a primary care, clinically led trust, are similar to his. The main thing is that the authority covers the whole of Powys, has a budget, and can make decisions strategically. The damage of taking that away will cause the closure of our community hospitals.
Mr. Griffiths: It will not, because the local health group, starting as a sub-committee of the health authority, will nevertheless have its own budget and be able to make its own commissioning decisions. That needs to be made absolutely clear. A problem with this debate is that people think that the new NHS trusts will be exactly the same as the old ones. They will be quite different.
I turn now to the Dyfed Powys plan for making recovery from the deficit which exists within the Dyfed Powys area. That is both a health authority and an NHS trust responsibility. Today, there was a meeting at which the partners with the Welsh Office agreed on a way forward and on measures to achieve a break-even point.
There was a stab at the strategy outlined in "Effective Care and Healthy People", but it was rejected by people in Dyfed Powys. In the light of those comments, the Dyfed Powys health authority revised its strategy. A new document is now available. It commits the health authority to a joint review with the Powys NHS trust of community hospitals in Powys. It is important that this review goes ahead quickly, is robust, and reaches conclusions which will allow services in Dyfed Powys to be developed in ways that will stand the test of time.
My Department has taken a close interest in the authority's planning. I met the former chair of the health authority last month to discuss the position. My officials
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held meetings today, and I am sure that between us we will tackle the problem successfully. However, I cannot comment on particular aspects of the Dyfed Powys strategy, because, if there are disputes to be resolved within Dyfed Powys, they will come to the Welsh Office, to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, for decision.
However, I am absolutely confident that the community hospitals in Powys are more likely to be strengthened by the reconfiguration of the trust, because it will make more money available directly for patient care, and the local health group in Powys—the doctors, the primary care professionals, the local voluntary groups, local government and Powys county council—will be at the heart of the decision-making and commissioning. The new NHS will give Powys a far better deal than it has ever had before.
Mr. Öpik: Is the Minister aware that, for all the promises of extra money made for health in Wales this week, unless he resists what we regard as a potentially expedient bringing together of Powys with Ceredigion, that extra money is not worth the promises made in the Chamber? Within that, will he reaffirm the promise made by the Secretary of State for Wales when he was the shadow Secretary of State, that he would resist the closure of any community hospitals if that was proposed in Powys?
Mr. Griffiths: I make it quite clear that this year already we have provided about £140 million extra for the health service in Wales. Dyfed Powys health authority has £3 million of the £20 million to tackle the waiting list problem. We are investing more money in the health service in Wales.
Yes, we recognise that not sufficient was invested in the past, and that there are some historical problems to be dealt with. But my right hon. Friend the Chancellor's public expenditure announcement gives us another £175 million next year on top of what we had this year, the following year the accumulated extra will be £345 million, and in the third year the accumulated extra will be £510 million. All told, during the three years, more than £1 billion extra will go into the health service. Dyfed Powys health authority and the Powys local health group will get their fair share of that money to develop services within the area.
It is clear that the Dyfed Powys health authority strategy will enable community hospitals to prosper where they provide an effective local service. From what I know of the Powys area, most fall into that category. I am sure that the local doctors, the primary care professionals, who want to strengthen the role of community hospitals, will be given the capacity to do so by the local health groups. There is no problem there. As we provide more money for the health service, more money will go to Dyfed Powys.
Mr. Öpik: I am sorry to press the Minister on this point, but will he give us an assurance that he will honour the pre-election promise by the then shadow Secretary of State for Wales, now the Secretary of State, that he would resist the closure of community hospitals if they were proposed in Powys?
Mr. Griffiths: That is impossible, because in Dyfed Powys, the closure of Tenby cottage hospital has already been agreed with the community. The facilities available in Tenby will be provided in another way in the town. I understand that everyone is happy for that to happen. If the hon. Gentleman is saying that the Secretary of State should have stepped in and told people in Tenby that that hospital could not be closed because of a promise made before the election, that is ludicrous.
Let us get down to the serious issue of ensuring that we provide a high-quality health service throughout Wales. That has nothing to do with what the head of the Welsh Office health division or the chief executive of the Dyfed Powys health authority wants; it is all about what the Labour party promised before the election. It said then that it would rationalise the trusts in Wales to save money. The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire mentioned £10 million, but in fact it will be between £7 million and £10 million. I would not plump on £10 million exactly, but more than £7 million of savings will go directly into patient care, and will help to keep hospitals open in the Dyfed Powys area.
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I also want to make it explicit that doctors in Powys will be able to send their patients to the appropriate district general hospitals outside their area where they consider that their patients can attain the best treatment. That is critical, because doctors will have far more say than they ever had before. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire has not taken up the offer made by the chair of the local project group for the trust reconfiguration to meet Powys Action for Patients.
Mr. Livsey: I intend to do that, but it has not been possible to do so yet.
Mr. Griffiths: I am pleased that that will happen, because I know that so far she has heard nothing.
On behalf of the Welsh Office, I give an absolute commitment that community hospitals which provide an effective service in Dyfed Powys will continue to do so, and that the trust reconfiguration exercise will make that more rather than less likely.
The motion having been made at Ten o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Adjourned at half-past Ten o'clock.

DEFENCE

  Departmental Environmental Policies
  Dr. Tonge
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what is the current energy consumption of his Department; what targets have been set to reduce this level; and what plans he has to include energy efficiency performance figures in his Department's annual report. [50087]

  Mr. Spellar
  Annual consumption of energy figures including those for MOD are reported by Departments to the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions as part of the overall Government Energy Efficiency Campaign. A summary of the information provided by Departments is in the Library of the House.

  The MOD target for energy savings is the same as that for the rest of the Government Estate and reflects current Government Policy, which is that 20 per cent. savings should be achieved by 31 March 2000 when measured against 1991 consumption as the base line. MOD has to date achieved an 18.6 per cent. reduction in Energy Expenditure 1996–97 relative to 1990–91.

  Dr. Tonge
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what measures he has introduced to discourage car use by his Department's employees. [50085]

  Mr. Spellar
  The use of public transport for commuting purposes is already encouraged by the availability of interest free loans to purchase season tickets and bicycles and the provision of cycle parking facilities. Departmental Travel Regulations require the most cost effective methods of transport to be used for official business. Measures to encourage greater use of public transport for duty travel as well as commuting to and from the work place are being considered during the preparation of the department's Green Transport Plans. The plans will draw on guidance issued by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions last Autumn.

  Dr. Tonge
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what percentage of his Department's waste is recycled; and what targets he has set for increasing this percentage. [50095]

  Mr. Spellar
  My Department is committed to the development of waste minimisation programmes which include recycling schemes. However, owing to the local nature of these schemes, statistics on recycling are not held centrally. Target setting will be considered as work is taken forward in the context of the Government's model framework for Greening Government Operations.

  Dr. Tonge
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what activities relating to his environmental responsibilities his green Minister has undertaken since being appointed. [50086]
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  Mr. Spellar
  Since assuming responsibility for the development and promotion of Government environmental policy in my Department, I have attended the Green Ministers' fora and had bilateral discussions with my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Environment, covering a wide range of environmental issues. I have also given both oral and written evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee on my Department's management of its environmental responsibilities.

  I have had several meetings with other Government Department Ministers to discuss a range of historical pollution and contamination problems at home and abroad. I have met a number of environmental groups to discuss their concerns in the context of the Strategic Defence Review.

  I have chaired my Department's Ministerial Steering Group on the Environment and Energy Efficiency to consider how emerging Government policy initiatives on the environment are to be taken forward in the Ministry of Defence.

  Dr. Tonge
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what steps he is taking to raise awareness of environmental issues within his Department; and what training will be made available to staff. [50094]

  Mr. Spellar
  Environmental policy matters are cascaded throughout the Department by means of a well developed environmental committee and focal point structure. Awareness of environmental issues and policy guidance is also promoted through regular updating of my Department's Environmental Manual and through internal publications such as "Sanctuary" which is devoted to conservation issues on the defence estate. In the case of energy use, an energy warden scheme has been put in place to provide information and practical advice on energy savings measures to departmental consumers. In addition, a programme of environmental protection training courses open to both Service and civilian personnel has been established. The purpose of the programme is both to raise awareness of environmental issues and to provide staff with the necessary competence to ensure compliance with environmental regulation.

  RAF Newton
  Mr. Kenneth Clarke
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what are his Department's future plans for the use of the site of RAF Newton in Nottinghamshire following the completion of the Defence Review. [50614]

  Mr. Spellar
  There are no current plans to change the use of RAF Newton and it is envisaged that the units currently based at the station will remain there for the foreseeable future. Disposal plans for the surplus areas of RAF Newton will be finalised as part of the detailed follow-up work to the Strategic Defence Review.

  Trident
  Dr. Julian Lewis
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, pursuant to his oral statement of 8 July 1998,Official Report, column 1076, if the figure of 48 nuclear warheads to be deployed on each Trident submarine is a minimum figure. [50617]
  237
  Mr. George Robertson
  The figure of 48 is the exact number of warheads that we plan to deploy on our Trident submarines.

  Dr. Julian Lewis
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what has been(a) the maximum and (b) the average number of nuclear warheads deployed on each Trident submarine since HMS 'Vanguard' entered service. [50618]

  Mr. George Robertson
  Trident submarines have typically deployed on deterrent patrol with 60 warheads.

  Mrs. Ewing
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence (1) what plans he has to remove Trident nuclear warheads from Coulport for dismantling in order to implement the Strategic Defence Review; and what proportion of warheads are to be removed; [50565]

  (2) what plans he has to reduce the number of Trident nuclear warheads currently deployed on Vanguard class submarines in order to implement the Strategic Defence Review; and what proportion of warheads are to be removed. [50566]

  Mr. George Robertson
  12 warheads are to be removed from each of the three Trident submarines currently in service during their next programmed docking in the warhead fitting facility at Coulport. This process will be completed before the end of the year. Production of warheads to meet previous plans had not been completed and we do not need to decommission any warheads to implement Strategic Defence Review changes. Adjustments are being made to future warhead production, refurbishment and decommissioning plans to maintain an operationally available stockpile of fewer than 200 warheads.

  Mrs. Ewing
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence when the fourth Trident submarine, Vengeance, is scheduled to carry out contractors' sea trials in Scotland. [50567]

  Mr. George Robertson
  Contractors' sea trials are scheduled to take place early next year.

  Territorial Army
  Mr. Keith Simpson
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will list(a) each TA and cadet centre in the UK, (b) the TA and cadet units based in each centre and (c) the other military and non-military organisations which use each centre. [50555]

  Dr. Reid
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: I will write to the hon. Member with a list of TA and Cadet centres, and the units that are based in each. A copy of my letter will be placed in the Library. However, we do not hold centrally records of other military and non-military users of such centres and so the information in part (c) of the hon. Gentleman's question could therefore be provided only at disproportionate cost.

  Staff College, Camberley
  Mr. Hawkins
  To ask the Secretary of State for Defence which organisation he proposes to re-site in the Staff College buildings at Camberley; and if he will make a statement. [50838]
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  Dr. Reid
  A range of options for the future of the former Staff College Buildings at Camberley are being studied. No proposals have yet been put to Ministers, and no decisions have been taken.

ENVIRONMENT, TRANSPORT AND THE REGIONS

  Rear Seat Belts
  Liz Blackman
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what monitoring procedures he has put in place to evaluate the effectiveness of the current Rear Seat Belt Awareness Campaign. [50320]

  Dr. Strang
  The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions has commissioned market research both before and after the campaign to ascertain awareness and understanding of its advertising message to belt up in the back.

  In addition, the biannual surveys carried out by the Transport Research Laboratory, on behalf of my Department, will continue to monitor seat belt wearing rates both in the front and rear of cars.

  Sites of Special Scientific Interest
  Mr. Kidney
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions how many incidents of damage to sites of special scientific interest have occurred in each year since 1992. [50140]

  Angela Eagle
  Details of the number of incidents of damage to Sites of Special Scientific Interest are published in the annual reports produced by the respective country agencies, English Nature, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Countryside Council for Wales, all of which are held in the Library of the House.

  Such figures are not presently available for areas of special scientific interest in Northern Ireland.

  Mr. Kidney
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what guidance his Department(a) has issued and (b) intends to issue to the wildlife agencies responsible for monitoring and supervising sites of special scientific interest for the discharge of their duties. [50141]

  Angela Eagle
  The wildlife agencies have a statutory duty to notify Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs).

  The Department issued a Code of Guidance for SSSIs in 1983. this explained the provisions contained in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 for the protection of special sites, including the notification of sites. We will review the need for further guidance in England and Wales following consultation on improvements to the protection and management of SSSIs.

  The financial relationship between the DETR and English Nature is governed by a financial memorandum. This has recently been reviewed and a revised text came into operation at the start of the current financial year. We will adopt a management statement describing the strategic relationship between the Department and English Nature as soon as we receive Treasury and Cabinet Office approval of the text.
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  English Nature adheres to the procedures set out in "Government Accounting", and is notified by the Department of changes to this guidance from time to time. English Nature is also notified of Ministerial priorities when the allocation of grant-in-aid for each financial year is announced.

  These are matters for the territorial departments in relation to the wildlife agencies in Wales and Scotland.

  Wildlife
  Mr. Kidney
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what is his proposed timetable for bringing forward new legislation to strengthen the protection of wildlife. [50139]

  Angela Eagle
  We are presently considering a number of means for improving the protection and management of Sites of Special Scientific Interest. There is likely to be consultation later this year. We are also examining what further measures are needed to strengthen wildlife protection. If legislation proves necessary we will look for a suitable opportunity.

  Donana Pollution Incident
  Mr. Matthew Taylor
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what technical assistance the UK has provided to the Spanish authorities to tackle the Donana pollution incident. [50075]

  Angela Eagle
  A number of UK bodies have offered assistance to the Spanish authorities in the aftermath of the Donana pollution incident. The Natural Environment Research Council Institutes and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds made a joint visit to Donana soon after the incident to assess the situation and have been able to make a number of suggestions for future monitoring. English Partnerships and the Environment Agency are also arranging to visit Donana in the near future to assess what advice and assistance they may be able to offer the Spanish authorities.

  Birds of Prey (Culling Licences)
  Mr. Canavan
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what licences have been issued over the past year for the killing of(a) peregrines and (b) sparrowhawks; and for what reasons they were issued. [50455]

  Angela Eagle
  Details of licences issued under Section 16 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to kill and take birds are contained in Reports by the United Kingdom to the European Community on Derogations under Article 9 of the Directive on the Conservation of Wild Birds (79/409/EEC). The latest report for which figures are available covers 1996, and a copy of this report is in the Library of the House.

  Allotments
  Mr. Sheerman
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions how many individual allotments existed in(a) 1970, (b) 1980, (c) 1990 and (d) the last year for which figures are available. [50656]
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  Angela Eagle
  The information on the number of individual allotments in each of the years referred to is not available.

  The English Allotments Survey published in 1997 by the National Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardeners Limited and Anglia Polytechnic University and financed by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions provides the following data on allotment numbers:

  1970—532,964 in England and Wales

  1977—497,793 in England and Wales

  1978—479,301 in England and Wales

  1996—296,923 in England plus an estimated 30,000 allotments in Wales.

  Mr. Sheerman
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions how many acres of land were devoted to public allotments in(a) 1970, (b) 1980, (c) 1990 and (d) the last year for which figures are available. [50657]

  Angela Eagle
  The information on the acreage of land devoted to public allotments in each of the years referred to is not available.

  The English Allotments Survey published in 1997 by the National Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardeners Limited and Anglia Polytechnic University and financed by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions provides the following data on allotment acreage:

  1970—58,242 in England and Wales

  1977—49,873 in England and Wales

  1978—49,105 in England and Wales

  1996—25,393 in England.

  Road Signs
  Dr. Vis
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (1) if he will make a statement on his policy on commercial advertising in London upon land having public highway or trunk road status; and how that policy and the factors underlying it have changed since 1990; [50562]

  (2) if he will make it his policy that no private street signs will be licensed upon land having trunk road status unless provided in the interests of public safety; [50561]

  (3) if he will make a statement on his policy on the granting of licences for street signs or advertising promoting commercial or sectional interests upon land having public highway or trunk road status. [50560]

  Dr. Strang
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: All applications for the erection of advertisements on or near public roads are considered with reference to their likely effects on public safety and amenity at their proposed location. Local planning authorities are responsible for advertisement control within the rules laid down in the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) Regulations 1992, and the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (Amendment) Regulation 1994. The Department's advice to local planning authorities remains as in DOE Circular 5/92. Appendix B sets out the public safety factors to be considered for advertisements on land alongside motorways, trunk roads and other roads. Highway authorities, including the Secretary of State as highway authority for trunk roads,

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  will take similar considerations into account in deciding whether advertisements should be permitted on land and street furniture that they own.

  Train Operating Companies
  Mr. Drew
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what amount is currently paid to the train operating companies in subsidy by the Government; and what controls are exerted by the Government on how this money is spent by the train operating companies. [50668]

  Dr. Strang
  Support for Passengers Rail Services (SPRS) paid to and premium payments received from train operating companies by the Franchising Director are set out in the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising's Annual Report 1997–98, a copy of which is in the House Library. Where applicable, payments to train operating companies by Passenger Transport Executives are also shown, with further information on PTE support shown in the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions' Annual Report 1998, a copy of which is also in the House Library. The franchise agreements specify the services and standards the train operating companies are contractually required to provide in return for support payments.

  Railtrack
  Mr. Drew
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what proposals the Rail Regulator has to increase controls on Railtrack. [50669]

  Dr. Strang
  Last Autumn the Rail Regulator negotiated changes to Railtrack's network licence which strengthened the company's accountability to the Regulator and increased his enforcement powers. The Regulator has now completed his consultation exercise on Railtrack's recent Network Management Statement. He announced earlier today that, in the light of that consultation, Railtrack has given further commitments to improve network performance and track quality; to address network capacity problems; and to strengthen its processes for meeting the needs of train operators and funders.

  Mr. Drew
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions what measures the Rail Regulator proposes to ensure that Railtrack provides value for money over the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. [50670]

  Dr. Strang
  The Rail Regulator has made it clear that he will ring-fence Railtrack's core regulated activity of managing the domestic network and that any diversification by Railtrack Group plc should not impact on the access charges which may be levied by Railtrack plc.

  Rural Affairs
  Mr. Gray
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, pursuant to his answer of 3 July 1998,Official Report, column 286, on what occasions since 1 January he has (a) issued press releases and (b) made public statements on a proposed Rural White Paper. [50765]
  242
  Mr. Meacher
  We have issued no press releases and made no public statements about a proposed Rural White Paper. We are continuing to consider the best way of presenting our rural policies.

  Transport Projects
  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (1) what representations he has received from local authorities covering the Maidenhead constituency on transport projects qualifying under the category of specific transport projects for which the Treasury recently allocated £500 million; [50849]

  (2) when he expects to announce details of the allocation of the £500 million for specific transport projects recently announced by the Treasury. [50852]

  Dr. Strang
  The Budget included provision for an additional £500 million for public transport over the next three years.

  The Deputy Prime Minister announced in the House on 20 March 1998, Official Report, columns 1539–42, that the Government would be providing London Transport with an additional £365 million over the next two years. At least £300 million of this is for investment in the core network, and it will boost investment over the next two years to £1 billion. London Transport announced the details of their Tube 2000 investment programme on 11 June.

  New funding of £50 million per year for three years is being made available across the UK for public transport in rural areas. England's share of this is £41.7 million. A provisional allocation to local authorities of the additional support for rural bus services (£32.5m this financial year) was announced on 28 April. Detailed proposals in this connection were laid before the House on 17 June 1998, Official Report, column 206, including the allocation of £50,584 to Windsor and Maidenhead and £77,436 to Wokingham. As announced in my answer on 3 July 1998, Official Report, columns 285–86, we are now consulting on the arrangements for the £5 million Rural Bus Challenge competition which also forms part of this new money. Within the £50 million, £5 million has been set aside for community-based transport initiatives. In England, resources will be channelled through the Rural Development Commission. We are discussing with the Rural Development Commission how best to make use of these resources and have consulted the Local Government Association. An announcement will follow shortly.

  No representations have been received from the local authorities covering the Maidenhead constituency on transport projects encompassed by the £500m provision.

  Road Use Revenue
  Mr. Nicholas Winterton
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions if he will express the total revenue raised by the Treasury from road-user taxation, including vehicle excise duty, fuel tax and new vehicle tax as a proportion of the total amount spent on maintaining the road network in the most recent year for which figures are available. [50885]
  243
  Dr. Strang
  In 1996–97 £2.28 billion was spent on maintaining both the trunk and local authority road networks. In the same financial year £21.1 billion (some 925%) was raised in road-user taxation.

  Radioactive Waste Management
  Mr. Tony Clarke
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions when he will announce the conclusions of the Financial Management and Policy Review of the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee; and if he will make a statement. [51257]

  Mr. Meacher
  I have today published the report of the Steering Committee guiding the Financial Management and Policy Review of the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC). Copies of the report which was completed in March 1997, including a list of those who responded to the consultation exercise, have been placed in the Library of the House.

  The conclusion of the prior options stage of the Review were announced by my predecessor on 28 November 1996. This was that RWMAC should continue to operate for at least the next five years. It was also announced at that time that the Steering Committee would go on to

  RWMAC Membership template

  Specialism

  Indicative Organisation(s) from which members drawn

  Proposed number

  Nuclear and radioactive waste management

  Industry, consultancies, overseas operator

  4

  Geology, hydrogeology, geochemistry, chemical modelling

  University, research institute or private sector

  4

  Industrial waste management, pollution control

  Non-nuclear industry

  1

  Radiological protection

  NRPB

  1

  Environmental health/medical health

  Medical Research Council, university, medical research, charity or hospital health physicist

  2

  Local government/planning

  Local authorities, NGOs

  1

  Environmental and societal perspectives

  Environmental NGOs and associated individuals relevant university disciplines

  3

  Health and safety

  Trades unions, regulators

  1

  Environmental law

  Academia or private practice

  1

  Lay interests

  Various

  1

  Total

  19

FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS

  Building Europe Together
  Dr. Julian Lewis
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will list the publications printed under the Building Europe Together project and released in the United Kingdom. [46068]

  Mr. Doug Henderson
  The following publications were produced under the Building Europe Together programme: fact sheets on some of the areas covered by the Amsterdam Treaty; booklets entitled, "The Citizen's guide to the Treaty of Amsterdam" and "The Treaty of Amsterdam: Questions and Answers". The factsheets were made available on the internet. The booklets were available from the Commission Representation in the UK.244
  consider the structure and operation of RWMAC. The report being published today sets out the considerations leading to the decision that RWMAC should continue, and the Steering Committee's proposals for modifying the structure and operation of the Committee to suit current requirements.

  The Government welcome the majority of the Steering Committee's recommendations but have given further consideration to two of the recommendations; the membership template and the deletion of 'civil' from RWMAC's terms of reference to reflect its practice, now well established under invitation, of also considering the management of radioactive waste from defence establishments.

  The membership template has been amended to place a greater emphasis on environmental and social perspectives and lay perspectives. The new membership template printed below will become an attachment to all copies of the Steering Committee's report.

  Consideration of the proposed amendment to RWMAC's terms of reference will be deferred until the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology has reported on nuclear waste management.

  My right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Scotland and for Wales and I have accepted all the other recommendations made by the Steering Committee.

  Correspondence
  Mr. Sanders
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what is his Department's average response time to correspondence from members of the public; and how such response times are monitored. [48669]

  Mr. Fatchett
  In 1997, FCO replied to 84.7 per cent. (17,997) of the 21,248 letters received from members of the public within 20 working days of receipt.

  FCO Departments record the dates of receipt of letters from members of the public and issue of replies, and the proportion of their replies issued within the 20 day target.

  Mr. Ian Bruce
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what plans his Department has to correspond electronically with(a) hon. Members and (b) members of the public. [49803]
  245
  Mr. Tony Lloyd
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: This Department is able to receive electronic correspondence from hon. Members and members of the public via an interactive form on its website (www.fco.gov.uk). Where possible, we are happy to reply electronically.

  European Structural Funds
  Mr. Wigley
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on his Department's role in discussions relating to the future of the European structural funds for the period 2000 to 2006. [48775]

  Mr. Doug Henderson
  I refer the hon. Member to the answer given by my hon. Friend the Minister for Small Firms, Trade and Industry on 2 July 1998 Official Report column 240.

  Centre for Citizens and the Media
  Mr. Trend
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what is the(a) mandate and (b) budget of the Centre for Citizens and the Media in DGX. [49646]

  Mr. Doug Henderson
  The centre for citizens and the media and DGX aims to increase dialogue between the Commission and the general public and journalists. It is responsible for: organising programmes for groups visiting the Commission (over 34,000 people in 1997); selecting sponsored visitors from third countries (with the EP); managing the public inquiries service "Europe Direct"; setting up a Commission call centre to respond to telephone inquiries; managing the Commission's internal databases; training speakers available to give talks on the EU and the euro; supporting training on European affairs for journalists; developing links between twinned towns. The centre's budget for 1998 is 4.9 mecu (£3.26 million at current prices). It manages an additional 10 mecu (£6.66 million) for town-twinning projects.

  EU Funds
  Mr. Trend
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will place in the Library a list of the(a) organisations and (b) projects which received funding under budget line A-3024 and A-3104 for 1997. [49643]

  Mr. Doug Henderson
  I refer the hon. Member to my answer to the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) on 29 June 1998,Official Report, column 67.

  General Affairs Council
  Mr. Quinn
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on the outcome of the General Affairs Council in Brussels on 13 and 14 July. [51259]

  Mr. Doug Henderson
  The information is as follows.

  A General Affairs Council was held in Brussels on 13 July. The Council agreed the 37 A Points listed in document 10255/98 and noted the European Parliament's Resolutions, Decisions and Opinions taken at its part sessions in Strasbourg on 15–19 June and 1– 2 July, and
  246
  listed in documents 9471/98 and 9533/98. Copies of both these documents will be placed in the House Library as soon as they become available.

  The Council endorsed the Austrian Presidency's handling plan and timetable for the Agenda 2000 package. Over lunch Ministers discussed the working methods of the General Affairs Council.

  The mandates for negotiations with Norway and Iceland over their continued involvement with Schengen after entry into force of Amsterdam were briefly discussed. A few points remain to be settled; but the Presidency made clear that it would aim for the adoption of the mandates before the summer.

  Ministers condemned the violation by Belarus of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations in its actions against Ambassadors' residences in Drozdy. As a signal of the seriousness with which it took the situation, the EU had already adopted a Common Position imposing an entry visa ban on all members of the Government and senior officials of the Republic of Belarus. The Council expressed its determination to adopt further measures should further violations of the Vienna Convention occur. It will continue to monitor the situation in Minsk and demanded concrete proposals from the Belarus authorities. The EU hoped that early action by the Belarusian Government to respect fully the Vienna Convention would enable a return to the status quo ante and facilitate the development of the more constructive EU/Belarus relationship which the EU wished.

  The Council expressed its grave concern at the continuing violence and loss of life in Kosovo, particularly among the civilian population. The danger of a rapid widening of the crisis remains. The Council reiterated its call for an immediate cessation of all hostilities and the restart of a political process, with direct international involvement, between the parties. The Kosovo Albanian team for these talks must be able to speak authoritatively and therefore be fully representative of their community. The Council accordingly called on the leaders with the Kosovo Albanian community to unite and to make common cause to this end.

  The Council recalled that a solution for Kosovo can be found neither through the maintenance of the status quo nor through independence, but through a special status, including a large degree of autonomy within the FRY. The Council welcomed the intention of the Contact Group to set in hand work, to which the EU is actively contributing, to define possible further elements for the future status of Kosovo with a view to making them available to the parties. It emphasised that international involvement in the dialogue remains an essential element of credible negotiations.

  The Council discussed the situation in Albania. It strongly encouraged the Government of Prime Minister Nano to follow a policy of restraint and moderation in the Kosovo crisis, which is now more necessary than ever. It expressed its concern about the flow of arms from northern Albania to Kosovo Albanian armed groups. It called on all political organisations in Albania to support the policy of the Albanian government and to associate themselves with the line taken by the European Union on

  247
  the Kosovo issue. At the same time it called upon the Albanian Government to increase its efforts to stop the flow of weapons from Albania to Kosovo.

  The Council was encouraged by General Abubakar's commitment to national reconciliation leading to the restoration of democratic civilian rule and his decision to release a significant number of detainees. The Council urged General Abubakar to release all the remaining detainees and to announce his plans for the electoral process. They reiterated EU's readiness to support an inclusive political process.

  The Council heard a report on the EU troika Ambassadors' visit to East Timor from 27–30 June. It paid tribute to the way the members of the troika handled the difficult situation which arose and agreed that their report and conclusions should continue to be followed up by the competent Council bodies.

  The Council discussed the situation in Guinea Bissau and agreed that there was a need for humanitarian assistance and the opening of corridors for it to be delivered. It stressed the need for political and diplomatic solution to the problems and agreed that the EU should commit itself to a reconstruction programme on the basis of democratic conditions and the maintenance of the elections planned for this year and the next.

  The Council adopted conclusions inviting COREPER and the Commission to solve rapidly the problems emerging from the ECJ's recent judgment on spending without a legal base.

  The Council expressed the hope that the Conference nearing its conclusion in Rome would result in agreement to establish a credible International Criminal Court.

  The UK and seven EU partners drew the Council's attention to a joint statement deploring the Commission's decision to impose provisional anti-dumping duties on imports of unbleached cotton fabric from six non-EU countries.

  The first EU-Tunisia Association Council was held on 14 July, following the entry into force of the EU/Tunisia Association Agreement earlier this year. A dinner with the Tunisian Foreign Minister was held on 13 July. Ministers welcomed the new agreement, as part of wider moves towards a Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area by 2010, and discussed issues of common interest including developments in the middle east peace process, human rights, and inward investment.

  The inaugural Co-operation Council under the terms of the Partnership and Co-operation Agreement (PCA), between the EU and Moldova took place on 14 July. Over a working breakfast, Ministers had an exchange of views on foreign policy issues of mutual interest (including the situation in Transdniestra) and EU/Moldova relations. The Council itself exchanged views on the implementation of the PCA and adopted the Rules of Procedure establishing the foundations for the future work of the Co-operation Council and Committee, as well as the Joint Work Programme for 1998–99.

  The first EU/Mexico Joint Council was held on 14 July. It renewed the EU and Mexico's shared commitment to closer ties, including through the substantial and reciprocal liberalisation of trade in goods and services.

  Nazi Persecution Victims
  Mr. Quinn
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs who will benefit from the United Kingdom's contribution to the International Fund for Needy Victims of Nazi Persecution. [51260]

  Mr. Robin Cook
  I have announced that the UK's £1 million contribution to the Fund will be divided in the following way: two thirds will go through the World Jewish Restitution Organisation to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee for projects providing medical care to needy survivors of Nazi persecution in the Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova. The remaining third will go to the Board of Deputies of British Jews for needy survivors in the UK. Non-Jewish survivors will also be able to apply to these organisations for assistance.

  Nigeria
  Mr. Howard
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what reports he has received concerning changes to the timetable for a handover to civilian rule in Nigeria. [50719]

  Mr. Tony Lloyd
  I have heard nothing further since my answer to the right hon. and learned Member's previous question of 9 July 1998,Official Report, column 580.

  North Korea
  Mr. Howard
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what representations the Government have made to North Korea following the latest incidents involving infiltration into South Korean territory. [50717]

  Mr. Fatchett
  The UK does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea and no talks between officials have been held since these incidents.

  In his capacity as a member of the United Nations Command, our Defence Attaché in Seoul has taken part in the investigations into these events. He is also participating in the General Officer talks between the US-led United Nations Command and the North Korean People's Army, to discuss the 1953 armistice agreement and related issues arising from the latest incidents.

  North Korea has recently expressed an interest in political dialogue with the EU. Any such dialogue would need to include the subject of the recent incursions by the North.

  Iraq
  Mr. Howard
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on progress in inspecting Iraqi missile warheads alleged to contain traces of VX. [50721]

  Mr. Tony Lloyd
  On 24 June, UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler informed the UN Security Council that results of tests on missile warhead fragments removed from Iraq earlier this year had uncovered evidence that Iraq put VX and VX stabiliser into the warheads. These tests were carried out at a Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) accredited laboratory in the US.
  249
  UNSCOM is now arranging for further tests to be made on fresh samples at other accredited laboratories in France and Switzerland.

  Biological Weapons
  Mr. Howard
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what progress is being made in negotiations on the development of an international agreement on biological weapons. [50718]

  Mr. Tony Lloyd
  Since 1994 an ad hoc group of states parties has been meeting in Geneva to consider measures to strengthen the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. UK officials chair the key sessions on compliance measures at these negotiations. The ad hoc group has made good progress and is now working on the rolling text of a draft Protocol to the Convention. 1998 has seen a significant intensification of the negotiations. Much detailed work remains to be done but the United Kingdom, together with its EU partners, believes that an effective package of measures could be agreed during 1999.

  West Bank
  Mr. Howard
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what developments there have been in discussions on the future status of land in the West Bank; and if he will make a statement. [50720]

  Mr. Fatchett
  Discussions on the second Israeli redeployment continue between the parties and the US. We await an Israeli response to the latest US proposals. The talks have been made more difficult by the recent announcement of the Israeli Government, proposing an extension to the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem to include certain territory on the West Bank. We regard this development as serious and damaging to the prospects for peace in the middle east. We supported a UN Security Council Presidential Statement to this effect on 13 July 1998.

  Cyprus
  Mr. Howard
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what consultations he has had with Britain's EU partners concerning the proposed deployment of missiles in Cyprus; and if he will make a statement. [50722]

  Mr. Doug Henderson
  The intention of the Cyprus Government to deploy S300 missiles to Cyprus has been discussed with EU partners on a number of occasions. The overwhelming majority share UK concern that deployment would exacerbate tension in the region. We have expressed this concern to the Government of Cyprus and shall continue to do so.

  Our views are widely shared internationally. In May this year, the G8 expressed concern that new developments in the military sphere, including any increase in force levels and the upgrading of sophisticated weaponry, would risk further raising tension in the region. The UN Security Council last month called on all parties to avoid any actions which might increase tension, including through the further expansion of military forces and armaments on Cyprus.
  250
  We continue to believe that there are better ways to assure the prosperity and security of Cyprus than an increase in armaments. Measures to reduce military tension have a role to play, but the best way is by means of a comprehensive political settlement. We continue to work actively in support of the UN-led peace process and we look to others, in particular the leaders of both Cypriot communities, to do the same.

  Sierra Leone
  Sir John Stanley
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, pursuant to his answer to the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Hill) of 9 July 1998,Official Report, column 580, to whom indemnities relative to the Sierra Leone arms investigation have been given. [50858]

  Mr. Robin Cook
  As is normal practice in investigations of this kind, indemnities have been granted in relation to any legal action taken against Sir Thomas Legg, Sir Robin Ibbs and the secretariat of the investigation.

  British Overseas Territories
  Dr. Marek
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what plans he has to grant British citizenship to citizens of British Overseas Territories. [50886]

  Mr. Tony Lloyd
  The possibility of granting citizenship to citizens of the Overseas Territories is under active discussion between all Departments involved. We are looking at the issue sympathetically, but more work needs to be done before any announcement can be made. The result of this review will be made public in the forthcoming White Paper on the Overseas Territories.

  UNITA
  Mr. Pike
  To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what action Her Majesty's Government have taken in respect of the chief UNITA representative in the United Kingdom, Mr. Anibal Kandeya, to comply with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1127 (1997); and what knowledge his Department has of his whereabouts. [50447]

  Mr. Mike O'Brien
  I have been asked to reply.

  An application from Mr. Kandeya for further leave to remain in the United Kingdom is currently under consideration. No action may be taken to deport or otherwise remove him until this application has been resolved. I understand that Mr. Kandeya remains in the United Kingdom and is in contact with my Department.

PRIME MINISTER

  EU Cardiff Summit
  Mr. Llew Smith
  To ask the Prime Minister what environmental issues were considered when planning and implementing the EU Cardiff Summit, in respect of(a) energy use, (b) transport arrangements and (c) use of recyclable materials for catering; and what actions were taken. [47882]
  251
  The Prime Minister
  We tried wherever possible to take environmental issues into account when planning and implementing the European Council Meeting in Cardiff. Large multilateral meetings inevitably involve high energy consumption, because of the number of people involved (around 4,000 in this case), the equipment they use and the technical facilities involved. These included a media centre for the use of up to 2,500 people, interpretation facilities, extra lighting in the meeting rooms and in press briefing rooms for the use of the television crews. By using a self contained island site for the meeting and associated activities, we were able to keep use of cars to the minimum consistent with the normal courtesy to visiting Head of Governments and their security. The catering contractor used routinely has all paper, glass, steel and other metals collected for recycling.

  Sellafield
  Mr. Llew Smith
  To ask the Prime Minister what matters relating to radioactive releases from Sellafield were discussed with his Norwegian counterpart on 6 July; and what conclusions were reached. [49748]

  The Prime Minister
  During our meeting on 6 July, I reassured Prime Minister Bondevik that all discharges of radioactive material from Sellafield into European coastal waters were subject to licensing by the Environment Agency, that present levels were being reviewed and that levels were always set well within the threshold of what might pose a threat to public health. We agreed that our Environment Ministers should discuss the issue when they meet later this year.

  Strategic Defence Review
  Mr. Peter Bottomley
  To ask the Prime Minister, pursuant to his oral answer to the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, (Mr. Hague) of 8 July 1998,Official Report, column 1066, what potential sources of the leak of the Strategic Defence Review will be considered by the leak inquiry. [50536]

  The Prime Minister
  The independent investigator appointed by the Cabinet Office to conduct the inquiry into the leak of the Strategic Defence Review will determine what sources should be considered by the leak inquiry.

  Mr. Peter Bottomley
  To ask the Prime Minister when copies of the Strategic Defence Review were first provided to(a) Opposition parties and (b) the media. [50537]

  The Prime Minister
  Copies of the Strategic Defence Review were first given by the Government under the usual embargo terms to the Defence spokesmen for the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) and the hon. and learned member for Fife, North-East (Mr. Campbell) at a meeting with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence at 11.00am on 8 July.

  The media received their first copies from the Government at a Press Conference held at the Ministry of Defence Main Building at 1.15pm on 8 July. Attendance
  252
  was restricted to those who had agreed to be locked in until sometime after my right hon. Friend had started his statement to the House of Commons.

  These procedures are fully in line with the usual arrangements.

  Ministerial Code
  Mr. Peter Bottomley
  To ask the Prime Minister if he will amend the Ministerial Code to place a requirement on Ministers to correct significant factual inaccuracies. [50532]

  The Prime Minister
  Paragraph 1 of the Ministerial Code requires Ministers to give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Correspondence
  Mr. Ian Bruce
  To ask the Prime Minister what target his Office sets for the maximum time to respond to letters from hon. Members; what proportion of letters meets that target; and what is the average time taken to respond to a letter from an hon. Member. [49820]

  The Prime Minister
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: I refer the hon. Member to the reply given by my hon. Friend, the Parliamentary Secretary, Office of Public Service on 13 July 1998, Official Report, column 1.

  Government Buildings (Passes)
  Mr. Gibb
  To ask the Prime Minister if he will list the(a) occasions on which and (b) reasons for which passes to Government buildings have been issued to persons not employed by or under contract to a Government Department. [50613]

  The Prime Minister
  Most Government Departments operate a system of entry control to their buildings based on an assessment of the risk to their assets, the sole or shared ownership and occupancy of the site, and whether the public have right of entry to it. Practice can vary considerably, therefore, between Government sites, but entry control requiring registration and the use of visitors' passes is commonplace. Such passes are normally issued on a daily basis and must be surrendered on departure from the premises. Holders of these passes may require escorting. Of course details of the thousands of such passes issued daily at all Government buildings throughout the country is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

  Car Parking Charges
  Mrs. Shephard
  To ask the Prime Minister what consultations members of the No. 10 Policy Unit have had with supermarket owners, their representatives or advisers concerning the possibility of taxes or charges on car parking spaces at out-of-town shopping centres and at supermarkets. [50158]

  The Prime Minister
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: I refer the right hon. Member to the reply I gave to the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) on 14 July 1998, Official Report, column 94.
  253
  We have carried out an extensive consultation as part of the fundamental review of transport policy. My Ministers and I, and our special advisers, have met a large number of individuals and organisations and have attended a number of seminars to discuss a wide range of transport issues. The discussions and the written representations we received have played an important role in informing the development of our integrated transport policy, following our consultation document "Developing an Integrated Transport Policy: an Invitation to Contribute".

  Roger Liddle
  Mr. Winnick
  To ask the Prime Minister what factors led him to appoint Mr. Liddle as his special adviser; and what are his responsibilities. [50347]

  The Prime Minister
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: I considered a variety of factors when appointing the members of my Policy Unit, the most important of which was their ability to carry out the duties required of them effectively and well. His responsibilities include European policy and defence policy.

  Derek Draper
  Mr. Winnick
  To ask the Prime Minister what is the Government's current policy in respect of ministerial contact with Mr. Draper. [50348]

  The Prime Minister
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: I refer the hon. Member to the reply I gave to the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) on 14 July 1998, Official Report, column 94.

  Legal Drugs Tsar
  Mr. Flynn
  To ask the Prime Minister if he will appoint a tsar to reduce the deaths and addictions caused by the mis-use of medicinal and other legal drugs. [50485]

  The Prime Minister
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: Misuse should occur only when prescribers or patients use medicines outside the authorised conditions. Doctors and other healthcare professionals are individually responsible for the products they prescribe and must be able to justify, if necessary, their prescribing decisions. In particular, prescribing over large quantities or for excessive periods could be taken up as a terms of service issue or by the General Medical Council as professional disciplinary matter.

  Medicines are authorised for the United Kingdom market only after thorough and expert evaluation by the Medicines Control Agency, advised by the Committee on Safety of Medicines. The MCA continues to monitor the safety of medicines after they have been placed on the market and exposed to a greater population than in pre-authorisation tests. Medicines are authorised for use in very specific circumstances and any contraindications and warnings are shown clearly both to prescribers in the summary of product characteristics and to patients in information leaflets. We are satisfied that regulatory control, together with information and guidance to healthcare and patients, provides the necessary safeguards.

  Civil Servants (Information)
  Mr. Gordon Prentice
  To ask the Prime Minister what guidance is given to members of his Policy Unit concerning participation in events held under Chatham House rules. [50465]

  The Prime Minister
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: Members of my Policy Unit are covered by the same rules as other civil servants, which are set out in the answer given to my hon. Friend by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 15 July 1998, Official Report, column 205.

CABINET OFFICE

  Derek Draper
  Dr. Julian Lewis
  To ask the Minister without Portfolio, pursuant to his answer of 10 July 1998,Official Report, column 679, on how many occasions his office received draft articles written by Mr. Derek Draper for scrutiny prior to their publication in the press since 1 May 1997. [50837]

  Mr. Mandelson
  None.

  Lobbyists
  Mr. Spring
  To ask the Minister without Portfolio if he will list the lobbying firms to which he routinely faxes(a) press releases and (b) other information about his ministerial activities. [50733]

  Mr. Mandelson
  None.

  Mr. Spring
  To ask the Minister without Portfolio on what occasions he has met(a) Mr. Derek Draper, (b) GPC Market Access representatives, (c) Mr. Roger Liddle and (d) Lawson, Lucas Mendelsohn representatives in respect of his ministerial responsibilities. [50734]

  Mr. Mandelson
  I refer the hon. Member to the answer I gave to the hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) on 10 July 1998,Official Report, columns 678–79. I meet Mr. Liddle and other members of the No. 10 Policy Unit on a regular basis during the course of my official duties.

DUCHY OF LANCASTER

  Small Businesses
  Mr. Bob Russell
  To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster what plans he has to reduce the level of bureaucracy affecting small business; and if he will make a statement. [49375]

  Dr. David Clark
  I am committed to publishing new guidance, produced by the Better Regulation Unit, which will require Government Departments to make an assessment of risk, cost and benefits of any new regulations affecting business, charities, consumers and, in particular, small business. I hope to publish this guidance by the end of the summer.

  In addition, the Access Business Group, chaired by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, Office of Public Service, (which includes representatives of central

  255
  Government, business and local government) is continuing its work to make the regulatory system more transparent, accessible and helpful.

  At the European level, I am working with the European Commission to establish a new mechanism for consulting business direct on new regulatory proposals. A pilot test panel of European businesses, agreed under the UK Presidency, will enable the voice of British business, including small firms, to be heard in Brussels and help reduce unnecessary bureaucracy.

CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT

  Olympic Bid 2012
  Mr. Gareth R. Thomas
  To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what assessment the Government have made of London's capability to host the Olympic Games in 2012. [50234]

  Mr. Banks
  The British Olympic Association has decided that the next bid for the Olympic Games should be London-based. Like the BOA, the Government is determined that any bid should be of the highest possible quality. My Department is already working closely with the BOA who are conducting comprehensive studies on what is already in place and what needs to be in place to mount a winnable bid, which might well be for the 2012 Games. The BOA makes the nomination in respect of this country and ultimately the decision is entirely a matter for the International Olympic Committee.

  Correspondence
  Mr. Ian Bruce
  To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what target he sets for the maximum time to respond to letters from hon. Members; what proportion of letters meets that target; and what is the average time taken to respond to a letter from an hon. Member. [49832]

  Mr. Chris Smith
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: I refer the hon. Member to the reply given by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, Office of the Public Service on 13 July 1998, Official Report, column 1.

  Mr. Ian Bruce
  To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what is the e-mail address of his Department's Ministerial Correspondence Unit. [49834]

  Mr. Tom Clarke
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: The Department's Support Unit can be contacted at the following e-mail address: msu@culture.gov.uk.

  However, all DCMS Ministers can be contacted at their own e-mail addresses which are published on my Department's website (www.culture.gov.uk) as follows:

  chris.smith@culture.gov.uk

  mark.fisher@culture.gov.uk

  tony.banks@culture.gov.uk

  tom.clarke@culture.gov.uk.

  Commonwealth Games
  Mr. Stringer
  To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport if he will attend the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Malaysia; and if he will make a statement. [49964]
  256
  Mr. Banks
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: The Government will be represented by a Minister from DCMS. I know the games will be a great success, and I extend my very best wishes to all the British competitors.

  NESTA
  Mr. Spring
  To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what was the process whereby Lord Puttnam was appointed chairman of NESTA; who made the decision; what consultations were carried out; what are his terms of employment and salary; and what is his budget for staff and expenses. [50737]

  Mr. Chris Smith
  The process for the appointment of the Chairman of NESTA was based on the principles set down by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Potential candidates were generated from several sources, including a widespread consultation exercise in which over 250 bodies were asked to suggest names, advertisements in national newspapers and suggestions from within Government. All candidates were considered objectively against the same criteria. Lord Puttnam was one of a number who were interviewed by a panel with independent membership. On the basis of its consideration of written applications and of its interviews, the panel recommended to me that Lord Puttnam was eminently suitable for appointment and, in the light of this he was appointed by me after further consultation with colleagues in Government.

  Lord Puttnam has been appointed for a period of three years from 13 July 1998, at a salary of £22,000 per annum for two days' work per week. The budget for NESTA's staff and expenses will be a matter for NESTA's Board, within the resources available to them. The National Lottery Act 1998 allows me to place a limit or limits on NESTA's running costs expenditure, including staffing costs. I have not currently set any such limit. I and my Ministerial colleagues have however repeatedly made clear that we see NESTA and a slimline, unbureaucratic body employing no more than thirty staff.

  British Holidaymakers
  Mr. Spring
  To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport if he will publish the latest statistics on the numbers of British people taking holidays(a) in the United Kingdom and (b) abroad; and what is his estimate of the current spending difference. [50744]

  Mr. Tom Clarke
  The British Tourist Authority (BTA) collects statistics on the number of British people taking holidays in the United Kingdom and abroad in its annual British National Travel Survey.

  The BTA has published the figures for 1997, the latest year for which information is available, in the April 1998 edition of "Tourism Intelligence Quarterly": these figures show that the British spent £17,220m on holidays abroad of four or more nights, £12,410m more than the £4,810m they spent on holidays of four or more nights in Britain.

  Information on short break holidays of less than four nights will be available later in the Summer when the national tourist boards publish their annual United Kingdom Tourism Survey.

NORTHERN IRELAND

  Learning Disabilities
  Mr. Moss
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what measures she proposes to take to improve the standards of health services for people with learning disabilities in Northern Ireland. [49978]

  Mr. Worthington
  People with a learning disability have access to the full range of health services in Northern Ireland, in keeping with the Government's social inclusion policy. We are committed to continuous improvement of the standards of these services. Our agenda for improvement is set out in "Well Into 2000", published by the Department of Health and Social Services in 1997.

  Railways
  Mr. Moss
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if her Department will conduct an investigation into the number and thoroughness of safety checks made by Northern Ireland Railways; and if she will make a statement. [49980]

  Mr. Paul Murphy
  On 7 July 1998 my noble Friend Lord Dubs, Minister for the Environment in Northern Ireland, announced the appointment of Mr. Christopher Hall, one of Her Majesty's Principal Inspector of Railways to review the conduct and outcome of the current NIR inquiries into 3 recent railways accidents in Northern Ireland and to make recommendation on the further steps, if any, which may need to be taken to address identified safety deficiencies.

  The Minister also announced that Northern Ireland Railways would be commissioning a wider safety scrutiny of NIR operations under terms of reference to be agreed with HM Railway Inspectorate. A senior Railways Inspector will help oversee the wider scrutiny which will include NIR's safety procedures and checks. The main findings and recommendations of the inquiry and the NIR audit will be made public.

  I have arranged for a copy of the terms of reference of the inquiry to be placed in the Library of the House.

  Mr. Moss
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what actions the Department of Environment is taking to acquire additional funding for Northern Ireland Railways under the Private Finance Initiative. [49979]

  Mr. Paul Murphy
  The Department of the Environment is examining with Northern Ireland Railways, the Department of Finance and Personnel and HM Treasury the desirability and practicability of a Private Finance Initiative solution for the replacement of suburban rolling stock and for the provision of integrated bus and rail ticketing and related services.

  This consideration is ongoing.

  Selective Education
  Mr. Moss
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, pursuant to her answer of 15 June 1998,Official Report, columns 4–5, what is the exact remit of the major research project on the effects of the selective system on secondary education in Northern Ireland. [49997]
  258
  Mr. Worthington
  The terms of reference for the major research project on the effects of the selective system of secondary education in Northern Ireland are as follows:

  1. To investigate the effects on pupils and their families, teachers, schools and the community of the existing selective structure of secondary education in Northern Ireland, in order to provide a better basis for informed debate on the future structure of secondary education. Particular attention needs to be given to the identification of any differences in opportunity and performance in respect of different socio-economic groups, and especially between the constituent parts of the Northern Ireland community, which may result from the present system and structures. The study should also examine the inter-related effects of selection and open enrolment.

  2. To prepare a Final Report setting out the key findings, supported by quantitative and qualitative evidence, and highlighting the main issues emerging for consideration in light of the research. This report should draw together all the relevant aspects, but may be supported by more detailed papers as necessary. Interim Reports on specific aspects of the project should be prepared and presented to the Department on a schedule to be agreed at the outset of the assignment. The main focus should be on the effects of the selective structure of the secondary sector, though attention should also be given to the effects of the Transfer Procedure. The study should consider how well the present structure serves to promote learning through fostering values and attitudes; raising standards of learning, and providing opportunities for personal development and fulfilment.

  The research team should consult with the DENI Inspectorate where appropriate. The following points should be covered in the investigation and the report:
  1 Pupils

  a. effects of selection on achievement at GCSE level for all groups, including comparison of patterns of achievement by those of similar ability who attend selective and non-selective secondary schools;

  b. effect on patterns of school leavers' destinations, including routes into employment, FE, HE and training and

  c. effects on motivation, self-esteem and social attitudes.

  II Teachers:

  a. effects on teachers' perceptions and expectations of pupils; and

  b. effects on teacher motivation and performance.

  III Secondary Schools:
  a. for both selective and non-selective secondary schools:
  opportunities and constraints in the curriculum, and in particular an assessment of the extent of which selective and non-selective schools provide alternative pathways which meet the different needs of pupils, and the extent to which academic, vocational and pastoral provision are appropriate to the capabilities and needs of all pupils;
  an analysis of the extent and impact of transfer of pupils between selective and non-selective schools; and
  the extent to which NI has more small secondary schools than would be necessary in a non-selective system, and the implications, if any;
  b. For non-selective schools:
  trends in enrolment, and especially the implications of a reduced proportion of higher achieving pupils attending these schools as a result of the increased intakes to selective schools consequent on open enrolment;
  the extent to which the performance of non-selective schools reflects the quality of their intake;
  analysis of the changes in the pattern of ability levels on intake over the last ten years, and the resulting effects on performance; and

  259
  the restoration of pupil self-confidence and motivation in Key Stage 3.
  c. for selective schools:
  the extent to which the performance of selective schools reflects the quality of their intake;
  the extent to which selective schools have adapted their curricular provision to address the wider range of abilities attending these schools as a result of open enrolment; and
  sustaining performance of lower, achieving pupils.
  IV Primary Schools

  a. the researchers should consult with the DENI Inspectorate and CCEA on their findings on the effects of the Transfer Procedure on the implementation of the curriculum, and the nature and content of learning in Key Stage 2.

  b. the extent of coaching, the reasons why it is sought, and the costs and other implications for pupils, parents and schools; and

  c. the consequences of perceptions of transfer procedure performance for enrolment patterns of primary schools.

  V Society

  a. the effects on attitudes to education in both young people and adults;

  b. an analysis of the reasons why some parents choose not to enter their children for the transfer tests; and

  c. the effects of selection on how individuals are perceived by parents, employers, and tertiary education and training providers.

  Assembly
  Mr. Moss
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what plans she has to transfer responsibility for decisions regarding the future of hospitals in Northern Ireland to the Northern Ireland Assembly. [49983]

  Mr. Paul Murphy
  As envisaged by the Belfast Agreement [Cd 3883], the Government intend to bring forward legislation shortly which will provide for the transfer to the Northern Ireland Assembly of full legislative and executive authority in respect of those matters currently within the responsibility of the six Northern Ireland Government Departments. This will include the transfer of responsibility for decisions regarding the future of hospitals in Northern Ireland.

  Student Tuition Fees
  Mr. Moss
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if students from Northern Ireland holding British-Irish dual nationality will have their fourth-year fees waived if they attend a Scottish institution of higher education. [49984]

  Mr. Worthington
  No. Eligibility for support towards tuition fees is based on a residence requirement, not nationality.

  Millennium Compliance
  Mr. Moss
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what measures the Department of Health and Social Services is taking to ensure that equipment in general practitioner surgeries will be millennium compliant by 31 December. [49981]

  Mr. Worthington
  The Department has written to all GP practices to raise awareness of the Year 2000 issues. It has also facilitated the establishment by the 4 Health and Social Services boards of a special inter-Board Year 260
  2000 Primary Care Group to co-ordinate action and advice necessary to ensure a proper response to the Year 2000 problem across the whole of primary care.

  Guidance on Year 2000 has already been issued to all GP practices and further guidance specified to embedded systems in GP practices is currently being prepared for issue.

  The inter-Board group is arranging for a detailed Year 2000 audit of selected exemplar practices. Results from this audit will be used to inform other practices and will provide a basis for awareness-training for practice staff during Autumn 1998.

  A detailed questionnaire has been issued by HSS Boards to each GP practice seeking information by end-July 1998 on Year 2000 compliance progress.

  The Department will continue to monitor Boards' progress in respect of GP practice Year 2000 compliance.

  Police (Clear-up Rates)
  Mr. Barnes
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what was the clear-up rate for recorded offences in each police district in Northern Ireland in the last five years for which figures are available. [50192]

  Mr. Ingram
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: The percentage clear-up rates for each sub-division of the Royal Ulster Constabulary is shown in the table:

  Division/Sub-Division

  1993

  1994

  1995

  1996

  1997

  A Musgrave Street

  45.1

  43.5

  45.7

  47.0

  40.2

  Mountpottinger

  27.5

  29.4

  32.4

  28.5

  26.1

  Donegall Pass

  27.7

  22.6

  19.9

  22.4

  24.6

  Dunmurry

  28.4

  25.3

  25.7

  24.7

  22.9

  B Grosvenor Road

  31.0

  29.6

  30.4

  26.3

  21.8

  Lisburn

  40.7

  35.0

  30.9

  27.0

  29.7

  Woodburn

  33.0

  34.4

  27.0

  23.8

  21.0

  D North Queen Street

  32.8

  31.5

  31.7

  30.3

  27.7

  Antrim Road

  34.9

  32.8

  32.4

  30.4

  26.1

  Antrim

  35.3

  28.4

  32.1

  28.8

  23.8

  Newtownabbey

  32.8

  32.6

  35.8

  32.8

  27.8

  Carrickfergus

  38.7

  37.8

  37.9

  35.1

  36.5

  Tennant Street

  36.8

  32.5

  34.6

  33.3

  33.9

  E Bangor

  29.6

  29.6

  32.9

  30.8

  23.5

  Strandtown

  29.7

  30.8

  35.1

  30.3

  29.2

  Castlereagh

  30.7

  30.7

  33.9

  31.7

  31.4

  G Newtownards

  35.8

  39.1

  39.1

  38.1

  38.6

  Downpatrick

  41.3

  38.1

  35.9

  34.6

  34.1

  Newcastle

  28.8

  26.5

  26.7

  27.4

  27.9

  H Armagh

  35.1

  48.1

  43.4

  42.2

  37.0

  Newry

  42.0

  41.3

  38.3

  31.3

  29.7

  J Portadown

  40.4

  39.4

  40.0

  32.1

  31.6

  Lurgan

  44.1

  41.0

  38.4

  27.2

  33.7

  Banbridge

  44.6

  37.4

  39.3

  32.6

  32.5

  K Dungannon

  38.6

  57.6

  38.8

  42.7

  42.5

  Cookstown

  42.8

  44.7

  43.4

  41.9

  38.1

  L Enniskillen

  40.4

  42.1

  45.6

  39.2

  40.6

  Lisnaskea

  50.8

  52.4

  46.2

  43.8

  47.4

  Omagh

  46.8

  51.7

  40.1

  39.4

  38.6

  N Strand Road

  42.6

  46.6

  46.3

  39.2

  33.8

  Strabane

  45.7

  54.6

  57.7

  47.0

  39.7

  Waterside

  41.5

  44.1

  42.2

  38.1

  37.2

  O Coleraine

  38.3

  33.7

  37.2

  38.5

  33.0

  Limavady

  42.8

  47.0

  46.2

  41.0

  39.4

  Magherafelt

  42.8

  48.8

  51.4

  43.5

  42.0

  P Ballymena

  32.4

  31.2

  36.1

  42.4

  33.4

  Ballymoney

  46.7

  45.1

  38.5

  42.1

  43.2

  Larne

  42.2

  39.5

  40.2

  36.2

  38.7

  Motorists (Crimes)
  Mr. Barnes
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland how many motorists were(a) charged with and (b) convicted of (i) failure to accord precedence at pedestrian crossings, (ii) failure to comply with traffic signs, (iii) speeding offences, (iv) driving after consuming alcohol or taking drugs and (v) reckless driving in Northern Ireland in (1) 1994, (2) 1995, (3) 1996 and (4) 1997. [50191]

  Mr. Ingram
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: The information requested at (a) is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

  The table shows the number of persons against whom proceedings have been taken and the number found guilty.

  Offence

  1994

  1995

  1996

  1997

  Failing to stop at a pelican crossing

  Proceeded against

  0

  2

  0

  0

  Found guilty

  0

  1

  0

  0

  Failure to comply with traffic signs

  Proceeded against

  260

  278

  205

  226

  Found guilty

  236

  260

  186

  203

  Speeding offences

  Proceeded against

  2,400

  2,279

  2,423

  3,039

  Found guilty

  2,360

  2,204

  2,349

  2,948

  Drink/drugs related motoring offences

  Proceeded against

  3,224

  3,019

  2,596

  2,443

  Found guilty

  3,127

  2,939

  2,501

  2,350

  Reckless driving offences

  Proceeded against

  364

  445

  368

  353

  Found guilty

  339

  408

  329

  324

  Pedestrian Accidents
  Mr. Barnes
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland how many(a) children and (b) adults were (i) killed, (ii) seriously injured and (iii) slightly injured on or near pedestrian crossings in Northern Ireland in (1) 1994, (2) 1995, (3) 1996 and (4) 1997. [50222]

  Mr. Ingram
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: The number of casualties on or near pedestrian crossings for the years in question are shown in the table.

  Year

  Killed

  Serious injury

  Slight injury

  1994

  Children

  1

  18

  48

  Adults

  5

  34

  123

  1995

  Children

  1

  24

  57

  Adults

  8

  39

  102

  1996

  Children

  1

  15

  61

  Adults

  3

  35

  125

  1997

  Children

  1

  17

  67

  Adults

  4

  40

  111

  Irish Language
  Mr. Barnes
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what estimate she has made of the number of people in Northern Ireland who speak Irish. [50225]

  Mr. Worthington
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: The most reliable information is from the last Census in 1991 when a total of 142,003 people in Northern Ireland claimed some degree of ability in the Irish language with 131,974 indicating an ability to speak Irish. Revised figures will be available after the next Census in 2001.

  Narey Report
  Mr. McNulty
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what progress the Northern Ireland Prison Service has made in implementing the recommendation of the Narey report which was laid before this House on 2 April. [51261]

  Mr. Ingram
  The Narey Report contained 59 recommendations mainly concerned with improving security at HMP Maze. Management of Maze has made considerable progress in taking forward those recommendations.

  Forty recommendations relate specifically to procedural and operational matters. Of these, 23 either have been, or are about to be, implemented. These include revised procedures for children's parties which will be applied to the annual summer children's parties over the coming weeks. Twelve require further work and five have been referred to Her Majesty's Inspector of Prisons for advice.

  Fifteen recommendations, some of which will involve the provision of additional physical security measures, relate to staff-search procedures, the staffing and security arrangements for visits and the protection of the Block-roofs. A considerable amount of work has already been done by the three working groups and further work is in hand. In particular enhanced searching and training has been introduced and a new system of roof protection has been devised and is being piloted.

  Four recommendations dealt mainly with matters which the Northern Ireland Prison Service was required to consider. Two have been implemented and a third awaits greater clarity on the future of the prison in the medium term. The post of Governor has been advertised but as yet a suitable candidate has not been found, and other options are being pursued.

  The Narey Report pointed the way forward for improving security at HMP Maze. A good deal of progress has been made. The prison is now a safer and more secure environment but we are determined to ensure that momentum for improvement will be maintained. To this end, and going beyond the Narey recommendations, we have introduced a Security Audit Unit to continuously monitor and report on security standards in all establishments.

  Industrial Research and Technology Unit
  Dr. Godman
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what key performance targets have been set for the Industrial Research and Technology Unit for the financial year 1998–99. [51263]
  263
  Marjorie Mowlam
  IRTU's key strategic targets are to raise the level of industrial R&D in Northern Ireland and to operate efficiently and effectively. In that context, the following key targets have been set for the agency for 1998–99.

  1. To achieve new user participation in the Compete Programme of 10 per cent.

  2. To increase the average industry contribution to projects funded under the Compete Programme by 1 per cent.

  3. To achieve an increase in R&D projects under the pre-competitive Start Programme of 20 per cent.

  4. To achieve full cost recovery for scientific services.

  5. To maintain UKAS Accreditation for Scientific Services.

  Business Development Service
  Mr. McWalter
  To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what key performance targets have been set for the Business Development Service to be achieved by April 1999. [51264]

  Mr. Paul Murphy
  The Business Development Service is an executive agency of the Department of Finance and Personnel. I have set a number of key performance targets for the Agency to achieve by April 1999, as follows:

  at least 90 per cent. of customers to be satisfied with the services that they have received;

  at least 90 per cent. of customers to be satisfied with the way in which services were provided to them;

  to achieve levels of efficiency savings in total running costs of 3 per cent. over the allocation for 1997–1998;

  to demonstrate, on a national basis and within the context of service level agreements (where these apply), that the Agency would recover the full cost of its operations from its customers; and

  to achieve the Investors in People (IIP) standard by 31 March 1998.

  Copies of the Agency's Corporate and Business Plans for 1998 to 2001 have been placed in the Library.

WALES

  Correspondence
  Mr. Ian Bruce
  To ask the Secretary of State for Wales what plans his Department has to correspond electronically with(a) hon. Members and (b) members of the public. [49827]

  Mr. Ron Davies
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: My Department has no plans at present to communicate routinely with Members of Parliament and the public by electronic means, although external e-mail facilities will be available later this year. The Department will use whatever form of communication is appropriate to suit particular circumstances.

  Carmarthenshire NHS Trust
  Mr. Denzil Davies
  To ask the Secretary of State for Wales, pursuant to his answer of 7 July 1998,Official Report, column 504, on the proposed location of the headquarters for the Carmarthenshire NHS trust, if he will publish the policy guidelines referred to. [50538]
  264
  Mr. Win Griffiths
  The policy guidelines are those detailed in the Capital Investment Manual. The manual provides detailed guidance for each of the main stages of capital schemes. A copy is in the Library.

  Dyfed Powys Health Authority
  Mr. Denzil Davies
  To ask the Secretary of State for Wales, pursuant to his answer of 7 July 1998,Official Report, column 503, if he will provide a breakdown of the recurring additional cost of £285,000; and if this figure is an annual recurring figure. [50531]

  Mr. Win Griffiths
  The additional costs subject to management arrangements confirmed by the new Trust Board, if approved, will be:

  £

  Locality management

  200,000

  Standardisation

  75,000

  Protected staff costs (eg travel costs)

  10,000

  The first two items will be annual recurring costs, while the third will be phased out in line with changing staff conditions.

  Outdoor Education Centres
  Mr. Martyn Jones
  To ask the Secretary of State for Wales if he will make a statement on the Government's policy on outdoor education centres in Wales; and what financial provision he has made for them in the current financial year. [50482]

  Mr. Hain
  Outdoor education centres are the responsibility of the operator, usually a local authority or an independent provider. No direct Welsh Office funding is provided for such centres.

  Llanllyfni Bypass
  Mr. Wigley
  To ask the Secretary of State for Wales when he expects to announce(a) the results of the public inquiry and (b) his decision on Llanllyfni bypass. [50830]

  Mr. Hain
  The A487 Llanwnda-Llanllyfni scheme is subject to the current review of the Welsh trunk road programme. A report on the review will be published later this month.

  Inward Investment
  Mr. Barry Jones
  To ask the Secretary of State for Wales if he will make a statement on the prospects for further inward investment in Wales. [51212]

  Mr. Hain
  Our track record on inward investment is excellent. Over 300 overseas-owned manufacturing companies employing over 75,000 people in a range of industries including aerospace, consumer and office electronics, automotive components, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. These companies have been attracted by
  265
  a number of factors, not least the quality of the workforce, high levels of productivity, a sound infrastructure and the assistance offered by the organisations involved.

  The establishment of the National Assembly will strengthen Wales' ability to provide the right environment in which companies can succeed and prosper. Despite increasing competition for inward investment, the prospects for Wales remain good.

HOME DEPARTMENT

  Gender Impact Assessments
  Jackie Ballard
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the answer of 24 June 1998,Official Report, columns 557–58, prior to 18 May, what mechanisms were used to determine how legislation passed in the current session would affect women; what consultation he had with women's organisations; and if he will make a statement. [49094]

  Ms Quin
  Guidance on policy appraisal for equal treatment has been available within the Home Office since 1989, with revised guidance issued in August 1997.

  Within this Department, where appropriate and possible, we are making use of consultation, research projects and disaggregated statistics to identify the impact of policy on women. For example, we have conducted research aimed at understanding the sentencing of women. Examples of bodies with which I have had correspondence include the Maternity Alliance, Women in Prison and the Mother's Union. Furthermore, the Cabinet Sub Committee on Women's Issues, on which I am the Home Office representative, reviews and develops the Government's policy and strategy on issues of special concern to women and oversees their implementation. The importance of seeing the implications for women of all policies is discussed.

  Lobbyists
  Mr. Clappison
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will list the meetings(a) Ministers and (b) special advisers in his Department have had with lobbying companies since 1 May 1997. [49668]

  Mr. Straw
  [holding answer 9 July 1998]: Ministers, their Special Advisers and other civil servants meet many people in the course of their work. This properly includes meetings with interest groups outside Government; indeed one of the specific functions of Special Advisers is to liaise with such interest groups. This liaison is intended to help Ministers draw upon outside contributions—from academics, think-tanks, trade and industry associations, trade unions, lobby groups and others, as well as relevant experience from other countries—during the process of policy analysis and development. By convention, it is not the practice of Governments to make information on such meetings or their content publicly available—a principle reflected in the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information published in January 1997.
  266
  Special Advisers and other civil servants must observe the requirements of propriety: for instance, they must not provide confidential information without authorisation or allow improper influence on policy. Any breach of these requirements could be a disciplinary offence.

  CS Gas
  Mr. Livingstone
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, (1) pursuant to his answer of 16 June 1998,Official Report, columns 173–74, on CS spray, if he will place in the Library a copy of the report arising out of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency's literature review on possible alternative solvents at the end of 1997; [49998]

  (2) pursuant to his answer of 16 June 1998, Official Report, columns 173–74, on CS spray, if he will place in the Library a copy of the specification issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers on the purchase of CS sprays; and on what date this specification was issued. [49999]

  Mr. Michael
  The specification issued jointly by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Police Scientific Development Branch was issued to chief police officers in March 1997. Copies of the specification and of the report arising out of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency's literature review of possible alternative solvents are available in the Library.

  Non-criminal Prisoners
  Ms Drown
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what was the total cost to the public purse of keeping non-criminal offenders (excluding fine defaulters) in prison for each year from 1992 to 1997. [50328]

  Ms Quin
  The information is not available in the form requested, as the Prison Service does not record costs by type of prisoner or offence. However, the average cost per uncrowded prison place, defined as current expenditure per baseline Certified Normal Accommodation, is one of the Prison Service's Key Performance Indicators. The figures for the years 1992 to 1997, in cash terms, are:

  1992–93: £22,723

  1993–94: £23,080

  1994–95: £23,391

  1995–96: £24,178

  1996–97: £24,271.

  Ms Drown
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what proportion of(a) men and (b) women convicted of (i) defaulting on a fine and (ii) non-criminal offences, excluding fine defaulting, were given custodial sentences in each year from 1992 to 1997. [50397]

  Ms Quin
  The available information is for the number of fine defaulters and non-criminal prisoners received into prisons. The table shows information for the years 1992 to 1997. Information on the total number of persons who default on the payment of a fine, and hence the proportion of those who are imprisoned, is not recorded centrally. It
  267
  is also not recorded centrally what other orders are made in the circumstances in which persons are committed to prison as civil prisoners.

  Receptions into prison: fine defaulters and non-criminals, by gender, 1992–97

  Fine defaulters

  Non-criminals

  Males

  Females

  Males

  Females

  1992

  18,782

  1,044

  2,968

  141

  1993

  21,097

  1,306

  4,756

  317

  1994

  21,015

  1,454

  4,217

  290

  1995

  18,787

  1,370

  3,611

  178

  1996

  8,094

  461

  2,994

  134

  19971

  5,964

  372

  3,063

  141

  1Provisional

  Youth Justice Board
  Mr. Clappison
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, (1) pursuant to his answer to the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) of 30 June 1998,Official Report, column 142, regarding the Chairman of the Youth Justice Board, if he will list the (a) legal qualifications and (b) experience of working with victims of crime of the successful candidate for Chairman of the Youth Justice Board; [50416]

  (2) what assessment he made of the advantages and disadvantages of requiring political independence on the part of the Chairman of the Youth Justice Board. [50380]

  Mr. Straw
  The competition for Chair of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales was conducted in line with guidance from the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments ('Nolan' procedures).

  The Information for Applicants for the Chair and Board Members of the Youth Justice Board describes the role of the Chair and sets out the following essential experience:

  Knowledge of the youth justice system;

  Senior management experience, including strategic and/or resource management at senior level; and

  Experience of working with Government.

  It also states:
  'Members of the board must include individuals who appear to the Home Secretary to have knowledge of the youth justice system. It will be desirable for Members of the Board between them to have experience of the following services: business; child and adolescent mental health services; courts dealing with young offenders; education services; legal services; police; probation; secure facilities for young people; social services; services for victims and young people.'
  'Members will need to be objective and open-minded, able to act in an independent capacity and to deal with gender and race issues in a criminal justice context. They will need to be able to work effectively with providers of services for young people in the youth justice system. They will not be expected to represent particular professional associations or viewpoints.'

  I am glad to say that the selection panels for the Youth Justice Board are at pains to ensure that all qualified candidates for appointment as Member (including the Chair) have the necessary impartiality for their task and fully meet the requirements for their posts specified above.
  268
  The Chair-designate is not a qualified lawyer, and has not worked directly with victims of crime (although he has played a significant role advising on the Government's policies for supporting victims).

  Harassment
  Mr. Beith
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many persons have been prosecuted under section 4 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997; how many prosecutions have resulted in a conviction; and if he will make a statement. [50429]

  Mr. Michael
  Section 4 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997—Putting people in fear of violence—came into force on 16 June 1997.

  Provisional court proceedings data for 1997 show 243 prosecutions under section 4 of the Act, which resulted in 76 convictions. In addition, 51 cautions have been recorded provisionally for the offence.

  Non-custodial Sentences
  Mr. Beith
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what assessment he has made of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons' statement to the Home Affairs Committee concerning the proportion of women prisoners and of young and adult prisoners who could be better dealt with through non-custodial sentences; and if he will make a statement. [50619]

  Mr. Michael
  We are aware of no evidence to support the contention that 30 per cent. of prisoners should"self-evidently not be in prison".

  Evidence could only be obtained by detailed case by case analysis by experienced sentencers. Statistically, it would require over half of the offenders convicted of non-sexual or violent offences currently in prison to be given non-custodial sentences instead (including burglars, drug offenders and persistent offenders).

  The Government are anxious to ensure that prison is used only when necessary and appropriate, so we are taking a range of measures to ensure that this is the case. In the Crime and Disorder Bill [Lords], we are introducing tough new community penalties for drug misusers and juvenile offenders, including the drug treatment and testing order, the action plan order and the reparation order. We are also keen to make greater use of modern technology and we have recently extended the areas where curfew orders can be enforced by electronic monitoring. Provisions in the Crime and Disorder Bill will also enable short-term prisoners to be released early on home detention curfew.

  Similarly, the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 contains provisions allowing courts to impose community service orders or curfew orders on fine defaulters and persistent petty offenders and to impose driving disqualifications for non-motoring offences and fine default. These provisions are being introduced initially through pilot schemes in Norfolk and Manchester which began in January. The Act also widens the power to impose attendance centre orders on fine defaulters to include 21–24 year olds.

  Reconviction Rates
  Mr. Beith
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what statistics his Department collates on re-offending rates among offenders sentenced to fines; and if he will make a statement. [50598]

  Mr. Michael
  Reconviction rates within two years of sentence are calculated from time to time for all court disposals relating to standard list offences (all indictable and some more serious summary offences). This is done by extracting sample criminal career information from data held on the Home Office Offenders Index. Two figures are usually produced: the actual reconviction rates; and those predicted by taking into account a range of offender characteristics (such as age, gender, criminal history and current offence). These rates are not routinely published, but estimated figures for those fined are given in the table:

  Reconviction rates within two years of sentence for offenders fined for standard list offences

  1987

  1991

  1993

  1994

  Reconviction rate1

  30

  37

  47

  45

  Predicted rate

  40

  42

  49

  46

  Number sampled

  2,698

  7,605

  7,218

  6,275

  1A change in coverage slightly increased the reconviction rate for those sentenced in 1994

  There are difficulties in comparing reconviction rates for 1993 and 1994 with those for earlier years, in that the sentencing structure was altered by the Criminal Justice Act 1991 (implemented on 1 October 1992). A unit fine scheme operated up until 20 September 1993. A large part of the increase in the reconviction rate between 1991 and 1993 can be accounted for by changes in predicted rates (the reconviction rate increases by 10 percentage points and the predicted rate increases by 7 percentage points).

  It should be borne in mind that the figures quoted relate only to those fined for standard list offences. They do not necessarily reflect the reoffending behaviour of the many offenders who are fined for offences not on the standard list.

  Police Staffing
  Mr. Beith
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) what proportion of the extra funding from his Department for the police in each of the last three years was allocated to police recruitment and staff expenditure in each police force; and if he will make a statement; [50600]

  (2) if validated figures for the number of police officers per police force in England and Wales on 31 March are available. [50603]

  Mr. Michael
  Information on the number of police officers per police force on 31 March 1998 is contained in the table. It is not known what proportion of the additional £100 million provided by the Government to police forces over the years 1996/97 to 1998/99 has been used for police recruitment and staff expenditure. It is for individual chief constables to determine the number of police officers in their force area, within the total resources available to them. The table shows the changes in police numbers since 31 March 1996.
  270
  One of the mistakes of the last Government was to promise increases in police numbers. In the Police and Magistrates' Courts Act 1994, they handed to chief constables the freedom to decide whether to use available resources on employing police officers or on other expenditure, such as information technology. We attached no condition to the extra £40 million we provided to the police in England and Wales in 1998/99.

  Police Manpower

  31 March 1996

  31 March 1997

  31 March 1998

  Avon and Somerset

  2,981.0

  2,988.8

  2,975.9

  Bedfordshire

  1,127.7

  1,093.6

  1,078.5

  Cambridgeshire

  1,238.1

  1,302.0

  1,291.4

  Cheshire

  1,997.9

  2,045.5

  2,035.9

  City of London

  869.5

  858.9

  824.9

  Cleveland

  1,420.3

  1,459.3

  1,483.4

  Cumbria

  1,115.0

  1,143.5

  1,163.5

  Derbyshire

  1,763.1

  1,790.6

  1,772.2

  Devon and Cornwall

  2,898.9

  2,864.5

  2,961.5

  Dorset

  1,263.0

  1,284.0

  1,310.0

  Durham

  1,401.0

  1,460.5

  1,514.8

  Dyfed-Powys

  991.0

  1,004.5

  1,002.3

  Essex

  2,884.3

  2,960.7

  2,928.5

  Gloucestershire

  1,132.7

  1,132.6

  1,103.9

  Greater Manchester

  6,938.0

  6,921.6

  6,948.7

  Gwent

  1,043.5

  1,243.0

  1,232.8

  Hampshire

  3,347.1

  3,451.7

  3,489.5

  Hertfordshire

  1,712.0

  1,759.1

  1,739.9

  Humberside

  2,041.0

  2,045.0

  2,021.2

  Kent

  3,120.1

  3,260.1

  3,251.8

  Lancashire

  3,171.0

  3,247.5

  3,257.1

  Leicestershire

  1,908.3

  1,948.8

  1,983.1

  Lincolnshire

  1,144.6

  1,196.4

  1,191.1

  Merseyside

  4,411.0

  4,230.4

  4,217.4

  Metropolitan Police

  27,343.0

  26,677.3

  26,192.7

  Norfolk

  1,401.0

  1,431.6

  1,429.6

  Northamptonshire

  1,152.5

  1,176.7

  1,168.7

  Northumbria

  3,668.3

  3,676.8

  3,766.7

  North Wales

  1,377.5

  1,369.0

  1,396.0

  North Yorkshire

  1,324.4

  1,337.6

  1,367.2

  Nottinghamshire

  2,317.7

  2,323.4

  2,322.6

  South Wales

  3,027.0

  2,975.9

  2,986.2

  South Yorkshire

  3,073.1

  3,158.7

  3,182.0

  Staffordshire

  2,208.8

  2,211.1

  2,292.1

  Suffolk

  1,137.8

  1,179.7

  1,185.8

  Surrey

  1,643.8

  1,619.5

  1,608.4

  Sussex

  3,073.5

  3,084.9

  3,037.7

  Thames Valley

  3,674.0

  3,695.0

  3,775.5

  Warwickshire

  979.0

  925.9

  924.1

  West Mercia

  2,016.8

  2,040.2

  2,011.8

  West Midlands

  7,145.1

  7,112.7

  7,156.5

  West Yorkshire

  5,142.0

  5,208.8

  5,154.7

  Wiltshire

  1,218.5

  1,154.3

  1,148.3

  Total

  124,843.9

  125,051.7

  124,885.9

  Mr. Beith
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what was the number of police officers per head of population, (i) per police force and (ii) in total for the last date for which figures are available and in each of the three preceding years. [50597]
  271
  Mr. Michael
  The information requested is set out in the table.

  The population figures are those provided by the Office for National Statistics. For 1997–98, the population figures used are the same as for 1996–97 (mid 1996); mid 1997 population figures will not be available until later this year.

  Head of population per police officer by police force area

  Police force

  1994–95

  1995–96

  1996–97

  1997–981

  Avon and Somerset

  486

  491

  491

  493

  Bedfordshire

  482

  484

  502

  509

  Cambridgeshire

  545

  560

  540

  545

  Cheshire

  505

  490

  479

  481

  City of London

  6

  6

  6

  6

  Cleveland

  390

  394

  382

  376

  Cumbria

  420

  440

  429

  422

  Derbyshire

  531

  543

  537

  543

  Devon and Cornwall

  533

  532

  539

  521

  Dorset

  523

  537

  531

  521

  Durham

  449

  434

  416

  401

  Dyfed-Powys

  485

  478

  475

  476

  Essex

  513

  522

  511

  517

  Gloucestershire

  472

  488

  491

  504

  Greater Manchester

  366

  372

  372

  371

  Gwent

  454

  434

  447

  451

  Hampshire

  531

  520

  508

  502

  Hertfordshire

  501

  501

  491

  496

  Humberside

  438

  436

  434

  439

  Kent

  496

  497

  478

  479

  Lancashire

  443

  450

  439

  437

  Leicestershire

  499

  484

  476

  468

  Lincolnshire

  505

  535

  515

  517

  Merseyside

  308

  324

  336

  337

  Metropolitan Police

  271

  274

  284

  289

  Norfolk

  551

  551

  543

  543

  Northamptonshire

  515

  520

  514

  517

  Northumbria

  400

  392

  390

  381

  North Wales

  481

  478

  479

  470

  North Yorkshire

  559

  552

  549

  537

  Nottinghamshire

  445

  445

  444

  444

  South Wales

  441

  440

  414

  413

  South Yorkshire

  429

  424

  413

  410

  Staffordshire

  473

  478

  477

  461

  Suffolk

  545

  577

  561

  558

  Surrey

  460

  472

  480

  483

  Sussex

  494

  476

  477

  485

  Thames Valley

  524

  557

  559

  547

  Warwickshire

  490

  509

  541

  542

  West Mercia

  546

  552

  548

  556

  West Midlands

  374

  369

  372

  369

  West Yorkshire

  417

  410

  405

  409

  Wiltshire

  465

  485

  514

  517

  Total

  412

  415

  416

  416

  1Based on provisional police strength figures as at 31 March 1998

  Street Robberies
  Dr. Cable
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what plans he has to ensure better co-operation between the Metropolitan Police and the British Transport Police to reduce the number of robberies occurring in the vicinity of underground and railway stations and to reduce the means of escape they offer to criminals. [50578]

  Mr. Michael
  The deployment of staff and use of resources are operational decisions for the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police. The Commissioner has confirmed to me that the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police have a close working relationship. They 272
  co-operate and share information, and in relation to street robbery they work together in partnership under the banner of Operation "Eagle Eye".

  Operation "Eagle Eye" is an initiative set up specifically to tackle street robbery through the collection and analysis of information about crimes and known offenders, together with sophisticated policing techniques to arrest street robbers. The Commissioner tells me that this initiative has led to a 5 per cent. fall in the number of robbery offences recorded in the year to March 1998.

  Firearms
  Mr. Martyn Jones
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) if he will list the international bodies or groups as members of which the Government have taken part in discussions on firearms matters since May 1997; and if he will indicate the topics discussed; [50540]

  (2) if he will list the non-Governmental organisations invited by him to take part in international discussions on firearms matters. [50539]

  Mr. Michael
  On 26 June 1997, the Council of Ministers of the European Union adopted the European Union programme for Preventing and Combating Illicit Trafficking in Conventional Arms. The Government have also taken part in discussions within the United Nations Crime Commission, which adopted a Resolution in April entitled: "Measures to regulate firearms for the purpose of combating illicit trafficking in firearms". Additionally, a statement of principles and action plan to combat illegal manufacturing and trafficking of firearms was drawn up by a Sub-Group of the G8 Lyon Group on Transnational Organised Crime and endorsed at the Birmingham Summit in May. The United Nations Small Arms Panel has considered ways to prevent and combat the accumulation of small arms to help avoid the destabilisation of countries engaged in conflict.

  No non-governmental organisations have been invited to take part in these discussions.

  Charities
  Mr. Lidington
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department when he expects to reply to the letter of 11 May 1998 from the hon. Member for Aylesbury concerning the status of charities. [50616]

  Mr. Michael
  I replied to the hon. Member on 26 June. I will send the hon. Member a copy of my reply.

  Magistrates
  Dr. Cable
  To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what plans he has to extend the training of lay magistrates prior to their sitting on the bench. [49875]

  Mr. Hoon
  I have been asked to reply.

  By statute the responsibility for organising and delivering training to meet these requirements rests with individual Magistrates' Courts Committees.

  Under the present training arrangements magistrates are required to attend prescribed induction training for a total of 12 hours and undertake visits of observation to their own and another magistrates' court before they commence sitting.
  273
  New training arrangements are to be introduced over a twelve month period commencing in September 1998. Under these new arrangements magistrates will have to acquire and demonstrate through a process of appraisal, a range of identified competencies appropriate to the areas of work of the magistrates' court they are engaged in. Appraisal will be conducted by an experienced magistrate colleague, specially selected and suitably trained.

  Newly appointed magistrates will receive some training in basic competencies and undertake visits of observation to their own and another magistrates' court before they commence sitting.

  Training and development to achieve the competencies required for the adult court will continue through a process of attending courses and experience gained through sitting in court.

  On appointment, new magistrates will be assigned an experienced magistrate colleague, specially selected and suitably trained, who will act as a mentor to them, to provide information, advice, support and guidance and help them identify and apply the learning related to the required competencies derived from the experience of sitting and to apply the learning obtained from attending courses to sitting in court.

  A magistrate who fails to demonstrate the acquisition of the required competencies and, despite further training and development opportunities, shows no further progress towards attaining the competencies will be referred to the Local Advisory Committee who may then recommend to the Lord Chancellor that the magistrate be removed from sitting on the bench.

TREASURY

  Personal Pensions
  Mr. Timms
  To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will make a statement on the progress being made by firms in resolving their reviews of personal pensions. [51262]

  Progress by pensions firms in resolving cases of personal pensions mis-selling in the period to the end of June 1998

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  Under 50% of cases resolved

  DBS

  1,965

  400

  392

  101

  291

  165

  8

  34

  Financial options

  399

  146

  48

  22

  26

  24

  6

  48

  Burns Anderson

  1,210

  335

  327

  150

  132

  99

  8

  48

  50–75% of cases resolved

  Gan

  11,915

  1,610

  6,242

  661

  5,581

  4,305

  36

  55

  Countrywide

  4,879

  2,501

  281

  172

  109

  85

  2

  57

  Abbey Life

  17,544

  4,768

  6,904

  1,096

  5,808

  5,158

  29

  63

  Lincoln National

  13,342

  1,934

  7,789

  1,174

  6,615

  5,302

  40

  63

  Windsor Life

  9,582

  3,505

  3,060

  299

  2,761

  2,258

  24

  63

  London and Manchester

  8,466

  1,356

  4,862

  558

  4,304

  3,859

  46

  68

  Hill Samuel

  6,150

  867

  3,845

  661

  3,184

  2,855

  46

  71

  Colonial

  8,495

  2,724

  4,094

  474

  3,620

  2,918

  34

  72

  Friends Provident

  6,994

  1,104

  4,419

  660

  3,759

  3,307

  47

  73

  Canada Life

  5,593

  376

  4,270

  605

  3,665

  3,119

  56

  73

  Nat West

  15,208

  4,647

  7,631

  1,108

  6,523

  5,479

  36

  74

  Berkeley Independent

  181

  111

  23

  19

  4

  4

  2

  74

  Standard Life

  7,130

  825

  4,892

  1,106

  3,786

  3,349

  47

  74

  274
  Mrs. Liddell
  On 17 June 1998,Official Report, columns 208–10, I published figures showing the progress being made in the period ending 31 May by the 41 firms I have been monitoring for the last year. The table shows the progress made in the period up to the end of June by 29 of the 41 firms. Most of these firms have continued to make good progress, and only 3 firms have resolved under 50 per cent. of their cases. These are networks of independent financial advisers, and were among the firms I met on 7 July.

  When I met senior representatives of the 41 firms last summer, I challenged them to meet or to better the targets set for them by the regulators, and made clear to them that I would publish progress statistics collected from them monthly. In my oral statement to the House on 18 November 1997, Official Report, columns 155–63, I said that I would remove from this list the name of any firm once it had achieved its target for resolving priority cases.

  The Personal Investment Authority (PIA) have informed me that information provided to them indicates that, consistent with the deadlines they were set, 12 firms appear to have made every proper effort to obtain investors' acceptance of offers of redress. The names of these 12 firms have therefore been removed from the list. The firms are AXA Equity & Law, Barclays Life, Britannic Assurance, Commercial Union, Godwins, Guardian, Lloyds TSB, Midland Bank, Norwich Union, Prudential, Royal and Sun Alliance and United Assurance.

  I should emphasise, however, that this does not mean that their work is over. The regulators will continue to monitor firms to see that they follow through on offers of redress in a timely manner and establish the arrangements necessary to honour guarantees of pensions rights. Looking to the future, firms must also tackle the next phase of the review of personal pensions, which in general terms concerns the cases of people whose need for redress is less urgent. This second phase of the review was the subject of a consultation by the regulators ending in May this year, and they will shortly be announcing the way forward. I hope all firms will respond constructively.
  275

  Progress by pensions firms in resolving cases of personal pensions mis-selling in the period to the end of june 1998

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  Over 75% of cases resolved

  CIS

  43,679

  5,346

  31,446

  13,395

  18,051

  14,249

  33

  76

  IFA Network

  365

  122

  161

  107

  54

  48

  13

  76

  Sedgwick

  16,597

  8,673

  4,348

  1,665

  2,683

  2,417

  15

  77

  Sun Life of Canada

  28,038

  11,730

  12,386

  2,380

  10,006

  8,508

  30

  81

  Albany Life

  2,970

  666

  2,107

  195

  1,912

  1,537

  52

  81

  Equitable Life

  7,584

  1,895

  4,657

  1,691

  2,966

  2,687

  35

  83

  Allied Dunbar

  19,385

  4,133

  13,413

  3,687

  9,726

  8,246

  43

  83

  M&E Network

  319

  175

  108

  28

  77

  65

  20

  84

  Hogg Robinson

  2,226

  810

  1,191

  401

  790

  675

  30

  85

  Legal & General

  36,738

  15,093

  19,363

  1,812

  17,551

  14,668

  40

  86

  Pearl

  47,125

  3,956

  39,500

  5,633

  33,867

  31,548

  67

  87

  Wesleyan

  4,185

  293

  3,535

  1,001

  2,534

  2,368

  57

  88

  Royal London

  12,971

  1,140

  11,694

  1,521

  10,173

  9,569

  74

  94

  A: cases identified as requiring review

  B: of A, cases where investor was informed that information gained during assessment excluded cases from review

  C: number of assessments completed

  D: cases where the investor has been informed that no redress is due

  E: cases where redress has been offered

  F: cases where redress has been accepted

  G: cases where redress has been accepted as a percentage of cases identified for review ((F/A)x100)

  H: cases resolved, including exclusions, as a percentage of cases identified for review (((B+D+F)/A)x100)

LORD CHANCELLOR'S DEPARTMENT

  Court Transcripts
  Mr. Sanders
  To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department if he will take steps to allow members of the public to view court transcripts without charge. [49754]

  Mr. Hoon
  Members of the public can, with the permission of the court, obtain from private contractors transcripts of hearings held in open court provided they do not involve sensitive issues, such as child abuse. However, transcribers are entitled to charge for this, or for copying the transcript if one has already been made. There are no plans to provide transcripts free of charge.

  Mr. Sanders
  To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department if he will take steps to ensure that copies of court transcripts are made available free of charge. [49753]

  Mr. Hoon
  There are no plans to provide copies of transcripts free of charge. The Court Service pays for transcripts required for appeal purposes. Only between 5–10 per cent. of cases are transcribed for the Court of Appeal at a cost of approximately £700,000 pa. The increased demand, if transcripts were made freely available, would not, in my judgment make the best use of taxpayers' money.

  Correspondence
  Mr. Sanders
  To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department what is his Department's average response time to correspondence from members of the public; and how such response times are monitored. [48670]

  Mr. Hoon
  The Lord Chancellor's Department has a 20 working day target for responding to correspondence from members of the public and monitors performance against this target. The average response time in 1997–98 was 15.7 working days for the Chancellor's Department Headquarters and 13 working days for the 276
  Court Service Headquarters. Information on average response time for the courts and the Public Trust Office is not readily available and could be obtained only at disproportionate cost.

  Mr. Ian Bruce
  To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department what plans his Department has to correspond electronically with(a) hon. Members and (b) members of the public. [49836]

  Mr. Hoon
  The information is as follows:

  (a) Hon. Members can e-mail the Lord Chancellor's Department's Ministerial Correspondence Unit at: mcu.lcd@gtnet.gov.uk

  (b) Members of the public can e-mail the Department at: enquiries.lcdhq@gtnet.gov.uk.

  The Lord Chancellor's Department website (http//www.open.gov.uk/lcd) also provides a number of other e-mail addresses for more specific contacts, such as for responses to consultation papers. In addition, it is expected that the Lord Chancellor's Department will be linked to the Government Secure Intranet by the end of this year.

  Magistrates
  Dr. Cable
  To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department if he will list the (i) ethnic and (ii) religious background of(a) lay magistrates, (b) stipendiary magistrates and (c) Recorders in (1) numerical and (2) percentage terms. [49953]

  Mr. Hoon
  The table sets out the figures for the number and percentage of lay magistrates, stipendiary magistrates, acting stipendiary magistrates and recorders of ethnic minority origin. The figures for lay magistrates are based on a survey (excluding the Duchy of Lancaster) conducted in 1997 to which 94% of lay magistrates responded. The figures for the other judicial office holders are believed to be correct but because candidates for judicial appointments were not asked for information
  277
  about their ethnic origin before October 1991, the data may be incomplete. Candidates are not asked to provide details of their religious background.

  Post

  Total

  Of ethnic minority origin

  Percentage

  Lay magistrates

  25,124

  1,026

  4.1

  Stipendiary magistrates

  88

  2

  2.3

  Acting Stipendiary magistrates

  114

  4

  3.5

  Recorders

  836

  13

  1.5

  Court Waiting Times
  Mr. Nigel Jones
  To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department what was the average length of time between charge and verdict for(a) all offenders and (b) young offenders, in each of the most recent five years for which records are available. [50065]

  Mr. Hoon
  The exact information requested is not available and could be obtained only at a disproportionate cost. The nearest information available is given in the table.

  The majority of criminal cases are completed in magistrates' courts. From a survey of approximately 4,000 defendants (450 youth defendants) each year the average time from charge/summons to completion in the magistrates' courts is as follows:

  Sample size

  Average time from charge/summons to completion (weeks)

  All defendants

  1993

  4,435

  15.2

  1994

  4,092

  16

  1995

  4,161

  16.8

  1996

  3,551

  17

  1997

  3,704

  17.2

  Youth defendants

  1993

  335

  15.2

  1994

  415

  16.2

  1995

  567

  17.2

  1996

  447

  17

  1997

  524

  17

  Cases in the Crown Court are committed there by the magistrates' courts. From a survey of approximately 4,000 defendants (200 youth defendants) each year, the average time from charge/summons to committal to the Crown Court is as follows:

  Sample size

  Average time from charge/summons to committal (weeks)

  All defendants

  1993

  4,431

  14.5

  1994

  4,034

  15

  1995

  3,836

  15.2

  1996

  3,993

  15.1

  1997

  4,450

  15.8

  278

  Sample size

  Average time from charge/summons to committal (weeks)

  Youth defendants

  1993

  61

  12.7

  1994

  122

  15

  1995

  102

  14.4

  1996

  140

  14

  1997

  214

  15.2

  The average time from committal to the Crown Court to the start of the main hearing is as follows:

  All defendants

  Average time from date of committal to start of main hearing (weeks)

  1993

  12

  1994

  13.1

  1995

  16.1

  1996

  16.7

  1997

  16.2

  Note:

  This information includes all cases in the Crown Court, but is not available for youth defendants

  Conditional Fees
  Mr. Michael J. Foster
  To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department if he will make a statement on the responses to the consultation paper, "Access to Justice with Conditional Fees", and on the measures the Government proposes to take. [51371]

  Mr. Hoon
  The Lord Chancellor has today placed in the Libraries of both Houses a summary of the responses to the Consultation Paper. The Government remain committed to achieving the aims set out in the consultation paper of extending access to justice and beginning the process of refocusing legal aid to where it can do most good. The Lord Chancellor is grateful to all those who responded, all of whose comments have been carefully considered.

  The Government have received wide support to extend conditional fees to all civil proceedings other than family cases and we are keen to proceed as quickly as possible. I have today laid a draft Order for the approval of the House to extend conditional fees to all proceedings not excluded by statute. The draft Order will be debated as soon as time can be found. For the longer term, the Government continue to believe the operation and fairness of conditional fees would be enhanced by making the success fee and insurance premium recoverable. We wish to consider this further before reaching any final decision but the Lord Chancellor is minded to seek the legislation to allow the success fees and insurance premiums to be recoverable as soon as possible.

  Legal aid is in urgent need of reform and we shall begin the process of reform in a number of ways. First, we will ensure that assisted persons have access to suitably competent lawyers in medical negligence cases by using existing powers to direct clients towards specialist lawyers who hold franchise contracts with the Legal Aid Board. It will be a condition of holding a contract that the lawyers have shown themselves to be competent in this area of

  279
  law. The Lord Chancellor has asked the Legal Aid Board to press ahead with putting in place the necessary contracts. The Lord Chancellor wishes to see these contracts in place by January 1999. The Lord Chancellor has also directed them to establish a panel of lawyers of proven experience and expertise to whom preference would be given in awarding contracts for group actions and other related changes, as canvassed in the Board's consultation paper When the Price is High published in June 1997.

  In addition, the Lord Chancellor has asked the Board to complete, by the end of 1999, not only the provision of civil advice and assistance exclusively through contracts, but also all family legal aid, including representation.

  Finally, to achieve the maximum benefit from the money available, the Government are determined to ensure that legal aid is not spent in purchasing legal services where a suitable alternative exists. They believe that conditional fees provide a suitable alternative, particularly in a range of money claims. They recognise, however, that this alternative would be more attractive if the success fee and insurance premium were recoverable. For that reason the Government are considering how quickly to move to a position where the kinds of money claims described in the Consultation Paper, in particular personal injury claims, and financed principally by conditional fee agreements. The Government would like to be able to move this position by October 1999.

TRADE AND INDUSTRY

  Arms Sales
  Mr. Mullin
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what plans she has for greater transparency regarding arms sales; and if she will make a statement. [49384]

  Mrs. Roche
  The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd), said in a written reply on 14 July 1998,Official Report, column 149, that the Government are preparing a report on UK strategic export controls which will include an account of the moves we have made since 2 May 1997 towards a responsible UK and European arms export policy; which will list by country of destination the numbers of export licences issued in each equipment category and give details of the military equipment for which licences have been granted; and which will set out the value of defence exports to each country.

  This reflects HMG's commitment to increase the transparency and accountability of the decisions on export licences for arms.

  Millennium Compliance
  Mr. White
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what further measures her Department is taking to help businesses tackle the millennium bug. [49385]

  Mrs. Beckett
  An extra £18 million has been provided by the Government for the work of Action 2000 to help businesses deal with the Millennium Bug. Action 2000 280
  has recently finalised its business plan for the new funding which will be published shortly. A major communication and public relations campaign was announced by Action 2000 yesterday and at the same time the current Action 2000 Campaign material which has been updated was relaunched. Action 2000 will undertake further and more detailed monitoring of the state of readiness of small and medium sized companies.

  Insolvency Service
  Mr. Vaz
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will make a statement on the Insolvency Service. [49386]

  Mr. Nigel Griffiths
  The Insolvency Service was created as an Executive Agency of the Department of Trade and Industry on 21 March 1990. Its Framework Document defines its status, role, responsibilities and accountability; and the structure within which its work is to be determined, its resources established and its performance assessed. It was last revised and laid before Parliament on 16 March 1998. Its annual report and audited accounts for 1997–98 are due to be laid before Parliament shortly. In February 1996, after an evaluation of The Service's performance against the private sector, it was decided not to contract out the case administration work of Official Receivers.

  Post Office
  Miss Kirkbride
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what representations she has received on her review of the Post Office. [49388]

  Mr. Ian McCartney
  I have met a wide range of interested parties, including the management and unions of the Post Office, leading private sector carriers and representative organisations. The review process is an inclusive one and since the announcement of the second stage of the Review on 6 April 1998,Official Report, column 63, my officials have received written views and met interested parties.

  Mr. St. Aubyn
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will make a statement on the future of the Post Office. [49395]

  Mr. Ian McCartney
  The Government plan to give the Post Office greater commercial freedom so that it can meet the challenges of domestic and international markets. The Government have commissioned a review of the public sector options for achieving this and we plan to present our proposals to Parliament in the Autumn.

  Energy Review
  Sir Sydney Chapman
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will make a statement about progress in respect of the proposals in the Government's review of energy. [49389]

  Mr. Battle
  On 25 June the Government published a consultation document setting out their proposals. The consultation period ends on 20 July 1998.

  Mr. Skinner
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade when she expects to receive a report on the consultations regarding energy markets. [49392]
  281
  Mr. Battle
  The consultation period on the Government's consultation document on their Review of Energy Sources for Power Generation finishes on 20 July. We expect to reach conclusions shortly thereafter.

  Young Entrepreneurs
  Mr. Touhig
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will make a statement about her Department's role in assisting young entrepreneurs. [49391]

  Mrs. Roche
  The Department is keen to encourage young entrepreneurs. One of the Department's key aims is to foster an enterprising nation. The Department, and other Government departments, assists entrepreneurs through a wide range of activities and schemes, including locally delivered business advisory services.

  Employment Rights and Trade Union Recognition
  Mr. Mackinlay
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade when she expects to bring forward the proposed legislation on employment rights and trade union recognition. [49393]

  Mr. Ian McCartney
  I cannot, of course, anticipate the content of the Queen's Speech, but it is the Government's intention to introduce legislation on employment rights and trade union recognition as soon as possible.

  Higher Technology Industries
  Mr. Sheerman
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what steps she is taking to address the shortfall of investment in innovation in higher technology industries. [49394]

  Mr. Battle
  The Government recognise that investment in innovation is key to our overall competitiveness. We have already taken steps to improve the regulatory climate for investors, to help high technology companies to improve their management and marketing skills, to improve the quality and quantity of financing opportunities and to encourage industry to draw on our excellent science and engineering base. For example, we have recently launched the University Challenge Fund to assist in the transformation of good research into good business. A copy of the scheme guidelines has been placed in the Library.

  Foresight Programme
  Dr. Desmond Turner
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what action she is taking to raise the profile of the foresight programme. [49396]

  Mr. Battle
  The progress report I published last month outlined the steps which are being taken to raise the profile of the Foresight Programme within Government under the overall direction of the Ministerial Foresight Group. Copies are available in the Libraries of both Houses. A range of initiatives are in hand to raise its profile with business and academia. These include the current consultation on the next round which has produced a very positive response and expressions of interest in participation from organisations which have not been involved in Foresight to date.

  EU Structural Funds
  Mr. Blizzard
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what her objectives are for the reform of EU structural funds. [49397]

  Mrs. Roche
  We welcome the publication of the draft regulations for Structural and Cohesion Funds—which are part of the wider Agenda 2000 reform package.

  Our overriding concern in the long negotiation ahead is to ensure that these draft regulations are affordable, durable and fair overall, particularly to the UK.

  Energy Policy
  Mr. Gill
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will make a statement on the role of state intervention in industry following her statement on energy policy. [49398]

  Mr. Battle
  The Government are committed to consumer protection promoting fair competition in open markets and putting consumers first. We will take action to the extent necessary to secure properly functioning markets and to protect consumers, as set out in our energy statement and in our Green Paper, A Fair Deal for Consumers: Modernising the Framework for Utility Regulation.

  Plutonium
  Mr. Chaytor
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what assessment she has made of the relative costs of eliminating Britain's plutonium stockpile through(a) the production of mixed oxide fuel and (b) vitrification. [49399]

  Mr. Battle
  It is for the owners of spent fuel and plutonium to assess the relative costs of MOX fuel production and vitrification. Subject to meeting the stringent safety, security and international safeguard requirements, it is for them to choose their preferred management options, including whether or not their spent fuel should be reprocessed and whether their plutonium is stored, manufactured into MOX fuel or vitrified.

  Mr. Baker
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what her policy is in respect of the creation of plutonium from energy sources in the UK. [49402]

  Mr. Battle
  Nuclear generating stations in this country currently meet nearly 30 per cent. of our electricity needs. It is an inescapable fact that plutonium is produced when uranium is burnt in conventional nuclear reactors.

  All civil plutonium in the UK is stored safely and securely under relevant national and international regulations.

  University Research
  Mr. Alan W. Williams
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what plans she has to improve the infrastructure and equipment for research at Britain's universities. [49400]

  Mr. Battle
  Earlier this week, on 13 July 1998,Official Report, columns 47–48, my right hon. Friend announced the establishment of a £600 million capital fund for building new and refurbishing existing university laboratories, equipment and other essential infrastructure,

  283
  funded equally by the Government and the Wellcome Trust. £400 million has also been provided over the next three years for the Research Councils to meet the current and capital costs of new project funds in priority areas. Additional funding for research of £300 million over the next three years has been announced by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, and a further £100 million by the Wellcome Trust towards the cost of a high intensity x-ray source for use mainly by university researchers.

  The size of this package for research, which amounts in total to £1.4 billion over the life of this Parliament, will ensure that our universities have the facilities they require to remain at the forefront of research into the next millennium.

  Science
  Dr. Gibson
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what action she has taken to promote the interests of UK science in Europe. [49401]

  Mr. Battle
  UK researchers are active in a wide range of scientific activities in Europe, through the European Union's framework programmes, through major European collaborations such as CERN and the European Space Agency, and through bilateral and multilateral collaborations between institutes, universities and individual researchers. At the level of the European Union, the Government have played a leading role in encouraging UK scientists to participate in the current, fourth, framework programme and in negotiating the fifth framework programme, currently under discussion.

  UK scientists perform very strongly in these programmes, and are expected to continue to do so in the future. The Government also play a proactive role in respect of our membership of the major European collaborations, with a view to ensuring high quality, cost effective opportunities for UK scientists to work with others in these areas. And we are active, through maintaining close and constructive bilateral relations with other European countries, in ensuring that the UK is seen to be keen to create opportunities for mutually beneficial collaborative research partnerships at all levels.

  We also consider that useful work can be done at the European level to promote the role of women in science. The UK actively supports the Commission's development of measures to encourage action on the under-representation of women in science. This parallels the activity of the Office of Science and Technology's Development Unit on women in science, engineering and technology. As part of the UK Presidency, I chaired the round table discussions during the European Commission Conference on Women and Science in April.

  We have also been keen to encourage discussion at European level of key issues surrounding the development of new technologies, such as biotechnology. Among measures to encourage this the UK Presidency and European Commission jointly organised a Biotechnology Round Table in June which brought together representatives from the EU institutions, industry, research, consumer, environmental and other interest groups.

  Science, Engineering and Technology
  Mr. Dobbin
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will make a statement on the impact of the fifth framework research programme on the UK science, engineering and technology sectors. [49403]

  Mr. Battle
  The fifth framework programme is currently the subject of negotiation with other member States and with the European Parliament. The Council's common position, agreed unanimously during the UK Presidency in February 1998, envisages a programme which will be clearly focused on areas where research at a European level can be expected to make a contribution to increased competitiveness and improvements in quality of life. The aim is to agree the programme, which will run until the end of 2002, by the end of this year. I expect the UK science, engineering and technology sectors to participate strongly in this programme, as they have done in previous programmes.

  EU Industry Council
  Mr. Timms
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will make a statement on the work of the EU Industry Council during the UK presidency. [49404]

  Mrs. Beckett
  I refer my hon. Friend to the answer given to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) on 21 May 1998,Official Report, columns 357–58.

  Human Genome Sequencing
  Mr. Miller
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what share of the world's effort in human genome sequencing is being undertaken in the UK. [49405]

  Mr. Battle
  The UK is undertaking around one third of the world's effort in sequencing the human genome. The UK contribution is made primarily through the work of the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.

  The mapping programme is currently scheduled to be completed by 2005.

  Loan Companies
  Mr. Flynn
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what new proposals she has to restrict the activities of loan companies charging excessive rates of interest. [49406]

  Mr. Nigel Griffiths
  The Director General of Fair Trading is currently consulting on the extortionate credit provisions of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. Before taking further action I will study the evidence this exercise produces and his proposals.

  Minimum Wage
  Mrs. Heal
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what recent representations she has received about the implementation of the Government's proposals for a national minimum wage. [49407]

  Mr. Ian McCartney
  The Government have received a number of recent representations about the implementation of our proposals for a national minimum wage, which we expect to be implemented by April 1999.

  Business Practices
  Mr. Quinn
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what steps her Department is taking to promote innovation in business practices. [49408]

  Mrs. Roche
  The Department continues to work with a wide range of partners to help companies innovate by adopting better business practices.

  As part of the Competitiveness UK programme, my hon. Friend the Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs has been chairing the Best Practice Working Party to discuss what further activities the Department should be supporting in this area.

  Euro
  Mr. Kidney
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what action her Department is taking to raise business awareness of the introduction of the euro. [49409]

  Mrs. Beckett
  The Euro Preparations Unit was set up in Treasury at the beginning of this year to raise awareness of the implications of EMU for UK businesses and to help them prepare for the strategic and practical changes that the introduction of the single currency on 1 January will bring.

  My officials will continue to work closely with the EPU to ensure that the many business contacts that my Department has are used to best effect.

  Jackie Ballard
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what steps her Department is taking to help small to medium-sized enterprises prepare for the introduction of a single currency. [49387]

  Mrs. Roche
  The Euro Preparations Unit was set up in H.M. Treasury, with secondees from DTI, at the beginning of this year to raise awareness of the implications of EMU for UK businesses and to help them prepare for the strategic and practical changes that the introduction of the single currency on 1 January will bring.

  DTI officials will continue to work closely with the EPU to ensure that the many business contacts that the Department has are used to best effect. For instance, I recently discussed the implications of the euro with the Business Link Chief Executives and considered with them how they could help SMEs prepare.

  Inward Investment
  Mr. Evans
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade how many new jobs she estimates were created by inward investment into England in 1997–98. [49792]

  Mr. Ian McCartney
  [holding answer 10 July 1998]: My Department's Invest in Britain Bureau announced yesterday that in 1997/98 the UK has had another successful year, attracting 618 inward investment decisions with 124,622 associated jobs, of which 45,937 were new jobs. Of these decisions 464 were to invest in England with 98,699 associated jobs, of which 29,778 were new jobs.

  Ladbroke-Coral Merger
  Mr. Meale
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade how many representations the Monopolies and Mergers 286
  Commission has received about the proposed merger between Ladbroke and Coral; and if she will make a statement. [50149]

  Mr. Nigel Griffiths
  The Monopolies and Mergers Commission has received a large number of representations about the acquisition by Ladbroke of the Coral betting business, and I have asked the Chairman of the MMC to reply to my hon. Friend direct.

  Mr. Meale
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade if she will direct the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to consider the adverse effects of the proposed merger between Ladbroke and Coral on national competition in the bookmaking industry. [50153]

  Mr. Nigel Griffiths
  In announcing her decision to refer the acquisition by Ladbroke of the Coral betting business to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC), my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade stated that she considered that the acquisition raised competition concerns in relation to the off-course betting market.

  It is for the MMC to consider whether a merger operates, or may be expected to operate, against the public interest. The Fair Trading Act 1973 requires the MMC, in considering whether any particular matter operates, or may be expected to operate, against the public interest, to take into account all matters which appear to them in the particular circumstances to be relevant, although they are required to have regard to certain specified public interest issues.

  Mr. Meale
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade when she expects to receive the report of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission inquiry into the proposed merger between Ladbroke and Coral; and if she will make a statement. [50154]

  Mr. Nigel Griffiths
  On 1 July, I announced that I had agreed to a request by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) for an extension to the time allowed for their inquiry into the acquisition by Ladbrokes of the Coral betting business. The MMC's report, which was originally due to be made by 7 July, is now due to be made within the period ending on 31 July.

  Redundancy Payments (Scotland)
  Mr. David Marshall
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what has been the total cost in each of the last 10 years of(a) redundancy payments and (b) lump sum redundancy payments to people who were employed in the public sector in Scotland. [50652]

  Mr. Ian McCartney
  The information requested is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

  Retailers' Loyalty Cards
  Mr. Barnes
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade what research she has(a) commissioned and (b) evaluated on the impact of retailers' loyalty cards on consumer spending patterns and on prices. [50209]

  Mr. Battle
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: No research has been commissioned and no evaluations made by the Department on the impact of retailers' loyalty cards.

  Telephone Services (Charges)
  Mr. Barnes
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade What research she has(a) commissioned and (b) evaluated into the costs incurred by consumers through the use of call-queueing and automated telephone-answering systems. [50208]

  Mrs. Roche
  [holding answer 14 July 1998]: Call-queuing and telephone-answering equipment has been introduced by companies and other organisations since the 1980s, with the aim of making their telephone-answering operations more efficient for themselves and their callers. Companies have a wide choice of switchboard equipment to choose from, and have responsibility for choosing equipment and setting it up so that their consumers' needs are met. Calls are legitimately charged to the calling party, but companies can set up their inquiry lines to run on Lo-call or even Freephone numbers, which will reduce or remove the cost to the consumer. No research has been commissioned or evaluated into the costs incurred by consumers through the use of call-queueing and automated telephone-answering machines, but the Office of Telecommunications (Oftel) is working with the telecommunications industry to ensure that switchboard recorded messages inform members of the public who ring that they are being held in a queue, where this is the case. Once informed of this, callers have the choice of continuing to wait in the queue, which may incur a cost, or of hanging up and trying again later.

  Employment Tribunals Service
  Dr. Starkey
  To ask the President of the Board of Trade when she expects the Employment Tribunals Service to publish its annual report for 1997–98. [51370]

  Mr. Ian McCartney
  The Employment Tribunals Service became an executive agency on 1 April 1997. Its annual report, covering its first year of operation, has been published today. I have arranged for copies to be placed in the Libraries of the House.

SOCIAL SECURITY

  Pensions
  Mr. Cousins
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security what are the range of maturity values at two years and 10 years after commencement of the pension plans of each approved personal pension plan provider; and what assessment she has made of variations of maturity values, and the reasons for them, under the pensions review. [47728]

  Mr. Denham
  [holding answer 29 June 1998]: The information is not available in the format requested. Such information as is available is set out in the table.

  £

  Pension fund

  Maturity value with 2 years contribution

  Maturity value with 10 years contribution

  Scheme 1

  5,800

  28,400

  Scheme 2

  5,200

  26,200

  Scheme 3

  5,000

  25,400

  Scheme 4

  4,400

  22,300

  Scheme 5

  4,300

  22,400

  288

  £

  Pension fund

  Maturity value with 2 years contribution

  Maturity value with 10 years contribution

  Scheme 6

  4,100

  21,000

  Scheme 7

  3,800

  22,700

  Scheme 8

  3,600

  23,4000

  Scheme 9

  3,300

  27,6000

  Scheme 10

  2,800

  20,3000

  Notes:

  1. Amounts have been rounded to the nearest £100

  2. The table shows maturity values upon retirement at age 65 of ten modelled Appropriate Personal Pension (APP) funds and are based on the characteristics of actual providers

  3. They are based on an individual who contracts-out of SERPS at the age of 30 at the beginning of the 1997/98 financial year for 2 and 10 years with all National Insurance rebates accrued during this time being paid into the APP

  4. Fund values are expressed in constant 1997 prices

  5. The following assumptions have been made:

  (a) that the National Insurance rebates, and associated tax relief, paid over the 2 and 10 year periods are the only contributions ever made;

  (b) that the individual was earning the national average level of full-time earnings in Great Britain at the time the APP commenced in April 1997;

  (c) that earnings increase at a rate of 1.5 per cent. a year above inflation;

  (d) that the rate of return on the pension fund assets (before charges are deducted) is 4.5 per cent. a year above inflation;

  (e) that National Insurance rebates are paid into the pension fund halfway through the following tax year in which the earnings to which they relate were accrued;

  (f) that the retirement age of 65 is also the retirement age specified in the personal pension policy (penalties may be incurred if an individual retires before a specified scheme retirement age); and

  (g) that the sample funds accrue the same rate of return on fund assets before charges are deducted

  Mr. Flynn
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security if she will estimate the present weekly value of the basic pension for a single person and a married couple had it been increased in line with earnings since 1980. [50863]

  Mr. Denham
  If the basic State Retirement Pension had been increased by the higher of earnings or prices since 1980, the weekly rate would now be £89.60 for a single pensioner and £143.40 for a married couple.Notes:

  1. The Retail Price Index (RPI) (All items) and the Average Earnings Index (Whole Economy) as supplied by The Office for National Statistics were used in this calculation.

  2. The figures have been rounded to the nearest 5 pence at each uprating.

  3. The rate of basic Retirement Pension was increased in the April 1994 uprating by 50 pence for a single pensioner and 70 pence for a couple on account of VAT on fuel. This increase has not been added in to these illustrative figures.

  4. For the calculation where State Retirement Pension was linked to the higher of RPI and earnings, the earnings index was the higher figure except in 1982, 1984, 1991 and 1996, when the RPI was used.

  Housing Benefit Overpayments
  Mr. Roy
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security if she will publish for each Scottish local authority, a breakdown for 1996–97, of housing benefit overpayments, in terms of(a) numbers, (b) amounts for DSS, local authority and claimant errors and (c) (b) expressed as a percentage of total expenditure. [48500]
  289
  Mr. Keith Bradley
  The information available is set out in the table.

  Overpayments of Housing Benefit Expenditure, Scotland—1996–97

  Housing benefit expenditure £

  DSS/DfEE error

  Local authority error

  All other overpayments (including fraud)

  (a)

  Numbers

  (b) Amount £

  (b)as a percentage of (a)

  Numbers

  (c) Amount £

  (c) as a percentage of (a)

  Numbers

  (d) Amount £

  (d)as a percentage of (a)

  Aberdeen

  23,923,000

  12

  1,071

  2—

  111

  6,885

  2—

  5,271

  1,008,285

  4.2

  Aberdeenshire1

  16,229,000

  4

  2,180

  2—

  112

  183,990

  1.1

  1,031

  382,753

  2.4

  Angus

  10,410,000

  5

  1,247

  2—

  11

  1,345

  2—

  164

  99,439

  0.9

  Argyllbute

  13,120,000

  23

  3,265

  2—

  1

  151

  2—

  1,576

  389,837

  2.9

  Clackmannanshire

  6,975,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  100

  1.180

  2—

  1,540

  211,121

  3.0

  Dumfries Galloway

  21,479,000

  17

  2,326

  2—

  59

  4,073

  2—

  2,620

  483,680

  2.2

  Dundee

  42,262,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  3

  1,419

  2—

  4,968

  1,174,883

  2.8

  East Ayrshire1

  18,531,000

  5

  1,289

  2—

  70

  9,721

  2—

  2,252

  364,728

  2.0

  East Dunbartonshire

  7,670,000

  3

  302

  2—

  16

  2,329

  2—

  549

  125,239

  1.6

  East Lothian

  12,222,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  56

  8,476

  2—

  1,100

  258,682

  2.1

  East Renfrewshire1

  6,204,000

  13

  584

  2—

  35

  6,920

  0.1

  182

  70,394

  1.1

  Edinburgh1

  98,891,000

  0

  0

  2—

  10

  1,114

  2—

  25,282

  3,030,866

  3.0

  Falkirk1

  19,361,000

  0

  0

  2—

  5,414

  189,433

  1.0

  7,990

  719,999

  3.7

  Fife

  51,687,000

  0

  0

  2—

  88

  24,967

  2—

  11,768

  1,314,306

  2.5

  Glasgow

  238,035,000

  0

  0

  2—

  369

  112,659

  2—

  29,664

  9,455,184

  3.0

  Highland1

  29,074,000

  2

  561

  2—

  22

  4,624

  2—

  4,902

  749,955

  2.6

  Inverclyde

  17,528,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  33

  7,507

  2—

  1,025

  220,332

  1.3

  Midlothian

  8,957,000

  5

  3,104

  2—

  519

  52,670

  0.6

  1,481

  353,626

  3.9

  Moray

  8,799,000

  1

  117

  2—

  498

  28,019

  0.3

  2,961

  383,055

  4.3

  North Ayrshire1

  22,770,000

  6

  307

  2—

  3

  1,503

  2—

  1,938

  318,969

  1.4

  North Lanarkshire1

  56,676,000

  11

  2,647

  2—

  965

  76,804

  0.1

  12,892

  1,146,921

  2.0

  Orkney

  1,948,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  73

  1,850

  2—

  255

  69,957

  3.6

  Perth and Kinross

  13,743,000

  1

  408

  2—

  16

  3,562

  2—

  580

  429,565

  3.1

  Renfrewshire

  30,324,000

  11

  1,897

  2—

  178

  7,530

  2—

  2,743

  480,507

  1.6

  Scottish Borders

  11,704,000

  3

  378

  2—

  0

  0

  n/a

  1,310

  351,937

  3.0

  Shetland

  1,815,000

  1

  106

  2—

  4

  682

  2—

  1,552

  80,869

  4.5

  South Ayrshire

  18,264,000

  10

  337

  2—

  176

  22,415

  0.1

  493

  226,727

  1.2

  South Lanarkshire1

  48,608.000

  0

  0

  n/a

  312

  8,870

  2—

  7,824

  582,942

  1.2

  Stirling

  12,104,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  17

  1,345

  2—

  2,733

  394,626

  3.3

  West Dunbartonshire

  19,891,000

  2

  316

  2—

  345

  8,023

  2—

  2,539

  415,667

  2.1

  West Lothian

  19,675,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  23

  51,130

  0.3

  2,826

  447,431

  2.3

  Western Isles

  3,160,000

  0

  0

  n/a

  117

  3,458

  0.1

  595

  75,558

  2.4

  1Non audited returms

  2Percentage less than 0.1

  Note:

  n/a = Not applicable

  Source:

  DSS Planning and Finance Division

  Benefits Agency (Complaints)
  Mr. Love
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security, pursuant to her answer of 25 June 1998,Official Report, column 625, what was the ratio of complaints in the period 1 October 1997 to 31 March 1998 received by the Benefits Agency districts with London offices to (a) the total claimant count at each office and (b) the total population within each district. [49728]

  Mr. Keith Bradley
  The administration of the Benefits Agency is a matter for its Chief Executive, Peter Mathison. He will write to my hon. Friend.

  Letter from Peter Mathison to Mr. Andrew Love, dated 15 July 1998:
  The Secretary of State has asked me to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question pursuant to her Answer of 25th June, Official Report, column 625, what is the ratio of complaints in the period 1st October 1997 to 31st March 1998 received by the Benefits Agency (BA) districts with London offices to (a) the total claimant count at each office and (b) the total population within each district.
  The information requested is not available.
  It is not possible to provide a total customer count. The customer load figures collated by each BA office represent the number of people receiving a particular benefit. These figures do not reflect that one customer may be receiving more than one benefit and
  290
  therefore may be counted more than once. There are also customers in receipt of benefits who will not be captured in the load figures, for example those in receipt of Retirement Pension are only counted on a national basis.
  The total population count for each BA district is not available.
  I am sorry that I have been unable to provide more specific information.

  Housing Benefit
  Mr. Nigel Jones
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security what plans she has to equalise the rate of housing benefit for all tenures. [50053]

  Mr. Keith Bradley
  We have no plans to introduce a single rate of Housing Benefit across all tenures. The current system is based on tenants' actual rents. Housing Benefit can cover up to the full reasonable rent for tenants on low incomes in every tenure.

  Ms Oona King
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security if she will assess the advantages of extending the period in which the NHB-1-EP form has to be completed and returned for the applicant to qualify for the extended payment to be awarded. [50381]
  291
  Mr. Keith Bradley
  As the Welfare Reform Green Paper makes clear, we are currently looking at a range of proposals for improving the work incentives offered by Housing Benefit. We are examining a number of ways of improving the way in which people receive support with their housing both during the transition into work and once in work. Working families tax credit and Housing Benefit together will improve the financial position of many people in work. It is vital that all welfare support, including Housing Benefit for people in work, is accessible, understandable and delivered in an efficient manner.

  Ms Oona King
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security how many applications for a housing benefit extended payment were made in the last year; and how many were successful. [50373]

  Mr. Keith Bradley
  The information is set out in the table.

  Housing benefit extended payments—Great Britain 1997

  Provisional

  Number

  Total extended payment applications

  163,000

  Total successful applications

  140,000

  Percentage of successful applications

  85

  Notes:

  1. Figures have been rounded to the nearest thousand

  2. Figures refer to a benefit unit which may be a single person or a couple

  Source:

  Local Authority Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit quarterly Administration data returns January 1997 to December 1997

  Ms Oona King
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security what monitoring her Department conducts to establish the degree of slippage between the number of NHB-1-EP application forms(a) issued and (b) returned. [50382]

  Mr. Keith Bradley
  There are no records kept of the numbers of extended payment application forms (NHB 1 EP) issued to potential applicants. The forms are readily available at local Benefits Agency offices, Employment Services' Jobcentres and some local authority offices.

  Council Tax Benefit
  Mr. Nigel Jones
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security how many households in Cheltenham have been affected by the restriction of council tax benefit on properties in Band F and above. [50052]

  Mr. Keith Bradley
  The information requested is not available.

  Rented Housing Debt
  Mr. Andrew George
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security what assessment he has made of the level of debt owed to landlords whose rent is(a) paid direct by district council housing benefit departments and (b) paid by housing benefit claimants. [50410]

  Mr. Keith Bradley
  Information is not available in the format requested.
  292
  Housing Benefit is paid to the landlord only in specified circumstances that are prescribed by regulations. For example, benefit must normally be paid direct to the landlord where the claimant is in arrears of an amount equivalent to eight weeks or more of the amount he is liable to pay his landlord as rent. Local authorities can also choose to make direct payments where they consider it would be in the best interests of the claimant to do so.

  The present regulations, give consideration to the personal responsibility of the tenant and the legitimate interests of landlords and the taxpayers in keeping rent arrears in check. However, it is the landlord's own responsibility to ensure that he obtains whatever payments are properly due to him, irrespective of the tenant's source of income.

  Departmental Environmental Policies
  Mr. Oaten
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security (1) if she will list the activities undertaken by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), in his capacity as the Green Minister for Social Security since his appointment; [50032]

  (2) what measures are being taken to raise awareness of sustainable environmental issues within her Department; and what specific training is available to staff; [50030]

  (3) what percentage of her Department's waste is recycled at present; and what targets she has set for increasing recycling in the future. [50031]

  Mr. Denham
  [holding answer 10 July 1998]: In my capacity as Green Minister I have attended meetings of Green Ministers and encouraged the initiative when many staff cycled to work on 10 June 1998. My priority this year has been the development of Green Commuting Plans within the Department. I launched this initiative on 17 February 1998 at a Departmental conference on Sustainable Development and "Greening the DSS". 21 senior representatives of the various Departmental Business Units attended that meeting.

  Their commitment to the Green Agenda has led to further Departmental conferences for policy and operational senior and middle managers in all Departmental business units. Following these conferences the Department is committed to producing a minimum of 20 "Green Commuting Plans" to be introduced by March 1999 with the appointment of a similar number of local co-ordinators to ensure success.

  In addition there is the commitment to education, training and motivating staff and contractors to work in an environmentally responsible manner and to play a full part in developing new ideas and initiatives. This includes communicating openly about environmental policies and best practice (including best available scientific advice) and co-operating with others in the public and private sectors at home and abroad to develop and promote environmentally sound policies.

  A portfolio of relevant training courses is currently being compiled and as the Government's new sustainable development strategy is developed Green Ministers will be considering staff awareness alongside options for more formal training.
  293
  The setting of targets for recycled waste in the Department was not previously an option because of the fragmented nature of its estate management. The appointment of PPM, the private sector consortium who provide building services including waste management, to the entire Departmental estate has now made this possible.

  The Department's current guide "Green Guide", used locally throughout the estate, includes guidance on the recycling of paper, drinks cans, glass, plastic, print toner cartridges and batteries. There are contacts in each Business Unit/Agency for the promotion of green issues.

  A benchmarking exercise to baseline current volumes and costs was completed earlier this year and the results are being used in the revision of the Departments "Green Guide" which is currently underway. PPM will work with the Department to implement its "Green" policies.

  Winter Fuel Payments
  Mr. Gale
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security (1) what estimate she has made of the number of winter fuel payments sent to local post offices for distribution and returned as unclaimed to the department; [50011]

  (2) what estimate she has made of the number of winter fuel payments remaining outstanding and unpaid at 30 June. [50010]

  Mr. Denham
  Winter Fuel payments are one of a number of initiatives the Government have taken to help vulnerable people, especially the elderly, keep warm in the winter. A total of £400 million has been committed for two years (1997–98 and 1998–99), to help pensioners with fuel bills to pay. This is the first time any Government have provided additional help with heating costs to all pensioners living in the United Kingdom who receive a retirement pension or one of a number of other qualifying benefits.

  The making of this year's payments has been an enormous and unprecedented exercise. In order to establish all eligible pensioners, correctly identify pensioner households, and determine the amount each should receive, it was necessary to correlate data. This involved 15 million computer records, covering 15 qualifying benefits, across nine computer systems. Overall, almost ten million pensioners, in over seven million households, have received a payment.

  The administration of Winter Fuel payments is a matter for Peter Mathison, Chief Executive of the Benefits Agency. He will write to the hon. Member.

  Letter from Peter Mathison to Mr. Roger Gale, dated 14 July 1998:
  The Secretary of State for Social Security has asked me to reply to your recent Parliamentary Questions asking what estimate she has made of the number of winter fuel payments sent to local Post Offices for distribution and returned as unclaimed to the Department and how many remain outstanding and unpaid at 30th June 1998.
  Around 5 million pensioners paid by order book had to collect their winter fuel payment girocheque at the Post Office when they called to collect their normal weekly pension payment. We have estimated that around 107,000 (2 per cent. of the volume issued) were not collected and were returned to the nearest Benefits Agency (BA) office.
  294
  The vast majority of all eligible pensioners should now have received their winter fuel payments, with the exception of a small number where BA is having difficulties ascertaining the reason for non-collection at the Post Office. Where someone has not received a payment, but is expecting one, they should contact the office which normally deals with their pension or benefit.
  Thank you for the opportunity to explain the position.

  Public Appointments (Women)
  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security if she will publish the representations made by the Minister for Women to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on women in public appointments prior to publication of his recent report, "Quangos: Opening the Doors". [50856]

  Ms Ruddock
  It is not practice to disclose internal discussions between Ministerial colleagues.

  One of the main priorities of the Ministers for Women is to increase the representation of women at all levels and in all areas. The Government have agreed in principle a ratio of 50:50 women and men for public appointments and a pro-rata representation of the ethnic minorities. This commitment was made public in 'Quangos: Opening Up Public Appointments', published 29 June.

  This is a great step forward and we look forward to working with colleagues to ensure that the goal of 50:50 representation is reached.

  Part-time Working Directive
  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security what assessment the Women's Unit has made of the impact of the implementation of the Part-Time Working Directive on the number of part-time jobs in the UK. [50859]

  Ms Ruddock
  The Government are keen to promote family-friendly employment policies and the implementation of the Part-time Work Directive will be an important step forward. Many women choose to work part-time in order to balance their work and family responsibilities and this Directive will be particularly important to them as it will remove discrimination and increase the status of part-time work.

  We do not consider that implementation of the Directive will result in a loss of jobs; on the contrary, the view of the Government, employers and workers themselves is that it will eliminate obstacles to part-time work and increase opportunities for those wishing to work part-time.

  We will be carrying out detailed research into the impact of the proposals and expect to receive the findings later in the year.

  Women's Unit
  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security how many officials work in the women's unit of her Department. [50875]

  Ms Ruddock
  As at 13 July 1998, 35 officials work in the Women's Unit of the Department of Social Security. Seven of these staff are part-time workers. The total hours worked are equivalent to 33.4 full time staff.

  Maintenance Disregard
  Mr. Webb
  To ask the Secretary of State for Social Security what would be the cost of increasing the amount of maintenance disregarded for family credit, disability working allowance, housing benefit and council tax benefit purposes to(a) £20 and (b) £25 per week. [50887]

  Mr. Keith Bradley
  The information is set out in the table.

  Benefit cost of increasing the maintenance disregard

  £m per annum

  Benefit

  £20 disregard

  £25 disregard

  Family Credit

  15

  35

  Housing Benefit

  5

  5

  Council Tax Benefit

  *

  5

  Disability Working Allowance

  *

  *

  Total

  25

  45

  Notes:

  1. Modelled on the benefit rules and benefit rates as in November 1998

  2. Modelled using data taken from the 1996–97 Family Resources Survey and November 1997 Family Credit 5 per cent. sample, uprated to 1998–99 prices, benefits and earnings levels

  3. Figures have been rounded to the nearest £5 million and may not sum to the total because of rounding.* denotes a cost of less than £2.5 million

  4. Assumes that the recorded maintenance payments on the Family Credit datasets are paid at the same level each week

  5. Excludes the financial impact of behavioural changes caused by the new disregard levels

SCOTLAND

  Mathematics
  Mr. Gorrie
  To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland what plans he has to implement the recommendations concerning better contact between schools, examining bodies, the inspectorate and professional mathematicians contained in the 1995 report, "Tackling the Mathematics Problem". [48836]

  Mr. Wilson
  [holding answer 9 July 1998]: The report to which the hon. Member refers concerns England and Wales only. It was not submitted to the Scottish Office Education and Industry Department for a formal response.

  In Scotland there are already good relations encompassing higher education involvement in educational decision making at school level.

  My department is already taking action to respond to general concerns raised by this report where relevant in Scotland—for example the numerical and algebraic competence of university entrants. HM Inspectors of Schools published in 1997 the report "Improving Mathematics Education 5–14" which proposed earlier introduction of algebra in schools and advised that more attention should be paid to mental calculation and that non-calculator papers be introduced into national examinations—a proposal now out for consultation by the SQA. Scottish Certificate of Education examinations have, as a result, been putting more emphasis on algebraic manipulation so as to encourage schools to improve
  296
  pupils' skills. The development of new Higher Still courses has taken these points into account and numeracy is a core skill in all proposed Scottish Group Awards.

  Chemistry and Biochemistry Curriculum
  Mr. Gorrie
  To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland what research his Department has(a) commissioned and (b) evaluated into the effectiveness of the higher chemistry curriculum and exam in preparing students for degree courses in chemistry and biochemistry. [48743]

  Mr. Wilson
  [holding answer 9 July 1998]: No such research has been commissioned or evaluated by The Scottish Office Education and Industry Department. The content of the Higher Chemistry course was, however, reviewed during the development of the new Higher Still courses in Chemistry, which will be introduced into schools and colleges in Scotland in 1999.

  Correspondence
  Mr. Sanders
  To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland what is his Department's average response time to correspondence from members of the public; and how such response times are monitored. [48642]

  Mr. Dewar
  [holding answer 9 July 1998]: I refer the hon. Member to the answer given to him by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, Office of Public Service on 14 July 1998, Official Report, column 159.

  Assisted Places Scheme
  Mrs. Ewing
  To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland what estimate he has made of the savings from abolishing the assisted places scheme in the years(a) 1998–99 and (b) 1999–2000. [48466]

  Mr. Wilson
  [holding answer 6 July 1998]: The estimated savings from phasing out the assisted places scheme are not less than £3.84 million in 1998–99 financial year and £4.23 million in 1999–2000 financial year.

  Language Examinations
  Mr. Gorrie
  To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland which languages other than English may be offered for examination in Standard Grade, Highers and Advanced Highers as proposed. [49870]

  Mr. Wilson
  Examinations in French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Latin and Classical Greek are currently available at Standard Grade, Higher Grade and Certificate of Sixth Year Studies (CSYS). Separate examinations in Gaelic for native speakers (Gàidhlig) and learners are currently available at Standard Grade and Higher Grade. Gàidhlig is also offered at CSYS. A Standard Grade examination in Urdu was set for the first time this year.

  Following the introduction of Higher Still in 1999, examinations in French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Latin, Classical Greek, Gaelic and Gàidhlig will be available at Standard Grade and at Intermediate 1, Intermediate 2, Higher and Advanced Higher. A coherent group of units at Access 3 will also be available in all of these languages with the exceptions of Latin and Classical Greek.

  Tourism
  Mr. Moore
  To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland (1) if he will ensure that the Scottish Tourist Board helps to promote sustainable development and biodiversity in Scotland; [49742]

  (2) what plans he has to include environmental duties and a commitment to sustainable development in the remit of the Scottish Tourist Board. [49743]

  Mr. Wilson
  The Government are committed to the principle of environmentally sustainable tourism. Our policy is to promote Scotland as an environmentally sound destination. The Scottish Tourist Board (STB), on the Government's behalf, is a major player in the Tourism and the Environment Task Force. The Board supports all of the Task Force's activities which are designed to increase environmental awareness throughout the tourism industry and to promote environmentally sensitive tourism development. STB has recently developed and launched a "Green Tourism Business Scheme" which aims to enable businesses working in the hospitality sector to address their environmental responsibilities.

  Birds of Prey
  Mr. Canavan
  To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland what licences have been issued over the past year for the killing of(a) peregrines and (b) sparrowhawks; and for what reasons they were issued. [50454]

  Mr. Macdonald
  No licences have been issued.

EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT

  World Citizenship
  Mr. Hancock
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment how much funding his Department has given to the Council for Education in World Citizenship in each of the last five years. [48765]

  Ms Estelle Morris
  The Department has provided funding of £360,000 over the period 1993–94 to 1997–98 as follows:

  £

  1993–94

  92,000

  1994–95

  84,000

  1995–96

  85,000

  1996–97

  60,000

  1997–98

  39,000

  We are currently developing proposals for new funding arrangements to support organisations working in the field of education for citizenship which move away from core funding individual organisations to a more flexible approach which supports overall policy development in this area.

  Correspondence
  Mr. Sanders
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what is his Department's average response time to correspondence from members of the public; and how such response times are monitored. [48668]
  298
  Dr. Howells
  Information in the form requested is not readily available and could be obtained only at disproportionate cost. The Department's monitoring systems record the proportion of replies that meet the DfEE correspondence standard, which is that replies will be made within 15 working days of receipt. I also refer the hon. Member to the reply by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 14 July 1998,Official Report, column 159.

  Gender Impact Assessments
  Jackie Ballard
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, pursuant to the answer of 24 June 1998,Official Report, columns 557–58, prior to 18 May, what mechanisms were used to determine how legislation passed in the current session would affect women; what consultation he had with women's organisations; and if he will make a statement. [49084]

  Mr. Alan Howarth
  Guidance on policy appraisal for equal treatment has been available since 1992. Application of the guidance has been the responsibility of individual Departments.

  We consult a wide range of organisations on the gender impact of our policies. We have also published, and make use of, disaggregated statistics which show gender differences across the whole spectrum of education, training and employment.

  As an example of this, the Equal Opportunities Commission and Women's National Commission were included in the wide ranging consultation on the White Paper, "Excellence in Schools" which has formed the basis for much of the Teaching and Higher Education Bill and the Schools Standards and Framework Bill. Further consultation is planned on the regulations which will flow from the Bills and, where appropriate, women's groups will be included.

  Childminders
  Mr. Ennis
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment how many childminders are registered with(a) Barnsley and (b) Doncaster local authorities; how many children aged (i) under five and (ii) five to 11 years are cared for by registered childminders in these authorities; and what was the average charge for each place. [49617]

  Ms Estelle Morris
  I refer my hon. Friend to the answer I gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) on 9 July 1998,Official Report, column 617.

  Ayaz Sheikh
  Mr. Vaz
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, pursuant to his Department's letter of 19 March 1997, if he will make a statement on the case of Ayaz Sheikh of 4 Thorpewell, Leicester, date of birth 11 April 1986. [49949]

  Ms Estelle Morris
  Ayaz Sheikh's case was considered by the Social Educational Needs Tribunal on 18 June 1998. The Tribunal upheld Mr. and Mrs. Sheikh's appeal against the provision specified in Ayaz's statement, including the school names in Part IV. They ordered that the statement should be amended to name Sutherland
  299
  House School, Nottingham. This is an independent special school for pupils with autism. Leicester City Local Education Authority will make arrangements to Ayaz to be admitted to Sutherland House School starting in the spring term of 1999.

  Autistic Children
  Mr. Vaz
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment if he will make a statement on his Department's policy towards autistic children; and what guidelines his Department issues on the placing of autistic children in schools. [49950]

  Ms Estelle Morris
  Schools and local education authorities have statutory duties to identify, assess and provide for children's special educational needs, including the individual needs of children with autistic spectrum disorders. In doing so they must have regard to the guidance contained in the Department's "Code of Practice on the Identification and Assessment of Special Educational Needs". Decisions by LEAs on the placement of autistic children with statements of SEN will reflect the profile of the particular child's autism and may be in autism specific schools, other special schools, units in mainstream schools or in mainstream classes with support. The Department will publish shortly the report of a study by the University of Birmingham, assessing the current research evidence about the educational interventions for children with autism.

  Teachers (Early Retirement)
  Mr. Nigel Jones
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment how many(a) head teachers, (b) deputy head teachers and (c) teachers, have taken early retirement in Gloucestershire Local Education Authority in the financial year 1997–98; and if he will make a statement. [50066]

  Ms Estelle Morris
  Early retirements1 from the maintained nursery, primary, secondary and special sectors in Gloucestershire in the financial year 1997–98 are as shown.

  Retirements

  Head teacher

  Deputy head teacher

  classroom teachers2

  Premature retirement

  19

  14

  89

  Ill-health retirement

  3

  3

  21

  Total

  22

  17

  110

  1Provisional data

  2Includes one unqualified teacher

  Note:

  Changes in the statutory regulations governing early retirement came into force during 1997–98. The changes made teachers' employers responsible for the extra cost of premature retirement and clarified the definition of ill-health in the case of applications for ill-health retirement benefits

  Education Funding
  Mr. Lepper
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment if he will make a statement on progress towards achieving the harmonisation of funding of the education of 16 to 19 year olds in full-time education. [50150]
  300
  Dr. Howells
  A group of local authorities has been looking at alternative approaches to the principles on which school sixth forms are funded, including the scope for introducing those used in further education (funding for recruitment, programme delivery and achievement). We expect to receive a progress report later this month which will help to inform them on how they wish to proceed.

  The levels of funding available to school sixth forms and FE colleges for their 16–19 students will be affected by the outcome of the Government's Comprehensive Spending Review and by local authority decisions on the level of spending they devote to schools from their overall spending settlement.

  Internet
  Dr. Cable
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what steps his Department takes to publicise the educational benefits of the Internet. [50649]

  Dr. Howells
  The Government have announced a major initiative to connect schools to the Internet through the National Grid for Learning. Plans were set out in "Connecting the Learning Society", which was published last Autumn and circulated widely within the education service, industry and other interested parties. The Government are supporting in 1998–99 through the Standards Fund and other means over £100 million for the development of the National Grid for Learning.

  The educational benefits of networking and the Internet were established and disseminated widely through the outcomes of the Education Departments' Superhighways Initiative, "Preparing for the Information Age", published last year.

  Further advice on the educational benefits of the Internet is contained in "Connecting Schools, Networking People", published by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency. This contains procurement, planning and good practice guidance in the use of information and communications technologies in schools.

  Copies of all the above documents are available in the Library.

  Nursery Schools
  Mr. Michael J. Foster
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment how many nursery places within the Hereford and Worcester Local Education Authority were available for four year olds in maintained nursery schools and nursery classes in maintained primary schools in January 1998; and how many are forecast to be available for January 1999. [50452]

  Ms Estelle Morris
  Provisional figures show that in the Hereford and Worcester Local Education Authority area there were 1,014 four-year-olds in maintained nursery schools and nursery classes in maintained primary schools, as at January 1998.
  301
  From September 1998, Herefordshire and Worcestershire LEAs have guaranteed that they will be able to secure a free, good quality place for every four-year-old whose parents want one in the maintained, private or voluntary sectors.

  Further Education, Hampshire
  Mr. Hancock
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what percentage of further education colleges in Hampshire had their funding reduced for 1997–98. [46003]

  Dr. Howells
  Some 60 per cent. of colleges in Hampshire received lower funding allocations for the academic year 1997/98 than for the previous academic year. Colleges in Hampshire will benefit from the additional £100 million that has been made available for the sector in 1998/99.

  Child Care
  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what assessment he has made of the cost to local authorities of carrying out the audit of the supply of and demand for child care set out in the Green Paper, Meeting the Childcare Challenge. [50854]

  Mr. Alan Howarth
  It is not possible to assess with precision the cost to partnerships of conducting local audits. In preparing their audits Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships will be able to draw upon information about child care that local authorities are already obliged by law to collect or make available, for example day care reviews and Children's Services Plans required by the Children and Young Persons Acts. Research carried out for my Department has shown that the extent and quality of information held by local authorities varies widely. We are making available £12 million pounds to help local partnerships conduct audits and draw up local child care plans.

  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment if he will list the regional conferences and workshops for partnership members and others which have been held as a follow-up to the Green Paper, "Meeting the Childcare Challenge". [50853]

  Mr. Alan Howarth
  Regional conferences have been held in Sheffield, Gateshead, Bristol and London to follow up the Green Paper. They were attended by a range

  Assisted places scheme Parental contribution scales for school year 1998–99

  percentage

  Part of relevant income to which percentage applies

  One assisted pupil

  Each of two assisted pupils

  Each of three assisted pupils

  That part which exceeds £10,248 but does not exceed £11,144

  9

  6.75

  5.25

  That part (if any) which exceeds £11,144 but does not exceed £12,053

  12

  9

  7

  That part (if any) which exceeds £12,053 but does not exceed £13,858

  15

  11.25

  8.75

  That part (if any) which exceeds £13,858 but does not exceed £16,639

  21

  15.75

  12.25

  That part (if any) which exceeds £16,639 but does not exceed £20,264

  24

  18

  14

  That part (if any) which exceeds £20,264

  33

  24.75

  19.25

  302
  of organisations including local authorities, Training and Enterprise Councils, private and voluntary providers, child care organisations and employers.

  A workshop on child care information services has also been held, and workshops on training and qualifications, child care audits, guidance for child care partnerships and involving employers in child care and family friendly employment will be held from July through to the autumn.

  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment how many copies of the Green Paper, "Meeting the Childcare Challenge", were(a) published and (b) distributed. [50850]

  Mr. Alan Howarth
  The Stationery Office produced 10,000 copies of the Green Paper, of which the Department for Education and Employment bought 4,500. Of these some 2,500 were distributed to interested organisations and individuals, 1,200 copies were distributed within Government and the remaining copies were kept for use during the consultation period. We have also produced a leaflet summarising the Green Paper, of which 1.1 million copies were printed. Most of these have now been distributed to parents, child care providers and others.

  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment when he expects to publish responses to the Green Paper, "Meeting the Childcare Challenge". [50855]

  Mr. Alan Howarth
  All responses to the Green Paper received by the Government are available for public inspection, unless the respondent has requested that they remain confidential. The Government will take account of these responses when it produces guidance for the new child care partnerships in October. We will consider what other Government response to the consultation is needed in the light of the comments we receive.

  Assisted Places Scheme
  Judy Mallaber
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment if he will make a statement on the uprating of the parental contribution scales for the Assisted Places Scheme for the 1998–99 school year. [51258]

  Mr. Byers
  Revised scales have been incorporated in the 1998 Amendment Regulations which have been laid before Parliament today. The scales and allowances have been uprated by 2.7 per cent. Where relevant income does not exceed £10,414, the tuition fee will be wholly remitted so that the child receives a free place. The new provisions are set out in the following table.

  Education (Grammar School Ballots) Regulations
  Mrs. May
  To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment when he expects to publish final statutory instruments on the Education (Grammar School Ballots) Regulations. [50860]

  Mr. Byers
  Subject to the School Standards and Framework Bill receiving Royal Assent and to affirmative resolution debates in both Houses, I expect the Regulations to be published before the end of the Parliamentary Session.

AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND FOOD

  Hunt Kennels
  Mr. Michael J. Foster
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, pursuant to his answer of 15 June 1998,Official Report, columns 20–26, if he will list the reasons for the unsatisfactory audit finding for each hunt kennel listed. [46571]

  Mr. Rooker
  It is not possible to list the individual failures found during State Veterinary Service specified risk material (SRM) audit visits during 1998 to the hunt kennels listed in my reply of 15 June as this could prejudice any legal action being considered by the local authority concerned. It is the local authority, rather than Government Departments, which has enforcement responsibility under the relevant legislation.

  For those visits carried out during 1997, release of the information requested has raised a number of legal issues which are being urgently considered. Once this has been completed, I will write to my hon. Friend and place a copy of my letter in the Library of the House.

  Mr. Michael J. Foster
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, pursuant to his answer of 15 June 1998,Official Report, columns 20–26, if he will list the potential (a) animal and (b) human health risks in circumstances where hunt kennels fail to achieve a satisfactory SRM audit. [46573]

  Mr. Rooker
  Government measures to combat BSE have greatly reduced the number of cases of preclinical BSE in bovines, and there are relatively few now found in the field. Any animals suspected of suffering from BSE are destroyed in designated incinerators and not taken to hunt kennels. The main throughput of hunt kennels is therefore casualty animals and dead stock from which specified risk material has to be removed and disposed of in accordance with the Specified Risk Material Regulations 1997. Meat from such carcases is not eligible for the human food chain.

  The potential human health risks arise from the possible illegal diversion of material into the human food chain. For animal health, the potential risks arise from the possible diversion of SRM into animal by products, and the direct feeding of SRM to hounds, even though no case of a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) developing in dogs has ever been recorded. In all cases, the controls applied on the handling and disposal of SRM in hunt kennels are intended to prevent such risks arising, reinforced by the compliance audit carried out by the State Veterinary Service, the results of which are reported monthly in the BSE Enforcement Bulletin.
  304
  In all cases where unsatisfactory audit visits have been reported and investigated, unannounced follow up visits have also been carried out to ensure that any necessary remedial action has been taken.

  Mr. Flynn
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will list the failures that were discovered in the surveillance visits in 1997 and 1998 to the(a) Llangibby Foxhounds, (b) Pentyrow Hunt Kennels, (c) Tegryn Farmers Hunt, (d) Carmarthen Hunt, (e) Llandeilo Hunt, (f) Game Foxhounds Hunt Kennels, (g) Amman Valley Hunt and (h) Carmarthenshire Hunt Kennels. [46586]

  Mr. Rooker
  [holding answer 22 June 1998]: I refer my hon. Friend to the reply given to our hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) today 16 July 1998, Official Report, column 303.

  Samaritans
  Mr. Quinn
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what discussions he has had with the Samaritans on farming-related issues. [49111]

  Mr. Morley
  [holding answer 6 July 1998]: We recognise the issue of stress within rural communities and the role the Samaritans play in helping to relieve it. The Ministry participates in the work of the Rural Stress Information Network, provides assistance towards establishing local support networks and makes certain specialist advice available free of charge on referral from agencies such as the Samaritans. My hon. Friend the Minister of State visited the Samaritans' stand at the Three Counties Show to discuss the issues raised with the Samaritans within the rural communities. The Samaritans in Hereford have kindly provided a copy of the video which they have produced and widely distributed. We will be giving further consideration to the issues related to rural stress which have been raised with MAFF Ministers during their regional visits.

  Royal Agricultural Benevolent Fund
  Mr. Quinn
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what meetings he has had with representatives of the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Fund. [49112]

  Mr. Morley
  [holding answer 6 July 1998]: The Ministerial team at MAFF is aware of the good work of the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution (RABI), who provide financial help and advice through a confidential helpline for members of the farming community suffering hardship.

  My hon. Friend the Minister of State has met representatives of the RABI during his visits to the regions, and paid a visit to the RABI stand at the Royal Show. As a result of these contacts, arrangements are in hand for posters and literature explaining the work of the RABI to be displayed in the Department's nine Regional Service Centres. The RABI has already announced it is to extend its work to include farm workers, and Ministers in this Department are keen to see that as wide a section of the farming industry as possible is aware of the RABI.

  Environmental Issues
  Mr. Jack
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will list the organisations(a) from which he has received representations and (b) which he has consulted which have as part or all of their remit the promotion of (i) biodiversity at the level of the farm, (ii) integrated crop management schemes and (iii) organic farming. [50041]

  Dr. John Cunningham
  This Department carries out many consultations concerning the areas mentioned. Among the organisations which MAFF regularly consults on one or more of the issues mentioned by the right hon. Member are:

  BioDynamic Agriculture Association

  Butterfly Conservation

  Country Landowners Association

  Countryside Commission

  Elm Farm Research Centre

  English Heritage

  English Nature

  Environment Agency

  Farm and Food Society

  Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group

  Henry Doubleday Research Association

  Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association

  Linking Farming and the Environment

  National Farmers Union

  Organic Farmers and Growers

  Organic Food Federation

  Organic Trust

  Plant Life

  Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

  SAFE Alliance

  Scottish Organic Producers Association

  Soil Association

  Sustainable Agriculture Development Group

  The Wildlife Trusts

  The Integrated Arable Crop Protection Alliance

  Ulster Organic Association

  World Wide Fund for Nature UK.

  Animal Health Act 1981
  Dr. Palmer
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will place in the Library a copy of the instructions to his staff responsible for applying sections 40 to 49 of the Animal Health Act 1981 and any subordinate legislation made under the same sections of the Act. [50047]

  Mr. Morley
  I am placing in the Library today a copy of the relevant Guidance Notes for Exporters, which give an explanation of the procedures followed.

  Departmental Environmental Policies
  Mr. Andrew George
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what is the current energy consumption of his Department; what targets have been set to reduce this level; and what plans he has for including energy efficiency performance figures in his Department's annual report. [50411]
  306
  Mr. Morley
  The latest energy consumption figures available for the Ministry's main estate and its Laboratory Agencies is for 1996–97. It is:

  kWh

  Electricity

  Gas

  Oil

  Total

  37,786,876

  59,623,879

  9,093,363

  106,504,112

  The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) has set a Government-wide target to reduce energy consumption levels by 20 per cent. up to 31 March 2000 when compared with the base year of 1990–91. By 1996–97, the Ministry's main estate had achieved reductions in energy consumption of 14 per cent. and its Laboratory Agencies had achieved a 6 per cent. reduction. The Ministry will be submitting the annual returns for 1997–98 to DETR when asked to do so, which is expected to be around September.

  The energy efficiency performance figures for 1996–97 were included in Chapter 7 of the Ministry's 1998 annual report which was published in April. MAFF's energy efficiency performance will be included in future annual reports.

  Mr. Andrew George
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what percentage of his Department's waste is recycled at present; and what targets have been set for increasing this. [50412]

  Mr. Morley
  Under the Department's action plan for green operations, there is a requirement on all our sites to minimise the generation of waste by encouraging recycling schemes and reusing materials. For example, many of our sites operate paper and other recycling schemes. So far we have not measured waste streams and set targets for waste reduction and recycling because of the practicalities of physically measuring the quantities of waste produced and the extent to which waste is recycled. However, this remains under consideration.

  Mr. Andrew George
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what steps he is taking to discourage unnecessary car use by his Department's employees. [50414]

  Mr. Morley
  The Department has strict rules to ensure that travel on official business is authorised only when it is absolutely necessary and that cars are used only when they are the most cost effective method of travel.

  Fishing Regulations
  Mr. Todd
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food how many vessels have been advised of contraventions of European Union fishing regulations in United Kingdom fishing protection operations in the last three years; and on how many occasions these contraventions have led to prosecutions. [50401]

  Mr. Morley
  During the period 1995–97, the UK enforcement authorities detected 5,401 infringements of European Union fishing regulations in respect of 2,514 vessels. This has resulted in the masters and/or owners of some 324 vessels being prosecuted in respect of 612 of the infringements detected. There are some cases which are still being processed and the number of prosecutions may therefore rise.

  Parliamentary Questions
  Mr. Jack
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will list the written parliamentary questions tabled by the right hon. Member for Fylde which remain to be answered. [50248]

  Dr. John Cunningham
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: As of today, 16 July, the only written parliamentary questions tabled by the right hon. Member which remain to be answered are two parliamentary questions for which the right hon. Member has named Tuesday 21 and Thursday 23 July for answer and three parliamentary questions for ordinary written answer which appeared in the Order Paper today for the first time.

  Fishing Industry
  Mr. Andrew George
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what representations he has received from the fishing industry on his Department's latest proposals for alterations to(a) fishing licences generally and (b) external water licences. [50546]

  Mr. Morley
  We have invited the fishing industry to comment on the following proposals for changes in licensing arrangements: the introduction of new licensing arrangements to limit access to the UK's scallop fisheries (consultation letter issued on 11 June and comments invited by 14 August 1998); the aggregation of whitefish licences with pelagic licences for the purposes of introducing pelagic freezer trawlers into the UK fishing fleet (consultation letter issued on 2 July and comments invited by 31 August 1998); more flexible and transparent arrangements for external waters licensing (consultation letter issued on 15 June and comments invited by 17 August 1998).

  Representations on each of these proposals are being submitted to the Ministry and copies will be available to the public through the MAFF Library at 3 Whitehall Place (West Block) London SW1A 2AH after the consultation process has been completed.

  Additionally, and as announced on 17 December 1997, Official Report, columns 336–49, Fisheries Departments are holding a series of meetings with representatives of the principal fishermen's organisations to review the operation of the current licensing arrangements for fishing vessels.

  Meat Imports
  Mr. David Davis
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will introduce measures to control MBM-fed(a) pork and (b) bacon imports which do not meet British traceability requirements to take account of BSE outbreaks in continental Europe. [50700]

  Mr. Rooker
  No. The ban on meat and bone meal in pig feed in the United Kingdom is to prevent cross contamination of ruminant feed with meat and bone meal incorporated into feed for other farm animals. There is, therefore, no basis on which it would be reasonable to restrict imports of pig meat.

  Tuberculosis
  Mr. Drew
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what testing of badgers in TB affected areas is currently taking place. [50667]

  Mr. Rooker
  Although new badger removal operations have now ceased, we are still testing some of the badger carcases which have been removed. Additionally, in areas of TB incidents, where it is felt that this would provide valuable epidemiological evidence, some carcases of badgers which are found dead are tested.

  Mr. Drew
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will list by area the number of herd breakdowns caused by bovine TB since January 1997. [50666]

  Mr. Rooker
  I refer my hon. Friend to the reply given to the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) on 3 July 1998,Official Report, columns 318–20. I will write to my hon. Friend with the information relating to the first six months of 1998 when I have it.

  Sturgeon and Caviar Imports
  Mr. Fallon
  To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for what reasons imports of sturgeon from Iran and caviar from the United Arab Emirates have been banned; what steps have been taken by his Department to have the bans lifted; and what compensation is available to United Kingdom fish merchants who have lost business as a result of the bans. [50723]

  Mr. Rooker
  The United Arab Emirates is unable to export fishery products to the EU because it is not included in the list of countries authorised to do so under current EU hygiene measures. Transitional arrangements which allowed imports from unlisted countries ended on 1 July 1998. The United Arab Emirates did not provide sufficient guarantees to the Commission by this date and has therefore not been added to the list. It is a matter for the competent authority in the United Arab Emirates to provide such guarantees. Iran is included in a list of countries allowed to continue existing export trade of fishery products to individual Member States until 31 January 1999. There is no compensation available to fish merchants who have lost business as a result of EU hygiene measures.

HEALTH

  Salford and Trafford Health Authority
  Mr. Brady
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health (1) on what date his Department first requested the Salford and Trafford Health Authority to withdraw its public consultation document on the future of children's health services; and on what grounds; [49359]

  (2) on what grounds the Salford and Trafford Health Authority refused to withdraw its consultation paper on children's services when first requested to do so by his Department; [49360]
  309
  (3) on what date his Department indicated to the Salford and Trafford Health Authority that a legal direction would be issued requiring the authority to withdraw its consultation on the future of children's services; [49361]

  (4) what representations he has received from health authorities which adjoin the Salford and Trafford Health Authority relating to the public consultation on the future of children's health services in Salford and Trafford; and on what dates the representations were received; [49357]

  (5) what representations he has received from members of the Salford and Trafford Health Authority in relation to the consultation on the future of children's health services; and on what dates; [49358]

  (6) what discussions took place between his Department and the Salford and Trafford Health Authority between the date when the authority refused the Department's request to withdraw its consultation on the future of children's services and the date when a legal direction was issued by the Secretary of State requiring the withdrawal of that document. [49356]

  Mr. Dobson
  [holding answer 7 July 1998]: We have received no such representations on this matter. The legal direction was issued to, and received by, Salford and Trafford Health Authority on 30 June 1998.

  I did not ask the health authority to withdraw its consultation; discussions took place between officials of the Department and representatives of Salford and Trafford Health Authority, to explore the issues and consider the options for withdrawing the proposals.

  I am not aware of any representations from health authority members in relation to the consultation on the future of children's health services.

  The legal direction was effective immediately and its receipt was acknowledged on 1 July 1998. The purpose of this action was to allow wider consideration of a more systematic improvement of children's services which build on our efforts over the last year to ensure that changes in health services in Manchester, Salford and Trafford are arrived at quickly and as part of an integrated approach across the Health Action Zone.

  Mr. Brady
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will list all requests which his Department has made since 2 May 1997 for health authorities to withdraw public consultation documents which have been issued in accordance with normal procedures; and in which of those cases(a) he has issued a legal direction and (b) he is considering issuing a legal direction. [49365]

  Mr. Dobson
  [holding answer 7 July 1998]: The only such request made by the Department since 2 May 1997 related to the consultation document "Future Hospital Care For the Children and Young People of Salford and Trafford". This was in the form of a legal direction issued by North West Regional Office on my behalf to Salford and Trafford Health Authority. No other such direction is under consideration at the present time.

  Public Consultations
  Mr. Brady
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will list the occasions on which his Department has asked health authorities to withdraw properly conducted public consultations during the 20 years prior to 1 July 1997; and on how many of those occasions the Department subsequently required compliance through the use of a legal direction. [49355]

  Mr. Dobson
  [holding answer 7 July 1998]: The information requested can be provided only at disproportionate cost.

  Tonsillectomy
  Dr. Cable
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will list(a) by health authority or trust and (b) nationally the average waiting time for a tonsillectomy after referral to a consultant. [50079]

  Mr. Milburn
  Information is available only at specialty level for waiting times for an outpatient appointment to see a consultant following referral by a general practitioner. The latest information for surgical waiting times, following a decision by a consultant to admit for excision of tonsil, is available in Hospital Episode Statistics Volume 2 Finished consultant episodes: waiting time for elective admissions by diagnosis and operation; England: Financial year 1995–96, copies of which are available in the Library.

  Dementia
  Mr. Coaker
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health what recent research his Department has(a) commissioned and (b) evaluated on the causes of and treatment for (i) Alzheimer's disease and (ii) other forms of dementia; and what proposals he has to support future research. [50229]

  Ms Jowell
  The Department directly funds research covering a whole range of issues relating to mental health. There are two programmes—the policy research programme (PRP), which is designed to underpin the development of health and personal social services policy, and the National Health Service research and development programme, which commissions research in and for the NHS.

  The PRP is contributing £1 million to the Medical Research Council Study of Cognitive Function and Ageing. This is a multicentre study to examine dementia, its natural history and risks, including Alzheimer's Disease.

  The NHS Executive is supporting, through its regionally led research and development programme, a project on mobility and dementia—"Is physiotherapy during respite care admission effective?"—at a cost of approximately £140,000. Also, West Midlands regional research and development directorate are directly funding a project which is considering the cost and clinical effectiveness of Aricept for treating mild to moderate dementia at a cost of approximately £600,000.

  Hepatitis C
  Mr. Stunell
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health (1) what treatment is available to people with haemophilia infected with hepatitis C through the NHS; what is the success rate; and what are the side effects; [50384]

  (2) if he will make a statement on the (a) treatment available, (b) success rate of treatment and (c) side effects of treatment for people with haemophilia with hepatitis C infection. [50437]

  Ms Jowell
  People infected with the hepatitis C virus may remain symptom free for many years but a proportion will eventually develop chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis or even liver cancer. At present the only drug licensed in the United Kingdom for the treatment of any patient with hepatitis C is alpha interferon. Some haemophiliacs infected with hepatitis C may benefit from treatment and should be offered it when appropriate. However, current experience shows that alpha interferon will only produce a sustained response, that is clear the virus on testing, in 20–25 per cent. of patients. Current research is examining how best to use alpha interferon and testing other antiviral drugs that either alone or in combination with alpha interferon, could give better results.

  Alpha interferon is not well tolerated by some people. Most will have a mild reaction including influenza-like symptoms; in others the side effects will be more severe ranging from nausea, influenza-like symptoms and lethargy to depression, cardiovascular problems and hypersensitive reactions. Some will be unable to continue with the treatment. A history of certain types of health problems, for example depression, may be a contra-indication for treatment with the drug.

  Home help/care contact hours, households receiving service average contact hours per household and "intensive" packages of service during the survey week in September/October each year 1992 to 1997, England

  Year

  Total home help/care contact hours

  Number of households hours receiving service

  Average contact hours per household receiving service

  Per cent. of total contact hours spent on "intensive"1 packages

  1992

  1,687,000

  528,500

  3.2

  11

  1993

  1,780,800

  514,600

  3.5

  12

  1994

  2,215,100

  538,900

  4.1

  15

  1995

  2,395,700

  513,600

  4.7

  21

  1996

  2,486,700

  491,100

  5.1

  25

  1997

  2,637,800

  471,000

  5.6

  28

  1"Intensive" = more than 5 visits during the week totalling more than 5 hours

  Source:

  Department of Health return HH1

  Argentine Health Authorities
  Mr. Dalyell
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on general practice co-operation systems with Argentine health authorities. [48678]

  Mr. Milburn
  [holding answer 13 July 1998]: There are no formal agreements between the United Kingdom and Argentina at Government level covering this area.

  The Argentine authorities wish to develop their arrangements for primary health care. The Royal College
  312
  The Department has commissioned £1 million research into hepatitis C, and a further £0.5 million will be commissioned shortly. It is also supporting the Royal College of Physicians and other professional bodies in the preparation of clinical guidelines on the treatment of hepatitis C with alpha interferon. The guidelines should be ready later this year.

  Mr. Nicholas Winterton
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many representations he has received calling for financial assistance on behalf of people with haemophilia infected with the hepatitis C virus; and if he will make a statement. [50435]

  Ms Jowell
  I refer the hon. Member to the reply I gave to the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell) on 15 July 1998,Official Report, column 222.

  Home Care Services
  Ms Perham
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the answer of 16 June 1998,Official Report, column 162, on home care services, what factors underlie the changes in each year in the numbers and percentage of adult households in England receiving home help/home care services in each category. [50438]

  Ms Jowell
  Trends in the provision of domiciliary care reflect the provisions of the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. One of the objectives of the Act was to focus services on those most in need.

  Figures published in Statistical Bulletin "Community Care Statistics 1997 Day and domiciliary personal social services for Adults, England" (ref 1998/13), and summarised in the table, reflect the increased targeting. The table shows that the total number of contact hours has risen, as has the average number of hours spent with each household receiving the service, and the proportion of contact hours spent on more intensive packages of care has increased from 11 per cent. of total hours in 1992 to 28 per cent. in 1997.

  of General Practitioners met Argentine healthcare experts in the UK in February and took part in a UK healthcare mission to Argentina, supported by the Department of Trade and Industry earlier this month.

  Edgware Community Hospital
  Mr. Dismore
  To ask the Secretary of State for Health (1) when the data on the use of Edgware Community Hospital Urgent Treatment Centre will be made available to the Independent Evaluation Team; [50740]
  313
  (2) to what medical and nursing protocols the Urgent Treatment Centre, Edgware Community Hospital, is currently operating. [50739]

  Mr. Milburn
  This is a local matter for the Wellhouse National Health Service Trust. My hon. Friend may, therefore, wish to contact Mr. David Phillips, Chairman of the Trust, for this information.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL

  Government Legal Service
  Mr. Cranston
  To ask the Attorney-General (1) how many barristers over six years call were employed as lawyers by the Government Legal Service, during each year since 1993; [50098]

  (2) how many registered pupil masters were employed by the Government Legal Service; and how many pupils were trained by those pupil masters in each year since 1993. [50099]

  The Attorney-General
  The information requested is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

  Crown Prosecution Service
  Mr. Dismore
  To ask the Attorney-General what arrangements are in place to provide media training to Crown Prosecution staff; and if he will make a statement. [50144]

  The Attorney-General
  Media training is available for Chief Crown Prosecutors, Branch Crown Prosecutors and other senior staff. The courses are run by the Crown Prosecution Service's Communications Division and up to six people are trained at a time.

  Correspondence
  Mr. Ian Bruce
  To ask the Attorney-General what plans his Department has to correspond electronically with(a) hon. Members and (b) members of the public. [49839]

  The Attorney-General
  An examination of the methods available within my Department is being undertaken as part of the government-wide exercise.

  Furthermore, the annual report of the Serious Fraud Office for 1997/98, which was published today, will also be available to hon. Members and members of the public on the SFO World Wide Web site at http://www.sfo.gov.uk. Copies have been placed in the Libraries of the Houses.

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by The Lord Bishop of Oxford.): The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
The Earl of Portsmouth-Took the Oath.

Refugees and Asylum Seekers
Lord Judd Lord Judd asked Her Majesty's Government:
What steps they are taking with the European Union and other appropriate multilateral organisations to promote an internationally agreed strategy towards migration and towards respect for, and protection of, the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Williams of Mostyn): My Lords, the Government co-operate fully in the relevant European Union, United Nations and Council of Europe structures in these areas. The Government attach great importance to the protection of the rights of genuine refugees and asylum seekers as well as co-operating with other member states in countering abuse of the asylum system.
Lord Judd: My Lords, while I naturally welcome that reply in relation to co-operation, does my noble friend not agree that there is a major strategic issue facing the human community at this juncture? It is difficult to imagine the economic, social, emotional and psychological stress for those who are removed from their homes or who must leave their homes for reasons beyond their control. In view of our commitment to human rights, is it not essential to maintain the spirit of a commitment to human rights in all we do in relation to the administration of policy on refugees and those seeking asylum? As the numbers are so great, is it not absolutely essential that we give major attention to working out a viable international approach to that issue rather than finding ourselves concentrating inevitably on the negative aspects of it in terms of how many we can absorb in this country?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, the basis of what my noble friend says is something with which I can entirely agree. His Question is deliberately framed quite widely. It deals with migration and therefore includes economic migration as well as refugee and asylum matters. Those are extraordinarily difficult questions. It seems to me that the noble Lord is right to say that no single country can deal with them. I can perhaps help my noble friend to the extent that there is to be an audit of immigration rules and policies prior to incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into United Kingdom law. That is an extremely important step.
Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, is the Minister aware that unless a decision to the contrary is taken tomorrow by the Council of Ministers, the budget lines for civil dialogue and the support of NGOs concerning, for example, victims of torture will cease as a result of a legal case brought by the previous government and the ruling of the European Court of Justice on that case, which is likely to lead to the suspension of all help for NGOs within the area of civil dialogue, human rights and issues concerning violence against women? Will the Minister comment on that?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, the noble Baroness is right. The Government will obviously have to review the circumstances as they are found to obtain. As she says, those matters are extremely important. However, I stress—I think rightly—that no single government are capable of solving all those problems without co-operation on an international basis.
Lord Renton of Mount Harry: My Lords, following on the Minister's reply to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, does he agree that the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees' definition of a refugee, namely, that he or she should have a well-founded fear of persecution in his own country, is now out of date and far too subjective? It may have been appropriate in the 1930s and the 1940s when people were fleeing before invading armies but it is no longer appropriate. Will the Minister work with international colleagues to arrive at a much more sophisticated definition that would take into account, for example, the human rights record of the country, economic conditions and the means of transport out of the country in order that we should be able to return economic migrants much more quickly but at the same time identify and protect genuine refugees much more quickly?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, that is the critical tension between the two aspects which the noble Lord rightly identified. There is a view which I have heard expressed that the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, being now somewhat elderly, needs review. Of course, the test there is not entirely subjective. It is an objective view of someone's subjective beliefs. Therefore, it is not entirely subjective.
The Government are quite clear. We do not have an open door; we cannot, for economic migrants. Equally we have a proper, civilised approach to the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. The key is to be firmer, faster and fairer because that serves the proper interests of all those concerned.
Baroness Anelay of St. Johns: My Lords, what will the Government do to ensure that the forthcoming enlargement of the European Union does not in any way jeopardise the concessions which have been negotiated for Commonwealth citizens?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, I do not believe that the concessions for Commonwealth citizens will be affected at all by enlargement. We have an

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existing commitment to Commonwealth citizens and I know of no proposal to do away with their present position.
The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, has not Commissioner Anita Gradin come up with a much more imaginative solution recently in the European Commission; that is, that we should move some way towards financial burden-sharing with the case of Bosnia in mind, which was not exactly a model for a common European policy on migration?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, the noble Lord is quite right. Economic burden-sharing has its virtues because obviously by definition it means that there is not a single country shouldering the burden, which should be shared on a pan-European or even more international basis.
Lord Elton: My Lords, can the Minister enlarge on his reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams? Are we to understand that there is to be a period during which the much-needed government funding to NGOs, some of which do vital work in support of refugees, is to cease? If so, how long will that period be and will the Government take steps to shorten it?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, I am not in a position to give a definitive reply to the noble Lord, Lord Elton. However, I shall research further the extremely important questions which he has raised. I undertake to write to him as soon as possible and place a copy of the letter in the Library. I cannot give a more precise answer than that at the moment.
Lord Judd: My Lords, does my noble friend accept that the recent Strategic Defence Review has imaginatively understood the kind of turmoil which the world is likely to face in the future and how we should respond to it? We have clearly been giving major inter-departmental attention to that. Will my noble friend accept that he would have all possible support from all sides of the House if the Government would give a strategic lead not only in Europe but internationally in looking at the whole issue on an international basis and examining what the international strategy should be?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, I take my noble friend's point on the Strategic Defence Review which was, I believe, generally acclaimed by all sections in this House as a masterly piece of work. However—and I say this, I hope, not too harshly—it is a much more simple question to attend to when one is dealing with one's own SDR, as opposed to the whole spectrum of pan-European and international problems. My noble friend is right; indeed, he is really reaffirming my earlier answer. We will get no solution on a single country basis and no solution on a selfish country basis.

Building Society Repossessions
3.9 p.m.
Lord Dean of Beswick Lord Dean of Beswick asked Her Majesty's Government:
What is the present rate or number of owner-occupied houses being repossessed by building societies due to the lapse of mortgage repayments.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Baroness Hayman): My Lords, figures are not available separately for building societies. The most recent figures for all mortgage lenders are those published by the Council of Mortgage Lenders in January. These show that 32,770 properties, representing 0.31 per cent. of all mortgage loans, were taken into possession in 1997.
Lord Dean of Beswick: My Lords, as I understand it—perhaps my noble friend the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—those figures represent a substantial reduction as regards the situation that we faced a short time ago. Although that is very acceptable, should we not keep up our guard on behalf of those people who seem to face interminable increases in their repayments because of the fluctuations in the bank rate? Can my noble friend the Minister tell us whether the Government have any initiatives in mind to help people in such situations in the future?
Baroness Hayman: Yes, my Lords. My noble friend is certainly right. This is a great improvement compared with the peak of repossessions which was reached in 1991, when about 75,500 homes were repossessed. The figures have been falling steadily since then, but we are obviously concerned that we still have a legacy from those very dreadful days in the 1990s. That is why the Government have taken action to implement our manifesto commitment to work with mortgage providers to encourage greater provision of flexible mortgages to protect families. My honourable friend the Minister for Local Government and Housing and other colleagues from the Department of Social Security have met the Council of Mortgage Lenders and the Association of British Insurers and asked them to look at ways of improving the quality and coverage of mortgage payment protection insurance for such families.
Lord Clark of Kempston: My Lords, does the Minister agree that the seven increases in the bank rate have created tremendous hardship for the many thousands of home owners with mortgages? Discussions with the ABI and the Council of Mortgage Lenders are all very well, but, unless the responsibility for calculating the base rate is taken back by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, those with mortgages will still suffer hardship.
Baroness Hayman: My Lords, I do not think that my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer is abrogating responsibility in his management of the economy. We have debated the Monetary Policy

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Committee of the Bank of England, including the specific issue of interest rates, at some length in your Lordships' House. The Government's position on that is well known. It is in the best interests of economic policy that that committee should consider inflation rates. Of course, it takes into account all the evidence when interest rates are set.
The noble Lord raised the issue of the effects of interest rate rises on home owners. Of course there are effects in that respect and we must consider them. However, even with the recent rate increases, it is right to point out that housing remains very affordable by historical standards. I remind the noble Lord that the average mortgage rate is now about 9 per cent., compared with over 15 per cent. at the peak in 1990. Moreover, the payment on a typical mortgage of £55,000 is £260 a month less than it was in 1990.
Baroness Ludford: My Lords, does the Minister accept that one of the ways of directly helping mortgage lenders to reduce interest rates would be to join the single currency? Indeed, even a declared intention to do so would probably have a fairly immediate effect in terms of bringing down interest rates and would be a direct financial help to all those with mortgages.
Baroness Hayman: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on her ingenuity in linking commitments on the single currency to a Question on repossessions by building societies. I believe that the Government's position on the single currency has been made very clear in this House and, indeed, in another place.
Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, what does my noble friend the Minister read into the issue of the distribution of wealth in this country when one has seen in recent years very steep increases in house prices in certain parts of the South-East, and absolutely stationary or even lower levels of house prices in other parts of the country?
Baroness Hayman: My Lords, I read many things into those statistics. However, there is one lesson that we must learn both from history and from the geographical differences to which my noble friend referred; namely, that the best help that a government can give to home owners is to ensure a sustainable house market recovery and avoid some of the boom and bust that we saw in the early 1990s—and to do so against a background of a stable and sustainable rate of economic growth and employment opportunities, which will lead to a rise in living standards. Of course, that underpins the Government's economic policy.
Baroness Miller of Hendon: My Lords, is the Minister aware that many of the repossessions are due to the existence of the so-called "mortgage guarantee policies", which actually encourage the lender to call in the mortgage and to claim on the insurance rather than enter into negotiations with the borrower for deferred or different terms when he or she has got into difficulties?
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Can the Minister tell the House what the Government would be prepared to do to try to alleviate the problem for borrowers who run into such difficulties?
Baroness Hayman: My Lords, as I believe the noble Baroness is aware, there is government support through the Department of Social Security for certain borrowers who get into difficulties, especially jobseekers, pensioners and the disabled in certain circumstances. However, the noble Baroness rightly pointed out that there are difficulties with existing schemes and methods of financing mortgages. As I said in response to the preliminary Question, that is why we undertook to work with the Council of Mortgage Lenders and the ABI to ensure that there is better protection for borrowers. We are doing so by encouraging lenders to increase the availability of mortgages with flexible repayment arrangements and to improve the quality and take-up of mortgage payment protection insurance. We welcome lenders' commitment to take repossession action only as a last resort. My honourable friend the Minister for Local Government and Housing will be meeting the Council of Mortgage Lenders on 27th July to discuss proposals in more detail.

Kensington Gardens: Princess Diana Memorial
3.17 p.m.
Lord Blaker Lord Blaker asked Her Majesty's Government:
When they expect a decision to be taken on the proposal to develop Kensington Gardens as a memorial to the late Diana, Princess of Wales and whether there will be an opportunity for parliamentary consideration before that decision.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, the results of the preliminary consultation exercise will be analysed and reported to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Committee in the autumn. If the memorial committee continues to support the proposals in principle, the process of commissioning designs will begin, taking account of the views expressed by the public. Any preferred design would in due course be subject to the formal consultation processes which apply to developments on Crown land and which parallel the planning process as set out in Department of the Environment circular 18 of 1984. The allocation of parliamentary time is a matter for the usual channels.
Lord Blaker: My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that the proposals of the memorial committee involve very big changes to what is an outstanding heritage site and that, therefore, most people would think it quite wrong if such proposals were put into force without full debate in both Houses of Parliament? Would not the best solution be simply to change the name of Kensington Gardens to the Princess Diana Gardens and to use the £10 million thus saved to do

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something positive, like building a children's hospice, which would fit in very well with one of the other proposals of the committee?
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, these are, of course, important proposals; and, indeed, they affect a major site. As I said, the allocation of parliamentary time is a matter for the usual channels, but it is open to any noble Lord to table Questions or initiate debates on the subject. The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Committee is considering a whole range of ways of commemorating the late princess. The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund is allocating money to the princess's favourite charities. The figure of £10 million to which the noble Lord referred was bruited about last year. It has no particular relevance to any proposals now under consideration.
Lord Strabolgi: My Lords, is my noble friend aware of the very strong feelings against these proposals for Kensington Gardens by the people of Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster? These views are supported by the local authorities. Will they be taken fully into account before considering proceeding with these proposals?
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says but this is exactly what the consultation exercise is about. In addition to the exhibition which is now being held at the Albert Memorial Visitor Centre, leaflets and questionnaires are being sent out by 20th July to W1, W2, W8, W11, W14 and to SW1, SW3, SW5, SW7 and SW10. That is a wide consultation exercise. Of course the memorial committee will take serious account of the responses to that consultation exercise.
Baroness O'Cathain: My Lords, is the Minister sure that the leaflets which are to be sent out to all these areas of London are detailed enough as regards what is likely to happen with the Diana Memorial Garden, because certainly the press comment—if one reads it—seems to suggest that the exhibition at the Albert Memorial is not detailed enough and does not give enough information to allow people to make a judgment?
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, we cannot win, can we? If we provide information that is too detailed, we are told that we have already made up our minds and the whole consultation exercise is phoney. If the information is not detailed enough—according to the noble Baroness—we are told that we are not providing enough detail. Surely the idea of the consultation exercise is for local people and anyone visiting the visitor centre to give their views about what should happen. The whole point about this consultation exercise is that the memorial committee has not made up its mind about the scope or detail of the memorial which is planned; that is why the consultation is genuine.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, what is being done to find out the opinion of the rest of the country on these
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proposals? The number of postal districts read out by my noble friend has justified, I believe, the dispatch of only 180,000 leaflets of inquiry. That is not a large share of the British people.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Committee has received views from all parts of the country ever since its establishment at the end of last year. It has received about 10,000 responses to its invitation to people anywhere in the country to express their views about what should be done to commemorate the late princess. By far the most popular single response from the population of the country as a whole was that a memorial should be in the form of a garden and that it should be situated at Kensington Gardens.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I declare an interest in that I live in the area. Has this commission, or whatever it is, absolute power? Is there no form of permission, constraint, planning permission or anything of that kind? It seems rather odd that the wishes of the whole country—I have declared my interest—should be imposed on the residents of part of it.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, I have already made it clear in my replies this afternoon and last week that the committee does not have absolute power. Any proposal would have to be dealt with as a proposal on Crown land under circular 18 of 1984 which requires that,
"the Crown … will issue a notice of the proposed development to the local planning authority. If the local planning authority objects to the proposed development, and if those objections cannot be resolved in dialogue between the parties, the Crown body must refer the matter for resolution to my right hon friend the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions".
There is plenty of consideration of this matter and the public have been consulted all along. Any member of the public, wherever he or she lives, may go to the visitor centre at the Albert Memorial and express a view.
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein: My Lords, in view of the difficulties, has the Minister considered a referendum?
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, if the noble Viscount will pay for it we might consider it.

Speed Limits
3.25 p.m.
Lord Berkeley Lord Berkeley asked Her Majesty's Government:
Following publication of vehicle speed data that speed limits were exceeded,

(a) by 54 per cent. of cars on motorways and 70 per cent. of cars on urban roads,

(b) by 91 per cent. of articulated lorries on dual carriageways and 70 per cent. of articulated lorries on single carriageways,

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what action they are taking to enforce speed limits more effectively.
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, police enforcement is at an all time high. A total of 761,400 speed limit offences were dealt with by prosecution or fixed penalty in 1996. Chief officers of police target their resources on locations where they can most effectively reduce road casualties and where excessive speed contributes to dangerous driving conditions.
Lord Berkeley: My Lords, I very much welcome my noble friend's answer to that question. It is obvious that he is aware of the connection between excessive speed and the seriousness of any accident. However, I am sure he is concerned at the figures mentioned in a report two years ago. Has he considered handing over some of the basic enforcement to local authorities, which could then find the money to put the videos in the police cameras—apparently the police cannot afford to do so—use the revenue to offset some of the costs and spend the remainder on public transport investment plans?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, I think there are two questions here. One concerns the handing over of the enforcement of the criminal law in this area to local authorities, which I think generally would not be a good idea. The second concerns hypothecation of the revenues from those who have been unfortunate enough to be caught on camera while speeding. This is a deeply complex area which is presently under consideration.
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, further to the point the noble Lord has just made, will the Minister confirm—he may well not wish to do so—that only one in seven speed cameras is operating at any one time? Is there not therefore a good case for allowing the police to keep at least some of the revenue from the fines to enable them to make more of the cameras operative? Does not the noble Lord agree that as regards motorways and dual carriageways, the 70 miles an hour limit as presently enforced is just about right?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, I think the 70 miles an hour limit as presently enforced—or evaded, as the case may be—seems to be about right when I travel on the M.40 myself. As regards film in the cameras, it is not known to the approaching driver whether a camera contains film. Therefore a camera with no film existentially has quite a useful role to play.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that I, and I am sure a number of other people, will be puzzled by the fact that 91 per cent. of articulated lorries on dual carriageways and 70 per cent. of articulated lorries on single carriageways exceed the speed limit, because there is a law in force which obliges that kind of lorry to have a speed limiter? Why and how is it that if the speed limiters are installed and in working order those lorries exceed the speed limit? Are not the police enforcing the law as regards the installation and maintenance of speed limiters?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, I think not, because a speed limiter simply limits the speed to a
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particular mph. However, not all roads in the United Kingdom are subject to the same speed limit. I think the police do a good job of enforcement bearing in mind the balance they need to draw between public co-operation and the prevention of speeding offences.
Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: My Lords, does the Minister accept that there is a good deal of dispute as to whether speeding should continue to be a criminal offence? Are the Government giving consideration to that matter? Will they consider enabling local police services to fine speeding motorists on the spot?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, speeding is an offence. It ought still to be a criminal offence. An enormous number of people lose their lives or are seriously injured as a direct result of speeding. It is not a case of allowing the police to impose fixed penalties; such penalties can already be imposed. Someone can be fined up to £40 on a fixed penalty, with three penalty points; 12 points means that a driver is liable to be disqualified. The police already have those powers.
The Earl of Erroll: My Lords, will the Minister consider the needs of those people who want to get moving and do things in life and not only the desires of those who are happy to dawdle along achieving less?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, yes. I have travelled on the A.5 to North Wales. My peregrinations on that journey always follow a man in a cap, driving a Morris Minor pulling a caravan.
Lord Swinfen: My Lords, are foreign motorists who are caught speeding on camera fined in court?
Noble Lords: Order!
The Lord Privy Seal (Lord Richard): My Lords, I think it is the turn of this side.
Lord Randall of St. Budeaux: My Lords, on the question of speed limits, will my noble friend tell the House what steps the Government are taking with regard to high-speed driving in villages? Will they give consideration to introducing low speed limits such as 15 or 20 mph, as exist in the United States?
Lord Williams of Mostyn: My Lords, consideration is being given to lower speed limits of 20 miles an hour. However, they are quite difficult to enforce, and there is need for a whole spectrum of speed calming measures in small villages, where many people believe that even 30 miles an hour is too fast. The noble Lord is right. In 1996, for example, no less than 65 per cent. of accidents happened on roads where the speed limit is 30 miles per hour.
Lord Swinfen: My Lords, how do the Government ensure that fines are collected from foreign drivers who are caught speeding—
Lord Carter: My Lords, the time has already exceeded 30 minutes.

Business
3.32 p.m.
Lord Carter: My Lords, at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m., my noble friend Lady Jay of Paddington will, with the leave of the House, repeat a Statement that is to be made in another place on health expenditure.
Regarding the Summer Recess, it may be for the convenience of the House if I announce that, subject as always to the progress of business, the House will rise on Friday 31st July. The House will sit at 11 a.m. on that day and will return on Monday 5th October. I am grateful to the Opposition Chief Whip and the Liberal Democrat Chief Whip for agreeing the business through the usual channels in such a way that sitting into August will not be necessary. However, I repeat that this is subject, as always, to the progress of business.
Perhaps I may take this opportunity to remind your Lordships that the staff of the House have a significant amount of building refurbishment and other work to complete in the Summer Recess. Unfortunately, there will be a certain level of disruption and noise. Black Rod has asked me to assure the House that everything possible will be done to keep the disruption to a minimum.

Business of the House: Standing Order 44
Lord Richard: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
There are three items of business arising before the Summer Recess on which the usual channels have agreed that more than one stage of a Bill may be taken on a day. These are, as usual, the Consolidated Fund Bill and the Finance Bill; in addition, the usual channels have agreed that the remaining stages of the Landmines Bill should be taken on Friday 24th July, the Second Reading being taken tomorrow. Rather than passing a number of Business Motions to give effect to those agreements, it was also agreed through the usual channels that a single Motion before your Lordships today would be appropriate. I commend the Motion to the House.
Moved, That Standing Order 44 (No two stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) be suspended until the House adjourns for the Summer Recess.—(Lord Richard.)
Lord Renton: My Lords, I believe that this is the longest Session of Parliament for many years, and even though it has been so long, there is not enough time to consider in detail, as we need to do, all the legislation that has been, and will be, put before the House. In future Sessions, will the Government try to ensure that the legislation suits the timescale better than has been done this time?
Lord Richard: My Lords, I am told that this is not the longest Session of Parliament. I merely repeat what I have been told; nor do I accept that the Session has necessarily been overloaded. The fact that this House is
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able to rise on 31st July seems to indicate proper application to the amount of work that we have had to do; and on the whole we seem to have succeeded in doing it. Returning on 5th October is not without precedent. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Denham, is not in his place. I am told that, one year, he kept the House here until 12th August and brought noble Lords back at the beginning of October. So on that basis, we are doing quite well.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) (No. 2) Bill
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord McIntosh of Haringey.)
On Question, Bill read a second time; Committee negatived.
Then, Standing Order 44 having been suspended (pursuant to Resolution), Bill read a third time, and passed.

Northern Ireland (Sentences) Bill
3.37 p.m.
Report received.
Clause 1 [Sentence Review Commissioners]:
Lord Cope of Berkeley Lord Cope of Berkeley: moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 1, line 11, at end insert (", and
(c) at least one is a representative of the victims of terrorist crime associated with Northern Ireland.").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment concerns the question of whether the victims of terrorism in Northern Ireland should be represented on the new commission that is to be set up under the Bill. The amendment was moved in Committee by my noble friend Lord Tebbit and was sympathetically received by many Members. As a result, the Minister was kind enough to say that he would give further consideration to the question. It would be helpful to know the results of that consideration. I beg to move.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Cope, said, an amendment on this subject was moved by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, in Committee. The amendment currently before the House is almost identical. It reflects the views of many noble Lords as expressed in Committee, and is very much in line with Clause 1(3) which states:
"In making appointments the Secretary of State shall have regard to the desirability of the Commissioners, as a group, commanding widespread acceptance throughout the community in Northern Ireland."
In Committee, there was a minority view that the Secretary of State might find it difficult to identify an individual victim of terrorism. I am quite certain that the Secretary of State herself and the Minister will have no

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great difficulty, given that the former, in particular appointed Sir Kenneth Bloomfield in November 1997 to report on,
"the feasibility of providing greater recognition for victims".
I quote from the terms of reference. In Committee, my noble friend Lord Dunleath reminded us that the Belfast agreement of Good Friday declares:
"It is recognised that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society".
So on both grounds the Secretary of State would be on firm foundations if she were, for example, to appoint Sir Kenneth Bloomfield to the commission, given the collective or consensus views of the many victims who made submissions to him in preparation for his report.
Further, the Secretary of State has the authority of what has become the Holy Writ of the Good Friday agreement. I am quite sure that the Secretary of State would not want to incur the displeasure or even the censure of those who have condemned some of us here in the Chamber who have sought to scrutinise, amend and improve the Bill. We were condemned on the grounds that even a modest textual amendment or correction would "send the wrong signals", the phrase used so frequently in your Lordships' House. Presumably, it would send the "wrong signals" to terrorists and perhaps wreck the agreement.
I respectfully suggest that the Secretary of State and the Minister, by obeying the words of paragraph 12 of the Good Friday agreement, should say:
"It is recognised that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society".
Surely, it would be indefensible to exclude victims from the opportunity, as laid down in the agreement, to contribute to what we all hope will be a changed society. In fact, it may be thought that their exclusion would clearly be a breach of paragraph 12 of the sacred Good Friday agreement.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, I am one of those who agree with the sentiment of the amendment but is unsure about its exact wording. The words of the noble Lord, Lord Molyneaux, are wise and the Government would be extremely well advised, when they come to make decisions about the membership of the commission, in practice to include someone who has the confidence of the many victims in Northern Ireland and that he or she would represent their concerns.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I support what the noble Lord said. I am open to correction but, as I see it, there is absolutely no reference in the Bill or the schedules to any representations being able to be made to the commissioners by victims of terrorist crime. That seems to be a gap which ought to be plugged. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, would agree that somehow there should be a procedure so that representations can be made to the commissioners by the victims of crime.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Cope for taking over the amendment which I originally put down during the Committee stage thus
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giving it even more force. Of course, we all understand that the Bill has no effect as regards the perpetrators of the particularly vile murder of the three young boys at Ballymoney, the cut-off date being Good Friday. However, as I watched the distress of the parents of those children, it seemed to me that it made even more powerfully the arguments put here in earlier days concerning the needs of the victims. There is nothing we can do to ease the grief of those parents other than to ensure that the perpetrators of the crime are hunted down and punished; punished with no prospect of any early let out in any future deal with another group of terrorists.
It would also give those parents some comfort if they felt that others who had been through what they are now going through were able to have some formal recognition of the way that those who had committed the dreadful crimes before Good Friday were now to be excused and let out.
3.45 p.m.
Lord Dunleath: My Lords, in Committee I too supported the amendment. Nothing has changed since then to make me alter my views. Indeed, the view put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, about the ghastly murders we had in Ballymoney last weekend serve only to reinforce that. As I am sure the Minister agrees, the Bill will give great comfort to the perpetrators of the crimes because they are being let out far earlier, I am sure, than even they dared to expect when the crimes were committed. In one small way I hope that we can all agree that the amendment will redress the balance in that it will provide a little bit of comfort for the victims of crime. After all, they are the ones who deserve that comfort.
Baroness O'Cathain: My Lords, I support the amendment. I also wish to reinforce the statement made by the noble Lord, Lord Molyneaux, to the effect that it might be said that it would give the wrong signals. I believe that the amendment would give all the right signals. There is hardly a family or neighbourhood in Northern Ireland that is not touched by the sadness and terror of the past 29 years. The idea that victims should be represented would be extremely good in terms of the healing process.
However, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Molyneaux, in suggesting that Sir Kenneth Bloomfield would perhaps be the person to represent the victims. For all the admirable work he has done, he is not a victim. There should be a strong case for a search for a victim who would be capable of representing victims in Northern Ireland.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I too support the amendment. With respect, I slightly disagree with my noble friend Lady O'Cathain on the issue of Sir Kenneth Bloomfield. His would be the right appointment because he represents all victims. When we discussed the matter before, the difficulty was whether it would be victims who were Catholic or those who

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were Protestant. He has heard all of them and could presumably consult them. He could even bring them forward to support his point in the discussions.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, perhaps I can clear up a misunderstanding. Sir Kenneth Bloomfield was in my mind because he was a victim of a bomb attack on his home. It was only through a degree of luck and the grace of God that he and his wife were not killed.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, that makes the case even stronger. There is even more support for the idea that the agreement—if we have to think in these terms—fully authorises what we wish. Paragraph 11 states:
"The participants believe that it is essential to acknowledge and address the suffering of the victims of violence as a necessary element of reconciliation".
Paragraph 12 states:
"The provision of services that are supportive and sensitive to the needs of victims will also be a critical element".
It seems to me that that is part of it.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, in Committee I supported the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit. Everything I have heard since leads me to believe that I was right in doing so. The events of recent times in Northern Ireland have sickened people more than ever of the violence that has happened in the past and is happening now. If we pass this amendment today, the people of Northern Ireland will at least understand, be aware of, and appreciate that those who have suffered most at the hands of terrorists, of whatever denomination, would at least be represented and their voice heard.
I hope that my noble friend will be able to accept this amendment or, if it is not in order for some reason, that he will bring forward one of his own which will have the same effect.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Lord Dubs): My Lords, before speaking to this first amendment there are some preliminary matters that I would like to address. When your Lordships' House considered this Bill in Committee, I undertook to reflect further on a number of the amendments that were spoken to by noble Lords. I have done so and the Government have brought forward amendments in response to some of the points. We shall come to them in due course. However, there is one other issue, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Denton, that I should like to mention at this point if your Lordships will permit.
The noble Baroness spoke to an amendment that would have required the commissioners to consider applications in the order that they were received. She was concerned that the commissioners should have clearly defined procedures for prioritising cases to protect them from any suggestion of capriciousness or partiality.
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The Government agree with the noble Baroness that the manner in which the commissioners carry out their functions will be important in maintaining public confidence in the implementation of the legislation. Under the Bill my right honourable friend the Secretary of State may make rules relating to the procedures to be adopted by the commissioners, and she intends to do so. However, it is the Government's view that the commissioners should develop their own priority rules to take account of the speed with which applications are received and other matters such as when prisoners would be likely to be released should they receive a declaration.
By allowing the commissioners to set the priority rules, account can be taken of unforeseen circumstances or developments without the requirement that the legislation be amended after it has been commenced. But the noble Baroness can be assured that my right honourable friend will draw to the attention of the chairman or chairmen the importance of establishing clear rules of procedure where they have a discretion. In addition, the Secretary of State would intend to require the commissioners to make available any rules of procedure that they may choose to adopt.
I now turn to the amendment before your Lordships' House. First, I wholeheartedly concur with the sentiments expressed about the tragic murder of the three children in Ballymoney a few days ago. I know that everybody was shocked in this country, Northern Ireland and in most parts of the world at such a brutal and callous act.
The people who committed that awful murder—I hope that they will be brought to justice—will not come within the scope of this Bill. They committed the murder after the necessary date and there is no way in which they will be given early release—I am presuming that they will be caught, convicted and sentenced—and the Bill does not apply to them.
As the noble Lord, Lord Cope, said, this amendment is the same as an amendment that was spoken to in Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit. He asked that I consider the amendment further or, as an alternative, that I might give a commitment to your Lordships that the Secretary of State would appoint such a person as a commissioner.
I have considered the proposal in conjunction with the Secretary of State. We do not think that it is necessary to amend the Bill, but consider that there would be merit in appointing a person with the expertise identified by the noble Lords, Lord Tebbit and Lord Cope.
The Government acknowledge that, although many victims accept the release of prisoners as part of the package that is the Good Friday agreement, the work of the commissioners under this Bill is likely to cause them concern. The Government sought to address that concern in part by providing that victims may be given information about the release of individual prisoners should they request it. But the Government consider that it is also important that the commissioners take forward their work in a manner that is sensitive to the concerns of the wider group of victims, including those who do not request information under the scheme provided for

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by the Bill. For that reason the Secretary of State agreed that it would be helpful to appoint a commissioner who has experience of working with victims. That commissioner could bring his or her experience to the work of the commissioners to ensure that the procedures that were adopted took full account of the need to be sensitive to the concerns of victims. As recommended by noble Lords, the Secretary of State would intend to consult with Sir Kenneth Bloomfield before making such an appointment.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, asked a specific question as to whether representatives on behalf of victims or victims themselves could make representations to the commissioners. I am not happy about that. It is not part of the agreement to make the release subject to the views of victims. Indeed, many victims would not want such a specific role which would in part make them responsible for the release of prisoners. I understand the sentiment behind the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, but that is not the right way to go.
I hope noble Lords will agree that the Government are meeting the substantive point at issue in the amendment, even though we believe it can be done by a decision of the Secretary of State without requiring amendment to the legislation. In those circumstances, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, before the Minister sits down, perhaps I may say that he misunderstood my argument. I did not mean—or I think say—that release should be subject to representations. I was suggesting that representations could be made to the commissioners. There would be no pressure. I was concerned with providing access for the victim to make representations. They may be rejected, but at least they could be made. That is all I was suggesting.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I take that point. It was in that sense that I understood the noble Lord's comments, even though I used the phrase "subject to the views of victims". There is still a difficulty in putting on the face of the Bill a provision that there will be arrangements whereby victims or people representing victims could make representations to the commissioners. I am not sure that is the best way forward. It may give victims the sense that if they made representations, those representations would have a bearing on the release procedures or on the release date. It would also involve victims directly in the work of the directors in a way that I am not sure would show that wide-ranging respect for victims that many noble Lords feel.
I understand the point and am not unsympathetic to the motive behind the noble Lord's argument. But to put that on the face of the Bill would not be appropriate and may set up all sorts of other expectations, which would be undesirable.
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, before the Minister sits down, perhaps I may thank him and the Secretary of State for examining the purpose of the amendment I moved at Committee stage. From bitter
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experience I know how difficult it is to please all communities in Northern Ireland at one time. I believe that the more the rules are evolved before the need for them, the better it will be for the future of the agreement. I thank the Minister.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, also before the Minister sits down, perhaps I may say how grateful I am for the way in which he came forward with the ideas of which he spoke. It is extremely helpful. Also, in relation to victims putting in evidence and pleas, I understand why he says he has reservations about that being placed on the face of the Bill. However, I do not imagine that letters written to the commissioners would be returned, "Not known at this address".
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for what he said. The commissioners, by definition, will be independent of government and behave as they see fit within the terms of the legislation. However, I would be most surprised if letters were returned unopened.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for the way in which he responded to this amendment. I am also glad of the assurance that he gave that the people who were responsible for the ghastly murders at Ballymoney will in no way benefit from the provisions of this Bill, which of course we understood.
I take it that it is also true that any organisation to which the people belong who committed the murders will also, by the fact of the murders, have placed itself in the greatest difficulty under the Bill. They have patently not maintained a ceasefire. On the contrary, they have committed the most ghastly murder. Clearly, if it turns out that those who are responsible for these murders belong to an organisation, it, too, will place itself in great difficulty under this legislation.
Like the Minister, I feel sure that the commissioners will receive letters from victims and I hope that they will pay careful attention to them. I am grateful to the Minister for the way in which he has responded to the amendment. In the circumstances, there is nothing for me to do except to seek leave to withdraw it.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
4 p.m.
Lord Cope of Berkeley Lord Cope of Berkeley moved Amendment No. 2:
Page 1, line 17, after ("(2)(a)") insert ("and in paragraph 1 of Schedule 1").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving this amendment it is sensible that we discuss Amendment No. 18. The purpose of the two amendments is to provide that the chairman of the commission should be a lawyer. This was briefly touched on in our earlier debates, but since then I have had the opportunity to look at the equivalent legislation in the Republic of Ireland and the debates that took place in the Dail on that legislation. I see that the equivalent body in the Republic of Ireland—it is not identical in its responsibilities—is to be chaired by a lawyer. That made me think that it might be worthwhile for your Lordships to return to this question at least briefly this afternoon.
It is true that the Republic of Ireland legislation takes a different form. That government decided that they did not need specific legislation to release prisoners under the agreement. Their releases are intended to take place by executive action, under legislation that has existed for some time. All the Republic of Ireland Bill does is to set up an advisory committee to advise the Minister on how to use his powers.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Can he indicate whether the inaction of the Irish Government and the rather peculiar way they have set about implementing the sacred, holy writ of the Good Friday agreement have in any way endangered the sanctity of that agreement or wrecked the prospects of its success?
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, that is an extremely interesting question. The method of proceeding chosen by the Republic of Ireland Government does not seem to be what was envisaged at the time of the agreement. In that sense it is not in accordance with the agreement, although it seeks to achieve the same effect as the agreement. All it does is set up the new commission. It is to be a totally independent commission, consisting of one lawyer and two civil servants from the staff of the Minister of Justice. It is, by statute, to be an independent commission. It has no instructions on how to proceed with its work except that the relevant section of the agreement is reproduced in a schedule to the Bill as the guidance to the commission.
It is not quite clear, to me at any rate, how many prisoners will be affected in the Republic. The noble Lord the Minister has been kind enough to place a document in the Library about the Republic of Ireland legislation which suggests that the number of prisoners will be in the region of 30. The Dail was told that the number would be about 47. So I am not exactly clear on that point either.
The purpose of the amendments is to raise the question of whether or not the commission should be headed by a lawyer. In view of the precedent which seems to have been set by the Republic of Ireland, and the fact that the commission in this jurisdiction is to deal with sentencing, I think it is certainly a question which is worth your Lordships considering once again. I beg to move.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, I venture to disagree with the amendment. I yield to no one in my admiration for lawyers—many of my best friends, and so on! But I wonder why it is necessary to feel that a commission of this kind could not find people of judgment to make the difficult decisions that are called for without them having had to have had the benefit of many years of legal training. Surely legal advice will be available. I hope that the Minister will reassure us on that point. The best legal advice must clearly be available. I find it unusual for the Benches on my left
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to be praying in aid the precedent that, if the Republic of Ireland does it in this way, we must do it in the same way. I am not at all persuaded of that.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, the effect of these amendments would be to require that, should the Secretary of State appoint joint chairmen, one of the joint chairmen should be a lawyer with legal qualifications in the United Kingdom. Noble Lords will be aware that in another place my right honourable friend the Secretary of State accepted an amendment to the Bill which required that the lawyer appointed as a commissioner should hold a legal qualification in the United Kingdom. The Government accepted the wisdom of that amendment in the context of arrangements that would only apply within the jurisdictions of the United Kingdom.
I am not persuaded by the arguments for this amendment. Much reference has been made to the legislation in Dublin. I do not want to be put in the position of having to explain, defend or justify legislation produced in another country; I find it hard enough sometimes to explain our own legislation. It is not hard to justify it, but it is sometimes hard to explain it! I think it would be getting us into somewhat uncharted waters if I attempted to explain the whole basis of the Republic's legislation, which I have in front of me.
The noble Lord, Lord Cope, said that there was some doubt about the exact figures, there being two different sources. The information note on the Criminal Justice (Release of Prisoners) Bill 1998—the Bill from Dublin—suggests that there are in the region of 30 prisoners in custody who will qualify for review under the legislation. Noble Lords will be aware that I have placed in the Library a copy of the Bill and the explanatory statement.
I am aware that the legislation introduced in the Republic of Ireland requires that a lawyer should chair a panel appointed to advise the Minister. However, noble Lords who have examined that legislation will see that the role and function of the panel are very different from the role and function of the commissioners to be appointed under our legislation. It is true that both pieces of legislation are intended to implement the Good Friday agreement, but as they do so in very different ways there can be no direct read-across from one Bill to another. If the commissioners appointed under this Bill were to operate as advisers to the Secretary of State, a similar approach might be appropriate. But that is clearly not the case. They do not operate as advisers to the Secretary of State. They operate as independent persons who are guided or instructed as to how to operate by the legislation; and of course they will develop further rules of procedure, to which I referred in the debate on an earlier amendment.
The noble Lord, Lord Holme, asked a question. Yes, the commissioners will have access to legal advice to enable them to fulfil their functions.
When your Lordships considered the Bill in Committee, noble Lords accepted that it was important that the panel of commissioners appointed under the Bill

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should command widespread acceptance throughout the community in Northern Ireland. That is a test in the legislation. Noble Lords also accepted that the appointment of an appropriate chairman or chairmen was of particular importance. But to meet those tests it is not necessary that the chairman or chairmen should have legal qualifications. The chairman or chairmen will be appointed to give leadership and direction to the commissioners. Those are the particular skills which are being sought; not the specific test of legal competence. The Bill does not preclude the appointment of a lawyer as chairman or as joint chairman, but it is not appropriate that it should require it. For those reasons, I ask the noble Lord not to press his amendment.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, the Minister referred to his occasional difficulties in explaining legislation, which I well understand. But that has not been apparent to the House. The Minister always does his best and we appreciate that. As he said, I realise that occasionally he has a difficult job in that respect. The chairman of the commission will also have a difficult job, but that is perhaps not a reason for insisting on his being a lawyer. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 3 [Applications]:
Lord Monson Lord Monson moved Amendment No. 3.
Page 2, line 16, leave out ("connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment is identical to one moved in Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Cope, from the Conservative Front Bench. He decided not to press it at that stage. I thought then that it was an excellent amendment and it remains so today. The Government's reasons for resisting it were unconvincing. One suspects that the full implications have not been thought through.
Some terrorists worldwide are motivated by warped idealism; some by mercenary considerations and others by a combination of the two. Above all, it is the latter two categories that one should worry about. If the Bill remains unamended the commissioners would be obliged to release a prisoner who qualified for release on every other count (for example, he is no longer a formal supporter of a terrorist organisation) even if the intelligence services discovered that this particular prisoner—let us say, a skilled bomb maker or an extremely proficient and accurate sniper—had been recruited by ETA (the Basque terrorist organisation) or by violent Corsican separatists or a terrorist organisation in the Balkans, North Africa, the Near East or Middle East, the Indian Sub-Continent, Sri Lanka or Japan.
It is true that subsection (6) provides that a prisoner should not be released if he is likely to be a danger to the public, but the definition of "public" in that context must surely mean in law the public within the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. It cannot embrace the Spanish public, the Bosnian or Israeli public, nor the Sri Lankan or Japanese public. It is rather tough on the latter to permit known terrorist experts to be released into their midst. It may not be contrary to international
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legal conventions, but it is certainly contrary to international moral conventions. In other words, it is not exactly neighbourly.
There is another factor to be considered. The Notes on Clauses issued by the Northern Ireland Office on 24th June state that prisoners will be released on licence and will be recalled—and those three words are underlined—if they engage in terrorist activity after release.
How can they be recalled from Libya, Syria or Iran? If the Minister can convince us that acceptance of this amendment would, for some strange and obscure reason, be contrary to the terms of the Good Friday agreement, regrettably that has to be the end of the story. But if the Minister cannot do so then this matter needs to be pursued. I beg to move.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, I, too, share the disappointment that Clause 3(5) is worded as it is. In view of a much earlier extension of the Prevention of Terrorism Act over a decade ago to take in international terrorism, it seems wise that we should think carefully, given the perception that terrorists are being let out of prison. That perception will remain no matter what we in your Lordships' House may say by way of explanation. That perception will not be lost on international terrorists. There will be a very real risk of their regarding the United Kingdom as a safe haven and the rest of us as a soft touch. Therefore, I agree that connecting terrorism with Northern Ireland alone is a regrettable step.
4.15 p.m.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, at Committee stage I supported the noble Lord's amendment, and I still do. The noble Lord, Lord Williams of Mostyn, responded from the Government Front Bench. He resisted the amendment on the ground that a review of international terrorism was under way at the Home Office. When the Minister responds, will he be kind enough to tell us about the timing of that review? If it is not to be completed early and deals with the point raised here today, there is a dangerous gap left in our armoury against terrorists.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I, too, support this amendment. The IRA and the so-called splinter groups of Continuity IRA and the 32 Counties Group—if we are to judge by the latest attempts at terrorism in London—are using what are called "lily-whites" who are young people who have never been involved with terrorism before. Therefore, the IRA will be tempted to develop its long-standing relationships with such organisations as ETA and possibly use them as surrogates. One cannot exclude the possibility that there will be combinations of that kind operating. That would be very tempting for the IRA. We should not allow ourselves to be powerless to use the Act against them.
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, I also support the noble Lord, Lord Monson, by saying simply that it is not a question of going as far as Spain, Libya

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or Greece to get people back and involved in terrorism again. The record in respect of bringing people back from Dublin is one in ten. That should be borne in mind.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, this amendment has merit. One of the problems with this Bill is that all too often people look on terrorists, particularly Irish terrorists, as starry-eyed freedom fighters. That is not the case. They are not starry-eyed freedom fighters at all, but thugs and murderers.
This Bill gives the impression that they are anything but thugs and murderers and that does no good at all. I believe that the commission has to be completely satisfied that it is not releasing people who like murder, violence and acts of terrorism and who can be bought, not only in the Middle East and in other parts of the world, but perhaps in relation to some other groups in this country. Therefore, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Monson, has merit. We should be extremely concerned and very careful that we do not release into the community people who are not starry-eyed freedom fighters but simply thugs and murderers who enjoy what they do.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, perhaps I may briefly intervene. I hope that the Minister will reflect on what his right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary would say to the government of a friendly nation if one of these individuals arrives in their country and is found to have been involved in something like the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York or a bombing in Israel, or anywhere else. It would be rather difficult for the Foreign Secretary to say, as he presumably would have to—"Well, we did not think he was going to do it in our kingdom, so we did not think it mattered where he took his expertise or to whom he sold it elsewhere in the world".
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Monson, for moving this amendment once again. We discussed it, at my suggestion, at Committee stage. I still support the idea behind it, as I did then. It is very important. My noble friend Lady Park of Monmouth has pointed out the links that already exist between some of the terrorist organisations in Ireland and in other parts of the world. The Government would be placed in a difficult position if a friendly government said that in their view x prisoner whom HMG proposed to let out under this legislation would, if released, assist terrorists against that friendly government. As my noble friend Lord Tebbit has said, in those circumstances all that the Home Secretary could say would be that all that mattered at the time the legislation came on to the statute book was Northern Irish terrorism; that if x was released early and caused difficulty for that friendly government there was nothing under the law that the UK Government could do about it. Parliament had not suggested that.
Reference has been made to ETA and terrorist groups in Israel and other places. It may not be as far away as that. At times Irish terrorism has been directed against the Irish state. If the Government of the Republic of
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Ireland said that they thought a particular prisoner who was likely to be released might pose a danger to them, I do not know how that could be regarded as terrorism connected with Northern Ireland. It would be terrorism connected with the Republic of Ireland. I believe that this restriction is too narrowly drawn.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, this amendment is similar to that which was discussed by noble Lords at Committee stage. At that time it was explained why the term,
"connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland",
had been included. This Bill deals with matters related to Northern Ireland. It is concerned with persons imprisoned in Northern Ireland who in most cases have been convicted of offences related to terrorism.
The form of words used in this clause and elsewhere in the Bill does not require that the activity covered must take place in Northern Ireland. There are many circumstances in which terrorist acts connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland may take place outside Northern Ireland; for instance, the purchase of weapons or training with other illegal organisations. Noble Lords will be aware that acts of terrorism connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland have taken place in England and outside the United Kingdom. What is not covered by the Bill are acts of terrorism that have no connection with the affairs of Northern Ireland. I understand that that is the main reason for this amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Monson. That the Bill is confined to acts of terrorism connected with Northern Ireland is an appropriate limitation in relation to a Bill about Northern Ireland.
The wider question of legislation in relation to terrorism is under review and noble Lords will have an opportunity to contribute to it in due course. I am not yet in a position to tell the noble Lord, Lord Holme, when that review will be made available, but I believe that the House will shortly have the opportunity to consider it. That wider approach to terrorist legislation covering all parts of the United Kingdom, not just Northern Ireland, is an important matter. This matter has been referred to in the past as representing the Government's approach to the wider issues.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, perhaps I may seek clarification. Surely, we are concerned to ensure that such criminals should not benefit from the particular dispensation conferred by this Bill. Presumably, this would not normally arise in terrorist cases. That is why we are concerned.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I understand that. I am dealing simply with terrorist offences that are committed outside Northern Ireland in the context of the Bill. The Bill covers a number of matters but not the matter to which the noble Baroness or the noble Lord has referred.
Clause 3(6) provides:
"The fourth condition is that, if the prisoner were released immediately, he would not be a danger to the public".
I am advised that the definition of "public" is not confined to the public in Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom. The definition goes wider than that. If that

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advice is accepted by noble Lords this amendment is not necessary. Furthermore, if prisoners are considered to pose a risk of that kind they can be refused release. I believe that the Bill in any event has some safeguards. The real difficulty is that we are dealing with a Bill that is framed to deal with a particular situation that stems from the agreement.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I am very much obliged to the Minister for giving way. I am surprised by the legal advice that the Minister has received. Certainly, anyone will argue in court that "public" means what people usually understand that term to mean—our public. On any showing this requires clarification. Will the noble Lord take on board that point? I do not believe that it is by any means certain that "public" can be construed as widely as he suggests without any further limitation.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I take the noble Lord's point and certainly I shall give thought to it.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, in helping my noble friend to think about it, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, has intimated, we must remove any doubt whatever about what "public" means. I agree with the noble Lord that there may well be an argument that this Bill is intended to deal with a domestic matter of the United Kingdom and "public" means the public of the United Kingdom. Will my noble friend consider tabling his own amendment to make this clear by inserting either "to the public anywhere" or "to the public in any part of the world"?
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his suggestion. I should like to think about the points that have been raised, the more so as my noble friend has added to the argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the Minister again. In the course of thinking about this matter, will he also bear in mind that the condition,
"if the prisoner were released immediately, he would not be a danger to the public",
applies only to lifers and not to the very large number of prisoners due to be released under this legislation who have fixed term sentences? Therefore, in any case it is limited in application. Whatever "public" means it is limited to the release of only some prisoners.
Perhaps I may trespass on the Minister's time by putting another question. Does he suggest it is remotely possible that the review of international terrorism that is being conducted in the Home Office may lead to proposals to alter this legislation when it becomes an Act? I believe it is extremely unlikely that that will happen.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I did not suggest that. I said in reply to a number of comments, including the suggestion that the United Kingdom was soft on terrorism, that we condemned terrorism absolutely from
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wherever it came; that we were reviewing all of our legislation to do with terrorism; and that the results of that review would be available shortly. I did not suggest that there was a direct link between the release provisions in this Bill and the wider review, but that the latter would bring up to date existing legislation dealing with terrorism; it would not be confined to Northern Ireland but would deal with the United Kingdom as a whole.
I understand the strength of feeling on this matter. The main argument is that this is a Bill about terrorism connected with Northern Ireland and it is difficult to attach to legislation of this kind wider considerations such as terrorism in Spain or any other country. I shall reflect on the point that has been made and return to it at the next stage of the Bill.
4.30 p.m.
Lord Monson:My Lords, I may warmly thank noble Lords from every quarter of the House, Front Benches and Back Benches alike, for their powerful and thoughtful support for this amendment. The only opposing voice was that of the Minister—perhaps "dissenting voice" might be a better description.
The first question is: is this amendment contrary to the terms of the Good Friday agreement? From the fact that the Minister said nothing about it, I suspect that it is not. The second question is; can it be denied that this amendment, if accepted, would be a good thing from the point of view of the entire international community? I do not think that that can be denied.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, perhaps I may clarify whether the fact that I did not say that the amendment took the Bill outside the agreement meant that I thought it was within the agreement. I have doubts about whether the Bill, with this amendment, would be within the scope of the agreement because the amendment imposes a new and different condition and one which was obviously not part of the agreement as decided. I am not happy that the noble Lord should draw the conclusion that he did from my silence on that point.
Lord Monson: My Lords, I thank the Minister. Everything would appear to hinge on two things. First, would the Bill, with this amendment, conflict with the Good Friday agreement? Obviously that will require some research on the part of the Minister and his department. The second point on which everything hinges is the precise definition of "public". There are totally opposing views on this. I think that the valuable suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, that the Bill might be widened at the next stage to include "the public in the world at large" is excellent. Perhaps the Government will see fit to adopt that suggestion.
It seems to me, despite the large support that I have enjoyed, that it might be better to await a little more research on the precise question of whether this amendment conflicts in any way with the Good Friday agreement. Whether it is merely outside it is neither here nor there.
Lord Tebbit: My. Lords, perhaps a little research might go into contemplating exactly which organisations which were parties to the Good Friday agreement might feel that it was damaging to the Good Friday agreement for Her Majesty's Government to have the power to keep in gaol people who might commit acts of terrorism outside Northern Ireland. It would tell us quite a lot about any organisation which took that view.
Lord Monson: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, makes an excellent point. That, too, must be considered. Tempted though I am to press this, in view of the support I have received, I think it would be better for more research to be done into whether "public" really does embrace "the public throughout the entire world" which, of course, would solve our problems, and whether the amendment conflicts with the Good Friday agreement. We may come back to this at the next stage, depending on how far we get on with that. However, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Cope of Berkeley Lord Cope of Berkeley moved Amendment No. 4:
Page 2, line 28, leave out ("may specify only") and insert ("shall specify").
The noble Lord said: Amendment No. 4 brings us on to those provisions in the Bill under which the Secretary of State may specify as "terrorist organisations" those organisations which are believed to be,
"concerned in terrorism connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland"
or not, as the case may be, depending on the outcome of the consideration of the previous amendment, or those concerned in promoting or encouraging terrorism and which have not established a ceasefire.
It seemed extraordinary to us in Committee that the Secretary of State might be thoroughly convinced that a particular organisation was concerned with terrorism and had not established a ceasefire and yet that she should have the ability under the Bill not to specify that organisation as a "terrorist organisation".
I find it difficult to envisage the circumstances in which the Secretary of State should want discretion in this matter. Why should the Secretary of State not specify as a "terrorist organisation" an organisation of the character described? Giving the Secretary of State that discretion only means that the Secretary of State will be pressed to use that discretion for reasons at which we can only guess and about which we can only speculate.
It would be much better if the Secretary of State did not have the discretion once she had come to the conclusion in accordance with Clause 3(8) that the organisation in question was concerned in terrorism and had not established a ceasefire. It seems to me that it would be incredible that she should not do so. That being the case, it is highly desirable that the Bill should say that she should specify such an organisation rather than have discretion as to whether or not to do so. No guidance is given as to how she is to use that discretion.
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As the indications given in Committee were that she never would use that discretion, she would be better not to be given it by the Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, I would very briefly, in two sentences, support what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Cope, in moving the amendment. We are not in any way suggesting that the Secretary of State should be confused or overloaded by these responsibilities but, as the clause stands at the moment, it gives the impression of a grey area. If, by any miracle, I find myself in the position of the Secretary of State, I would welcome the wording as amended. It would put the position beyond all shadow of doubt.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, the only argument the Minister advanced in Committee against this amendment was that we should trust the Secretary of State. May I say unambiguously that I wholly trust the present Secretary of State? But that is not the issue which noble Lords are raising. Secretaries of State are mutable; others will succeed to the office. This legislation will last for some time. I think it is incumbent on the Government to say why the substitution should not be made.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, this amendment was considered in Committee. It concerns the application of the test in Clause 3(8) of the Bill. Under Clause 3(8) the Secretary of State may specify only organisations that she believes:
"(a) are concerned in terrorism connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland, or in promoting or encouraging it, and
"(b) have not established or are not maintaining a complete and unequivocal ceasefire".
That is the test clearly contemplated under the terms of the Good Friday agreement.
Amendment No. 4 would place the Secretary of State under a duty to specify any organisation which she believed failed the two tests set out in Clause 3(8). It is neither necessary nor appropriate to place the Secretary of State under such a duty. If the Secretary of State believes that an organisation fails these tests, she can and will make an order specifying the organisation as a "terrorist organisation".
Nothing is gained by placing the Secretary of State under a duty in this way. In addition, noble Lords will also be aware that any order made under this clause is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, so noble Lords will have the opportunity to debate which organisations should be specified when such an order is made.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, in that very lucid response he said that the Secretary of State "can and will". If the Secretary of State "will", what is the difference from "shall"?
Lord Dubs: My Lords, the difference is that parliamentary draftsmen will normally use a form of wording because they think it is most appropriate to the

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circumstances. When I said that she "can and will" I was saying that the Secretary of State would clearly interpret both the wording of the Bill—and, indeed, the thrust of the debate here today—in the way I have indicated. However, I believe it would still be preferable to leave the wording as it is now, on the face of the Bill unamended.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I am not convinced. The Minister says that the Secretary of State will never use the discretion. In that case, what on earth is the point of having the discretion in the Bill when all it could do is give rise to extra argument, judicial review and so on? I notice that two of the lawyers who were with us a little earlier have left the Chamber, so I think I can venture on to dangerous ground. It seems to me that the discretion might be such as to give rise to judicial review and to other questions.
The Minister sought to comfort us by saying that because of the affirmative orders the House will have the opportunity to decide whether the Secretary of State has made the correct decision. But the House will not have the opportunity to decide whether the correct decision has been made as regards any organisation where the Secretary of State chose to use the discretion. If some future Secretary of State chose to use the discretion, we should not have the opportunity to discuss the issue because an affirmative order would not be required.
The matter is not satisfactory. I hope that the Minister will reflect on it further in case we wish to return to the issue at a later stage of the Bill. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
4.45 p.m.
Lord Cope of Berkeley Lord Cope of Berkeley moved Amendment No. 5:
Page 2, line 35, leave out ("take into account whether") and insert ("satisfy himself whether or not").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, having discussed that item in minutiae, we come to one of the main problems in the Bill.
We are agreed I think in all parts of the House and between the two Front Benches that the Bill should reflect the agreement. The difference is that on this side of the Chamber we feel that the Bill should reflect the whole agreement, whereas the Minister thinks that it should reflect the section on page 25 of the agreement headed "prisoners". That is the point of principle underlying the amendment.
The practical point is whether prisoner releases will continue up to and including the two-year stage if decommissioning is not proceeding in parallel with the releases. It is not a pre-condition. We do not ask for decommissioning to take place either in whole or in part before any releases occur. But we want the two to proceed in parallel.
I believe that the agreement clearly envisages that in its overall terms and in particular in its opening statements of the agreement. The Prime Minister has emphasised, as have many other people, that the agreement has to be taken as a whole, and that one
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cannot take out individual pieces. At present the Bill does not do that. It provides that the Secretary of State has to take into account whether an organisation is doing the four things set out in subsection (9), including in particular co-operating with the decommissioning commission.
We suggested in earlier debates more sweeping proposals to the Bill. Those were rejected by the Minister. But this amendment deletes the words "take into account whether". The subsection would provide that,
"In applying subsection (8)(b) the Secretary of State shall in particular satisfy himself whether or not an organisation",
is doing what is set out in the Bill, including co-operating with the decommissioning commission. It is a weaker version which is less satisfactory to me in many respects. But it is an attempt to encourage the Minister a little further in our direction. I hope that at the very least it will cause the Minister to say clearly that the Government are determined to see the whole agreement, including decommissioning, put in place over the same timescale of two years, and that if decommissioning is not running in parallel as the two years progress then prisoner releases will not continue.
I believe that to be the Government's position. It should be spelt out clearly for the benefit of the law-abiding public. It should also be spelt out so that there can be no complaints from prisoners if the release programme is stopped at some point during the two years because decommissioning is not proceeding in parallel. It would be unfair to let prisoners believe that they will be released if the whole agreement, including decommissioning, is not proceeding.
Your Lordships may recall—I have said it before—that I hate the idea behind the Bill. I believe that prisoner releases are acceptable only if their organisations have given up violence for good. I think that the Bill is an injustice anyway, and without decommissioning, without a proper end to violence, it is a horrible and a deadly mistake to pass the legislation, which could have appalling consequences.
Nevertheless, the Bill is acceptable if there is a permanent end to the violence. Decommissioning is the most practical, verifiable and effective way of gauging the reality of a permanent end to violence as opposed to a temporary lull. There have been previous temporary lulls. But that is not enough to justify a Bill of this character. If an organisation, in the terms of the Bill,
"is committed to the use now and in the future of only democratic and peaceful means to achieve its objectives",
then it can have no use for arms and explosives. I can foresee difficulties about establishing for certain whether some members of what has been until now a terrorist organisation are still preparing plans for violence. But there will be no doubt about the fact of decommissioning. That is why I say that it is the most verifiable, effective way of judging the end to violence.
The other criteria depend to a great degree on the Secretary of State gauging sensitive, difficult, intelligence information, good as that can sometimes be. But for the decommissioning commission to say that it can certify that x number of guns or pounds of

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explosives have been destroyed is a different matter. It is a matter that everyone will know about. It will demonstrate clearly that there has been an end to violence. It will be difficult for anyone to be sure that all the weapons of an organisation have been destroyed. Of course new weapons can be obtained; and of course some terrorists will continue the violence in support both of political aims and for the financial rackets. But decommissioning still remains the key action which will signal an end to violence by a terrorist organisation. It is a key requirement of the agreement.
The agreement needs to be implemented in full. I believe that the Bill should reflect that. The amendment goes a small way to seek to achieve that.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, I apologise for not having taken part in or been present during the earlier stages of the Bill. Part of the reason was that I was in Northern Ireland at the time. It seems to me that the noble Lord has somewhat overstated his case on the amendment, but I leave that for the Government to reply to.
I seek reassurance from the Minister that former terrorists who used to belong to organisations but who have clearly broken their links with their old organisations while in prison—I can think of a good many people in HMP Maghaberry and perhaps a few elsewhere who have done so—will still be eligible for release, even though the Secretary of State is not fully satisfied with the organisation to which they used to belong. If the Minister finds that a little complicated and would prefer to write to me, I shall be quite happy.
Lord Holme of Cheltenham: My Lords, whereas I was happy to support the noble Lord, Lord Cope, on his previous amendment, I fear that I cannot on this one. It is not that I find the wording of line 35 satisfactory. I fear that there is not sufficient clarity about who makes the decision on (a), (b), (c) and (d) and upon what evidence he or she makes it. I still have that acute reservation. The amendment strikes at a fundamental piece of architecture of the Good Friday agreement by which the Secretary of State is required to take into account those four various considerations in arriving at a judgment.
As the Minister knows, I should like greater clarity about how the Secretary of State arrives at a view on each of those four considerations, but it is taking those four considerations as a whole and balancing them as a matter of judgment in the account that she takes that is crucial to the Good Friday agreement. I understand what the noble Lord, Lord Cope, is trying to do, but I believe that in this respect it would strike at the delicate agreement constructed a month ago.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, I, too, share the anxiety over the lack of clarity, especially of the conditions and of subsection (8) in its entirety. Like the noble Lord, Lord Holme, I would welcome clarification on those points. I support what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Cope of Berkeley. I regard the amendment and the explanation he gave for submitting it as a positive suggestion designed to have a positive effect.
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In the current situation, and the situation as it is likely to obtain for some considerable time, the amendment suggested would remove ambiguity and the impression of weakness. The impression of weakness always greatly encourages evil doers of all sorts.
Lord Cooke of Islandreagh: My Lords, the potential the Bill has for causing unease and unrest in Northern Ireland if it is thought that there is any fudging of the conditions under which early releases will take place may not be understood. Anything in the wording that suggests that it could be fudged should be cleared up. That applies to the previous amendment and the one before it, which in my view added clarity.
In this case I cannot understand why "to satisfy himself" would be contrary to the Belfast agreement. I should have thought that it was in order. To "take into account" is a phrase of little meaning. How does one "take into account?" I find that dubious. "Satisfy himself" makes sense. I look at the amendment in the broader sense also. If there is, and there will be, certain contention about the releases, the thought that there is room for fudging would be most unsatisfactory.
Lord Desai: My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Holme, said. There are times when fudging is better than clarity. In a delicate situation, there are a number of aspects to be considered which cannot all be put on the face of the Bill. One needs a great deal of understanding, common sense and delicacy. This is the time, when the situation is so delicate, when we should leave well alone, and leave the Bill as it is.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, the amendment is intended to change the nature of the test that the Secretary of State must apply in determining whether an organisation is a "terrorist organisation" for the purpose of the Bill. It changes the nature of the test. Although there is only a small change in the wording, it is significant.
Clause 3(9) incorporates those matters, referred to by the Prime Minister in his Balmoral speech, which were intended to clarify how the Government would determine whether an organisation had established and maintained a complete and unequivocal ceasefire. In his speech the Prime Minister referred to the four matters he identified as factors to be taken account of. He did not, as the amendment would do, make each of the factors a separate test to be satisfied. He said:
"These factors provide evidence upon which to base an overall judgment—a judgment which will necessarily become more onerous over time".
He also said:
"We are not setting new preconditions or barriers. On the contrary we want as many people as possible to use the Agreement as their bridge across to an exclusively democratic path".
The Prime Minister was careful to stick closely to the terms of the agreement, and so should we. The Government have clearly said that they will not accept any amendment which would depart from the terms of the Good Friday agreement. The amendment would do so, and for that reason the Government are resistant to it.

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I should like however to clarify one or two other points which were raised during the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, asked about terrorists who had broken their links with the organisations to which they had previously belonged. Yes, any person who is not a supporter of a terrorist organisation and who otherwise meets the conditions in Clause 3 is eligible for release under the terms of the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Cooke, talked about the fudging of the conditions. A complete and unequivocal ceasefire means not a sham or a tactical ceasefire, but a proper ceasefire. We are in no way seeking to fudge that point. As to the substance of the amendment, I can only repeat that I believe, and the Government believe, that it would depart from the terms of the Good Friday agreement. It would depart from the terms of the commitment given by the Prime Minister by way of explaining how the Good Friday agreement would operate. As such, I believe that it would be wrong in principle for the House to accept it.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I agree with the Minister that the amendment makes a definite change to the way in which the criteria are to be applied. That is obviously its purpose. The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, suggested that I had overstated the case. I plead guilty to that in the sense that the amendment is not as strong as I would have wished, and, indeed, as some of the amendments we moved in Committee.
The amendment is, as I explained, an attempt to persuade the Minister to move in my direction. In that it has failed, whether I was overstating or understating it. I failed to move the Minister in my direction. He emphasised once again the agreement, but I emphasise once again that it seems to me that it is the whole agreement that matters. Decommissioning is equally part of the agreement, with the prisoner release part of the agreement. All of it should move in parallel. However, I have not persuaded the Minister that that is the case at this point. I therefore beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Murton of Lindisfarne): My Lords, I should point out that if Amendment No. 6 is agreed to I shall be unable to call Amendment No. 7.
Lord Dubs Lord Dubs moved Amendment No. 6:
Page 2, line 40, leave out ("committed").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Cope, has tabled Amendment No. 7 which is the same as one which your Lordships' House considered in Committee. At that time I undertook to reflect further on the matter and said that I would bring forward a further amendment myself if that would be helpful. That I have done in the form of Amendment No. 6.
Both amendments would have the effect of extending the scope of Clause 3(9)(c). The effect of that amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cope, would be to require the Secretary of State to take account of whether an organisation was involved in
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directing or promoting acts of violence planned by other organisations as well as acts of violence committed by other organisations.
The amendment in my name achieves a similar effect but by a slightly different means; that is, by removing the requirement that an act of violence has been committed by another organisation. Now the focus is on the activity of the organisation that is under scrutiny, not the proxy organisation. The question is whether the organisation under scrutiny is engaged in directing or promoting acts of violence by other organisations. That could include general support through financial assistance as well as assistance with particular acts of violence which are planned or committed. As such, my amendment covers a wider range of activity than the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cope. The Government consider that their amendment fully reflects the commitment given by the Prime Minister in his Balmoral speech and that it remains faithful to the Good Friday agreement.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cope, for his help in drawing attention to this matter. I hope that he will agree that the Government's amendment is wider in its scope than the amendment in his name. Therefore, I hope that he will feel able to support the Government amendment.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for taking up the point I made in Committee and moving his amendment. We move from a matter of principle to nitpicking over the wording. The noble Lord says that his amendment is wider, but I am not sure about that. Let us suppose that organisation A claims to be on ceasefire, but it becomes known to the Secretary of State that those in charge of its store of weapons, ammunition and explosives are allowing them to fall into the hands of organisation B, which is not on ceasefire. The only reason for organisation B having the weapons will be because it is planning violence. I believe that that action would slip through the Minister's new wording, which concerns me. However, if my wording were applied, such action would cause both the organisations, A and B, to fail the test.
Nevertheless, we should not nitpick too much across the Floor of the House when we are agreed on the principle which lies behind the issue.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
[Amendment No. 7 not moved.]

Health Expenditure
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Baroness Jay of Paddington): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I should like to repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health. The Statement is as follows:
"The Government's top priorities are to renew and modernise our country's health and education systems. And so on Tuesday the Chancellor of the Exchequer was able to announce that as a result

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of our comprehensive spending review an extra £21 billion will be invested in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom over the next three years, approaching £18 billion in England. This is an average annual real terms increase of 4.7 per cent. over the three years, starting off with 5.7 per cent. next year. It will kick start the Government's 10-year programme of modernisation for our National Health Service.
"This is the biggest cash increase ever announced for the NHS. This step change in funding will be matched by the biggest programme of renewal and modernisation since the NHS was founded. Investment for reform: £21 billion is a large sum of money. It has been welcomed by the representatives of all the people working in the NHS and described by the National Health Service Confederation as "beyond their wildest dreams". However, when set against the run-down state of the NHS which we inherited when set against the improvements which the staff and the public are seeking, when set against the scale of our ambitions, even £21 billion is a settlement that will have to be tightly managed and properly targeted. Not all the problems that we inherited in the NHS are going to be solved over the next three years. They are too deeply entrenched for that. Not all the improvements we seek can be delivered in that time. But what both staff and public will see is a demonstrable year-on-year improvement in all parts of the health and social care system.
"Staff and patients alike want to see a modern and dependable health service. A modern health service requires high and stable levels of funding. In all its long history the NHS has never before had a three-year settlement. The NHS has never been able to plan beyond the short term. Modern organisations have to plan for the long term. The NHS can now do that for the very first time.
"A modern health service requires enough staff, well trained and highly motivated. With the extra money we are making available, the NHS will be able to take on more doctors and more nurses—up to 7,000 more doctors and 15,000 more nurses over the next three years. And earmarked funds will be provided to allow staff to update their skills to keep up with rapidly changing technology. I can tell the House today that over the next three years there will be an extra 6,000 nurse training places. And I will shortly be announcing a large increase in the number of places in medical schools. With these extra staff, NHS hospitals will treat an extra 3 million patients.
"Expanding staff numbers, in particular to deal with some of the shortages we know exist, depends upon pay rises being fair and affordable: fair, to allow us to recruit and retain motivated staff; affordable, to allow us to make the modernisations patients demand. Fair pay and modernisation must go hand in hand. That is why for the first time we are asking the pay review bodies formally to take into account the service improvements we want to achieve, the resources available to the NHS and the Government's inflation target, as well as recruitment and retention.
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"A three-year settlement allows the NHS to take a longer term view. Now that funds are guaranteed for three years, for example, there should be no more systematic use of short-term employment contracts for nurses and other staff. That will provide security that they do not have at present.
"A modern health service requires modern buildings and modern equipment. Over recent years, the NHS has been starved of capital. We are putting that right. That is why as part of the modernisation programme £8 billion will be invested in new hospitals, clinics and GP premises. Thirty new hospitals are already planned. Work is already under way at Dartford and Gravesham, Norfolk and Norwich, Carlisle, High Wycombe, Durham, Sheffield, Amersham and Greenwich. There will be more to come. But new and better buildings will not be confined to the places getting new hospitals. We will be increasing public sector capital by 50 per cent.
"Hospitals in every part of the country will benefit. Hundreds of wards, A&E departments and operating theatres will be refurbished. And every year outdated equipment will be replaced with the newest and best medical science can offer.
"And we are investing in primary care. Over the next three years 1,000 GP surgeries will be improved or rebuilt.
"A modern health service requires earmarked cash to make change happen. I can announce today that the £18 billion settlement for England includes a £5 billion-plus modernisation fund. This money will be strictly targeted on helping NHS staff to transform the NHS into the kind of service both they and we want to see: a service which is fast and convenient; a service which has uniformly high standards; a service which is moulded to the needs of patients.
"The modernisation fund will fund the IT revolution. It will go towards making sure that we meet the reductions in waiting lists to which we are committed. We will also use money from the modernisation fund to make a start this year on introducing booked admissions, so that when a patient is told by his GP that he needs to attend an outpatient clinic he will be able, there and then, to book an appointment which suits him. Similarly, if a patient has to have surgery as a day or in-patient, he will be able to book an admission date which suits his needs and family and work requirements.
"Besides contributing to the refurbishment of hospitals and the building of new GP premises, the fund will help buy new equipment. It will support the promotion of good health. It will pay for better training of NHS staff. It will provide modern and effective mental health services. The modernisation fund will be allocated to finance well worked out plans and proven mechanisms for improving services. It is investment for reform.
"A modern health service requires modern ways of working. By getting rid of the wasteful and divisive competitive internal market, we are taking money out of the bureaucracy and into patient care. Primary care groups involving doctors, nurses and social services

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will replace the maze of commissioning and fundholding organisations. NHS management trusts will be amalgamated. Competition between hospitals is being ended. They are working together again. They will continue to do so. The NHS is proudly already the most cost-effective healthcare system in the world. But there are unacceptable variations in performance. Management effort will be targeted on hospitals where costs are above the national average. A new performance framework will help measure progress. Our value-for-money improvements should release a further £1 billion a year for patient care. So there will be a tough drive on genuine efficiency. That means more money for patients, more money for staff and better value for taxpayers.
"A modern health service also requires a new relationship with social services. We have made a start on breaking down the Berlin Wall between the NHS and social services.
"To back that up, over the next three years we are providing an extra £3 billion for social services so that they can match, complement and augment what the NHS is doing—an increase of 3.1 per cent. in real terms, year on year. So for the first time they will be able to produce joint local long-term plans with the NHS. And for the first time we will be setting tough efficiency targets for all social services authorities to help them deliver the goods for vulnerable people. It will mean better help for the elderly and for carers. There will be new measures to allow tens of thousands of old people to live an independent life, where at present they often end up trapped in nursing homes or in hospitals. And it will mean more help for people with mental health problems to match the extra NHS commitment to mental health.
"Arrangements for looking after children in care have far too frequently been deplorable, with children being molested, with low levels of school attendance and educational attainment. Many of them have been turned out of care to fend for themselves when they are little more than children. We are determined to give them a new deal and the extra social services money will provide the money necessary to improve the quality of care received by children living away from home. And not before time.
"All this effort, all this investment is intended to deal properly with people when they need treatment and care. But this Government are not satisfied with a health policy just for treating the sick. We want to stop people getting ill in the first place and stop people dying prematurely. And we want to tackle the growing inequalities in health.
"That is a job for the whole Government, not just for the Department of Health. This CSR settlement is not just a good settlement for our health service; it is a good settlement for our people's health: £540 million for the Sure Start children's fund, almost £4 billion to invest in decent housing and improved insulation, £3 billion for deprived communities, £1.7 billion for transport, and mostly public transport. And that is on top of our earlier commitment to the £3.5 billion New Deal for jobs
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and our introduction of a national minimum wage. What all this amounts to is the biggest health crusade the country has seen since the NHS was born 50 years ago—a modern, government-wide crusade.
"The NHS was founded on a simple principle: care should be provided on the basis of need. That principle has served the NHS well for 50 years.
"While we were considering the CSR we were urged by all sorts of people to abandon this principle: by some of the honourable Members opposite; by the Social Market Foundation; by the Adam Smith Institute; by many of our newspapers; by various professors. They wanted us to charge people for going to the doctor. Charging to see a GP. Charging for outpatient appointments. Charging people for going into hospital. We have looked at all of this very carefully. We have looked at all the pros and cons. We have spent the best part of a year doing it. We utterly reject these ideas. We have rejected them because they would not work and they would harm the worst off. Charges would be expensive to collect and would glean little overall revenue. Most important, charges would deny treatment to those who need it most. So I can announce today there will be no new NHS patient charges in the lifetime of this Parliament.
"And we have not stopped there. From next April the NHS will provide free eye tests for pensioners. This will be good for their purses and pockets, good for their sight and good for their general health.
"This is an historic settlement. It will enable the hardworking and dedicated staff of the National Health Service and social services to provide the treatment and care that people need and to provide it to a higher standard than ever in every part of the country. It will modernise and renew the NHS. The extra money will be matched by enormous changes and improvements.
"Over the last few weeks we have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the NHS. That was right and proper. But now we must do as the founders of the NHS did. We must look forward; find the resources; and make the changes that are necessary to relaunch the NHS so that it serves our country well for the next 50 years. Nothing less will do, and that is what this Government are doing."
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
5.15 p.m.
Lord McColl of Dulwich: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for repeating the Statement. Of course, we welcome the promise of extra funds for the NHS, provided that they are based on sound money.
The Government's claim that an extra £21 billion will be available for the NHS over the next three years is an extremely interesting piece of creative accounting. We welcome the proposed increase in the number of nurses and doctors, although recruitment of nurses has been a great problem, even though the money has been there.
To be more specific and down to earth, will the Minister tell us what she proposes to do about the 300 fully trained obstetricians who are waiting for consultant

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posts? Will she ensure that many more consultant posts are created for them? Will she tell us when she thinks that will be?
Does the Minister accept the figures produced by the House of Commons Library which show that the extra money from the comprehensive spending review over the conservative real growth trend of 3.1 per cent. is just over £2 billion, which is a very long way from the £21 billion that is being claimed?
Furthermore, is it now the case that the independence has been taken out of the Independent Pay Review Body and that its recommendations are now subverted to Treasury considerations? If that is so, it will be a betrayal of the principles of such review bodies. How will the Minister react to the British Medical Association's objection to any unilateral attempt to undermine the fairness of pay review bodies?
The Independent newspaper today states that this is not the largest real terms three-year increase in the history of the NHS as asserted by the Chancellor. It is in fact below the 5.6 per cent. that we spent between 1990 and 1993.
Will the Minister tell us how much the millennium bug programme will cost the health service? I believe that the Audit Commission estimated that it may be as high as £850 million. What will be the cost of the minimum wage to the NHS? How much will the abolition of compulsory competitive tendering cost the NHS? How much will the abolition of tax relief on private medical insurance for the over-60s cost the NHS in terms of extra work?
Finally, when we subtract all those figures from the extra £2 billion and also allow for inflation and the costs of administering each of the primary care groups, it seems to me that there will be only a few hundred million pounds left, which is barely enough to run the NHS for a week.
To be fair to the Government, perhaps they are hoping for some surprises for the NHS. We sometimes have completely unexpected results from medical research. For example, Viagra was designed originally to relieve angina but it did not work. The doctors were therefore extremely surprised that the male patients who were given the drug seemed somewhat reluctant to give it back. Perhaps the Government are hoping for a similar piece of luck to give them some surprises.
5.19 p.m.
Lord Newby: My Lords, we, too, welcome the Statement. Naturally we welcome the additional funding which forms the heart of it, but we would have preferred it if the Government had felt able to make some of that funding available earlier rather than later. Nevertheless, we are pleased to see that there will be significant extra funding from the next financial year. We specifically welcome the proposal for free eye tests for pensioners, although we believe that such a preventive test should be freely available for all ages. Indeed, the maximum benefit of such tests is that they should be available freely at the point when the problems first arise. We
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also believe that the principle of free eye tests should be extended to dental checks and again that those checks should be available to everyone.
However, we are less impressed with the proposals to ratchet up prescription charges and are somewhat surprised at this given the fact that when in opposition the Labour Party described such increases as a "tax on the sick". We would have frozen them at their present level and regret that the Government did not take this opportunity to do so.
The Statement raises a whole raft of questions, but the House will be pleased to know that I shall not attempt to cover all of them. However, there are one or two points that I should like to mention. We obviously welcome the increased provision in staff numbers. However, given the fact that unfilled vacancies at present amount to some 10,000, of whom 8,000 are nurses, how confident is the Minister that on current levels of pay higher target levels of staffing will actually be met? How confident is she that we will not find that higher staffing levels are at least partially matched by higher unfilled vacancy levels?
Moreover, on the question of pay, given the stricter terms of reference that have been given to the pay review bodies, can the Minister confirm that the Government will in future implement their recommendations in full from the start of the relevant financial year and not stage them, as has been the case both under the previous government and so far under this one?
I turn now to waiting lists. Before the election, the Government said that they would be spending £100 million to take 100,000 people off waiting lists. The Statement says remarkably little about waiting lists. Given the fact that the Government are actually spending an extra £21 billion in their terms rather than the extra £100 million that they were talking about in terms of waiting lists before the election, can the Minister say why they have not set a target? Indeed, we would have suggested a six-month target within which all patients requiring serious operations would be treated. Can the Minister also say whether further progress can be made beyond what is in reality a relatively modest waiting list target that the Government have set and, because of their parsimony to date, have so far failed to meet?
I conclude with a slightly broader question as regards the extent to which the extra funding available could offer a much wider range of services for seven days a week and 24 hours a day, rather than just for the working week. It is a cross that the Minister has to bear in her current portfolio that everyone uses the NHS and, therefore, has his or her own bit of experience to relate. I am afraid that this is the point at which my little bit of recent experience is brought to bear. I had to take my son, with a broken wrist, to the John Radcliffe hospital on a Saturday a few weeks ago. We had to wait for hours to be seen at the fracture clinic because there was only one doctor on duty. Thereafter, we had many more hours of waiting for my son to have a minor operation because only one operating theatre was staffed. We were told that, if we had been there on a "working day", the

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levels of staffing would have been significantly different. In that area—and, indeed, in many other areas of care—it is the case that in all too many instances the quality of treatment depends on exactly when a person is taken ill. What assurances can the Minister give that this unacceptable state of affairs will now effectively be addressed?
5.23 p.m.
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Lords for their response to the Statement, although I have to say that their financial arithmetic leaves even me—not the world's greatest expert in mathematics—somewhat adrift. Perhaps I may explain to your Lordships that £3 billion will be put into the health service next year, £6 billion will be put in the year after and £9 billion the following year. That adds up to £18 billion. If we then add the £3 billion for social services, the total figure is £21 billion and not £2 billion or £2.1 billion—or whatever it is that members of the Conservative Party seem to have agreed as the figure they wish to bandy about. One wonders whether they have added an unexpected decimal point between the two and the one thus enabling them to come up with such a figure. However, let us assume that we can agree that substantial sums of money are being put into the health service, that this is new money and that substantial sums are also being put into the social services budget, which is also new money.
Both noble Lords raised the question of the independence of the pay review bodies. Those bodies will continue to have the independence that they have always had. As I said when repeating the Statement, we have tried to make explicit what has always been implicit in their considerations. Obviously, if one is looking at pay for a large number of people in the public services, the current economic position of the economy as a whole has to be taken into account and, indeed, the current performance of the service to which the pay review is applied. But that does not in any way undermine the independence of those bodies. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State repeated in another place earlier this afternoon that he will certainly wish to ensure that he will not have to pay staged pay review recommendations in the future. I am sure that that is something that he will adhere to as far as he can.
The other points made by both noble Lords related to the quality of the service. It is true that there are problems as regards shortages of doctors and nurses of the type referred to in relation to the particular experience at the John Radcliffe hospital. However, I should tell the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that it is wrong to imply—and certainly unnecessarily critical of the many millions of people who work 24 hours a day in the health service, whether in primary care, in emergency services or indeed in our hospitals—that the NHS is not now a 24-hour service. Indeed, it is.
Precisely what we are trying to do by expanding the number of people in the medical and nursing professions is to provide better cover, better services in accident and emergency and a more rapid response to the kind of problems that the noble Lord experienced. No one would protest that the health service cover at present at
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the week-ends or during the evenings was total and perfect. But to suggest that the NHS is not a 24-hour service now is to undermine confidence in the quality of the work which is carried out for seven days a week.
The noble Lord, Lord Newby, also raised the question of waiting lists. The £500 million already agreed in the spring Budget has been targeted directly to reducing the number of people on waiting lists. Again, as my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has announced, waiting lists are now beginning to go down and they will continue to do so. Indeed, they will go down for the remainder of this Parliament. Of course they remain a priority, but not within the context of the modernisation fund to which I believe the noble Lord was referring. That is more specifically targeted towards the kind of improvements in the service that I listed when repeating the Statement.
The noble Lord, Lord McColl, raised specific questions about the year 2000 and about the provision for people who fall within the minimum wage category. I can tell the noble Lord that the provision which has been agreed and which has, as I understand it, now been accepted as appropriate for the health authorities for remedying the problems with the year 2000 so-called "millennium bug" was already included in those budgets and, therefore, does not require new money. On the question of the minimum wage, I can tell the noble Lord that we have agreed that it will take up approximately £20 million of the NHS budget. We believe that to be entirely appropriate and simply regret that there are that number of people working within the health service who fall within the category and need the protection of the minimum wage provision.
5.28 p.m.
Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, it is a particular pleasure for me to be able to congratulate my noble friend the Minister and the Government on these new national health proposals. It is only 50 years ago since I sat on the second Bench opposite, when the other place was sitting in this Chamber. I sat behind my chief, Aneurin Bevan, while he went through his introduction to the Bill which was thereafter translated into the National Health Service. There is an awfully long way to go. Those of your Lordships who have seen the recent OECD report on health in various countries throughout the world will know that the United Kingdom comes 22nd from the top of the list of expenditure expressed as a percentage of GDP. In Germany, for example, 10.5 per cent. of GDP is spent on health. In the United Kingdom, the figure is 6.9 per cent. I repeat that we are 22nd on the list. There is a long way to go. I feel confident that the Government will be able to go that far. Certainly on the basis of the OECD figures, they cannot consider any capping of expenditure on the National Health Service.
There is also the commitment, which I welcome, and which I have long advocated, of a return to the nation's health being the responsibility of the whole of government and of all departments rather than relying on only the ministry of health and local authorities to deliver the service. It is quite clear from the Statement that the Government intend to use the other great

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departments of state to produce those conditions which encourage good health, which fight ill health and which, as a consequence, lower expenditure on the health service. This should be a proud day for the Government; it certainly is for me. For my part, I only hope that world economic and financial conditions are such as to permit the fulfilment of this commitment.
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to me that my noble friend Lord Bruce of Donington is present this afternoon to draw on his extraordinary historic experience of the foundation of the health service. It is a great pleasure to me that he feels that the principles behind that are being maintained by the present Government. I can reassure him that we consider public health in the wider context of housing, air quality, the experiences of young children, and all aspects of economic life, particularly employment. Those are considerations which we feel are as relevant to health policy as the rather narrower concerns of the health service. I can assure my noble friend that we shall give those matters priority.
Lord Hayhoe: My Lords, the Minister knows of my interest in the hospice movement. Her support for hospices is equally well known. I do not think I heard in the Statement any reference to that important element within our health services. Will the Minister give some indication of whether the hospice movement generally will benefit as a result of the extra resources that are being made available?
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hayhoe, for his comments. Both he and I have an interest in the hospice movement. Specific funding for the voluntary sector has not yet been agreed. However, I can assure the noble Lord that I am concerned that those great instincts and methods which have been pioneered by the hospice movement in palliative care are extended and included in the health service. The noble Lord may not be aware that in the past few weeks in order to encourage good practice the NHS has distributed to its own hospitals the important policy documents developed by the hospice movement. I shall certainly make it my business to ensure that that good work is extended.
Lord Morris of Manchester: My Lords, speaking as a former Minister, I am naturally delighted that resources for the National Health Service will be so very substantially increased in the years ahead in further fulfilment of the manifesto promise. I congratulate my noble friend and, of course, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health on what they have achieved. The figures mentioned in the Statement are huge. The NHS now has an opportunity to improve patient care as never before and, as my noble friend said, also to improve prevention. In proportion as we maximise prevention, the NHS will have still more resources to enhance patient care.
But is there anywhere in the Government's plans any provision for the modest cost of giving help that many of us in both Houses of Parliament seek for people who
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were infected with Hepatitis C by contaminated NHS blood products, and for the dependants of those who have now died of liver failure in consequence? My noble friend will be aware that we recently debated in your Lordships' House the depth of suffering caused by this tragedy in the haemophilia community. Is theirs not a compelling claim, more especially in view of the High Court's recent decision in favour of those who fear they may develop CJD due to NHS treatment? They fear a life-threatening condition. The patients infected by contaminated blood products with Hepatitis C now have a life-threatening condition. Does not that alone make their urgent claim for help a most compelling one?
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Morris of Manchester, as always, shows his concern for those with a particularly unfortunate form of disability. I am grateful to him for what he said about the public health agenda. We hope that through that agenda we shall be able to prevent the 15,000 premature deaths a year of people who unfortunately die before their natural life span is ended through diseases such as cancer and coronary heart disease. As regards the specific point about those infected with Hepatitis C, I hope that my noble friend will be glad to learn that yesterday I met a cross-party delegation of 10 Members of another place and we discussed this issue thoroughly. I am now in the process of discussing that again with my right honourable friend the Secretary of State.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: My Lords, in welcoming the Statement, I observe that my successor as chief executive of the NHS Confederation has described the settlement as beyond his wildest dreams. In the 15 years that I occupied that post I was never able to make such a statement. Does my noble friend agree that in accepting this additional resource for the NHS, the NHS will be judged principally on whether it is able to modernise its services and facilities? In order to do that, three conditions must be met. First, the managerial infrastructure of the NHS must be developed, leaving aside the traditional debate of whether or not we have too many managers. Without question we have dedicated people who are underskilled and underdeveloped. They need to be developed much more fully to take on the leadership role that they have to accept.
The second condition relates to an issue that has been faced time and time again; namely, the public's resistance to changes in the use of many of our hospitals. Does my noble friend agree that until the medical profession in particular is prepared to lead that change and to explain to the public that that change is in the public's interest, proposals for the modernisation and reorganisation of our hospital services will continue to hit the buffers?
Does my noble friend agree that the third condition that has to be met concerns the way in which we deal with the staff of the National Health Service? Year after year they have accepted more and more pressure and have treated more and more patients. However, our human resource capacity is incredibly underdeveloped. We do not support our staff on the front line who are in

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"pressure-cooker" situations. Does my noble friend accept that we must improve our human resource management and the support that we give to staff?
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, I am tempted merely to reply "yes". My noble friend has, as always, made substantial points, with all of which I agree. To reflect on them in slightly more detail, I hope he will agree that the £5 billion fund for modernising the health service has been earmarked for precisely the kind of developments that we hope will assist managers, such as the IT revolution, and will be supportive of their activities.
I think it is fair to say, and it is a point that we want to make explicit, that there should be a clear attraction for people to do the jobs very well. That is one of the reasons why my right honourable friend the Prime Minister, in his speech to the 50th anniversary conference 10 days ago, referred to the concept of "beacon" hospitals; namely, hospitals that would attract more resources given that they were in a sense performing above expectations, and which would then, we hope, act as leaders within the profession of NHS management and within the medical and clinical professions in achieving the targets that we want to see developed.
Turning to the question of leadership of the medical profession in general, one of the most encouraging features of the past few months has been the ready acceptance, particularly by members of the medical and nursing professions, of the need to address issues of quality within the health service; and also, interestingly, the need to address the concept of a change of practice. It is true that leaders of professions may not always reflect the wishes and aims of other members of those professions who operate on the front line.
One of the most encouraging factors in trying to implement change and introduce documents such as A First Class Service, as we did a few weeks ago—which tried to demonstrate the need to introduce systems such as clinical governance, systems where professional performance is monitored, or where national guidelines are issued to the clinical professions—was the warmth of reception for those proposals. It has been most encouraging, and I am optimistic about that attitude.
On the question of staff, it is the case that human resources policy for the 1 million dedicated and committed members of staff who keep the health service going has been extraordinarily lax. My honourable friend Mr. Alan Milburn, the Minister of State in another place, is presently setting as one of his highest priorities in working with the new director for human resources for the health service the development of a proper, strategic human resources policy, which will include the recruitment and training of up to 7,000 more doctors and 15,000 more nurses, and will make it possible for us to take on a more strategic approach to precisely the developments that we need in professional organisation. The same approach needs to be taken to the very important matters, particularly in the nursing
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profession, of family friendly policies, and more flexible employment policies, which we hope will help with recruitment and retention of staff.
Lord Rea: My Lords, I join in congratulating my noble friend and her right honourable friends on producing the Statement. It is very welcome to those who are working, or have worked, in the National Health Service. However, the amount is not excessive; it is not prodigal. The amount is to be £3 billion per annum, year on year, over the next three years. It is a useful amount, and will allow the plans that the Government are developing, together with work of all kinds in the health service, to be put into effect.
Perhaps I may return to the burning question of nurse recruitment, and achieving the targets mentioned by my noble friend in increasing the numbers of nurses and doctors. From reading between the lines, I understand that the Government are, as it were, giving a nod and a wink to the review bodies that they may need to do something about helping to increase recruitment through decent salary awards. For instance, what is my noble friend's view of the statement made on radio earlier today by Christine Hancock of the Royal College of Nursing? She said that in recruiting and retaining nurses the question of the payment of staff must be a major consideration.
My noble friend Lord Bruce of Donington said that, as our health improves—in which we all hope and feel that this package will help—people will make less use of the National Health Service and that will save money for the health service. I think that that is a fallacy. If people do not die, they go on living—and they suffer from chronic diseases which cost the health service a lot of money. A recent paper from Holland indicated that mental health conditions, arthritis and locomotor conditions cost the health service more than conditions which kill.
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, my noble friend, with his long experience in general practice, has thrown up an interesting conundrum in his final remark.
On his first point, that even £21 billion is not necessarily the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, he is precisely right. That is why, in repeating the Statement, I said that even a £21 billion settlement will have to be tightly managed and properly targeted. We are in agreement on that point.
On the question of nurse and medical recruitment, we need to have imaginative policies. We are seeking to develop such policies in discussion with leaders of the profession, such as Christine Hancock of the Royal College of Nursing, and leaders in the medical profession. It comes back to the point made by my noble friend Lord Hunt; namely, when developing a human resources strategy we need to think of matters beyond pay. Issues that particularly affect nurses relate to the social context in which they work, the working environment, the possibility of flexible working, and other matters. As surveys always indicate, those considerations are at least as important to them as basic pay.

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One of the current problems in relation to nursing is that 140,000 registered nurses are not working. One of our first efforts will be directed towards trying to find out the reasons for the loss of that skilled labour and to try to attract some of those people back into the health service.
Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, while giving a general welcome to the Statement, perhaps I may congratulate the Minister and the department on the development of the Sure Start programme, which brings together several departments in dealing with the particular and acute issue of deprivation among those who are less well off in our society. It addresses the crucial issue of giving young people support in their early years, when some suffer crucial disadvantage.
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, I am pleased to endorse what my noble friend says. The £540 million for the Sure Start children's fund will precisely address the problems of the under-threes and their parents, particularly their mothers, who may be very vulnerable indeed. It is a very good example of precisely what I referred to in replying to my noble friend Lord Bruce of Donington. It is a cross-government attempt to address an issue that will affect health throughout life. It is one of the appalling facts of our society that children born at the lower end of the social and economic scale have a shorter life expectancy, even in 1998, than those born to more prosperous parents. That is a matter that the Sure Start children's fund will attempt to address.
Lord McColl of Dulwich: My Lords, in the absence of any further Back-Bench questions, perhaps I may repeat my earlier question to the Minister. Does she accept the independent figures produced by the House of Commons Library which indicate that the extra money, over a conservative real growth trend of 3.1 per cent., is just over £2 billion?
Baroness Jay of Paddington: No, my Lords, I certainly do not. I have seen those figures repeated politically. I am slightly surprised that the noble Lord, with his great interest in accuracy in many areas, should repeat them again. As I said in my first response to his question on this matter, if we add up the figures—£3 billion next year, £6 billion the year after, and £9 billion the year after that—we get £18 billion of new money. If we add to that amount £3 billion for social services, the amount is £21 billion.

Northern Ireland (Sentences) Bill
5.50 p.m.
Consideration of amendments on Report resumed.
Clause 6 [Life prisoners]:
Lord Dubs Lord Dubs moved Amendment No. 8:
Page 4, line 11, leave out ("elapse") and insert ("completion").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 8, I should like to speak to Amendments Nos. 9, 10, 12 and 19 also. They have been tabled by the Government in response to amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken, when the Bill was considered in Committee. At that time I said that I thought the amendments had merit, but that I would reflect further on the matter. I have done so and I am happy now to move these amendments to the Bill. I also wish to thank the noble Lord for his assistance in this matter.
The noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken, also spoke in Committee regarding the confusion caused by the use of the term "terrorist organisation" in the legislation and noble Lords supported him in making his point. I have undertaken to consider the matter further before Third Reading to see whether it is possible to identify an amendment which would reduce any confusion regarding the impact of the Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for taking over the two amendments that I moved in Committee. They have now spawned three other amendments in this group. I believe that they improve the Bill and I welcome them.
On the other point that my noble friend raised which is not relevant to the amendments, I am glad that he is considering the suggestion which received support from all parts of the House and which, if suitable wording could be found, would greatly improve the Bill.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 7 [Life prisoners: specified dates]:
Lord Dubs Lord Dubs moved Amendments Nos. 9 and 10:
Page 4, line 25, leave out ("date") and insert ("day").
Page 4, line 29, leave out ("date") and insert ("day").
On Question, amendments agreed to.
Lord Cope of Berkeley Lord Cope of Berkeley moved Amendment No. 11:
After Clause 10, insert the following new clause—

RELEASE TO BE SUBJECT TO APPROVAL OF SECRETARY OF STATE
(" . Nothing in this Act shall require the release of a prisoner if the Secretary of State regards such release as undesirable after taking into account the need to protect the community.").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment stands in my name. The Minister has said repeatedly in the course of our debates that the Bill should reflect that part of the agreement which refers to prisoners. That is the top half of page 25. The amendment seeks to do exactly that.
The agreement says that the review process should allow,
"account to be taken of … the need to protect the community".
That is a specific overall condition of the "Prisoners" part of the agreement, but I cannot see where it is provided for in the Bill. It seemed to me that the only way to raise the issue was by moving a new clause of the character that I have put before your Lordships' House.
Whenever we are thought to be pushing against the edges of what was agreed in a direction which might disadvantage the terrorist prisoners, the Minister tells us

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that we cannot go a millimetre forward. However, when we try to ensure implementation of the whole agreement, including the bits favourable to the law-abiding community, we are told that it is not necessary to be so precise. The new clause seeks to insert a phrase which is in the agreement, but is not in the Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, I feel that it is right to support the amendment and the new clause because Parliament ought to grant the Secretary of State a form of over-riding power which she could exercise when drawing upon the intelligence information to which she alone would have access. That information might give her cause to believe that the release of a certain prisoner would pose a threat to the "community". That is the word used by the noble Lord, Lord Cope, and it runs parallel to the word "public" which we debated on an earlier amendment. For example, there might be good reason to believe that former associates of the prisoner could be engaging in certain undesirable activities, sometimes classified under the word "terrorism". We are grateful to the Minister for producing the new clause which is Amendment No. 16, to which we will come later.
In the current situation and given the capacity of terrorist movements as defined in the Minister's new clause, there is more than a possibility that former associates would exercise a good deal of pressure and blackmail on the released prisoner to suck him back into their evil activities. If, for that reason, intelligence reports indicated that that organisation was alive and well and that, by reason of the vulnerability of the prisoner and his family, there was a chance that he would become involved in such activities, he would pose what the noble Lord, Lord Cope, suggested was a threat to the community, or perhaps, in the wording of the earlier amendment, to the general public.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, this amendment concerns the protection of the public under the terms of the Bill. It seeks to add a further protection by allowing the Secretary of State to override a decision of the commissioners.
As it stands, the Bill contains a series of safeguards. I should like to run through them because it is quite an impressive list. A prisoner may not be released if the commissioners consider that he is a supporter of an organisation identified by the Secretary of State as having not established and maintained a complete and unequivocal ceasefire. A prisoner may not be released if the commissioners consider that he would be likely to become a supporter of such an organisation after release. A prisoner may not be released if the commissioners consider that he would be likely to become concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland. A life-sentence prisoner may not be released if the commissioners consider that he would be a danger to the public.
The Secretary of State may refer the case of a prisoner who has been granted a declaration under the Bill back to the commissioners at any time before he is released
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if she considers that the prisoner no longer satisfies the conditions in Clause 3. If she does so, the commissioners must reconsider the case.
Each and every prisoner released under the terms of this Bill will be released on licence. The Secretary of State may suspend a licence and return a prisoner to custody if she considers that he has become a supporter of an organisation that is not maintaining a complete and unequivocal ceasefire or if he has become, or is likely to become, involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. The Secretary of State may also defer or suspend the accelerated release provisions set out in Clause 10 if she considers the circumstances require it. Finally, the Secretary of State may suspend all further releases under the Bill.
Those are extensive safeguards which are appropriate to the subject matter of the Bill. They are also in accordance with the Good Friday agreement and the policy that has been set out by this Government to implement the agreement.
I cannot give my support to the new clause that has been proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Cope and Lord Molyneaux. The new clause would usurp the jurisdiction of the commissioners by giving to the Secretary of State the final decision on release in each case. In doing so, it would make release under the Bill into an executive decision. That is a very significant change.
6 p.m.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps I can return to my point about intelligence information. It may be that some of the commissioners would not be of Privy Council rank. They would not then have access to the vital security information to which the Secretary of State has access and on which she forms her judgment. The noble Lord used the term that I used: is it not fairer to the Secretary of State and the community she is seeking to protect that she should exercise the override powers which she alone will possess?
Lord Dubs: My Lords, perhaps I may come to that point in a moment. It is important and I want to deal with it.
Let me repeat that it is a significant change to give the final responsibility to the Secretary of State and take the final decision away from the commissioners. That makes the Secretary of State responsible.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord has consulted his noble friend Lord McIntosh of Haringey. Indeed, I wonder whether the noble Lord was in the Chamber the other day when the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, referred to a matter relating to Scottish education. He said that he could think of no occasion where a Secretary of State bound himself to accept the verdict of an outside group of commissioners. Is this the case the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, could not think of?
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I was in the Chamber and followed the debate with interest. However, we are not dealing with a comparable instance.

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The discussion the other day related to an independent group of people who would give advice. The question was whether that advice would bind the Secretary of State or whether the Secretary of State might consider it. We are dealing with a completely different situation.
The noble Lord laughs and by his laughter indicates that he knows that this is a different situation and is simply trying it on a bit.
Under this Bill we are giving commissioners specific responsibilities to deal with the release of prisoners. There is no question of their giving advice to the Secretary of State which the Secretary of State will have to accept. The commissioners will act in their own right under the terms set out in the legislation. There is therefore no question of the Secretary of State coming back into the frame. But the amendment would have that result.
As I said earlier, the amendment would make release under the Bill an executive decision and that is not the right way forward.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I take the point being made by the noble Lord and agree with it. But if the commissioners act unreasonably, with bias or improperly, their decisions and their conduct are subject to review by the courts. That is the safeguard. The commissioners are not just left as authoritarian people subject to no control.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his intervention; of course he is correct. I do not want to open the doors to a stream of judicial reviews. If the commissioners behave improperly, outside the terms of the legislation or unreasonably, then a different remedy is available. That is not one which lies with the Secretary of State, but one that properly lies with the court.
Noble Lords will be aware that the limits of executive release are tightly drawn under the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights. The European convention requires that decisions that affect the continued removal of the liberty of the subject should in the main be taken by judicial bodies or by bodies that manifest the attributes of the judicial process, including in particular independence from the executive part of the state. The arrangements that are proposed under this Bill have been carefully drawn up to be in accordance with those requirements. It is the view of the Government that the amendment proposed would be at variance with the European Convention.
I turn to the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Molyneaux. He suggested that the Secretary of State would have access to intelligence information which would not be made available to the commissioners and that that intelligence information would influence her into making a better decision with regard to any specific prisoner release. The argument that the Secretary of State would be better placed to make assessments as to the risk to the public because she is likely to have access to a wider range of information than the commissioners
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is not the case. The Secretary of State may make available to the commissioners any information necessary to assist them in making their determinations.
Under Schedule 2 to the Bill, the Secretary of State may make provision for the protection of sensitive information from disclosure. As such, the commissioners may be given access to intelligence information if that is both appropriate and necessary. I suggest therefore that, while I understand the reason for his anxiety, the point is met by that explanation. The information could be made available by the Secretary of State to the commissioners if necessary for the determination of a specific release decision.
I am concerned that the amendment would be at variance with the European Convention and also that it would take away from the commissioners the ultimate decision and give that decision-making power to the Secretary of State. That is not the right way forward and I hope the House will not accept this amendment.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, the Minister seems to have proved, at least to his satisfaction, that the power is devolved to the commissioners. It is still an executive decision; the commissioners are executing the decision. They become the executives instead of the Secretary of State, but it is still an executive-type decision.
Earlier in the afternoon the Minister specifically turned down the suggestion that the chairman of the commissioners should be required to be a lawyer. We did not even propose that the chairman should be a judge. This is not a judicial process; it is an executive process. The Minister proved to my satisfaction that this is an exception to what one might call the "McIntosh doctrine", laid down for us the other day. There are probably a lot more exceptions to it as well, but this certainly seems to be one.
The Minister also suggested that there should be no question of the Secretary of State coming back on a decision after he had just set out a whole list of specific ways in which the Secretary of State could come back to a decision—she could refer it back to the commissioners or stop the whole process and so forth.
In any case, as I said earlier, in the legislation under this agreement in the Republic of Ireland it would appear to be an executive decision totally. The Minister there is to release prisoners under existing executive powers. It is not a court or a judge, but the Minister of Justice who is to release the prisoners. He is advised in that process by a lawyer and two civil servants. They are advisory roles, though they are also independent.
How that squares with the human rights legislation is not a question for the Minister or myself. However, I suggest that it casts a little doubt on his argument. I do not suggest that we pursue this matter and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 11 [Notice of decisions]:
Lord Dubs Lord Dubs moved Amendment No. 12:
Page 6, line 31, leave out ("date") and insert ("day").
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 12 [Interpretation: prisoners and sentences]:
Lord Cope of Berkeley Lord Cope of Berkeley moved Amendment No. 13:
Page 7, line 7, leave out ("each").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is a different class of amendment and a much more detailed matter which the Minister undertook to consider before the Report stage.
Amendment No. 13, together with Amendments Nos. 14 and 15, seek to make the Bill fairer for certain prisoners. Under the Bill, a prisoner with two or more sentences of over five years benefits more than a prisoner with one sentence of five years and one of less than five years. I am interested to know what is the result of the Minister's consideration of this point. I beg to move.
Lord Dubs: Yes, my Lords, I did say that I would reflect further on these amendments after we debated them in Committee. I have reflected further on them, but I am not persuaded. As I said when your Lordships first considered the matter, the effect of the amendments would be to allow the Bill to apply to sentences of less than five years. That has never been the intention of the Government and it would go beyond the terms of the paper placed in the Library on 20th April. But, in addition—this is a telling point—we are not aware of a single prisoner in custody at present who would be likely to benefit were the amendment to be accepted.
Of course, in theory, there might be prisoners who committed their offences before 10th April who have not yet been sentenced and who might therefore be sentenced in such a way that the amendment might have an effect on them. However, at the present time we are not aware of any prisoner in custody who would be affected by the amendment.
For the reason that the amendment goes beyond what the Government have said they will do in respect of prisoners, and because the matter is largely academic anyway, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I always hesitate to use the word "academic" about any point if it is suggested that what it means is that the point is useless, immaterial or has no practical effect. That does not seem very polite to academics, especially as some distinguished academics are present.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I would not wish in any way to be offensive to academics. I was using the expression in the sense that it is a theoretical point which would not have any practical application.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, there you are: "academic" means theoretical, with no practical application. I do not profess to go along with that; but as this has no practical application—if no prisoners are involved—I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 14 and 15 not moved.]
Lord Dubs Lord Dubs moved Amendment No. 16:
After Clause 12, insert the following new clause—

INTERPRETATION: TERRORISM
(". In this Act "terrorism" means the use of violence for political ends, and includes any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear.").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Government have tabled this amendment in response to an amendment spoken to by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, in Committee. The noble and learned Lord proposed a definition of "terrorism" and "terrorist". A definition of the latter is not required, and I could not accept the amendment that was tabled in Committee. The Government accepted the principle behind the amendment, however, and have brought forward a further amendment to give effect to it. As before, the definition of "terrorism" is that as given in the prevention of terrorism Acts. I beg to move.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for accepting at least half of the amendment moved by my colleague at an earlier stage.
Lord Molyneaux of Killead: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Cope, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Drumadoon, on their initiative in tabling in Committee the interpretation clause which paved the way for the new clause. I respectfully commend the efforts of the Minister, who in a comparatively short time has produced a clause which removes ambiguity over the meaning of the word "terrorism".
Without this clause it would still have been possible to ignore violence for political ends, or any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear. That is most welcome in the light of the atrocity in Ballymoney. With those offences go intimidation, the torching of homes, threats of arson, beatings, knee-cappings and the continuing targeting of individuals, particularly off-duty members of the security forces. The knock-on impact of the Minister's new clause will be the elimination of the capacity to wage war and thereby threaten elected governments if their concessions via the conveyor belt slow down. One hopes and expects that this will apply to the "subcontractors", such as those attempting and intending to, as the amendment says, put in fear the public in Northern Ireland and in London within very recent times. I join in the congratulations that have been paid to the Minister and thank him for his consideration of the matter.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
6.15 p.m.
Clause 21 [Commencement]:
Lord Tebbit Lord Tebbit moved Amendment No. 17:
Page 9, line 32, at end insert ("but no such day may be appointed (other than in respect of this section) until after the release on licence of every member of the naval, military or air forces of the Crown serving a sentence of imprisonment in respect of a conviction for murder committed in the course of their duties in Northern Ireland").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, there is very little I can add to the case which I made on Monday of last week and which no doubt I shall make again next week. I remind the House that, although to avoid rendering the Bill hybrid the amendment does not mention Fisher and Wright, it is about those two young men. I do not think there is any doubt that there is a growing consensus inside the House and outside that those two young men should not be kept any longer in prison; least of all should they be kept in prison while terrorists are being released. The Minister was helpful in setting out some of the ways in which it is possible that they might be released. But, of course, there is at the moment no guarantee.
It may be useful to remind the House of some of the events which have occurred over this affair. On 3rd November last year, in a Written Answer, the Minister, in replying to my noble friend Lord Westbury, said of the case:
"The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has decided that the cases of Guardsmen Wright and Fisher should be referred back to the review board in one year's time, i.e. in October 1998, when they will have served six years in custody. No date for release has therefore yet been fixed".—[Official Report, 3/11/97; WA 276.].
The position seemed to have hardened up a little some months later, in February, when in the course of a debate in the other place the Minister of State, Mr. Ingram, told the House that, given all the available information, the Secretary of State had concluded that Fisher and Wright had not served a period sufficient to reflect the seriousness of their crime and she decided to invite the review board to consider the cases again in October 1998 when each guardsman would have served approximately six years.
Thus it rested until 3rd June, when in the course of another exchange between my right honourable friend the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister said, somewhat surprisingly:
"there was a court case which concluded on Friday 22 May; before that court case was concluded, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was not able to conduct her own review"
That was palpably not correct. She had conducted her own review before the court case had started.
Lord Burnham: My Lords, perhaps I may correct my noble friend on a very small point. The date of 22nd May followed a judicial review which was held some time earlier. That was the day on which the result of that review was published.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. The Prime Minister went on to say:
"Now that is out of the way"—
the judicial review—
"she will do that, and do so as quickly as possible".—[0fficial Report, Commons, 3/6/98; col. 359].
"As quickly as possible" did not turn out to be terribly quickly. In our consideration in Committee on 6th July, the Minister said:
"Clearly the Secretary of State's wish to look at the papers again, and her decision to start to do so today"—
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that is about five weeks after the Prime Minister said she would do it with great urgency—
"is an indication of her desire, as it were, to reflect the views which have been expressed in this Chamber on a number of occasions".—[Official Report, 6/7/98; col. 1076.]
Five weeks does not seem very immediate to me.
So this matter drifts on. At least we know now that the Secretary of State has finally turned her attention to the matter, but nonetheless Guardsmen Fisher and Wright are still in gaol. It seems to me that it would only be appropriate if during her consideration, which we know has started, and in view of all that has been said, Fisher and Wright were at least released on bail. I am sure I shall be told that there are many technical, legal and administrative reasons why they cannot be released at this stage. I remind the House, and particularly the Minister, that it is not that long ago that terrorists were released from prison in order to assist the Government's campaign to achieve a yes vote in the referendum. If terrorists can be released from gaol for that political purpose, then there can be no conceivable reason why the same powers that the Secretary of State used to release those terrorists, temporarily, should not be used to release the guardsmen temporarily, pending the final outcome of her review of the case.
I suspect that the Secretary of State would like this matter resolved. My amendment would help her to do that. It would be effective and certain. It does not affect the terms of the agreement, although when the Minister gave way to my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway he was in the process of saying during Committee proceedings that the amendment would drive a coach and horses through the agreement. That is not so. It would not affect the agreement in any way whatsoever. It is merely that this Bill is a convenient vehicle for the release of the guardsmen. It would not delay the passage of the Bill. Were the Government to accept this amendment tonight or even next week, the Bill would continue on its schedule without any damage at all. We do not know the date on which the Secretary of State intends to bring this legislation into effect, but that need not be affected either. All she has to do is release the guardsmen either on bail, day release or whatever other arrangements can be made. It would be up to the Government, and no one else, to decide whether the implementation of the Act, as it will be, were to be delayed.
There is very little more I can add. I was encouraged by the way in which the House reacted to this proposal during the Committee stage. I was also encouraged to a considerable extent by the Minister's demeanour and his words on the subject. He has had something like 10 days to mull it over in company with the Secretary of State. If needs be, I am content to give him and the Secretary of State a few days more. I shall be grateful to the Minister if he can tell us what exactly the Government now have in mind for these two young men. I beg to move.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I believe that my noble friend misunderstands. When I opposed this amendment at Committee stage I said,

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"Release (as proposed by this amendment) is without paragraphs 1 to 3 of page 25 of the Stormont agreement, which is not subject to negotiation. There is no concept of priority of eligibility for release either under the agreement or the paper used in negotiations".—[Official Report, 6/7/98; col. 1070.]
I referred to paragraphs 5 and 7 of the paper. That is the position which I maintain today.
The collapse of the Stormont agreement—which was overtly opposed by my noble friend for reasons which are fully understood and totally respected—is possible. It is even perhaps probable, but not inevitable, as assuredly could be the case if the Government were to accept this amendment.
Your Lordships may well believe that neither the end, the means nor the result of this amendment is well conceived. One may support the purpose of this arrangement. I call it "an arrangement" because it was not signed. In my book something that is not signed is not an agreement, but an arrangement. It is an arrangement to seek peace in the Province. Even if one objects to its provisions—and I object to some of them, which I shall come to in a moment—they are not subject to renegotiation. I support the peace process.
The end is the release of the guardsmen as soon as possible. That has been, and will continue to be, so in a manner hitherto acceptable to your Lordships on all sides of the House without hint of political contention. Questions have been asked in your Lordships' House and my noble friend referred to some of them. They have been asked for quite some time. The last Unstarred Question was debated on 23rd June. It was retrieved from limbo in "No Day Named" with the help of the Government Chief Whip, who found extra and wholly sufficient time for the debate.
Long after that Unstarred Question was tabled, information was received on 14th May which cast doubt on the rectitude of the conviction. Affidavits and documents were prepared, placed in the Library and handed to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. In fact, only today the affidavit of Guardsman Williams, the fourth man in the patrol, was put in the Library. The noble Lord has a copy. There was also the affidavit of C.S.M. Dunn.
Your Lordships concluded that findings as to culpability, which supported conviction and which continue to thwart release, were fundamentally flawed; that there was a grave and manifest miscarriage of justice; and that these guardsmen, as my noble friend said, should be released immediately. But that could only be under the delegated remit of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy.
At Committee stage of the Bill the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, told us about a fresh review to be set up by the Secretary of State. On 20th July, which is next Monday, your Lordships will be invited to support a Motion to resolve to present an humble Address to Her Majesty to release these guardsmen in the exercise of her unfettered discretion of the prerogative of mercy. If it is carried, which is the hope, and without a Division, the prospects of immediate release could be enhanced. Indeed, the object of my noble friend's amendment would be fulfilled.
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At Committee stage it was made perfectly plain by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, that the Government would not, could not, accept this amendment which delays implementation of the Bill, frustrates the Stormont arrangement and inhibits the peace process.
These guardsmen qualify for general release many months ahead under the Clause 3 linkage. That is a strange and somewhat indigestible anomaly. This was the linkage between those who killed on duty in aid of the civil power and those who resorted to the gun and the bomb to kill and maim, on many occasions for sectarian and politically motivated purposes. It was however part and parcel of the Stormont arrangement. I referred to the passages at the start of my speech. That has been endorsed by the electorate of Northern Ireland.
To what constructive end may your Lordships support this amendment? As matters stand, release from a mandatory life sentence in Northern Ireland as a matter of law may be granted only by the Secretary of State under a variety of mechanisms identified on both 23rd June and 6th July. I understand—I may be wrong—that the review of 6th July is under the statutory power of general release after consultation with the trial judge and the Court of Appeal, but this is months ahead. The only mechanism under which immediate release may be granted by the Secretary of State is the delegated remit of the Royal Prerogative, in truly exceptional circumstances, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has fairly conceded. Release from a mandatory life sentence according to statute is a matter for the Executive, not the judiciary or the legislature, save under a criminal justice repeal Bill of general application, which this Bill assuredly is not. This amendment therefore is without the accepted province of the judiciary and the legislature under the separation of powers.
When the criminal cases review commission has investigated the matter—which will take some time because there is a backlog of work of about a year, and it has referred the matter to the Court of Appeal to challenge the rectitude of this conviction; it was the unanimous conclusion of your Lordships' House on 23rd June that there had been a miscarriage of justice—an application may be made months ahead. So much for the end.
As to the means, apart from the fact that this Bill is not a repeal Bill of general application to remove release from the Executive, the means are not well conceived because the claim to priority of release as a precondition to the Bill taking effect constitutes a pre-condition to the letter and spirit of the Stormont arrangement. That would inevitably delay the implementation of general release in any event. Without losing moral authority to foster the peace process, the Government simply cannot accept this pre-condition to the linkage of general release. Your Lordships may well think that it is wholly unacceptable that these guardsmen should have been taken hostage and used as pawns for such a purpose.
6.30 p.m.
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, I do not believe that anyone in this House is unsympathetic to

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the aims of the amendment moved by noble friend Lord Tebbit, having seen the dangers that the RUC and the security forces have had to face during the past week. They have had no choice in the matter. I hope that that sympathy extends to the Minister and the Secretary of State.
My noble friend Lord Tebbit generously gave the Minister a few more days. One can imagine how much more comfortable a few more days are to noble Lords in this House than to young men who have been in prison for a considerable time and have to face further time in prison without a firm future. I am sure that the lawyers have an answer—they always do. But for me the moral issue now is whether it is right to let out terrorists while we keep in prison two men who were doing their job.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, my noble friends who have spoken are united in wishing to see the release of these soldiers. I have sympathy with the amendment that has been moved by my noble friend Lord Tebbit. This has become a complex matter, although at heart it is simple. I believe that the House would be considerably assisted in considering the different ways in which these two soldiers might regain their freedom if it knew how long the review by the Secretary of State would be likely to take.
It is obvious to me that the review of the Secretary of State—whether it started on 3rd June, as the Prime Minister said, or on 6th July, as appears to be the case—must be completed well before this Bill leads to any release of terrorists who are supposed to have renounced terrorism. When the Bill has achieved Royal Assent a new commission has to be selected and assembled and has to set up shop, as it were. A good number of rules have to be set down for that commission under Schedule 2 to the Bill. The commission must then ask for and receive applications. Only then can it begin to consider the applications made to it and reach decisions. Beginning as it would at least three weeks later than the Secretary of State began her review, it would be amazing if the Secretary of State's review did not finish before the new commission got to the point of releasing anybody. That is one way in which the guardsmen may obtain their freedom.
The background to this matter is the respect and admiration that we all have for the work of the security forces. For some three decades we have placed young soldiers in the most difficult and dangerous position. Many have lost their lives in our service and in defence of democracy. The Army and the other Armed Forces in support of the RUC have shown exemplary restraint in their behaviour. I observed that over a number of years, not only when I was security Minister in Northern Ireland. For all that time we have asked individual private soldiers to place themselves in an incredibly difficult and dangerous position. Both in training and in action the necessity for restraint, the cadre system and so on have been drummed into them daily until they are second nature. I do not believe that any other army in the world has that capacity to carry out sensitive
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individual peace-keeping operations. That is why there is such intense sympathy for these two individuals, given the position in which they find themselves.
As has been spelt out again this afternoon, the legal complications have become very great. Whatever arrangements are made to release them, through whatever mechanism—clearly a number are available—we hope that the guardsmen will be released as soon as that can be arranged. Many of us in your Lordships' House, regardless of the difficulties of this amendment, wish to send a strong signal to that effect. That is why I support the amendment.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I am sensitive to the strength of feeling that has been expressed in this House today and on a number of other occasions regarding the two guardsmen. We have debated the matter several times in recent months and I am aware of your Lordships' feelings about the case. However, I made it clear when we debated this matter last week that the Government could not accept this amendment or any amendment like it. That remains the case.
The amendment would depart entirely from the terms of the Bill that is before your Lordships' House. It imposes a condition that was not contemplated by the Good Friday agreement or by any of the parties to that agreement. Indeed, the amendment attempts to make the implementation of the Good Friday agreement hostage to the release of two prisoners.
Many noble Lords here today have pressed the case for the early release of the guards both with myself and with my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. They have done so in a measured way and have deployed arguments that are related to the cases. No suggestion has been made that the release of the guardsmen should be bartered for the release of other prisoners—and that is how it should be. It is a testament to those noble Lords who have spoken on behalf of the guardsmen that, although there is great strength of feeling, that feeling has not clouded their judgment of what is the right way to proceed.
I am therefore disappointed that this amendment has been pressed again given that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has said that she will look at the case. I made clear that she had started to look at the case when I announced her intentions when we debated this Bill on a previous occasion.
Last week I told your Lordships' House that the Secretary of State had received papers on the case and was now reviewing it again. At that time I explained that the case papers are extremely extensive. They run to about 2,500 pages. Although the Secretary of State has seen much of the material before, she has undertaken to conduct a thorough review of the case. That will take some time as the review will have to be undertaken in parallel with her other responsibilities. Further papers or advice may be required before a decision can be made. Noble Lords will understand that it is not a decision which can be taken in an over-hasty manner. But equally, the Secretary of State understands that the decision must be made with due attention to the fact that the liberty of the two subjects is in question.

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Noble Lords will also be aware that under the law as it applies in Northern Ireland my right honourable friend the Secretary of State is required to consult the Lord Chief Justice and the trial judge before releasing a life sentence prisoner. She cannot engage in that consultation process until she has come to a view regarding the case. The decision on release is for the Secretary of State alone, but she will want to consider any comments the Lord Chief Justice or the trial judge wish to offer before making a final decision.
Your Lordships will understand that the review process must protect the position of the judiciary. There can be no suggestion that the question of release falls to the Lord Chief Justice. For that reason, I cannot give any indication as to when the Secretary of State might ask members of the judiciary for their views as to do so would suggest that a view had been taken of the case and that would place the Lord Chief Justice in an invidious position.
As such, I will not separate out the periods taken to make an initial decision and to request and receive the views of the judiciary if that advice is required. Taking account of the matters set out above, the Secretary of State may not be able to announce the result of the review until the latter part of August. This is the time that it will take to consider all the papers and to request and receive such advice as is required. I understand that noble Lords will be disappointed that the process should take such a period, but that is the time required to consider all aspects of the case and to make any arrangements that follow from consideration of the case.
Noble Lords have asked when prisoners would first be released under the Bill—or at least have indicated that they want to see how the two timetables might work in relation to each other. Although that is not related in any way to the review of the cases of the two guardsmen, noble Lords were concerned that any review should not extend beyond the point at which prisoners might begin to be released under this Bill. It is difficult to be certain about dates. This Bill has further stages to complete before it receives Royal Assent. Commissioners must be appointed and orders made. When all the arrangements are in place, prisoners must make applications. Those applications will have to be given due consideration. Taking all this together, it is possible that the first releases might not take place until early September.
6.45 p.m.
Lord Merlyn-Rees: My Lords, I take my noble friend's major point that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, should not be supported. I could not support the linkage.
The point that concerns me is the point that has been made in this House time and time again. These young men were carrying out duties that we imposed on them. They are not policemen; they are soldiers. They were put in an invidious position. They made mistakes. I want to hear not that we shall support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, which I think is flawed, but
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that we shall proceed with speed and that the guardsmen can be released under the miscarriage of justice provisions, or this Bill.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that. The position is that the Secretary of State may not be able to announce the result of the review until the latter part of August. That allows for the necessary consultation with the Lord Chief Justice and the trial judge. Given that it is now the middle of July, we are talking of a matter of a few weeks only. I give way to the noble Baroness.
Baroness Denton of Wakefield: My Lords, I thank the Minister for giving way. This may be a naïve remark which will make every lawyer in your Lordships' House wince, but why does the sequence have to be that the Secretary of State can consult with the Lord Chief Justice and the trial judge only after she has read all the papers? Can she not consult with them first and ask what their opinions would be if the answer was plan A or plan B and therefore speed up the process?
Lord Dubs: My Lords, my understanding of the procedure is that the Secretary of State has to come to a view about the case and, having come to a view, she will then consult or seek the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice and the trial judge. If she were not to come to a view first, she would simply open it up for comment. It seems appropriate—and certainly the procedure as I understand it is the normal one—that she comes to a decision and then goes through a process of consulting the two people concerned. It is a sequential process and hence it will take, as I have already said, probably until the latter part of August.
I appreciate that time drags on and that the liberty of two individuals is at stake. On the other hand, we are talking about a matter of four or five weeks from today. I think that it is not unreasonable that one should give the Secretary of State the time to do the consultation.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, will the Minister agree, however, that we have been talking, right through this Bill, about sending messages? A message needs to be sent to the Armed Forces and to the RUC and to all the people who have supported them. No message could be more telling than speed in this matter. It is very difficult for everybody out there—not excluding us—to understand, even despite the weight of paper, why it is not possible to be faster than the end of August by which time a lot will have happened. This is a critical moment to send the message that there is concern for the good people, not just the bad ones.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, perhaps I may ask the Minister if he will consider, and if he is aware, that a week is a very long time in politics and an even longer time in prison.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, perhaps I may draw the attention of noble Lords to the fact that we are on Report.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, being on Report, I wonder whether I can assist. Will my noble friend the Minister consider that matters might be speeded up if the 2,500 pages now being read by the Secretary of State were sent now to the Lord Chief Justice and the trial judge so that they are apprised fully of the situation when she makes up her mind? The consultation can then be very brief indeed.
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I shall deal with the points that have been made. First, I accept that if one is deprived of one's liberty a week is an enormously long time. My noble friend made a suggestion. I am not sure that I can give him an authoritative answer at this stage, but I shall look into it to see whether there is any way in which the sequential process that I have described can be made into a simultaneous process. I do not have the knowledge or authority to say that that can be done, but I shall look into it to see whether it is a possibility.
I can assure your Lordships that the Secretary of State is well aware of the strength of feeling and the issues raised in this House and in the Guards regiments, and the Army in general. She is sensitive to the need to move quickly. That is why, instead of waiting as she had originally said, until October or November, she decided recently that she would come to a quicker decision.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, will the Minister deal with the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Merlyn-Rees. I think he will agree that the answer is that the only mechanism available for immediate release for a miscarriage of justice, as has happened in this case, is the delegated remit to the Secretary of State of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy? It is available. The Minister has conceded that. The question is: why can it not be exercised?
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I believe that the noble Lord is going to debate that very point next Monday. Although I appreciate that that is a few more days, perhaps I should try to deal with that point on Monday rather than today. In answer to the questions raised by my noble friends Lord Merlyn-Rees and Lord Mishcon on the matter of sending the papers to the Lord Chief Justice, the advice I have been given is that the Lord Chief Justice is not given all the papers; he is merely given the Secretary of State's view on the particular case. It would be difficult to send the papers simultaneously because that is not the procedure. The Lord Chief Justice and the trial judge are given just the Secretary of State's views, and then they comment accordingly. I do not suppose it would save that much time even if one were able to adopt the procedure suggested.
I shall return to the key point. I was asked when prisoners would first be released under the Bill. As I was saying, that is in no way related to the review of the cases of the two guardsmen. There was a concern that the review should not extend beyond the point at which prisoners might be released under this Bill. I was saying that it is difficult to be certain about dates. The Bill has to receive Royal Assent; commissioners have to be appointed. When all the arrangements are in place
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prisoners must make applications, and those applications will have to be given due consideration. Taking all that together, it is possible that the first releases might not take place until early September.
It is also likely that applications from those prisoners serving life sentences, because of the additional matters to be considered, might take slightly longer to consider than applications from fixed-term prisoners. Of course noble Lords will understand that that view of the time likely to be required to consider cases is based partly on speculation regarding how the commissioners, who are, after all, independent, will go about their business. That will be their responsibility, subject to the rules that my right honourable friend intends to make to cover the procedures that they will adopt.
I am aware, and the Government are aware, as my noble friend Lord Merlyn-Rees, said, that we send soldiers out there to face difficult conditions. A few months ago I met the parents of Lance Corporal Restorick who was shot some time ago while on duty in South Armagh. I am aware—I was aware before, and I am even more aware having talked to them—of the difficult situation faced by young soldiers. I should like to pay a tribute to his parents for the brave way in which they have responded to the terrible tragedy when their son was shot. The Government are aware that our soldiers and the RUC have behaved bravely in difficult circumstances. Their lives are in danger, and many of them have lost their lives to keep the peace and protect ordinary people. The Secretary of State is well aware of the need to move quickly on this issue and will do so. I suggest that this amendment is not the right path to follow.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, I suspect that the Minister must begin to feel the pressure upon him and the Secretary of State not just from these Benches but of course from the Benches opposite including, if I may say so, the noble friend of us all, the noble Lord, Lord Merlyn-Rees, the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, and so many others. We have also to recollect that there has been what would appear from the outside to be a lack of urgency within government.
The Minister told us that the Secretary of State had begun to consider this matter on 6th July. He gave us an indication this evening that he hoped that a conclusion might be reached by about the end of August—roughly, I think, about seven weeks. But five weeks elapsed following the Prime Minister's undertaking in the other place that this matter would be dealt with at once since it was possible, he said, to do so then because the judicial review proceedings had been completed. If those five weeks had been used the Minister tonight could have told us that a conclusion would be reached by the end of this month.
I think the Minister can therefore understand why we have some reservations about these matters. My noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway set out a number of legal obstacles on the road to justice. I am a little impatient of legal obstacles on the road to justice. I shall join him on Monday in doing all that I can to persuade this House, by voice or by vote, that the route which he has set out should be followed. Of course we should

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explore every route. He was wrong in two matters. I am sad to have to say that to my noble friend. First, that would not delay the Bill. It does not have to delay the Bill. It will be the Secretary of State's choice as to whether it delayed the Bill. It will be entirely in her hands.
My noble friend ignored also that there is another way of taking men out of prison in Northern Ireland. On 1st June I asked a Question of the Government. It was on a slightly different point but it was related closely to this issue. I asked:
"Whether, following the day release from prison of IRA criminals to assist in the campaign for a Yes vote in the forthcoming Northern Ireland referendum, it is their intention to release an equal number of other criminals to campaign for a No vote".
The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, answered me, saying:
"The Secretary of State granted temporary release to four prisoners to attend a Sinn Fein conference to discuss the Belfast Agreement on 9 May".
He went on to acknowledge that,
"The release of those prisoners was a matter of concern and hurt to many members of the public and the Secretary of State has said that releases will not be granted for such purposes in the future".—[Official Report, 1/6/98; col. WA 19.]
Quite clearly the Secretary of State had power to release those men.
My amendment refers to "release on licence", but I do not mind, nor I suspect do they, by what means the prisoners are released—by the means by which those terrorists were released to campaign for a yes vote; by release on bail pending the Secretary of State's conclusions; or any other method. That would be entirely up to the Secretary of State. I am not asking that the Bill should be used as a vehicle to overturn their convictions. In my judgment, and I am sure that of every Member of this House, that would be entirely wrong. My noble friend Lord Campbell will take that route in seeking, through an appropriate method, to overturn the convictions. I, as I am certain does every Member of this House, simply want to see those men free.
7 p.m.
Lord Davies of Coity: My Lords, if the noble Lord will give way, what he has suggested is probably the most important point. Sympathy for the guardsmen extends throughout the House. We wish to see their cases reviewed and to see them released. Of that there is no doubt. However, it is the means by which we do that that is important. The circumstances that we face are extremely difficult. On the one hand, we have the case of the guardsmen in prison that the noble Lord has argued. On the other, we have a peace process with which the Bill is associated to prevent future terrorism, bombings, killings and mutilation in Ireland. The issue is very sensitive.
It seems to me that if the noble Lord's amendment is pressed to a vote and succeeds, it would be like a Damocles' sword over the head of the Secretary of State and would not help the situation in Northern Ireland. This House having taken a view and extended sympathy towards the guardsmen, it seems better that that is relayed to the Secretary of State and that the review
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is hastened as quickly as possible. But we should not do that by conditioning the Bill on the release of the guardsmen.
Lord Tebbit: My Lords, of course I understand the view that the noble Lord puts. However, what he forgets is that once the Bill is enacted there is no further leverage for Parliament to exert. We know that there are good intentions all round. But the road out of gaol is unlikely to be paved with those good intentions. We need more than that.
I sense that the House would not wish to divide on this issue tonight. I may return to it with a view to seeing whether the House, or some Members, would welcome a Division next week. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Serota): My Lords, is it your Lordships' pleasure that the amendment be withdrawn?
Lord Campbell of Alloway: Not-Content.
The Deputy Speaker: My Lords, the Question is that the amendment be agreed to? As many as are of that opinion will say "Content"; to the contrary "Not-Content".
Lord Campbell of Alloway: Not-Content.
The Deputy Speaker: My Lords, the amendment is negatived.
Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, I am not clear whether that was intended to be a vote on whether there should be a vote.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, what is the position? I have said "Not-Content" that this amendment should be withdrawn. Why is not a Division called?
The Deputy Speaker: My Lords, I put the Question again: the Question is that the amendment is agreed to? As many as are of that opinion will say "Content"; to the contrary "Not-Content". The "Not-Contents" have it.
On Question, amendment negatived.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I object.
Lord Carter: My Lords, the amendment has been negatived. The "Not-Contents" have won.
Schedule 1 [Commissioners]:
[Amendment No. 18 not moved.]
Schedule 3 [Sentences passed outside Northern Ireland]:
Lord Dubs Lord Dubs moved Amendment No. 19:
Page 13, line 41, leave out ("date") and insert ("day").
On Question, amendment agreed to.

Royal Assent
7.05 p.m.
The Deputy Speaker: My Lords, I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

Appropriation Act,

Data Protection Act,

Teaching and Higher Education Act,

Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council Act.

Scotland Bill
7.6 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Scottish Office (Lord Sewel): My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.
Moved, That the House do now again resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Sewel.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (Baroness Turner of Camden) in the Chair.]
Schedule 3 [Standing orders—further provision]:
The Earl of Dundee The Earl of Dundee moved Amendment No. 122:
Page 61, line 37, after ("committees") insert ("to address subjects relevant to the Parliament and").
The noble Earl said: In moving Amendment No. 122 I shall also speak to Amendment No. 128. Schedule 3 to the Bill already indicates that standing orders will provide for parliamentary committees. However, the additional words,
"to address subjects relevant to the Parliament and",
enable a clearer focus. The proper functioning of parliamentary committees is clearly vital to the Holyrood parliament and its executive. The better parliamentary committees perform, the more opportunity there will be for parliamentarians to influence policy and decision-making.
Equally, the more comprehensive the structure of these parliamentary committees in the first place, the healthier the balance thus encouraged within Holyrood between parliamentarians and the executive. Yet in this context, the Bill's provisions for committees is too general. No proper committee structure is indicated. As drafted in Schedule 3 such committees need not necessarily address subjects relevant to the parliament. The purpose of Amendment No. 122 is to put right that omission.
I turn now to Amendment No. 128. Paragraph 4 of Schedule 3 to the Bill indicates that standing orders shall provide committees and in appointing members to committees and sub-committees they shall pay regard to the balance of parties in parliament. That ensures
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correctly that political membership of committees will reflect the respective strengths of parties elected to parliament.
However, it may often be helpful to parliamentary committees and their work to include people who may not be members of the parliament. Such people may well have great knowledge of the subject under discussion in a committee. It would be up to the parliament and committee concerned to invite to be a member of a committee a person who was not a member of the parliament. If the co-option of such a person on the committee were perceived to infringe the standing orders provision for maintaining political balance on committees, then clearly that person would not be co-opted in the first place.
Clearly, it is the business of the parliament and its committees to assess what does and does not infringe the provisions for maintaining political balance on committees. Yet since much of the work on committees is to discuss ideas and to promote policies without necessarily making decisions on them in committee, then co-option of committee members need not infringe rules on political balance. However, if in any event the composition of committees is a matter for the Holyrood parliament to handle as it sees fit, in order for it to do so with greater flexibility the Bill's standing orders require Amendment No. 128 as proposed. I beg to move.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: My noble friend has a point and I welcome him to the debate. I wonder whether he expected to be debating the first amendment at five past seven in the evening. It is intolerable that in the Government's programme the third day of the Committee stage of this vitally important Bill, as I understood it to be, should not start until five past seven. We might have lived with that were it not for the fact that the second Committee day on Tuesday did not start until ten past six.
I wish to take this opportunity to say that I do not consider either Tuesday or today to be full Committee days. Therefore, the clear undertaking that I gave on Second Reading—that we would not hinder the Bill and that I wanted to see the Committee stage completed before the Summer Recess—is dependent on the Government finding at least another day to compensate for the two half-days we have lost. I wish to place on record the fact that I believe that to be intolerable. As I understand it, next Tuesday will be exactly the same: we have business before the Bill which may go on for some time. I hope that the Government realise that I do not consider today a full Committee day; nor did I consider Tuesday a full Committee day.
Lord Renton: Before the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, replies to my noble friend, perhaps I may stress that tonight we are required to consider the legislative powers of the new parliament. That is the most important part of the Bill. That we should be considering the issue at a late hour on Thursday night, when in the nature of things we shall not have a very full attendance and when there is so much detail to discuss, is intolerable. The Government have tabled a number of

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important amendments which we must consider carefully. Schedules 4 and 5 run to 21 pages. It is intolerable that we should have to start at this time.
Lord Fraser of Carmyllie: I, too, am concerned about the time we are starting the Bill. As my noble friend Lord Renton pointed out, we are starting to debate one of the most important parts of the Bill; certainly a part to which Members of the Committee should be giving the closest scrutiny. As we discovered late on Tuesday night, the Government are unclear about the extent to which, and in what circumstances, the judiciary is to be involved in the workings of the parliament. We are beginning to debate the standing orders of the parliament. There are other important matters which we shall wish to discuss at some length and with some care: for example, whether during the proceedings of the Scottish parliament, unlike the Westminster Parliament, it would be open to members who took exception to the way in which the proceedings were going to withdraw from the parliament and ask the courts to reach a decision on what is required by the standing orders.
I regard that to be a very important matter. Because it is so different from the way in which matters proceed in the Westminster Parliament, we ought to be able to examine it carefully. It is intolerable that we are beginning this chapter on a Thursday evening some time after seven o'clock. As my noble friend Lord Mackay has indicated, that would be bad enough in any circumstances, but it is impossible given that we suffered much the same problem on Tuesday.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: That is another five minutes gone! I agree that the situation is intolerable, but perhaps the Minister too feels that it is intolerable. At least, I hope and believe that he does and that he will do his best to correct matters.
I believe that the two amendments are unnecessary. Amendment No. 128 is certainly flawed in that although one can have expert witnesses and expert advisers, it would be unsuitable to have non-members of parliament as voting members of a committee. Therefore, I hope that the noble Earl will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Carter: Although I was out of the Chamber when the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, first spoke, I was watching the proceedings on the screen and came here in a hurry. I entirely understand what he is saying and I sympathise. He will understand my problem as Chief Whip. I have been given a Northern Ireland Bill as a part of the peace process. As we all know, that Bill must receive Royal Assent before we break for the Summer Recess. We agreed through the usual channels when we would break for the summer. We can find time to finish the Committee stage in the first week of August, as the noble Lord knows, but I entirely understand his wish not to do so.
I apologise for the time at which we are starting the Bill tonight. The Bill is important, but the fact is that I have had to juggle the Northern Ireland Bill against this Bill. We have more time—until eleven o'clock tonight, which is another two-and-a-half hours away. However, I understand how the noble Lord feels. It is a matter for
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the usual channels. We offered extra time in the first week of August. The noble Lord decided not to take that, which I understand. I think that the best thing now is to get on with the Bill and to see what progress we make. I suspect that we shall keep on talking about it from now until 31st July.
7.15 p.m.
Lord Sewel: With Amendment No. 122, the noble Earl is attempting to restrict the parliament to setting up committees which, in his words,
"address subjects relevant to the Parliament".
I am not sure how the noble Earl would define what is "relevant" to the parliament. I suspect he means that committees should be able to discuss only devolved matters. This would, of course, be an unacceptable restriction of the parliament's day-to-day working.
The Government intend that the Scottish parliament will be able to debate the full range of issues which are of interest and concern in Scotland, whether devolved or reserved, just as this House debates issues about which it does not legislate. The parliament will also be able to investigate any matter, also including reserved matters, through its committees. It will be for the parliament itself to decide on its committee structure and what powers and functions they should be given.
With this Bill, we are creating a framework in which the Scottish parliament will be expected to operate. The noble Earl's amendment, is I am afraid, unwarranted interference in the proper decision-making powers of the parliament. How the parliament operates within the framework that we are establishing is a matter for the parliament to decide.
With Amendment No. 128, the noble Earl is intending to pave the way for non-MSPs to be members of the committees. The Government believe that it is right that the Scottish parliament's committees and sub-committees will be composed of members of the parliament. Special provision is made in the Bill for the case where the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor-General are not members of the parliament, but that is an exception. They need to be able to participate in the proceedings of the parliament because they are Scottish Ministers.
Apart from that special provision, we consider it appropriate that only members should have the right to deliberate and vote when committees take decisions. It is difficult to see how it could be otherwise. MSPs will be accountable to the electorate for all their actions. I raise the question, simply and bluntly: who would non-members be accountable to?
However, as we made clear in the White Paper, we want the Scottish parliament to be accessible, open and responsive. Involvement by organisations and individuals in decision making will be encouraged and advice from specialists will be sought as appropriate. But that is fundamentally different from being full members of the committees and sub-committees of the parliament.
The contribution which non-MSPs could make to the work of the parliament and how best to organise this is being considered by the Consultative Steering Group

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chaired by my honourable friend Henry McLeish, the Minister responsible for devolution. The CSG has commissioned research on the experience of other parliaments. We are looking to deliver imaginative, innovative solutions as to how non-MSPs can become involved in the work of the parliament to ensure that the parliament has access to a wide range of expertise and opinion when considering an issue. But—and this is the important point—that must be in ways which do not blur the accountability of MSPs for the decisions of the parliament. Therefore, we are keen to involve outside organisations in the parliament in appropriate ways but I believe that the way offered by the noble Earl is fundamentally misconceived. I ask him to withdraw his amendment.
The Earl of Mar and Kellie: I was pleased to hear the Minister say that the Scottish parliament will be able to discuss all issues which arise in Scotland. In the event of a Scottish parliament taking a view on a reserved matter, would I be right in thinking that the parliament will be able to pass a resolution and then send that resolution to the Parliament of the United Kingdom? Has any procedure yet been thought of as to how such resolutions would be received by the UK Parliament?
Lord Sewel: My understanding is that the parliament would just take a view on a reserved matter and that would be the end of the matter.
The Earl of Dundee: I am grateful to all Members of the Committee for their contribution and to the Minister for what he said. I acknowledge that my amendments are probing amendments. What I had in mind was to listen to what the Minister had to say about his interpretation of the provisions of the Bill with regard to ensuring a balance between parliamentarians and the executive in the committee structure arising from the standing orders in Schedule 3.
The Minister reassured us that all subjects relevant to the parliament will in fact be considered by parliamentarians within the committee structure as matters already stand. I accept the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, that if we followed the route of co-opting persons who were not members of the parliament, this would then risk producing two classes of citizen on the committees: those who voted and those who did not vote. With those various comments, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees: I must remind the Committee that if Amendment No. 123 is agreed to, I cannot call Amendments Nos. 124 and 125 because of pre-emption.
Lord Thomas of Gresford Lord Thomas of Gresford moved Amendment No. 123:
Page 61, leave out lines 38 to 43.
The noble Lord said: I move this amendment and speak to other amendments in place of my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood.
The structure of this particular part of the Bill is interesting, particularly for those of us who have been involved with the Government of Wales Bill where the setting out of standing orders and committees is gone into much more fully. In this Bill, Clause 21 merely provides that:
"The proceedings of the Parliament shall be regulated by standing orders",
in accordance with Schedule 3. In Schedule 3, there are only the very bare bones of directions to the parliament as to how those standing orders should be formulated.
Indeed, a moment ago, the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, criticised the amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, as being an attempt to restrict the scope of committees. He said that that was unacceptable. Amendment No. 123 seeks to remove a restriction on the parliament in the formulation of those standing orders. We seek to remove subparagraphs (2) and (3) of paragraph 4 of Schedule 3, which we submit are restrictive in themselves. The first of those paragraphs is mandatory:
"The standing orders shall include provision for ensuring that, in appointing members to committees and sub-committees, regard is had to the balance of parties in the Parliament".
Sub-paragraph (3) is discretionary and states:
"The standing orders may include provision for excluding from the proceedings of a committee or sub-committee a member of the Parliament who is not a member of the committee or sub-committee".
We simply ask why the Scottish parliament, duly elected, should not decide for itself what the balance of a particular committee should be.
Should those sub-paragraphs remain, we move on, in our Amendments Nos. 124 and 125, to consider the position of regional committees and regional sub-committees which may be set up.
Regional committees and sub-committees, as I understand them, are advisory only. They are not to set policy but to advise the parliament on the particular problems that appertain to a region within Scotland, however those regions are defined and drawn up by the parliament itself. It is argued that it would be inappropriate, on a regional committee, simply to achieve the party balance that obtains throughout the whole of the parliament, that members from other areas in Scotland should be members of that regional committee.
If one takes one area which, on the results of the last election, would be adverse to my party—perhaps the area east of Glasgow, where there is no Liberal Democrat representation—why, in a regional advisory committee, should there be representation by a Liberal Democrat member of the Scottish parliament who comes from an entirely different part of Scotland?
In the case of the Highlands and Islands, why should members come from another part of Scotland simply to maintain, let us assume for a moment, a Labour majority on that regional committee? In order to obtain a Labour majority on the regional committee for the Highlands and Islands, based upon the results of the last election, it would be necessary to import Labour members from another part of Scotland to sit upon that regional

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committee. Therefore, our argument is that, in the regions, the balance that appertains in the region itself should be maintained on the committee and not the balance in the parliament overall.
I move on to Amendment No. 126, which deals with the scrutiny of European legislation. In this Chamber we are familiar with the scrutiny of European Commission documents or European Union legislation. Members of the Committee will appreciate instantly that that does not involve taking policy decisions in relation to European Union legislation and documents. Scrutiny means scrutiny: looking at it and reporting to the parliament about the effect of that legislation and those documents upon the economic and social life of Scotland.
In that context and in that context alone, we propose that elected members of the European Parliament who are elected in Scotland should be entitled to contribute their expertise and act as a link between the parliament in Scotland and the European Parliament. There is a huge volume of legislation to be looked at, scrutinised and reported upon. We believe that elected MEPs have the experience to advise and assist the Scottish parliament on those issues.
If one looks at the way in which other countries handle scrutiny in their own domestic parliaments, one observes that in Belgium there is a scrutiny committee in its national parliament which consists of 10 Members of the European Parliament and 10 Members of the Belgian Parliament. In Germany, in the Bundestag, there are 50 elected representatives involved in scrutiny, of whom 39 are directly elected to the Bundestag, with 11 of them actually being Members of the European Parliament. In Greece, there are 31 Members who scrutinise European legislation for the benefit of the Greek Parliament but, of those, 10 are Members of the European Parliament. Spain has joint meetings, France has a mechanism whereby Members of the European Parliament are invited to give evidence, while in Ireland and Italy Members of the European Parliament attend scrutiny meetings.
Moreover, in Finland, Luxembourg and Portugal similar links are created so that the domestic parliament has the advice and experience of members of the European Parliament who are elected to the same areas by the same electors to assist in the scrutiny process. It will not surprise noble Lords to learn that the UK has no formal arrangements with its Members of the European Parliament and no direct links. The scrutiny given to European legislation is, to a great degree—and, one has to say, successfully—confined to the non-elected Members of your Lordships' House. It is our argument that the European Parliament should have this direct link with the Scottish parliament by having its elected members for the Scottish regions on the Scottish parliament's scrutiny committee. I beg to move.
7.30 p.m.
Baroness Carnegy of Lour: As regards the first three amendments to which the noble Lord has spoken, I wonder what he thinks local government is for. I cannot support the idea of imposing on this parliament the need
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to set up committees for regions when we have local government, recently reorganised, which is extremely keen to relate to the new parliament. I imagine that that local government will be relating to the new parliament very much as it now relates to the Scottish Office. It will be constantly negotiating, recommending and trying to persuade the parliament to give it more money, and so on. Indeed, that is the job of local government.
The noble Lord mentioned the west of Scotland around Glasgow as a possible region. One of the reasons we now have smaller councils in Scotland than we used to—for example, we used to have Strathclyde region—is that it was a very unbalanced negotiation between the west of Scotland and the Scottish Office. Indeed, it would be very unbalanced with the Scottish parliament. I have to say that it is a strange idea. I am surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, who knows a great deal about how Scotland works, is making this suggestion. Quite frankly, I cannot see it working at all.
As regards the notion that Members of the European Parliament might actually be members of such committees, I should have thought that that, too, would confuse the situation. However, I can see no reason why they should not be invited to come, give evidence and assist the committees if they wish to do so; in fact, that will probably happen. I agree that that works in other countries where there is a closer link in that respect. But this parliament will have limited responsibilities for European affairs. It is not the parliament which will be dealing directly with the European Union. That will be reserved for the Westminster Parliament. Quite honestly, I believe that the amendments would cause great confusion and I would not be able to support any of them.
The Earl of Balfour: I am very concerned about the amendment. I gain the impression that it would allow small committees to be formed within the Scottish parliament. I very much hope that the Scottish parliament will be more like this Chamber and conduct almost all of its business on the floor of the House and not be split off into little sub-committees. I believe that that is one of the great dangers. The fact that Members of this place from any quarter can participate in debates or in the various stages of legislation is, I believe, one of the outstanding features of this Chamber. Therefore, I shall be very sorry if the new Scottish parliament was to have much of its business discussed in small committees.
Moreover, there is nothing to prevent any Member of the European Parliament giving a talk or having a discussion off the Floor of the Chamber in a committee room. Again, that is something which I believe to be so remarkable about this Parliament and something which I hope will be continued in the future parliament of Scotland.
Lord Mackay of Drumadoon: Perhaps I should make it clear that these Benches could not support any of the amendments in this group. I hope that that will be welcomed as consensus politics and that the Minister will listen most carefully to what I have to say; indeed, he always does.

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However, there is an important point of principle behind the attempt to remove the two subparagraphs of Schedule 3, as proposed in Amendment No. 123. As has been said on a number of occasions, it may well be a matter for the Scottish parliament to work out the detail of how it will conduct its business. But it is important to remember that the laws which it makes will have equal standing in Scotland with public general statutes made by this Parliament. Those Acts of the Scottish parliament will not only affect Scottish people; they will also affect citizens throughout the United Kingdom who have occasion to do business in Scotland or with Scottish companies which are in some way connected with Scotland. Therefore, it seems to me to be right that the parliament in this Bill should set out certain basic requirements as to the procedure which is to be followed. In that respect, I welcome the approach set out in Schedule 3.
As far as concerns the idea of having regional committees, that seems to me to be a potentially divisive idea. There may or may not have been some argument for it in Wales, where support for the Government's devolution proposals was not so conclusive and where there was considerable regional variation, with certain parts of Wales being very supportive of the idea and other parts being very much against it. However, in my submission, that does not apply in Scotland. Not only would regional committees ignore the valuable role played by local authorities; they might also seek to divide members of the parliament, which would be entirely counter-productive as regards what the Government are trying to do in this Bill.
We also oppose the idea of having Members of the European Parliament serving on such committees. It appears to me that Clause 23 would give the new parliament and its committees ample opportunity, if they so wished, to seek the views of Members of the European Parliament by requiring them to attend such proceedings or to produce any documents which might set forth their views. We are against all the amendments in the group for those reasons.
However, while I am on my feet and while we are focusing on the provisions set out in paragraph 4 of Schedule 3, can the Minister tell us in his response what will happen if, after the standing orders are in force, proper regard is not had to the balance of parties in the parliament when members are appointed to committees and sub-committees? If a particular party grouping in the new parliament takes the view that proper regard has not been had to the statutory directions set out in subparagraph (2) of the schedule, who will have the right to object, and what form could that objection take? Is this an example of where a disgruntled member or parliamentary group could go to court and have an order of some form pronounced quashing the decision of the Scottish parliament to set up a particular committee because of its membership? That is a kind of sub-question of the question that I posed late on Tuesday night. As my noble and learned friend Lord Fraser of Carmyllie said, the relationship between the court and the parliament is an important consideration.
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Early in our deliberations today we have a practical example of how the question that I posed needs to be answered.
Viscount Thurso: The noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy, referred to local government. It may be helpful to reflect on a local authority in Scotland which is larger than a considerable number of countries in Europe; namely the Highland Council. From the date when that council was set up and to this day its structure includes regional committees. Each regional committee is made up of councillors of the area concerned. Therefore, the Caithness committee is made up of all of the councillors from Caithness, irrespective of whether they are independent or party. They act in an advisory capacity.
The relevant measure to implement that was passed by the noble friends of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Drumadoon, although I do not think he was a Member of your Lordships' House at that time. The Secretary of State of the day, who is now the noble friend of the noble and learned Lord, made it clear that one of the reasons he accepted this large grouping against the will of most of the people in the Highland area was because there would be sub-committees for each region.
There may well be a case for having regional committees in the Scottish parliament. As I understand our amendment, it seeks merely to permit the parliament to have those committees if it wishes. However, at present, as the Bill is written, it is absolutely impossible to have a committee made up of all the members of a particular region because that will not reflect the party balance. Will the Minister at least agree to think about this point and return to it at a later stage?
Lord Sewel: The Government do not support Amendments Nos. 123, 124, 125 or even, for that matter, Amendment No. 126. I shall respond to the first point that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, made about the degree of detail in the Bill. We have consistently argued that, as far as possible, the parliament should decide such matters for itself. That is basically the guiding principle we have sought to apply. However, we believe that paragraph 4(2) of Schedule 3 should send a clear signal that the parliament should have regard to the balance of parties in the parliament. It is important to maintain that so that all committees contain a balance of views. But that, of course, does not preclude the parliament taking account of other factors. However, we think it is important—I refer to local government experience in this regard—to send a clear message that the committees of the parliament should be expected to be constituted in a way that has regard to the balance of parties in the parliament.
As regards Amendments Nos. 124 and 125, the noble Lord is trying to amend the provisions in the Bill about party balance on committees to allow for the establishment of regional committees. I am neutral on the issue of regional committees. Again, it is for the parliament to decide whether it wishes to establish regional committees. There may be strong arguments in favour that no doubt the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, would wish to advance. There may be equally strong

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arguments against, as we have heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Drumadoon. However, it is essentially a matter for the parliament to decide.
Lord Mackay of Drumadoon: As regards the point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, how could there be regional committees under the provisions of paragraph 4(2)? I do not want regional committees; I do not think they are a good idea but, as a matter of law, how could they be established? If they were appointed, would someone who objected to them have a right to challenge in court the fact that it was outwith the competence of the parliament to approve standing orders which fly in the face of subparagraph (2)?
Viscount Thurso: I am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord for making the point far more effectively than I did.
7.45 p.m.
Lord Sewel: My reading of the Bill is that it is for the parliament to establish those regional committees if it so wishes. I could go further and say that I see an argument that the membership of such committees should reflect the balance of parties in a particular region. Our view is that Amendments Nos. 124 and 125 are simply unnecessary. The current provision in paragraph 4 of Schedule 3 does not require the parliament to ensure that the membership of every committee reflects precisely the balance of the parties in the parliament. It merely provides that the standing orders must include provisions for ensuring that in appointing members to committees regard is had to the balance of parties in the parliament. However, that is not intended to tie the parliament's hands.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: Is it not the case that the committees would recommend that any legislation would be passed by the chamber according to the balance of parties in the parliament? The committees would put the regional point of view to the parliament.
Viscount Thurso: Before the Minister responds, is there a power to have advisory committees? As the Bill is currently written, can the parliament set up an advisory committee for a region, and can that committee be composed of all the members sitting for that region?
Lord Sewel: My understanding is that the parliament could certainly set up advisory committees if it wished. It could set them up in the way that the noble Viscount indicates. I believe there is a big difference between advisory committees and decision-making committees. Essentially we come back to the point that we return to time and time again; namely, that how the parliament develops its committee structure is a matter for the parliament to decide. I am happy with that. It must make provision to meet the requirement that, in appointing members to committees and sub-committees, regard is had to the balance of parties in the parliament. The balance of parties must be taken into account. However, it may be that in some cases, having had regard to the balance of parties in the parliament, the parliament
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decides to appoint to particular committees persons with a particular knowledge or interest, even though that means that that committee does not reflect the balance of parties in the parliament. That is an understandable position. The Government do not think that we should make additional provision in the Bill to require the parliament to set up particular committees in particular ways. As I said, this is a matter for the parliament to decide.
Amendment No. 126 would require the parliament's standing orders to allow MEPs to sit on committees or sub-committees which scrutinise European Commission documents or European legislation. We do not accept that amendment. While I agree that there may be occasions when a contribution by MEPs could help the parliament's consideration of EU proposals, how best to achieve that is a matter which should be left to the Scottish parliament to decide for itself. That does not prevent the parliament deciding whether and how to make provision in its standing orders for inviting non-members of committees to attend committees so that the benefit of their knowledge and experience is available to the parliament and its committees. However, as I have indicated previously, the Government believe it is right that, with the exception of the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor-General, for whom special provision is made, only members of the parliament should be members of its committees and sub-committees.
I can therefore agree with the idea that lies behind the amendments and we shall certainly want to encourage close collaboration between members of the Scottish parliament and Members of the European Parliament. But let us leave it to the parliament itself to decide how to achieve that and what the appropriate measures should be. I hope that on that basis the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: The Minister has interpreted paragraph 4(2) of the schedule in a way that is directly contrary to the interpretation of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Drumadoon, a moment before. The noble and learned Lord could not see that regional committees could possibly be set up under paragraph 4(2) which did what my noble friend Lord Thurso suggested would be sensible; namely, that those regional advisory committees should consist of all the members elected for that region.
However, having heard the interpretation that the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, has put on that paragraph, it is right that it will be interpreted in that way should the point arise for discussion in any legal forum in the future.
Lord Sewel: Regarding the matter of, "have regard to", the case law on the issue is in support of the Government's position. I refer the noble Lord to Simpson v. Edinburgh Corporation 1961, and Bearsden and Milngavie District Council v. Secretary of State for Scotland 1992. It is on those cases that the argument has been advanced tonight.
Lord Mackay of Drumadoon: Does the case law provide the answer to my question—namely, would it

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be possible to challenge in court a committee on the basis that the proper regard had not been had to the balance of the parties?
Lord Sewel: I apologise to the noble Lord for not replying to his question immediately. His point is a specific one but it raises a general issue: that of the relationship between the parliaments and the courts. I cannot give a single useful generalised answer to that question. I am happy to take away any specific points and consider them. I accept that this is a significant issue.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: My noble friend Lord Thurso asked a straight question and received a straight answer from the Minister. His question was: is it possible to have a regional committee under paragraph 4(2) on which all the members of that region sit, without incomers from other areas taking part. The Minister said yes.
The cases to which he referred are always carried in my head. I turn them over in my mind in the early hours of the morning and am fully aware of their implications, who decided them and who appeared in them. The Minister has given the answer that will be used in any court proceedings that may ever arise on the construction of this paragraph.
The question of the desirability of regional committees was raised. Perhaps noble Lords will forgive me for saying that in Wales we regard regional committees as essential. In various parts of Wales there are communities of interest. We believe that each of those communities should be represented and should be in a position to advise the national assembly of Wales.
In case noble Lords think that I am fixated on Wales, I should say that I have a deep interest in Scotland. Perhaps I can best illustrate it by saying that my new grandson's name is Angus Huw (the second name is spelt in the Welsh way), so I am almost 50:50 split on the Wales/Scotland issue. I can see that in the part of Scotland that I know best, Aberdeen, people have the same concerns about a tug from the central belt, the polarisation of power and influence in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as we in North Wales have about the polarisation of power in Cardiff. Consequently, in the part of the world that I know people are concerned that there should be proper representation and consultation, and a proper community of interests in the Scottish assembly. I should have thought that regional committees are desirable. We hope that this schedule will permit such regional committees to be formed.
The maintenance of subparagraphs (2) and (3) of paragraph 4 means that any question arising under this legislation would be for the courts to determine. If the Scottish parliament decided, for example, that a committee should be formed which did not have a balance of parties in the parliament, then the matter would go to court. All we are saying from these Benches is that the Scottish parliament should be able to decide such issues without the courts being involved in construing Westminster legislation.
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I am sure that we shall return to these issues. The amendments are not originally in my name. For the present, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 124 to 126 not moved.]
Lord Hoyle: I beg to move that the House do now resume. In moving this Motion, I suggest that the Committee stage begin again not before 8.40 p.m.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House resumed.

Houses in Multiple Occupation (Charges for Registration Schemes) Regulations 1998
7.57 p.m.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 22nd June be approved [39th Report from the Joint Committee.]
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I beg to move the first of the Motions standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman on the Order Paper.
The Housing Act 1996 gave local authorities new powers to adopt registration schemes for houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). It was intended that local authorities should be able to charge a non-refundable fee on application to recoup some of their costs of processing applications for registration. However, we have concluded that the provisions of the 1996 Act do not enable authorities to charge a fee unless and until registration is granted.
We are concerned that that may leave authorities that have adopted control schemes out of pocket, particularly if there are large numbers of HMOs in a poor condition in their area. It may also deter them from chasing landlords of poor-quality HMOs to ensure that they comply with their duty to apply for registration. However, authorities may be reluctant to adopt these schemes if they are unable to charge a fee until registration is agreed.
These regulations will enable authorities with control schemes to charge a non-refundable fee when application for registration is made. They are made under the power in Section 150 of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989. This power has previously been used to enable authorities to charge fees under HMO registration schemes adopted prior to the Housing Act 1996. The fee stipulated by the regulations is subject to a maximum of £60 per habitable room, which was prescribed by the Houses in Multiple Occupation (Fees for Registration Schemes) Order 1997. This order will also be amended to provide that where a fee has been paid on application under the regulations, no further fee will be payable on registration. I therefore ask the House to approve the making of the regulations.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 22nd June be approved [39th Report from the Joint Committee].—(Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton.)
Lord Bowness: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her explanation. From these Benches we are content that the regulations be approved.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers' Compensation) (Payment of Claims) Amendment Regulations 1998
7.59 p.m.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 2nd July be approved [40th Report from the Joint Committee].
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I beg to move the second of the Motions standing on the Order Paper in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman. These regulations are being made under the Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers' Compensation) Act 1979. The purpose of the regulations is to increase by 4.9 per cent. the amounts of compensation paid under the Act to those who first satisfy all the conditions of entitlement on or after 1st September 1998.
The Act provides for lump sum payments to be made to sufferers from certain dust-related diseases, or, when the sufferers have died, to their dependants, where there is no realistic chance of success through the courts.
I feel sure that all noble Lords will recognise that no amount of money will ever compensate individuals and families for their suffering and loss. These regulations do, however, allow us to ensure that the compensation provided for in the original Act maintains its value. I commend the regulations to the House.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 2nd July be approved [40th Report from the Joint Committee].—(Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton.)
Lord Ewing of Kirkford: My Lords, I wish to ask my noble friend who is introducing the amendment regulations to what industries the regulations apply. My understanding is that for many years the pneumoconiosis regulations applied only to the mining industry. I now understand that they apply also to the Welsh slate industries and to a number of other industries.
The regulations are very welcome and the Government are to be congratulated on the increase announced by the Minister today, although victims suffer greatly as a result of the illness. I wish to get it on the record tonight that we are talking about not only the coal-mining industry, but also the slate-mining industry, particularly in relation to Wales.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his question. Those covered are sufferers from respiratory industrial diseases caused
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by dust, irrespective of industry, and, if the sufferer has died, their dependants. Most coal-miners do not need to rely on this scheme because a special scheme exists.
The diseases covered in the Act are pneumoconiosis, which includes silicosis associated with slate-quarrying, mentioned by my noble friend; asbestosis and kaolinosis associated with china clay; byssinosis, associated with cotton dust exposure, which affects areas such as the North-West and people who worked in the textile industry; and diffuse mesothelioma, asbestos-related cancer.
There may be other categories to which I am unable to refer at the moment. If that is the case, I shall write to my noble friend.
Lord Bowness: My Lords, we are content that the regulations be approved.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Community Drivers' Hours and Recording Equipment (Amendment) Regulations 1998
8.3 p.m.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 22nd June be approved [39th Report from the Joint Committee].
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I beg to move the third Motion standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman. I welcome this opportunity to explain in more detail the proposed amendment to the regulations.
There are two elements. The first amends Part VI of the Transport Act 1968 so that the European Union regulation which requires the fitment and use of tachographs can continue to be implemented correctly within Great Britain. The second element extends an existing exemption from the same regulations for health authority vehicles to include vehicles used by National Health Service trusts.
The first change arises from a recent High Court judgment which has thrown doubt upon whether Part VI of the Transport Act 1968 accurately reflects the intention of the relevant European Union regulations on drivers' hours and tachographs.
The regulations apply to vehicles used for the carriage of goods, but the recent case was dismissed on the grounds that the vehicle was not a "goods vehicle". That stemmed from the wording in Part VI of the Transport Act 1968 which refers to "goods vehicles" rather than,
"vehicles used for the carriage of goods".
As I have said, that is what the regulations state.
This first so-called "change" merely reinstates what until recently was the generally accepted meaning of the European Union regulations as they have been enforced up to now by the Police and Vehicle Inspectorate. It does not introduce any new requirement.
Secondly, the rules on tachographs apply only to vehicles being used for commercial purposes. So a tachograph will not have to be fitted to an off-road vehicle which is being used, for example, to tow a horse-box, caravan or trailer for private or recreational purposes.
Thirdly, not all commercial activities are caught by the regulations. There are a number of exemptions, depending on the nature of the operation being undertaken and, in some cases, the distance travelled.
I now turn to the second change. There is an exemption from the European Union regulations for vehicles used by public authorities to provide public services which are not in competition with professional road hauliers. This exemption is applied in Great Britain by a 1986 regulation which exempts vehicles being used by health authorities as ambulances to carry staff, patients, medical supplies or equipment. This wording does not extend to vehicles used by National Health Service trusts set up under the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. As National Health Service trusts are already established as public authorities in law, it is only right that this exemption should be extended to include them. I commend the regulations to the House.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 22nd June be approved [39th Report from the Joint Committee].—(Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton.)
Lord Ewing of Kirkford: My Lords, perhaps I may raise what I regard as an important point in relation to National Health Service trusts. In what position does this place the passengers who are carried by patient transport services which are organised by National Health Service trusts?
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, in order to be certain that in an area of what may be detailed law I give my noble friend absolutely accurate information, I should prefer to take advice and write to him. I shall place a copy of the reply in the Library.
Ambulances are exempt from the provisions of the order regulations because they are exempt from EU drivers' hours rules, but they are still subject to the UK domestic drivers' hours rules. I shall write to my noble friend.
Viscount Simon: My Lords, notwithstanding what the Minister has just said, drivers' hours are there to protect the public from people who drive for excessive hours and are therefore dangerous when they are behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. It may be an ambulance, heavy goods vehicle or whatever. Consequently, I do not understand why ambulances should be exempt. An ambulance driver can be equally as tired as anyone else behind a wheel. As such people are supposed to be in the business of providing transport to and from hospitals for people who are or have been ill, it does not make sense to me. Can the Minister explain?
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, the best explanation I can give my noble friend Lord Simon
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is that, while they are exempt from the EU drivers' hours rules, they are still subject to the UK domestic drivers' hours rules. If I have any further information to offer him, I will write to my noble friend.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Deregulation (Exchangeable Driving Licences) Order 1998
8.10 p.m.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 25th March be approved [26th Report from the Deregulation Committee].—(Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton.)
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I beg to move the fourth Motion standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman.
This proposal would change certain legislative provisions governing the issue of British driving licences. It would introduce some flexibility into the present arrangements for allowing drivers from certain other countries to exchange their licences for British ones without having to pass a British driving test. As well as saving the time and expense involved in passing a test, this would benefit some drivers by enhancing their availability for a wider range of employment.
The proposal concerns persons taking up residence here from a country outside the European Economic Area (EEA). At present, anyone coming to live here from outside the EEA may drive small vehicles for up to a year on their licence. Thereafter they must generally pass a British driving test to continue to have the right to drive, unless they hold a licence issued in a country which is designated by law for the purpose of exchange of licences. Once a country is so designated, its licences may be exchanged, as a matter of course, subject only to the holders meeting the normal British requirements on health and minimum ages.
The current provision for designating countries was first introduced in 1983 and has not been significantly amended since. It enables the Secretary of State to designate a country for exchange of licences, if satisfactory provision for the granting of licences to drive motor vehicles is made by the laws of that country. Of the criteria usually used to determine whether the provision is satisfactory, the principal one is whether the driving test is of comparable standard to the British test, although the arrangements for granting a licence are also important. Twelve countries have been designated to date.
The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, was kind enough to intimate in advance that he wishes to know how the proposal deals with countries made up of states which have separate administrations for driving licences. In such cases the standards in all states would have to be acceptable to allow the country to be considered as a candidate for designation. Should there be any further information or more detail that would be of help to the noble Lord, I shall be pleased to write to him.
The proposed order will remove the requirement that certain persons holding licences issued by a country outside the European Economic Area must pass a test in Great Britain so that, first, where a person holds a licence issued by a country which is not currently designated for exchange purposes, he need not pass a test if the Secretary of State is satisfied that his licence was properly issued or was at least properly issued in respect of some of his driving entitlements; and, secondly, where a person holds a licence which is issued by a country currently designated for exchange purposes and includes entitlement to drive some classes of goods or passenger-carrying vehicle, he need not pass a test in order to upgrade his entitlement to include those vehicles if the Secretary of State is satisfied his licence was properly issued in respect of them.
The protection of the general public will not be reduced by the proposed order. The proposal will remove a burden from what is likely to be a significant number of new residents, without compromising road safety interests. As such, I commend it to your Lordships.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 25th March be approved. [26th Report from the Deregulation Committee].—(Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton.)
Lord Ewing of Kirkford: My Lords, I have already asked my noble friend Lady Farrington two awkward questions. I know that this order is not about exchanging my driving licence for that of someone from Belgium, Germany or France. But I can understand that someone from those countries may want to exchange their driving licence for mine after 40 years offence-free driving in my case.
All I want to do at this time is to pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Farrington and to place on the record our appreciation of the way in which she dealt with these matters.
Lord Bowness: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for dealing with the question I raised before this evening's discussion. When she considers whether or not to write to me with further information, perhaps she will deal specifically with the question of countries that are organised on a federal basis. Does that mean that we could have a situation where licences issued by one of those states were acceptable for exchange, but licences issued by other states were not? Or are we saying that we have to wait for a situation where all the jurisdictions within that country issue licences on an acceptable basis before the country as a whole can be part of the order?
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, my understanding is that in such a case the standards in all states would have to be acceptable to allow the country to be considered as a candidate. Should it be otherwise, I will write to the noble Lord.
Baroness Thomas of Walliswood: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her response, which will assist in settling one of our major worries in regard to this order.
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I have no further objections. However, I should like to associate myself with the comments that have already been made. They do not surprise me because I know of the noble Baroness's competence from some time ago. Before I sit down, perhaps I can ask the noble Baroness to convey to her noble friend Lady Hayman our best wishes for her son.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Walliswood. My noble friend's son broke his wrist and obviously she wished to return home. If the answers have not been quite as comprehensive as they might have been, it is because I had inadequate time to brief myself.
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Lord Hoyle: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now adjourn during pleasure until 8.40 p.m.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
[The Sitting was suspended from 8.17 to 8.40 p.m.]

Scotland Bill
House again in Committee on Schedule 3.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish moved Amendment No. 127:
Page 61, line 43, at end insert—
("(4) The standing orders shall include provision that a committee, which may not delegate its functions to another committee or sub-committee, shall be appointed with the function of considering accounts and reports laid before the Parliament in pursuance of section 66(1).
(5) The standing orders shall provide that—

(a) no member of the Scottish Executive may be a member of the committee appointed under sub-paragraph (4), and

(b) the person chairing that committee may not be—

(i) a person representing a party of which any of the Scottish Ministers are members, or

(ii) if each of the parties in the Parliament have one or more of the Scottish Ministers as a member, a person representing the party of which the First Minister is a member.").

The noble Lord said: This is an important amendment because it deals with the financial controls which will be exercised in the new parliament. In Clause 66 there is sketched out for us the financial controls which the Government will put in place from day one for the new parliament. As far as they go, they are reasonable. They deal with accounting and auditing matters. In particular, subsection (1)(f) refers to,
"the publication of parliamentary accounts and of reports on such accounts and for the laying of such accounts and reports before the Parliament".
So the parliament will get reports. It will get reports from the government of Scotland, if I may call it that, and from the auditor general, who will have exercised his independent and very important function.
However, as far as I can see, there is little detail—I may be wrong about this—about how the parliament will exercise control and oversight over financial

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matters, and in particular over the reports of the auditor general. My amendment specifies essentially the system of parliamentary controls which are in place in the other place, which is where these financial matters are dealt with. My amendment would ensure that there is provision in the standing orders for the equivalent of the Public Accounts Committee, with some of the important safeguards associated with that committee.
Subsection (5) of my amendment states:
"no member of the Scottish Executive may be a member of the committee".
I would not expect a member of the executive to be a member of the committee. However, for the removal of any doubt, I have included that provision. What is more important is subsection (5)(b)(ii) which concerns the person chairing the committee. That makes it perfectly clear that the chairman should not be a member of the governing party or parties. That is very much in accord with what happens in the other place, where, always, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee is a member of the Opposition party.
I have also taken into account what might happen if all four parties got into a grand coalition, although I suspect that that is taking consensus politics about 10 bridges too far. The governing party here cannot conceive of such an amazing consensus. If I had not put that in, it would have been conceiving of it and telling me that that is why my amendment was defective. I have got to the pass before it. The amendment says clearly that, if all four parties form a grand coalition—there would be no chairman of the public accounts committee—the debar would be on the party of which the first minister was a member. It could be any of the other three parties, but not the one of which the first minister was a member.
I am sure that I do not have to explain to your Lordships the importance of the Public Accounts Committee in the other place. It is an extremely influential committee. Its reports are highly influential and are read with great care by governments. They are taken into account in a very serious way. Arguably, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee is by far the most powerful Back-Bencher in the House of Commons; and so he would be in the Scottish parliament.
My right honourable friend in the other place, who is the current chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Mr. David Davis, proposed a number of amendments to the Bill at the Committee stage in the House of Commons. He received a number of assurances from Mr. Henry McLeish, the Minister in charge of devolution. Referring to the whole question of the standing orders and what is in the Bill, Mr. McLeish said:
"It is only a framework. For the reasons I have given, the Parliament must be responsible for the detail".
I have no great argument with that. He went on to say:
"In framing that detail, it can incorporate—if it so wishes—the suggestions featured in these amendments"—
the amendments regarding a public accounts committee—
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"such as the establishment of a Committee similar to the Public Accounts Committee. I have no hesitation in saying that I hope that the Parliament will do that. My experience as a member of the Committee was excellent, and it does invaluable work. However, the Parliament should be able to decide on the best way forward, even though my preference would be to go for a Public Accounts Committee".—[Official Report, Commons, 12/2/98; col. 637.]
So the Government were saying that if it were left to them—if they were in the Scottish parliament—they would have a public accounts committee, but they were not going to go as far as to say that there ought to be one.
The position improved a little because on 19th May on Report, when my right honourable friend returned to the matter, Mr. Henry McLeish said:
"On a second and perhaps more positive note, a meeting of the all-party consultative steering group yesterday agreed that, as part of the Standing Orders, we might want to identify a few Committees to recommend to the Scottish Parliament, and that one would be the equivalent of the Public Accounts Committee. Hopefully, that will satisfy the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, and ensure that the integrity of the person who chairs such a Committee is beyond doubt".—[Official Report, Commons, 19/5/98; col. 763.]
My right honourable friend Mr. David Davis had started his speech with the words, "Clearly, I welcome", when the curtain came down in the other place and mystery surrounds what he was welcoming. I am sure that I can speak for him when I say that I welcome the assurances. But given the assurances, I fail to see why we cannot put something on the face of the Bill along the lines I suggest.
I can understand it if the Government say that they do not want to specify everything on the face of the Bill and that they must leave such matters to the parliament or, in this case, to the consultative steering committee, which is working on this matter. But this is rather a zig-zag issue in that some matters clearly ought to be left to the parliament; some ought to be dealt with by us in the Bill; and some matters fall in the middle. I am sure that we could have many happy hours of argument—and we will have—as to where each one falls. I think the equivalent of the Public Accounts Committee falls firmly as something that ought to be put on the face of the Bill. There are far less important matters on the face of the Bill regarding how the parliament will work than a public accounts committee.
I appreciate that this House has less to do with these matters than the other place. It is after all the other place which votes the money and which is responsible for raising the money. The other place is also responsible for spending it. As the great bulk of the money going to the Scottish parliament will come from the United Kingdom Parliament, and as the spending of that money will be very much left to the Scottish parliament—I have no complaint about that—there is something to be said for this Parliament laying down clearly to the Scottish parliament that we expect a public accounts committee, or something named differently if that is what is wanted, as we do not want to call the first minister the Prime Minister and we do not want to call the presiding officer the Speaker. I have avoided all that

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by not naming the committee at all but by referring to it as a committee for,
"considering accounts and reports laid before the Parliament in pursuance of section 66(1)".
We should put that in the Bill and make sure that the standing orders make provision for the committee. I am not bothered about its total formation but the chairmanship, which is all-important. There may be a parliament with four parties where no one has an overall majority. There may be a temptation not to make the stipulation that the chairman ought not to be a member of the governing party. While I do not believe my previous point about taking account of a situation where all four parties would be in a grand coalition, I suspect that two or three may be in a coalition and they may not be very happy about a member of the fourth party being given such a powerful position. I can imagine a situation where that might arise. We should not leave it to the parliament to do what Mr. McLeish said he clearly hoped that it would do. This is a case where we should turn the hope of the Minister and of the other place into clear detail in the Bill. I beg to move.
Viscount Thurso: I have listened attentively to the argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish. I find it persuasive in some respects. I am certainly sympathetic to the thrust of what he is trying to do. The core of the matter is in the principle of what we allow the Scottish parliament to do and what we do not. The litmus test must be that whatever we oblige it to do from this Parliament, it is clearly something where we believe that there is a danger in some form so that we must oblige it to have the committee.
It is important that we have considerable trust in the Scottish parliament and the people in it. Therefore, we should allow them to make the decisions. Having weighed up the balance of the two arguments, I come down on the side of allowing the Scottish parliament to make up its own mind. Having listened to the Minister's response to my last question, which greatly reassured me, I feel certain that that is the correct way forward.
Lord Sewel: I do not believe that there is any difference at all between us as to where we want to get to on this matter. I suppose a difference is whether we want to provide a framework that enables the parliament to make its own decisions and accept responsibility for its own affairs or whether we want to provide a nanny Bill which tries to cross every "t" and dot every "i". I have made it clear that the approach we have tried to adopt all the way through is to give as much decision-making power in its internal affairs to the parliament itself.
It is paramount that the parliament puts in place the appropriate machinery to examine the financial affairs of the executive. The Bill already provides for that in Clause 66(3) which states,
"Standing orders shall provide for the consideration by the Parliament of accounts and reports laid before it in pursuance of",
the subsection which the noble Lord, Lord Mackay, quoted. There is a little more in the Bill than the noble
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Lord indicated. There is a requirement to produce standing orders that put in place how reports and accounts will be considered by the parliament. That is pretty well a sufficient degree of detail.
As I said, the Bill requires that, but how the parliament achieves it in its committee structure is for the parliament itself to decide. I make it clear that there is absolutely nothing to stop it having the equivalent of the PAC and adopting the Westminster model. That may not necessarily be the case. I appreciate the words of my honourable friend in another place, Mr. McLeish, on how much value he puts on the PAC model. I offer the thought that that might not be the only model that the parliament wishes to consider. It may consider that another approach may be more effective; for example, subject committees, which might also play a role in the scrutiny of value for money. That would give real responsibility for investigating performance as well as policy in particular areas.
Under that regime any audit committee might then concentrate on regulatory and propriety matters. The difficulty with the amendment as phrased is that it makes that kind of arrangement impossible. It is very tightly and deliberately drawn by the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish. It reads,
"a committee, which may not delegate its functions to another committee or sub-committee".
So it is actually forcing consideration very much into the relative straitjacket of the PAC-type model. It does not allow for the degree of flexibility which would, on the one hand, allow for the audit committee but, on the other, allow some of the probing on consideration of accounts, and particularly in relation to the value-for-money area, to be carried out by subject committees. In that capacity one would have thought that the specialist knowledge that the subject committees built up might play a useful and helpful part in the considerations.
As I say, there is nothing between us in terms of the degree of importance that we attach to making sure that the parliament puts in place the appropriate mechanisms to enable proper audit and the consideration of financial reports and accounts. That is covered and envisaged in the Bill as it stands in Clause 66(3). I imagine that that is going to be one of the first matters that the parliament will set its mind to; namely, how to bring that to reality. We have been making sure that the parliament and the executive are given the best possible advice on the matter. The consultative steering group and the financial issues advisory group have been charged, as the noble Lord indicated, and they are beginning to come to conclusions about the best way forward. Because there is a general recognition of the need to have robust mechanisms in place, the actual details are best left to the parliament itself.
Lord Thomas of Gresford: In supporting what the Minister said a moment ago, I make this point. It is

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certainly right that the Scottish parliament meets and, as its first matter, brings a committee of this sort into reality. If in practice that committee, first formed, does not work in the way envisaged, the Scottish parliament can immediately, and without returning to Westminster for primary legislation, change the system it has put into operation.
It is not simply that the Scottish parliament chooses the first way of running various things, but it is its ability to alter in the light of experience and circumstances which is important. For that reason we believe devolution means no more than placing a framework around the structures and organisations of the Scottish parliament and of the national assembly in Wales and leaving it to those bodies which will be elected to use their common sense in order to produce the right solutions to meet the problems that they have to face.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: I suppose that I should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for adopting his usual position and coming to the defence of the Government. It may be that I should welcome the Scottish Bill. I suspect that the noble Lord is here to wreak vengeance on the Scots for my appearance from time to time on the Welsh Bill. Perhaps I should apologise to the Committee for taking that point of view.
I have listened to the Minister with care and his reply half satisfies me. I listened to the words used. There is no difference between us as to where we want to go. However, I want to make sure that we get there. The Minister is content to leave it to the parliament or the advisory committee. However, the committee, unless it is misnamed, is only advisory and the parliament need not accept its advice. I fully understand that we do not want a Bill which appears to nanny the Scottish parliament into existence. There are already many provisions in this Bill that deserve that description and are less important than a properly constituted public accounts-type committee to monitor how the executive spends its money.
I do not believe that subject committees are a substitute. Like local authorities where subject committees as opposed to finance committees are keener on spending money than controlling it, the subject committees of the Scottish parliament will be in the same vein. I prefer to have a committee whose exclusive purpose is the control and monitoring of the way that the executive spends its money.
While I am pleased to hear the assurances of the noble Lord, as my colleague was pleased to hear the assurances of Mr. McLeish, they do not go far enough. I do not know who will be successful in the elections to the Scottish parliament. When I look at the lists of the parties I see a fair clutch of councillors. When I look at Scottish councils, North Lanarkshire and East Ayrshire do not spring to mind as role models for financial probity. As this Parliament is to send a considerable amount of money to the Scottish parliament, I believe
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that it has the right to suggest that the latter sets up a public accounts committee. I regard this matter as very important and I desire to test the opinion of the House.
9.2 p.m.
On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 127) shall be agreed to?
Their Lordships divided: Contents, 34; Not-Contents, 70.

Division No. 1

CONTENTS

Astor, V.

Mackay of Drumadoon, L.

Attlee, E.

Norrie, L.

Balfour, E.

Quinton, L.

Brougham and Vaux, L.

Rawlings, B.

Byford, B.

Renton, L.

Campbell of Alloway, L.

Rowallan, L.

Carnegy of Lour, B.

Saltoun of Abernethy, Ly.

Courtown, E. [Teller.]

Sanderson of Bowden, L.

Denbigh, E.

Seccombe, B. [Teller.]

Dundee, E.

Selkirk of Douglas, L.

Hardwicke, E.

Sempill, L.

Kingsland, L.

Skelmersdale, L.

Kintore, E.

Stair, E.

Lane of Horsell, L.

Stodart of Leaston, L.

Lucas, L.

Trefgarne, L.

Lyell, L.

Wedgwood, L.

Mackay of Ardbrecknish, L.

Wise, L.

NOT-CONTENTS

Addington, L.

Islwyn, L.

Alderdice, L.

Janner of Braunstone, L.

Allenby of Megiddo, V.

Jay of Paddington, B.

Archer of Sandwell, L.

Jeger, B.

Avebury, L.

Kennedy of The Shaws, B.

Blackstone, B.

Kilbracken, L.

Borrie, L.

Lester of Herne Hill, L.

Carlisle, E.

Levy, L.

Carter, L. [Teller.]

Linklater of Butterstone, B.

Chandos, V.

McIntosh of Haringey, L. [Teller.]

Clinton-Davis, L.

Cocks of Hartcliffe, L.

Mackie of Benshie, L.

Davies of Coity, L.

McNair, L.

Davies of Oldham, L.

Maddock, B.

Desai, L.

Mar and Kellie, E.

Dixon, L.

Molloy, L.

Donoughue, L.

Monkswell, L.

Dormand of Easington, L.

Montague of Oxford, L.

Dubs, L.

Pitkeathley, B.

Ewing of Kirkford, L.

Ramsay of Cartvale, B.

Falconer of Thoroton, L.

Randall of St. Budeaux, L.

Razzall, L.

Farrington of Ribbleton, B.

Redesdale, L.

Gilbert, L.

Rendell of Babergh, B.

Gordon of Strathblane, L.

Richard, L. [Lord Privy Seal.]

Grenfell, L.

Russell, E.

Hacking, L.

Scotland of Asthal, B.

Hanworth, V.

Sewel, L.

Hardie, L.

Simon, V.

Hardy of Wath, L.

Symons of Vernham Dean, B.

Haskel, L.

Thomas of Gresford, L.

Hilton of Eggardon, B.

Thurso, V.

Hoyle, L.

Tope, L.

Hughes, L.

Watson of Invergowrie, L.

Hughes of Woodside, L.

Whitty, L.

Hunt of Kings Heath, L.

Young of Old Scone, B.

Resolved in the negative, and amendment disagreed to accordingly.
9.10 p.m.
[Amendment No. 128 not moved.]
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish moved Amendment No. 129:
Page 62, line 5, at end insert—
("Scrutiny of delegated legislation
The standing orders shall include provision for the exercise of appropriate control by the Parliament over the passage of delegated legislation created by a Scottish Minister by virtue of this Act or under powers conferred by the Parliament.").
The noble Lord said: I beg to move Amendment No. 129. This amendment is about the scrutiny of delegated legislation. Under governments of all political parties the amount of delegated legislation has increased enormously. In this House we have set up a Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Deregulation. Indeed, I was one of its founder members. Then I fell to be one of its victims when some of my legislation was called into question by that committee. I have to say in my defence that I immediately took on board what that committee said and tabled suitable amendments.
That Select Committee looks for Henry VIII clauses in particular, and tries to judge, and to point the House in the direction of, the correctness of the chosen route for the approval of secondary legislation. I refer to whether it should be by the affirmative procedure or the negative procedure. Occasionally the committee tells Ministers and the House that perhaps a power is a Henry VIII-type power and that rather than using the negative procedure, approval should be by means of the affirmative procedure. I think I can safely say that the previous government very much listened to what the committee said and that so far this Government have done likewise. However, that is just one aspect of this. I refer to looking at powers as they are constructed in primary legislation.
This amendment deals with what we do with delegated legislation when it comes before a parliament. In this House we have a convention not to divide. The noble Earl, Lord Russell—he is unfortunately not in his place although I saw him earlier—has found some ingenious ways round that convention without actually breaking it as I also know—not, I am happy to say to my cost as I always managed to win, but at least it caused a little trouble.
Under the Statutory Instruments Act 1946, both Houses must consider all affirmative orders. A huge number of negative instruments are laid before Parliament and never discussed. The figure runs into hundreds in a Session. The House, of course, has a right to discuss them as we have 40 days in which to table a prayer. In the other place, if it is agreed to have a debate (through, I suspect, the usual channels) they are Standing Committee debates of an hour and a half. Noble Lords who were once Members of the other House will remember some happy hours and a half dealing with secondary legislation. The Joint Select Committee of both Houses considers statutory
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instruments as to the form in which they are and the legal propriety. The financial ones are laid before the Commons alone and treated by a Commons committee.
Lord Renton: I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. It is important that he should stress that it is a question of whether they are ultra vires, within the power, that that joint committee has to consider above all.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: I am grateful to my noble friend, who knows a great deal about these matters. By "legal propriety" I meant that they are within the vires of the original Act. My amendment does not lay down what should be the appropriate controls. I am content that the detail should be left to the Scottish parliament. It may wish to use a method different from the one used here. It might be too much to hope that it would use a method which would improve the scrutiny of secondary legislation, and that more secondary legislation might be scrutinised by the Scottish parliament than is scrutinised here. That might come about, because the Scottish parliament will obviously not have as much as the other place does. One can only hope.
I am not laying down the details; I am merely saying that the:
"standing orders shall include provision for the exercise",
of such delegated legislation, when the Scottish parliament comes into being. It is an important matter. Many Members of the Committee take part in serious debates on legislation on the propriety of the Government seeking powers via secondary legislation. Part of that argument is always the lack of control by both Houses of this Parliament of secondary legislation. I hope that the parliament in Scotland might do rather better. I beg to move.
9.15 p.m.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: We should not forget that this Holyrood parliament will not have a second chamber. This is an important amendment which should receive serious consideration by the Government.
Lord Hope of Craighead: The amendment touches upon the area of judicial scrutiny as well as parliamentary scrutiny, because if there is a defect in the delegated legislation, because it falls outside the competence of the parliament—I am looking particularly at Schedule 6 which lists the devolution issues—the legislation will be vulnerable to attack. I think that I am picking up the point made a moment ago by the noble Lord, Lord Renton: one of the crucial points of scrutiny is to scrutinise the vires of the delegated legislation.
In the case of the Scottish parliament, that will raise a number of complex issues affecting European Community law, human rights law and the rights of the Scottish parliament itself. Anything that could be done to ensure that delegated legislation was as secure as possible against challenge should be done. In that connection, I was struck by a point made by the noble

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and learned Lord the Lord Advocate when Clause 1(4) was being discussed. He may well remember that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, was suggesting that that clause was unnecessary. If I picked up correctly the reply made by the noble and learned Lord it was that it was desirable to include that subsection in Clause 1 to ensure the provisions passed by the parliament were as secure as possible against attack.
I support entirely that philosophy. The amendment falls into that category. It is a mechanism which will tend to make the delegated legislation as secure as possible against attack. Some steps have been taken in the Bill to try to provide protection. I can see in paragraph 2 of Schedule 6 a provision which attempts to deal with the possibility of frivolous or vexatious complaints. It may be difficult for a court, when faced with a complaint challenging delegated legislation on the ground of lack of vires, to say immediately that that complaint is frivolous or vexatious. My concern is that delegated legislation may be subject to question and cause uncertainty. The amendment is a step at least in the direction of securing certainty.
Lord Selkirk of Douglas: I wonder whether in answering the amendment the Minister could turn her attention to the earliest date when the standing orders could be published. I am referring in particular to the draft standing orders. Will the Minister tell the Committee whether the draft standing orders are now in existence? Obviously the Government would wish to take into account the views expressed in Parliament and the wording of the statute. It would be of great help if the Committee could be told the earliest possible date that they could come into existence. In deciding such matters, the Scottish Parliament will want to have draft standing orders before it before it can approve them and before they receive the force which standing orders approved by Parliament receive. If the Minister can enlighten us on this point, it would be a great help.
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: My Lords, we have had now a number of debates about what it is appropriate for this Parliament to require the Scottish parliament to include in its standing orders. Amendment No. 129 raises yet another point on what is becoming familiar ground.
We stated in paragraph 9.1 of the White Paper that there should be a minimum of legislation and wherever possible we would leave it to the Scottish parliament to decide for itself what its procedures should be. While the Bill requires standing orders to address a number of aspects to do with the passage of primary legislation, it is, quite properly in my view, silent on the procedures for secondary legislation.
However, I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, that it is important that the parliament should have appropriate control over the passage of delegated legislation. I do not think that anyone would dispute that. I agree with the importance that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, stressed, in his intervention on the amendment. Indeed, the
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amendment reflects a suggestion made by the Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Deregulation—in which the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, has such a special interest—which drew attention to the Bill's lack of prescription on this point. Noble Lords will have noted that the report of the committee was generally favourable. On this particular point the committee accepted that,
"it will be for the Parliament to decide in the case of each new delegated legislative power what is the right measure of scrutiny and control".
It did not make a recommendation but suggested that,
"the House may wish to consider whether Schedule 3 (Standing Orders) should be amended to make plain that Standing Orders will, in fact, address the issue".
I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me if I repeat something which has been said a number of times now: that this new parliament will, we believe, without doubt be a responsible body. It must be right that the Scottish parliament is able to decide its procedures for itself. Since we are devolving power to the parliament, we are anxious to allow the parliament the discretion to exercise this power and we think we should trust it to exercise it properly.
Various provisions in the Bill envisage that the parliament will make provision for the scrutiny of legislation. For example, Clause 106 translates references to procedure at Westminster to procedure in the Scottish parliament for subordinate legislation-making powers which will transfer to the Scottish ministers. But we felt that the detailed parliamentary procedures for the subordinate legislation were better left for the Scottish parliament to devise.
The noble Lord, Lord Selkirk of Douglas, asked me about the publication of draft standing orders. There are no draft standing orders at present in existence because the consultative steering group which we have now talked about on various occasions, chaired by my honourable friend Mr. Henry McLeish with representatives of all the Scottish political parties, is still meeting on that subject. It is expected to report by the end of December. The Secretary of State will then prescribe an initial set of orders which will be available next spring.
I am sure that we can rely on the parliament to make provision for the scrutiny of subordinate legislation in its standing orders. The Select Committee made only one recommendation. It drew to the attention of the House the extent of Henry VIII powers and the suggestion that the affirmative procedure would be appropriate for the exercise of these powers. We are giving careful consideration to what the Select Committee said and we will certainly return to the issue when we consider Clauses 101, 102 and 103, which deal with subordinate legislation.
However, I do not wish to imply that the Government are intransigent on this matter. We are certainly willing to look at it again and tell the House how we feel at the next stage of the Bill. I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Rodger of Earlsferry: I was comforted by the concluding words of the noble Baroness. As one looks

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at the schedule, it is hard to imagine that the Government did not believe that the parliament would make standing orders for the reporting and publishing of proceedings but nevertheless have included a particular provision for that. I cannot imagine that the Government would be happy if the parliament did not have some mechanism in place for reviewing secondary legislation. Indeed, it has been implied that that is expected.
In that situation, I cannot see that any harm would be done by including a provision along the lines outlined in the amendment. As my noble and learned friend Lord Hope said, it is a matter of the very greatest importance. Everyone wishes to ensure that the legislation is as secure as possible. I hope that on further reflection the Government reach the view that the provision should be included.
Lord Renton: I am pleased that the Minister has said that the Government are willing to consider the issue again. It is very important. She made one comment about which I hope she will be cautious in future. She said that we must assume that the parliament will be a responsible body. That greatly depends upon which party is government in that parliament. It is safer for us to get things right rather than to take chances of that kind.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her last few words. At first I thought that we were going to get a "No, no, no". However, we got a "No, no" and then a "Maybe". Of course I appreciate that the Bill largely deals with procedures for primary legislation, but I hope that that does not imply that secondary legislation is of less importance. It can be of the greatest importance, especially as this parliament—and I have no doubt in future the Scottish parliament—tends to pass Bills of a more skeletal nature than was once the case with many order-making powers. Some Bills that were passed through this Parliament by my own party were very dependent on secondary legislation, and I have little doubt that the same will be true of the present Government. Therefore, the issue of secondary legislation is important.
While the Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee rightly stated that the correct procedure must be highlighted in any legislation which the Scottish parliament passes for secondary legislation—the procedure that should be used and whether it should be an affirmative or a negative-type procedure—it did not say much about the control that the parliament might exercise on that secondary legislation.
The noble Baroness was wise to suggest that the Government would ponder on what was said because the noble and learned Lords, Lord Hope and Lord Rodger, had intervened to highlight the real problem about the vires and the requirement to make delegated legislation as secure from attack as possible. My noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Drumadoon pointed me to Schedule 6, paragraph 1(b) where it seems clear that the courts might be asked to judge legislative competence even before the parliament has agreed to a piece of secondary legislation by whichever mechanism it is to decide on that. Therefore, the noble Baroness
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was wise to say in conclusion that she would take the matter away. With those first words of comfort which we have received from her in the course of the Committee stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
9.30 p.m.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Baroness Linklater of Butterstone moved Amendment No. 129A:
Page 62, line 5, at end insert—
(""Regulation of lobbying activities
6. The standing orders shall include provision for the regulation of the lobbying activities of individuals and companies in relation to the work of the Parliament.").
The noble Baroness said: The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that lobbying in the Scottish parliament is regulated properly. That subject has become extremely topical once again with the Prime Minister being reported in The Times today as backing the idea of a statutory register of lobbyists and the introduction of a quarantine system for ex-political advisers before they join lobbying firms.
Whether we like it or not, lobbyists have increasingly become part of the paraphernalia of political life and have a role to play when they behave properly. When they abide by the rules, they can play a helpful role in such matters as interpreting Bills for companies or acting as go-betweens between industry and other groups and Parliament. However, they are go-betweens and in many ways, by coming between government and the electorate, they can interfere with the process of communication and even emphasise the gap between the two.
How a government communicate with their electorate says quite a lot about them and this Government seem to rely increasingly on that form of communication to interpret and spin, from Mr. Mandelson down.
The experience of the recent past—the zeal and enthusiasm for dealing in government information and selling it to clients and even selling access to a Minister—has demonstrated the risks associated with that activity. Such a way of dealing with government information is not something that we wish to see in Holyrood. Only last week the noble and learned Lord, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie—I am sorry to see that he is no longer in his place because I should like to hear his views—launched a new lobbying group of his own from the august premises of the New Club in Edinburgh. So, already the bees are preparing to swarm around the new honeypot. But the noble and learned Lord, Lord Fraser, has pledged that he would back a code of ethics and a system of regulation by the Scottish parliament.
The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, is reported to be drawing up a new code of conduct for lobbyists in the next few days, an initiative which can only be warmly welcomed. I understand that it is on the cards that the Neill Committee could be asked to examine the role of lobbyists. So now at Westminster action is being taken to tighten up on the activities of that layer of political consultation.
Before the Scottish parliament comes into being we should like to see it laid down clearly that:
"The standing orders shall include provision for the regulation of [such] lobbying activities".
The Government may take a lead from the Association of Political Consultants. Its code of conduct recommends, for example, that its members should not have passes to the Palace of Westminster and should not,
"place themselves in a position of a potential conflict of interest by appointing any MP, MEP or sitting Peer to their main or any subsidiary board or by paying any retainer or commission",
to any of those people. One may well add MSPs to the list.
However, as we have already been discussing and agreeing at some length, precisely what form the regulations should take must be for the Scottish parliament to decide. But it is important that from the word go the new parliament is seen to protect itself as far as possible from the excesses that we have seen in the recent past at Westminster. I beg to move.
Lord Renton: I believe that the noble Baroness deserves support for this amendment as far as it goes. However, the trouble that we have learned about in recent months and about which I had a Starred Question last week is not merely the lobbying of Members of Parliament. The problem was—we are all very glad to note that the Government are doing something about it—that there was lobbying of civil servants and lobbying in relation to the work of the Government. Therefore, if this amendment is passed, on Report we should add an amendment to the effect that it should apply to the work of the parliament or of the executive.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie: I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising this important subject. Perhaps I should declare an interest in that I am what she described as one of the "bees" who will perhaps be swarming around the "honeypot" of the Scottish parliament in years to come. As an alternative, I should very much like to be an elected member of that parliament, but that is for others to decide.
As the noble Baroness said, it is a topical issue and I welcome the very measured tones in which she introduced the amendment. In the light of media coverage over the past 10 days or so, I had become rather alarmed that it might be another "rant". I do the noble Baroness no disservice in suggesting that; indeed, that is not normally the way that she addresses this Chamber. However, there have been many contributions in that vein, so I welcome this proposal.
Not only have I no objection to there being regulation of lobbying within the Scottish parliament—indeed, I would welcome it—I am also an advocate of self-regulation for many of those involved within the lobbying profession, if I may use that expression, and in the wider sense. It is a much wider sense than is often understood, and that is not something which has come out in the recent media coverage over the past few days. There are many organisations, apart from lobbying
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companies like the one of which I am a director, which are involved in lobbying in and around this place, in local government and in the European Parliament—there are quangos, local authorities, charities, voluntary organisations, trade unions and trade associations—all of which indulge to a greater or lesser extent in lobbying.
It is part of the hypocrisy of the press coverage over the past few days that two of the most assiduous lobbyists of the Newspaper Publishers Association indulge in lobbying in respect of regulation of what they are or are not allowed to print, the ownership of the media, and the BBC in terms of its licensing fee. I am sure that a great deal of it goes on behind the scenes in a way that they have criticised others for employing. I reject that approach.
It is important that the Scottish parliament should start on the right footing. I believe that the noble Baroness mentioned an organisation called the Association of Professional Political Consultants. That is a self-regulatory body which operates in and around these Houses of Parliament. Unfortunately, it has been shown to be ineffective. I understand that two of the three organisations highlighted in the Observer reports last week were in fact members of that association. Therefore, the dangers or limitations of self-regulation are evident for all to see.
Having said that, I and several other people concerned with lobbying in its various forms in Scotland have been involved over the past six months in putting together a self-regulatory organisation aimed at operating around the Scottish parliament. I am sure that that will continue until its conclusion, but I believe that it could quite easily be complemented by some form of regulation from the parliament. I cannot really see that there could be any objection from those who operate any form of lobbying. The way in which I operate when I have to approach someone on behalf of a client, whether it be a Member of Parliament or a Minister, is to be absolutely open and transparent. I say what I am doing, outline the argument and say on whose behalf I am making it. I firmly believe that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. If you are up front and open, there is absolutely no reason to fear any kind of regulation as to what you do. It is only those who want to operate behind the scenes and under cover who have something to fear. It is within that context that I support the noble Baroness's amendment.
Viscount Thurso: I rise to express my support for my noble friend and kinswoman in her amendment. This is one of the subjects which is not only topical at present but something which is of such importance that the principle deserves to go on the face of the Bill. The important part about my noble friend's amendment is that she leaves all the decisions as to how such regulation should be enforced to the Scottish parliament.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: This is an important subject. Well, it is mildly important in comparison with the two matters that we have already discussed. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, summed it all up and that there is very little to add to what he said. Like the

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noble Lord, I believe that there is nothing wrong with lobbying by companies, and so on. It would seem remarkable if we had a parliament where the only people who were not allowed to lobby were those people who actually create the economic wealth but every pressure group which wanted to spend that wealth were allowed happily to carry on lobbying. Therefore, we should be careful before we decide that lobbying ought not to be allowed. Frankly, it will always take place. Like the noble Lord, Lord Watson, I believe that it is important for it to be done openly and above board. Indeed, he made that point most clearly.
I turn now to the remarks made by the noble Baroness. I hope that she gave my noble and learned friend Lord Fraser of Carmyllie some notice that she was going to do a little advertising for him. I am not entirely sure that he would be happy with being described as someone hovering around a honeypot. My noble and learned friend could perhaps do without hovering around a honeypot. However, I would caution the noble Baroness against saying anything like that outside this Chamber. What intrigues me about the source from which this came is the fact that, in the great levels of importance, I should have thought that a public accounts committee and the scrutiny of delegated powers were hugely more important.
Earlier I discussed the matters I thought we should leave to standing orders and the matters I thought we really ought to set down. I think this matter comes pretty low down the list. When we discussed a public accounts committee the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said that that was a matter that should be left to the Scottish parliament and this Parliament should not set down anything in that regard. I am amazed that just a little while later a Liberal Democrat demands that standing orders will include provision for regulating lobbying activities. A few moments ago that party said we should not include a provision that made it compulsory to have a public accounts committee.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: The noble Lord may appreciate that this is a new form of trouble which has been revealed in recent weeks, whereas a public accounts committee is absolutely essential. The matter we are discussing is something new which we think should be taken into account.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: I suppose that if you have to defend holding two opposite positions within an hour, that is as good a defence as I have heard. However, it does not convince me. If I had heard the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, roundly condemning my suggestion that standing orders should include provision for a public accounts committee, if I had been the noble Baroness I would have decided quietly not to move my amendment. I do not know what the Government will say about this, but I believe this matter falls well inside those matters that can safely be left to standing orders of the parliament.
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: Before the Minister replies to this point, I should say that I have no objection to what is being proposed in this amendment. All I
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would say as someone who may have to do some kind of work—in connection with a company I am involved with—to ensure that the Scottish parliament gets the right idea about certain matters is that I consider this matter of far less importance than that of the amendment which was defeated recently. I advise Ministers that I believe one needs to look closely at what was proposed under Amendment No. 127 which was defeated. The whole credibility of the parliament, its functions and its financial arrangements will come under intense scrutiny by business up and down Scotland and beyond the borders of Scotland. It will be vitally important to the parliament's future credibility to examine its accounts and the reports laid before it.
The Lord Advocate (Lord Hardie): The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness raises an important issue, as is apparent from the many contributions made by the Committee this evening. It is an issue which obviously requires careful consideration. We believe that it is important—I am sure the Committee will accept that this is important—that the Scottish parliament should establish from the outset a reputation for the utmost probity in the conduct of its members. I do not think there can be any question about that. Having said that, I cannot support this amendment. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, and that of the noble Lord, Lord Sanderson of Bowden, on the relative importance of this matter. I also am of the view that this is clearly a matter which can safely be left to the Scottish parliament.
The amendment proposes that there should be a duty on the parliament to make standing orders to cover such lobbying activities as are specified. I do not believe that standing orders are the right means to regulate lobbying activities of individuals and companies. The means by which the noble Baroness has sought to regulate this matter in this amendment are in my view, not appropriate. Standing orders are concerned with regulating the proceedings of parliament and the conduct of members of the Scottish parliament who are participating in those proceedings. But to regulate the evil or ensure that the proper remedy is provided this proposal would be extending the scope of standing orders too far to encompass matters proposed in the amendment.
If there is to be statutory regulation of the lobbying activities of individuals and companies—and I do not demur at the suggestion that that matter may well have to be considered, and considered seriously—I suggest that it would be more appropriate for such regulation to be by an Act of the Scottish parliament. I can assure the noble Baroness that it would be within the legislative competence of the parliament to enact such legislation if it concluded that that was the right course.
Clause 22 covers matters of members' interests and also the question of lobbying in relation to paid advocacy of a particular cause or matter on behalf of any person. We shall deal with these matters further in considering a later group of amendments. However, I think it is important that noble Lords should note subsection (4) of Clause 22. That provision makes it clear that standing orders must prohibit a member of

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the Scottish parliament from advocating or initiating any cause or matter in return for payment or benefit in kind. That is a matter which, I note, the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, would be content to accept.
I would further remind the House that in its first report the committee under the noble and learned Lord, Lord Nolan, which considered standards in public life concluded firmly against the establishment of any form of public register of lobbyists and specifically against a statutory register. I mention that in the context of the comments by the noble Baroness. The thinking behind the recommendation was that the committee recognised that it was the right of everyone to lobby Parliament and Ministers. Moreover, it foresaw a danger in the creation of a register in that it might create the impression that the only way to approach an MP or Minister was through a registered lobbyist. That is clearly not in the interests of democracy. These arguments will still have to be addressed.
To assist the parliament in addressing these issues, it is my understanding that the Consultative Steering Group will cover this matter in its report. I understand that the committee is expected to consider the issue at its next meeting and that further work will be undertaken over the next few months to allow the group to make recommendations to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and ultimately to the parliament to consider in due course.
With that explanation, I hope that the noble Baroness will accept that it is not appropriate to press this amendment, certainly at this stage, and I invite her to withdraw it.
9.45 p.m.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone: This has been an interesting short debate. I am glad that, if nothing else, there seems to be a consensus around the Chamber that this an issue of great importance. I am grateful to the Minister for clarifying his position. This amendment was more in the nature of a probing amendment and he has made matters very clear.
However, I noted the feeling of the noble Lord, Lord Renton, that the amendment could possibly go further, thus disagreeing with some noble Lords on his side who feel that it is almost an entire irrelevance.
I took great heart at the words of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and was grateful to him. As I understood it, the noble Lord welcomed the amendment. I know that he is a distinguished lobbyist of the best kind. The fact that he welcomes some kind of regulation from parliament is good to hear.
I suppose that I did not expect much more from the noble Lord, Lord Mackay, than to have this proposal dismissed. However, I indicated clearly that the shape and form of any regulation should be left to the parliament itself. Under the circumstances, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Schedule 3 agreed to.
Clause 22 [Members' interests]:
The Earl of Mar and Kellie The Earl of Mar and Kellie moved Amendment No. 129B:
Page 10, line 25, leave out ("Standing orders") and insert ("An Act of the Scottish Parliament").
The noble Earl said: Amendment No. 129B deals with the registration of members' interests. It was suggested to me by the Law Society of Scotland. The amendment would ensure that this important public issue of members' interests is dealt with in primary legislation. There needs to be adequate parliamentary scrutiny of the subject, especially in the light of recent allegations. We have heard that the consultative steering group will report in December. The draft standing orders must be made readily available to the public for their scrutiny and peace of mind.
Standing orders strike me as being too easily amended merely by resolution of the parliament. I would prefer that the Scottish parliament put the issue of registration of members' interests into primary legislation. Any changes would then have to be given proper scrutiny prior to amendment. Standing orders seem not to be a suitable vehicle for the regulation of members' interests. Although Clause 22 creates a framework for an offence provision, surprisingly that provision is delegated to standing orders. I say "surprisingly" because it could involve serious offences such as bribery, corruption and fraud. I beg to move.
Lord Hardie: Again, in relation to the noble Earl's amendment, I remind the Committee that Clause 22 has provisions to ensure that the parliament puts in place a framework within which it will regulate members' interests. I am sure that the electorate would expect no less.
Paragraph 9.8 of the White Paper made it clear that there would be minimum requirements, among other things with respect to rules about members' pecuniary interests. I should explain to the Committee that, in common with other parts of the Bill, we are establishing in the legislation basic provisions which will require to be filled out in the standing orders by the parliament itself. I have no doubt that the parliament will take a keen interest in that area and will want to build on best practice. The work which has already been done by the Nolan committee and the continuing activities of the Neill committee and the joint Select Committee on parliamentary privilege will also be pertinent. I am sure it will be of invaluable guidance to the parliament.
The Government recognise the need to keep this matter under review and doubtless the Scottish parliament will also do so. I have already referred to the consultative steering group which will also address the matter.
Amendment No. 129B in the name of the noble Earl would oblige the parliament to put down the detail of rules in respect of members' interests in an Act of the Scottish parliament rather than in standing orders.
We agree absolutely that the issues raised in relation to members' interests are serious ones which deserve to be handled in an appropriately serious manner. I do not, however, agree with the noble Earl that the detail of

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those rules needs to be specified in legislation. As I have already explained, in Clause 22, as in other parts of the Bill, we have taken the view that standing orders are the appropriate vehicle for setting out the detailed rules for the internal working of the parliament, with the Bill simply laying down the key issues which those standing orders must cover. Against that background, we believe it would be anomalous to have the detail of the rules relating to members' interests contained instead in primary legislation.
I understand the concerns expressed by the noble Earl, but do not see any particular difficulty with linking the creation of an offence with the breach of the provisions contained in standing orders rather than in an Act of the parliament. I do not think that there is a significant practical distinction. There will be no scope for standing orders to be capricious or unfair. The parliament will clearly need to keep firmly in mind that the standing orders, not only in this case but in general, will need to be rigorously drafted. Members of the Scottish parliament will be entitled to set, and I have no doubt will demand, clear and fair rules. With that explanation, I invite the noble Earl to withdraw the amendment.
The Earl of Mar and Kellie: I thank the noble and learned Lord for his explanation. Those who were advising me encouraged me to think that primary legislation may be more secure. They will read Hansard, as will I, and come to a conclusion in that regard. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 130 and 131 not moved.]
The Earl of Balfour The Earl of Balfour moved Amendment No. 132:
Page 11, line 12, leave out subsection (6).
The noble Lord said: This is a probing amendment. Subsection (6) of Clause 22 states that,
"Any member of the Parliament who…
(b) contravenes any provision made in pursuance of subsection (4), is guilty of an offence"
My question is: who will investigate the prosecution? I beg to move.
Lord Mackay of Drumadoon: The amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Balfour and Amendment No. 133 in my name are important amendments dealing with another aspect of the relationship between the new parliament and the courts.
The purpose of these amendments—mine in particular—is to enable the parliament to deal with the behaviour of any of its members who act in breach of the standing orders relating to the registration of their interests or who act contrary to the provisions of Clause 22(4). As the noble and learned Lord the Lord Advocate said a short time ago, it will be important for the Scottish parliament to establish at the outset a need for financial probity on the part of all those who are members of it.
The statutory powers which the new parliament will have under subsection (5) to make standing orders which will allow it to regulate the behaviour of, and to discipline, its members are sufficient. They provide that when any
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member fails to comply with or contravenes a standing order, the parliament may withdraw his rights and privileges for the period of his exclusion.
If the courts are involved, far from helping the parliament to achieve the objective of high probity, that may cause difficulties. Any possible prosecution would require to be investigated by the procurator fiscal. No doubt in such cases the procurator fiscal would seek to discharge his duties as an independent prosecutor in as fair and objective a manner as possible. But he will inevitably require to become involved in investigating the behaviour of members of the parliament and possibly some aspects of parliament's conduct of its business in a manner which would occur only unusually in regard to the affairs of either your Lordships' House or another place. That might unavoidably, and certainly unintentionally on the part of the procurator fiscal, lead to some tensions and conflict between his office on the one hand and members of the parliament on the other.
More importantly, any such criminal investigation or criminal proceedings that might follow from it may delay the parliament invoking its own powers contained in standing orders made under Clause 22(5). If any proceedings were commenced, the sub judice rule which the standing orders must contain would ensure that the investigation would require to be put on ice until the criminal proceedings had run their course.
Without mentioning any examples, we are all aware in recent years of allegations in relation to the lack of probity of Members of Parliament and, indeed, members of local authorities. When the parties concerned try to investigate those matters and sometimes discipline the individuals involved, they are delayed while the criminal investigation takes place. Therefore, delay may be inevitable.
Furthermore, if on investigation the procurator fiscal decides that no proceedings are appropriate, were the parliament then to act, there might be perceived to be a difference of approach between the procurator fiscal on the one hand and the parliament on the other. It is perfectly competent for such a difference of approach to arise, but it may nevertheless provoke an element of controversy.
Another situation might be when the member had been prosecuted and convicted. Some people might feel that in that situation, if he had been prosecuted in a criminal court and punished there, it would be wrong for any further punishment to be visited upon him by the parliament, whatever the standing orders might provide. I perceive a further difficulty in these criminal proceedings. They are to be summary criminal proceedings before a sheriff court. If they ever occur, they will occur very rarely. With the best will in the world, it may be difficult for a sheriff trying a case in summary proceedings to get a clear feel as to the gravity or otherwise of what may or may not have been going on.
From time to time members of society are prosecuted for breaching the rules of their profession. Insider dealing by those involved in the financial services industry is one example of that. Some of the more abstruse provisions of the health and safety legislation is another example. Because these cases come along so rarely, and because

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they involve actions on the part of those highly experienced in areas of society where people may not have an in-depth knowledge of what goes on, it is sometimes difficult for the lawyers and the sheriff fully to grasp the gravity of what is involved. When someone has been accused and convicted of some of these offences and a fairly modest fine has been imposed, many lawyers have said privately that their impression was that the court did not fully appreciate the gravity of what had occurred. If that happened in this case, and only a modest fine was imposed and then the parliament proceeded to suspend the member for six months and to withdraw his salary and other privileges, there might be some scope for an appearance of conflict between the parliament on the one hand and the courts on the other.
I have a further difficulty. If the member was prosecuted for breaching the standing orders, in all probability he would be acting on behalf of some other person who had paid him the consideration, had given him the benefit in kind, and had asked for a particular cause to be advocated. However, under this provision it would not be competent to prosecute the individual—the member of the public—for being the other party to the criminal enterprise that took place.
I am not suggesting that there are not other statutory provisions around which might well found the basis of a prosecution against the member of the public or the company involved. But, if the criminal law is to be brought in, it seems to me that all those involved in the criminal enterprise should be capable of being prosecuted under the same statute. That would not be competent here.
A further and slightly more technical objection is that the offence would depend upon the precise terms of standing orders which are yet to be made and which, when they are made by the parliament, would not have the standing of secondary legislation. Their vires would not be a devolution issue in terms of Schedule 6. I am not saying that in some circumstances they might not be open to challenge in the court—I do not want to go over that ground again—but certainly they will not be scrutinised by the parliament, following the detailed procedure that would apply either with primary legislation or secondary legislation. I may be wrong but I think it would be very unusual for someone to be prosecuted in a court of law for breaching standing orders which did not have the force of primary legislation or secondary legislation, with the exception possibly of by-laws made by a local authority or some other public authority in accordance with powers given to them. That is a further technical reason.
The main thrust of my argument is this. The parliament will have powers to discipline its members. How it chooses to go about investigating such allegations is for the parliament. I believe that it would be competent to set up a particular committee to deal with it such as the Select Committee for Standards and Privileges in another place. It would be competent for it to appoint some form of parliamentary commissioner, such as exists in another place, to carry out the investigation and to lay details of the complaint before the committee concerned.
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If the committee, and ultimately the parliament, has power to suspend the member, possibly until the date of the next election and therefore effectively exclude him for the remaining term of the parliament, that seems to me to be more than enough power of punishment. I beg to move.
Lord Hope of Craighead: There is another aspect to this matter which I mention by way of supplement to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Drumadoon, has said. One of the features of the criminal law is that it deals with the offence after the event. That is the nature of the criminal process. But the problem with lifting the lid, as it were, on the affairs of the parliament in the way that these subsections do, is that they introduce the possibility that someone may attempt to deal with the matter in advance by means of the civil process.
I have in mind the court being invited to pronounce an interim interdict to prevent the member acting in a way which would attract the offence. I do not know whether it is envisaged by Ministers that the courts in their civil capacity should be intervening in the affairs of the parliament in that way. My own view is that it would be preferable, so far as possible, that the parliament should be left to regulate its own affairs, including this particular chapter. But the presence of these offences in this clause tends to suggest that if someone were seeking to bring an interdict in the civil process, the courts should entertain that matter to deal with the matter which is expressly stated to constitute an offence under the Bill.
Baroness Carnegy of Lour: I am deeply worried about this from my amateur and lay knowledge of the way in which the law works. A really rather serious offence is being considered, with a fine of up to £5,000 or three months' imprisonment. I see in subsection (8) that the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor-General are included, whether or not they are members of the parliament. Can the noble and learned Lord describe the scene in which the Sheriff tries the Lord Advocate or the Solicitor-General and all the other things that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, has been talking about with the possibility of an interdict against the Lord Advocate behaving in a certain way? It seems slightly Alice in Wonderland and also rather terrifying.
Lord Hardie: I do not find it terrifying at all. I have confidence in the holders of the office of Lord Advocate and Solicitor-General for Scotland. I am certain that they would never commit a criminal offence. But, if they did, whether it was under this provision or not, they, like any other members of society, are subject to the law and they would be prosecuted.
There are two matters raised by these amendments: the short question referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Balfour, and the more substantial one touched upon by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Drumadoon. Without disrespect to the noble Earl, I shall deal with his question in the body of the response to the substantive issue. As I understand the argument, the noble and learned Lord suggests that the powers under subsection (5) of Clause 22 are sufficient. Therefore, one can delete subsections (6) and (7) which create the criminal offence and the penalty. As to the latter, subsection (7) simply imposes the

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penalty of a fine. There is no equivalent period of imprisonment. The maximum penalty is a fine of £5,000, which is level 5 on the standard scale.
Turning to the powers of the parliament to take action under subsection (5), the noble and learned Lord will be aware that this is not an unusual situation. For example, in employment law it is not uncommon for an employer to have civil remedies that include the dismissal or suspension of an employee, whereas if the employee has been engaged in criminal activity he will also be subject to the criminal law. People outside politics view very seriously any abuse by Members of Parliament. We have determined that from the outset there should be no room for doubt that members of the Scottish parliament are expected to adhere to rigorous rules of conduct in relation to declarations of interest.
If the Committee turns to Clause 22 it will see that the first four subsections indicate what members must do. They have to register their interests in the appropriate register. There is also an obligation under subsection (2) to declare a financial interest in any matter before the member takes part in any proceedings. It may be that standing orders will prevent the member from taking part in proceedings once that financial interest is declared. Subsection (4) is concerned with lobbying. A member must refrain from taking money from people to advocate a particular cause in parliament. I am sure no one doubts that these are reasonable obligations and ones that the public may reasonably expect to be imposed upon members of the Scottish parliament so that they retain the trust the electorate has placed in them.
Having gone that far, the Government wish to emphasise the importance that they place upon the integrity of members and their requirement to meet standards which are not unduly onerous. In that context we do not believe that it is unreasonable to create a criminal offence if a member of parliament chooses to ignore these obligations. Therefore, there are two sanctions. If the member decides not to comply with subsections (1) to (4) and fails to declare an interest or accepts money in exchange for advocating a particular cause the parliament make take action or the criminal authorities may take action, or both. I have no difficulty with that. If members of parliament are aware from the outset that that is what is expected of them and that it is a criminal offence to fail to comply with these obligations, then they know the risks that they are taking. That would bring home to them the importance of being open and frank about their involvement and their interests. I hope that there would then be less risk of a member straying from the straight and narrow.
I turn to the question of whether summary proceedings are appropriate because of the possible conflict between the criminal courts and the parliament. I do not find any difficulty with that. It is not unusual for the criminal authorities to investigate alleged misconduct by elected members, whether of local authorities or other bodies. With respect to the noble and learned Lord, to say that the sheriff does not or may not fully appreciate the significance of the action is not a proper answer.
It would not be difficult for the sheriff to determine whether a member has failed to register an interest which he or she ought to have registered—assuming the
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evidence is before the sheriff. It would not be difficult for the sheriff to determine whether a member had a financial interest in a matter that was being discussed at the relevant time—assuming that the evidence was there. Those are simple points of fact. It would not be difficult for the sheriff to determine that a member had received some payment in kind or money—if the evidence was available. Again, those are matters of fact.
Having established the guilt of a member, the sheriff is then faced with determining the appropriate penalty. The maximum penalty is fixed at £5,000. The sheriff, as in other cases, will have to determine where, within the range of zero to £5,000, he thinks that this particular offence falls. If it is a blatant offence, it is at the higher end; if it is not blatant, it will be towards the lower end.
To deal with the point raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, I do not envisage that the creation of a criminal offence would have the effect of someone bringing interdict proceedings. I am aware, of course, that if one is apprehensive of someone committing a wrong, it is possible in some circumstances to bring such proceedings. But the likely situation is that if there is an apprehended wrong, an interdict may be sought.
We shall come later to the question of the relationship between the courts and the parliament. I hope that the concerns of the noble and learned Lord will not be realised.
As far as the amendments are concerned, given the importance that we place upon members complying with their obligations under Clause 22, and given that we see the creation of the criminal offence as an important step in bringing home to members and emphasising in public that we consider the probity of members to be of the utmost importance, I would respectfully submit that it is appropriate to have such an offence.
I turn now to the point made by the noble Earl. The offence would be investigated in the same way as any summary criminal offence: first, by the police reporting the matter to the procurator fiscal, but the fiscal would be the person who would be responsible for taking summary proceedings. With that explanation, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Clyde: Before the noble and learned Lord sits down, I wonder whether he could set my mind at rest about one aspect of the matters which were raised earlier, which causes me considerable concern. It is of course elementary that in defining any criminal offence, one has to do so with the utmost precision, otherwise the criminal law comes into disrepute, and no one can know for certain whether they are offending.
Here we are apparently giving the Scottish parliament the opportunity, in the devising of its standing orders, to define an offence. While I am sure that we have immense confidence in it in the preparation of its standing orders, do we have the confidence to be sure that in defining registrable and financial interests it will do that with the complete precision which is the necessary ingredient for defining a criminal offence?
I confess that I have in the past found it extremely difficult to identify with exactitude what is meant by a registrable interest in such circumstances. Financial

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interest may be easier but is, to an extent, uncertain. I am anxious that what we are doing here is letting loose an undefined potentiality for criminal prosecution which would be offensive to the criminal tradition.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: I am absolutely amazed that the Government are anticipating that members of the Scottish parliament will be such a dishonest, sleazy lot that they will not themselves be able to regulate the registration of their interests and matters such as that, and that it will be necessary to introduce into the Bill criminal sanctions, quite apart from those available outside the Bill, to keep them under control.
Lord Monson: My noble friend might be unaware that a precedent was set recently in the Government of Wales Bill.
Viscount Thurso: Perhaps I may ask the Minister one question. It is sometimes possible for people, when registering their interests, to have a slip of memory or make a small mistake. In those circumstances, is it appropriate that the full weight of the law should used against them? If it is, when would the Government consider bringing such strictures to bear on another place?
Lord Hardie: To deal with the point raised by the noble Viscount, it is not unusual for people to have slips of memory and to make errors. Those are issues which are frequently addressed by the procurator fiscal when investigating other cases and they are taken into account. If the investigation by the fiscal indicated that it was a genuine error or slip of memory which was obviously not blatant, the likelihood is that the fiscal would not take any proceedings. That would be a matter for him or her to assess.
Perhaps I may deal with the point raised by the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, and refer her to the answer given by the noble Lord, Lord Monson. The Government are not showing a lack of confidence in members of the Scottish parliament; they are recognising the importance that people place on the probity and integrity of Members of Parliament and people who stand for public office. It is right that in setting up such a body there should be no doubt that that is one of the fundamental principles which we believe should be enshrined in the legislation.
I turn to the point raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clyde. The question of course is whether we are confident that the Scottish parliament will be able to frame standing orders with sufficient precision as one would expect of a provision in a criminal statute. I ask the noble and learned Lord: why not? The parliament will have power devolved to it to create criminal offences in the body of legislation. If the expertise is available to the parliament to frame such provisions, that expertise will be available to it in the formulation of the standing orders.
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As regards subsection (1) and a registrable interest, the noble and learned Lord will see that that is to be defined in the standing orders. One would expect it to be defined with the precision necessary for the creation of a criminal offence.
Lord Clyde: Perhaps I may intervene. That is my exact concern. We are creating a criminal offence without knowing what it is.
Lord Hardie: With respect, we are not. We are creating a criminal offence which is quite clear: the offence of contravening the subsection which refers to any member who takes part in proceedings without having complied with, or in contravention of, the provisions of subsections (1) to (3) or contravenes any provision made in pursuance of subsection (4). I do not understand the noble and learned Lord's difficulty in this regard, given that the parliamentary counsel involved in drafting legislation will also be available to the parliament to draft the necessary standing orders.
Lord Monson: Does the noble and learned Lord agree that while it is fairly easy to define financial interests, it is extremely difficulty to define non-financial interests?
Lord Hardie: I accept the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clyde. The definition of registrable interests will have to be particularly specific.
Lord Mackay of Drumadoon: I am grateful to the Lord Advocate for setting out the Government's position, which I fully understand. We are at one that it is essential that the highest standards of probity are established from day one of the new parliament. We differ on how that is best achieved.
Although it is entirely a matter for my noble friend Lord Balfour to decide what he does with his amendment, I should indicate to the Committee that when Amendment No. 133 is called I intend to seek the opinion of the Committee.
The Earl of Balfour: I am not quite certain where I stand now. Perhaps someone can help me.
Lord Mackay of Drumadoon: Perhaps I may give some free legal advice, which I have been endeavouring to give to the Government. The Committee is waiting for my noble friend to indicate whether he intends to press the amendment to a vote or to seek leave to withdraw it.
The Earl of Balfour: The answer has taken something like 25 minutes. I should have thought that it was a fairly straightforward question. I wish to read in Hansard what has been said. If I beg leave to withdraw the amendment at this stage, I can come back with further questions at the next stage of the Bill. With those few words, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Mackay of Drumadoon Lord Mackay of Drumadoon moved Amendment No. 133:
Page line 12, leave out subsections (6) and (7).
The noble and learned Lord said: I have already spoken to the amendment. I beg to move.
10.29 p.m.
On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 133) shall be agreed to?
Their Lordships divided: Contents, 28; Not-Contents, 59.

Division No. 2

CONTENTS

Astor, V.

Mackay of Drumadoon, L.

Attlee, E.

Minto, E.

Byford, B. [Teller.]

Monson, L.

Carnegy of Lour, B.

Rawlings, B.

Clyde, L.

Renton, L.

Courtown, E. [Teller.]

Rowallan, L.

Cranborne, V.

St. John of Bletso, L.

Denbigh, E.

Saltoun of Abernethy, Ly.

Dundee, E.

Sanderson of Bowden, L.

Hope of Craighead, L.

Selkirk of Douglas, L.

Kintore, E.

Sempill, L.

Lucas of Chilworth, L.

Stodart of Leaston, L.

Lyell, L.

Wedgwood, L.

Mackay of Ardbrecknish, L.

Wise, L.

NOT-CONTENTS

Addington, L.

Jay of Paddington, B.

Alderdice, L.

Kennedy of The Shaws, B.

Allenby of Megiddo, V.

Lester of Herne Hill, L.

Blackstone, B.

Linklater of Butterstone, B.

Borrie, L.

McIntosh of Haringey, L. [Teller.]

Carter, L. [Teller.]

Chandos, V.

Mackie of Benshie, L.

Clinton-Davis, L.

McNair, L.

Cocks of Hartcliffe, L.

Maddock, B.

Davies of Coity, L.

Mar and Kellie, E.

Davies of Oldham, L.

Molloy, L.

Desai, L.

Monkswell, L.

Dixon, L.

Montague of Oxford, L.

Dormand of Easington, L.

Pitkeathley, B.

Dubs, L.

Ramsay of Cartvale, B.

Ewing of Kirkford, L.

Randall of St. Budeaux, L.

Falconer of Thoroton, L.

Razzall, L.

Farrington of Ribbleton, B.

Redesdale, L.

Gilbert, L.

Rendell of Babergh, B.

Gordon of Strathblane, L.

Richard, L. [Lord Privy Seal.]

Grenfell, L.

Scotland of Asthal, B.

Hacking, L.

Sewel, L.

Hanworth, V.

Simon, V.

Hardie, L.

Stair, E.

Hardy of Wath, L.

Symons of Vernham Dean, B.

Haskel, L.

Thurso, V.

Hoyle, L.

Tope, L.

Hughes of Woodside, L.

Watson of Invergowrie, L.

Hunt of Kings Heath, L.

Whitty, L.

Islwyn, L.

Young of Old Scone, B.

Resolved in the negative, and amendment disagreed to accordingly.
10.37 p.m.
Clause 22 agreed to.
Clause 23 [Power to call for witnesses and documents]:
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Baroness Linklater of Butterstone moved Amendment No. 134:
Page 11, line 28, at end insert—
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("( ) matters involving the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Independent Television Commission,").
The noble Baroness said: The purpose of this amendment is to give the Scottish parliament the power to call for witnesses and documents on matters involving the BBC and the ITC.
While broadcasting has clearly remained a reserved matter under Schedule 5, under the Charter of the BBC, responsibility for broadcasting in Scotland is in large measure devolved already to the Broadcasting Council for Scotland under the chairmanship of the national governor for Scotland. That body produces a rigorous annual performance review as well as the BBC Scotland annual review.
Broadcasting in all its forms has a profound and permeating influence on all our lives in Scotland, culturally, socially and economically. It affects and influences our perceptions and thinking in a multitude of ways, including how we see the new parliament and how we relate to it. It is an enormously important element in the fabric of our democratic society.
In that situation, it seems to me extraordinary that the Scottish parliament should have no say in that element of public life and it seems only logical and right that it should be able to scrutinise the activities of the BBC and ITC and that they in turn should be accountable to it. The parliament should be able to ask questions of the BBC and the ITC and in turn, they should be expected to justify their actions. That would be particularly important if they were thought to be failing in some way.
The role of the Scottish parliament would not be to instruct or control but it should be able to have its voice heard and its influence felt. This amendment would also build into the structure an element of dialogue as well as accountability from which everyone should benefit. I have spoken with several top executives in broadcasting in Scotland who say that they have no problem at all with this proposal and would not object to being called as a witness or to producing documents. The BBC already expects to lay its annual report before the parliament.
If those most intimately concerned with the implications of this amendment see no problem with it, I cannot see why the Government should. Without the benefit of this amendment, the Scottish parliament would have no right to have a say in broadcasting in Scotland, nor would the BBC or the ITC be accountable to it in respect of an activity which is absolutely central to Scottish life. This is a situation which is surely both completely illogical and highly undesirable. I beg to move.
Viscount Astor: I should like to express my support for the principle behind the noble Baroness's amendment. I notice that she also has three other amendments on broadcasting which will require annual reports of the BBC to be laid before the parliament, as well as the,
"promotion and funding of Gaelic broadcasting in Scotland",
and the,
"appointment of the National Governor for Scotland".

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My criticism would be that the noble Baroness's amendment does not perhaps go far enough. It seems to me that broadcasting is very separate in Scotland. In effect, there is almost a separate BBC, there are separate ITV regions and there are separate radio stations. Of course, the BBC is national and Scotland is part of the national system. One must also recognise the fact that the BBC is, as it were, the cement which holds much of this country together. Indeed, it is a national institution and should remain so. I am not suggesting that it should not.
There was a debate on the subject in another place in Committee which seemed to focus on two issues. The first was whether broadcasting should be responsible to a Scottish parliament and whether that parliament should be able to call witnesses from broadcasting, and so on, and have reports laid before it. The other issue was whether broadcasting should be an entirely separate matter for Scotland and thereby devolved. That was very much the proposal put forward by the Scottish National Party.
The debate in another place got somewhat out of kilter because it was automatically assumed that any form of change would result in some form of hypothecation of revenue and that, therefore, the BBC in Scotland would only be able to survive with the licence fee raised there. I do not believe that to be the case. However, it is true to say that the Scottish parliament will be responsible for arts policy, museums and galleries and many other matters which all come under the Department of Culture, Media and (Mr. Bank's) Sport, but it will not be responsible for broadcasting. That seems to me to be odd. The Government did not really come clean in another place on why broadcasting should be left under the control of Westminster.
If you want to start a Gaelic radio station in Dundee, it seems to me to be odd that you will have to go to Westminster for permission. There ought to be a mechanism for the devolving of powers of the ITC and the Radio Authority to Scotland within a national framework. As Members of the Committee will be aware, the BBC was created by Royal Charter. Schedule 5 to the Bill says that the BBC is a "reserved matter". Can the Minister say whether that means that the Bill will, as it were, supersede the Royal Charter or whether that reference merely applies to the transmission part of the BBC which, of course, is covered by Act of Parliament?
In the other place in Committee on 4th March of this year, the Secretary of State made two slightly contradictory statements in answer to such a point. At col. 109 of Hansard he said that,
"a separate charter is not needed, because we can devolve broadcasting in Scotland within the BBC charter".
Then, further on in the debate he said:
"However, in terms of statutory power—the legislative power that is at the heart of the Scottish Parliament—there is very little that could be devolved. Even the BBC would be extremely difficult to devolve because, as I said in an intervention, it is a creature not of statute but of royal charter. Therefore, in effect, we are discussing very little".
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That seems to be slightly contradictory. The Secretary of State did, however, give a crumb of comfort to the Scots—it really was a crumb—when he said,
"the Government intend that the appointment of the national governor for Scotland will be made after full consultation with Scottish ministers".—[Official Report, Commons, 4/3/98; col. 1128.]
He described that as an important safeguard. I do not think that it is much of a safeguard. He also said at col. 1127 that,
"The draft executive devolution Order requires consultation with Scottish Ministers in connection with the appointment of the Scottish member of the ITC, and we propose similar provisions for appointments to the Broadcasting Standards Council and the Radio Authority".
That also is rather a crumb of comfort.
It seems to me that the Government have not thought out their policy on broadcasting clearly. I am not saying in any way that broadcasting should be totally devolved to Scotland but it seems to me that the Government should consider making the institutions that are totally reserved cross-border bodies. After all, the ITC has a separate office in Scotland. I do not know about the Radio Authority, but I am sure it will have one. Digital broadcasting and digital radio will mean that more channels will appear. I believe that the Scottish parliament ought to be able to have a role in this and ought to be able to call to account those who are responsible for Scottish broadcasting. They ought to be accountable to the Scottish parliament, albeit within a national system.
It has been suggested that the BBC is rather against this proposal. The chairman of the BBC, Sir Christopher Bland, came to the all-party media committee recently. When I asked him about this matter he said the BBC did not have a view on it and that it was a matter for Parliament to decide. I hope that the Minister will explain why this policy exists and the reasons behind it. I do not think the reasons put forward in another place are good enough. The Government ought to consider how to bring broadcasting within the orbit of the Scottish parliament.
10.45 p.m.
Lord Gordon of Strathblane: I speak briefly at this late hour. In the light of the heightened sensitivity on declarations of interest after the previous debate, I should immediately declare that I am chairman of Scottish Radio Holdings, which owns several radio stations in Scotland. The amendment, quite remarkably, mentions,
"matters involving the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Independent Television Commission",
but makes no mention of the Radio Authority. One might perhaps assume that this is an oversight from people who do not realise that the Broadcasting Act 1990 is, unfortunately, on the statute book. Indeed one of the more attractive arguments that the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, advanced concerned that matter. If it were possible to turn the clock back on the 1990 Broadcasting Act throughout the UK, I think we would all be enthusiastic about that, but to do it uniquely in Scotland I do not believe to be practical.

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I think the difference is that the content of broadcasting is vitally important to the people of Scotland, as is the content of the press. What we are talking about is not the content of broadcasting; for that you would hold to account people such as the chief executives of my company, Scottish Radio Holdings, the director of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, and people like that, not parliament and regulators. We have in this country a system under which Parliament has stood back from broadcasting and regulates it at arm's length through buffer bodies such as the Independent Television Commission, the BBC board of governors or the Radio Authority.
For that reason it is difficult to see Scotland having separate legislation for broadcasting. But that is what we are talking about, if we are talking about the Scottish parliament. What bit of legislation about broadcasting could conceivably be different in Scotland from the rest of the UK? If we take the example of the 1990 Act, if Scotland was not bound by that Act, radio in Scotland would still be under an independent broadcasting authority, while south of the Border it would have been moved to the Radio Authority. That would not make sense. The important point is that the broadcasting authorities will clearly want to co-operate with the Scottish parliament, and we shall discuss broadcasting.
If we examine the amendment, we see that it deliberately adds, uniquely, apart from the devolved subjects, the ITC and BBC. The amendment would seem to express the wish that broadcasting should be a devolved subject. I believe, however, that the Government are right to leave it as a reserved matter.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: The Liberal Democrat amendment would allow the parliament to summon to its committees anyone involved in the BBC and ITC. The noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, rather beat me to it in wondering why radio was not included. I wondered why cable and satellite were not included. They are increasingly important in people's lives, in Scotland as elsewhere.
My noble friend Lord Astor wants to go slightly further and remove the reservation so that broadcasting matters are devolved. I can see the difficulties surrounding that approach. They were pointed to by both the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, and my noble friend. However, I cannot believe that it would be any less difficult to deal with devolving broadcasting and yet retaining some form of national overview than it is to devolve fishing and farming and yet keep the powers of negotiation with Europe in this place; or to break up the Forestry Commission into its component parts and yet try to think that one forestry commission can operate for the United Kingdom in the three different parts of the kingdom. So it is not so difficult as the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, suggested.
There are two aspects to this matter: the technical aspect and the question of who runs the show in relation to transmission and broadcasting. When I became a Member of the other place in 1979, one great problem at that stage was that many parts of my constituency, along with the rest of the Highlands, did not receive television pictures. An "active deflector" had been
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devised, which could be sited on the top of a hill, and the signal was bounced—with a little help (that is where the "active" came in) down into the glen so that people could receive television pictures. Those who looked after the airwaves did not approve of that at all; nor indeed could they understand that there was anywhere on earth that was hilly and unable to receive television pictures without interference from hills.
Unfortunately for them, one of my constituents, the late Colonel Archie Fletcher, who had been a commanding officer in the Scots Guards, was not a man to take those kinds of decisions lying down. His Member of Parliament was marched on parade, and we both conducted a campaign. We should have had no trouble had the matter been decided in Scotland. People would have understood immediately. But we had an immense amount of trouble persuading the guardian angels of the airwaves that this was a real problem and that it could be solved only by the means that we proposed. So there is much to be said for matters surrounding the frequencies of services and so on being devolved to Scotland.
After all, it may be that in Scotland we do not want many of the radio programmes that are broadcast on a national basis, such as Talk Radio. In Scotland, we might prefer to use that slot, as my noble friend Lord Astor said, for Gaelic. I understand that the Radio Communications Agency could contemplate a degree of autonomy within its Scottish operation if it were not inhibited by legislation which applies throughout the United Kingdom. These are important matters.
There is the question of the digitising of TV and the use of multiplexes. The digital multiplexes will reach only between 66 and 90 per cent. of the population in the UK. It is not hard to see where most of the missing percentages will be. They will be in rural Scotland, to an extent in Wales, and maybe in Cumbria. So there is a problem which it might be better to devolve to Scotland.
Turning to those who provide the viewers with pictures and sound, as the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, indicated, we have very robust media groups in Scotland. There is the Scottish Media Group, which includes Grampian and STV. We have Radio Clyde, which the noble Lord mentioned. I do not know it by the grand title of Scottish Radio Holdings because the radio station I listen to is Radio Clyde. The noble Lord will be delighted to hear that I listen to it and I will give him my complaints about some of the programme changes later. Those are Scottish organisations.
Then we come to the BBC, which is not. Or is it? No organisation has done more to advocate and push devolution over the past 20 years than the BBC at Queen Margaret Drive. With a few honourable exceptions, its broadcasters have never disguised the desire for devolution. There were a few exceptions, whether it be "Good Morning Scotland", "Newsdrive", the lunchtime programme, "Headlines", or a whole host of other current affairs, the broadcasters have plugged the devolution line. One of the recent national governors tried to pretend to us that he was neutral. The moment he was released from the BBC he went off to a political post somewhere, propagating devolution, without any

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hindrance. So it was no great surprise to us that his organisation had been oblivious to all the complaints we had made about bias.
It is the BBC I am looking at, like my noble friend Lord Astor. The BBC fought the campaign in favour of devolution. Many of the journalists and people who supposedly chaired discussions in which I have been involved made no attempt to disguise their bias. If the BBC had advocated devolution, should it not share in the devolution? Why should all the rest of us have it and not the BBC?
Lord Gordon of Strathblane: Is the noble Lord suggesting that a Scottish parliament should legislate for the programme schedule of BBC Scotland? The degree of devolved programming at the moment is entirely within the gift of the BBC, unless the noble Lord wishes a Scottish parliament to insist that there should be more.
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: I am not asking the Scottish parliament to control it, I am simply saying that the BBC should be a devolved matter and there should be a Scottish BBC, just as there will be a bit of the Forestry Commission which will be the Scottish forestry commission. I see no problem about that at all. If other things are to be devolved, like great departments of state such as health, education, and many others, it seems to me that there is a lot of sense in the BBC in Scotland cutting itself free of the shackles—those are the words used—of London, Whitehall and all the other places. It should be a Scottish organisation. I am amazed that those keen advocates of devolution in the Committee are not keen on this. I wonder why.
It is right and proper that the BBC should be devolved and I share the view of my noble friend Lord Astor. I look forward to the pro-devolution Front Bench opposite agreeing with the points made.
11 p.m.
Lord Hardie: I am conscious of the hour and that the House is sitting tomorrow morning, so I shall try to be brief. Amendment No. 134 would give the Scottish parliament power to summon witnesses in connection with matters involving the British Broadcasting Corporation and the ITC. Perhaps I may say to the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, that the ITC includes cable and satellite broadcasting.
As the Committee will be aware, broadcasting is a matter which is reserved to the UK Parliament and Government. The Government believe that there should be clear lines of accountability. It is right and proper that it should be for Westminster to investigate matters which are reserved, such as broadcasting. The Bill therefore does not give the Scottish parliament a power to summon witnesses in connection with reserved matters, except with regard to matters in relation to which functions have been executively devolved to Scottish ministers. This amendment seeks to have broadcasting treated differently from all other reserved matters. We do not think that that would be right.
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The Government's policy about the power of the Scottish parliament to summon witnesses and documents from bodies operating in Scotland which have responsibilities only in reserved areas was clearly set out in paragraphs 2.10 and 2.11 of the White Paper. We recognise the importance of those bodies in the economic and social life of Scotland and for that reason the parliament will be able to invite such bodies to give evidence.
The Bill needs to make no provision to allow it to do that. We have no reason to believe that representatives of the BBC, ITC and other bodies concerned with broadcasting in Scotland will be reluctant to give evidence to the Scottish parliament. We do, of course, recognise that broadcasting will be of interest to the Scottish parliament. I hope that the Scottish parliament will stimulate an informed debate on broadcasting matters, and I anticipate that broadcasters in Scotland will be sensitive to the views of the members of the Scottish parliament.
The amendment in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, would remove broadcasting from the list of reserved matters altogether. I have already explained that our policy is and remains as set out in Schedule 5; that is, that broadcasting should be a reserved matter. The Government feel, first, as a matter of principle that the standards applied to broadcasting should be established at national level and that the proper independence of broadcasting should be established and maintained at that level. Secondly, we believe that it is in the interests of Scottish viewers and listeners and of the broadcasting organisations that broadcasting should be dealt with at a UK level. Indeed, the noble Viscount recognised that the BBC was a national institution.
The view of the Government is also the view of broadcasters in Scotland. Scottish production and broadcasting have made a substantial contribution to the quality of television and radio in the whole of the United Kingdom. Equally, we benefit from a free flow of broadcast material within the United Kingdom. It may be objective that devolving broadcasting would not necessarily detract from the unified regulatory framework for broadcasting in the UK. It would be possible, and in view of the technical complexity of broadcasting it might be sensible, for the Scottish parliament not to use the power to make laws if that power were devolved. But the assumption will be that if broadcasting were to be devolved, different laws could be made and different regulatory bodies could be set up. If there were different programme codes, there could be a situation in which a programme was permitted in Scotland but not allowed in England, or vice versa. In such circumstances, there would be a serious disincentive to companies investing in production in Scotland. The confidence of the industry is a factor which we take seriously and I am sure Members of the Committee share that concern.
The noble Viscount noted that the BBC is largely governed by its own charter. But that does not mean that parliament cannot provide in this Bill for the BBC to be reserved. Nor does it mean that the BBC will be caught by the reservation of the Crown. It would be within the competence of Westminster legislation to modify

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prerogative instruments. Indeed, the present Bill provides for ministerial functions conferred by such instruments and exercisable in relation to matters which are not reserved to be exercisable instead by Scottish Ministers. In other words, the Bill would modify certain Royal Charters. That would be the case for ministerial functions conferred, for example, by the Royal Charters of the Scottish Sports Council and the Scottish Arts Council.
Although broadcasting is to be reserved, it is intended that some changes will be made in relation to the various broadcasting authorities. For example, as the noble Viscount noted, my honourable friend the Minister in another place recognised that the national governor for Scotland of the BBC is appointed under the provisions of the Royal Charter. But it is intended that Scottish Ministers will be consulted by the Secretary of State for Media, Culture and Sport on future appointments.
Its own charter provides that an annual report of the BBC shall be sént to the Secretary of State and shall be laid before both Houses of Parliament. In future the report will also be sent to Scottish Ministers and presented to the Scottish parliament, and similar arrangements will be made for the other broadcasting authorities.
With those explanations, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Viscount Astor: The noble and learned Lord gave a clear explanation of the BBC and the Royal Charter and how that works under the Bill, for which I am extremely grateful.
Will the Government consider the ITC, which has not so far been mentioned? The ITC has a separate office in Scotland that largely deals with matters in Scotland. Will the Government look at whether that body should be responsible for cross-Border matters or be given some form of authority within Scotland so that it can make local decisions without always having to refer to Westminster when those matters did not affect, for example, broadcasting on a national basis?
Lord Hardie: The point raised by the noble Viscount is covered by the comments that I made in relation to the BBC. The ITC is also concerned with national broadcasting and the same considerations would apply.
Viscount Astor: Perhaps I may come back to the noble and learned Lord. The difference between the BBC and the ITC is that the ITC—this applies also to the Radio Authority—is responsible for local services.
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When digital comes in, the ITC will be responsible for local television services and local cable services. That is what makes the ITC different from the BBC.
Lord Hardie: I do not think that the position is essentially different for the ITC. The Government do not intend to distinguish between the BBC and the ITC.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone: I thank the noble and learned Lord for his reply and his explanations, which I found very helpful. I must also say that the stories of the noble Lord, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, about people who live in the hills having problems with television reminds me of my home in the hills of Perthshire. My father refused to pay his television licence because he could receive only one channel, and very badly at that. In the end, he was fined and he was all over the local papers as the "revolting colonel".
I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, and the noble Lord, Lord Mackay, for their support. I take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Gordon, about radio. Although we are well aware that the BBC and ITC can be invited to appear before the Scottish parliament, as the Bill stands they may not be required to appear. That is only really relevant when there is an issue of some importance. I feel, as everyone in the Committee appears to feel, that this is a matter of great importance and one to which we shall probably wish to return at a later date. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: I beg to move that the House do now resume.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House resumed.

Teaching and Higher Education Bill [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons with the amendment agreed to.

School Standards and Framework Bill
Returned from the Commons with one of the amendments agreed to with an amendment; with certain other amendments disagreed to and with an amendment in lieu thereof and with amendments to the words so restored to the Bill; with certain other amendments disagreed to with reasons for such disagreement; and with the remaining amendments agreed to; the Commons amendments and reasons ordered to be printed.
House adjourned at seven minutes past eleven o'clock.

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