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Commons Chamber

Volume 205: debated on Wednesday 4 March 1992

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House Of Commons

Wednesday 4 March 1992

The House met at hall-past Two o'clock

Prayers

[MR. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Private Business

London Underground Bill

Order for consideration of Lords amendments read.

To be considered tomorrow.

Oral Answers To Questions

Foreign And Commonwealth Affairs

Soviet Union

1.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will give details of the programme of aid and assistance for the former Soviet Union.

Britain has pledged more than £80 million in bilateral aid to the former Soviet Union and is contributing through the EC budget about 18 per cent. of Community technical assistance and food aid, which totals £595 million. The Community has also agreed a programme of food credits worth £1·225 billion.

I thank my right hon. Friend for that full reply. Clearly, the United Kingdom and the Community are doing a great deal to assist the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe generally. However, what additional measures will be taken, particularly to assist with the distribution of foodstuffs once they reach eastern Europe? My right hon. Friend will agree that empty bellies make poor counsellors. What positive action will be taken to assist people in eastern Europe and in the former states of the Soviet Union?

It is important that food should be not only dispatched but distributed to those who need it. That is why my right hon. Friend the Minister for Overseas Development has ensured that the Crown Agents, for example, are working with the authorities in St. Petersburg so that our feed aid for animals around St. Petersburg—£20 million worth—reaches its destination. We are ensuring that the beef that we sent to St. Petersburg and Murmansk has got through, and we are tackling the remaining problems of distribution in Moscow.

Is there not a grave danger of the former Soviet Union lapsing into anarchy? Did we not recently see riots on the streets of Moscow, with two factions fighting it out? Therefore, should we not use our strength and influence to try to organise throughout the west a Marshall plan, similar to the one after the second world war, to strengthen the hands of those who are doing their utmost to stave off anything approximating to anarchy?

It is certainly in our interest that the republics of the former Soviet Union should not disintegrate into anarchy and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) said, starvation. We believe that the next step, in considering large-scale help for the former republics, should be taken through the International Monetary Fund. That is the orderly and sensible way to proceed, which is why we are pressing and encouraging others to press for the earliest possible membership of the former Soviet republics in the IMF. Meanwhile, we are pressing for IMF teams already in Moscow and elsewhere to start preparing the ground.

Is my right hon. Friend aware that a delegation from the Inter-Parliamentary Union has just returned from Russia and the Ukraine? Does he agree that western aid should be given to and deployed in the former Soviet Union with care and tact so that those proud people are not humiliated or offended? Is he also aware that there is apprehension about the possibility of strings being attached to western aid? Under what conditions is western aid being given to the former Soviet Union?

I know of the visit and am grateful to my hon. Friend and his colleagues for undertaking it. There is no doubt that such contact now is particularly useful. My hon. Friend is entirely right about the pride of the Russian people, which must be respected as we seek to help them.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) said, when people are starving, one does not impose conditions. But the republics know that the help that is increasingly coming in technical assistance and the possible eventual macroeconomic help is tied to the prospect of reform and is dependent on the continued impetus of both political and economic reform.

Is the Foreign Secretary awarere is a case for feeding people who are starving in Russia, as there is for those who are starving in Africa and Latin America countries? There is also a case to be made for the Government to spend more money on overseas aid. There is a case to be made for those starving and living in cardboard boxes just around the corner—

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that there is no case to be made for taxpayers' money being used to prop up Boris Yeltsin, who will turn out to be the David Owen of Russia?

I do not know if the hon. Gentleman has got around to reading his Financial Times this morning. If he has, he will have seen the eloquent article by the Russian Finance Minister. The case that he makes, which we must listen to, is for help from this country in privatisation, and the creation and stimulation of the free market and the other basics of prosperity.

Africa

2.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what assessment he has made of the prospects for increased democracy in Africa.

The prospects for democracy in Africa are probably better now than at any time in the post-colonial era. Although there are some countries where little progress has been made, most African nations now have, or are moving towards, multi-party political systems.

Bearing in mind that encouraging answer, may I ask whether the Minister considers that the worsening drought in southern Africa may have implications for the process of democracy in Africa?

Yes, indeed I do. We are deeply concerned about the dreadful effects of the drought in southern Africa. That is why, as a first step today, I have approved £2·5 million each to Zambia and Zimbabwe in balance of payments aid to ease the difficulties that will be caused by the need to import food. We have also agreed on a further £3·9 million worth of food aid to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and Mozambiquan refugees in Malawi.

Following the welcome change in Kenya's constitution towards a multi-party democracy, and in view of the unhappy news from Kenya yesterday of the repression of demonstrations in Nairobi, will the Minister not only advise that country on the international standards of multi-party democracy, which she has ennunciated from the Dispatch Box before, but suggest that, in order to disarm such demonstrations, it is time that the Government start a dialogue with the Opposition on both the timing and ground rules for an election?

The right hon. Gentleman knows that we shall encourage dialogue wherever it is needed to promote a democratic system. The incidents in Nairobi are regrettable, but we deplore all use of violence and provocation, whether from protesters, the Opposition or Government forces. The way to resolve political differences is through debate, dialogue and the ballot box, not on the streets. That is why we urge all Kenyan political leaders to open up a constructive dialogue on free and fair elections.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the best method for underpinning democracy is through economic stability? Has she seen the great efforts being made this year to obtain private inward investment into southern Africa in the form of conferences and other initiatives? Will she give all such initiatives her fullest support?

My hon. Friend is right: economic stability is the only foundation for the sound development of democracy. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that open market systems are developed, subsidy is abolished and there is a proper market economy in all parts of southern Africa. That is one reason why we are putting so much effort as a nation into helping countries in southern Africa to achieve just that.

On the question of democracy in the republic of South Africa, does the right hon. Lady agree that our objective should be to ensure that the white electorate fully appreciates that South Africa will face unprecedented international isolation should there be a "No" vote in this month's referendum? Should not we support the negotiating process now under way through the Conference for a Democratic South Africa, and so secure the maintenance of international pressure for rapid progress towards a new, genuinely democratic constitutional order? Will those be the objectives of this Government this month, as they will he the objectives of the Labour Government next month?

Through the whole of their period in office, the Government have supported efforts to do away with apartheid and to ensure that when change came with President de Klerk, there would be a start towards a new constitution and the transitional arrangements that are now being discussed within the Conference for a Democratic South Africa.

We have always sought to maintain contact with all the parties and we have urged them to build on the fundamental principles already agreed. Through our influence, we shall do all that we can to ensure that there is a "Yes" vote in the referendum, because that is the only way to achieve a peaceful, prosperous, successful and democratic South Africa.

United Nations

3.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what initiatives Her Majesty's Government have proposed for reform of the United Nations.

In January, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister convened a meeting of the Security Council at Heads of Government level, which called on the Secretary-General to report on how the peacekeeping role of the United Nations could be strengthened.

We proposed the appointment of a United Nations disaster relief co-ordinator and the introduction of a United Nations arms register, and both proposals have been accepted. We have also encouraged the new secretary-general to reform the secretariat and we applaud his first achievements in that area.

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the global position in which the United Nations was established has little relevance to today's world? Is it not true that, because of the break-up of the Soviet Union, the balance of power has shifted towards the United States? Does not that make it difficult for the United Nations to carry out a peacekeeping role? Do not the problems of the third world, which is still suffering economic deprivation, need to be addressed? Therefore, will not there be a need for radical changes in the United Nations if it is to maintain any confidence and respect throughout the world?

I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman. The United Nations has found it much easier to undertake a peacekeeping role since the end of the cold war because its efforts are no longer frustrated by the clash between the super-powers. We are fortunate that the super-power that remains has no instinct or appetite for dominating the world by oppression and force.

My right hon. Friend referred to the summit. Will he take this opportunity to say what progress is being made on the question of preventive diplomacy, for which the secretary-general has set a deadline of 1 July? Can my right hon. Friend assure the House that he will take fully into account the role of parliamentary diplomacy through the conference on security and co-operation in Europe, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the North Atlantic Assembly and other relevant organisations?

The secretary-general has been asked to produce his report on a range of subjects by 1 July. I am sure that he will not neglect the parliamentary context—which my hon. Friend leads in the IPU. It is an important element in preventing conflicts reaching the stage of war.

International Meetings

5.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will list the most important international non-EC meetings which he expects to attend this year.

There is the North Atlantic Council consultative meeting and the conference on security and co-operation in Europe ministerial meeting this month; the North Atlantic Council meeting in Oslo in June; the economic summit of the Group of Seven in Munich in July and the CSCE summit in Helsinki in July, both of which I shall attend with my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister; the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September; the CSCE council of ministers in Stockholm in early December, and Western European Union ministerial meetings in June and November.

Will my right hon. Friend reflect on the fact that when he attends those international meetings and many others in the EC he will discover that Britain's standing, authority and reputation are vastly higher than they were a few years ago? Is not that a tribute to the work done not only by him but by his recent predecessors? Would it not be a national tragedy if that were all to be thrown away by any alternative team of Ministers, who were wrong about every international defence issue in the 1980s and who carry no conviction in the 1990s?

That is rather a difficult question to answer. I hope that we have a reasonable record on piloting Britain's foreign affairs through troubled times. The right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) and his team are always ingenious in defending whatever the policy of the moment is; it is just that that policy is changed so often that it leaves a little bit of a question mark over whether they have any plan or direction at all.

When the Foreign Secretary visits the Group of Seven summit in the summer, will he bang some heads together to try to bring forward a new deal for the third world? The announcements made by the Minister for Overseas Development a few minutes ago about the food situation were welcome, but people in Africa are starving and the terms of trade that they receive in their dealings with the developed countries, the problem of their huge indebtedness to the developed countries and the world order over which we now preside are such that hundreds of millions of people live on the edge of catastrophe. The Group of Seven has a responsibility to the human race to deal with that this summer.

I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is looking forward to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and myself going to the G7 summit in mid-July. He was specific on that point; rather markedly so I thought. We shall be delighted to seek out his advice just before we go if he is still a Member of the House at the time. Of course he is right on his serious point about debt and that is why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has been so energetic in pressing what are called the Trinidad terms to enable the poorest countries of the world to benefit from those terms. We shall do our best within reason and common sense to ease those burdens as best we can.

In the wake of the impressive list of meetings that the Secretary of State will be attending for the remainder of this year, will he encourage the Security Council to have a special meeting, after Britain's anticipated endorsement of the Van den Stoel resolution on the destruction of human rights within Iraq at least to ensure that human rights monitors are in south Iraq to protect the unfortunate Shias?

We are worried about the extent to which Saddam Hussein is still able to inflict hardship and persecution on the peoples of Iraq, both the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Overseas Development is trying to arrange a donors conference to bring further help, but, as my hon. Friend would agree, the best relief of human rights would be if the Iraqis accepted resolutions 706 and 712 and began to sell oil, the proceeds of which could go to the relief of poverty as well as the compensation of those whom they have victimised.

I advise the Secretary of State to ensure that all his flight bookings are transferable. However, in the few weeks remaining to him, will he pursue at all relevant meetings the question of the massacre at Santa Cruz in East Timor. In particular, will he urge that the Indonesians should immediately abandon the trial of the two East Timorese survivors and press for a full United Nations investigation? Finally, will he make it clear, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) has done, that British aid and trade depend on Indonesia seeking an agreed solution and ending its illegal occupation of East Timor.

If the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that our trade with Indonesia depends on a resolution to that question, that is a new and rather remarkable policy statement. The hon. Gentleman must not beg policy in that way. If he does, his place on even the Opposition Front Bench will be at stake. He is, however, right about the basic seriousness of the problem, which I discussed with the Indonesian Foreign Minister—as, perhaps, the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) has done. The report published by the Indonesian Government and the action that they subsequently took—for example, against certain military commanders involved in the incident—show that they are not concerned simply with a cover-up. I agree that further action needs to be taken. We are in close touch with the Community and the United Nations about how the issue should be progressed.

Vietnam

6.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what recent discussions he has had with the United States Government regarding that country's aid and trade embargo against Vietnam and its veto against Vietnam's membership of the IMF and the World bank.

Is the Secretary of State aware that the United States still appears to be at war with Vietnam and that it is blocking all aid and trade in the International Monetary Fund and World bank and through misuse of the COCOM regulations? Only recently vice-president Quayle remarked that most of the refugees in Hong Kong are political—which, as the Secretary of State will be aware, led to a halving of applications for voluntary repatriation. No quantity of private representations in the relevant forums will make any difference. It is about time that the Government said something publicly to the psychopaths who run American foreign policy, with a view to achieving change.

The hon. Gentleman knows full well that United States Government policy is a matter for the United States. Now that change is coming, we are trying to ensure that Vietnam will have access to international financial institutions. We already keep under review financial contributions to the support group, because clearing the arrears to the IFIs is absolutely critical. Those to the IMF already amount to £108 million, and to the Asian Development bank, $6 million. There is no United Kingdom trade embargo. This country is Vietnam's fifth largest investor, at some $143—6 million. British industry is taking a clear interest in the opportunities that exist in Vietnam, and I hope that others will follow our example.

While I cannot associate myself with some of the language used by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), many people feel that it is high time that the United States modernised its economic relations with Vietnam and started to observe the common action programme agreed between 24 countries in respect of the Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong. In view of the events surrounding the Haitian boat people who attempted to enter the United States, does it make any sense for that country to continue opposing the implementation of the common action programme?

We consistently encourage observance of the common action programme in respect of Vietnamese boat people and in the light of events in other parts of the world, such as that to which my right hon. Friend referred. We have done well in trying to ensure that we could help Vietnamese migrants—more than 20,000 of whom have returned from all over the region. The success of our work, with the full support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, leads us to believe that the American Government would do better to adopt a plan similar to our own.

Middle East

7.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on the current middle east peace talks.

The peace process continued in a fourth round of bilateral negotiations in Washington last week. A regional settlement remains an important and realistic aim. It is encouraging that all parties remain determined to continue the process. I strongly applaud Mr. Baker's continued commitment to pushing for a settlement and we will maintain our full support of that effort.

I am sure that the Secretary of State recognises the sensitivities of the middle east peace process. As he knows that the Syrians spent the money that they received for their support during the Gulf war on sophisticated missiles from North Korea—all of which are pointing towards Israel—can he reassure the House that Britain is not getting involved in that arms process? Will he confirm the inaccuracy of reports stating that British Aerospace is involved with Egyptian scientists in uprating scud B missiles for use by the Egyptian army? Surely we must keep out of that arms process, if we are to maintain our nation's influence in the peace process that we all hope will succeed.

The position regarding the supply of arms to Syria remains as it was when Ministers were last questioned about it in the House. As for Egypt, I do not think that the hon. and learned Gentleman is seriously suggesting that it is about to launch an attack on Israel, or is to be feared in that connection. Egypt's pioneering efforts in regard to peacemaking are well established and respected, and I do not consider such a line of questioning helpful.

Now that the Palestinians have presented serious proposals on autonomy, does my right hon. Friend agree that no progress can be made unless Israel responds by agreeing to freeze the illegal settlements, and by abiding by the Geneva convention? In that context, is not the continued closure of Bir Zeit university, which was announced the other day, an intolerable provocation, and should not it be condemned?

Clearly, it is good that the Israelis and the Palestinians are sitting around a table in Washington, and that each side is advancing ideas for the future of the occupied territories. That is a considerable plus. I have not yet studied the Palestinian proposals, which, I believe, were tabled only yesterday, but I hope that there will now be proper discussion of the proposals that are on the table.

Given that background, my hon. Friend is right in saying that—as we have often commented—the Israelis ought to halt the policy of establishing settlements in the occupied terrorities which is provocative and, in our view, illegal. I equally deplore the continued closure of Bir Zeit.

8.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs when he next plans to meet the Israeli ambassador to discuss the Government's policy on the occupied territories.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has no specific plans to meet the ambassador, but both he and I have met him recently. We are in regular contact with the Israeli Government at the highest level on this issue.

Will the Minister take time in the next week, as a matter of urgency, to meet the Israeli ambassador and tell him about the feeling in the country generally that the Israeli Government are literally getting away with murder? I refer to the case of Mustapha Akkawi, who was killed after being tortured in prison just over a week ago.

Just what does Israel have to do—what can it get away with—before the Government are prepared to do something internationally about sanctions and to treat Israel as we treat other countries that break the Geneva convention?

Like the hon. Lady, we believe that the fourth Geneva convention—the protocol—applies to the occupied territories. When grave breaches of the convention occur, we raise them frequently, and directly, with the Israelis. The incident mentioned by the hon. Lady is clearly deplorable, as are the deportations that occur from time to time and the closures of universities, about which we have also protested.

The hon. Lady can be sure of this: we do protest to the Israeli Government when there are clear, serious and obvious breaches of international law.

Does my hon. and learned Friend recognise that, in recent years, several hundred Arabs have been murdered by terrorists for co-operating with the Israelis? Does he accept that those brutal killings, which are still taking place, do not help the peace process?

My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the pattern of killing involving those who are described as collaborators. That is dreadful and we deplore it, as we deplore all violence. It emphasises the importance of trying to push ahead with the peace process that is now under way.

Horn Of Africa

9.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what is his latest view of the prospects for long-term peace (a) in Mogadishu and southern Somalia and (b) in northern Somalia.

The situation is very grim for the innocent people of Somalia. We welcome the United Nations initiative on Somalia. We hope that the factions will honour their commitment to a ceasefire in Mogadishu. This must be the first step towards national reconciliation.

Reports from northern Somalia suggest that instability is, once again, growing and clan divisions widening.

I am grateful for the Minister's reply and I know that she will have been as horrified as the rest of us by the images and the conflict that was reported from Somalia last weekend. Does she agree that one unfortunate thing about the United Nations effort to seek peace between the factions in the south is the implication that those factions, together, represent a Government? Does she agree that the factions that are fighting in the south have no claim to represent the north, which has the main link with the Somali community in this country, and that all factions in the regions of Somalia must be involved in reaching a settlement that can be expected to last?

It is extremely important that all the factions—not just the clans but the sub-clans—in northern, southern and central Somalia come together under the United Nations plan for the ceasefire. I sent one of our officials to Mogadishu and northern Somalia just over a week ago. He reports that stores and vehicles belonging to the Save the Children Fund and Médecins sans Frontieres—MSF—have been looted and that individuals have been abused. If that is starting again, it is as bad as what is going on in Mogadishu. It requires all people to be involved in a ceasefire and a total cessation of hostilities if the aid that we are willing to send—we have sent£8 million to Somalia since early last year—is to get to the people who desperately need it.

Given that the appalling tragedy in the Horn of Africa will not end until there is peace, and given the changes in the pattern of the United Nations' work in recent years, which our Government have so actively supported, does the Minister think that we are now reaching a stage where British troops could be deployed under a United Nations banner in humanitarian action as a precursor to effective aid?

In northern Iraq, we have used British troops to help in that situation. We need a UN relief plan for Somalia as soon as possible. I cannot foretell what proposals it will contain, but without an effective ceasefire no one can be deployed. Having talked to James Jonah following his visit and having seen the national reconciliation plan, I am prepared to consider what is necessary. But we should be very careful not to expect to send troops all over the world. I believe that there are ways of getting local people to participate in their own ceasefire with some help from outside, but it should not need mass troop movements to do it.

The Minister will he aware of the valuable contribution that is made by members of the Somali community in this country and of the tremendous work that is done on their behalf by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael). Since only the United Nations can do the job of peacemaking, is the Minister concerned that just over half the value of the assessments on individual countries for last year has been paid, and will she therefore press other members of the international community to ensure that they give the United Nations the resources to do that necessary peacemaking and peacekeeping job?

The hon. Gentleman may already have guessed that we have been pressing others to play their part in the important work in which the United Nations is engaged. I shall add that to the list of discussions that I shall be having shortly with other assisting countries who are aiming to relieve the awful effects of the wars, wherever they may be occurring.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is a tragedy if law and order is beginning to break down in the north of Somalia, in what is, after all, the old British Somaliland and is now known to local people as Somaliland? If it is breaking down, it is to some extent because the international community has not recognised the separate nature, if not the independence, of that part of Somalia. Will she do everything within her power, with our European Community partners, to ensure that all the people of Somaliland are listened to, not just the factions in the south who, after all, have an Italian connection rather than a British one?

I cannot speak too highly of all the British people who have been in the northern part of Somalia seeking to give help and to assist. They will go on doing so, but they can be effective only if the fighting which seems to have broken out and the looting that I described cease. It is not a question whether it is a separate country —it obviously is not. The relative stability in the months following the purported declaration of independence back in May last year was very welcome and we must do all that we can to re-establish it, but sheer names on pieces of paper will not do so. We must have a relief plan that the United Nations can implement throughout Somalia if there is to be peace and if the people are to be relieved.

Ec Presidency

10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what are Her Majesty's Government's principal goals during the United Kingdom presidency of the EC.

Our first job will be to run an efficient presidency. We aim to complete the single market, prepare for enlargement of the Community, support democracy and reform in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and prepare the ground for carrying out the Maastricht treaty.

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the Government will remain firm against raising the present European Community budget ceiling and that they will continue to encourage EC financing arrangements based on supply-side economics, not on the massive transfers of money between one country and another through the Commission?

We had a first skirmish on that at the Council on Monday. I do not believe that the Commissioners justified their proposal to raise the ceiling. There is headroom within the existing ceiling—for example, we are not in favour of financing an interventionist industrial policy or increased spending on the common agricultural policy.

If the Foreign Secretary is still here—which I doubt—when Britain takes over the presidency of the European Community, will he insist that some race legislation is passed in the European Community to protect black and minority ethnic citizens when they move around Europe?

I do not think that that is a matter within the competence of the Community.

Can my right hon. Friend confirm that our European partners are not losing sight of the need to make the European Commission democratically accountable, any more than they are losing sight of the need to conform to the European Commission directives that we scrupulously honour?

When I talk about implementation of the Maastricht treaty I mean that one of the things that must be done is to set up the arrangements agreed at Maastricht by which member states can be taken to the European Court and punished if they do not carry out obligations that they have assumed.

Does the Secretary of State accept that one of the Government's principal goals during the United Kingdom's presidency of the European Community should be to secure recognition and acceptance of national boundaries by all member states?

I do not think that there is any question in the Community of the boundaries between the member states.

Has my right hon. Friend seen the excellent proposals tabled by Sir David Williamson for the reform of the bureaucracy running the European Community? Does he agree that if—in his admirable phrase—we are to prevent the Commission interfering in the nooks and crannies of everyday life, it would be greatly to the advantage of all European countries if there were a thorough overhaul of the mechanics for the administration of the Commission?

Yes, indeed. What the Commission has to do now there is a new article in the Maastricht treaty is to ensure that its practice complies with it and that it does not encourage the drafting of legislation or the working out of projects on matters that can perfectly well be dealt with by member states, or even closer to the citizen, and that applies to English and French cheeses.

Of course, this Government will not be responsible for Britain during the presidency—they will be watching from the Opposition Front Bench. That is fortunate for Britain. Is the Foreign Secretary aware that the Government's attitude in Maastricht has left a crippling legacy of anger and resentment among our Community partners about the double opt-out, and that it has even led to a denunciation of the Prime Minister and the Government by their own right-wing allies in the European Community? The new Labour Government who will be elected five weeks tomorrow will immediately sign the social charter and set about getting the social chapter firmly into the treaty itself. By doing so, and by being at the heart of Europe, that Government will be able to represent Britain properly during the presidency.

There seems, not for the first time, to be a division between the Opposition Front Bench and Back Benches. Opposition Back-Bench Members have been questioning my right hon. and hon. Friends and myself on the basis that we shall be here for a long time, whereas Front-Bench spokesmen still nurse the occasional illusion. Let us not shatter that illusion for a week or so. The hon. Member for Hamilton (Mr. Robertson) is not usually given to fanciful rhetoric, and if he studies the movement of opinion in Europe he must know that since Maastricht more and more people have begun to comment on the future of Europe in the same sort of way as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and I did before. There is no doubt about the direction in which the intellectual tide is flowing. On the whole, that is a good thing. Another reason that we should be against the Labour party is that we should not put them in a position to buck the trend.

Russia

11.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what further assistance he is providing to help political and economic reform in Russia.

13.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on British relations with the Russian Federation.

15.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs how the United Kingdom is assisting the process of political and economic reform in Russia.

Our relations with the Russian Federation are excellent. My hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office will visit Russia on 9 March. We have strongly supported Russia's application to join the IMF. We have pledged more than £80 million in bilateral aid to Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union. I have already given the House the details about Community aid in which we participate.

Will the Foreign Secretary also help to provide a breathing space for the Russian Government, by supporting their call for a suspension of interest payments on the debt? Would not it be a disaster if Russia ended up having to pay as much in interest rates as it received in aid? Would not that fatally undermine the radical, bold and much-needed programme that President Yeltsin is now trying to push through?

The crucial factor is that Russia and the other republics should be eligible for macroeconomic aid on an IMF basis. For that to happen there has to be an arrangement about the former Soviet Union's debts. An agreement has been reached. It is important that it should be honoured and that republics such as the Ukraine, which have not yet found a way of doing so, should join in the process. That is a necessary part of providing the kind of aid for which there is an increasingly strong case.

Is not one of the problems of Russia in its current economic difficulties that the country might turn in on itself and revert to its usual historic xenophobic tendencies? Is not it our job to keep open the window on the west? What are we doing in terms of establishing contacts right across the range with Russia, to keep it closely tied in with western Europe?

We are doing more and more, with all kinds of projects. I shall name just the latest, launched yesterday evening—the British Emergency Action for Russia and the Republics Trust, founded by Lady Braithwaite, the wife of the ambassador--which is trying to bring together in an imaginative way charities and non-governmental organisations in this country to make contacts and help to build up that kind of self-help in Russia. That kind of spontaneous effort, by all kinds of people in this country, will he just as important in the long run as what Governments do.

Does the Secretary of State agree that until now, there has been little to encourage the new democracies of central and eastern Europe to change their minds about the EC being a rich man's club? Will he do all that he can to ensure that within the EC, there is some agreement about how we shall tackle the enormous problems, which will not be tackled by charity, however welcome that is? If we do not do that, shall not we see hordes of people sweeping from eastern Europe into western Europe simply looking for jobs?

That is right and that is why we have pressed energetically for almost two years for the association agreements, which include trade and political discussions, with Poland, with Hungary and with Czechoslovakia. That is why we are now pressing for trade and co-operation agreements with the republics further to the east. Effort on all those fronts, including trade and being willing to open our markets to goods from those republics, is necessary. We shall continue to press for that and, as I have said, it is one of the priorities of our presidency.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is crucial to persuade Russia that its political stability depends on the stability of the region as a whole, especially its neighbours? To that end, will he encourage Russia to use its good offices to intervene in the appalling situation in Nagorny Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, if Russia is to win its spurs as a member of the Security Council and ultimately as a member of the conference on security and co-operation in Europe?

I urged especially Mr. Kozyrev, the Russian Foreign Minister, to persevere with his efforts. Realistically speaking, it will be a little time before there is an answer to the terrifying question between Armenia and Azerbaijan. My hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State will go to that part of the former Soviet Union next week and I look forward to hearing what he recommends.

Lockerbie Bombing

12.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what developments there have been in relation to the attempts by Her Majesty's Government to secure the extradition of the two Libyan nationals accused of bombing flight PA 103 in 1988; and whether he will make a statement.

The Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 731 on 21 January endorsing certain requests put to Libya on 27 November by the United Kingdom, the United States and France in connection with the bombings of flights Pan Am 103 and UTA 772. Those included the request that Libya surrender those accused of the bombing of flight Pan Am 103 for trial in Scotland or the United States. The secretary-general will report formally on the Libyan response to the Security Council later today. I have, however, seen an advance copy of the report, which makes it clear that Libya has still failed to comply with resolution 731.

Will the Minister confirm that under the terms of the 1971 Montreal convention, which was signed both by Libya and by Britain, any dispute can be referred for arbitration to the International Court of Justice? Now that Libya has referred the matter to the International Court of Justice, will Britain desist from trying to get the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions or take military action against Libya until the International Court of Justice has ruled on the matter?

Her Majesty's Government have the greatest respect for the International Court of Justice and we look to co-operating with it. However, as the hon. Gentleman knows, the Libyan Government have been taking steps in parallel—that is, they have made an application to the ICJ and, at the same time, they are making a response to the UN Security Council. They are working in parallel. That being so, it is appropriate for us to act in a similar way.

Will my hon. and learned Friend confirm that, apart from the political complexities, the matter is straightforward? Two suspected murderers have had international arrest warrants issued against them and the Government's intention is to pursue those arrest warrants. Will my right hon. Friend confirm to the House that there will be no secret deal and no secret negotiations, but that the international arrest warrants will be executed as soon as the opportunity arises?

Her Majesty's Government have put the position plainly and it has been endorsed by the Security Council. There is a prima facie case against two named individuals which is sufficiently strong to justify the issue of warrants. We are anxious—indeed, we are determined—to ensure that those individuals appear before a competent court as speedily as possible. We think that the courts of Scotland are well placed to judge them.

Cyprus

14.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he intends to have discussions about the Cyprus problem with his European Community colleagues.

No. The EC has made clear its continuing full support for the United Nations Secretary-General's mission of good offices, which offers the best hope of progress towards a comprehensive, just and lasting solution to the intercommunal dispute. We shall continue to give full and active support to the United Nations.

I thank the Minister for his reply. Is it not time that the Government stood up and were counted by telling the Turkish Government to remove their troops from occupied Cyprus and saying that if they do not do so the British Government will veto any attempt by Turkey to join the EC?

I share, and I believe that the whole House shares, the hon. Gentleman's frustration at the tragic situation in Cyprus. But I am sure that, as a reasonable man, he will agree on reflection that the wisest course of action for the Government is to continue to support the secretary-general's efforts. That is what we shall do. Of course, we shall also continue to encourage the other guarantor powers,—Greece and Turkey—to play an equally constructive role. I am sure that that is the way forward.

I thank my right hon. Friend for his clear statement of the Government's policy on Cyprus. Does he agree that Cyprus's application to join the EC provides a positive opportunity for other EC states, including Britain, to take a positive attitude to finding a solution to Cyprus? I hope that our Government will encourage other EC states within the United Nations fully to back up the United Nations and put pressure on Turkey to find an early solution.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Dr. Twinn) and, indeed, to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Corbett) and all Members of Parliament for their continued interest in the matter. The EC application was referred on 30 September 1990 to the Commission for an opinion, in accordance with the treaty. When that opinion emerges, we shall, of course, examine it with our partners. But we remain keen, as many partners do, to strengthen relations between the Community and Cyprus.

Surely the Minister ought to be a great deal more forthright and clear on the subject than that. Will the United Kingdom advocate the early admission of Cyprus to the European Community? Will he say that the United Kingdom will not agree to Turkish membership of the EC so long as any Turkish troops are present in Cyprus against the wishes of the present sovereign Government of Cyprus? Does he agree that Turkey should not be admitted to the European Community until its human rights record is rectified? Will he give active support to a federal solution for Cyprus which does justice to both communities within the integrity of the sovereignty of the republic of Cyprus?

The right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) has been rushing up and down the country making what I take it he regards as encouraging noises to Cypriots, Kashmiris and others. British Cypriots are well able to judge what weight to place on his remarks. The policy of Her Majesty's Government, which is to support the efforts of the Secretary-General of the United Nations is the wisest policy for both the British Government and other Governments in the Community. No amount of faffing around by the right hon. Gentleman will convince either our allies or Cypriots.

The presence of Turkish troops is clearly a hazard which makes life difficult in seeking a compromise agreement. Is it not clear that the northern Cypriots are afraid that if the troops go they will simply be overrun? Is there not a case for the EC to reassure both sides that they can live in peace if the troops go? I underline that the presence of the troops is causing the problem at present.

I certainly agree with my hon. Friend that a significant reduction in Turkish troops in northern Cyprus would improve the climate for a negotiated settlement. However, we also have to recognise that the Turks are unlikely to agree to that in advance of a settlement. My hon. Friend and the House will be aware that our contribution and support for the secretary-general is not merely a matter of words. We make a substantial troop contribution to the United Nations peace-keeping force in Cyprus, UNFICYP, which we think is a tangible measure of the efforts that we are giving to peace there.

Soviet Union

16.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs when he next intends to visit the former Soviet Union to discuss matters relating to technology transfer and aid for the republics.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State visited Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine in January and discussed such question then. I visited St. Petersburg also in January.

Does the Minister believe that a vitally important stabilisation fund for Russia can be made to work successfully without tackling the problems of food supply in Russian markets, especially when we consider the consequences for money supply and wage inflation?

The hon. Gentleman will know from our debate this morning that the United Kingdom is fully ready to play its part in providing the financial assistance, on a multilateral basis, which is likely to be necessary to support an IMF programme—such as the stabilisation fund or some other suitable instrument—for the former Soviet Union, and especially for Russia. I sought to explain to him then and before that we not only need to sort out finance but to get on with distributing the food that they can grow, with the production of the food that they do not grow, and sort out their system of feeding the people. That is why, through the know-how fund, endless new ideas and help available, which are being paid for by this country to assist with the production and distribution of food. That work will continue, but so will work on economic reconstruction.

Northern Ireland (Prison Management)

3.31 pm

With permission, I should like to make a statement on Lord Colville's report on the management of paramilitary prisoners in Belfast prison. Before dealing with the substance of his report, which is published today, I should like to express my thanks to my noble Friend Lord Colville for the thoroughness and speed with which he carried out a very difficult task.

The House will recall the tragic events which gave rise to his review. On 24 November last a device exploded in the dining hall in C wing in Belfast prison. One prisoner was killed outright, another mortally wounded, and several others less seriously injured. The efforts of staff in rendering first aid immediately after the explosion were in the highest traditions of the Northern Ireland prison service and earned the thanks of the relatives of the prisoners who died. On 26 November the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the outrage.

Three inquiries were established: a murder investigation by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which continues; and an internal and necessarily confidential review of security procedures in the prison by a senior official of the prison service. Most of its recommendations have been implemented and decisions on the others will be made shortly. The third strand was Lord Colville's inquiry into the operational policy for the management of prisoners of opposing factions in Belfast prison.

The central conclusion of his report is strongly against further segregation within the prison system. It also recommends: that, in Belfast prison, numbers in A wing, the only wing at present housing exclusively paramilitary prisoners, should be reduced; that, out of concern for visitors' safety, those prisoners should have separate visiting arrangements; and that time on remand in custody awaiting trial should be reduced, his preferred method being that the powers in section 8 of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1991 should be used.

I accept the report. I shall comment on each of the recommendations in turn. First, the question of segregation. Lord Colville brings out very clearly the increased risks posed to security by segregation. He says:
"All the lessons from history suggest that segregation facilitates escapes, and escapes will give freedom to paramilitary fanatics, of both factions, who will kill and maim outside prison."
On security grounds 1 am satisfied that Lord Colville's recommendation is right.

Moreover, I am also satisfied that segregation would make it more difficult to offer constructive regimes for inmates, as it already has at the Maze. It would constrain the flexible and effective use of the available accommodation. The opportunity which segregation would provide the paramilitaries to reinforce their cohesiveness within the prison would have an adverse effect on the morale and self-esteem of staff.

I turn now to the reduction of numbers in A wing. There are obvious advantages in keeping untried prisoners together in a more central location. I am pleased to tell the House that the governor can implement this recommendation within the next few weeks, when the necessary construction work will have been completed, without the need to move those prisoners out of Belfast prison.

The recommendation on separate visits is not free from difficulty, but Lord Colville believes that the change is justified in the interests of the safety of visitors, and I have concluded that it should for that reason be accepted.

The case for cutting down remand times has always been strong. Lord Colville concludes that it is now unanswerable and I accept that conclusion. Delays in these cases are, of course, inextricably linked to the terrorist situation, which gravely complicates the investigation of crime and the criminal process as a whole. But it is not acceptable that people should remain for long periods without a trial. Together with my ministerial colleagues, I am urgently considering how the very real problems which exist might best be resolved so that those unacceptable delays can be overcome.

Segregation remains a key objective of the paramilitaries. In resisting campaigns by both factions, prison governors and their staff have implemented the policy of successive Administrations. There now have been three major reports by respected and independent figures which say that segregation is wrong. Lord Gardiner, in his report published in January 1975 on measures to deal with terrorism, recommended that special category status—segregation writ large—should be ended and that the influence of the terrorist leaders must be reduced. Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir James Hennessy, in his 1984 report into the Maze escape of the previous year was in no doubt about the increased threat to security posed by segregation. Lord Colville, having taken evidence from a wide range of people, has come to the same conclusion.

My predecessors accepted the recommendations of Gardiner and Hennessy and I, in turn, have concluded that I should accept the recommendations of Lord Colville. I do not believe that it would be acceptable to this House for the clear stand which has been taken over the years against segregation to be set aside as a result of paramilitary violence and in the face of unequivocal advice from three such distinguished sources and the powerful arguments that they have deployed.

The bomb explosion in C wing in Belfast was an act of terrorism no different from the murder of workmen at Teebane or the killing of people who happened to be in a betting shop at the wrong time. None of those events will deflect the Government from what they believe to be in the best interests of the people of Northern Ireland.

I thank the Secretary of State for coming quickly to the House to make this statement.

Before I deal with the content of the statement, my hon. Friend the Member for Newry and Armagh (Mr. Mallon) has asked me to convey his apologies for his absence this afternoon. He was on his way to the airport this morning when he came upon ,the scene of the foul murder of one of his constituents, who was known to him. He has asked me to express his horror at such a vicious killing—a horror tht I know the House shares. My hon. Friend was looking forward particularly to making his observations on Lord Colville's important report.

Lord Colville was asked to produce his report in the aftermath of another vile act of savagery within Belfast prison. We owe him our thanks for the thoroughness and rigour of his report—qualities which we have come to expect from him. We welcome the fact that the Government have been prepared to accept his recommendations so quickly and largely in full. Our only regret is that the Government have been unable to follow a similar course with many other recommendations that Lord Colville has made about other issues associated with prisons in Northern Ireland.

It is also proper on such an occasion that we should pay tribute to the staff of Belfast prison. They have to work in very primitive conditions, in a highly charged and emotional atmosphere. The staff, at all levels, conduct their difficult task with bravery and dedication. We should pay them proper respect for doing a job that many in the House and within the country would not be happy to carry out.

A number of questions arise from the report and the incident that gave rise to it. The Opposition are glad that the Secretary of State has decided to accept the recommendations. In particular, we are pleased that he will use his powers to reduce remand periods, a course of action that we have urged on him and his predecessors for quite some time. What time limits is he considering? Will he flesh out what he said about the discussions that he will be having with his ministerial colleagues? The House and the country would like further information on this because the reasons for these long periods of remand in Northern Ireland give rise to many accusations.

Will the Secretary of State accept that the physical state of Her Majesty's prison in Belfast, despite recent improvements, is still very much a blot on the face of the Northern Ireland prison service? We know that much money is being spent and many improvements are to be made, but it is still an old, expensive, badly designed prison, which will always cause problems not only for the prisoners but for the staff.

Can the Secretary of State assure the House that prisoners will be kept in humane, secure, sanitary and safe conditions? Will he assure the House that he will take whatever action is necessary to ensure that this is the case? Lord Colville spoke about the best of private practice in Humberside. Will the Secretary of State be able to establish the same sort of regime in Belfast prison, as we shall ensure that it is maintained in the Humberside prison once it is brought back into public control?

I know that the House would want to respond to the apology that the hon. Gentleman made on behalf of the hon. Member for Newry and Armagh (Mr. Mallon). I am sure that the House will join the hon. Gentleman in his condemnation of the murder of Mr. Gray in County Armagh this morning.

I am grateful that the hon. Gentleman thanked my noble Friend Lord Colville, as I did. I am particularly grateful for his tribute to the prison staff in Belfast prison and throughout the prison service in Northern Ireland. It was my privilege to meet a number of the staff who were directly involved in the incident after it occurred, and I join the hon. Gentleman in his admiration for the work that they do.

It will take a little time to conclude our examination of the various steps that we can take to improve the remand period. Some steps have been taken and we can take further steps, but I would not want to be drawn today on how we can determine the target times. I have accepted the spirit of Lord Colville's recommendation.

As to the improvements to Belfast prison, it is known that a rehabilitation of it is envisaged, but that is necessarily somewhat more for the longer term. As to Lord Colville's recommendation to which the governor has reacted, the consideration that the hon. Gentleman mentioned will have been taken into account in the rearrangements made.

The Secretary of State will know that we wish to be associated with his tributes to the prison staff and to Lord Colville.

On the basic principle of segregation, the Secretary of State will know that we agree with Lord Colville. Nevertheless, as the Secretary of State will also know, there is a de facto separation in A wing. Will the Secretary of State give us an assurance that prisoners there will not be compelled to mix?

As to the general position of the prisoners, the right hon. Gentleman will know of the general condition in the prison, and that the length of time that people spend on remand is crucial. I have seen plans for the refurbishment that the prison governor wishes to take place and for the restructuring of the cells, and I hope that the Secretary of State will accept the prison governor's ideas and implement them as soon as possible. When will refurbishment take place?

We accept Lord Colville's views on time limits for remand, and his view that the Scottish model is the best one to follow is right. What is the problem with regard to the length of time on remand? Lord Colville says that delays are not caused by lack of prosecuting counsel, that there is no shortage of court accommodation, and that delays are not caused by requests for a particular defence counsel. What, then, is the problem?

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's tribute to Lord Colville and the prison staff. His first question related to the de facto arrangements within Belfast prison. Following representations in 1990 by certain public representatives, the Government introduced new unlock arrangements to reduce the possibility of confrontation between the factions. Those involve staff making an assumption about which faction will accept the offer of exercise or evening association. Those sensible and pragmatic arrangements fall far short of segregation, and I confirm that the position will remain as the hon. Gentleman asked.

The hon. Gentleman asked about remand times. When the enabling powers on the application of statutory time limits to which I referred in my statement were taken in 1987—they were renewed in 1991—the then Minister of State said that the Government would have to be confident that any scheme was unlikely to have the effect of procuring the release on bail, or even the discharge, of a person indicted for serious terrorist crime. That prospect was still a possibility when the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1991 was debated, and it remains so today. Therefore, that consideration will weigh with us in examining the issue.

The hon. Gentleman also asked about the difficulty of raising the time limit. Several conditions will apply. He will know from his research that the number of weeks on remand had been falling and that the trend then reversed. One of the questions that we have been asking ourselves is why that change occurred. The upsurge in terrorist violence since 1989 greatly complicated investigations by the RUC and has resulted in a number of complex, multi-defendant trials, which largely negated the effectiveness of our initiatives.

There is no value judgment in what I am saying—I am simply being descriptive. Additional factors have been the increasing tendency of the defence to challenge police notes, and to request ESDA—electrostatic data analysis —tests and the problems experienced by the RUC in interviewing witnesses in certain areas.

I reiterate that the issues responsible for the delay in remand times are being considered urgently in the light of the reversal of the trend.

I join in the expressions of thanks to Lord Colville for his report and to the prison staff for their excellent work in difficult circumstances.

There is a real problem with lengthy remands in custody. Has the Secretary of State noticed that, when a case comes to trial, the defendant or defendants sometimes plead guilty at that late stage? Can discussions take place to ensure that, if a defendant is to plead guilty, his case is brought before the court as quickly as possible?

I shall look into the hon. Gentleman's question. It may be helpful to the House if I list the administrative measures that have been introduced in the past few years to help reduce waiting times. They include: a review of the organisation and staffing levels in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, relevant sections of the RUC and the Northern Ireland forensic science laboratory; the establishment of a fast stream to identify and take forward cases that can be brought to trial relatively quickly; the appointment of a presiding judge at Belfast Crown court to oversee the listing of cases, and two additional High Court judges, one additional county court judge and 12 additional Queen's counsel, significantly increasing the number of senior counsel available for criminal cases.

In answer to the question by the hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble), I should have said that the major building work at Belfast prison is in preparation. The Government are taking it seriously, but I do not wish to commit myself to the precise moment at which it will be done.

I also wish to express my appreciation of the work of Lord Colville and my satisfaction at the fact that the Secretary of State has been able to accept Lord Colville's recommendations. I am glad that the Secretary of State is working towards implementing the remand recommendations, while understanding the difficulties. Will the right hon. Gentleman undertake to report progress to the House as soon as he can?

The Secretary of State referred to the internal and necessarily confidential inquiry into security procedures, and said that decisions were expected shortly. Naturally, I do not ask him to reveal the nature of those recommendations, but can he say whether there has been full consultation with the prison staff, both about matters that may have been thrown up by the security inquiry and about the implications of the intentions regarding the numbers in A wing? Have they met with the understanding and backing of the staff?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for what he said about Lord Colville. I shall as soon as possible vouchsafe further information on the recommendations on remand times that we are considering. Most of the recommendations of the internal security review at the prison have been implemented. Unless we are prepared to countenance draconian measures that would seriously and adversely affect the quality of life for all prisoners and their visitors, absolute security cannot be guaranteed.

The prison service has rightly earned praise, both in the Province and elsewhere, for the overall quality of the regime that it provides. Neither it nor I wish to make life less tolerable for the many because of the actions of the few. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that the prison service has always made it clear that it will seek properly to carry out the Government's decisions about the prison regime.

I am all for integration, as distinct from segregation, in Northern Ireland, but is not relative integration among paramilitary prisons presenting many problems? The significant point in Lord Colville's reports seems to be that, if groups are segregated, it leads to cohesion within them, which means that escapes and other activities are more likely. Relative integration begins to break that down. Are there not other methods, apart from relative integration, to break down that cohesion?

I think that the central point of Lord Colville's report is that segregation makes the planning of escapes easier. The fact that those held on remand in Belfast prison are prisoners who have recently been arrested and whom the paramilitaries would particularly like to have outside prison reinforces Lord Colville's recommendation, to which I think the hon. Member for Derbyshire, North-East (Mr. Barnes) gave support.

Separation is a word that has been quoted as the antithesis to segregation, perhaps along the lines mentioned by the hon. Gentleman. The governor has already introduced sensible arrangements to reduce the chances of confrontation. It is significant that the prisoners to whom Lord Colville spoke drew no distinction between separation and segregation.

My colleagues and I should like to express our sympathy to the relatives of the person most recently murdered in Northern Ireland. We have repeatedly condemned violence, terrorism and murder. The report came about partly as a result of the murder of one of my constituents in Belfast prison, which naturally heightened concern among prisoners and their relatives outside prison for the safety of prisoners.

What progress has been made to date in tracking down those responsible for the bomb and the murder? Does the Secretary of State agree that the safety of prisoners and prison staff remains paramount? Will the right hon. Gentleman ensure that every effort is made as quickly as possible to improve the conditions under which prisoners have to remain in Belfast prison?

I know that the whole House will wish to join me in agreeing with the sympathy expressed by the hon. Gentleman for the family of his constituent who was killed in the incident concerned.

On the question both of the security of prisoners and of the safety of prison staff, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, there can be no guarantee of absolute security —as I said in my answer to the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan).

All prison governors take practical and reasonable steps to discharge their duty of care. However, segregation does not guarantee safety; the two prisoners murdered in prison were segregated. Most of the recommendations of the internal security review of Belfast prison have been implemented. I recognise that that mainly concerns prisoners, but I assure the hon. Gentleman that it also concerns prison officers.

I referred in my statement to the Royal Ulster Constabulary investigation into the murder of the hon. Gentleman's constituent. That investigation is continuing, and the RUC hopes to bring it to a conclusion.

As I understand it, republican terrorist groups get their arms and explosives from the middle east and America. Will the right hon. Gentleman have a quiet word with the Governments concerned, and especially with George Bush, about that matter? Where do the loyalist terrorists get their arms—and, more importantly, what are the Government doing about it?

I would not want to be confrontational towards the hon. Gentleman, but if he wants to make charges about the American Government providing military assistance to anybody within the island of Ireland, it would be better if he presented his evidence privately to me before making such accusations in the House.

The Semtex involved in the episode on which I made my statement today is widely thought to have come in the pre-Eksund consignment from the Libyan Government to the IRA. We should look in that direction for the source of the offence in this instance.

During the urgent considerations to which the right hon. Gentleman referred, would he be prepared to accept any useful suggestion from those of us who come across fairly regular information in the course of our constituency duties?

If any right hon. or hon. Gentleman wishes to be of assistance privately in that way, the Government would be happy to receive such help and advice.

Points Of Order

3.58 pm

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I apologise to you and the House for being late for Foreign Office questions. I assume that it was my lateness that caused you not to see me, rather than the sobriety of my dress this afternoon. The reason for my being late is that the 1.52 pm train from Forest gate to Liverpool street was rather peremptorily cancelled. By way of consolation, a rather satirical member of British Rail's staff gave me a copy of British Rail's passengers charter to read while I was waiting for the next train. I was able to read it in full and there are many questions that I wish to ask—

When I arrived at Liverpool street and made my complaint, I was told that if I looked very carefully I would see that the passengers charter is in fact entitled "Passenger's Charter", and that therefore it did not apply to me because I was not the passenger for which it was actually devised.

I want to know whether you, Mr. Speaker, have received any application from the Secretary of State for Transport to come to the House to give us more details about the passengers charter so that we can know whether it applies to all of us or whether it is just a way for the Tory Government to save money.

In fairness, I shall call the hon. Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe) first.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. This is a personal point of order. It has been brought to my attention by a journalist who hopes to be covering a general election in the near future that, the last time the House debated capital punishment, I was shown as having voted on both sides of the issue. That appears in the guide for journalists covering the election. I do not suppose that there is much that you, Mr. Speaker, can do about that, but if there is one subject on which it is improbable, to say the least, that I would vote on both sides it is on capital punishment. Ever since I entered the House, I have voted against it. I would not have made such a mistake, and if the record could be corrected, I should be grateful.

That is a proper way in which to deal with such a matter. I hope that we shall have other legitimate points of order.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Has the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry requested your permission to make a statement on an important matter? It has come to light that stolen money has been given to an organisation— £400,000 to the Conservative party—from the chairman of Polly Peck. Could it be returned?

There is an early-day motion on the Order Paper about that. It is not a matter for me.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. I refer to early-day motion 793. Has the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster requested your permission to make a statement to the House about the donation by Mr. Asil Nadir of £440,000 to Conservative party funds?

Order. The hon. Gentleman has tabled an early-day motion on that very subject. It is not a matter for me. He can ask about it tomorrow at business questions.

Order. It is not a matter for me. The hon. Gentleman has tabled an early-day motion. He asks for the matter to be debated. I cannot do anything about it now.

Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Have you had a request from the right hon. Member for Northavon (Sir J. Cope), the deputy treasurer of the Conservative party, to allow him to clear his name of the charges that he solicited and received illegal funds from a company based in Cyprus?

That is a similar matter. I hope that the hon. Gentleman gave the right hon. Member for Northavon (Sir J. Cope) notice that he intended to mention him. That would be in the proper traditions of the House.

Interest On Business Debts

4.2 pm

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide that business debts should carry interest after a period of 28 days.
The Bill is an attempt to crack down on businesses—usually, but not exclusively, large businesses—which drive thousands of other businesses, usually much smaller businesses, into bankruptcy by failing to pay their debts on time.

If passed, the Bill would allow a much freer flow of money for jobs completed and goods supplied. Without it, many firms will continue to crash. Not because of Government policies, not because of high interest rates, not because of difficulties with the banks, but because they cannot get in the money to which they are justly entitled and without which they cannot pay their way and continue in business.

The actual rate of interest and the actual number of days after which interest is to be paid, whether it be 28 or 30, can be decided in Committee. At this stage I simply seek justice and fairness on business debts which underlie the need for the Bill.

The chairman of the National Westminster bank, Lord Alexander—no relation I am afraid—has warned that the unfair practice of paying debts late is hampering Britain's economic recovery. That bank has surveyed business problems and second on the list is late payment of debt. The Bill will give the opportunity to redress that problem.

My Bill is designed not to give easier recourse to the law or to the courts but to achieve a change in business climate. Of course, businesses and their customers can agree between them at the time of contract that interest will be payable if the debt is not settled by a certain time. However, that is easier said than put into practice. Most suppliers are not strong enough to insist on such a condition. They have neither the muscle nor the bargaining power. The Bill will redress that.

Most of us have a Barclaycard, and many have American Express cards. We know that if we do not settle our statements by the end of a stipulated period, interest will be charged in the next statement. That concentrates the mind and brings out the cheque book. In the same way, if a debtor business wanted to take another month or so to settle its debts, it could pay to do so. It is an added cost on that business, not to the innocent supplier.

It is not only Barclaycard and American Express that charge interest on late payments—the Inland Revenue does so as well. The business man, however, has no recourse to interest in respect of his late payers—and they are often the people who cause him to delay his tax payments. The problem is one which mainly affects small businesses, but they are not the only ones to suffer.

Businesses with the largest muscle and biggest bargaining power are usually the culprits, and they can be large or small firms. The dominant customer can choose from a dozen or more suppliers and do exactly as he likes in respect of late payment. The less dominant supplier is in no position to insist on interest at the time of contract. If he does, the business may be placed elsewhere. My Bill addresses the problem created by dominant customers in an economic climate in which business is hard to win in the first place.

Mine is not a new idea. Several attempts have been made in the House to change the law. The Government have hitherto believed that a voluntary code accepted by all would achieve the desired effect without legislation, in the belief that any company that embraced a voluntary code would abide by it. Anyone does not and will not, and no amount of codes will deal with him.

There have been several codes since 1986, but over that period the problem of late payment has demonstrably grown worse. In 1986, a survey by the Forum of Private Business found that all businesses, excluding the very largest, were owed £57,000 million, and they themselves owed £47,000 million. When that exercise was repeated in 1990, companies were owed the horrendous sum of £145,000 million, and themselves owed £75,000 million. Those immense figures account for a huge proportion of this country's gross domestic product.

Last year, there were 47,777 recorded business closures. Dun and Bradstreet say that one of the main causes was slow payment. The whole business structure has a domino effect, so that if one business goes bankrupt, two or three others to which it owes money usually fail in its wake.

Businesses in England and Wales have the worst record in Europe for paying their bills on time. In 1986, the average bill settlement period after an initial 30 days was another 44 days—a total of 74 days before a supplier received payment. The average is now 51 days on top of those 30 days, making a total of 81 days before a supplier is paid, and this is the average.

Surely that position cannot continue. There is a statutory right to interest in all the other EC countries except Greece, Portugal and the Republic of Ireland. It can be no coincidence that, in countries where such a right exists, the average number of days that elapse after the 30-day payment period is as low as 22 in Denmark, and 18 in Germany.

It is probably the kiss of death for any hon. Member to say, "If the Bill is passed, it will bring this country into line with the majority of other EC countries." Nevertheless, I believe that reform will come about—and, for many small companies in particular, but for some quite large ones too, it cannot come soon enough.

I urge my party to include a commitment to such reform in its manifesto for the next election. In the meantime, I commend my Bill to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Richard Alexander, Mr. Derek Conway, Mr. Christopher Gill, Mr. Michael Mates, Mr. Andrew Rowe and Sir David Mitchell.

Interest On Business Debts

Mr. Richard Alexander accordingly presented a Bill to provide that business debts should carry interest after a period of 28 days: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time upon Friday 20 March and to be printed. [Bill 101.]

Local Government Finance Bill (Allocation Of Time)

4.11 pm

I beg to move, That the Order of the House [12th November] be supplemented as follows:—

Lords Amendments

1. The proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments shall be completed at this day's sitting and, if not previously brought to a conclusion, shall be brought to a conclusion two hours after the commencement of the proceedings on this Order.

2. For the purpose of bringing any proceedings to a conclusion in accordance with paragraph 1 above—

  • (a) Mr Speaker shall first put forthwith any Question which has already been proposed from the Chair and not yet decided and, if that Question is for the amendment of a Lords Amendment, shall then put forthwith the Question on any further Amendment of the said Lords Amendment moved by a Minister of the Crown and on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown, That this House doth agree or disagree with the Lords in the said Lords Amendment, or, as the case may be, in the said Lords Amendment as amended;
  • (b) Mr Speaker shall then designate such of the remaining Lords Amendments as appear to him to involve questions of privilege and shall—
  • (i) put forthwith the Question on any Amendment moved by a Minister of the Crown to a Lords Amendment and then put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown, That this House doth agree or disagree with the Lords in their Amendment, or, as the case may be, in their Amendment as amended;
  • (ii) put forthwith the Question on any Motion moved by a Minister of the Crown, That this House doth disagree with the Lords in a Lords Amendment;
  • (iii) put forthwith with respect to the Amendments designated by Mr Speaker which have not been disposed of the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendments; and
  • (iv) put forthwith the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in all the remaining Lords Amendments;
  • (c) as soon as the House has agreed or disagreed with the Lords in any of their Amendments Mr Speaker shall put forthwith a separate Question on any other Amendment moved by a Minister of the Crown relevant to that Lords Amendment.
  • Stages Subsequent To First Consideration Of Lords Amendments

    3. Mr Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the consideration forthwith of any further Message from the Lords on the Bill.

    4. The proceedings on any further Message from the Lords shall, if not previously brought to a conclusion, be brought to a conclusion one hour after the commencement of those proceedings.

    5. For the purpose of bringing those proceedings to a conclusion—

  • (a) Mr Speaker shall put forthwith any Question which has already been proposed from the Chair and not yet decided, and shall then put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown which is related to the Question already proposed from the Chair;
  • (b) Mr Speaker shall then designate such of the remaining items in the Lords Message as appear to him to involve questions of privilege and shall—
  • (i) put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown on any item;
  • (ii) in the case of each remaining item designated by Mr Speaker, put forthwith the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in their Proposal; and
  • (iii) put forthwith the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in all the remaining Lords Proposals.
  • Supplemental

    6.—

    (1) Mr Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the appointment and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons.

    (2) Such a Committee shall report before the conclusion of the sitting at which it is appointed.

    7.—

  • (1) In this paragraph "the proceedings" means proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments or on any further Message from the Lords on the Bill, on the appointment and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons and the Report of such a Committee.
  • (2) Paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings.
  • (3) No dilatory Motion with respect to, or in the course of, the proceedings shall be made except by a member of the Government, and the Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.
  • (4) If the proceedings are interrupted by a Motion for the Adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 (Adjournment on specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration) a period equal to the duration of the proceedings on the Motion shall be added to the period at the end of which the proceedings are to be brought to a conclusion.
  • The Bill carries through the Government's decision to abolish the community charge, and to replace it with a new council tax. Once we had made that decision, as part of the review of local government, we were determined to carry it through as quickly as we could. I am sure that everyone in the House and outside will agree with that intention.

    The timetable motion continues the momentum that we have established. We set ourselves the demanding but achieveable target of introducing the council tax on 1 April 1993. The Opposition said that that could not be done, and pressed us to return to a rating system based on the discredited 1973 rateable values; but the progress that has been made through this Bill and in other ways now demonstrated just how wrong the Opposition were.

    The first stage was to pass the Bill. We had it ready for introduction at the very start of the present session, and, once the House had accepted its principle on Second Reading, we sought approval for a timetable motion. The House's agreement to that motion ensured that the Bill could be enacted on the fastest possible timetable, which will give local authorities a firm basis on which to plan for the introduction of the council tax in April next year.

    Today's timetable motion is appropriate, not least because we have taken further action in parallel with the parliamentary debates in order to ensure that all the necessary parts of the jigsaw will be in place in time.

    My opposition to the guillotine motion is not based simply on the fact that it perpetuates the poll tax for a further year—it will not be abolished until 1993. My opposition is more specific. I think that we should devote far more time this afternoon to discussing Lords amendment No. 57, which relates to computer evidence.

    I am advised by those who helped my constituents David and Eleanor Bullard to take their case all the way to the High Court—it related to computer evidence, and lay behind the introduction of the amendment some days ago—that it is defectively drafted. It merely allows the Government to use computer evidence to prove payment of the poll tax; they cannot prove non-payment. For that to be possible, the amendment would have to use the precise words, relating to negative hearsay, that are contained in the Civil Evidence (Scotland) Act 1988. That is why two hours will not be enough. The Minister has not closed the loophole, and if he does not believe me, we will see him in the High Court.

    The only way in which two hours may not be enough is if I am interrupted at length in the debate on the timetable motion, thereby preventing us from debating the amendments. I am keen to debate the amendments.

    We have drafted the key orders and regulations that local authorities will need to design their computer software and other systems for the new tax; drafts have been placed in the Library. We intend to make the necessary statutory instruments and lay them before Parliament as soon as possible after Royal Assent.

    We have taken further action to ensure that computer software will be up and running before April 1993. The Department has sponsored a specification for users for council tax computer systems, and a copy was sent to each billing authority in December.

    Preparations are well advanced on every front for the introduction of the council tax in April next year. No one, not even the Opposition, is saying that it cannot be done.

    I commend the motion knowing that Parliament has given the Bill full scrutiny. In Committee, it was subject to 88 hours of detailed examination, including lengthy debate of all its important aspects. It was debated for two days on Report. In another place, the Committee stage lasted six full days, followed by a further three days on Report.

    Throughout all its parliamentary proceedings, the details of the council tax have been subjected to rigorous examination. Alternatives have been proposed and discussed, but the council tax has stood the test. The principles have emerged with the endorsement of both Houses.

    Today's consideration of Lords amendments is not controversial. Where improvements have been suggested in either House, we have listened and, where appropriate, have amended the Bill, although it is worth noting that it has not needed much amendment.

    The House will recall that in Committee we introduced additional powers to allow a scheme of relief for disabled people. In the other place, we clarified the information powers of local authorities. Throughout proceedings on the Bill, we have responded positively to constructive suggestions. The hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) will recall that I even added my name to one of his Committee amendments about certificates for students.

    That constructive approach continued in another place. The majority of the Lords amendments represent the outcome of that approach. I am glad to be able to say that the Government will urge the House to accept all their Lordships' amendments.

    I hope that the Opposition will take a constructive approach today. I am heartened to see that no official Opposition amendments have been tabled seeking changes to the Lords amendments.

    The consideration that the Bill has received is a possible model for future parliamentary procedure. There can be no possible reason for suggesting that proceedings this evening should he delayed beyond the time allocated in the motion. The key is to get the Bill on to statute book and to give local authorities the firm base that they need to implement the tax at the earliest practical date—1 April 1993. We can now either debate the motion for an hour or the Bill for nearly two hours. I commend the motion to the House.

    4.18 pm

    It is now well known and established that the Government have had recourse to the guillotine on more occasions than any of their predecessors. It is perhaps worth establishing a further point: we are not talking about an agreed and planned timetable for legislation—an idea that has sometimes commended itself to some of our more responsible parliamentarians. Not a bit of it. There was a hint in the specious argument advanced by the Leader of the House that this procedure might be a model for other legislation, but that simply is not the case. This is not an agreed and planned procedure designed to produce good legislation. It is being unilaterally and irresponsibly imposed. It is the negation of good government and good legislation.

    We began with a bad Bill and, by virtue of successive guillotines, we have at the very least failed to make it better and, in some senses, it could be argued that it has been made worse.

    My hon. Friend is right: the Government bear the responsibility for that sequence of events.

    We now have a two-hour debate in which to debate the very motion that limits debates to two hours and which then, in what is left of the two hours, allows us—magnanimously—to debate the implications of no fewer than 77 Lords amendments. To discuss a guillotine motion and 77 amendments in two hours is not serious government or serious debate. It is almost laughable that the Minister can with a straight face pretend to support the motion on the ground that it guarantees the merits of the legislation. Indeed, the reverse is true.

    The Minister argued that the amendments deal with issues that are not controversial. I beg to differ. The matters covered by some of the amendments are matters of the greatest controversy. They are the product of an attempt by the Government to resolve that controversy, but we should at least have the opportunity to debate properly the so-called solutions suggested by the Government.

    Let us consider some instances of matters of considerable consequences which are now enshrined in the amendments and which we shall have precious little time to debate in proper form. One such matter is the question of the joint and several liability of the unfortunate people who suffer from Alzheimer's disease and who were rightly singled out originally in schedule I for exemption from liability to pay their own poll tax. We pressed on the Government the illogicality—even in terms of the Bill's own perverted logic—of exempting such unfortunate people from liability for the personal element of their own council tax but then making them potentially jointly and severally liable for the personal element of someone else's tax.

    Does my hon. Friend agree that there has been an important development relating to that point? There should be some provision in the Lords amendments for recovery from Alzheimer's disease because, as my hon. Friend will recall, Mr. Ernest Saunders was discharged because he developed Alzheimer's but made a remarkable recovery. That complicates matters because the legislation needs to be suitably amended.

    My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. It is barely relevant to the debate but it is certainly the case that, contrary to received medical opinion, great medical advances have been made. I heard that particular person arguing with great clarity and coherence not only that he had been dealt with unfairly and that the procedures were wrong but that he was innocent. He was compos mentis to that degree.

    The amendments are shot through with illogicality. The Government have dealt with a particular aspect of the problem, but the Minister has still not acknowledged the illogicality of the exemptions in schedule 1, combined with the joint and several liability provisions in the early clauses.

    On the point made by my hon. Friend the. Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer), it is interesting that Mr. Ernest Saunders was let out early because of the circumstances described, having served one day in prison for every £30,000 that he was alleged to have defrauded and found guilty of having defrauded during the Guinness scandal. However, Mr. Cassidy, a pensioner from Northumberland, was sent to Durham maximum security prison—with no possibility of remission because non-payment of the poll tax is a civil offence—for one day for every 62p that he owes. That was not just a question of a good recovery being made from a tragic disease, but a classic illustration of the old story that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.

    That is a powerful point, but I do not propose to be diverted further by it, important though it may be.

    The second group of amendments provides examples of the important debates for which we ought to have time. Those amendments concern the obligations imposed on taxpayers to divulge information to the collecting authorities—the Minister of State referred to that matter—and the authorities' plea to be given in turn the statutory authority to maintain what they accurately describe as a council tax register.

    The amendments deal with that problem up to a point, but it may be useful for the Minister of State to hear, simply as an illustration of the anxiety that remains, a quotation from a letter written by the Birmingham city council treasurer to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Corbett):
    "The Government is proposing that there will be a statutory obligation to answer questions on liability so that I can, in effect, maintain a 'Council Tax Register'".
    Incidentally, it is interesting that the city treasurer immediately sees through the pretence that no register is to be kept. He continues:
    "In my view, and this is shared by many colleagues throughout the country…this does not go far enough. I would wish to have a statutory right to require people to provide me with information on discount entitlement so that the Property Register contains all the information needed to calculate at the outset the proper Council Tax liability for a dwelling. It is of the utmost importance that local authorities are able to issue bills for Council Tax next year which are as accurate as possible. If we have to rely on people claiming discount status then I can see all sorts of administrative problems because people will think they will get discount automatically when in fact the Government's current proposals require them to claim it."

    The hon. Gentleman will recall that, when we debated the matter on Report, I said that I intended to discuss it with the local authority associations. I did so, and the associations, while calling for the power which is now included in the Bill, did not call for the power that the hon. Gentleman quotes the Birmingham city treasurer as requesting. If the hon. Gentleman found himself in government, would he respond to every individual request made by a city treasurer, or would he tend, as I have done, to base what he put into legislation on what local authority associations said to him formally?

    For the sake of brevity, I omitted a phrase from my reading of the letter. I shall now read the full sentence:

    "In my view, and this is shared by many colleagues throughout the country as well as the Local Authority Associations, this does not go far enough."
    The city treasurer then went on to make the fuller point. The Minister had better resolve with that gentleman which of them has the right interpretation of the views of the local authority associations. I would lay a small bet that the city treasurer is more in tune with those views than is the Minister of State.

    The group of amendments likely to be of greatest concern is that intended to plug the legal loophole concerning the use of computer records which has arisen over recent weeks and months. No one should doubt the enormous problems that that loophole has caused local authorities, and the Opposition believe that it should have been foreseen and acted upon much earlier. As soon as it became clear that magistrates courts, and then the High Court, had ruled to the effect that computer records could not be relied upon, the Government should have acted immediately.

    I have repeatedly offered our co-operation for a short Bill, which could have been completed in a single day, to ensure that local authorities collecting the poll tax were not frustrated in that way. Instead, we have the measure in the Lords amendment, which has been long delayed and simply does not deal with some of the legal problems, including problems of retrospection, that local authorities now have to face.

    The truth is that the Bill is complex. It began with 117 clauses and 14 schedules. It could hardly have addressed a more difficult and important problem than the replacement of what is probably the most important and most damning single policy mistake made by any Government in modern times. Yet throughout the proceedings on the Bill, we have been forced by Government diktat to treat the legislation with a cavalier disregard for proper debate and proper principles.

    The Bill started as a hotch-potch and it ends up in no better condition. The council tax preserves all the worst features of the poll tax. It preserves the unfairness of the exemption for those at the top of the income scale from the liability to pay their fair share. It preserves the whole concept of the head count and, as we have heard from the city treasurer of Birmingham and many others, it preserves the requirement for a register. It also preserves the administrative complexity. It adds to those known problems all the difficulties of a wholly new and untried property tax proceeding on the basis of a Mickey Mouse valuation which is already throwing up huge problems because it has been carried out so unsatisfactorily.

    One of the most bizarre aspects of the proceedings on the Bill has been the transformation in the personality and style of the Minister of State who has piloted it through. When we began, we were confronted by a man who was perhaps slightly austere, certainly rather detached and even commendably academic in style. We should no doubt have been put on notice that things were about to change when he changed his hair style to a sort of Heseltinian haystack.

    We then found that, instead of the rather attractive, reserved and academic figure, someone came to the Dispatch Box—but for his perfunctory speech, we might have seen another illustration today—whose eyes flashed, whose lips curled, whose nostrils flared and whose voice vibrated with synthetic outrage. He gives all the appearance of having enrolled in a youth training scheme leading to a diploma in the "Michael Heseltine school of Labour bashing".

    Clearly the qualifying test is the ability to spout absolute nonsense with utter conviction. I have every confidence that the hon. Gentleman will shortly be awarded his diploma. The only point in which we can take comfort is that he shows no sign so far of reaching for the peroxide bottle.

    My hon. Friend is talking about the Heseltine factor. Has he considered the fact that 25 Victoria street, the well-known headquarters of the person who challenged the previous Prime Minister and who led the way to the change when she was kicked out like a dog in the night, was also the headquarters of that little coup? I passed it the other day. I do not know what will happen to the poll tax or the council tax on that property. It has turned into a slum and there is nobody there any more. It is almost as though it was bought and used for the purpose I have mentioned, which suggests that the Secretary of State for the Environment has a lot of money.

    Into what council tax bracket will the property fit? It is a slum-like building with barred gates and rubbish chucked inside. It is now not even fit for someone with a cardboard box. Will it be at the bottom of the range, at the top or somewhere else? One thing is certain. The Secretary of State paid a lot of money for a building to get to the top of the tree. The Minister of State was with him, although that has not served any useful purpose.

    Well, the Minister is now. They have finished up with the poll tax round their necks when they wanted the top job.

    My hon. Friend is understandably interested in 25 Victoria street. I do not know what council tax liability will be attracted by that property. What. I can tell my hon. Friend may be even more interesting. The millionaire house of the Secretary of State in Westminster will pay less than £200 in council tax, which will be lower than the council tax paid by the poorest people in virtually every other London borough. That alone tells us something about the fairness or lack of it of the Government's proposals.

    We are entitled to draw only one set of conclusions from the whole tawdry performance. The Government are acting so irresponsibly and piling up such obvious problems for themselves in the passage and then administration of the council tax that I and many others conclude that they have literally no intention of ever implementing such a hopelessly confused and ill-prepared measure. If by any chance they win the general election, it is clearly their intention that this ill-digested dog's breakfast will be immediately regurgitated. But that would mean—let us be clear—that, if the council tax or something rather like it was ever properly implemented, there would then have to be a further delay in getting rid of the poll tax. This measure replaces the poll tax, but a new measure would not be in a position to do so by 1 April 1993. The voters should be put on notice that a re-elected Tory Government would certainly give a further lease of life to the poll tax while they worked out a scheme to replace it that would work.

    There is only one other interpretation of the Government's irresponsibility: the Government, or at least that part of the Government represented by the Secretary of State for the Environment, realise that the game is up and the general election is lost. They know that there is no prospect of their ever having to implement this ill-prepared legislation. The Bill is their continued effort at a face-saving device, a last desperate throw at pretending that a Government who have wibbled and wobbled over the poll tax have something decisive to say or do about it. The truth is that the Government are still ducking and weaving over the poll tax. First, they tried to put the blame for the poll tax and for this year's high bills on local councils. But that simply has not worked—for a very good reason. The problems in collecting the poll tax are clearly intrinsic to the tax. It is not only the Labour party which says so: the Prime Minister described the poll tax as virtually uncollectable.

    Local government has been engulfed in the biggest debt collection exercise in the history of the world. Local authorities have had to issue 11·5 million summonses. Local councils are still chasing at least £1·5 billion-worth of poll tax arrears. The Government have not helped. They have made things worse. They have no one to blame but themselves for the current problems facing local government and, for that matter, poll tax payers.

    First, the Government have consistently turned down the urgings of the local authority associations that the Government should at the very least fund an advertising campaign to make it clear to people that they are still obliged to pay the poll tax and will be so obliged for at least another year. That campaign is necessary because of the Prime Minister's glib and unjustified assurance in October last year that "We have abolished the poll tax." How can people be sure of their obligations when the Prime Minister tells them that the poll tax no longer exists?

    Secondly, the Government have kept the poll tax alive when they could have abolished it for the forthcoming financial year. If they had taken up our offer of support for a Bill to replace the poll tax with something along the lines of our fair rates proposals, we could indeed have seen the back of the poll tax by the end of this financial year.

    Then the Government refused to abolish the 20 per cent. minimum contribution rule. They have conceded the principle, but they persist in maintaining for the time being the practical problems which even the Audit Commission excoriated when it said that it cost £15 in administrative costs for every £6 net revenue raised. Lastly, the Government have demonstrated amazing complacency about plugging a legal loophole that most students of local government and certainly most local government practitioners saw coming months ago.

    We are entitled to conclude that, somehow or other, the Government misled themselves and believed for a time that they had some vested interest in stoking up the collection problems in the hope that they could be turned back on Labour authorities. It is a testimony to the good sense of of local government and of poll tax payers that the vast majority of the people of Britain rightly attribute responsibility for the difficulties to the Government who introduced the wretched tax in the first place.

    As we have long suspected, the latest twist is an attempt to delay poll tax bills. The back page of The Times today gives the game away. Despite ministerial denials, it is quite clear that a paper was prepared on the instructions of the Secretary of State to put forward various ways in which poll tax bills might be delayed until beyond a general election. The report in The Times sets out the options considered in the paper. Each has as its objective the delaying of poll tax bills at least until after 9 April.

    The Minister of State permits himself the faintest shake of the head. Since he appears—in that careful manner—to disagree with what I have said and with the report in The Times, I invite him to assure the House that those reports are wrong. Will he deny that the Government have considered any proposals which might lead to a delay in issuing poll tax bills? [HON. MEMBERS: "Come on, get up."] I suspect that the House and the country will form their judgments as to what has happened.

    The truth is that the Tories are running scared. They know that poll tax bills will arrive during the week preceding 9 April and that there will be no more powerful invitation to vote Labour than their arrival. Thirty-eight million people will receive the reminder, in its most direct and potent form, that poll tax lives on and that it is rising, on average, three times faster than the rate of inflation.

    No wonder the Government are doing all that they can to divert attention from that certain time bomb, which will blow up their electoral prospects. It will be poetic justice that the arrogance which led them to introduce the poll tax, the incompetence with which they applied it and their dithering attempts to keep it alive will come to judgment on election day.

    Today's further disreputable episode will do nothing to avert that deserved judgment, when it is inevitable that the electorate will have its say on this vital and central mistake by a Government who have made so many.

    4.42 pm

    The Minister began by saying that there had been a great deal of debate on the Bill. Yet if one asked most people outside the House what the council tax was, they would be unable to answer, because the Government have not explained what it will mean for them. They have not done so because the detail of the Bill will be further bad news for the people.

    The reason for the Bill in the first place was purely an attempt by the Government to bail themselves out of the poll tax fiasco in which they had become enmeshed. As a result, they cobbled together a mixture of measures—supposedly a tax on people and on property—which adds up to misery for millions of people.

    I suspect that less than 10 per cent. of the people have heard of the council tax. In those circumstances, it is important that, given it has the opportunity, the House should scrutinise every aspect of the Bill. Serious defects in the legislation are still emerging at this late stage.

    During 100 hours of discussion, the Bill has not been substantially improved. The only Government concession that I can trace is the decision to exempt people with a disability, by moving them one band lower. As the Minister will know, that change was prompted by me and my hon. Friends in an amendment. Apart from that, it is difficult to see that the original Bill has been much improved and it is still hugely defective.

    We need time during the legal process to continue to investigate the results of using computer evidence to establish whether someone has paid the tax. Eleven million people have been summonsed for non-payment and the poll tax legislation has caused a hiatus in our courts, so so it is essential that we tackle that key issue when changing the system of taxation.

    I wish to correct something which is raised in these debates time after time. I am the one with all the information on that issue—statistics collated from Home Office computer information in the Library, on a quarterly basis.

    If my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) doubts that, we can check it later and go through all the parliamentary questions that I have asked in the past few years.

    For the record, there are 11,051,000 summonses in England and Wales, to which must be added 2·75 million sheriff's warrants in Scotland. So 14 million people are being dragged through legal proceedings, not 11 million.

    I am grateful for that correction, because it adds to my argument. I have no doubt that it is factually correct, because the hon. Member always checks such figures. If the Government sat back for a moment and thought about the number of people involved in that process, they would surely conclude that they had got something wrong. If they conclude, that they had got the poll tax legislation wrong they would realise that the council tax deserves closer scrutiny.

    As the Lords have tabled more than 70 amendments, we certainly ought to have more than a two-hour debate. It is clear from the Government's attitude and from the Minister's opening speech that all they want is a vote in the direction they seek. They could not care less whether the House considers the Bill sensibly.

    In Committee, there was considerable debate over joint and several liability and yet the Minister and his hon. Friends did not take on board the arguments. The Lords have tabled an amendment concerning joint and several liability and I think that the Government have today accepted the principle that people with severe mental impairment should not be responsible for another person's council tax. If the Government accept that principle, surely we should now debate whether another range of people ought not to be responsible for someone else's taxes. The question is, should anyone be responsible for someone else's tax? Should we not ensure that that principle is enshrined in future legislation?

    There is a sense in which millions of people are responsible for other people's taxes. Millions of people are having to pay extra as a result of non-collection of the poll tax and because the Government introduced a tax which has been unworkable as well as unpopular. The Government did not care when they introduced the poll tax legislation and, in introducing this legislation, they do not care about inflicting the payment for some people's taxes on to other people.

    In a short time, the Minister will be disappointed. The hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) suggested that, within a week or two, the Minister might be looking for a youth training programme. Unfortunately he is not quite young enough to go on one. I am sure that he might find opportunities in employment training, which is for adults. He would need to have a word with his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment, who in the last few months has substantially cut the amount of money available for people going on Government training programmes. Those opportunities are reducing fast.

    Rather than placing his hopes in an employment training programme after the Government fall, the Minister would do better to tackle the issues seriously, by continuing to debate the Bill and by giving more serious consideration to the alternatives. We shall be able to explain to the public that the Government have continued during this two-hour debate to treat the people in the same way as they have always treated them. They have not considered what people can afford to pay or their ability to pay. They have taken only one thing into account—their desire to pass whatever legislation they wish without any consideration for the people.

    4.49 pm

    Today we have been given a very short time in which to deal with the most unpopular piece of legislation that has ever been brought before the people. That legislation is universally hated. There can be no doubt about that, given that 14 million people in England, Scotland and Wales are now subject to legal proceedings. The vast majority of them have never been dragged before a court before.

    In fact, 20 times more people have been brought before the courts because of the poll tax than under the old rates system. Under the old system, about 1·5 million people a year were brought before the courts, but that figure covered not just domestic rates but industrial and commercial ones. Up to 31 December 1991, 11,051,000 people in England and Wales had been brought before the courts and a further 2·75 million people had faced legal proceedings in Scotland. Those 14 million have been taken to court in relation to the domestic poll tax alone.

    This week, the oldest person charged with non-payment was brought before the courts. Tudor Rhys Jones, who is 94, was brought before Kensington magistrates on behalf of Hammersmith and Fulham council. He has severe hearing and eyesight problems and he was on the point of being sent to prison, but his case has been adjourned until 7 May because the magistrates are waiting for the passage of the Bill.

    I have already asked the Secretary of State what powers are available to magistrates courts to adjourn cases in anticipation of a decision yet to be made by Parliament. Hon. Members are aware that I am neither a solicitor nor a lawyer; my knowledge of the law comes from the headline stuff that I have dealt with in my nine years in the House. I believe that it is strange that Parliament's role to set legislation can be usurped by a lower body, a magistrates court. However, a magistrates court has adjourned a case in anticipation of a decision that Parliament is about to make. Courts have been adjourning cases for some weeks—particularly since my constituents, David and Eleanor Bullard, appeared in the High Court some days ago—while they wait for the Government to make the amendments to the Bill that were accepted in another place.

    I believe that the sole role of the court is to apply the law as it now stands and not to wait to apply the law as it wishes it might become in some weeks' time. The case of Mr. Rhys Jones, the 94-year-old who is on the point of being sent to prison, should have been thrown out. The council should have been told to return to the courts afresh once the legislation had been cleared up. The court should not have held the proceedings in abeyance. When I asked how that could come about, I was told by the Home Office that the magistrates courts have general powers to adjourn a case.

    Since the particular case in the High Court in February to which I referred, what advice has been given to magistrates' and justices' clerks? I was told by the Home Office that, as a result of the decision on computer evidence on 20 February, it did not believe that there was any need for further guidance. That is not true. I have copies of guidance that has been issued—hardly anyone in the House is aware of it, including those on the Front Benches.

    Letters were issued by the Department of the Environment on 31 January and by the Home Office on 4 February. Those letters anticipated the High Court decision on computer evidence and gave advice to clerks, local authorities and magistrates in advance of what this debate might decide.

    The letter from the DOE contains misleading advice to councils. Notwithstanding decisions reached in the past 12 months in magistrates courts and by stipendiary magistrates not only in Clerkenwell but in the north, the DOE states that there is no obstacle to authorities proceeding with cases.

    The Home Office letter contains advice about what procedures should be followed, which has far more serious implications. Because of the time limit, I shall paraphrase that letter. It gives direct advice to councils and to magistrates clerks to get together to decide on how long to adjourn cases in advance of this debate. I do not know what you think, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but there must be a conflict of interest in magistrates clerks discussing with one party to an action, the local authority, tactics about the best way in which to proceed in a case. That tactical discussion is obviously not open to the other party in the dispute, the defence.

    We should have far more time today to discuss the Lords amendments, especially No. 57, to which I have tabled a starred amendment. I know that that amendment will not be selected, but I tabled it because I believe that the Lords amendment, as drafted, is seriously defective. We should have more time to debate the technical nature of the amendments.

    While Parliament has awaited today's debate, the Home Office, the DOE and the magistrates have been colluding to undermine the authority of Parliament. They have taken decisions in advance of possible parliamentary decisions. Surely that must colour the nature of today's debate.

    If the Bill is passed in just over an hour's time, it will not get rid of the poll tax. It will perpetuate it for another 13 months, with all the injustices that flow from it. As I said, the cases of 11,051,000 people in England and Wales have already appeared before the courts and 250,000 of them have turned up in court to argue their case. It is because of their appearance that the problem of hearsay evidence came to light. Lords amendment No. 57 is supposed to address that problem, but it fails to do so.

    As of 31 December, 28,325 hours of court time have been taken up by the poll tax and, according to Ministers, that has cost £217 an hour, which is equivalent to £6 million in court time. The vast majority of people who have been dragged before the courts are unable to pay the poll tax. So far, 11,259 means inquiries have been conducted, but no instruction has been given to magistrates to remit, in part or in whole, an outstanding poll tax debt or, as a result of the new legislation, an outstanding council tax debt. I have asked Ministers to issue such an instruction, but the amendments tabled by the Government do not address that issue.

    Such an instruction should be given when it is apparent that a person cannot afford to pay his debt. I would prefer such powers of remit to be enacted at the liability order stage or, even better, that local authorities should have the power to write off that debt. Housing committees and housing chairmen have always had the power to write off rent arrears when someone is unable to pay and a similar power should be given to local authorities in respect of the poll tax. That has not happened and we have ended up with court cases by the tens of thousands in which there is no opportunity for a solid legal defence to be put.

    Imprisonment for the civil debt of the poll tax is about the only occasion when one can be sent to prison for a maximum of three months without enjoying the right to the presence of a solicitor to ensure that one is dealt with fairly. The duty solicitor scheme does not apply to the poll tax. In July, I met the Lord Chancellor and asked him to change the rules either to make the duty solicitor scheme applicable in such cases or to grant legal aid at least in those cases where people are about to be sent to prison.

    Earlier on, we talked about Ernest Saunders, but we could also cite the Maxwells and others who have no problem in getting hold of barristers who can charge £20,000 a day. The Minister will be aware of the solicitors who lobbied in Central hall a few weeks ago and of the strike that is taking place in the south of England because of concerns about legal aid. That strike is in protest against charges of £50 an hour for solicitors in criminal legal aid work being insufficient. In these civil cases, charges are similar, and people who can afford £50 for a solicitor can afford to pay their poll tax in the first place.

    The amendments from the other place will not stop the injustice of people being sent to prison for inability to pay. That is clearly the reason for non-payment in the cases of the 180 people who have so far been sent to prison—I have dealt with the families of those involved in most of the cases. Of those 180, there have been at least 15 pensioners, four people whose only income is disability benefit and at least 35 people whose only income is income support. Had they had solicitors, it is probable that magistrates would have remitted, in part if not in whole, the debts for which they were being charged.

    Perhaps my hon. Friend would like to comment on the fact that in the past few days, we have heard about writs being issued on behalf of these people with money at Lloyd's who were supposed to pay their debts but did not want to. They were gambling at this posh gambling den known as Lloyd's and when the money came in, they took it. When they had to pay out some money, they decided that they were not going to. I have not heard any talk from those on the Government Front Bench about these non-Lloyd's payers who are trying to get out of their responsibilities.

    My hon. Friend is right. Perhaps it would strain your patience too much, Mr. Deputy Speaker, if I were to use the example of the Caribbeans who had their debts written off two or three weeks ago by the Minister for Overseas Development, or the £14·5 billion-worth of debt written off for privatised companies. However, I do not intend to stray any further down that road, as I do not wish to try your patience.

    The Government should give a pledge to bring Scottish and English law into harmony. This involves not only bailiffs and what can or cannot be taken in the form of distress and distraint—we shall debate that when we consider a Lords amendment to the Bill—but imprisonment. Five years ago, the Government, including all those who are at the moment sitting on the Treasury Bench, voted in favour of imprisonment for debt being abolished in Scotland when the House considered the Debtors (Scotland) Bill. Despite repeated demands from Labour Members, not least from me, the Government have never introduced legislation to allow the same to take place in England and Wales and to stop this mediaeval barbarity of using imprisonment for civil debt as a weapon of fear over the poorest sections of the community in England and Wales.

    Instead, the Government have introduced regulations to extend the powers that are set out in the Bill from two to six years. It is an admission of failure that the Government do not think that authorities will be able to collect debts within two years. Despite the Minister saying that it is all about the abolition of the poll tax, the Bill allows local authorities to use the barbaric methods of imprisonment, bailiffs, distress and distraint for a further four years on top of the original two years. That should have been amended, but it will not be.

    I have two more points to make, and these are on the detail of the amendments, which I feel should be debated at greater length than the guillotine will allow. Some of the amendments will prescribe the individuals who can act as bailiffs in the collection of poll tax debt. At the moment, there is no restriction on who may act as a bailiff in a poll tax case. Local authorities are not required to employ only certificated bailiffs. Any private citizen can act as a bailiff and there are legions of stories from, among others, the National Consumer Council, about the way in which such bailiffs operate.

    For example, a woman's wedding ring valued at £147 was taken in pursuance of debt, and sold for £14 by the bailiffs, who then took their commission out of that money before putting it towards payment of the debt. In another example, a car worth £700 was sold for £70 and again bailiffs took out their commission. There can be no sensible recovery of debt from such methods. They are only a way to engender in the minds of other people the fear that they may be treated in the same way.

    The amendments will give the Government power, after the Lord Chancellor has had his review in three months' time, to bring in conditions as to who can and cannot be a bailiff and to prescribe what goods can be taken. On a matter as important as this, we should not be handing the Government a blank cheque. If they cannot bring before the House, at the same time as the Bill is supposed to complete its final changes, the detail of what they wish to implement, the House should not give them the authorisation to continue.

    I know that this is slightly outwith the debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but it will take two sentences to explain. If I brought before the House an Industry Bill that would give a Labour Secretary of State the power to nationalise any company at some point in the future and told Conservative Members that in three months' time I would produce a list of companies that we intended to nationalise, there would be mayhem. They would say, "You can't do that." But that is what they are doing with this Bill. It is enabling legislation that will hand to the Government a blank cheque, just a few days in advance of the calling of a general election.

    Computer evidence is dealt with in Lords amendment No. 57. I tabled an amendment on this, which I accept is starred and therefore not formally before the House so I cannot divide the House on it. However, perhaps I can use it to illustrate why I think that the drafting of the amendment is defective. The amendment on the use of computer evidence in courts allows, under the Civil Evidence Act 1968, something that should have been introduced years ago—the use of computer records in magistrates courts.

    However, what the amendment does not do but what everything else in that Act has done is give advance notice to the defendant of the document or record that has been brought as part of the case. That is defective, because it means that what can be presented on the day is a record that the defendant and, if he is lucky, his legal adviser cannot check as they could do in any other circumstance at any other court under the provisions of the 1968 Act. We should have more time to debate that, so that others of my hon. Friends can take it up.

    In Coventry, as in other places, two-year-olds have been dragged before the courts. We have seen distraught families whose deceased relatives have been summoned before the court because of computer—[Interruption.] It is not funny. I have dealt with those families and I know that it leads to great trauma. I will not mention his name because he is not present in the Chamber, but an hon. Friend of mine, whose wife died five years ago, has repeatedly received notices, from the computer, asking for her poll tax payment. It is as distressing for him as it is for my constituents. If we had a minimum of seven' days notice before such records could be used in the courts, perhaps summonses would not be issued to two-year-olds and deceased people.

    I have a technical point that I wish to put on the record. I gave the Minister some advance notice of it, so perhaps when he is winding up he will have had some advice from his civil servants. I am advised by the barristers for my constituents whose case went to the High Court at the end of February to test the rules on computer evidence that, as drafted, Lords amendment No. 57 will enable local authorities to bring computer records before magistrates courts to prove payment. However, computer records cannot be used in magistrates courts to prove non-payment. To achieve that, the words of the Civil Evidence (Scotland) Act 1988 should have been used, because it raises the question of negative hearsay.

    As I have said on more than one occasion, I am not a legal expert. Like many other hon. Members, I take legal advice. However, there is a body of law, not least that concerned with the Walsall magistrates in the past year or so, in which the High Court has ruled that, when there is hearsay evidence, only Parliament is allowed to rule. Magistrates are not allowed to interpret.

    I hope that the Bill will fail, because it perpetuates the poll tax. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) rightly said, the council tax is a dog's dinner and is no better. It would perpetuate many of the injustices toward ordinary people.

    I warn the Minister, in what is probably the final debate on the Bill before an election is called next week, that if he thinks that his legal problems in courts throughout the country, including the High Court, are over because of the introduction of Lords amendment No. 57, we shall see him back in the High Court in weeks to come.

    On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. We intend to vote against the timetable motion and it normally takes the House 14 or 15 minutes to divide. Can you advise us on whether that 14 or 15 minutes will be included in the two hours allocated for the debate? If that time will also be lost, does not that add insult to injury by denying us yet another period of time in addition to the two hours, which is already pathetically inadequate?

    If the allocation of time motion is approved by the House, I shall be bound by it. It includes the following provisions:

    "the proceedings … shall be completed at this day's sitting and, if not previously brought to a conclusion, shall be brought to a conclusion two hours after the commencement of the proceedings on this Order."
    That means that the 15 minutes or whatever time is taken by a Division will be included in the time allocated for debating the matter.

    5.10 pm

    The hon. Member for Coventry, South-East (Mr. Nellist) has made another forceful, forthright and immense contribution to the debate. I do not agree with him and seldom do. But the hon. Gentleman was awarded an accolade of Back Bencher of the Year for his activity, assiduity—

    It being one hour after the commencement of proceedings on the motion, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER put the question necessary to dispose of them, pursuant to Standing Order No. 81 ( Allocation of time to Bills).

    The House divided: Ayes 273, Noes 205.

    Division No. 107]

    [5.10 pm

    AYES

    Adley, RobertFarr, Sir John
    Alexander, RichardFenner, Dame Peggy
    Alison, Rt Hon MichaelField, Barry (Isle of Wight)
    Allason, RupertFishburn, John Dudley
    Amess, DavidFookes, Dame Janet
    Amos, AlanForsyth, Michael (Stirling)
    Arbuthnot, JamesForth, Eric
    Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)Fowler, Rt Hon Sir Norman
    Ashby, DavidFox, Sir Marcus
    Atkins, RobertFranks, Cecil
    Atkinson, DavidFreeman, Roger
    Baker, Nicholas (Dorset N)French, Douglas
    Baldry, TonyGale, Roger
    Batiste, SpencerGardiner, Sir George
    Beaumont-Dark, AnthonyGarel-Jones, Rt Hon Tristan
    Bendall, VivianGill, Christopher
    Bennett, Nicholas (Pembroke)Glyn, Dr Sir Alan
    Benyon, W.Goodhart, Sir Philip
    Biffen, Rt Hon JohnGoodlad, Rt Hon Alastair
    Blaker, Rt Hon Sir PeterGoodson-Wickes, Dr Charles
    Body, Sir RichardGorman, Mrs Teresa
    Boscawen, Hon RobertGorst, John
    Boswell, TimGrant, Sir Anthony (CambsSW)
    Bottomley, PeterGreenway, John (Ryedale)
    Bowden, A. (Brighton K'pto'n)Gregory, Conal
    Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)Griffiths, Peter (Portsmouth N)
    Bowis, JohnGrist, Ian
    Braine, Rt Hon Sir BernardGround, Patrick
    Brandon-Bravo, MartinHague, William
    Bright, GrahamHanley, Jeremy
    Brown, Michael (Brigg & Cl't's)Hannam, Sir John
    Browne, John (Winchester)Hargreaves, A. (B'ham H'll Gr')
    Bruce, Ian (Dorset South)Hargreaves, Ken (Hyndburn)
    Buck, Sir AntonyHarris, David
    Budgen, NicholasHaselhurst, Alan
    Burns, SimonHayes, Jerry
    Burt, AlistairHayhoe, Rt Hon Sir Barney
    Butler, ChrisHayward, Robert
    Butterfill, JohnHeathcoat-Amory, David
    Carlisle, John, (Luton N)Heseltine, Rt Hon Michael
    Carlisle, Kenneth (Lincoln)Hicks, Robert (Cornwall SE)
    Carrington, MatthewHiggins, Rt Hon Terence L.
    Cash, WilliamHill, James
    Channon, Rt Hon PaulHind, Kenneth
    Chapman, SydneyHogg, Hon Douglas (Gr'th'm)
    Chope, ChristopherHordern, Sir Peter
    Clark, Dr Michael (Rochford)Howarth, G. (Cannock & B'wd)
    Clark, Rt Hon Sir WilliamHowe, Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey
    Colvin, MichaelHowell, Rt Hon David (G'dford)
    Coombs, Anthony (Wyre F'rest)Hughes, Robert G. (Harrow W)
    Coombs, Simon (Swindon)Hunt, Sir John (Ravensbourne)
    Cope, Rt Hon Sir JohnHunter, Andrew
    Cormack, PatrickHurd, Rt Hon Douglas
    Couchman, JamesJack, Michael
    Currie, Mrs EdwinaJackson, Robert
    Curry, DavidJanman, Tim
    Davies, Q. (Stamf'd & Spald'g)Johnson Smith, Sir Geoffrey
    Davis, David (Boothferry)Jones, Gwilym (Cardiff N)
    Day, StephenJopling, Rt Hon Michael
    Devlin, TimKellett-Bowman, Dame Elaine
    Dickens, GeoffreyKey, Robert
    Dorrell, StephenKilfedder, James
    Douglas-Hamilton, Lord JamesKing, Roger (B'ham Nthfield)
    Dover, DenKirkhope, Timothy
    Dunn, BobKnapman, Roger
    Durant, Sir AnthonyKnight, Greg (Derby North)
    Dykes, HughKnight, Dame Jill (Edgbaston)
    Emery, Sir PeterKnowles, Michael
    Evans, David (Welwyn Hatf'd)Knox, David
    Evennett, DavidLang, Rt Hon Ian
    Fallon, MichaelLee, John (Pendle)

    Leigh, Edward (Gainsbor'gh)Rost, Peter
    Lester, Jim (Broxtowe)Rowe, Andrew
    Lightbown, DavidRyder, Rt Hon Richard
    Lilley, Rt Hon PeterSackville, Hon Tom
    Lloyd, Sir Ian (Havant)Sayeed, Jonathan
    Lloyd, Peter (Fareham)Scott, Rt Hon Nicholas
    Lord, MichaelShaw, David (Dover)
    Luce, Rt Hon Sir RichardShaw, Sir Giles (Pudsey)
    Lyell, Rt Hon Sir NicholasShelton, Sir William
    McCrindle, Sir RobertShephard, Mrs G. (Norfolk SW)
    MacGregor, Rt Hon JohnShepherd, Colin (Hereford)
    MacKay, Andrew (E Berkshire)Shersby, Michael
    Maclean, DavidSims, Roger
    McLoughlin, PatrickSkeet, Sir Trevor
    McNair-Wilson, Sir MichaelSmith, Tim (Beaconsfield)
    McNair-Wilson, Sir PatrickSoames, Hon Nicholas
    Madel, DavidSpicer, Sir Jim (Dorset W)
    Malins, HumfreySquire, Robin
    Mans, KeithStanbrook, Ivor
    Marland, PaulStanley, Rt Hon Sir John
    Marlow, TonySteen, Anthony
    Marshall, John (Hendon S)Stern, Michael
    Marshall, Sir Michael (Arundel)Stevens, Lewis
    Martin, David (Portsmouth S)Stewart, Allan (Eastwood)
    Mates, MichaelStewart, Andy (Sherwood)
    Maxwell-Hyslop, Sir RobinStewart, Rt Hon Sir Ian
    Mayhew, Rt Hon Sir PatrickSumberg, David
    Mellor, Rt Hon DavidSummerson, Hugo
    Mills, IainTapsell, Sir Peter
    Miscampbell, NormanTaylor, Ian (Esher)
    Mitchell, Andrew (Gedling)Taylor, Sir Teddy
    Mitchell, Sir DavidTemple-Morris, Peter
    Moate, RogerThompson, Sir D. (Calder Vly)
    Monro, Sir HectorThompson, Patrick (Norwich N)
    Montgomery, Sir FergusThorne, Neil
    Moore, Rt Hon JohnThornton, Malcolm
    Morris, M (N'hampton S)Thurnham, Peter
    Morrison, Sir CharlesTownend, John (Bridlington)
    Neale, Sir GerrardTownsend, Cyril D. (B'heath)
    Nelson, AnthonyTracey, Richard
    Neubert, Sir MichaelTredinnick, David
    Newton, Rt Hon TonyTrippier, David
    Nicholls, PatrickTwinn, Dr Ian
    Nicholson, Emma (Devon West)Vaughan, Sir Gerard
    Norris, SteveViggers, Peter
    Onslow, Rt Hon CranleyWaldegrave, Rt Hon William
    Oppenheim, PhillipWaller, Gary
    Page, RichardWalters, Sir Dennis
    Paice, JamesWard, John
    Patnick, IrvineWatts, John
    Patten, Rt Hon Chris (Bath)Wells, Bowen
    Patten, Rt Hon JohnWheeler, Sir John
    Pattie, Rt Hon Sir GeoffreyWhitney, Ray
    Pawsey, JamesWiddecombe, Ann
    Peacock, Mrs ElizabethWiggin, Jerry
    Porter, David (Waveney)Wilkinson, John
    Portillo, MichaelWilshire, David
    Powell, William (Corby)Winterton, Mrs Ann
    Price, Sir DavidWinterton, Nicholas
    Raffan, KeithWolfson, Mark
    Raison, Rt Hon Sir TimothyWoodcock, Dr. Mike
    Rathbone, TimYeo, Tim
    Renton, Rt Hon TimYoung, Sir George (Acton)
    Rhodes James, Sir Robert
    Riddick, Graham

    Tellers for the Ayes:

    Ridsdale, Sir Julian

    Mr. John M. Taylor and

    Roe, Mrs Marion

    Mr. Neil Hamilton.

    Rossi, Sir Hugh

    NOES

    Adams, Mrs Irene (Paisley, N.)Beith, A. J.
    Anderson, DonaldBell, Stuart
    Archer, Rt Hon PeterBellotti, David
    Ashton, JoeBennett, A. F. (D'nt'n & R'dish)
    Banks, Tony (Newham NW)Benton, Joseph
    Barnes, Harry (Derbyshire NE)Blair, Tony
    Barron, KevinBlunkett, David
    Battle, JohnBoyes, Roland
    Beckett, MargaretBray, Dr Jeremy
    Beggs, RoyBrown, Nicholas (Newcastle E)

    Brown, Ron (Edinburgh Leith)Ingram, Adam
    Caborn, RichardJones, Barry (Alyn & Deeside)
    Campbell, Menzies (Fife NE)Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S W)
    Campbell, Ron (Blyth Valley)Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald
    Campbell-Savours, D. N.Kennedy, Charles
    Canavan, DennisKilfoyle, Peter
    Carlile, Alex (Mont'g)Kinnock, Rt Hon Neil
    Carr, MichaelKumar, Dr. Ashok
    Cartwright, JohnLambie, David
    Clark, Dr David (S Shields)Lamond, James
    Clarke, Tom (Monklands W)Leighton, Ron
    Clelland, DavidLestor, Joan (Eccles)
    Clwyd, Mrs AnnLewis, Terry
    Cohen, HarryLitherland, Robert
    Cook, Robin (Livingston)Livingstone, Ken
    Corbett, RobinLofthouse, Geoffrey
    Corbyn, JeremyLoyden, Eddie
    Cousins, JimMcAllion, John
    Crowther, StanMcAvoy, Thomas
    Cryer, BobMcCartney, Ian
    Cummings, JohnMacdonald, Calum A.
    Cunliffe, LawrenceMcFall, John
    Dalyell, TamMcKay, Allen (Barnsley West)
    Darling, AlistairMcKelvey. William
    Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)McLeish, Henry
    Davies, Ron (Caerphilly)Maclennan, Robert
    Dixon, DonMcMaster, Gordon
    Dobson, FrankMadden, Max
    Doran, FrankMahon, Mrs Alice
    Duffy, Sir A. E. P.Marek, Dr John
    Dunnachie, JimmyMarshall, Jim (Leicester S)
    Dunwoody, Hon Mrs GwynethMartin, Michael J. (Springburn)
    Eadie, AlexanderMartlew, Eric
    Enright, DerekMaxton, John
    Evans, John (St Helens N)Meacher, Michael
    Ewing, Harry (Falkirk E)Meale, Alan
    Ewing, Mrs Margaret (Moray)Michael, Alun
    Faulds, AndrewMichie, Bill (Sheffield Heeley)
    Fearn, RonaldMichie, Mrs Ray (Arg'l & Bute)
    Field, Frank (Birkenhead)Mitchell, Austin (G't Grimsby)
    Fields, Terry (L'pool B G'n)Molyneaux, Rt Hon James
    Fisher, MarkMoonie, Dr Lewis
    Flannery, MartinMorgan, Rhodri
    Flynn, PaulMorley, Elliot
    Foot, Rt Hon MichaelMorris, Rt Hon A. (W'shawe)
    Forsythe, Clifford (Antrim S)Mowlam, Marjorie
    Foster, DerekMullin, Chris
    Foulkes, GeorgeMurphy, Paul
    Fyfe, MariaNellist, Dave
    Galbraith, SamOakes, Rt Hon Gordon
    Garrett, John (Norwich South)O'Brien, William
    Godman, Dr Norman A.O'Hara, Edward
    Golding, Mrs LlinOrme, Rt Hon Stanley
    Gordon, MildredParry, Robert
    Gould, BryanPatchett, Terry
    Graham, ThomasPendry, Tom
    Grant, Bernie (Tottenham)Powell, Ray (Ogmore)
    Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)Prescott, John
    Grocott, BruceQuin, Ms Joyce
    Hain, PeterRadice, Giles
    Hardy, PeterRandall, Stuart
    Harman, Ms HarrietRedmond, Martin
    Hattersley, Rt Hon RoyRees, Rt Hon Merlyn
    Haynes, FrankReid, Dr John
    Heal, Mrs SylviaRichardson, Jo
    Healey, Rt Hon DenisRobertson, George
    Henderson, DougRobinson, Geoffrey
    Hinchliffe, DavidRogers, Allan
    Hoey, Kate (Vauxhall)Rooker, Jeff
    Hogg, N. (C'nauld & Kilsyth)Rooney, Terence
    Home Robertson, JohnRowlands, Ted
    Hood, JimmyRuddock, Joan
    Howarth, George (Knowsley N)Sedgemore, Brian
    Howells, Dr. Kim (Pontypridd)Sheerman, Barry
    Hoyle, DougSheldon, Rt Hon Robert
    Hughes, John (Coventry NE)Shore, Rt Hon Peter
    Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)Short, Clare
    Hughes, Roy (Newport E)Skinner, Dennis
    Hughes, Simon (Southwark)Smith, C. (Isl'ton & F'bury)
    Illsley, EricSmith, Rt Hon J. (Monk'ds E)

    Smyth, Rev Martin (Belfast S)Wareing, Robert N.
    Snape, PeterWelsh, Andrew (Angus E)
    Soley, CliveWelsh, Michael (Doncaster N)
    Spearing, NigelWilliams, Rt Hon Alan
    Steel, Rt Hon Sir DavidWilliams, Alan W. (Carm'then)
    Steinberg, GerryWinnick, David
    Stephen, NicolWise, Mrs Audrey
    Stott, RogerWorthington, Tony
    Strang, GavinWray, Jimmy
    Taylor, Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)Young, David (Bolton SE)
    Trimble, David
    Turner, Dennis

    Tellers for the Noes:

    Vaz, Keith

    Mr. Jack Thompson and

    Wallace, James

    Mr. Ken Eastham.

    Walley, Joan

    Question accordingly agreed to.

    Resolved,

    That the Order of the House [12th November] be supplemented as follows:—

    Lords Amendments

  • 1. The proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments shall be completed at this day's sitting and, if not previously brought to a conclusion, shall be brought to a conclusion two hours after the commencement of the proceedings on this Order.
  • 2. For the purpose of bringing any proceedings to a conclusion in accordance with paragraph I above—
  • (a) Mr Speaker shall first put forthwith any Question which has already been proposed from the Chair and not yet decided and, if that Question is for the amendment of a Lords Amendment, shall then put forthwith the Question on any further Amendment of the said Lords Amendment moved by a Minister of the Crown and on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown, That this House doth agree or disagree with the Lords in the said Lords Amendment, or, as the case may be, in the said Lords Amendment as amended;
  • (b) Mr Speaker shall then designate such of the remaining Lords Amendments as appear to him to involve questions of privilege and shall—
  • (i) put forthwith the Question on any Amendment moved by a Minister of the Crown to a Lords Amendment and then put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown, That this House doth agree or disagree with the Lords in their Amendment, or, as the case may be, in their Amendment as amended;
  • (ii) put forthwith the Question on any Motion moved by a Minister of the Crown, That this House doth disagree with the Lords in a Lords Amendment;
  • (iii) put forthwith with respect to the Amendments designated by Mr Speaker which have not been disposed of the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendments; and
  • (iv) put forthwith the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in all the remaining Lords Amendments;
  • (c) as soon as the House has agreed or disagreed with the Lords in any of their Amendments Mr Speaker shall put forthwith a separate Question on any other Amendment moved by a Minister of the Crown relevant to that Lords Amendment.
  • Stages Subsequent To First Consideration Of Lords Amendments

  • 3. Mr Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the consideration forthwith of any further Message from the Lords on the Bill.
  • 4. The proceedings on any further Message from the Lords shall, if not previously brought to a conclusion, be brought to a conclusion one hour after the commencement of those proceedings.
  • 5. For the purpose of bringing those proceedings to a conclusion—
  • (a) Mr Speaker shall put forthwith any Question which has already been proposed from the Chair and not yet decided, and shall then put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown which is related to the Question already proposed from the Chair;
  • (b) Mr. Speaker shall then designate such of the remaining items in the Lords Message as appear to him to involve questions of privilege and shall—
  • (i) put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown on any item;
  • (ii) in the case of each remaining item designated by Mr. Speaker, put forthwith the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in their Proposal; and
  • (iii) put forthwith the Question, That this House doth agree with the Lords in all the remaining Lords Proposals.
  • Supplemental

    6.—

  • (1) Mr. Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the appointment and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons.
  • (2) Such a Committee shall report before the conclusion of the sitting at which it is appointed.
  • 7.—

    (1) In this paragraph "the proceedings" means proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments or on any further Message from the Lords on the Bill, on the appointment and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons and the Report of such a Committee.

    (2) Paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings.

    (3) No dilatory Motion with respect to, or in the course of, the proceedings shall be made except by a member of the Government, and the Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.

    (4) If the proceedings are interrupted by a Motion for the Adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 (Adjournment on specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration) a period equal to the duration of the proceedings on the Motion shall be added to the period at the end of which the proceedings are to be brought to a conclusion.

    Orders Of The Day

    Local Government Finance Bill

    Lords amendments considered.

    Clause 3

    Meaning Of "Dwelling"

    Lords amendment: No. 1, in page 2, line 22, leave out from ("which") to line 23 and insert—

  • ("(a) is a composite hereditament for the purposes of Part III of the 1988 Act; and
  • (b) would still be such a hereditament if paragraphs (b) to (d) of section 66(1) of that Act (domestic property) were omitted,")
  • 5.23 pm

    I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

    With this it will be convenient to take Lords amendments Nos. 2, 12 to 14 and 16. Lords amendment No. 1 involves privilege.

    In Committee we debated the purpose of clause 3 and the difference between clause 3 of this Bill and the schedule to the Local Government Finance and Valuation Act 1991. The matter was similarly debated very fully in Committee in another place. In the course of those debates, the Government made it clear that the intention is to ensure that only properties that include living accommodation should be subject to the council tax. Garages, storage premises, yards, gardens and such like, which under rating were hereditaments in their own right, should not be chargeable dwellings.

    Amendment No. 1 puts it beyond doubt that the same should apply to any composite hereditament that does not include living accommodation. The amendments specifically exclude from the definition of a dwelling any composite hereditament which is only a composite by virtue of the fact that it includes a domestic garage, storage premises, yard, garden or other domestic property that is not living accommodation. Amendment No. 2 is consequential.

    Composite properties will quite properly be subject to both non-domestic rates and the council tax. Valuation for each will take account only of non-domestic and domestic uses as appropriate and will achieve a fair balance between the two taxes. If the balance of use of a composite changes or, more significantly, it becomes or ceases to be a composite hereditament, its valuation for non-domestic rating may change. The amendments give the potential for a corresponding change in valuation for the council tax. I commend them to the House.

    Question put and agreed to.—[Special Entry.]

    Lords amendment: No. 3, in page 2, line 43, leave out ("or substitute another definition for")

    I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

    The amendment limits the Secretary of State's power to change the definition of a dwelling on the face of the Bill by order. The Bill originally permitted the Secretary of State to substitute or amend the definition. The amendment takes away the power to substitute the definition of dwelling by order.

    Question put and agreed to.

    Clause 6

    Persons Liable To Pay Council Tax

    Lords amendment: No. 4, in page 5, line 10, at end insert—

    ("(3A) Subsection (3) above shall not apply as respects any day on which one or more of the persons there mentioned fall to be disregarded for the purposes of discount by virtue of paragraph 2 of Schedule 1 to this Act (the severely mentally impaired) and one or more of them do not; and liability to pay the council tax in respect of the dwelling and that day shall be determined as follows—
  • (a) if only one of those persons does not fall to be so disregarded, he shall be solely liable
  • (b) if two or more of those persons do not fall to be so disregarded, they shall each be jointly and severally liable.")
  • I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

    With this it will be convenient to take Lords amendments Nos. 7, 8, 10, 21, 22 and 24. All the amendments in this group involve privilege.

    Lords amendment No. 4, and the amendments grouped with it, are about joint and several liability where one of the liable persons is severely mentally impaired.

    This was a matter which we discussed at length in Committee in the House. The Government were extremely concerned that the system should not be unfair. I explained that there were difficulties in trying to legislate for the private financial affairs of households.

    I can well understand concern about a severely mentally impaired person being jointly liable for a council tax bill, but, as I explained in Committee, there will be cases where the interest in the property and all the resources will be in the name of the person who is impaired. There are obvious difficulties in providing that the sole liability should fall on the partner with no resources. In practice, it is clear that there would be no question of pursuing a person who was severely mentally impaired, and that in circumstances such as I have described, arrangements would be made for the bill to be paid.

    Nonetheless, there continued to be concern. Opposition amendments were moved in another place, and carried. Those amendments were intended to prevent joint and several liability for the council tax from applying to people who are severely mentally impaired. But the effects of the amendments were unclear. Although they removed joint and several liability from the person with the impairment, it was unclear where the liability would fall. Indeed, the Opposition seemed not really to have thought through the way liability should work in these circumstances. However, following very helpful discussions, in which it was recognised that the situation was not straightforward, the Government were able to bring forward the amendments on Third Reading in the House of Lords, where they were accepted by the Opposition.

    A particular problem arises in the case of a couple where the partner with the impairment has the sole interest in the property. He or she will continue to be liable, jointly and severally, with the other spouse or partner, but it would be wrong to provide that a partner who has no interest in the property should nonetheless be solely liable for the council tax on it. We have ensured that no person who is severely mentally impaired can be made liable when there are other liable people in the property, but we do not believe that it is right to impose sole liability where it would not otherwise exist.

    I was a little puzzled by what the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) said when he spoke on the timetable motion. He implied that there remained disagreement between the Government and the Opposition over the issue. First, the Opposition have not tabled an amendment to the Lords amendment. In another place, Baroness Hollis said on behalf of the Opposition:
    "My Lords, I shall be very brief. I should like to express our thanks to the noble Lord for coming back with amendments which will adequately reflect in drafting terms the intentions of your Lordships' House. We are delighted to support them."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 February 1992; Vol. 536, c. 399.]
    I hope that the Opposition in this House will take the same attitude today.

    5.30 pm

    I shall be as brief as is necessary for the guillotine resolution to be effective. There is no fundamental disagreement between the Government and the Opposition about the amendment. However, we regret that it was due only to the diligence of Members in another place and their willingness to challenge the Government that the amendment has been introduced to resolve the outstanding problems.

    We are aware that there are still outstanding questions that concern housing associations about those who will become liable for bills where there is multiple occupation—for example, those people who are not suffering from Alzheimer's disease but who share a dwelling with a sufferer. There is also the question of the liability of the owner of the property.

    We understand the technical difficulties. It will not be long, I hope, before we are in a position to draw on the vast expertise currently available to the Government.

    There have been many discussions about joint and several liability and, at last, the Government have conceded that principle in one minor area. It is a great shame that we cannot persuade them, even at this late stage, to consider the principle even further. With any property-based tax, there is the problem of who is responsible for paying it. The Lords amendment, which the Government are prepared to accept, will at least bring some small comfort to a small number of people. However, I suspect that there will be many disagreements about whether a person will qualify under the amendment.

    The last thing that we would want to do with a person who suffers from a mental handicap of any sort would be to subject him and his family to the sort of inquiries that would be necessary to establish whether, under the amendment, that person would qualify not to be jointly and severally liable.

    At least the Government have had something of a shock. It is a shame that they did not feel able to consider the rest of the principle. We will not reject the few small crumbs of comfort available, but we remind the Government that property taxes are unfair because they do not relate either to the ability to pay or to the ability to take the decision to pay. In that regard, the ability to know that a tax is necessary and that it must be paid is perhaps more important that the ability to pay.

    We warmly welcome the amendment, although the Minister went far too far when he suggested that the Government were concerned about unfairness. If they had any such concern, the council tax Bill would not be before us and the poll tax legislation would have been repealed a long time ago.

    Question put and agreed to.—[Special Entry.]

    Lords amendment: No. 5, in page 5, line 12, leave out from ("person") to end of line 13 and insert

    ("as regards whom the following conditions are fulfilled—
  • (a) he has a material interest in the whole or any part of the dwelling; and
  • (b) at least part of the dwelling or, as the case may be, of the part concerned is not subject to a material interest inferior to his interest;")
  • I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

    I inform the House that the amendment involves privilege. With this, it will be convenient to consider Lords amendments Nos. 6, 9, 20 and 23.

    Amendments Nos. 5 and 6 redefine "owner" for the purposes of the council tax.

    Clause 6 provides for the owner of a dwelling to be liable to pay the council tax where there are no residents. The amendments made in the other place revise the definition of "owner". The new definition is based on a person's interest in the dwelling and covers both freeholders and long leaseholders. It is similar to the definition currently used for the standard community charge, under which the owners of unoccupied property are liable.

    Clause 8 contains a power to place liability on the owner of prescribed dwellings instead of the residents. There is also a power to prescribe who should be regarded as the owner in certain cases. The new definition of "owner" may not, however, cover the person on whom it would be appropriate to place liability in all situations. Amendment No. 9 clarifies the position with regard to the definition of "owner". It extends the order-making power to provide for liability to be placed on a prescribed person in particular cases.

    Dwellings occupied by Church of England ministers are one such example. We do not believe that those ministers should be liable to pay council tax on dwellings which they occupy in order to perform their duties. We discussed that matter in some detail with the Church authorities and agreed that the Church should be liable. However, the definition of "owner" introduced by amendments Nos. 5 and 6 would not, in all cases, cover the appropriate Church body. Amendment No. 9 allows us, through regulations, to place liability on the Church in the form of the Diocesan Board of Finance. The provision also allows for flexibility should difficult cases arise in the future.

    The amendments are necessary to ensure fairness and they will assist in the administration of the council tax. I commend them to the House.

    Question put and agreed to.—[Special Entry.]

    Subsequent Lords amendments agreed to, some with special entry.

    Clause 24

    Alteration Of Lists

    Lords amendment: No. 11, in page 15, line 8, after ("to") insert

    ("the whole or any part or').

    I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

    With this it will be convenient to consider Lords amendments Nos. 15, 17, 25, 26 and 28.

    Amendments Nos. 11 and 25 clarify the position in relation to a relevant transaction in the rare circumstances that there is more than one freehold interest in a dwelling.

    Amendments Nos. 17 and 28 also relate to the revaluation of dwellings following a sale, making it clear that the building, engineering and other operations referred to in the definition of "material increase" relate only to the dwelling concerned.

    Amendments Nos. 15 and 26 make it clear that a listing officer or assessor may alter the initial valuation band shown on the valuation list if he agrees that it is wrong.

    Question put and agreed to.

    Subsequent Lords amendments agreed to.

    Clause 65

    Duty To Consult Ratepayers

    Lords amendment: No. 18, in page 43, line 34, leave out from ("prescribed") to ("and") in line 35.

    I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

    With this it will be convenient to consider Lords amendment No. 19.

    These are technical amendments to improve the drafting of the Bill. Clause 115 provides that prescription under the Bill will be by regulations made by the Secretary of State. That renders unnecessary two references in clause 65(6) to prescription by regulation. Amendments Nos. 18 and 19 therefore remove the superfluous words.

    Question put and agreed to.

    Subsequent Lords amendments agreed to, some with Special entry.

    Clause 87

    Alteration Of Lists

    Lords amendment: No. 27. in page 59, line 10, after ("payments") insert ("or repayments").

    I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.

    Clause 87(8)(a) provides for regulations to be made requiring a person to make adjustments to his council tax payments to reflect an alteration to the banding of his dwelling. It is thought that the clause would allow regulations to require payment to be made or to provide for repayment of overpaid amounts. However, the absence of the word "repayments", which appears in the equivalent English clause—clause 24—may cast doubt on that. The amendment, which is purely technical, would remove any such doubt.

    Question put and agreed to.

    Subsequent Lords amendment agreed to.

    Clause 94

    Substituted And Reduced Settings

    Lords amendment: No. 29, in page 64, line 20, leave out ("that Schedule") and insert

    ("Schedule 7 to this Act")

    I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment. The amendment corrects a minor drafting error.

    Question put and agreed to.

    Lords amendment: No. 30, after clause 101, to insert the following new clause

    Transitory Enforcement Provisions For England And Wales

  • (".—(l) Schedule 4 to the 1988 Act (community charges: enforcement) shall he amended as follows.
  • (2) In paragraph 7 (distress), after sub-paragraph (3) there shall be inserted the following sub-paragraph—
  • "(3A) The regulations may include provision that—
  • (a) no person shall make a distress unless he is an officer of the authority concerned, or he is a person of a prescribed description and any prescribed conditions are fulfilled;
  • (b) no person making a distress shall seize goods of a prescribed description."
  • (3) In paragraph 8 (commitment to prison), in sub-paragraph (1)(a), for the words "it appears to the authority that no (or insufficient) goods of the debtor can be found" there shall be substituted the words "the person making the distress reports to the authority that he was unable (for whatever reason) to find any or sufficient goods of the debtor".
  • (4) After paragraph 13 there shall be inserted the following paragraph—
  • "Admissibility Of Evidence

  • 13A.—(1) Regulations under this Schedule may include provision that, in any proceedings before a magistrates' court under any provision included by virtue of the preceding provisions of this Part of this Schedule—
  • (a) a statement contained in a document of record shall be admissible as evidence of any fact stated in it of which direct oral evidence would be admissible; and
  • (b) a certificate which is made with respect to a document of record produced by a computer and purports to be signed by a responsible person shall he admissible as evidence of anything which is stated in it to the best of his information and belief.
  • (2) In this paragraph—
    • 'document of record' means a document constituting or forming part of a record compiled by the authority concerned;
    • 'responsible person' means a person occupying a responsible position in relation to the operation of the computer;
    • 'statement' includes any representation of fact, whether made in words or otherwise."

    (5) In paragraph 15 (joint and several liability), in sub-paragraph (3), for the words "it appears to the authority concerned that no (or insufficient) goods of that person can be found" there shall be substituted the words "the person making the distress reports to the authority that he was unable (for whatever reason) to find any or sufficient goods of the chargeable person".")

    Read a Second time.

    I beg to move, as an amendment to the Lords amendment, amendment (a) in line 38, at end insert

    'who can be made available to the court to testify to the proper and secure operation of the computer, and the accuracy of the record'.

    With this it will be convenient to take Lords amendments Nos. 31, 37 and 55 to 57.

    The amendment concerns personal privacy, which the Government are guilty of invading. My amendment would ensure that a responsible person would have to be made available to the court to testify to the proper and secure operation of the computer and the accuracy of the record before computer evidence for the council tax could be used in court. That would ensure that evidence from council tax computers was admissible in court only if rules similar to those adopted under sections 68 and 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 also applied.

    If, at the end of the legal process, the Government intend to imprison poll tax or council tax payers who cannot pay their debts, the evidence that sends them to prison must stand up to cross-examination in court. As a prison sentence might be involved, one would expect the rules of evidence to be analogous to those used by the police when they present evidence that ultimately sends a criminal to prison. That particularly applies to a number of those poll tax payers caught by the 20 per cent. rule who have been sent to prison.

    Section 68 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act states that any documentary evidence must be presented in court, supported wherever possible first-hand by a witness. The same should apply here. Section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act states:
    "a statement in a document produced by a computer shall not be admissible as evidence of any fact stated therein unless it is shown—
  • (a) that there arc no reasonable grounds for believing that the statement is inaccurate because of improper use of the computer;
  • (b) that at all material times the computer was operating properly, or if not, that any respect in which it was not operating properly or was out of operation was not such as to affect the production of the document or the accuracy of its contents."
  • Various sections of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act require a witness to be a responsible person who can be cross-examined and sign a certificate that states that in his knowledge the operating conditions of the computer were those outlined in section 69 during the production of the documentary evidence.

    If that is appropriate for the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which sets out the process used to send other people to prison, it should be appropriate in relation to the council tax and that is the fundamental point of my amendment which should be addressed by the Government.

    Amendment (a) to Lords amendment No. 41 also refers to the need to safeguard privacy which is even more relevant under the council tax than the poll tax.

    Order. The hon. Gentleman will realise that, first, it has not been selected and, secondly, it is out of their Lordships' hands.

    I appreciate that, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am slightly confused because I have an amendment (a) to both Lords amendment No. 30 and Lords amendment No. 41 and I was not sure which had been selected.

    I hope that the Minister will respond to the point I made. The rules under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act should also apply here if, at the end of the day, people are to be sent to prison for civil debt, which is something that I oppose.

    5.45 pm

    I shall be brief, because I have made my points earlier. We are debating the transitional enforcement provisions and the admissibility of evidence. I ask the Minister to reply to the following three points. First, may we have a clear statement on the question of retrospection? According to the letters that I quoted earlier from the Department of the Environment and the Home Office, the taking of cases for judicial review has been almost couched in terms of advice to courts that there would be no problem in proceeding and that judicial reviews could not take place more than three months—

    Order. I make it clear that we are dealing with amendment (a) to Lords amendment No. 30. Perhaps when we have disposed of that we can ask the Minister to move Lords amendment No. 30. I am advised that it will be in order for us to discuss them together.

    My understanding is that, while the judicial review usually takes place within three months of the question in the lower courts that needs to be examined occurring, it is at the discretion of the higher court. What is the Government's position on that?

    Secondly, this group of amendments, particularly No. 30, speaks of regulations being brought in. I understand that, once the Act receives Royal Assent, which I understand is scheduled for tomorrow, the regulations regarding evidence will be tabled and those regarding bailiffs will follow the Lord Chancellor's review. Some time ago I asked whether those regulations had been drafted, and I was told that they had not. Are they ready now, and will they be tabled tomorrow? The Minister should answer that.

    Finally, admissibility of evidence in the cases with which I have been involved with the Coventry magistrates, the city council and the hearing in February at the High Court, revolved around the use of computer evidence and the liability order stage. What about the burden of proof and the use of computers for the posting of demands and notices? That is also hearsay evidence as far as the Civil Evidence Act of 1968 is concerned. Is that contained within the amendments and the regulations to be published or is it, as I understand local authority associations have said, a further area which is not covered by the regulations? If so, as I said earlier, we should have had more time to discuss this, because the amendments are defective.

    I sincerely hope that this will be the last formal speech that I make from the Opposition Front Bench for the foreseeable future. It is a great shame that it has to be on the mess that we face at the moment in terms of non-collection.

    I well understand the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton (Mr. Cohen) in moving his amendment (a) to Lords amendment No. 30. All of us will be mindful of the need to avoid mistakes, as has been referred to this evening, which would cause distress to families where payment had been made or liability did not exist.

    However, what we face is the result of what amounts to four years of absolute fiasco. From the passing of the poll tax legislation for England and Wales and some time earlier for Scotland, we have faced one administrative and political nightmare after another, a degree of incompetence never previously foreseen or experienced in Britain.

    The position that we face on the inadmissibility of computer records and the correcting of the position is another illustration of that. It would never have occurred and this matter would not be before us if it were not for the implementation of the poll tax with the misery and political and administrative difficulties that that has caused and the considerable legal problems, which have resulted in the discrediting of our legal system to which the poll tax has contributed.

    I do not dispute the number of summonses; I do not need to double-count. If they total more than 11 million, it is a fiasco in any terms, and creates a syndrome whereby non-payment or resistance to payment will be with us for some time. Every effort must be made to avoid that happening. I do not suggest that the poll tax is something which the public should have readily warmed to or accepted, but the problem of raising money to spend on essential services is something of which everyone should have cognisance.

    Disastrous difficulties have confronted local authorities in terms of local government credibility and the proper delivery of services. The sum outstanding of £1·5 billion has implications for the country's wider economy, the national debt, inflation—in terms of the impact on borrowing—increased future local authority expenditure because of that borrowing, and the regrettable imposition of additional charges to cover the expenditure necessary to maintain local authority services while the poll tax is collected. Those are the crucial issues that we must consider tonight.

    Also at issue is the Government's culpability in failing to heed early enough the warnings that they were given and to take action—not against those people who had paid their poll tax and were pursued, or who were not in any way liable but were requested to pay, but those who were genuinely liable. Many of them could afford to meet that liability but chose not to do so, and passed on their bills to someone else.

    Last July, Camden council quite properly brought to the attention of the Department of the Environment the inadmissibility of computer records and the dangers that created for the cases that it was pursuing. The Government refused to heed that council's warning, and to take notice of the Rating and Valuation Association conference debate last October. The Government refused to heed also the warnings given last November and December by local authority association technical working groups on the proposed so-called council tax. The Government refused even to heed the warnings sounded by the court cases that were heard in the new year.

    Local authority officers raised the issue again in January, but it was not until 23 January that the Prime Minister's office made it known that action would be taken "shortly". A quarter of an hour of debate remains to consider the Bill, so more than six weeks seems a little longer than "shortly". The Government must unravel the mess that confronts local authorities, which they failed to assist in their efforts to collect the tax and to avoid the imposition of additional charges as a consequence of non-collection.

    We can only presume that the Government deliberately took six weeks to introduce this measure—never mind the previous six months. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) said earlier, one can only conclude that they believed that there was more political mileage in the accumulation of outstanding poll tax and failure to collect than in taking immediate action—hence the response by the Secretary of State for the Environment to my hon. Friend's proposal more than five weeks ago that both sides of the House should co-operate in passing a one-day Bill to enact the necessary amendments.

    Instead, on 30 January, the Secretary of State suggested that the "antics" of the Labour party in delaying the final stages of the Education (Schools) Bill were responsible for the Government's failure to act at that time. Goodness knows what the Secretary of State thinks of the "antics" in another place earlier this week in respect of that deeply flawed and unacceptable legislation. His pronouncement was nonsense and a deplorable excuse.

    Consequently, the public will receive higher poll tax bills. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South-East (Mr. Nellist) pointed out that councils will incur enormous legal costs in addition to those that they have already suffered. Local authorities of every political persuasion will be confronted with the difficulty of picking up the pieces.

    The latest statistics show that Labour authorities have brought court actions against 29·47 per cent. of those liable for poll tax, whereas the figure for Conservative authorities is 22·76 per cent. No one wants to see that happen again, and I give those statistics only to show the enormous lengths to which local authorities have gone to collect poll tax.

    Haringey, which is reducing its poll tax, issued 149,000 liability orders. The figure for Camden is 110,000. An equally desperate situation exists in Kensington and Chelsea and in Barnet. The Conservative-controlled council in Barnet hoped to pursue 20,000 liability orders in the current calendar year, but has not managed to take action on even one, because of the computer records disaster.

    Who is liable for that situation? Who devised the poll tax? Who spent £14 billion introducing it—including the 2·5 per cent. increase in value added tax? Who would not listen to the Opposition's warnings of what would happen, and of the cries that would come from those who could not pay the tax? Who would not heed the warnings given about its uncollectability? My hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham reminded the House of the Prime Minister's words about the "virtual uncollectability" of the poll tax. Who warned the Government that if they continued to impose the poll tax for another year, collection problems would grow much worse? It was Opposition Members.

    We gave the Government warning after warning. We made request after request for the Government to take action. We pointed out that non-collection would arise and that those who could not afford to pay would experience pain and be the victims of the poll tax.

    We are in the last throes of a Session of which the Conservative party should be deeply ashamed. The Government ought to apologise tonight to all those who paid their poll tax but had unwarranted claims made against them, and to those who, through no fault of their own, have had to pick up the bill for non-collection. We deplore that situation. Those responsible for it are the Conservative Members seated opposite, and those who are not present in the Chamber but who are prepared to go through the Lobby with Ministers on the nod.

    The way in which the computer records issue has been handled may be just another example of the Government's complete indifference to the way in which the poll tax has impinged on the lives of ordinary men and women throughout the country. Alternatively, it may represent a deliberate decision to us