PRICES AND INCOMES

HC Deb 16 March 1965 vol 708 cc247-8W

Q9. Mr. Woodburn

asked the Prime Minister whether, in view of the difficulties of securing voluntary restraint on demands for increased incomes in a large

Mr. Ross

Separate figures for these counties for years before 1959–60 are not readily available; and price support payments for milk, eggs, potatoes and wool cannot be determined separately for individual counties. The information available in the three main categories of production grants, improvement grants, and deficiency payments is as follows:

range of activities, and in order automatically to involve everyone in the task of keeping consumption in harmony with production, he will seek to create a regulator in the form of a national dividend by which a balance between expenditure and production will clearly be seen to be adjusted by higher dividends when productivity improves and by lower dividends when too little is produced.

The Prime Minister

No. As was stated in the recent White Paper on the Machinery of Prices and Incomes Policy, we intend to give the voluntary method every chance of proving that it can be made to work.