My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, since the GLC—as a result of its own budget decisions—is not in receipt of rate support grant for 1983–84, I am glad to say that taxpayers' money is not being used to meet the cost of this publication, which has been reported as an incredible £610,000. It must be for London ratepayers, on whom this burden falls, themselves to raise with the auditor any question about expenditure of their money on the publication.

:My Lords, while thanking my noble friend for that reply and rejoicing in it as a taxpayer, may I as a London ratepayer, however, ask him whether it is in accordance with the honourable traditions of local government to use ratepayers' money for the production of a paper which, although because of its cheap mendacity is unlikely to be of very considerable political effect, is plainly a party political organ; and whether if the district auditor does not move on this, he is earning his pay?

:My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his observations within his question. Certainly it is not within the honourable traditions—that is about the last thing that it is—but it has to be said that the auditor has to adjudicate in each case on every issue, if you like, that is brought to him, and I hope that he will look very carefully at the most recent one.

My Lords, does the noble Lord the Minister recall that when this matter was raised in the House in March last year he indicated to the House that these matters had been drawn to the attention of the district auditor and that the district auditor was considering any action that he might take? In view of that, can the Minister tell the House what action the district auditor did take either then or later? Would the Minister also bear in mind that, under the Local Government Planning and Land Act, it was his Government which laid a duty upon local authorities to publicise their activities and when passing stricture of a political nature will he deal also with Tory Westminster as well as Socialist GLC?

My Lords, the Act is quite clear it is open to ratepayers to question each and every issue. The conclusion that the auditor may have reached on earlier issues would clearly seem to indicate that no action was to be taken by him, otherwise we should have heard of it. I think it is equally fair to say, however, that the degree of politicisation in the most current issues of not just this publication but others by other authorities, is becoming more and more extreme, and it is therefore again for the auditor, if called upon by the ratepayers, to adjudicate in each case. That is the position.

My Lords, is it not only the Greater London Council but a number of other—an increasing minority—local authorities which are doing this? Is the noble Lord not aware that many people are becoming increasingly disturbed about the use by local authorities of these newspapers for party political purposes? Also, is he aware that the district auditor system really has not in the past provided any answer to this problem? Accordingly, what action is he contemplating taking to deal with it?

My Lords, I am aware, and indeed the noble Lord is quite right, that there are a number of authorities which go well beyond the point which the noble Lord, Lord Graham, made earlier. I think that he would probably be the first to agree with me, if we sat down together and looked at them, that there is always a balance of what is fair and sensible and reasonable in presenting one's own case as to what one is doing as an authority. Not only is there no objection to that; the Government feel it is desirable. There is a point and that point is being reached again and again. As to what the Government do about it, they have to watch carefully and decide. These are not issues which can lightly or easily be acted upon. There are great principles at stake here and we have to be very careful about them.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that The Londoner is not distributed to those London households who inhabit parts of London which could be regarded as no hope areas for Marxists? What conclusions does he draw from that practice?

My Lords, the conclusion I draw from what my noble friend says is that I am wondering in what category they place me, because I receive it.

My Lords, is not the proper conclusion to draw from that that this is careful husbandry and indicative of an attitude which the noble Lord should support? Will he not answer this question since he says this is a matter for the ratepayers, why has he removed from the ratepayers their traditional right to express their opinion on this and other matters at the ballot box?

My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord does not expect me to reiterate the whole story of the ballot box. The fact is that he knows as well as I do—or if he does not, he should do—that the number of people who actually register their vote at the ballot box, as against those who are paying as ratepayers the full rates for this kind of publication, is somewhere around about one-fifth of the people—that is all.

My Lords, would my noble friend not agree that there is anxiety on this question in all parts of the House? This is not merely a Tory propaganda stunt. There has been support from the Alliance Benches on the other side. There is manifest anxiety opposite where they sit silent or smug, as the case may be; and therefore is not a very serious review by the Government of the whole problem called for?

My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says and I have to concur with him on one thing that the degree of concern about this is rising very much indeed as matters become more and more extreme. I can today do no more than say that I note carefully what is said and the feelings in the House.

My Lords, can I ask the noble Lord whether he has seen the letters sent out with rate demands by the Westminster City Council which are blatantly anti-Labour political propaganda? That council is in receipt of rate support grant. What does he intend to do about that?

My Lords, the observations I made apply to all authorities; they would have no credence if they did not do so, and I am not here to attack or defend any authority on its own. It is the principle that we are all concerned with and if that goes, then there is much more loss than we are discussing today.

:My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that I live in a part of London which apparently earns rather high marks from the Greater London Council and that we have many causes to groan, indeed to over-groan, when we see every copy of this paper (another one having arrived today) and know that it is our already enormous rates which are being spent on it?

My Lords, I can only hear and sympathise with what the noble Lord says.

My Lords, in the light of the reference of the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, to the duty of a local authority to publicise itself, can my noble friend say whether it is possible to reconcile that admirable objective with the publication of a document the front page of which is mainly occupied by an offensive cartoon of the Prime Minister?

My Lords, I am sure that all your Lordships will deplore that type of publication using that type of propaganda.

My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that, although there may be anxiety on this side about this new practice, there is anxiety about another thing? I do not think that there is in the length and breadth of Britain a single local newspaper which gives support to the Labour party, particularly to local Labour councils. Although many local newspapers are neutral, many are unfair. I do not know of a single newspaper which gives Labour solid support, as in some areas there is solid support for Conservative administrations.

:My Lords, that is very wide of the Question. I do not feel obliged to answer it.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

:My Lords, the criteria for the installation of double white lines are given in chapter 5 of the Traffic Signs Manual issued by the Department of Transport of which there is a copy in the Library of the House. Highway authorities are advised to ensure that double white lines conform to these criteria. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport is satisfied that the criteria are generally well observed.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that Answer. May I ask whether he agrees that, in principle, double white lines have made a great contribution to safety? Will he agree, however, that the system has proliferated, and that the man with the paint brush has almost indiscriminately painted the roads to try and take away the decisions of the motorist? Does he agree that the system is therefore likely to come into disrepute? Has my noble friend noticed that there are many places where the dotted line indicates that one can overtake but where it would be quite dangerous to do so; and, vice versa, places where one cannot overtake but where relative speeds indicate that it is safe to do so? Does my noble friend not agree that the system should be confined to particular areas, perhaps crests and dangerous corners, so that the effectiveness of it is not cheapened by overuse?

My Lords, I can understand my noble friend's concern in this matter. Solid white lines are installed only when forward visibility falls below a certain value. The value used in the criteria is the safe stopping distance related to the speed of traffic. There has to be a measure of control through the double line system and the good sensibility of the driver. I might perhaps draw my noble friend's attention to paragraphs 78 and 85 of the Highway Code, which go to some length in explaining the criteria that drivers should observe when overtaking.

My Lords, can the noble Lord explain what one does when one comes to an area of white hatched lines? We know what to do when we come to yellow hatched areas, but what about these enormous areas of white hatched lines? What are you supposed to do on one of those?

My Lords, it depends how the hatching is contained. If the hatching is contained in a solid white line, that is a prohibited area and it would be an offence to cross over those hatched lines. If one was apprehended, one might find a penalty of three points against the 12 in the list of penalty points. If, however, the hatching is contained by a dotted line, an interrupted white line, that is an advisory warning, and the noble Lord would take his life and perhaps someone else's into his hands were he to cross over that danger area.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that if he were to respond to the blandishments of my noble friend who asked this Question he would cause much dismay in many people's hearts?

:My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend is right.

My Lords, does the noble Lord understand that a considerable number of motorists—the majority of motorists—recognise that these markings are for their own safety? If there is any difficulty, could the department consider using radio or television spots from time to time to draw attention to these and possibly other important points?

My Lords, the setting down of white lines on trunk roads is the responsibility of the department. It is, however, the local highway authority which is responsible for the white lines in its own area. Most white lines are in urban areas. It is therefore a local matter involving local people and local decisions.

:My Lords, I think the noble Lord has mistaken what I asked. There seems to be confusion about, or a tendency to ignore, these markings, which are valuable to us. I was asking whether publicity on the correct use of them by motorists could be given on radio and television.

My Lords, my department already spends a good deal of money on advising motorists through television and by other publicity. But certainly the point that the noble Lord makes will be borne in mind when we review our publicity programmes.

My Lords, would the noble Lord like to accompany me one day so that I can show him areas where it is impossible not to go on to hatched areas contained by solid lines?

My Lords, if the noble Lord would like to write to me explaining where the difficulty that he perceives arises, I will have it investigated through the regional office and write to him. That might save both of us a lot of time.

My Lords, would my noble friend not agree that there are not only the double solid lines, the solid lines dotted on one side or the other and the solid lines hatched with dotted lines, but also single dotted lines, single intermittent lines, long intermittent lines, solid lines that go down the side, and so on? Does he not think that it has become rather a dog's breakfast?

My Lords, no. It is quite simple for a reasonably intelligent motorist to study the Highway Code, and he will find no great difficulty. I should add, perhaps, that all signing on our roads conforms with international standards.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, we have no plans to do so at present, but we shall continue to keep the matter under close review.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that Answer. Is it not a fact that in 1982 the Home Office made a decision to increase the fees on firearms certificates? Is so, when will that legislation come into effect? How will it affect the shotgun?

My Lords, it was eventually decided not to revise the fee levels until after the working party that had been established to review the administration of the Firearms Act 1968 had reported. The working party has nearly completed its task, and a fresh review of fee levels will be made early in 1984.

:My Lords, in view of the fact that the use of shotguns in relation to crimes of violence has become a serious national problem, what has been the response of the Government to the concern expressed by the police about the ease with which shotguns are readily available and readily transferable to criminals?

My Lords, of the 8,400 notifiable offences involving firearms recorded in 1982, nearly two-thirds were minor offences involving air weapons. That does not mean that there is not cause for concern. Of course, there is, but the matter must be kept in perspective and looked at against the rise in crime generally. In 1982, as in previous years, firearms were used in only about 0.25 per cent of all notifiable offences.

My Lords, is the noble Baroness aware that in the police service, in particular among senior officers, there is widespread concern about the existing state of the law? With great respect, she has not answered the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, on this point. Is she aware that a situation in which a person can obtain firearms ammunition without having to demonstrate that he possesses a firearms certificate is inherently objectionable? Will she deal with both those questions, in particular the one put by the noble and learned Lord?

My Lords, first of all, I am aware that there is widespread concern, but I would contend that people who intend making illegal use of firearms will not worry whether or not they have a firearms certificate. The firearms certificate is really the only way in which control can be adequately maintained. Evidence of the source of weapons used in crime is very scarce, but it does not appear that the tightening of controls on legitimate owners would have any effect upon the number of weapons.

My Lords, would not my noble friend agree that under existing legislation the courts already have ample powers to deal with firearms offences, and that a more stringent use of those powers would be far more effective in reducing armed crime than would be the imposition of further restrictions on legitimate ownership?

My Lords, the penalties for offences under the Firearms Act are already severe—up to life imprisonment in some instances. The courts have a well-established policy of dealing more severely with offences involving firearms. That is clearly right. As part of the measures planned to strengthen the hands of those involved in the fight against crime, we have recently announced our intention to extend to life imprisonment the maximum penalty for carrying firearms in furtherance of crime.

My Lords, will the Government consider making it compulsory for holders of firearms and shotgun certificates to be insured against third party risks?

My Lords, I have a great many answers to a great many questions, but I do not have the answer to that one.

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that it is legal to obtain a shotgun without signing any conditions about safe-keeping, and that a neighbour who owns five shotguns can hang them all on the front door for me to take if I wish?

My Lords, I think that the question of the noble Baroness is a little wide of the original Question. However, a person who hands a gun to somebody should be aware whether the recipient holds a certificate.

My Lords, in view of the disquiet which I think exists and which has been manifested in the House, will the noble Baroness communicate that concern to the Home Secretary and, in particular, find out what response has been made to the request by the police authorities—who have to face men with shotguns—that something should be done about control?

My Lords, of course I shall pass on the message of the noble and learned Lord. Many of the suggestions would actually overburden the police, rather than help them.

My Lords. I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, this Government intend that new entrants to the teaching profession should have the best possible preparation for their role. They are currently considering advice from the Advisory Committee on the Supply and Education of Teachers (ACSET) on improvements for initial teacher training in England and Wales, including a recommendation that institutions offering postgraduate courses of initial teacher training should satisfy themselves that the content of a candidate's initial degree relates appropriately to the curriculum of primary or secondary schools, whichever is relevant. The Government will make their views known as soon as possible.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that moderately reassuring reply. However, would he not agree that any restrictions of that type would make no logical or educational sense for teachers of primary schools? Indeed, would it really make much difference whether the first degree was in mediaeval history, architecture, philosophy or social anthropology?

My Lords, I would agree that it would be difficult to single out a particular degree subject as being suitable or unsuitable for an intending school teacher. We acknowledge that the title of a degree course may not he a good guide to its content, and it is the latter which is important. No particular degree course has been named as unsuitable. Without anticipating the decision of my right honourable friend in the light of the advice he has received, I shall venture only to remark that the White Paper anticipates a force of primary school teachers equipped to teach across the broad range of the curriculums as classroom teachers, yet also to contribute a particular teaching strength to the school as a whole. If the PGCE student is to measure up to the requirements I should have thought it important that the foundations of academic knowledge should be there before he or she embarks on a short professional training course.

:My Lords, could the Minister ask the Secretary of State and his colleagues to make quite sure that, when decisions are made in this matter, the students will have plenty of warning about what is going to happen so that it is not after they have started on their first degree or have reached their third year that they know that they have chosen an inappropriate subject?

Yes, my Lords, I shall certainly draw that to the attention of my right honourable friend.

My Lords, regardless of what has been said so far in connection with the curriculum, the Minister must be aware that the curriculum is the responsibility of the governors of the school?

Yes, my Lords, I do not see where the difficulty lies. Presumably they look for a teacher who wants to teach that particular curriculum or subject.

My Lords, is it not true that in some countries all teachers are expected to be graduates? I am sure that someone could tell us for certain whether that is so. Is it not true in Scotland that all teachers in schools, except the most elementary, are required to be graduates, but that there is no particular connection between the subject in which they graduated and the subject which they are required to teach?

My Lords, I can only answer for the United Kingdom, and probably better for certain parts than for others. I would not know about other countries. The noble Lord has referred to Scotland. Entrants to postgraduate secondary teacher training must have completed two years of degree level study in a subject relevant to the secondary school curriculum. There is no similar restriction for entrants to primary training, but the question of relevant degree study is being considered.

My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to consolidate certain enactments relating to county courts. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Elton, I beg to introduce a Bill to make provision for facilitating the transfer between the United Kingdom and places outside the British islands of persons for the time being detained in prisons, hospitals or other institutions by virtue of orders made in the course of the exercise by courts and tribunals of their criminal jurisdiction. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.

My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to amend the provisions of the Animal Health Act 1981 relating to the seizure of things for the purpose of preventing the spread of disease and to powers of entry, and to enable certain orders under that Act to operate in or over territorial waters; to amend the Slaughter of Poultry Act 1967; to enable provisions to be made for controlling the practice of artificial breeding of livestock; to repeal the Improvement of Livestock (Licensing of Bulls) Act 1931 and the Horse Breeding Act 1958; to amend the Medicines Act 1968 in relation to feeding stuffs and veterinary drugs, and for connected purposes. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.

My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to make provision for the control of straw and stubble burning until 1989 and to prohibit it thereafter. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.

My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Bellwin, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The Bill is a further illustration of this Government's concern to preserve the nation's heritage in the building field. Your Lordships have only to raise your eyes to the ceiling of this Chamber, or to examine the freshly revealed detail of the stonework of the West Front, to appreciate the commitment of successive Secretaries of State to this policy. Some of your Lordships will also have seen the exhibition mounted by the Property Services Agency in the Banqueting House in September; this showed some of the conservation work carried out by the agency in London in recent years. A register, published this summer, listed all the historic buildings in the department's care in London, and Somerset House, the subject of this Bill, is one of them.

Somerset House is a Grade I listed building, which was built in the 18th century on the site of the former Royal Palace of Somerset House. The latter had been built by Edward, Duke of Somerset, the Lord Protector, and was forfeit to the Crown after his execution in 1552. In 1775 George III consented to the demolition of the palace to make way for the first purpose-built Government office building. Sir William Chambers was appointed architect, and construction took some 25 years. The present King's College was erected as an additional wing in the same style between 1829 and 1834, and the so-called New Wing was added in the 1850s on the flank facing Waterloo Bridge.

The Royal Academy had been allowed to use rooms in the old palace, and the new building made provision for the proper housing of the academy, the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. The rooms in the north block occupied by these bodies until a little over a century ago have become known as the Fine Rooms. In the last decade they have been restored to reveal much of the original decorative work that has survived. This includes fine plasterwork, mainly executed by Collins, and with painted decorations by Reynolds, Benjamin West, Angelica Kaufmann, Rigaud and Cipriani; elegant door furniture with medallion escutcheons, and two plaster casts, on loan from the Royal Academy, in the entrance hall.

The remainder of the building has interiors to the 18th century standard of office accommodation. Of particular note are the former Seamen's Hall, the Navy Board Room, the Navy Staircase and two rooms now occupied by the Board of the Inland Revenue. The courtyard to which the public have access is of course an important central feature of the whole architectural complex. These then are the architectural aspects of importance which my right honourable friend the Secretary of State wishes to protect; and which he wishes the public to be able to enjoy, through ready access, in so far as is consistent with the operational requirements of the Government departments which occupy wings other than the northern one.

The north block of Somerset House has not been fully used for many years, due to its unusual arrangement of space. Since it is generally easier to keep old buildings in good repair if they are in use, a suggestion by the University of London that they should lease this block for use by the Courtauld Institute was a welcome one. Not only should it ensure that the fabric of this block is properly maintained for many years to come, but it seems entirely appropriate that the Fine Rooms should be occupied once more by a body of this kind, and that fine pictures should again hang in these splendid rooms. Furthermore, this setting will do much, I am sure, to enchance the reputation of a collection of works of art that is perhaps less widely known than it deserves to be.

On 1stNovember my right honourable friend announced that agreement in principle had been reached on the terms of a lease to the University. Under this agreement the university would meet the cost of converting the block for their use, and would in return enjoy favourable terms in respect of the rent they would pay. The capital cost to the university is expected to be some £3 million which the university hopes to obtain by means of a public appeal to be launched in February next year. The only obstacle in the way of implementing this agreement is that my right honourable friend has no power to grant leases of any part of this building. The Crown Lands Act of 1775 contains no provision which would allow use of the building for purposes other than that of Government offices. The Bill therefore seeks to give the Secretary of State such powers, which are of course powers that he already enjoys in respect of most other Crown freeholds for which he is responsible, including many historic buildings, such as the old War Office.

These powers are of course enabling powers, and noble Lords will appreciate that they cover the whole of Somerset House. This would give my right honourable friend flexibility in the future should any further leases be considered. It would avoid the necessity of taking up valuable parliamentary time, as has happened in the past, by the need for legislation for any individual lease, no matter how small the area concerned.

Noble Lords may be aware of the proposal that, following its merger with Queen Elizabeth and Chelsea Colleges, King's College should expand into all or part of the areas currently occupied by Government departments. My right honourable friend has recently discussed this proposal with representatives of King's College, including my noble friend Lord Jellicoe and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Cameron. Their vision of a new academic centre of excellence arising around Somerset House is both imaginative and inspiring. Rehousing of the existing occupants, from the Inland Revenue and the Lord Chancellor's department, would raise major practical and financial difficulties. I will not disguise from your Lordships that these difficulties would not be easy to surmount, but my right honourable friend has agreed that officials of the Property Services Agency should discuss the possibilities in more detail with King's College. This Bill should not be seen as prejudging, in any way, the outcome of that study.

This Bill seeks to enable my right honourable friend to conserve and to widen the public use and appreciation of a fine building which is an important element in our heritage. The Fine Rooms have for too long lain obscured. I beg to move.

My Lords, first, I should like to thank the Minister for introducing the Bill and for explaining it so clearly. He did not have to spend much time on it because it really is not much of a Bill—it is a very small enabling Bill. I should like to welcome the news that at last something is being done for Somerset House, which has had a long and chequered history and which in recent times has had a fate which it ill deserved.

When I was a Minister at the Department of the Environment from 1974 to 1978 it was a battle day after day, week after week, to try to get Somerset House used for the purposes for which it was intended—so that beautiful pictures could be shown in it. At one point I should like to have seen the Academy Great Room restored as it was from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, with pictures all up the walls. But, in fact, that did not happen. At first there was an idea that it should be a theatre museum, for which it was completely unsuitable, and, fortunately, that was withdrawn.

Then the great crunch came and many of us wanted to see the Turner collection housed in Somerset House. I still believe that it could have been housed there. It would have been well received and looked after there, but unfortunately a combination of the National Gallery, which has a great many Turners, and the British Museum, which has the drawings, made that impossible.

My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Baroness for one moment, would she not agree that it was not the National Gallery which had so many Turners, but the Tate Gallery?

My Lords, I beg the noble Lord's pardon, yes, it was the Tate Gallery. The British Museum had the prints anddrawings—and I thought that the noble Lord was interrupting me on that—which they did not want shown in Somerset House. The opposition to this—and this is the main point—was so great that the matter was always left in limbo. In the early 1970s the rooms were done up; they were beautifully restored at great expense. It was heartbreaking to see the dust gather in those rooms in that wonderful building on a prime site on the river opposite the National Theatre, for people could have visited and enjoyed the building. As the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, pointed out, Somerset House is part of our heritage and should be treated as such. During this period only the London and Thames Exhibition did this building any real justice.

We now have this Bill before us, but, in spite of the very fine, enthusiastic words uttered by the Minister, there are a great many questions to be asked about it. As the noble Lord pointed out, it is an enabling Bill. First, I must draw attention to Clause 1(1) which says:

"(1) Subject to the provisions of this section, the Secretary of State for the Environment may grant a lease of any part of Somerset House for such period as he thinks fit."

We also know that the lease is now being negotiated between the University of London and the Department of the Environment through the PSA. As I understand it, it has reached the stage that for the first 20 years the Courtauld Institute would have the building at a peppercorn rent and then for the following 30 years at a reduced rent. Therefore, although it is not, and I am told cannot be, stated in the Bill at this stage, the lease is intended to be not less than 50 years.

In the circumstances, which I shall briefly outline, in which the Courtauld will find itself, it is quite impossible to have a lease of this ridiculously short length. I would also point out that the lease of the Hampton's site by the National Gallery was a lease to the developers of 125 years. If it cannot be put in an enabling Bill then this must be covered in the lease now being negotiated. If it is a question of a reduced rent for only 50 years which is the stumbling block, then all that has to be said is that a lease would be issued for 125 years: at the end of 50 years the lease would then be renegotiated and the question of what the rent should be could then be looked at once again. Hopefully the Government at that time would be in a position to be able to be generous in their terms, and not go for what is intended at the moment as a full market rent.

Why is this so important? It is important and essential because the Courtauld must have some security. It must have security for the galleries, and it must have security for the other part which follows on—that is, the other part of the North Wing—which it is hoping to use for teaching purposes and also for libraries. The design and construction will be the responsibility of the University of London. but the department would accept responsibility for major and unforeseen structural work. I should like the Minister when he replies to comment on that and tell me that that is correct, and I hope he will be able to expand further on the proposed terms of the lease.

The way this is intended to be carried out is that the Courtauld would have to raise the money involved, apart from anything that arises for major structural and unforeseen repairs. This, I understand, is only if something arises due to the fact that this is an old Grade I building, and therefore is something that would he considered to be beyond the responsibility of the Courtauld Institute itself. The financial responsibilities are enormous, and the money would have to be raised by a public appeal. The Courtauld is short of funds. Indeed, it had to send a collection of valuable paintings to Tokyo, with all the risks involved, in order to raise some money to keep itself going.

It is proposed that the move should take place in two stages. Stage 1 would be the Fine Rooms, including the Royal Academy Great Room—those that were restored in the 'seventies. However, the, need repainting; the lighting is not adequate, as I am sure all noble Lords who have visited them know; the humidity has to be controlled in order to safeguard the paintings; and smoke detectors would have to be installed, because the danger of fire has always been one of the problems there. A new lift would have to be put in, a bookshop, cafeteria, lavatories, and also other facilities.

The cost of all this is estimated at the moment to be at least –1 million. I should have thought that –1 million for this was certainly on the low side. When in fact the work comes to be done, I think it is more than likely that the cost will be higher. These rooms are intended to contain the Seilern Collection, which is a wonderful collection left to the state. I had hoped to have seen it in Somerset House years ago, but in fact it has been stored away. With the proper financing, it would be able to go into Somerset House together with the Courtauld collection of famous impressionist and post-impressionist paintings.

Stage 2, the rest of the North Block—that is the two wings and the extensive basement for the teaching activities of the institute and the libraries—would probably cost £3 million to £4 million. It should follow Stage 1 as soon as possible, although the institute itself is well aware that it cannot start on Stage 2 until it has sufficient money and Stage 1 has been completed. If the gap is too great it is going to make it more expensive. Also, as I think we are all aware, it is much more difficult to start something from scratch again than it is to continue when you have builders, architects and everybody else on the site.

The cost of the other part—the Stage 2—in rent would be around £100,000 a year, even when the capital for all this refurbishment has been raised by the Institute itself This means that altogether a figure of around £5 million is needed. This is a vast sum to find today, particularly by public appeal, even if attempts are made—as they will be—to try to get money from overseas as well.

Although I am sure they would be very welcome, this is not a question of getting small sums from individuals. It means enormous donations being given by a number of people, many of whom will have to be extremely wealthy business people or wealthy foundations. How are they going to view this when they have a prospectus put before them with no statement on the length of lease, and where as far as we know at the moment, although it is not in the Bill, the maximum appears to be 50 years? I do not think that anybody is going to buy that at all. They are not going to feel that the security of their investment—although it is in art and culture and not investment for themselves—is long enough, and they would be right to take that view.

The importance of the two stages being carried out one after the other is great, because it has always been the intention of the founders of the institute and the galleries that they should be housed under one roof. It is important because they are closely connected in their teaching and other activities. Therefore, a much more generous period is needed for the length of the lease. What is also needed is strong Government backing for the scheme. I have been told that the Minister for the Arts, the noble Earl, Lord Gowrie, has already promised his moral hacking for the scheme. I am glad that this is so, but moral backing is not enough.

What is needed is financial backing, and financial backing from the Government and not just from individuals responding to an appeal. I am in favour of as much sponsorship as one can get, business and private, but, as the noble Lord pointed out in introducing the Bill, this is an important part of our national heritage and it is something which belongs to the state, to the Government. The Government must play their part in helping to produce the finance for it, otherwise Somerset House will go on being left stranded and neglected as it is at the present time.

The Government must be prepared to make funds available in order to help the institute, and also to repay in some small way the generosity of the late Samuel Courtauld, who, during the war and in the period before the war, did so much to help bring over here art historians who were suffering and would probably not have lived if they had remained in Nazi Germany and Austria. In this country—and unfortunately this applies to all Governments—we are inclined to accept with gratitude the beautiful objects which are left to us, or given to us, like the Courtauld Collection and the Seilern Collection, but we do not always use them properly or show our gratitude in the right way, which is to furnish enough funds to be able to use and show things which are absolutely priceless, and not just have them stored away as they are at the present time.

If the appeal fails, the Government will then have the problem of having to find another suitable tenant for the Fine Rooms all over again. In view of the history of Somerset House, of which we are all aware and which was outlined by the Minister, this would be tragic. It would mean that another decade will go by with this beautiful building not being used, being neglected, and running further and further into decay. However, if the appeal succeeds and the Government give the backing that they should in this case, when the Institute vacates No. 19 to 21 Portman Square (where the Institute now is situated) the Department of Education and Science will have been saved the rent of £140,000 a year which it is paying to Portman Estates at the moment until the lease comes to an end.

We cannot let Somerset House continue as it is. It is unsatisfactory to be able to accept only what is in the Bill, though it may just be an introduction to something very much more substantial that the Government intend to do. However, as it stands it would be wrong for us to exhibit too much enthusiasm without hearing, as I hope we shall later from the Minister, that some of the necessary work on finance and length of lease will be undertaken.

I should like the Minister, if possible, to comment on amending the present Bill. I would not have any difficulty in putting forward some amendments which I think would improve the Bill enormously. If the Bill is an enabling Bill and what has to be covered has to be covered within the lease, we must know that this is going on at the same time as the Bill is before us. Before the Bill leaves this House we should know exactly what is intended in the lease. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us, though I am sure he will not be able to give us all the details; but I should like to feel that we hear enough to encourage us so that we will, before the Bill leaves this House, have much more of an idea of the Government's intentions about the security of tenure and the financial terms. I have to reiterate that this marvellous building must not just be seen from the outside and be like an empty shell within. It should be seen and be used as the important part that it is of London's artistic and cultural life.

My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, I wonder whether I heard her correctly when she said that the Count von Seilern gave his collection to the state? The Count von Seilern gave his collection, worth £30 million, to the Hume House Trustees, in whom also are vested the Courtauld paintings. That is why they are all ultimately under the University of London. When I was Vice-Chancellor I suggested to the Secretary of State that Somerset House would be a suitable place. May I also ask my noble friend another question? Has she the same impression as I have that Secretary of State after Secretary of State has been in favour of this proposal, that Minister after Minister has fought for this proposal, but that every time the question gets bogged down by the inter-service fighting between the civil servants in various departments?

My Lords, if I may have the indulgence of the House, I should like to answer my noble friend's first question. I seem to be getting nil today in exams on accuracy. He is absolutely right—I am sorry that I shorthanded it—but the collection was left to he used to the advantage of the country. That is what I meant. He is quite right, and I had the pleasure of being shown the von Seilern collection by him.

My noble friend's second point is absolutely true, but he has left out one important aspect, though perhaps he meant that when he mentioned the interdepartmental problem. This is the awful dead hand of the Treasury which slaps itself down on everything whichever Government is in power. It is the Treasury that we are also having to press all the time as well as the departments concerned. He is right that we have all been for it, but up to now nothing of any substance has been done. This is why, with the Bill before us, we must not let this opportunity pass of getting something really substantial off the ground.

My Lords, I am not certain whether this is a private fight, or a public fight, but whichever it is, I should like to join in. I wish to begin by offering my support to the Minister for the able way in which he put this important matter before us. If I can offer only moral backing, I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me, but I am not in a position to offer anything more. Indeed, even my moral backing is not entirely disinterested. I shall explain why to your Lordships in about two or three minutes.

If your Lordships cast your minds back about 25 years, you may recall that we had a debate in this House on the subject of the private and domestic affairs of the Diplomatic Service—affairs abroad in the consulates and embassies in the far-flung corners of the world. One point that was frequently raised was the point which affects our debate today. It was that the pictures displayed in the British embassies and British consulates did not reflect the way of life, or our artistic heritage, as well as they should. That was so for different reasons. First, there was the niggardly behaviour of the Ministry of Works, as it then was, and the Treasury, which occasionally gave a very small grant for certain pictures to be hung in embassies. If they did not do so, the ambassador had to find the money out of his own pocket, and neither his pocket, nor his taste, might always have been up to public consideration.

The third way of providing pictures was to rely on skulduggery. This was by far and away the best way. One only has to look at the splendid picture of Byron in the British Embassy in Athens, or the picture of Dr. Johnson, by Joshua Reynolds, in the British Embassy in Washington, where a fine Constable also hangs in the drawing room. I say this with diffidence in the presence of so many ex-embassadors who have occupied both those posts, but I believe that those pictures were all acquired by the nimble wit, as well as the nimble fingers, of the ambassadors concerned, in the face of considerable opposition from the Ministry of Works, but with some support from the Foreign Office, which on that occasion was prepared to do wrong things for the right reasons, instead of, as usual, the other way round.

The debate on the subject was wound up by the Minister in charge (sitting in the place presently occupied by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale), in a most cogent, lucid and farseeing speech. But unfortunately in the course of that speech I went too far. As Minister in charge, apart from agreeing with everything that people had said about pictures in the embassies, I suggested, rather rashly—this was 25 years ago—that we should find in London and elsewhere other buildings in which to hang pictures which were not hung at that moment. Although the cellars and attics of our national, provincial and municipal museums were crowded with pictures which could not be hung because there was not space on the walls, pictures could not be provided for the embassies abroad. One reason for that was that we were not allowed by law, or by the trust regulations governing the pictures, to export them to embassies abroad. That has now almost wholly been put right, and we can now do so.

I then went on to suggest that because we were so short of space we should look around, and, I asked, what was wrong with Somerset House? However, that was not in my brief. I was shot down from a very great height by those advising me, and those of your Lordships who have seen "Yes, Minister" will know just how far a Minister who goes beyond his brief can be shot down by those civil servants who desire to shoot him down.

Nevertheless, 25 years have passed, and we are now discussing this matter. I am glad to say that we have arranged for pictures to be put on embassy walls in greater profusion. Now we hear my noble friend Lord Skelmersdale explaining to us exactly how Somerset House can be put to very much better use.

The noble Baroness, Lady Birk, has raised a certain technical question, which must be properly dealt with. I had always understood that the building was destined to house the Seilern collection which I have myself had the privilege of seeing. Those of your Lordships who have not seen this collection have missed a very great treat, and I hope that it will soon come your way.

If your Lordships also doubt whether I am correct in saying that we do not have enough accommodation to hang the pictures which are available to us, I invite you to take one look tomorrow at the queues of people forming outside Burlington House to look at the magnificent collection of pictures from the Venetian Exhibition and also to go, in a month's time, to look at the queues or to join the queues—unless you are an old-age pensioner, as I am, and go to the top of them—outside the Tate Gallery and you will see the people waiting to look at John Piper's retrospective exhibition. We keep on talking about mugging and rioting in Luxembourg after football matches and other things which show what a dissolute and uncivilised country we are; but. on the other hand, look at queues outside the Tate, look at the queues outside Burlington House; and there is another side to the coin.

I am glad therefore that the Government have put forward this additional scheme for providing more space for pictures. There are technicalities of course that have to be settled. The noble Lord will probably give us an answer and the noble Baroness will put down amendments in due course. But on a matter of principle I should like to support this Bill strongly, only adding a small, perilous footnote. Time after time we hear people say that there is far too much legislation in this country—not just bad legislation, not just good legislation, but just too much legislation. The hereditary and traditional visitor from Mars might very well look down upon us this afternoon and say, "Is it not really possible to put this matter right after 25 years of wrangling (which the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, has described to us) between civil servants, Government departments and other Government departments, without an Act of Parliament?" I will not add to the legislative burden by speaking any further save to ask your Lordships to support the noble Lord in his excellent Bill, particularly as it has such excellent antecedents.

My Lords, I am sorry that I cannot congratulate the noble Lord the Minister on the way that he introduced this Bill. With great respect to him, I thought that he sounded like an enlightened estate agent reading particulars delivered of a prime property coming on the market for letting if only the landlord could get rid of the legal entanglements in the way of doing what he wished to do. I wish that the Minister had been more specific about what lies behind this Bill. For myself, if I thought that the Government were bent on evil—which lots of people think—I should say that it is a sinister little Bill. If I wanted to arouse prejudice on these Benches, I should say that this is the beginning of the privatisation of Somerset House. But I am not very clear what the Minister has in mind apart from freeing the hands of the Secretary of State for the Environment to do something with Somerset House that he cannot do at the present time.

This is part of our inheritance. I think that sometimes noble Lords are much more careful about their own inheritance than they are of the inheritance of the nation at large. This is part of our history. I have more than a passing interest in Somerset House. My noble friend Lord Plant and myself between us have trod the stones of Somerset House for the past 60 years trying to get better conditions, more satisfactory careers and more pay for the staff that work in it—a noble enterprise which we conducted with our customary dignity and cheerful spirit. My first contact with Somerset House was when I joined the Army in the First World War and then I saw the basement, the drill hall of the Civil Service Rifles, when two boys, aged just over 18, went to join the Army. One was named Henry Moore and the other was me. We joined together, strangely enough, the Civil Service Rifles. That was the first that I knew of Somerset House but I was to learn a great deal more about it later.

The noble Lord the Minister is telling us something of the history. Somerset House is a romantic place. If it were not associated with the Inland Revenue, it would he regarded as one of the tourist attractions of London. When I see that in this Bill the Minister is to "have regard … to the desirability"—the desirability, my Lords!—of the public having access to the quandrangle, well, the tourists would pour into it if they knew that Cromwell lay in state there and that Inigo Jones lived there and died there. And some strange doings took place in the Strand. Pepys said, "This day two soldiers were hanged in the Strand for their late meeting at Somerset House". I am not clear whether they were hanged because their meeting was late or whether they were late for the meeting. I have been late for meetings at Somerset House but, fortunately, by that time the death penalty had been removed for being late at meetings at Somerset House.

It is a romantic place. I have no objection to the Fine Rooms—so fine that they are so described with capital initials in the Explanatory Memorandum to the Bill. I have no objection to the Fine Rooms being returned to purposes similar to those that these rooms had many years ago. It was only when the Royal Academy and the Royal Society moved out that the Registrar General of Births, Marriages and Deaths moved into these Fine Rooms and was there for a very long time. The public sector was being enlarged then. Registration became compulsory in 1837 and they had to have an office where there could take place all this clerical work which previously had been confined to parish registers. So one sees how bureaucracy creeps in so as to have better order and government of the people. The Admiralty were there for a long time. But it has been almost wholly occupied by the Inland Revenue for over 100 years.

Not a word has been said about the possibility of commercial lettings. The noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, spoke as if the idea behind this Bill was for the glory of God, and art and pictures, the nation's treasures, culture and so on. That is the attraction of the Bill. But notice the words "other purposes" in the rubric to Clause 1. Clause 1(3) says,

"have regard to the architectural importance … and to the desirability of preserving public access to the courtyard."

Those are the only two conditions laid upon the Secretary of State in letting part of the building—or the whole of it, possibly—for "other purposes".

What other purposes? Are we going to have Cheatem and Twistem and Partners, consultants on tax avoidance and tax planning, given the address, "Somerset House"? My Goodness! What a rent they would pay to occupy part of Somerset House to carry on their trade as rivals to the other occupants of the building, to rub shoulders with the custodians of the nation's revenue, to go in the canteen and discuss the possibility of tax avoidance without being caught out. What a wonderful possibility it opens up by discriminating commercial lettings that the Secretary of State might feel disposed to make.

Your Lordships may say that this is a lot of rubbish and that he would not do anything of the kind. But the Government are trying to sell everything that they have; they are trying to turn everything into money. Quite frankly, I do not trust them not to turn Somerset House into money if they get the chance. I think that if there are purposes for which the Government wish to use Somerset House, they should come to the House and get sanction specifically for what they are proposing and not ask for "other purposes" to be brought into a Bill which excites the approval, the emotions and the romance of all of us for the better use of the "Fine Rooms."

Certainly those Fine Rooms can be used for much better purposes than those for which they were used for so long. The registration of births, marriages and deaths is no sort of vocation to take place inside the Fine Rooms of Somerset House. Then when they had to go and put a lot of their statistical work on to computers they cleared out and the Churchill Exhibition was held, and other uses have been found for the Fine Rooms. I distinguish between the provisions dealing with the Fine Rooms and the rest of the Bill. I shall certainly have amendments to put down to that part of the Bill which could open the door to the Secretary of State doing almost anything, within his own judgment, with Somerset House.

I ask for an express assurance that commercial lettings are not in any circumstances contemplated under this Bill. Let us have it clear and straight. I think that other Government offices might well be used for commercial purposes in due time or in certain circumstances. Perhaps no one would complain unduly if the old War Office was let to CND, or something: nobody would believe for a moment that anybody was going to take a letting in the old War Office in order to make war. But Somerset House has a connection with the Inland Revenue, and its activities and its place in the minds and hearts of the people is one which no other tenants should be allowed to usurp or to set aside.

That is it. This is a little Bill, but it has a very undesirable potential. I would conclude by saying this. I ask the Minister not to be afraid of troubling the House on important matters. We get troubled a great deal on very minor matters which nevertheless have an importance in the general pattern of parliamentary government. But when part of the heritage—a building like Somerset House—is made available for disposal, even for the most beneficent and desirable purposes, let us have it so that we know what is being done; otherwise, the Minister will come along and ask for freedom to let parts of this place. He will say that they are not being fully used, or that we could show pictures. After all, pictures would look very nice in your Lordships' House. And what about Buckingham Palace? Nothing is barred if the Minister gets freedom to do what he likes.

I am against Secretaries of State having discretion to do things of this kind without, presumably, a statutory instrument which would require approval of either House. So I am sorry; I cannot welcome the Bill. However much I would welcome the use of the Fine Rooms for the purposes indicated, I think they must be clearly differentiated from the other parts, which are covered in such broad terms and with so few conditions in the specifications of this Bill. There is trouble brewing, Minister—I warn you!

My Lords, I shall be very brief. I very much welcome this Bill, and I must thank my noble friend for allowing us to be emotional, sentimental and reminiscent, which is just what I am going to be. I am going to join the club, because I spent many happy hours, if sometimes frustrating ones, clambering up the stairs or in the galleries pulling out the indexes of the births, marriages and deaths. I disagree that that was the wrong place for them to be, because to people all over the world Somerset House conjured up a picture of a place where pedigrees—births, marriages and deaths of their forebears—were lodged. That office was there for 137 years, from July 1837 to 1974, when it was moved to what is, I suppose, a perfectly functional building not very far away; and that building was a very expensive one.

I would ask my noble friend two small questions. First, what is the planned use of the old search rooms in the North Wing of Somerset House? Secondly, could there possibly be a small permanent exhibition at Somerset House depicting the history of the General Registry Office? I think that could be very important. I am delighted by the thought that at the end of 10 years of misery and decay in this noble building people will be thronging to it.

My Lords, I am sorry to speak without having put my name on the list. This was due to a fault between me and my chief which we have not yet resolved. I thought this Bill would go through in two minutes. Everybody must agree with the enabling power in this Bill. The one thing we want the Government to do is to let Somerset House for the purposes very clearly and, with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, very restrictively described in Clause 1. I am not quite clear what he is worrying about, but we shall come back to that.

However, it has been an opportunity for some splendidly cultivated speeches which I have enjoyed enormously. I will not imitate them, but would only say that I think we should pay tribute to the way we got this marvellous collection, which I and many other noble Lords have seen. It is perfectly splendid. It was Professor Johannes Wilde, of the Courtauld Institute, who was the acquaintance of the donor; and I must say here—because honour is due where it is due, particularly in places where it is not often given—that I was approached on this when I was a Minister by the late, lamented and unhappy Anthony Blunt, who was part of the Wilde team trying to get this out of the donor, because the donor wished to do something, as a condition of letting us have this collection, to which I could not possibly agree. It was not possible at all, and I was terribly afraid we might have lost it. However, we did not, and all is well.

As we have had a discussion of this kind, which I was not expecting. I must say that I agree with everything that my old colleague the noble Baroness has said. What matters here is that once you have done the first job, which is to get the Government to lease this marvellous building for the proper purposes, you have to see how it is going to be maintained. I took the trouble early last week to write to the Government to ask for information about this. Your Lordships will not be surprised to hear that I have not so far had an answer. The noble Lord on the Front Bench has given us some indication of the kind of expense involved, and the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, has given us an even bigger indication of the kind of expense involved. No one has suggested who is going to pay for it. This is what really matters. It did not occur to me that this was going to be the occasion for such a discussion. The occasion for that kind of dicussion is when a lease is granted and the University of London wants money to do the job properly. That is when we have got to weigh in and help them.

I do not think I can agree with the noble Lord, Lord Teviot, that it is better to have people coming to see a beautiful building for an unbeautiful purpose than for a beautiful one. I think it is far better that they should come in and look at wonderful pictures rather than at registers of births and deaths; but that is a matter of opinion. I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, is the least right in his fears. It is perfectly clear that under Clause 1 no part of this building can be let for any purpose other than that described in Clause 1, which includes the provision,

"shall have regard to the architectural importance of the building and to the desirability of preserving public access to its courtyard."

The thing that is really serious is that it is not enough simply to give this permission to lease, which we have all wanted to see happen, without any provision, or any discussion of the provision, which will be very high and is very important at a time when the Arts Council is asking for 110 million and is probably going to be offered £90 million. I do not know who is going to pay for this (whether it will be the Department of Education and Science, Environment or the Arts) but one of the Government departments must put up money to pay for the administration and the maintenance—and the maintenance is very difficult. Somerset House is so built that if you have two large crowds going up the stairs at the same time you are going to do damage. There must be people limiting the crowds all the way through. It will be an expensive and awkward job. But having joined in the cultivated discussion because it is irresistible, I should like to support the Bill.

My Lords, 1 hope that I may intervene for one moment—even though I have not put my name down to speak—to say how much I welcome this Bill. I should like to say that if in an intervention I made some faint criticism of the operations of the Civil Service in some respects, I want to pay tribute to the way in which the Treasury handled the whole question of Count von Seilern's will, which was a most difficult affair. We could have lost the painting to this country, had not enlightened Treasury officials cut through masses of red tape and settled the matter on entirely sensible terms, which were acceptable both to the Seilern family in Austria and to the Hume trustees, the University of London and the Courtauld Institute. That is an admirable example of how good civil servants can he when they put their minds to it.

I shall certainly join other noble Lords, when we reach the Committee stage of this Bill, in examining a little further what the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, said about the financial arrangements between the University of London and the Government on this matter. But I should like to congratulate the noble Lord on having brought this Bill to the House and I wish it well.

:My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, will excuse me if I, like the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, and the noble Lord, Lord Annan, tip-toe unannounced into this brief discussion. I do so for two reasons. First, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, will excuse me if I make a slight correction to his admirable remarks, on which I, too, congratulate him. He referred to my noble friend and colleague the Principal of King's College as the "noble and learned Lord". My noble colleague at King's is indeed immensely learned, but technically speaking he is more gallant than learned. There was, I think, a slight confusion between Lord Cameron and the other Lord Cameron, a distinguished Scottish judge, who is indeed technically learned as well as being immensely learned.

Secondly, I should like to say at this stage how grateful I am to the Government for the way in which this Bill has been drafted, and also for the way in which they have received the representations which have been made to them on behalf of King's College by the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Randolph Quirk, by my noble and gallant friend and by myself, as chairman of the Council of King's.

The noble Lord, Lord Houghton, in an admirably witty and trenchant intervention referred with dark suspicion to "other purposes". One other purpose, as the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, remarked, would be the occupation of part of Somerset House by a new creation. That creation would be as part of a reorganised, modernised and streamlined University of London—a new college embracing the existing King's College, Queen Elizabeth College and Chelsea College, constituting, in effect, something like a new university in the heart of London.

I know that there are difficulties. There are difficulties of accommodation—the noble Lord referred to them; the difficulty of finding suitable alternative accommodation for some, at least, of the present admirable occupants of the building. There, as always, are difficulties of finance. The noble Lord, Lord Houghton, also referred to difficulties of romance. I do not think that there would be difficulties of romance in this imaginative idea. After all, the main sponsor of King's College over 150 years ago was the Duke of Wellington. He fought a duel with the then Marquess of Winchilsea over King's. I think that his spirit would lie down very amicably in Somerset House with Oliver Cromwell, with Inigo Jones and with those other admirable civil servants—and I speak with respect of the Civil Service—to whom the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, referred in those remarks which I greatly enjoyed.

Therefore, I welcome very warmly the Bill. I welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has said. I believe that it opens another opportunity, apart from housing the Courtauld Institute which deserves to be housed in these particular Fine Rooms, and I would say that the new King's would cohabit very amicably, very productively, and very legitimately with the Courtauld, if that were to come about.

I know that there are difficulties. But I believe that those difficulties can be overcome with will, goodwill and imagination, and I hope that the discussions on which we are engaged—and I am very grateful that this possibility has been opened by the Department of the Environment—will lead to those difficulties being surmounted and, I believe, a unique opportunity being seized.

My Lords, I feel that I am about to make another mistake on which my noble friend, before he leaves the Chamber, is prepared to correct me. Is there not a quotation from the Old Testament which goes along the lines,

"I slew a lion and brought forth a mouse"?

I am beginning to feel that it is the other way round this afternoon.

This is a short Bill and many of the points which have been raised this afternoon are, with respect, mostly Committee points, but I must in all fairness answer one or two of them. The first thing I should like to do is to look at the Bill in front of us, because the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, for example, and, by implication, although she did not actually express it, the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, were worried about certain words. But it is a very simple Bill, it has only one clause and each subsection depends on each other subsection.

I think that the words which the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, should have had particularly in mind before he concocted the very interesting and amusing speech which we heard this afternoon, are in subsection (3). They are:

"the Secretary of State shall have regard to the architectural importance of the building".

So can your Lordships imagine any responsible adult, let alone any responsible adult who has risen to the dizzy heights of Secretary of State, allowing Messrs. Grabbit, Grabbit and Twitch in such surroundings? I am simply horrified that the noble Lord should have had such an idea.

The other thing which the Bill does not do is to refer to leases, and the whole tenor of the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, was about the proposed lease of the University of London and Courtauld Institute. But, at present, the lease would be for at least 50 years. The Fine Rooms would be rent free for 20 years and at a reduced rental thereafter. The university would pay a market rent for the remainder of the North Block and would be responsible for maintenance costs, except, as she said, that the department would bear any exceptional costs arising from the age of the building. But the cost of refurbishment of the North Block beyond the Fine Rooms, which, as I said, are in a reasonable state of repair, although not in a suitable state for hanging fine pictures and displaying busts or anything else that might be desirable, is to be borne by the university and, as I said in my opening speech, they are intending to raise this by public subscription.

I am unable to stand at this Dispatch Box, especially here in your Lordships' House, and commit the Government to vast sums of money, or indeed any sums of money, but I have no doubt that my noble friend Lord Gowrie, to whose attention I shall draw this debate, will be extremely interested and will do his best to see what he can do to help in the appeal. In this connection, it might be interesting if I were to tell the House that even before the appeal has opened I understand that there have been promises of £½million. I do not believe, therefore, that the picture is quite so black as the noble Baroness has painted it.

My Lords, when the noble Lord spoke about the lease he confirmed what I put forward that a lease of not less than 50 years is now being spoken of. But I was arguing that a 50-year lease was far too short to enable the Courtauld Institute to move in, try to obtain the money and have security of tenure. I should like to hear from the Minister whether a lease of 125 years, similar to that granted for the Hampton's site, will be discussed, because that is not in the Bill.

No, my Lords, it is not in the Bill, for the simple reason that the word "lease" is not in the Bill in the context of what we are discussing. Not for the first time, the noble Baroness has pre-empted me. I was about to answer her question.

I apologise to the noble Lord.

The lease is only at the heads of agreement stage. Discussions are still taking place. If the Courtauld Institute agree with the noble Baroness that 50 or 60 years is not long enough, I have no doubt that they will have the opportunity to press for 100 or 125 years, or whatever might seem to them to be appropriate.

My Lords, the other point to which I ought to draw attention was made by the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby. The fact is that it was the university who came to the Government. The Government were not trying to sell like mad this building which the noble Lord, one infers from his speech, regards as a Whitehall white elephant, or something of that character. So again the picture is not quite so black as it has been painted. The basic purpose of the Bill is to give to the Secretary of State powers in line with those he already enjoys in respect of many other listed buildings on the Crown estate. He is not constrained in any way in any of those cases, so I shall have to read very carefully what the noble Lord said before I am prepared to agree that the Secretary of State should be constrained in this particular case. His powers over Government-owned buildings are wide, particularly so in respect of the office estate. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State recognises the particular importance of Somerset House. For this reason, the Bill contains qualifications, some of which I have mentioned, as to the powers he would have in respect of this building.

It will not be until the Committee stage that I discover whether your Lordships are satisfied, but I have no doubt that we shall then have a very interesting debate upon the subject. My right honourable friend would also like the public to have a greater opportunity to enjoy the architectural splendour of this work of the 18th century. I am not trying to sound like an estate agent again, but I really do believe that this is a most glorious building, very attractively sited at the back of the Aldwych. In the case of the Fine Rooms and the courtyard there would seem to be scope to widen the limited facilities which the public already enjoy.

This is a small but by no means unimportant Bill and it is a step along this particular route. I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken with great knowledge and eloquence upon it and I am sure that eventually it will very happily reach the statute book.

rose to move, That this House takes note of the present situation of the shipping industry and of the Report of the European Communities Committee on EEC Competition Policy: Shipping (3rd Report, 1983–84, H.L. 23).

My Lords, it is a pleasure and a privilege to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Rochdale. Any noble Lord who did not already know of the noble Viscount's great interest in shipping would have appreciated it from the speech we have just heard. It is what one would expect, bearing in mind that he was chairman of the committee of inquiry into the shipping industry in 1970, the report of which bears his name. I also rise with some trepidation because I was not a member of the sub-committee which presented this report and there are a number of other noble Lords to speak who have associations with the shipping industry. I congratulate the noble Viscount on his excellent summary of the whole report and his views on the future of the shipping industry, and on this report itself. I found it, as he said, a useful report, a fascinating report, although not one that I recommend to re-read, as I did, for bedtime reading.

We must not overlook the fact that the 1982 Merchant Shipping Act, the Third Reading of which was supported from these Benches, implements the United Nations Liner Code as adapted by the Brussels package, to which the noble Viscount has referred. The draft regulations confirm that Brussels package and, as the noble Viscount has pointed out, would exempt liner conferences and limited agreements from the bar of restrictive practices under Articles 85 and 86 of the Community treaty. It also includes a number of conditions which, as has been pointed out, could conflict with the United Nations code.

May I just comment, in passing, that it is interesting to note how very easily the Commission can set on one side articles of its Treaty when it considers it is necessary to do so, and that is what it has done in the case of the Brussels package.

Various sections of the report and the evidence presented to the committee deal with this question of restrictive practices; but it has to be kept in mind that liner conferences have operated for some hundred years, and if not actually restrictive practices, surely they do take the form of cartel. The loyalty agreements are also surely a form of discrimination in trade. I am not attacking liner conferences; I am not attacking the loyalty agreements; but I must stress that surely these are examples of managed trade which are not just left to the market to sort out.

The report sets out various developments in shipping practices and operations and it mentions some: it mentions the container revolution, newcomers in the form of outsiders coming in, development of consortia and also development of new national shipping lines. Paragraph 44 of the report observes that all these changes work towards the erosion of conference power. That is important in the light of the main recommendations of the committee.

For these reasons, and also the points made under international repercussions in paragraphs 71–78 of the report, the conclusion of the committee not to support the draft regulation would seem to be the right course. As argued in paragraph 95, just to maintain the status quo could present problems, and the noble Viscount intimated that there could be possible legal repercussions if the status quo situation was adopted.

The second course of action suggested by the committee, the adoption of a provisional regulation to last for a minimum period—the committee suggest five years—which would provide exemption for liner conferences, loyalty and other agreements between shipping lines and shippers, would enable the position to be reviewed during the interim in the light of all the many changes in shipping that may take place, to which I have referred and to which the noble Viscount also referred in his speech.

The paragraphs under the state of British shipping refer to the startling decline in the size of the British fleet over the last decade during which there has been a substantial increase in the world shipping fleet. I was very pleased that the noble Viscount gave actual details and figures (which saves me repeating them) to show how alarming is this decline. This serious situation was also referred to in the report by the evidence from the Department of Trade, the General Council of British Shipping, the British shippers councils and also the two main seafaring unions. They all emphasise this alarming decline in the British shipping industry.

The Motion before us does not deal with just taking note of this report. As the noble Viscount has said, it also takes note of the present situation in the shipping industry, and as supplements to all the evidence in this report—if one needed any supplements—I found it useful to refer to two other publications: one is British Shipping Heading for the Rocks, which was produced by the National Union of Seamen in December last year, and the other is the British Shipping Review 1982, published by the General Council of British Shipping only as recently as September this year; and I shall refer in my subsequent comments to some points made in those documents. The two documents reflect different approaches and solutions but both would seem to be directed to the same end: to retain Britain's share of the world shipping; to maintain shipping receipts; to assist in the balance of payments; to assist Britain's export trade, and to look to the interests of seafarers. Note that the last point is included.

The report, in paragraph 37, refers to the fall in competitiveness, particularly in cruising and dry bulk fleet, where the report says:

"Competitors, notably ships manned by Far Eastern crews, have lower manning costs than United Kingdom operators".

This point was taken up, I noted, by the National Union of Seamen, who claim that ship-owners have looked to cut costs by lower wage agreements, reduced manning and more inflexibility, and some have transferred ships to flags of convenience. Similar points were made in evidence given by the Merchant Officers' Association. The General Council of British Shipping countered that the use of flagging out as a term of abuse conceals the fact that a shipping company, to stay in business—and I am quoting from the general council's view—

"must be free to put its ships under the flag most likely to serve the success of the enterprise and an owner must decide whether to own ships under his country's flag or under another country's flag or by charter".

If we were left with that statement, that, I would suggest to your Lordships, is very alarming. The General Council of British Shipping has urged that the Government should interest a company in having a ship placed under a British flag by providing a favourable fiscal régime and should give positive political support against the activities of foreign Governments.

There is, I think noble Lords will agree, increasing concern about the growing penetration of the British fleet by foreign owners, and I understand that the Department of Trade itself estimated that at the end of 1980 some 40 per cent. of the United Kingdom registered fleet was controlled by foreign interests. That statement was clearly made in one of the documents to which I have referred. The National Union of Seamen argue that changes in the British shipping industry in terms of size, structure and control mean the industry is facing a precarious future. They urge simple protectionist and, I would say, interventionist measures, as an interim step to a longer-term policy of preservation and development of our shipping industry.

The General Council of British Shipping observe in their document—and I hope the Minister may have something to say about this,

"that the Government is totally opposed to any form of direct assistance to the industry, even the limited fiscal incentives which the General Council has advocated. There is to be no subsidy, no control, no protectionism. The industry will have to stand on its own two feet and prosper or decline as a result of its own efforts".

I have taken that quotation from the General Council of British Shipping's own document; not a socialist periodical.

Is not the National Union of Seamen correct in arguing that worldwide shipping does not operate in a free market? In fact, it is doubtful whether it has ever operated in a free market. I am almost tempted to refer to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Boyd-Carpenter, yesterday, but I will not.

Price fixing is well established either through liner conferences or multinational company manipulation. Virtually every fleet receives some form of subsidy and many countries follow various forms of protectionism such as reserving coastal trade to the vessels of the nation's own fleet and the reservation of Government generated cargo to national flag vessels. Britain has avoided these two measures, but our main competitors and European partners do not. The United States, Japan, Greece, France, West Germany and Italy, for instance, follow those two practices.

The United Kindom has continued to honour trading principles laid down in GATT, but, again, our competitors have begun to conclude bilateral agreements that take the form of trading discrimination. The Merchant Navy and Airline Officers' Association states that United Kingdom workers in the industry are concerned about the way in which competition in shipping is distorted by other member states of the Community through failing to accept international conventions, operating under non-Community flags, employing non-Community seafarers at cut rates and receiving either direct or indirect financial assistance from their Governments. Every one of those measures would appear to be not in conformity with the aims and aspirations of the Community treaties.

The Select Committee has made clear that it saw no reason why regulations should not include social factors such as wages, general conditions and manning. I am pleased that the noble Viscount stressed this point in his introductory speech. Why is it not possible, when the United Kingdom is considering a regulation dealing with a particular industry, for social factors to be included in that regulation, whatever the industry, shipping or any other? When the question of conditions not being observed by all nations is so important, this would appear to be a particularly important factor in any regulation dealing with the shipping industry.

Words and aspirations about leaving freedom in shipping are not enough when our competitors and our Community partners do not follow that course. It seems that we are in a situation where there is general recognition that the shipping trade must be regulated and not left to the market. If measures of temporary protection or, if I may so express it, intervention or even management—management may be the better word—are not to be followed, I must ask what positive action is to be taken internationally before British shipping suffers further decline.

This decline has taken place at a time when there has been no holding back due to restrictive practices. According to general philosophy, there have been no restrictions. There is one encouraging feature. The unions hold the view that British shipping has always been able to compete in technical efficiency, scale economies and general high standards. They have emphasised that these factors must not be allowed to slip back. The General Council of British Shipping has offered the two largest unions the opportunity to work out jointly broad lines of support that the industry should seek from the Government. That is encouraging. I hope that this course will be followed by the General Council and the unions concerned. If the conclusion of the Select Committee is adopted and there is an interim regulation instead of the draft regulation proposed, that will give a breathing space to look at all the issues involved.

I conclude by expressing my impression that this extremely useful report is not about a free market. It is really about planning and managing the shipping trade. That was also evident from the speech of the noble Viscount.

My Lords, it was a great privilege to sit on the committee under the chairmanship of the noble Viscount, Lord Rochdale. His long and authoritative connection with the shipping industry, far from breeding prejudice, enabled us to reach conclusions of a very fair-minded kind, conclusions with which I fully agree and which I believe are generally accepted. I shall speak very briefly and confine myself to two points prompted by the report; first, the role of the Commission in this matter, and, secondly, the chilling paragraphs 34 to 38 headed, "State of British Shipping".

First, the role of the Commission. The Commission has a very difficult role to play in the affairs of the Community. It would be remarkable if it could from time to time escape justifiable criticism from one quarter or another. It has the duty to try and ensure that the Treaty of Rome is implemented. It has the legal duty to do this. It is a duty that it must, and does, take very seriously indeed. But, at the same time, it would be best if it exercised its zeal selectively. The treaty was drawn up in certain political and economic circumstances, and the treaty naturally reflects these circumstances.

The circumstances are now vastly different, and it seems to me that members of the Commission are sometimes a little insensitive to the changes that have taken place and plough on in a bureaucratic way doing things that they could, with advantage, leave alone at least for the time being. Competition in shipping is just such a case. The proposed regulation which the report examines could very well have been conveniently left on one side with a saving of a certain amount of trouble. The priority target in the Community transport world is surely European air fares where there is an obvious distortion of competition to the great and continued detriment of the consumer.

There is no such urgency in the matter of shipping competition, and the advent at long last of the United Nations code, however unsatisfactory it may be to developed countries, was another decisive fact, the consequences of which require monitoring over a reasonable span of time before appropriate EEC regulations are introduced. This is what the report recommended. We need the help of the Commission in the reform of the operations of the Community. All that I ask it to do is to deal with first things first.

The second point that I wish to make is entirely different and more important. It is the state of British shipping. Nobody could listen to the witnesses without being conscious of the appalling decline of our merchant marine. The reasons are plain enough. Some are beyond control. Others cry out for remedy. The decline of the merchant marine must also mean the decline of those activities which are dependent upon it and in which this country has traditionally played a major role. The names of certain noble Lords participating in this debate have been household words in the shipping industry for more than one generation. But, unlike some of our traditional industries, even its strongest critics could not reasonably claim that it has not moved with the times. It has a very enterprising and innovating record since the war. I have never had any commercial connection with it. However, during the last war I had a great deal of experience with the movement of men and material by sea in support of our forces. At that period the merchant marine served the war effort magnificently, as I saw at first hand in all the main theatres of the war. It may be for those reasons that the value of a powerful merchant marine for the purposes of defence of this country bulks unduly large in my mind.

Of course, it is hard to envisage another war which would impose a comparable burden on our shipping, and the capability of movement by air is a new and vital mitigating factor. But I think it would be beyond dispute that this country needs a strategic reserve of shipping for defence purposes. The extent of this reserve must be a matter of professional judgment but it must contain vessels of all kinds and, in particular, short sea and coastal shipping. The creation of this reserve needs the co-operation of both the private sector and the Government. For example, sales abroad of certain types of ships should be closely controlled. It may be that this matter is already in hand following the lessons of recent history. I hope that the Minister can assure us that this is so.

Leaving aside defence requirements, let me now turn to the normal role of the merchant fleet, which has to meet our commercial needs and which has always been a substantial earner of foreign exchange. Paragraph 38 reports the General Council of British Shipping's estimate that the fleet will be down to 600 ships of 16 million tonnes deadweight by 1985, that it will stabilise there and will be well placed to profit by the upsurge in demand following the world recession. The brunt of the reduction will be borne by tankers and bulk carriers. This optimistic picture is contradicted in part by the evidence of the seafaring unions. I am glad that both the previous speakers referred sympathetically to this union evidence which I commend to Members of the House.

Whether 600 ships of a rather specialised kind, including a greatly reduced tanker fleet, are sufficient to protect our commercial, let alone our defence, interests is a question that I cannot answer. I doubt it, and I have an uneasy feeling that the future will demand far greater Government participation in the protection of our merchant marine and a much higher priority for the shipping industry in the Government's consideration. But suppose the optimism of the general council about the future proves to be misplaced. I do not see how far greater Government intervention in the industry can be avoided unless we are to see a further weakening. The document that the Maritime League have circulated to many of your Lordships proposes much increased Government activity in international bodies to protect our interests. Certainly the full negotiating strength of the EEC must be mobilised and greater European co-operation is certainly a part of the answer—so are joint ventures with developing countries. But all this takes time. For example, the United Nations code took 12 years. While we are consulting, discussing and arguing we must take care that our British industry does not sink beyond the reach of rescue.

The Maritime League talk about a Minister of Shipping or at least a Cabinet committee—preferring the latter. Neither would be of value, in my opinion, unless the Government have the will to put things right by according the industry its rightful place in national priorities and coming to its aid at the proper time. We may be able to afford to allow the foreign competition to wipe out our motor-cycle industry, but the fate of our merchant marine cannot be left to market forces or to the mercy of subsidised competitors.

A strong merchant marine together with a modernised shipbuilding industry and efficient ports are not optional for this country: they are indispensable. We must surely will the means to create and maintain them. I cannot visualise it being done without additional Governmental intervention which is, of course, entirely contrary to the present Government's policy. I hope this policy can be reconsidered with a view to selective modification.

My Lords, I apologise to your Lordships for intervening at this stage. I should explain that my reason for doing so is that my noble friend Lord Inchcape had intended to make certain points which represent to some extent the feelings of the General Council of British Shipping, but he has found himself unable to address your Lordships this afternoon and has asked me to do my best to make his points for him. Therefore, I can only try.

I suppose that I ought to declare an interest, as no doubt my noble friend would have done. For some 60 years, with the exception of seven or eight years in the middle of that period, I have been more or less directly concerned with the ownership and management of British shipping. Indeed, I remain a director of a company which still, I am happy to say, owns a few British ships manned by British seafarers. In the course of that time there have been a good many ups and downs. However, I should like to emphasise one of the many matters which my noble friend Lord Rochdale raised this afternoon in his masterly and masterful exposition, which really covered the ground so admirably that it is almost indecent to rise following him.

The depression which we are now experiencing is very much the worst that has occurred, certainly in my lifetime. It is different not only in extent, but also in kind, from those that went before. During the 1930 depression I had the task of trying to shepherd through a fleet of about 18 tramp ships without complete annihilation, and I am thankful to say that we succeeded. We had the advantage of capital commitments being spread over a larger number of units. So if we could not make a job with one ship, we stood a fair chance of making it with another. I suppose that today that fleet would have been covered, in tonnage terms, by about six bulk carriers—if indeed it took as many as that—all at very much higher capital cost.

You cannot effectively split a large ship into two when you do not have enough cargo for one big ship. That is one of the reasons why I say that this depression is entirely different in kind from those that went before. The other reason is the immense growth in the number ships, most of which are well built and competently manned by people from places such as Hong Kong, or even Korea. Their conditions of employment are such that they can run them a great deal more cheaply than we can in this country, in particular in the bulk trades.

The liner trades have also suffered. As my noble friend Lord Inchcape was going to say, the situation has been just the same for them—too many ships chasing too few cargoes. Those who invested prudently, as well as those who speculated rashly, have suffered a drastic decline in income.

Shippers may gain—and I think to some extent probably have gained—by the fact that under these conditions freights have been very much lower than they would have been had there been a smaller over-supply of tonnage, or even no over-supply. Liner rates have gone down, too. But, as has already been said, tankers and bulk carriers have carried the real knock. When one considers a state of affairs where a half million tonne tanker, costing 100 million dollars seven years ago, has been scrapped for 7 to 8 million dollars, one gets some measure of the catastrophic decline which has taken place.

It has already been said—and I can only emphasise it—that competition has never been stronger than it is today, and that there is competion just as much in the liner trades as there is elsewhere. The developing countries, in particular in the liner trades, have wished to assert their right to carry a large part of the trade, and it was that assertion by them which started in about 1974 and finished in the code to which reference has been made this afternoon.

British ship-owners did not like the code—I am not sure that even now we like it very much—but over the years they began to think that an international code of reasonable and reasonably limited effect was better, or at least less bad, than individual Governments adopting their own measures independently and probably competing to see which could do best for themselves and worse for their competitors. That really explains the origin of the code.

I should like to say very forcefully indeed—as, I know, my noble friend should have wished to do—how strongly we agree with the conclusion of the committee that the regulations should not be proceeded with until the code has had a fair run and has been fairly monitored.

I do not think that I can usefully say any more than that. Of course, there are many aspects which were touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill of Harrow, but I am a surrogate(or whatever the right word is), and I should not wish to detain your Lordships longer than to say what my noble friend Lord Inchcape would himself have said; namely, how very strongly he from within, and I from without, the committee support its findings and hope that they will meet with the approval which they deserve.

My Lords, I intend to devote most of my time this afternoon—and a short time it will be—to the first part of the noble Viscount's Motion: namely, the present state of the shipping industry; because it is in a parlous state which requires urgent and decisive action by the Government if it is not to become irreversibly worse, even terminal. I should like to make one or two brief observations on the report of which your Lordships are asked to take note.

First, may I refer to the economic climate in which the shipping industry has to operate, and against which the EEC Commission's proposals should be considered. As other noble Lords have said, the effects of the world trade depression and recession have been compounded by the pursuit of protectionist policies in a significant and growing number of trades. Shipping companies are also subject to severe competition from both commercial and non-commercial competitors.

Of course, competition is an everyday fact of business life and no one would deny the benefits that it brings. But there are disturbing signs that genuine competition is being increasingly precluded by protective legislation in developing countries—the non-commercial or dumping services operated by the Soviets in particular—whether it be in normal trading or in the cruise ship market, and by other threats to the free-trading system.

Sadly, even among some of our oldest and closest neighbours within the European Community and in the North Sea, our short-sea and offshore shipping companies are faced with restrictive governmental practices, discriminatory fiscal treatment, and unnatural competition from heavily subsidised operations, to which the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, referred.

Against that background, I believe that the noble Viscount's committee is to be warmly commended on an admirably commonsense approach to the Commission's proposal to apply the EEC competition rules to shipping. Because there is a certain, though obviously not total, similarity of purpose between this proposal and the UN Liner Code Convention, to which other noble Lords have referred, and because that convention came into force last month and will shortly be ratified by Her Majesty's Government and other EEC states, it seems entirely logical that Community member states should live for a while with the realities and workings of the code before a decision is taken on this new proposal. The shipping industry has welcomed the committee's recommendation that further consideration of the proposal should be postponed for five years, and I share the view of the noble Viscount, Lord Runciman, that this must be right in the circumstances.

However, I am less happy with the further recommendation by the committee—this was also recommended in the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Rochdale—that an interim regulation should be adopted in the meantime which would provide conferences with a widely-defined exemption from the Community's restrictions on monopolies. I see dangers here which require very careful weighing up, for the adoption of an interim regulation of the type proposed could produce even greater uncertainty than at present exists. I am aware that the GCBS is on record as firmly opposing this part of the report, and there are already other systems of monitoring, notably the mechanism which exists for monitoring non-commercial, and particularly Soviet, competition in certain trades. There would, therefore, seem to be no pressing need to cobble together some temporary Community regulation for monitoring the code.

There is only one other point in the noble Viscount's report which I should like to mention. I should like to add my voice to those of other noble Lords who have welcomed the recommendation of the noble Viscount's committee, that no artificial restriction —such as a limitation to 70 per cent.—should be placed on the traditional right of ship-owners and shippers to negotiate freely whatever loyalty agreements may seem to them desirable.

May I turn now to the present state of the shipping industry, which I have described as "parlous"—and all noble Lords who have spoken today have reinforced my point. On the harsh facts there can be no doubt that the word is both justified and appropriate. There can equally be no doubt on the same facts that the remedial action so desperately required can only be taken by the Government, and the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, referred to this. It gives me no pleasure to remind your Lordships that Ministers collectively have so far shown little public sign of being aware of the dangers staring us in the face, much less of any inclination to take action to avert them.

What are these harsh facts? It is necessary for me to be very brief on this occasion, so much must be left unsaid. At the very least, it must surely be common ground that a thriving maritime economy is in the interests of everyone in Britain, from the housewife to the chiefs of staff. Without it, our trade and security, our commerce and industry, and perhaps our very futures, are directly threatened, even in peace-time. As the noble Viscount, Lord Rochdale, has said today, during the last seven years alone our ocean fleet has halved from over 1,600 ships to under 900. It is neither subsidised nor protected. But world shipping has increased in the same period from 440 million tonnes to 680 million tonnes today, and this is because subsidised shipyards the world over are pumping out new tonnage, and there are always speculative, subsidised or protected owners willing to buy at these knockdown prices.

In the same way, in the last three years our fishing fleet has declined from 45 distant water vessels until today we have less than a dozen. It is not too fanciful to say that the Red Ensign is today flying at half mast. The same story is true of shipbuilding. We taught the world how to build ships. Less than 30 years ago we built more ships than any other country in the world, but today we are sixth in the shipbuilding league, and going down. I need not, I think, continue this dismal catalogue, but it must be said that years of indifference, neglect, wishful thinking, and taking it all for granted, are largely responsible.

What do those alarming figures that I and other noble Lords have given today mean? Given that British merchant shipping has proved in the past to be a major source of national revenue, its present reduced state, resulting in a reduced contribution, coupled with its continuing steep decline, and the defence considerations mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, which I shall leave alone today, must give cause for major national concern.

The causes are largely outside the control of British ship-owners. They include the worldwide recession, already discussed, coupled with excessive and mainly political ambitions on the part of the developing world and COMECON. The international shipping market has become chaotic and not subject to normal commercial activity. In addition to a serious loss of revenue, our home trade is falling increasingly into foreign hands, and our cross-trading is threatened. The reduced size of our merchant fleet has important strategic implications too, not only for the supply and security of the United Kingdom base but in distant operations as well.

In line with the merchant fleet, the number of qualified seafarers has sharply declined, and the training base which provides them has been run down. This latter point could not only well be the governing factor in the fleet's recovery, but it also sharply affects the number of trained men available for the Royal Navy in emergencies. Once lost, few, if any, of these maritime enterprises and their supporting industries, their shore facilities, educational and training establishments, may, I emphasise, ever reappear.

As a densely-populated island nation whose prosperity depends so critically on its industry, the United Kingdom more than any other country, except perhaps Japan, needs a substantial and continuous flow of imports and exports. The volume was 157 million tonnes and 108 million tonnes respectively last year, and 99 per cent. of those cargoes must come and go by sea, and must always come and go by sea. You would agree, my Lords, I am sure, that we cannot sensibly allow any part of that trade to be dominated either by an economic competitor or by a potential enemy. Yet, unless the various declines in our merchant fleet are soon arrested and reversed, this is precisely what is inevitably going to happen.

There is, quite plainly, no sudden cure; nor is there a single cure for these quite separate, though related, ills. There is one underlying factor, however, and a common factor which could be dealt with at once, and with dramatic advantage. It is clear that there is today no co-ordinated national maritime policy. It is my view, my Lords, that, to find out why this is so, we must look very hard at the actual management by the Government of the whole "sea affair", as Churchill called it.

Shipping is currently the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Transport. It is also of concern—in some instances to a major degree—to no less than 13 other departments of state: Defence; Foreign and Commonwealth; Exchequer; Agriculture, Fisheries and Food; Trade and Industry; Education and Science; Employment, and I could go on. But there is no single effective national body with the information and authority needed to reconcile the conflicting interests of all those diverse Government departments and to formulate a national policy which would stimulate the growth and prosperity of shipping and the related British maritime interests.

Other countries have tried to solve this problem through the appointment of a single commission. They have failed because such a body lacks the necessary clout to deal with the more powerful and older-established departments. From my many years in Whitehall, I have no doubt that nothing short of a Maritime Policy Committee of the Cabinet, as powerful as the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, would have the necessary authority to draw all these threads together and then make, and drive through, a coherent national maritime policy to avert the dangers—indeed, perhaps even the disaster—that have described.

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Hill-Norton, in his trenchant remarks, with which one so often has deep sympathy. I should first like to thank my noble friend Lord Rochdale and his subcommittee for their most useful report, and indeed for the helpful introduction that my noble friend gave to us. It was also a pleasure to find unexpectedly my noble friend Lord Runciman addressing us with his great experience of shipping, about which we all know.

As are many other noble Lords, I, too, am profoundly disturbed at the state of the shipping industry, whose decline over the past 20 years has been so dramatic. An endangered species, my noble friend Lord Rochdale called it, and that is very true. Of course, as a sailor my heart is with the Merchant Navy. I spent most of the last war escorting convoys, and therefore am particularly concerned for their future. I admired greatly the efforts that they then put in. However, for this debate I have to declare an interest being in the employ of two food-processing trade associations, and being responsible for exports on their behalf. I shall thus put a rather different view from other noble Lords, which I hope will add to the debate; the view of exporting manufacturers. I have been advised in particular by the British Shippers' Council.

In listening to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Hill-Norton, it struck me that the point that he made about a special committee was a sound one, but it crossed my mind that perhaps it is unfortunate from the point of view of exporters and traders, whose views I shall try to put to your Lordships, that the responsibility for shipping has been moved from Trade to Transport, because it will emphasise yet more the difference that there is between how the Government look at shipping and how the Government look at trading.

Twenty years ago conferences could call the tune in their dealings with shipper customers for export from the United Kingdom, because collectively they had a monopoly position, and they used it. Since then demands by British trade unions, on which the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, commented, however well justified from their point of view, have made British shipping so uncompetitive that it is becoming increasingly difficult for even the most patriotic trader to justify using it. It is a sad thing to have to say, in view of what other noble Lords have said, but it is a fact, especially so when overseas competitors are subsidised. But even without that added burden, how can a ship be competitive if its crew has to have five months' leave during the year, when a Taiwanese crew, for example, has only one month? It means, in effect, two crews for every ship. I cannot see how we can continue that way if we want the British shipping industry to survive.

It is against that background that one considers the report of the Select Committee. From the point of view of traders the report is profoundly disappointing, because its very tenor shows a bias towards the interests of the shipping companies. I appreciate that it would be a disaster with probable strategic implications for Britain to have no merchant fleet. The noble Lords, Lord Hill-Norton and Lord Greenhill, mentioned that. It would be an even greater disaster if British exports, on which our survival as an independent country absolutely depends, were to be priced out of the world market to preserve a declining shipping industry.

I am forced to the conclusion, therefore, to which both the noble Lords, Lord Greenhill and Lord Hill-Norton, came, that in the end there must be some sort of subsidy. If there is a strategic need to retain the merchant fleet—and I believe there is—it has to be subsidised out of defence funds, like its principal rival the Soviet merchant navy. It is an inescapable solution for shipping. Perhaps then it might be able to present reasonable rates to shippers, to the traders who would like, if they could, to use its services, provided that they were competitively charged.

In examining the report's summary of conclusions in detail, I turned to pages xxxii and xxxiii to pick out particular points on which I believe the committee went in the wrong direction. The first is in the general conclusions in sub-paragraph 100(k), which says that any regulation must take full account of the United Nations code and its effect on competition. Of course, it has to do that in the sense that the regulation is written for that purpose. But that is not comparing like with like because the UNCTAD code relates to sharing cargoes and continuing the cartel and conferences, and Article 85 of the Treaty of Rome is all about ensuring competition and protecting consumers or customers by prohibiting cartels and price-fixing agreements and prohibiting abuses arising from a dominant market position.

The noble Lord, Lord Greenhill of Harrow, said that there is this great difference and therefore we should wait to see what the code produces and should not rush into producing regulations. But the trouble with doing so is that, in the meantime, the traders may find that they cannot compete in the market. Traders must trade, and traders cannot trade if the competition rules are stacked up against them.

Because of this I suggest to my noble friend Lord Rochdale that perhaps his committee should have paid more regard to its own sub-paragraphs 100(i) and 100(j), which I support. I should perhaps remind your Lordships of what those paragraphs said. Paragraph 100(i) says:

"Although the draft Regulations would not lead to any immediately identifiable legal conflict with foreign rules, there could be undesirable political repercussions".

Yes, indeed there could. We are having all sorts of trading difficulties, particularly in food trading, with all sorts of threats from the United States against practices which the EEC adopts. This is growing rather than diminishing. I should have thought that the balance of the report should have given greater regard to that. Paragraph 100(j) goes on to say:

"There is a risk under the draft rules that Community lines will be penalised more than foreign lines".

Yes, indeed, there is that risk. It needs saying more forcefully in covering the general conclusions.

Turning now to the points of disagreement. I pick up sub-paragraphs 100(d) and 100(e). Paragraph 100(d) says:

"A mandatory rule limiting loyalty agreements to a fixed proportion of a shipper's business would be unenforceable in practice".

That is the point that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Hill-Norton, touched on briefly.

I am absolutely convinced by the arguments that have been presented to me by the British Shippers' Council that it is not the case that a mandatory rule limiting loyalty agreements to 70 per cent. would be unenforceable in practice. For a start, 80 per cent. of the United Kingdom exports are made by only 150 trading companies whose operations can be readily monitored. The remaining 20 per cent. of exports is spread over some 6,000 to 7,000 smaller concerns, each of whose custom accounts on average for a very small proportion of the cargo carried.

Also relevant is paragraph 3 of the British Shippers' Council's written evidence on page 50 of the report, especially the last sub-paragraph at the top of page 51. I will not bother with the detail of that but your Lordships may wish to turn to it. I mention it in that sense because I have a feeling that the committee, in producing its report, was carried away by the other evidence from other people who perhaps did not give sufficient consideration to the information provided for them by those who represented the customers.

I dislike saying this, especially in these days of containers, but ships are rather more like lorries than they used to be. We are talking about whether the lorry drivers should be the people to be given major consideration or whether it should be the people who provide them with the goods to carry on which their livelihood depends. I suggest to your Lordships that it is the people who provide the goods to carry whose view deserves greater weight than it has been given in the report.

Paragraph 100(e) of the Summary of Conclusions reads:

"Measures to counter disparities in rates would not be appropriate".

On the contrary, some action is essential if the competitiveness of the British exporter vis-à-vis his continental rival is to be fair and equal. In touching on this point in his recent speech to the General Council of British Shipping at their annual dinner, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport said, among other things:

"We want all markets to remain open. Our exporters and our importers must remain as they now are, free to ship their goods with the carrier of their choice because the marketing of our exports and the cost of our imports both depend upon it".

It seems to me that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State recognises that to trade successfully an exporter must have fair competition. The circumstances which led to the production of this report are tending not to give him that fair competition. For that reason, I believe that the reasoning in paragraph 87 of the report relating to the question of disparity in rates appears very weak. A better line of approach would be that in the British Shippers' Council's recent submission to the Department of Trade on this subject, at the foot of page 53 and the head of page 54.

In view of the fact that I feel that the balance in the report is wrong, it distresses me somewhat—as the splendid reports of the Select Committee, which are now highly regarded throughout Europe, are well read in the Commission and the European Parliament, and indeed, I believe, by Governments of other member states—that this report will in fact be read by them but they will not get copies of Hansard, so they will not have the opportunity to read that there is another point of view in which the balance of the argument perhaps might be shifted a bit towards the people who are the customers of the shipping lines. It would be helpful if my noble friend on the Front Bench could tell me whether an attempt to convey a different opinion on a report of this nature is an effort which the Government would feel they could put across to our fellow members of the Community and to the commission.

In conclusion, I repeat that the survival of this country and of our EEC partners as independent nations depends absolutely on competitively priced exports. This essential truth must dominate consideration of any study, such as the report we are debating, which has a relevance to exporting.

My Lords, may I join other noble Lords who have already expressed a welcome to the report of the noble Viscount, Lord Rochdale. We all know of his great experience in the shipping world and the extremely hard work that he has put into the shipping industry over the years. In explaining his sub-committee's report, he casts his net very wide, and very sensibly, to bring in the general overall situation existing in shipping today. As it is not often that we have the opportunity of a fairly general debate on shipping, I find it doubly welcome.

We are all aware of the cyclical nature of the shipping industry. The noble Viscount, Lord Runciman, has referred to the depression in the 1930s. The same thing was happening a hundred years ago. These depressions affect everybody, big and small, in the shipping industry. If I may, I will recite the recent history of a well known large Danish company, DFDS. It might give your Lordships some indication of how quickly things can change in the industry. About 10 years ago, this company was going through a very bad period and they brought in new shipboard-management concepts which broke down the former centralised structure of the company and which in the course of five to seven years, proved to be very profitable to such an extent that last year DFDS, narrowing it down to the confines of their North Sea operations, had taken over almost all the competition and, in fact, had a virtual monopoly of North Sea passenger and railroad traffic. The position today, only a year later, is totally different. The company obviously overreached itself and is now going into a very speedy retrenchment, selling off ships left right and centre. Only today I see in the paper that they are thinking of selling off another part of their operation.

It has been said time and again that shipping and politics do not mix; but, with protection and subsidy as it exists today, the position cannot be said to be any different now from the days of, say, Christopher Columbus and Francis Drake. On top of this, shipping has changed dramatically in the last 20 years with the advent, for instance of containers, and unforeseen circumstances such as the dramatic increase in oil prices. These in turn have brought massive waste to the shipping industry. Take, for instance, the advent of container ships. They displaced literally hundreds of comparatively new cargo liners, the finest of their type ever built, which were sold off to other countries which did not necessarily want them and did not necessarily know what to do with them either.

These container ships which were then built—and very expensive ships they are, too—were subsequently affected by the oil price rise, so that their steam turbine engines had to be ripped out and replaced by the more efficient diesel engines, leading to more waste. The recession brought about by the oil price rise has affected the tanker market enormously. We have the instance the other day—a record, perhaps—of a four-year-old very large crude carrier, or VLCC, sister of the ill-fated "Amoco Cadiz", being sold for scrap after only four years. And I do not think that this waste is necessarily going to end just like that.

We have heard from many noble Lords of the disastrous situation, the over-tonnaging and so on, which is facing shipping today, but, on top of that, we still have instances of certain companies ordering yet more ships. I may cite an example in the dry bulk trade, which is already highly depressed. They were the last of the trade to be so affected, but there is a company in Japan which recently placed an order (or is thinking of placing an order) for 100 bulk carriers. That can do nothing but exacerbate an already very alarming situation. It is not a happy situation.

May I digress, my Lords, to say a brief word about manning, which the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, brought up? I think that perhaps here ship-owners are beginning to learn through their own experience that using cheaper foreign crews to man their ships is not necessarily a cost-effective operation. I should like to cite one example about which I heard recently, where an experienced seagoing man took passage on a new chemical tanker. He was awoken in the middle of the night to find all hell broken loose and he felt that the ship was breaking up around him. He scrambled up to the bridge as fast as he could, where he found the master grim set and determined, looking out of the bridge windows and the ship steaming into a force 10 gale at revolutions which would have given her her normal maximum surface speed and she was in fact making only two or three knots. This gentleman asked the master what he was doing. The master walked over to a corner of the bridge, pulled out a massive tome and thumbed through it. He eventually arrived at the passage he was looking for and displayed it. It said:

"Masters must use utmost diligence in ensuring the speediest transit times between ports".

That is only a small example, but it shows the sort of thing that can occur when ship-owners choose to use foreign crews.

What are the Government going to do? I suspect not very much. A recent shipping Minister confided in me not very long ago that he was anxious to help ship-owners but he found it very difficult because they could never agree on precisely what they wanted. I suspect that that is due to the very complex nature and diversification of the present-day shipping industry. One thing is certain: more restriction and legislation such as the EEC proposals are not necessarily going to help and can only lead to further inefficiency in the longe term, which is of benefit neither tonor shipper.

On the subject of inefficiency, I am brought round to the Soviet and COMECON merchant fleets, which have already been referred to by several speakers. There we have perhaps the biggest bureaucracy in the world, and bureaucracy leads to inefficiency. That is a saving grace, as far as we are concerned in shipping. If the Red fleet were as efficient as ours we should be in trouble. They are competition indeed, but far more worrying—and I am sure the Government are aware of this—is the competition from the aggressively efficient outsiders: companies such as Taiwan's Evergreen and Yang Ming. The former is soon to start a new round-the-world container service which will include a North Atlantic leg, thus further adding to the confused and over-tonnaged position there already.

Perhaps at this stage I may add a tiny tongue-in-cheek rider, if I can find it in my notes, from today's issue of Fairplay, which I found in your Lordship's Library. It refers to the recent comments of Mr. John Eyre, the former chief executive of Canada's last foreign-going deep sea merchant fleet. He made a speech recently in which he drew attention to Canada's foreign shipping policy, the finest shipping policy of all—that of a zero deep sea merchant fleet. He said it was perhaps tough luck on the handful of deep water seamen but, with rates depressed, a huge surplus of shipping and a shortage of cargo, the majority of Canadians—farmers, manufacturers, miners and paper mills—enjoyed excellent shipping services and low rates. It is this, rather than the erudite theories of UNCTAD which he feels will eventually carry the day in favour of the traders, even though it takes a little time.

"Time" is the critical word there. I certainly am not suggesting that our Government should adopt such a policy, but I think some of the developing countries would do well to take note of the implications. They are learning the hard way at the moment—and especially today, when I read that Nigeria is thinking of cancelling an order for new ships because the banks will not give them the necessary finance. In conclusion, I think the committee's suggestion of the deferment of the draft regulation is a wise one. Time will produce the answer, as it always has done in the past.

My Lords, like my noble kinsman the noble Viscount, Lord Runciman, I have to declare an interest in that I hold office in a British shipowning company. Indeed, one of our ships has recently returned from duty in the Falklands after 15 months—the second longest continual period of service by a merchant vessel in that area.

The noble Viscount, Lord Rochdale, and his sub-committee have clearly done this House a great service in providing this report and I very much echo the comments that have been made already in that respect. The task of the sub-committee was to address itself to competition policy, shipping. It did so with great skill but only with regard to liner shipping, which of course includes container shipping, bulk shipping and ferries. There are, as has already been pointed out, other areas of shipping, also important to our country and to our owners. I will restrict my comments, if I may, to an area not so far coverd in the debate today; namely, the offshore support vessel industry.

My noble friend Lord Lucas will, I am sure, know that the General Council of British Shipping has had discussions with a number of relevant government departments on the specific subject of the United Kingdom offshore support vessel industry. Indeed, I am aware that on that subject the president of the GCBS wrote last month to my right honourable friends the Secretaries of State for Energy, Transport, Scotland and Trade and Industry. It would be entirely wrong for me to draw your Lordships' attention to the detailed context of such correspondence, but I hope your Lordships will allow me to paraphrase what I personally have said at three recent ship launches in this country over the last year.

In the context of fair competition in the offshore support vessel industry, offshore exploration and support is an international business, and surely we would not have it otherwise. But "international" does not seem to mean the same thing to all people. If we look at the statistics as they affect the activities and employment of the 289 offshore vessels currently in the North Sea, your Lordships will see how fair or unfair the position is. Of the 289, 32 are currently laid up and a further 30 uncommitted, leaving 227, if my mathematics are correct, employed on charter. Of those 227, 86 are Norwegian, 82 British, and 59 others. "Others" covers a fascinating variety of Dutch, Danish, German, American, Panamanian, Cypriot, Singaporean, and Bermudean.

So far so good; but when an examination is made on a sector-by-sector basis the following situation emerges: 142 vessels are employed in the British sector, of which apparently—and I shall return very carefully to that word in a moment—55 per cent. are British, 25 per cent. are Norwegian and 20 per cent. other. In the Norwegian sector there are 49 vessels employed, of which all 49–100 per cent.—are Norwegian flag. This sector flag disparity is not a new phenomenon but it has become exaggerated as the economic depression has deepened.

The problem appears to be three-fold: first, Norwegian versus British tax regulations, which encourage consortia of Norwegian private individuals to own ships; secondly, the Norwegian Government's credit terms are available, to the best of my knowledge, only on ships built in Norway and allow a three-year moratorium on loan capital repayments; and, thirdly, there is compulsory pilotage for non-Norwegian flag vessels operating into Norwegian ports on average every other day—whereas all vessels operating similarly at United Kingdon ports require a pilot regardless of their flag.

The effect of those factors is to give positive encouragement to the Norwegians to have off-shore support vessels built in Norway, and they enable such Norwegian owners to offer their ships at rates which have been calculated as at least £1,000 per day less than United Kingdom owners on otherwise like-for-like bases. Your Lordships will perhaps appreciate how catastrophic this is for the British off-shore supply vessel owners, when I say that this week one of our British built, British flag, British owned, British Government financed, British crewed vessels was employed at £1,200 per day gross, about half her break-even rate—hardly a climate to encourage British ship-owners to invest their money in British ships built, one hopes, in the United Kingdom.

That is not all. Such has been the conscience of both international charterers and Norwegian owners that, under pressure from the United Kingdom Off-shore Supplies Office, a number of Norwegian owners have recently set up—quite legitimately, I hasten to add, under existing legislation—brass-plate subsidiary companies in the United Kingdom and have switched their vessels from Norwegian to British flag and crew. By so doing, they have satisfied the current brief of the Off-shore Supplies Office, which under present legislation is restricted to the promotion within the United Kingdom sector of British flag and crew. It makes no reference to ownership.

While that is good news for British seafarers—and I genuinely applaud that—and indeed good news for Her Majesty's Exchequer, assuming that a taxable profit is made, it gives no lasting benefit either to the United Kingdom as a country, or to the United Kingdom's shipping industry, since in the example that I have given the ultimate owner remains Norwegian. He can retain his favourable finance terms and tax advantages, and leave United Kingdom ownership at will when he wishes. Such "flagging-in", as it is called, is pure window-dressing.

I earlier described the apparent statistics of national flag vessels in the United Kingdom sector as being 55 per cent. British, 25 per cent. Norwegian, and 20 per cent. other. If flags of United Kingdom brass-plate companies are put back to their ultimate owners, those same statistics for vessels in the United Kingdom sector become 38 per cent. British, 33 per cent. Norwegian, and 29 per cent. other; and, not surprisingly, the Norwegian sector statistics remain at 100 per cent. Norwegian flag. To put it another way, the Norwegians have one-third of the work in our sector, and we have none in theirs—hardly a chance happening.

May I comment that we, as British ship-owners, are proud to be British. We are confident of our ability to match, or better, ships of any other flag, provided that "all's fair". In the offshore support vessel industry, it is not. I urge my noble friend the Minister to ensure that the letters from the GCBS are read and understood, and that urgent action is taken not only by the four relevant departments, but also by the four Secretaries of State themselves. We are only 37 days away from 1984. I entreat my noble friend the Minister to ensure that all animals are indeed equal, and that the Norwegian husky is not more equal than the British bulldog.

My Lords, at the outset I, too, should like to extend my thanks to my noble friend Lord Rochdale and his committee for the work which they undertook in the production of the report that we are discussing tonight. May I also add my thanks to him for his very clear explanation of the conclusions to which his committee came. While I am on the "thanking" side of our debate, may I thank him for his very kind remarks which were particularly directed towards officials in my department, when he was discussing the evidence which they gave. I wish, first, to respond to the report, because so very many points have been made that I think it will be helpful if I do that; and then, given sufficient time, I shall attempt to respond to the points made in the wider context of this afternoon's debate.

We have heard that the proposed European Community regulation is concerned with liner conferences. Liner conferences exist because Governments worldwide have been prepared in varying degrees to exempt shipping from the anti-cartel laws that apply in other industries. In the United Kingdom, this is reflected in the Restrictive Trade Practices Acts. It was put rather differently by my noble friend but that, in effect, is what it is about. This is a long-standing policy and it was, as we have been reminded, endorsed by my noble friend in his very important report of 1970, the Rochdale Committee report. It remains Government policy today, although of course it has inevitably become more controversial. However, there is one very important condition: conferences must not merely be Government-sanctioned monopolies. They are acceptable only as long as they are exposed to competition from any shipping line that chooses to compete with the conference on a commercial basis. Governments have favoured what has been called the "closed conference in the open trade".

My noble friend Lord Mottistone spoke at some length on the UNCTAD arrangements—the 1974 Code of Conduct on Liner conferences. Following ratification by Germany and the Netherlands earlier this year, the code entered into force last month between those countries which have ratified it. The Merchant Shipping (Liner Conferences) Act 1982 will allow the United Kingdom to accede. The main purpose of the code is to give the shipping lines of developing countries a right to share in the business of conferences. Community countries, however, are acceding on the basis of the "Brussels package", which my noble friend Lord Rochdale described to us. This is designed to ensure that, whatever protection may be given to developing countries, developed OECD and Community countries will be able to participate in the rest of each conference's business on an essentially non-discriminatory basis.

However, pressures continue from many developing countries to go well beyond the code and to apply cargo-sharing not just to that part of the trade carried by conferences, but to all liner cargoes; in other words, to suppress competition in liner shipping altogether. This would clearly run counter to our national interests: first, because we are a major cross-trading nation and our direct freight earnings alone on cross-trades account for two-thirds of our shipping revenues—something of the order of £1,540 million a year; and, secondly, because, as a major trading country, we are dependent upon the efficient and competitive carriage of our own exports. The right to compete, if necessary outside the conference, is the only effective guarantee of these interests.

It should therefore be clear that the Government do not accept the conclusion of the committee, that the code says all that needs to be said about competition and that all the European regulation needs to do is to endorse the code. That would be a blank cheque to the conference system. It would not, we believe, even be acceptable to the least liberal of our Community partners. The UN code is not primarily about competition at all. In particular, it provides no solution to the grave problem posed when foreign Governments attempt to eliminate independent lines from our shipping routes, and impose monopolies depriving our traders of commercial choice of carrier.

The Government believe the Community competition regulation must allow us to oppose those pressures and must find ways of restoring competition when a foreign Government tries to suppress it. So this is one way in which the Government believe that, certainly in the international sphere, the Community's regulation must be able not merely to endorse the code but to preserve and foster competition.

The domestic environment, however, is just as important. The Government, in their evidence to the committee, pointed to the concern felt by exporters: that they appeared to face substantially higher rates for the shipment of their goods than those faced by their continental competitors. The British Shippers' Council considered that competition appeared to be generally more vigorous on the continent, and argued that "loyalty agreements", which are often less well observed there than here, could be a significant factor. In their evidence last year to the committee, and also in a parliamentary reply on 20th October of last year in another place, the Government said that they considered that loyalty ties should be limited so that they may not pre-empt more than 70 per cent. of any one shipper's business. This has proved controversial, and we have heard this afternoon from a number of noble Lords that this is so.

I should make it quite clear, however, that the Government are in no doubt that the general exemption of liner conferences from both national and Community anti-cartel legislation should continue. Nor is there any question of banning loyalty ties, as the United States Congress may be on the point of doing. It is a question of balance, and the Government remain open to persuasion on this matter from both sides. I take this opportunity to assure the House that my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State is taking a very close and very personal interest in it. Under his direction, exporters' views are being sought through the British Shippers' Council and the British Overseas Trade Board on whether the disparities in freight rates still cause undue and widespread concern. Clearly it is essential that the Government's information on such a vital point should be up to date. And while arrangements for the enforcement of loyalty ties are essentially a commercial matter to be worked out between conference and customer, the Government stand ready to help if the two sides wish. Meanwhile, the British proposal for a 70 per cent. limit on loyalty ties remains on the table in Brussels. But I repeat that we are open to any new arguments or evidence that ship-owners or shippers may wish to bring forward.

These, then, are the Government's views on the general issues covered by the noble Viscount's committee. As to the specific conclusions in the first part of paragraph 100 of the report, many of those conclusions are shared by the Government. The Government agree with the committee's conclusions on bulk shipping; on the unacceptability of retrospective annulment by the commission of conference agreements; on currency adjustment factors; and on passenger ferries where the return of collective price-fixing would not be welcome.

May I now turn to some of the points which have been made in the debate. Noble Lords will, I am sure, appreciate that it may not be possible for me to cover every point, but I have taken note of those which appear to have been raised on more than one occasion. In particular, nearly every noble Lord who has contributed to the debate has discussed in part, if not in whole, the decline of the fleet. My noble friend Lord Rochdale began by referring us to the CIT publication, the picture on the front of which is entitled "Endangered Species". The noble Lord, Lord Underhill, mentioned two other publications. But the facts are perhaps not quite so dramatic as either noble Lord has set out. There is no argument that the United Kingdom merchant fleet, measured by its total tonnage, has fallen by nearly a half since its all-time peak in 1975. For many years tanker tonnage has been predominant in United Kingdom tonnage, and the decline in that tonnage accounts for the major part of the decline in the United Kingdom fleet. The high-earning container fleet has increased in tonnage since 1975. We have the third largest container fleet in the world. Only those of the United States of America and Japan are larger.

I could debate with your Lordships some of the reasons which have contributed to the decline, and perhaps it would be helpful were I to note one or two: the weakness of demand, partly due to world recession; other consequences of the oil upset nearly 10 years ago; changing trading patterns, and so on. But the overriding reason is that which the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, mentioned in his very interesting speech; namely, wastage. There is a huge wastage of shipping. The fleets of the developing countries which have come into the markets have contributed to this decline.

It would not be true to say that the Government cannot have any influence on these factors, but it is broadly true to say that the Government cannot influence them sufficiently to make a major difference to the situation which the fleet faces. The Government have to consider what they should do in the national interest, by looking at the role and prospects of the fleet in the environment which exists today. We have to ensure that the markets remain open to our fleets in these days of creeping protectionism, both by the developed countries, with existing fleets, and by developing countries seeking to promote their national lines. We have to make strenuous efforts in international negotiations to secure the maximum amount of open access for our vessels.

It was the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill of Harrow, who asked me to respond to his plea that the Government should change their policy. I have to reject the noble Lord's plea this evening. I repeat: our belief is that we should attempt by negotiation to keep markets open to British shipping. We shall not succeed in doing so if we adopt a protectionist attitude towards the industry. My noble friend Lord Mottistone quoted from the speech of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State in November to the General Council of British Shipping, when my right honourable friend emphasised this point. He was responding to what the president of the General Council of British Shipping had said in his presidential address in May of this year. To paraphrase, the president said that he did not want protectionism; he did not want to become another arm of government and to be spoonfed with money; he did not wish to be the nurse at the dripfeed of resources; but wanted to represent an industry which was alive, very efficient and earning its own living.

The noble Lord, Lord Underhill, the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, and my noble friend Lord Mottistone raised questions loosely under the heading of manning. The noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, said that manning levels and their cost were perhaps one element, but that there were other relevant factors. He outlined some of them. The noble Lord, Lord Greenway, said that cheaper crews were not necessarily the answer to a less expensive operation in the long term. As usual, my noble friend Lord Mottistone reminded us in his pragmatic way of the different holiday entitlement of crews from various countries.

A number of noble Lords referred to defence requirements, and it is important that I say something about them at this stage. Whether or not a declining merchant fleet can match defence requirements is a question frequently asked. The Falklands operation examplified merchant shipping's defence role. It may not be generally realised, however, that the capability of the Government to proceed with last year's rapid mobilisation of merchant shipping for the Falklands Task Force depended in part on the regular peace-time monitoring of the merchant fleet's defence capabilities—undertaken then by the Department of Trade and now by the Department of Transport.

As a result, the department knew what ships were available when the requirements were declared. The monitoring of the fleet capability to which I have referred is now done by the Department of Transport, and it is a continuing monitoring. We are always informed of relevant shipping requirements by colleagues at the Ministry of Defence. The Government's view continues to be that the United Kingdom merchant fleet can currently meet all foreseen requirements.

I will touch very briefly on the contribution of my noble friend Lord Geddes, who spoke about the offshore industry. Many want to see the United Kingdom make the distinction, as others have made it, between deep sea trades, on the one hand, and coastal and offshore trades, on the other. While there is certainly a higher degree of protectionism worldwide in the latter trades, in terms of voyage in United Kingdom coastal trades, only 17 per cent. are accounted for by foreign flags; two-thirds of that by EC flag ships.

There is no evidence of any protection of its North Sea sector by Norway. The tax rates received by Norwegian shipping companies, to which my noble friend referred, and to which the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, also referred, are perhaps no more generous than those received by our own. It can be very dangerous to treat financial benefits received by foreign companies as a reason for keeping their ships out of our own markets. What conclusions would those competitors come to? I can assure my noble friend that I am aware of the General Council of British Shipping's recent papers put to some Secretaries of State. I can assure him that they are being most carefully looked at. All the papers are under active consideration now and he would not, therefore, expect me to give any further views on that topic tonight.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Hill-Norton, spoke at some length of the United States and extraterritorial difficulties. I believe it would be more helpful if I were to leave that matter and turn my attention instead to his vigorous plea for a Ministry of Sea. I would have to reject his suggestion. Government departments direct their efforts in the main to meeting objectives. When objectives have been totally identified and have been collected together, it is then decided which department is best able to meet those objectives. It would be rather odd—would it not?—if we decided on a Ministry of Sea to look after the Royal Navy; what would the Ministry of Defence then do? Would it look after just the Army or the Royal Air Force alone?

We try to group objectives and have them dealt with by the most appropriate department. We believe that the present arrangement, whereby the Secretary of State for Transport has the leading role in coordinating maritime policy while other Ministers continue to have the primary role for some specific fields, if necessary, is the most satisfactory one.

My noble friend Lord Rochdale drew attention to the USSR fleet, as did the noble Lord, Lord Greenway—who also drew attention, which had not been done before, to other new entrants into the maritime industry. He sounded a warning note; not only to the House tonight, but I suspected also to some of those new entrants. The only point I would make in the Soviet context is that in our bilaterial shipping relations with them, the Government have made it quite clear to their authorities that the Government are not prepared to see United Kingdom cruise operators damaged by non-commercial competition from Soviet cruise ships. In our bilateral trade, the Government's objective is to correct the long-standing imbalance in general cargo carryings with the USSR. Some progress has been made in all those areas and discussions continue. It is interesting to note that Soviet ships carry 1½ per cent. only of British trade; and two-thirds of that is direct between the United Kingdom and the USSR.

I have probably left a number of questions unanswered. If I said that this has been a useful debate covering a number of important shipping topics, I would probably be under-estimating the value of the two and half hours or so that we have spent on it this afternoon and evening. On the main issue before us, I hope that I have been able to give your Lordships a convincing explanation as to why the Government do not feel able simply to accept all the arguments of Lord Rochdale's Select Committee's report.

I hope, too, that I have been able to carry some conviction in expressing the regard which the Government have had, and will continue to give, to the arguments of the committee. As I have said, the other issues raised have covered a wide range. I shall obviously study Hansard tomorrow and if there are any points I can usefully answer in greater detail, noble Lords can be assured that I will be totally willing to do so. If any noble Lord feels that I have missed any point completely, then I do hope that he will get in touch with me.

Finally, I turn to a matter which I consider to be not more important but certainly of great importance; the report itself. I should tell your Lordships that next month the transport Ministers of the Ten will probably be invited to agree upon some of the less controversial aspects of the proposed regulation in Brussels. It is likely to be a good time yet before the regulation as a whole is adopted. Once the regulation passes into Community law, it is likely to remain in force for a very long time. It will not be easily revised; a fluid situation will have frozen. So the regulation we have debated has to fit, to serve the interests of shipping lines and their customers. It has to do that well into the future—in good times and in less than good times. The Government will be making every effort to ensure that the Community gets it right when it is finding agreement.

My Lords, may I first thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, and thank also my noble friend Lord Lucas of Chilworth for covering such a wide field. I was particularly interested in his last remark concerning the meeting of transport Ministers in, I believe, a month's time. I only hope that our report will be of some use when those discussions take place.

With such a very wide field as shipping, with so many very complex issues, obviously there are bound to be many different points of view. I personally would like on some occasion—but not this evening—to take issue with my noble friend Lord Mottistone and some of his points. But it has been a very useful debate. There has been an encouraging degree of agreement on many issues and I am most grateful.

rose to move, That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the regulations be annulled.

My Lords, I must confess that I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, has prayed against these orders. I am anxious, I must at once say, to stick to the conventions of this House about voting against orders. However, I am glad that this debate enables me to express my serious concern about the orders.

I am a dairy farmer although, like so many dairy farmers, not 100 per cent. dairying; but at least that gives me the chance to understand the difficulties which the Government have on other commodities. I am not anti-Community either. However, I believe we must carefully defend our national interest in certain areas and two areas which I believe are of very great importance are fisheries and milk. We have not been too successful with fisheries and I do not want to see a disaster with the milk industry. We live on an island and these two industries are of considerable strategic importance to us.

Milk is our cheapest protective food. The dairy industry has often been described as the sheet anchor of British agriculture. Milk sales total 21 per cent. of the gross sales of the industry, and that is only the tip of the iceberg, bearing in mind that the dairy herd is the basis of our beef supplies. Our dairy herd is not large. It is half the size of the dairy herd in France and there are very good reasons for thinking that, whatever we do, we should strive to make sure that it is not reduced. It is also worth mentioning, in passing, that the livestock industry is a part of agriculture that does not burn straw.

We should stand our ground and not sell out too easily. Traditionally the market for our dairy herds has been liquid milk. I believe our consumption per head is three and a half times that of France, which is an astounding figure. About 85 per cent. is doorstep delivery. Our milk is a very good product; and it must be to achieve the use to which it is put. In comparison, I should like to say a word about what happens in France. I ought to be fair and say that the French eat more cheese and yoghurt than do we. However, they have little faith in French milk. Last spring the Farmer's Weekly reported a survey that had been conducted in France which said that one-third of French housewives boil their pasteurised milk before using it. Whether that reflects on the milk or the housewives, I do not know, but I do not suppose the housewives are foolish. It is a pity that the French do not manage to develop their liquid market better, instead of adding to the butter mountain, and that other EC countries do not realise that they have something to learn from us, albeit slowly, about the way to exploit a liquid market.

I must turn to what happened in Holland when UHT and other milk appeared in the shops. Doorstep deliveries fell from 90 per cent. to 25 per cent. and the total liquid consumption fell by 25 per cent. I believe this happened in a remarkably short space of time—about two years. That shows how devastating the effect could be. The official hope in this country is that it may never happen. I confess I am not so optimistic. Other noble Lords who are to speak will probably be able to explain why. I do not want to go too far on that line because my noble friend will know that his right honourable friend in another place said that this was, in a way, negative criticism because we have signed a treaty which we must honour, and that we must start from there. So from now on I shall try to discuss health issues.

The first point to mention is that none of the heat processes referred to in the orders will deal with contaminants in milk; namely, antibiotics, pesticide residues and aflatoxins. Aflatoxins come from those feeds that can induce cancer in the cow, and in those consuming her milk. We stopped using ground nut cake when we discovered that it was a source of aflatoxins. I think that pesticide residues and antibiotics are contaminants that this House will understand.

I believe that our record in controlling these contaminants is substantially better than the records of others, and I shall quote what was said by the Milk Marketing Board:

"Analyses of foreign milks have shown that pesticide and aflatoxin levels in continental milk supplies are much higher than in UK supplies. Pesticide and antibiotic levels in Southern Ireland milk are also very high".

Obviously, it is very important to monitor this. I am very glad that Ministers have frequently mentioned the horrible taste of UHT milk, but I think when one thinks about contaminants there is rather more to complain about than that, and personally I should like to hear more of it.

Can we be satisfied about our own proposed inspection procedures on imported milk? It appears from the regulations that we accept the exporter's certificate unless from external examination there is something wrong. My reading of the regulations is that there is no real provision for regular spot checks. I am concerned about this because it is most important that these inspections should be really effective enough.

I should like to mention Irish milk, and I have some quotes which I wish to give. The Connaught Tribune of 10th June 1983 has as its headline,

"Antibiotics in 74 per cent. of samples taken in Western Survey".

That refers to the annual report for 1982 of the western region public analyst laboratory.

The Irish Times of 3rd October stated:

"Frighteningly high levels of antibiotic and hormonal residues have been found in Irish meat and milk products … unless tighter controls are introduced on the sale and use of antibiotics, growth promoters and anthelmintics (worm doses) for livestock, exports of Irish food may be affected soon".

The Veterinary College, Dublin stated that around 18 per cent. of milk supplied to dairies for liquid consumption in 1981 and 1982 contained antibiotic residues.

Finally, one headline stated—and this is almost back to the 18th century:

"And milk for school kids was watered down".

The report which followed referred to,

"levels of added water varing from 1 to 35 per cent. on at least nine occasions".

I think it is pertinent to mention that the actual standards laid down for milk production in Southern Ireland are the same as in Northern Ireland, but enforcement seems to be a difficulty and a notably different matter.

From there I should like to go on to ask whether we are now monitoring imports as well as we should. The Dairy Trade Federation told me that evidence has been found of high antibiotic levels in Irish UHT milk portions. These are the little fellows that one is given to pop into one's cup of tea; very often on airlines. The remedy, I have no doubt, is to demand British milk portions and fly the flag, but sometimes one is a captive clientele and one cannot do that.

Another thing that happened was in Harrod's, where a container for sale was labelled "Creme fraiche". There were also the words: "Fresh pasteurised cream from Normandy". It turned out that it was not that. It had a two-month shelf life, and therefore could not possibly be a fresh pasteurised product. I do not think that it is really quite known what that was.

I can only express concern for the public. Our own labelling of dairy products here has always been most rigidly controlled; so it is important. Is the inspection at point of entry going to be good enough? It would be helpful, I am sure, if my noble friend the Minister were able to enlarge a little on how this is to be done. I believe that at the moment the ports concerned inspect imported meat supplies. I wonder what facilities they are going to be given to deal with milk and whether they will make use of the milk marketing boards' facilities, and so forth.

There is also the question of chlostridum botulinum, which arises occasionally in UHT milk, and is an extremely devastating and poisonous thing. I should like to refer to some of the opinions of the trade. First, if the Department of Health says that 140 sterilisation for two seconds for UHT processing is necessary for home produced cream and flavoured milks, the trade cannot see that it is unnecessary for UHT milk. In one case the comment I heard was that it was absurd to think there was any difference. Secondly, I could not find any evidence that the trade would not be ready to treat United Kingdom UHT milk at 140C for two seconds. The trade think that UHT imports should all be at 140C for two seconds, so far as I know.

I gather that my noble friend the Minister's right honourable friend in another place is sympathetic to all this, so I do not want to labour the point; but I should like to know whether it might be possible to amend these regulations at once, so that instead of 132C for one second, we can have 140C for two seconds. If it cannot be done at once, how soon can it be done? It may be that some people will say that this will make UHT milk nastier to drink and less easy to market, but my own view is that health considerations should undoubtedly come first.

Lastly, I should like to turn to the subject of pasteurised frozen cream and to say, first, that attempts at adequate common European hygiene rules have been going on since 1971. There has not been much progress. I do not think that there will be much progress for some time—perhaps never. One must always remember that perhaps different milk is produced for different purposes. That is going to take a long time and in the meantime the trade here do not consider it possible to guarantee satisfactory public health control for imports of any pasteurised products. The cream is a pasteurised product. The trouble is that once it is out of the frozen store, even when it is in the domestic refrigerator, the bugs can start multiplying up. I believe this import is by far the most questionable, in particular when it is remembered that, after all, pasteurised milk was ruled out. We let it in six years ago, and I wonder whether we therefore have to continue with this risk, or widen the problem beyond the Irish imports only. I do not know what difficulties there really need be with the European Court, because surely if it is subsequently found that a certain course is unsatisfactory on health grounds, it would be wrong to be held to continue that risk.

Times change, and knowledge improves. Obviously, it is the strongest argument for customers to buy British cream. I am sure that that is right. In matters of price, it is always true that you get what you pay for. But the ethics of advertising make it very difficult for the trade to tell the public why they should be buying British cream under these circumstances, because those ethics say that advertisers should not resort to instilling fear. From this, I conclude that this particular trade must be dealt with by the Government. It should if possible, be stopped—and soon.

My Lords, one cannot but be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, for praying in your Lordships' House about these regulations. They bear considerable examination, and the Government deserve considerable criticism for the way they have handled the situation. It seems odd, I must say, to give more than has been asked for after having resisted giving anything at all. It also seems odd that we should be prepared to lower our standards in order to allow something into the country that we have not previously thought was up to our standards, rather than try and take our higher standards to other places and attempt to get the rest of the European Community to accept those standards.

There are enormous differences in standards in relation to milk. I was a dairyman—at least, I was employed in the dairy industry one way or another—for about 20 years. I was a retail dairyman, producing and delivering milk to the doorstep for a great part of that time. At one stage I used to offer a bonus to the people who worked in my dairy for the cleanliness of the milk. Your Lordships may not know that milk is not only tested but is very regularly tested. I am not certain of the procedures today because I have ceased my retail dairying enterprise; but in those days, when I was working at it, milk was officially tested every month for bacterial count and for content of foreign bodies, or anything of that sort, and it was also analysed for butterfat and solids-not-fat count. I used to pay a bonus to the people who worked in the dairy which began at 10,000 colonies per millilitre and increased to the point where they were getting top bonus at 2,000 colonies per millilitre or under.

This may not mean a lot to your Lordships but, during this period, I went to America where, we are always led to believe, milk standards are very high. I visited some of the leading dairy farms in New England, looking particularly at some of the Ayrshire cattle there. I asked about standards of milk production in New England. I was told that 100,000 colonies per millilitre was considered quite good. My response was to say that I would sack my staff if that was the sort of milk that they produced, and that I liked people to do under 10,000 colonies and perhaps even down to 2,000. The reaction was astonishment, and prompted the remark. "That is cleaner than water". I replied, "Of course; milk should be cleaner than water, and it could be cleaner than water".

Unfortunately, standards of treating milk over the world are not as high as those I have described. We get over the difficulty of the high contamination rate that obtains in many parts of the world by treating milk in various ways. In this country, we now consider it necessary to pasteurise even the milk that is produced cleaner than water. There are other methods. There is UHT, there is sterilised milk, and so forth. The dirtier the milk, the hotter you have to sterilise it. You can therefore get away with milk that has been contaminated if you heat treat it hot enough. But to my way of thinking this is not milk: it is bacterial soup. It is the kind of thing one may be getting in these UHT packages.

What is it that we really want from the milk industry? It seems to me that we want three things. We want, first, quality. People who buy milk are, I think, most concerned about the quality of the milk that they buy. By quality, they mean content: they mean that it has to have the right quantity of solids, not fat. It has to have the right cream for what it pretends to be. Secondly, they want hygiene. They realise that this is a food, and that it is a valuable food; and that they realise that it is not only a food for human beings and animals but also a food for bacteria. It must therefore be handled with all the care that applies to the handling of any form of food. The people of this or of any country, or the Common Market as a whole, demand that milk should be hygienic. This involves not only heat-treating it in order to kill any contamination that may have got into it, but also producing it in a clean fashion. This is very important. If the milk is clean to start with and there is any breakdown in the method of sterilising or pasteurising, the chances of serious damage taking place are obviously less. One wants therefore to be certain that the milk, whatever its source and whatever its provenance, is basically hygienic.

Thirdly, in relation to milk people want service. This is something that we in this country have developed to a very much higher degree than any other country. I feel proud to have been associated with such an industry. I know what effort it takes, but I know that it is a service undertaken by people at all levels with a real sense of responsibility. In another place, the Minister said that he could wax lyrical about doorstep deliveries, but he said absolutely nothing about how he was going to preserve them for us. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, will explain how he hopes that we shall avoid Holland's experience, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Monk Bretton, and how we shall avoid the falling off in the effectiveness of our doorstep deliveries and the service that this brings to the people of our country.

What also worries me is how we are going to police this whole operation. We have a set-up in this country where there are people who analyse milk and people who test milk bacteriologically. Their laboratories and the points at which they sample the milk, and the way in which they sample the milk, have been worked out over long years of experience. We know that what is being done to safeguard our milk supplies is being properly done and expertly done, and done regularly and sufficiently often for us to be sure that our supplies are safe and sound. But we do not know, and we have had no assurances that I have been able to discover, how these 17 ports through which this milk will come into the country will be policed or equipped for testing, or how the testing, if testing is to be done, is to be carried out.

In my view we are entitled to some information about this. We are entitled to a great deal more information about how the Government think they can ensure that the quality of milk coming in is as good as it is supposed to be, and how they are certain that it will be the same at each one of the 17 different ports of entry.

The noble Lord, Lord Monk Bretton, also raised the very important question of contaminants. It is most important that the contamination level at which we accept milk is kept as low as possible—as low as we can possibly achieve. The common ailment of the dairy cow is mastitis which is the inflamation of the udder. The common treatment for this inflamation is massive quantities of antibiotics of one sort or another. I do not know how many tubes of penicillin I have squeezed up the teats of dairy cows in my lifetime. But unless it were made quite clear that in no way could I use the milk from the cows that I had treated, and unless my business depended upon throwing that milk away after it had been taken from the cows, I would not like to drink the milk which I was producing.

Therefore, we must be certain that the standards of hygiene in the herds from which the milk that is to be imported comes is as high as the standard of hygiene of our own dairy herds. I should like to hear some assurances from the Minister about what checks and tests are to be done in the EEC.

Having said all that, your Lordships may take the view that I am being very anti the importation of milk from the European Common Market. Not at all. All I am saying is that if we import milk from another country, whatever other country it may be, that milk should compete upon level terms as regards quality and hygiene with our own milk produced in this country. I am perfectly prepared—or at least I would be if I were still in the industry, but as a farmer I am perfectly prepared—to compete in level competition with farmers from France, Germany, Italy, Holland or anywhere else so long as it is level competition and it is not competition derived from a lower standard on one side and a higher standard on the other side. It is as regards that matter that I would seek the assurance of the Minister. I hope that when we receive these assurances we shall be able to accept with a little more equanimity the regulations which have been very hastily, suddenly and, I think, somewhat in advisedly, foisted upon us.

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton, who so ably and thoroughly presented the issues raised by the regulations. I also, of course, join with other noble Lords in thanking him for tabling the Prayers for their annulment. I have listened with great interest, care and attention to the speeches made by three noble Lords, and I congratulate them on the way in which they displayed their expertise, knowledge and experience of the dairy industry. I am sure that the words they have used in this debate will be read very carefully by the Government in their examination of what will be the next step required to counter the damage already done by the regulations.

I believe I am correct in saying that the five regulations that have been tabled are strictly, in legal terms, applicable only to England and Wales. However, we are already aware of the wider implications of the legislation for the whole of the United Kingdom and I hope, therefore, that I do not unduly transgress the rules of the House, or appear to be discourteous to other noble Lords, if I refer briefly to some of the serious problems which arise for the Northern Ireland milk industry and the agricultural community from the regulations.

At the outset of my remarks I wish to state that the Northern Ireland milk industry is on record as accepting the obligations placed upon the United Kingdom Government by the ruling of the European Court of Justice. At the same time the spokesmen for the industry have stated that they are deeply disturbed by the precise form of the regulations. As I understand it, the Northern Ireland Milk Marketing Board wrote on Tuesday last, 22nd November, to the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, who is the Northern Ireland Minister of State for Agriculture. Along with other matters contained in its letter, the Northern Ireland Milk Marketing Board strongly protested about the requirements of the United Kingdom Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for veterinary certificates in respect of the movements of UHT products from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. There is now being made, for the first time, a requirement for a part of the United Kingdom to meet certain standards and carry out certain certifications. This has been sprung on the industry, which has been completely put offside by the way in which it has been implemented.

Judging from the statements in the Northern Ireland press, correspondence I have received, and speeches made on 16th November in another place, there is no doubt that these milk regulations—this new legislation and the requirements—are causing deep concern and anger among the Northern Ireland farming community and all sections of the milk industry.

Northern Ireland has taken great pride in the high standards attained and upheld by the milk industry and the necessary relevant animal health provisions to ensure that those high standards are attained and maintained. In that connection I should like to quote from a booklet published by the Northern Ireland Industrial Development Board, which is a Northern Ireland Government-sponsored body interested in promoting industry and employment in Northern Ireland. Indeed, it has put aside a lot of money in order to attract industry to Northern Ireland and to overcome some of the problems of unemployment. The pamphlet has been widely circulated to Members of both Houses. I should like to quote it in particular because standards have been mentioned, and because Ireland has been mentioned in broad terms. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Monk Bretton, qualified it, and referred to Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland.

I believe it is right that the standards required and laid down by the Government of the Republic are in parity with, or are equal to, those of Northern Ireland. It is the manner in which they are being scrutinised, administered and monitored that concerns a great many people. However, I shall quote from the pamphlet that has been circulated this week by the Northern Ireland Development Board. It cites a number of matters in connection with the food industries, and it says:

"Alone of any UK region, Ulster is a net food exporter. The output for its farmers last year topped I billion dollars, mainly from dairying and the intensive production of beef, sheep and pigs.

"The regional Chairman of the Confederation of British Industry Dr. George Chambers, has been chief executive of Ulster's Milk Marketing Board for 20 years and is closely involved with some of the numerous current projects to expand food processing industries and create jobs by adding value to the farmers' output".

I quote what Dr. Chambers said:

"In all my time in the food industry here I have never known so much going on and so much further scope not only in my own field, milk, but in other food sectors too".

The article then says:

"Chambers cites such developments as the production, started last month, of a revolutionary new health drink combining milk proteins and fruit juices. One of NI's largest farming co-operatives is making an $8 million investment with its Swedish partner to produce it for sale throughout the British Isles".

The article goes on to talk about the,

"imminent launching of 2 milk-and-whiskey cream liqueurs",

which I am sure noble Lords will be interested in seeing, if not tasting, at some stage. The article goes on to say that Dr. Chambers',

"own Milk Marketing Board, owned by its 8,000 suppliers, provides a single point of contact with which an incoming processor can deal for an assured, long-term, year-round supply".

It continues:

"We can back any customer with our own R & D and undertake pilot production for new milk-based products. We have unrestricted access to the EEC and are one of only three regions in Europe about which the US federal authorities raise no questions concerning milk quality, so tightly are hygiene and animal health controlled".

Perhaps I ought to apologise for reading that article at such length, but I thought it was necessary because so much has been said about the area of Ireland in connection with standards. I join with the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, in saying that Northern Ireland has taken great pride in the high standard in milk production attained there. Indeed, it is seeking to capitalise on milk used in the food processing industry, and we hope that this is one of the areas which will lend itself to great potential in the development of employment.

I feel sure that these matters must raise serious doubts about the implications of the new milk regulations when persons of such high standing, reputation and experience as Dr. Chambers express deep concern and hold such strongly pronounced views about the threat and the danger which the legislation poses for the future of the milk and food industries and for employment in Northern Ireland.

It appears to me that there has been a serious lack of adequate discussion and communication by the Government with the industry about the ramifications and the extent of these regulations. No matter who was responsible for the breakdown, and wherever it may have occurred, it must now rest with the Government to make the necessary adjustments before the milk industry and its potential for employment are not further critically damaged. As regards Northern Ireland, there has been a serious omission—an omission which I believe is serious beyond the issues of the milk industry. It is the omission, or the failure, to consult with the Agriculture Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly. For a number of reasons I am convinced that this failure should be repaired as urgently as possible.

I join with the noble Lord, Lord Graham, and share with him the pride that at one time I was employed in the Co-operative Movement. I am a life member of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers. Therefore, my views coincide with his. I share his views on issues such as the importance of the milk rounds man, and the need for doorstep delivery. One has to live in Northern Ireland to know and appreciate the real value of the roundsman's services and their sterling worth to the community.

I was unable to give notice to the Minister of matters that I should like to raise in this debate. However, I would ask the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, kindly to draw my remarks to the attention of his colleague, the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, who I know is in direct contact with the Northern Ireland milk industry and the farming community there.

My Lords, the protection of public health is never more plainly to be seen than among patients in orthopaedic and long-stay hospitals. In view of the current mind-boggling expenditure on the National Health Service and the necessarily huge and growing cost of medical science and research, it is obvious that everything possible needs to be done to reduce illness and disease, so that preventive action is of the very first importance.

As someone lucky enough to be a member of the Prince of Wales' Advisory Group on Disability, I know how much prevention concerns us there, and rightly. With the United Kingdom's abundant supply of excellent milk, with its high health standard, how can we now consider accepting supplies of a lower standard from other countries? Here in the United Kingdom we have this splendid source of an agreed basically healthy food, as was so well illustrated by my noble friend Lord Monk Bretton. To belittle this advantage by accepting milk supplies that have not attained the same standard seems to be at least frighteningly irresponsible. Perhaps the noble Lord the Minister when he replies will show us and persuade us that the inspection process on arrival is adequate and that standards will be raised to satisfy my noble friends who have spoken before me. To me long-term health means more in cost saving to the country and the wellbeing of its people than even an EEC difficulty, much as I uphold the Commission.

There is just one other aspect about which I am concerned—the milkman and the doorstep delivery. We all know the music hall joke which has the milkman cast in the role of Casanova—the lonely housewife is more than a friend. Here I hope that the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, will not take offence. May I assure your Lordships that I am not concerned with such antics, be they real or fantasy; but I know how invaluable is the regular visit of the milkman to the elderly and to the severely disabled. There are the crafty cases who hear him on the doorstep and then drop him messages in a bucket out of the window. There are the elderly who wait anxiously for him to put the kettle under the tap or just to pass the time of day. Still more, there are those he finds in difficulties, capsized on the floor, and those he can report about. Certainly the daily visit of the milkman can be invaluable, whether to rescue and revive or just to deliver.

I am a keen supporter of the competitive system, but as in this case the highest health qualifications will not be likely to be met, I cannot favour imports of milk. Support of the high quality of this country's milk industry, with its doorstep delivery service, is my reason for backing the Prayer of the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, tonight.

My Lords, in rising to support the noble Lord, Lord Graham, I must declare an interest because I am a dairy farmer. I should also say that I rise in a mood of some surprise, and indeed bewilderment, because, as has been pointed out, for something like two years Her Majesty's Government succeeded in resisting imports of UHT milk—it has been called "unbelievably horrible tasting milk"—on what was a fairly flimsy argument. I congratulate them on having done so, because I always salute people who can sustain causes on flimsy arguments. At least they were able to put off the evil day.

The funny thing is that, having been successful in so doing, they have now given in against the background of a much stronger argument. I have written in my notes the word "capitulate", but it would be wrong to quote that because they did not capitulate. Her Majesty's Government went further than they were requested to do by allowing frozen, pasteurised cream to be included in the regulations. Where as it would have been difficult for us now to have sustained an argument against UHT milk, there is every strong argument for resisting the importation of frozen, pasteurised cream.

Whereas we would much rather not have importation of UHT milk, what would be far more serious would be the precedent having been set that frozen, pasteurised cream can be admitted, the logical conclusion is that pasteurised whole milk could be admitted, and the pasteurisation process, as I think has been pointed out and as your Lordships will know, only destroys a proportion of the micro-organisms and the process of freezing does nothing but put them into cold storage. Once the product is unfrozen, those same micro-organisms are reactivated once again.

What concerns me particularlyis the danger that admission of frozen, pasteurised cream and possibly ultimately pasteurised whole milk from outside the United Kingdom will pose a threat not only to public health but also to the animal health status. I should perhaps mention that in Northern Ireland this poses a particular threat because of the land frontier that we have with the Republic of Ireland.

The Minister in another place said that there would not be frozen, pasteurised cream admitted from EEC countries where foot and mouth disease was endemic. To the best of my knowledge there are few EEC countries where foot and mouth is not endemic, with the exception of the Republic of Ireland. That would tend to indicate that the preponderance of imports of this product would be from the Republic of Ireland. Health status of animals in the Republic is not as high. Even though they have not got the same foot and mouth problem, in other respects it is not as high as it is in Northern Ireland. There are two standards of hygiene: one for liquid consumption and the other for manufacturing. What I should like to ask is, how can this be properly policed?

It has been stated that there will be three points of access from the Republic to Northern Ireland. One of them was stated to be Armagh. In another place last week, the question was asked how could a point of access be Armagh in view of the fact that Armagh is not on the border? I understood from another source that in fact Middletown was to be the point of access. But, as noble Lords may be aware, Middletown is bang in the middle of the "bandit country" in South Armagh. I should be interested to know how this particular operation could be policed.

It would be indeed a disaster if such a threat were posed to animal hygiene in Northern Ireland, because it has taken not years but decades of hard work, meticulous work, and indeed sacrifices on behalf of the farmers and on behalf of the Department of Agriculture in full co-operation with the farmers' union to build up this status of animal health, which is unique not just in the United Kingdom but in the entire European Community.

I would add in passing that insult has been added to injury, in that now the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has insisted that UHT products from Northern Ireland going out of the Province have to be accompanied by a veterinary certificate, which was never required before. The Milk Marketing Board, which has been making inquiries about this, states that it is totally frustrated by the difficulty in obtaining clarification and interpretation of this requirement. Reference has already been made to the fact that the Agriculture Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly was not consulted about the regulations which have already come into force, even though the ruling of the European Court was delivered on 8th February and the legislation in Westminster received Royal Assent on 13th May.

I happened to see the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, in the corridor this morning. When he told me that he was not going to be present, I said that I hoped he would not take exception if I made reference to him this afternoon. He said he would not take exception, provided that I was accurate and kind. I assured him that I always exercise my every endeavour to be accurate, and I was invariably kind. Therefore, in my kindness I should not like to blame him personally for a lengthy letter which was signed by him and dated 1st November, explaining why the Agriculture Committee of the Assembly was not consulted. I can only say that he was given a "bum steer" by whoever it was who drafted that letter for his signature. The worst thing about it was that it stated that the Ulster Farmers' Union, the Milk Marketing Board and the dairy trade had been consulted, and they were content.

I quote from the chairman of the Milk Marketing Board of Northern Ireland. The noble Lord, Lord Blease, has already quoted Dr. Chambers. The chairman of the board stated:

"First of all can I say that we have never been hurt as much as in the way we have been treated in this affair. Yesterday I accompanied Mr. Jim Robinson, who is Chairman of the Dairy Trade Federation in Northern Ireland and my opposite number, and Dr. Stewart to meet the Minister to discuss these matters. When I was leaving I said that in my 30 years' experience of dealing with the political aspects of dairying in Northern Ireland I had never been as much hurt nor had we ever been as badly treated. I feel very strongly about it."

They are hardly the words that would be used by someone who was "content".

Furthermore, there is additional resentment in that, after months of consultation with the Ulster Farmers' Union, the Milk Marketing Board and the dairy trade over the matter of imports of UHT and sterilised milk, suddenly, at the last moment and without consultation, the matter of frozen, pasteurised cream was slipped in, and they had not been asked at all about it before. How could anyone say that these bodies were "content"?

This matter is far more significant, and, with regard to the Agriculture Committee of the Assembly, we have been given a succession of matters to consider. Most of them seem to refer to the regulations regarding control of guard dogs. I do not know why guard dogs should be quite so topical at this stage. That is of minor significance compared to the matter of frozen pasteurised cream possibly leading to whole pasteurised milk—a matter which was never put to us at all. My honourable friend and colleague, the Reverend Dr. Ian Paisley, who is chairman of the committee, has, as we would say in Northern Ireland, "given off" about it at some considerable length.

There is some doubt about the exact situation about pasteurisation and foot and mouth disease. As far as I can gather, there is no agreement on the bacteriological content—the count—which is critical in considering whether milk would pass the test. In Northern Ireland a count of 50,000 colonies per millilitre is currently that which is adequate for the quality premium, but, with heat-treated milk, 140C for two seconds is accepted as being adequate for ultra heat treatment. In another place, the honourable Member for Norfolk South, Mr. MacGregor, if I am in order in quoting him, said that 80C for 15 seconds was adequate for pasteurisation to ensure that the foot and mouth disease virus could not survive. Yet, a veterinary officer of the Department of Agriculture states that the foot and mouth virus can survive eight hours' boiling, which means eight hours at 100C. There seems to be some divergence of opinion.

In another place, the right honourable Minister stated that there would be no imports from European Community countries where foot and mouth was endemic, so presumably the Republic of Ireland would be the main source from which such imports would come. Antibiotics were mentioned by one noble Lord. I would quote from the Sunday Independent of 20th November 1983. The heading is "Health risk milk 'could kill babies' ". The most pertinent paragraph reads:

"Dr. Michael Smith, president of the Irish Medical Union, described the situation as getting out of hand. He said that the free availability of antibiotics to farmers is creating a major public health hazard".

If I may display this rather charming exhibit; that is a syringe for supplying antibiotics and injecting them into the udder—

My Lords, I hesitate to interrupt the noble Lord, but no exhibits are allowed in the House. I am so sorry, my Lord.

My Lords, I thank the noble Viscount for his kind guidance. I was merely drawing attention to the fact that these antibiotics are available to be purchased anywhere. There is a warning on the syringe that milk from any cow which has been so treated must be withdrawn for 72 hours, but there is no way of policing that. That was my point.

The other matter is one that has been mentioned already; that is the door-to-door delivery of milk. The standard United Kingdom retail price for milk is 37 pence per litre, whereas in the Republic of Ireland it is 26·5 pence per litre, meaning a differential of 10·5 pence. Knowing supermarkets and the way in which they can promote loss leaders, this could undermine our retail trade in Northern Ireland altogether. It is not just the fact that there are so many jobs at stake here in door-to-door deliveries, in processing and packaging, in haulage, glass manufacture and vehicle manufacture which are promoted by the door-to-door deliveries, but there is also the social effect. Often, particularly with a senior citizen, it is the milkman who is the first to notice that the pint of milk delivered the day before has not been taken in. He wonders what has happened, raises the alert and perhaps, on investigation, it becomes apparent that the old person has suffered a stroke or some other illness.

I wholeheartedly support the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, and I trust that Her Majesty's Government will take note of the very pertinent points that he has made.

My Lords, I must start by declaring an interest as a fairly large dairy farmer. I am extremely grateful, like other noble Lords, to the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, for the Prayers that he has moved and the very explicit way in which he has dealt with the problem. He was good enough to say that he was sorry for the dilemma in which the Minister found himself. I feel somewhat less sorry for the Minister than apparently he does, for reasons that I will produce.

The noble Lord told us how disturbed he was about the anxieties of the 50,000 milk roundsmen, and I know that he will agree with me that those anxieties are shared by the many thousands of people who milk the cows. Indeed, the point is that this is a whole industry. The dairy industry, from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom, is as one in condeming the Government in the way they have handled this difficult situation.

I should make one point absolutely clear. This is not in any way to be construed as an attack by me on the Common Market. I am one of those who has always supported it, and I shall continue to do so, though many aspects of the common agricultural policy, as we all know, have to be looked at very carefully.

Furthermore—and I am sure that everyone who has spoken in this debate would agree—the Government had no option but to accept and take urgent action on the judgment of the European Court when it was given. But I must draw your Lordships' attention to what I believe to have been a fatal flaw in one of the main premises upon which that decision was based. I can best explain what I mean by reading Clause 27 of the judgment, which says:

"the very characteristics of UHT milk, which may be kept for long periods at normal temperatures, obviate the need for control over the whole production cycle of such milk if the necessary precautions are taken at the time of the heat treatment".

We all know (do we not?) that if milk is to be really wholesome it has to be treated with great care from the moment it leaves the cow's udder. To that extent, I ask your Lordships to take on board the fact that, although we must accept this judgment, there was something very wrong with the premise upon which it was based; because the court said that UHT treatment can do it all—and we know very well that it cannot. I ask your Lordships to take this on board because at some future stage we may find ourselves before the court again; and it is important that we should know that the court did not cover the whole spectrum of the production, treatment and delivery of milk.

Before I go on to deal with the extension beyond UHT that the Government chose to allow, I should like to say a few words about the timing of the legislation and the subsequent orders. Your Lordships will remember that the enabling legislation was put through two days before Parliament was dissolved before the general election. In another place, all stages were gone through in 1 hour 40 minutes. Of that, 10 minutes was taken up by the Committee stage. There was no Report stage and no Third Reading. In your Lordships' House, all stages were gone through in exactly 22 minutes. Arising out of this legislation, we have some orders which we are unable to amend. Was this the way to treat an industry like the dairy industry, with 150,000 jobs, to include agriculture, at stake? I suggest it was not.

I want to put it very squarely that my right honourable friend Mr. Peter Walker, at best, made a misjudgment, and, at worst, did something which was very cynical. The Government have not even had the courtesy to let the order sit on the table for 40 days. We are debating this tonight, and the order is already in effect. The other place had to debate it virtually after it had gone into effect. I take the Government very much to task on the way they have dealt with this—and, for the life of me, I do not know why they did it.

I want now to try to get from the Government some reasons that seem more valid than those we have had so far as to why they chose to extend these orders beyond UHT. We had in another place from my honourable friend Mrs. Fenner—and the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, referred to this—some very specific statements that all this was only to do with UHT; and, as the noble Lord said, in order to make her point she said that, of course, it was only 1 per cent. of the whole. Now we have the order extended to sterilised milk, which is 6 per cent., in some parts of the country 25 per cent., and to pasteurised cream, which we all know is capable of being the thin end of a very thick wedge indeed.

I hope my noble friend will take this on board. The whole of the dairy industry has condemned the Minister. They believe that they have been let down by the Government with a thump. It is very unhealthy for the dairy industry and, indeed, for the food industry as a whole to have a Minister of whom it has to be said, "Know thine enemy!". I think there is another danger, too. It appears as though the Minister took this decision to extend for reasons which were wholly legalistic. It appears that he was advised that there was a danger that, unless he went further than the court required him to go, he might find himself up before them again. But the European Court is not a criminal court. It is a civil court which is there to adjudicate on the disagreements which are bound to happen between member countries who are signatories to a treaty.

For the life of me I cannot understand why, and with such unseemly haste, he took this strange decision, which is a very dangerous decision—and I should like to explain to your Lordships why I think it is dangerous and can go well beyond the affairs of the dairy industry. If other countries think that we are going to run scared because there is a danger that, if we do not do something, we might be "up before the beak" in Brussels, or wherever the court sits, they are likely in this harsh world in which we live to take advantage of it. Therefore, I put it to your Lordships that the impression that has been created that the Minister is more frightened of the court than he is thoughtful about the welfare of a great industry in this country is a disaster, and one which must be put right.

I had intended to make some points about inspection, but they have been so well made that I will not press them. I will merely join other noble Lords in saying that we hope the Minister will change his mind, will alter the order and will alter the decision that there should be 17 points of entry—which he can perfectly easily do if he is prepared to. This is yet another thing which we demand from him.

Finally, I should like to draw your Lordships' attention to a speech that the Minister made on 26th October to the Milk Marketing Board. He said:

"Although we must comply with the law we can also avail ourselves of certain helpful aspects of the judgment … We have, of course, invoked these references in the course of the intense discussions which have taken place with the Commission and member states".

Could my noble friend tell me what the Minister was talking about when he referred to "certain helpful aspects of the judgment"? And, when he has told us that, could he tell us in what way we have invoked these helpful aspects? I think we should all be very pleased to know.

I have made what your Lordships may feel—and what I fear my noble friend may feel—is a very strong speech about the actions of the Minister. I hope for his sake, and for the sake of the great industry that we are discussing tonight, that he will do his level best to answer the questions that have been asked, and, indeed, the attacks that have been made, tonight.

My Lords, I have listened to every speech that has been made this evening and I have agreed with every one. I agree exactly with what the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, said and I agree with all that has been said by everybody else who has spoken. That means to say that I shall speak only very shortly because I was going to say a lot of things that have been said by others. In saying that I support them, I hope that the House will realise that I feel tremendously strongly. One thing that I mind very much is that these five orders have been brought out on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Milk Marketing Board. The start of the Milk Marketing Board in 1933 was the work of my husband, who was the Minister of Agriculture of the day, and who had a tremendously hard task in getting the dairy industry to co-operate, in getting the farmers to come together, and in co-ordinating the different farming methods that were used in those days. It took a long time but it has been successful. It has been far more successful than ever we dreamt it would be in 1933. It has been one of the great successful agricultural efforts which this country has made, and I think it is nothing short of tragic that suggestions of this kind should come out now when in fact the board is very powerful and very important and all the other dairy industries that have been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Graham, are co-operating.

I realise of course that the Government are in a very difficult position, because we are members of the common agricultural policy and I support that; but there are ways in which people deal with the common agricultural policy which seem to me sometimes rather strange. I will give one example which I happen to know about because, as your Lordships know, I am a sheep farmer and a cattle farmer. I have to sell in the summer and the autumn what is now called "sheep meat" but which I call lamb in the market. Now what happens? The French are the biggest importers of mutton and lamb and if their market is open then all the auction markets that are selling mutton and lamb get high prices, the mutton and the lamb are wanted and the export is of course, like any other export in the EEC, a free market. If the French decide that for the next month or six weeks, or whatever time you like, they have enough mutton, they shut down the door: down it goes. We are trying to sell—I am talking about Scotland in this case—our mutton, and bang goes down the price. So we hold everything back until, we hope, the French are going to allow the market to open again. How do they get away with that? They must get away with it because they do it.

Yet we are being held up, I understand, before the civil court because we do not want to import milk. We have the best dairy industry—I should like to say it is the best in Europe—and we have all the milk we want, so that therefore we do not want to import. However, we are now being told that we must import; so we have agreed to import the UHT milk which noble Lords have been talking about today. Why should we be asked to import more of the UHT? I agree with the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr, in what he said just now. All right: we have to import UHT milk but we have not got to import this frozen cream and the sterilised milk. I take it that has been a gesture made to please the civil court or the EEC, whatever it may be. I am all for being on good terms with the CAP, but I do not see why we should do something to please them which may do a lot of harm to us. This is something which I am afraid the Minister will have to explain to us because, so far as I know, it is not going to help at all.

I agree with all that has been said about the standard of milk that we have in this country. It is absolutely marvellous. I look back over those 50 years that I have known the Milk Marketing Board and remember, for instance, the amount of tuberculosis which was formerly unfortunately in existence arising from non-pasteurised milk and non-tuberculin-tested milk. Tested milk was made compulsory only after the Milk Marketing Board started and it saved thousands of lives. There are many other things which your Lordships will know as well as I do, but I remember it so vividly because we raised the standard in a way it is almost impossible to realise now, because we are so used to these things being so well organised.

The Milk Marketing Board is a marvellous organisation in the way it carries out all the necessary work throughout the whole of the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland. Its standards are tremendous and have been built up over the years. It is something in which I would say we could lead the European Community in this particular industry, probably better than in anything else. Yet we are being criticized for certain things and being asked to do things which we really do not want to do. As noble Lords have rightly said, we have not really had any very good reasons given to us.

I did not listen to the debate in the other place but I have read the Mansards—I have them here—and I was not at all impressed by what the Government had to say. I do not like saying that because I am a strong supporter of the Government and I am also a strong supporter of the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, whom I admire enormously for all he does in this Government. But I do think that at the moment this particular subject is being treated—how shall I put it?—very cursorily by the Government. I personally do not see why we should sign on the dotted line before we have had some opportunity of discussing the details and discussing what alternatives might be open to us. Yet, as noble Lords opposite have said, this is a subject which has never really been discussed in the same way as we discuss other things connected with agriculture. In consequence, we all feel very unhappy about it. I certainly do. Anything that makes it more difficult to sell milk, or reduces the amount of milk that is being consumed, surely is the last thing the EEC want to do. They talk about wine lakes and milk lakes, among other things, but they are increasing them if they do not back up the doorstep selling arrangement.

I remember how the doorstep selling arrangement started. That represented a revolution and it has done more good, certainly in rural areas, than almost anything that could have happened. I agree with everything that has been said by all your Lordships about doorstep selling. I should like to pay tribute to the Co-operative who, in our area at any rate, are the people who deliver the milk. They deliver it regularly in my particular area, which is very rural. It comes twice a week; it is always there, and always the best quality: whether it is snowing or raining or whatever it may be, the chap turns up in his lorry with the milk. That, I think, is enormously valuable.

Other noble Lords have spoken about what this does for old people. But it also does a great deal for families who live in very isolated areas, where their milk has to be delivered on their doorsteps. If they had to motor 10 miles into town twice a week in order to get the milk, think what the expense would be. It would also be very detrimental to the consumption of milk, because they would not drink so much.

Today one is always encouraging families and children to drink milk. One of the things that I regretted very much was when the milk in schools was not exactly done away with, but was so much reduced that the scheme was hardly in existence. That scheme was a marvellous way of selling milk and it was extremely good for growing children. That has almost gone now, but I believe that in some areas there is still milk for small children. We do not want to reduce the capacity for selling milk, which is in enormous supply. To reduce sales is all against the principles of the CAP and the EEC. The Minister will need to explain why he thinks they want to do this, when everybody knows that it will cut the amount of milk which is being sold.

I shall not say anything more, because everything has been said, but I feel deeply about this matter. To do this now, after we have built up this marvellous organisation for milk, and a wonderful dairy industry where complaints are practically non-existent, and for the EEC to produce something which ends up with these regulations, is something that I cannot understand. If they want milk to be consumed, and if they want to reduce the surpluses, this is not the way to do it. I bitterly regret that we have to agree, because, I understand, we cannot do anything else. But I beg the Minister, as everybody else has done, to see whether or not, even at this late hour, some changes could be made in order to make these regulations less harmful, because this change is a thousand pities and, in the 50th anniverary year of the Milk Marketing Board, it is absolutely tragic.

My Lords, I intervene in the gap in the list and I shall not keep the House too long. First, I should like to say that, having listened to all the noble Lords and noble Ladies who have spoken tonight, it seems to me that the Minister ought to have had an opportunity to speak to them, because the expertise that has come from the mouths of those noble Lords and noble Ladies is quite outstanding. I feel sure that if they had been consulted we would not have been faced with the fait accompli that we have tonight.

Noble Lords have given us details of how safe supplies reach our doorsteps. We have heard from the industry and from the farmers about the high standards they set themselves. Because that aspect has been adequately covered, I want to take up what my noble friend Lord Graham has said. I think that we all admire the way in which he began the comprehensive discussion which we have had. He mentioned the economics of doorstep delivery, which are very finely balanced, and we have to see that that balance is not tipped up so that doorstep deliveries completely disappear. I think that it was the noble Lord, Lord Monk Bretton, who gave us details of what has happened in Holland.

The noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, emphasised how medical opinion in this country encourages the expectant mother to make sure that she drinks her pinta, and how the mother with young children is exhorted to make sure that they get their fair ration of milk every day. Noble Lords have also spoken about the service to the elderly. The drinking of milk is important for them, because milk is something which they digest very easily. The doorstep service to these people is absolutely paramount.

Then there are thousands, and even millions, of young people in this country who do not have cars. If the doorstep delivery of milk is stopped, it will mean treks to supermarkets three, four, or five miles away, in order to fill up a pram with milk. That will be a daily chore for many of them, because young families are consuming four or five bottles daily in their homes.

These are services for which this country must take great credit. As the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, said, they took a long time to build up and they have proved very successful. As your Lordships will remember, last year we had a lot of snow and bad weather. Pictures on television showed the milkman constantly getting through the snow and getting onto the doorstep in all parts of the country. In some isolated areas the milkman found that the people were completely cut off and he signalled for the helicopter to come in with food for those places. We must not let the doorstep delivery go by default.

As noble Lords have said, we are faced with a fait accompli and there is little that we can do at this stage. Criticisms have been levelled against the Government and, no doubt, they will take note of them, so that we may not have to say, "We told you so" when people write in and say that their deliveries have stopped. I would make a final plea—and I wish that this place was full of housewives—that the message should go out that the housewife has a choice. She must recognise that she can choose the service and the convenience of doorstep delivery of high standard, safe and fresh milk. We do not want that replaced with, as some noble Lords have described it, bacterial soup with an utterly horrible taste.

My Lords, I must first apologise for the absence tonight of my noble friend Lord John-Mackie. He had accepted the estimate of time for the Somerset House debate and the Shipping Industry debate and expected that this debate would be over by eight o'clock. He had a commitment at that time which he could not avoid, so I am taking his place.

There can be no doubt, when every speaker from the Conservative Benches, the Cross-Benches, the Liberal Benches and the Labour Benches has spoken in support of the Prayer to annul the regulations by my noble friend Lord Graham, that the feeling is extremely strong in this House and the Minister must be feeling rather lonely at this moment. There cannot be any doubt about the strong feeling that there is over the effect of a surge of sales of UHT milk in supermarkets on doorstep deliveries in this country. But if the price is put as low as has been suggested, then the Government must look closely to see that the antidumping law is not being broken. Secondly, they must see that the production of milk in other countries is subject to the same stringent regulations as our farmers have to obey. We are subject to EEC regulations and as loyal members of the Community we must conform, but it is the Government's duty to ensure that excessive harm is not done to a major service in this country.

I should like to repeat a few of the questions which have already been asked. Why should we exceed the remit from the EEC court? Have the Government fully realised the impact of the regulations upon employment in the dairy industry—the milkmen who make doorstep deliveries—and employment among others involved in the trade? Moreover, if doorstep deliveries do not continue, one has to consider the effect, as many other speakers have said, on the old, the disabled and young mothers with small children—and, particularly where the old are concerned, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, made clear, the social effects. This says nothing about the taste of the stuff.

I ask, as have other noble Lords, whether there will be adequate inspection. Will the health aspects be safeguarded? How are they to be safeguarded if there are to be 17 designated ports of entry? Do there have to be so many? The very strong feeling in all parts of the House will, I hope, encourage the Minister to make changes and provide safeguards for the two trades which will be so heavily involved if the worst fears of those who have spoken in our debate tonight are realised.

My Lords, in debating these regulations, I must first meet the concern which has been expressed, first by the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, and then by all of your Lordships who have taken part in the debate about the scope of the regulations. In February, the European Court of Justice decided that to prevent imports of UHT milk into the United Kingdom—for that, in essence, was the situation—was inconsistent with Articles 30 and 36 of the Treaty of Rome. But the difficulty is that those two articles are of general application. Therefore, in order to comply with Community law—and it is very much in our trading interests to do so—we must also admit other milk products that have received as rigorous a heat treatment as UHT milk. I am sure that my noble friend Lord De La Warr has read the judgment with care, but I would ask him to read it again. I think he will see that he was mistaken in his criticism of my right honourable friend. It does no service to our country not to comply with the effect of a court judgment. By taking the action he is taking in putting these regulations before both Houses of Parliament, my right honourable friend is acting in the interests of this country.

I ought to say also that in bringing forward these regulations we are not contradicting what the Government said six months ago both in another place and in your Lordships' House on the occasion of the Importation of Milk Act. Statements made on that occasion by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Secretary and my right honourable friend Lord Ferrers in this House certainly tended to concentrate on UHT milk. I do not disguise that. But both my honourable friend and my right honourable friend also referred more generally to compliance with the judgment. It is because of the need to comply with the judgment that we shall admit sterilised milk.

Next I must try to satisfy my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox that the standards of imports are not going to be less than for our own products. Indeed, I must try to prove to my noble friend that the standards demanded are, where necessary, going to be, if anything, higher. For instance, sterilised milk is subject to a wide band of heat treatment, as I am sure your Lordships know better than I do. Under the regulations, we are only going to admit sterilised milk which will have received more rigorous treatment than the treatment for our own UHT milk. Moreover, for both UHT cream and milk-based drinks we are going to impose a higher minimum heat treatment than for UHT milk, which can very reasonably be said to be necessary because cream is thicker in substance and milk drinks have other substances added to them.

The noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, in a strong but very fair speech, said that the problems were not all of the Government's own making. The noble Lord will forgive me if I say, "You can say that again!" I must point out that we have been placed in a difficult position by the Labour Government's decision, taken without any requirement by a court decision in 1977, to admit into this country a catalogue of UHT cream, sterilised cream other than in cans and pasteurised cream. We are now taking the opportunity to prevent under these regulations any more pasteurised cream from entering this country. From now on, it will have to be frozen for, despite the information given to my noble friend Lord Monk Bretton, freezing, I am advised, prevents the growth of any contaminating pathogenic bacteria, which thus renders the product acceptable from a public health point of view.

All your Lordships, and finally the noble Baroness, Lady David, asked about the public health safeguards. I believe that these are going to be very effective for imports. Schedule 2 of the regulations establishes a comprehensive procedure to ensure that imports are properly certified. The certificate was published in the London Gazette last week and it is a very thorough check, running to 20 paragraphs, on the quality of the milk before it is treated, on the heat treatment process and then on the finished product. In effect, there will be a dual system of rigorous sampling and testing by port health authorities and by the Ministry of Agriculture laboratories. My noble friend Lord Monk Bretton suggested that pesticides, aflotoxin and antibiotics are a cause for concern. We certainly agree. We shall be testing accordingly. The regulations provide for spot checks. I would ask my noble friend to look, maybe afterwards, at the importation regulations, Schedule 2, paragraphs 3 and 7, to check that what I have said about spot checks is the case.

Both the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, and the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, adjured the Government to ensure that standards on farms in other countries are lifted—the word which, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, used. We cannot control this directly but we can test the finished product. One such test enables us to assess the quality of the raw milk before heat treatment. If this test suggests that French practice is not up to scratch—I give the French practice as one obvious example—we shall certainly take steps to remedy the situation.

In addition to what I have said in answer to your Lordships about safeguards at the ports, may I say that our staff are going to make visits to farms and dairies in other Community member states to check their arrangements for ensuring the healthy production of milk. The other point which I ought to make in this connection is that the noble Lord, Lord Dunleath, complained that the policing of imports would be difficult in certain parts of Northern Ireland because of the conditions to be found in Northern Ireland today: that is a matter to which I must draw the attention of my noble friend Lord Mansfield.

In the interests of public health, the regulations also specify the heat treatments to which imported milk must be subject; and I now go on to milk itself, having spoken earlier about cream and milk-based drinks. I realise that doubts have been expressed about the time/temperature requirement laid down for UHT milk. As my right honourable friend the Minister of Agriculture has said in another place, we believe that our requirement of 132.2C for one second is appropriate, not least because it has applied in Great Britain since 1965. In answer to my noble friend Lord Monk Bretton, we are ready to have further discussions on this matter and to consider possible amendment to this particular aspect of the regulations.

I will turn for a moment to the subject of animal health. Considerable reference has been made on either side of your Lordships' House to foot and mouth disease being endemic in other member states. Indeed, it was a matter to which the noble Lord, Lord Dunleath, referred in his speech. With respect, that is not the case. The bulk of the outbreaks which have occurred since 1981 are attributable to two foci of infection. The first caused most of the outbreaks in France, in the Brittany area and, incidentally, resulted, as your Lordships will remember, in our first outbreak for more than a decade. The second was the group of outbreaks which occurred over a short period in Denmark. Otherwise, it is true that there have been isolated outbreaks in Greece, Italy and Germany. But in all these instances we have been able to rely on the import procedures allowed under the rules governing inter-Community trade in order to safeguard the position of our country.

The cornerstone of those rules is the veterinary certification which has to be supplied by exporting countries. As 'we have made clear on a number of occasions, those arrangements have stood the test of time and have proved themselves to be effective.

So far as milk, cream, and milk-based drinks are concerned, the animal health certificate—which is an additional certificate that has to be presented—accompanying each consignment must provide assurance that imports have been subject to specified heat treatments for animal health. Those time/temperature combinations have been adopted in the light of the best professional advice obtainable from the Animal Virus Research Institute at Pirbright, and have been endorsed by the State Veterinary Service. In those circumstances, the Government are fully satisfied that all reasonable conditions to safeguard our animal health status are being applied, as in the past.

Before I finish, I should like to answer some of the questions which your Lordships have asked me. My noble friend Lord De La Warr referred to a speech which was made at the 50th anniversary dinner of the Milk Marketing Board by my right honourable friend. If I may say so—and I am not in any way trying to curry favour with your Lordships by mentioning this—it was an occasion at which my noble friend Lady Elliot of Harwood made one of the best short speeches that all who were present had probably ever heard.

My noble friend Lord De La Warr said that my right honourable friend referred in his speech at that dinner to certain hopeful aspects of the court judgment; and my noble friend asked what those were. The judgment said that we could not exclude milk from other member states. But on the other hand, the judgment acknowledged that we could operate a vigorous import regime including official certification, sampling and testing. Our import regime, to which I have already referred, takes advantage of those observations and is to be much more vigorous than that which applies in other sectors of imports.

The noble Lord, Lord Dunleath, made a point about Northern Ireland; that arrangements are being made for requiring certificates for trade coming across from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. There are two points I should like to make to both him and to the noble Lord, Lord Blease, on this matter. First, we have made special arrangements to deal with consignments which are in the pipeline. Secondly—and I was a little surprised that neither noble Lord mentioned this—we are for the first time making provision for the import of UHT and sterilised milk from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. It has not happened before; there has been no opportunity. It is something that ought to be recognised this evening.

Having said that, the noble Lords, Lord Dunleath and Lord Blease, made important points about consultation. Detailed consultation on the proposals for the regulations did take place with interested organisations in Northern Ireland. However, it was the case that Ministers had to make a last minute decision in relation to the provision of imports of frozen pasteurised cream in the Northern Ireland regulations. I regret that it was not possible to consult the industry on that matter in the time available. With regard to consultation with the Northern Ireland Assemby, as I believe the noble Lord, Lord Dunleath, will know, my noble friend the Minister responsible for Northern Ireland, Lord Mansfield, wrote to the Assembly's Agriculture Committee and advised them of the decision as soon as possible thereafter.

Finally, several noble Lords—including the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, at the beginning and the noble Baroness, Lady David, at the end and also my noble friend Lord DeLa Warr—asked about the number of ports and why there are 17 of them. They have, of course, been restricted to those ports which are already dealing with the meat trade. They have the necessary facilities and the trained personnel experienced in handling foodstuffs which are sensitive from a health viewpoint. Again, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, asked whether the ports are to have the right resources to enable them to do the job. The answer is, yes.

Those people are accustomed to working closely with the Ministry in operating the necessary health controls. A shorter list could have overloaded the facilities at some of the ports. A longer list—or no list at all—could have resulted in a considerable variation in the standards of enforcement. In either case, it would not provide the necessary degree of assurance that an acceptable standard of public health control could be operated.

I suggest to the House that our interests as a great trading nation require that we expect other member states to comply with international judgments—and so must we. Although the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, referred to the alacrity with which we came to this decision, it is nine months since the court's decision. But in doing that, I assure my noble friend Lady Elliot, the Government will always remember and will not let others forget the benefits of fresh pasteurised milk produced in this country and delivered on the doorstep. It is a wonderful service for a splendid product which neither UHT milk nor sterilised milk can begin to rival.

I acknowledge what my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox said, that in some cases it can be akin to a social service. If people today wish to buy a greater propor tion of their milk in the shops, then this is a question of consumer choice which people must be free to exercise, but I firmly believe that we are right to remind people constantly of the unique advantages of doorstep deliveries for the family, and the great importance of it to producers, to the Milk Marketing Board, of course, and to those who work in the dairy industry.

These regulations ensure that public health interests are fully protected and are in accordance with the judgment of the court, and that imported milk meets health and hygiene requirements at least up to our own production. I believe this is right for British interests and I have no hesitation in asking your Lordships to support the regulations.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I am very grateful indeed, first of all, to the Minister for the care that he has taken and the courtesy which he has shown to the House. Perhaps, having listened to the case opened and closed in another place, and trying to hear most of it, the great difference is that at least the noble Lord has had the opportunity in this House of making the case as he wanted to, and it has been listened to, I certainly think, with great attention.

I have rarely been in a debate involving political parties from all sides of a Chamber where there has been such unanimity as to the arguments that they wish to deploy against another force; clearly not against the arguments advanced by the Minister because, to be perfectly fair, there have been one or two shafts of light—certainly the assurances in respect of the care the Government will take to ensure that the milk that comes into this country will be of the highest possible standard.

But a very comprehensive demolition job has been done on the Government's actions in these matters over the past few months by noble Lords all around the House. It would be invidious to single out any particular contribution, except to say that the contributions we have heard from all three noble Baronesses have impressed me very much, because they come from a background of real experience in these matters. Professional experience has come from other quarters. I was enormously impressed by the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, not least with the greatest deference possible to the contribution that her late husband made to the whole concept of giving to the people of this country milk which they could rely on and find completely safe.

The great dilemma that I had in listening to the Minister was this. He saved himself literally in the last few seconds of his speech. Until then there had not been one word of what we consider important—not so much the past actions, or the present intentions, but on the future consequences concerning the effect on the doorstep delivery. If I may paraphrase what the Minister has said, he believes it is a first-class service and one that ought to be preserved. But if the French farmers are successful and comply with the requirements, the Minister says that up to 6 per cent. more sterilised milk can come in. The Minister might say: it has been a very great operation and we are sorry the patient has died. If the patient, the milk distributive industry, suffers as a consequence of this, how on earth are we going to face up to it?

I would simply say to the Minister that we believe hat he is relying upon the milk industry to get him out of a Catch-22 situation. If the milk industry, fearful of the consequences, does its job, as the Minister believes, it will be competitive, it will be able to survive, it will be able to keep out the foreign imports, and then the industry itself will have given the game away. The industry believes at the moment that this additional burden is going to cause all the consequences. The only way they can prove that the Minister is right is by proving themselves wrong.

I listened very carefully to what the Minister said. He believes that the industry will be able to compete in the new circumstances. The industry does not; the Milk Marketing Board does not; Age Concern does not; all of the other organisations do not believe that they will be able to compete in the new circumstances. If they are wrong, all they will have are red faces. If they are proved right and the industry is damaged—if not beyond repair savagely damaged—the consumers of this country will find that they will have to travel further, pay more, or get poorer milk.

I realise the reality of the parliamentary arithmetic in these matters and I appreciate the convention that in another place a decision has been reached. For our part on these Benches we remain wholly unconvinced that the actions which the Government have taken in the past few months were necessary. We believe that they may have been taken sincerely, but that they will nevertheless prove to be enormously damaging to British interests and we do not intend to let this matter pass lightly.