§ Mr. Stanleyasked the Secretary of State for Industry what is the total number of additional staff that he envisages will be required by his Department to deal with planning agreements, showing 191W the breakdown by grade; and how many in each grade have been recruited to date.
§ Mr. KaufmanI see no reason to believe that staffing requirements for planning agreements will not be contained within the overall figure of 250 mentioned in the Explanatory and Financial Memorandum associated with the original publication of the Industry Bill. At the present early stage in the development of the system it is not possible to forecast the rate at which the extra staff will be required or their distribution among Departments. This will be determined by the way in which the planning agreement system develops. It is estimated, however, that some 40 per cent. will be of Principal level equivalent or above.
At present in the Department in addition to staff engaged on planning agreement work as part of their duties 12 people are employed full-time on planning agreements of whom for are of Principal level or above.
Amount £ million Date of Payment Norton Villiers Triumph 4.872 16th July 1973 Kearney & Trecker Marwin/KTM Machine Tools (Holdings) Ltd. 1.250 20th July 1973 0.200 12th September 1973 2.975 (net) 15th August 1974 0.002 11th March 1975 0.522 27th March 1975 Meriden Co-operative 4.796 6th March 1975 0.154 6th October 1975 Moira 0.120 12th March 1975 Automatic Oil Tools Ltd. 0.250 25th April 1975 0.250 10th June 1975 Cambridge Instrument Co. Ltd. 4.500 31st October 1975 Salvesen Offshore Drilling Ltd. 0.392 3rd November 1975 Payments under the Wool Textile Industry Scheme up to 31st October 1975 amounted to £5.116 million
Under the Offshore Supplies Interest Relief Grant Scheme (Administered by Department of Energy) £0.215 million of assistance had been paid up to 31st October 1975.
In addition guarantees have been given under Section 8 as follows:
£ million British Leyland 100 Alfred Herbert 11.5 SMI 2 KTM 0.25 NVT 8 Of these, those for British Leyland and SMI have now been extinguished.
192W
§ Mr. Stanleyasked the Secretary of State for Industry how many companies he has invited, to date, to enter into planning agreements; how many have accepted; and how many have declined.
§ Mr. KaufmanWe are currently engaged in informal discussions with a number of companies about the possibility of introducing planning agreements into certain key sectors of manufacturing industry.