My Lords, it is with great regret that I have to inform the House of the death of Lord Allen of Abbeydale on 27 November. On behalf of the House, I extend our condolences to his family and friends.

asked Her Majesty’s Government:

What steps they are taking to improve the United Kingdom’s international competitiveness in the light of the fall from second to ninth place in the World Economic Forum’s annual league table.

My Lords, the UK continues to perform well on a wide variety of measures of competitiveness. Recent data suggest improvements in productivity performance over the economic cycle and in relation to key international competitors such as France and Germany. Nevertheless, the Government are committed to achieving continued long-term improvements in UK competitiveness through raising long-term productivity. The recent CSR illustrates this with policies aimed at improving performance through the key drivers of productivity, which include increased investment in higher education and skills, continued development of a world-class science base and simplifications to the tax system. This is underpinned by the Government’s commitment to maintaining macroeconomic stability, which provides firms and individuals with the certainty needed to invest for our future.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that reassuring and optimistic reply. Is he aware that the reasons given by the World Economic Forum and others for Britain’s falling competitiveness include the heavy burden of complex taxes and red tape? They also rate Britain fairly low in the economic stability league—46th position among 131 countries—because of persistently high government borrowing and low levels of household saving. Should not these weaknesses be firmly addressed by the Government to avoid the lower growth anticipated for next year being even lower than expected?

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, is right to assess simplification of the tax system and lessening the regulatory burden as key to enhancing productivity. Only yesterday we had the Second Reading of the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill and, in the Pre-Budget Report, the Chancellor of the Exchequer launched the simplification of the tax system. I would caution against league tables. I can show that the league table to which the noble Lord referred, which says that the UK is coming down, also shows that, for employing workers, Germany is 137th in the world while Georgia is fourth.

My Lords, the Minister has talked about the fall in competitiveness. Yesterday we heard that some countries have more presence worldwide in diplomatic posts than Britain does and the Minister said that we are snapping at their heels. What is happening? Are we reduced from top dog to whippersnappers? Are we running behind when we should be running ahead? Can the Minister reassure us that things are actually not that bad?

My Lords, I can assure the noble Lord that I have never snapped at anyone’s heels in my life. We spend every day at UK Trade & Investment getting round 137 countries, making sure that British companies, or overseas companies using Britain as the launch pad for global competitiveness, have the strength of the Union Jack behind them. That is key; business is the presence that can make the difference. Productivity comes in many different ways—for example, through investment in skills and higher education. Businesses around the world will succeed in the 21st century only if we cluster around knowledge—and our universities are among the best in the world.

My Lords, I have no idea what the World Economic Forum is but, judging from what it appears to have said, it talks a load of nonsense. The notion that the British economy is not one of the most stable in the world is ridiculous; we are one of the most stable and successful economies in the world and what that organisation needs is a lesson in economics. The last time I looked at the figures for the service industries, Britain was among the most productive and efficient economies in the world, if not the most productive and efficient—and that includes financial services despite the fiasco of Northern Rock. Is it not the case that a large part of the problem for the production industries is an overvalued pound sterling, which is due to an excessively restrictive monetary policy?

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for showing how important world macroeconomic stability is. Our service economy, to which he referred, is one of the reasons why we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the developed world—5.4 per cent compared with 8.1 per cent in France and 8.7 per cent in Germany; indeed, it is nearly 5 per cent in America. That is because of our diverse economy.

My Lords, when the Minister has finished waving his flag, could he find time to read a rather perceptive article in today’s Herald Tribune? It points out that our businessmen and government support are, compared to those of France and Germany, rather slow in China. We are lagging behind because we do not spend enough time in the big cities other than Shanghai, Tianjin and Hong Kong.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising this point. I was in China only last week visiting cities such as Wuhan which are not Beijing or Shanghai. We are always berated for our trade with China being about a third of that of France, but every Airbus that is sold to China is booked as a 100 per cent export from France whereas 60 per cent of it comes from the United Kingdom. We book our 60 per cent as an export to France; France books its Airbus as a 100 per cent export to China. If you look behind the figures, you will find that we export more to China than people realise.

My Lords, is the Minister prepared to accept that if he gave an honest answer to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy, he would say that there is not a lot that the Government can do? Is not his problem that the Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, put himself at the head of a drive to improve Britain’s productivity and that drive has so far not proved very successful?

My Lords, I think that in his observation about league tables the noble Lord meant that we should not always take them as gospel. Ahead of us in the current one are Iceland, Denmark and Singapore. Of the major economies, only the United States is substantially ahead of us. France is below us, Germany is on a par and Japan is just ahead of us. There are many different ways of calculating these league tables. If we keep concentrating on universities and skills, on simplification of tax and on better regulation, we will succeed.

My Lords, I wonder—

My Lords, we are into the ninth minute. It is time to move on.

asked Her Majesty’s Government:

Which government department holds responsibility for issues concerning obesity.

My Lords, tackling obesity is a cross-government responsibility led by the Department of Health. Childhood obesity is the joint responsibility of the Department of Health and the Department for Children, Schools and Families, as signalled by the new public service agreement to improve the health and well-being of children and young people. The Secretary of State for Health is developing a comprehensive cross-government strategy on obesity, facilitated by a cross-governmental ministerial group.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Is there any plan to give absolute authority to the Department of Health to ensure that things like recreational physical activity are made more readily available in any new planning? If not, why not? We have just heard that obesity is apparently a greater threat to us than global warming.

My Lords, the Secretary of State for Health is taking the lead. The Foresight report provided us with a catalyst and there is absolute determination that our cross-departmental work will bring forward results. The strategy will be available in the very near future and I am confident that the Secretary of State for Health will be determined in his leadership.

My Lords, I speak as a member of the All-Party Group on Obesity. Why is it that in central London you can hardly find a thinly-sliced or medium-sliced loaf of bread to buy, and any sandwich you buy in any supermarket is now made with thick bread? While the House of Lords continues to use medium-sliced—and very nice—bread in its sandwiches, even the House of Commons has moved to thick bread. Surely at a time when we want to reduce people’s consumption, there should be more pressure from the Food Standards Agency, or one of the many departments the Minister speaks about, to take us back to normal-sized bread instead of these super-sized sandwiches.

My Lords, that is an interesting and important point, but it is not really a matter for the Government. We would be accused of being a nanny state if the Government started to pronounce on these issues.

My Lords, what progress has been achieved so far by the physical education in schools initiative? What advice is given to schools to stop children being able to abandon PE after the end of year 9?

My Lords, I am pleased to report that 86 per cent of schoolchildren now do at least two hours of quality sport a week. That is one of the results of the programme. I recognise that there is a lot more to be done, and we aim to offer every child and young person the chance of five hours’ sport a week by 2011.

My Lords, is the Minister satisfied that the restriction on advertising foods high in salt, sugar and saturated fats are sufficient to achieve what the majority of people in this House and elsewhere would like to be achieved?

No, my Lords, I am not satisfied. The rules on advertising to children have got a lot better. From January onwards, adverts during television programmes of particular appeal to children under 16 will not be allowed. However, we believe that we must move forward, and we need a ban on all high-fat, salty and sugary foods before the 9 pm watershed.

My Lords, I accept that obesity is a serious problem, but is my noble friend satisfied that the current measure of obesity, the BMI, is a sufficiently flexible and precise indicator of obesity in relation to health?

My Lords, there is much discussion about measurements of obesity. We believe that the current BMI measure is the best one we have at the moment, but we are looking at that.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that people have always loved to eat junk food, whether it was bread and dripping and iced buns in my day or, nowadays, the dreaded burger? Does she also agree that people who are overweight and heavy but very fit are not necessarily obese?

Oh!

My Lords, I thought that would please your Lordships. To go back to my noble friend’s original point, it is terribly important that the Government encourage exercise in all forms.

Yes, my Lords. One of the problems is that we are no longer hunter-gatherers. Our lifestyle has changed; the society in which we live has changed; we must change our culture. That must mean more sport, more exercise and looking at our built environment.

My Lords, the Minister said that various factors may contribute to obesity. In light of the fact that many infants who do not rely on exercise and who do not necessarily eat chips and bread and butter are becoming grossly overweight, will she consider the contribution that the huge number of new chemicals to which we have been exposed during the past 40 years may have made to creating genetic alterations before children are born?

My Lords, that is a very interesting point which I shall take back to the department. We have to prevent young infants becoming obese. It is adults who buy their children’s food. Therefore, we have to target adults as well as young infants.

My Lords—

My Lords—

My Lords, there have been no Labour speakers on this Question. It should be the Labour side.

My Lords, will the strategy that is about to be concluded look at the underutilisation of resources available in gyms in the private sector? Will the Government explore the possibility of using those resources for schools, possibly in collaboration with the Youth Justice Board, as a means of getting some young people out of criminality and into exercise and a better life?

My Lords, if the strategy was not going to consider that before the noble Lord’s question, I can assure him that it will do so now.

asked Her Majesty’s Government:

What action they are taking to help in the world-wide fight against HIV/AIDS.

My Lords, DfID is the world’s second-largest donor in the fight against HIV/AIDS and has pledged to spend £1.5 billion on AIDS-related work in the three years to 2008. It recently made the first long-term commitment, to 2015, of £1 billion to the Global Fund. DfID promotes a comprehensive approach to tackling the epidemic, from prevention to access to treatment, from education to rights to health systems, and we prioritise women, children and other vulnerable groups.

My Lords, I pay tribute to the Government’s work overseas, but is the Minister aware that the position at home is not so good: that the number of people in the United Kingdom who are diagnosed each year with HIV has more than trebled since 1997; that the number of people living with HIV has reached a record total of 73,000; and that, rather than having the best record in western Europe, we now have one of the worst? Will the Government pledge on World AIDS Day on Saturday that, in renewing the battle against AIDS globally, they will renew it also at home?

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for asking us to mark the 20th World AIDS Day on Saturday. Yes, we will look at the new figures on the increasing prevalence of AIDS in the United Kingdom. I am sure that the Department of Health will have something to say about it.

My Lords—

My Lords—

My Lords, there is plenty of time for both contributions.

My Lords, will the Minister congratulate the Royal College of Nursing, which last night launched a campaign, Think Positive, aiming to stop discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS? Will she encourage the worldwide treatment of HIV and tuberculosis together, as there has been a rise in the incidence of tuberculosis?

My Lords, indeed, I congratulate the Royal College of Nursing, particularly because we understand that stigma and discrimination are among the major obstacles to treating HIV and AIDS. I am pleased to announce that DfID will today publish guidance on best practice in dealing with stigma and discrimination for all its staff around the world and for those in the development community who are working on HIV/AIDS.

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that treatment of AIDS is much more than just supplying medicine, and that for both prevention and treatment it is essential to focus aid on the proper delivery of health services, particularly in rural areas?

My Lords, I totally agree with my noble friend. We have to be aware of the fact that for every new person put on ARV treatment, there are three or four new infections of HIV/AIDS. Therefore, we have to take a very comprehensive approach to prevention as well as the delivery of HIV/AIDS treatment. DfID’s focus has been very much on the creation of health systems in developing countries, a lot of the funding for which is not specifically earmarked to HIV/AIDS and not in the figures that I mentioned earlier. In particular, we look at the distribution of condoms, the availability of treatment for children and vulnerable groups, and gender issues, so we need to take a comprehensive approach.

My Lords—

My Lords—

My Lords, it is the turn of the Liberal Democrats.

My Lords, the Minister will have seen, as I have done, many children with HIV/AIDS. When will we see a significant improvement in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission? Will the Government’s new AIDS strategy, which they are working on at the moment, continue to earmark the treatment and care of children? There seem to be some doubts as to whether that will continue to be the case.

My Lords, I am happy to assure the noble Baroness that it is not the case that there will be any backing away from our commitment to children and women. I am conscious of the fact that we could be very effective in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission if we made the effort. Only 11 per cent of women receive treatment in order to prevent transmission to children. Of course, this is one of the major ways in which children get HIV/AIDS; in Africa, 90 per cent of children who have HIV/AIDS get it from mother-to-child transmission.

My Lords, is the Minister aware that yesterday the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said that churches need to be brave, imaginative and honest in the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS? Does she agree with the most reverend Primate that Governments need to be challenged to work effectively with faith-based organisations on this issue?

My Lords, I completely agree with the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. I am pleased to say that DfID in particular is focusing on working with faith groups, which are, especially in Africa, one of the best delivery mechanisms for HIV/AIDS treatment.

My Lords, would the Minister agree that the virus in question is called the immunodeficiency virus and attacks the body’s immune system, and that because it does so it makes the development of a vaccine more difficult than in the case of many other infections? Nevertheless, what progress is being made in the development of a vaccine against this particular virus?

My Lords, no communicable disease has been eradicated without a vaccine, so we are completely aware of the need to focus on a vaccine. Unfortunately, I can say only that it remains a long-term goal; currently, 30 candidates are being trialled for vaccination and none of them looks immediately viable. We had a disappointment earlier in the year with the vaccine that was the most advanced. Nevertheless, DfID continues to fund and was the first government donor of the international AIDS vaccine initiative. Approximately $900 million are going into vaccine research this year.

My Lords—

My Lords—

My Lords, it is the turn of the noble Earl, Lord Howe. Indeed, I think that it might have been last time.

My Lords, what progress has there been on research into microbicides that have been shown to be a barrier to the virus?

My Lords, microbicides are very important because of the feminisation of the virus. They could empower women and lead to a female-led solution, which may not be comprehensive but is part of a solution. Three first-generation products are currently on trial and we expect the results in 2009. There are two second-generation trials from which we shall receive data later, perhaps in 2010-11. However, we do not expect any products to be available on the market before 2010-11, if we are lucky.

asked Her Majesty’s Government:

What steps they are taking to seek to concert the policies of the European Union towards Kosovo.

My Lords, in recent meetings of the EU there has been strong recognition that the status quo in Kosovo is unsustainable and that an early settlement is vital. All within the EU recognise that Kosovo provides an important test of the credibility of the EU’s common foreign and security policy. At the General Affairs and External Relations Council on 19 November, the EU reiterated the necessity of rapidly finding a solution to the Kosovo status issue.

My Lords, in light of the withdrawal of the UN mediators yesterday and the dangerous probability of Hashim Thaçi, the Kosovo Prime Minister in waiting, making a unilateral declaration of independence, do the Government accept that the European Union should seek to engage with the Russian Government to promote further peaceful dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo, which, while recognising the internal autonomy of Kosovo, strives for a confederal solution that recognises the economic interdependence of those countries in the Balkans and the need to end ethnic conflict?

My Lords, noble Lords will know that the timing of this Question is very appropriate given that yesterday the troika, which included a Russian representative, announced that:

“Regrettably the parties were unable to reach agreement on”—

Kosovo’s future “status”.

Every effort has been made to involve Russia in an agreed decision and to make the two communities agree a common way forward.

Unfortunately, it looks as though we are at the end of the road and I am not sure that it is possible again to try to find a common way forward with Russia. The place to test that will be if this is brought back to the Security Council to approve the next steps.

My Lords, is the Minister aware that the great majority of the Albanian Kosovan community want an independent Kosovo? Should we not be supporting the right to self-determination of the Kosovan people and supporting their basic right of independence if the great majority—90 per cent—want that?

My Lords, the noble Lord points to the strong ambition for independence among the Kosovar community. However, it is precisely the need to find a solution to the problems of the Balkans that respects not only majority but minority rights that has led to this extended negotiation, and why we still have to find a political solution to this situation.

My Lords, are we not reaping the whirlwind of a decision far too long delayed, which should have been taken much earlier—preferably in 1999? Does the Minister recognise that in consequence the potential crisis in the Balkans extends way beyond Kosovo and includes now Bosnia and Herzegovina where the Serb authorities and Republika Srpska intend to hold a referendum preparatory to a unilateral declaration of independence and the break up of the Bosnian state? Does the Minister agree that that will initiate a crisis of far greater proportions even than that in Kosovo? Will he therefore assure the House that NATO is prepared, willing and able to take whatever steps are necessary to assure the internal security of Kosovo and the territorial integrity of Bosnia?

My Lords, I imagine that the noble Lord knows more about the situation than any of us in this House. Therefore his concern is one that we should all take enormously seriously. First, we should be encouraged by the fact that none of the parties to this conflict has suggested a reversion to violence: despite the very serious disagreements, all sides are still pursuing a political solution to this. In terms of the readiness of NATO, as I am sure the noble Lord is aware, there is actually a UK responsibility in the first part of next year to be the battalion ready for immediate deployment if extra needs occur. We are already heavily committed to that mission and I have no doubt that NATO and our allies will be able to call on us if the need for extra forces, which I devoutly hope does not occur, does arise.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, is completely right that this could all spark a much wider conflict and a split yet again in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which would be a tragedy. We are all for concerting our views with the EU and other countries but I urge the Minister to accept that, before we tick the box marked “independence”, which our American colleagues seem to be keen on, we should realise that Russia and Serbia want to go on talking, and that, for all its prickliness, Russia has sensitivities. They are that if countries start breaking up, even in the name of self-determination, other bits of Russia might fall off as well. If we understand that, we may just avoid having to be reinvolved with the troops—if we have the troops, of course—in another conflict in this area.

My Lords, the noble Lord is right to emphasise the need to keep talking and that is why I say that there must be a political approach. However, every opportunity has been given to Serbia and to Russia to provide a way forward. There have been endless negotiations, the Ahtisaari proposals and those of the troika and Ambassador Ischinger. We have to be realistic and accept that you cannot talk for ever. People must put proposals on the table or one must assume that talk has become a substitute for finding a solution.

My Lords, in the unfortunate event that UK forces have to be committed to this area, can the Minister assure the House that an exit strategy for those forces will be worked out before they are committed on the ground?

My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord makes an important point; I very much hope that that will be the case. I stress again that at the moment there is no indication by any party of a reversion to violence. We very much hope that we will find a political, not a military, solution to this situation.

My Lords, with permission, my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton will repeat a Statement on Remploy modernisation. We shall take it after the first debate—between the two debates.

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

Moved, That the debates on the Motions in the names of Baroness Gale and Lord Berkeley set down for today shall each be limited to two and a half hours.—(Baroness Ashton of Upholland.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

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

Moved, That the draft regulations and orders be referred to a Grand Committee.—(Baroness Ashton of Upholland.)

On Question, Motions agreed to.

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

Moved, That it be an instruction to the Committee of the Whole House to which the Climate Change Bill [HL] has been committed that they consider the Bill in the following order:

Clauses 1 to 26

Schedule 1

Clauses 27 to 38

Schedule 2

Clauses 39 to 41

Schedule 3

Clause 42

Schedule 4

Clauses 43 to 51

Schedule 5

Clauses 52 to 55

Schedule 6

Clauses 56 to 73.—(Lord Rooker.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

rose to call attention to the Government’s record on the management and prosecution of sexual offences; and to move for Papers.

The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity of holding this debate today, especially during White Ribbon Week and following the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on 25 November. Yesterday the Map of Gaps document was launched by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the End Violence Against Women coalition. It sets out geographical maps showing support services for women throughout the UK, or the lack of them. In addition, yesterday the Government issued their response to the consultation document, Convicting Rapists and Protecting Victims—Justice for Victims of Rape. It outlines the measures that the Government will take to further assist victims of rape and that we hope will result in a rise in the conviction rate. I am sure that my noble and learned friend will say a lot more about that later.

The UN definition of violence against women is:

“Any act of gender-based violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman, or that affects women disproportionately”.

It includes rape and sexual violence, domestic violence, forced marriage, stalking, trafficking and sexual exploitation, forced prostitution, crimes in the name of honour, female genital mutilation and sexual harassment. Violence against women is endemic in every country in the world; women can go nowhere to escape it. It acts as a weapon to control women and as a punishment. Rape is used as a weapon of war in many conflicts in the world today.

The figures of violence against women make depressing reading. Three million women across the UK experience violence each year. Many more women cope with the legacies of abuse experienced in the past as children or adults. Almost half of women in England and Wales experience domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking in their lifetime. Convictions for rape are falling—just 5.3 per cent of rapes reported to the police result in a conviction—but I will say more about that later. Women represent around 85 per cent of victims of forced marriage. It is estimated that 33,000 young women and girls are at risk of female genital mutilation. Other noble Lords will speak about those matters today.

The effects of violence against women include physical injury, gynaecological disorders, long-term mental health issues, self-harm and suicide. This violence is also connected with women’s social exclusion—for example, that of women offenders. Histories of violence and abuse often form a pathway into their offending behaviour. Research for the Government estimates that, in England and Wales in one year, domestic violence alone cost £23 billion—£17 billion is a human and emotional cost and £6 billion is a direct cost to the state.

Violence against women is both a cause and consequence of women’s inequality. Under some measures men are more likely to be victims of violence, but it is not usually part of an ongoing or repeated pattern of behaviour as violence against women is. Violence that women experience is usually committed by men they know—partners, family members, friends or work colleagues. In addition, sexual harassment in public is widespread and contributes to women’s fear of crime and whether they feel safe in public places at night. Women are twice as likely as men to be worried about violent crime.

Violence against women is an issue that cuts through all walks of life. Girls and young women are more likely to experience sexual violence. Older women are more likely to be abused by carers than are older men. Women with mental health problems and learning disabilities are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence. Ethnic-minority women face additional barriers to access and support, and experience particular forms of violence such as forced marriage, female genital mutilation and crimes in the name of honour.

Violence against women is a violation of women’s fundamental human rights—the right not to be treated in an inhumane and degrading way, the right for respect for private and family life, and the right to life. There have been many good initiatives by our Labour Government over the last 10 years, and I feel proud of the measures carried out and the laws put in place. Much of that drive has been made by my noble and learned friend the Attorney-General, and I congratulate her on and thank her for all her efforts.

The acceptance of violence against women needs to be tackled. An ICM poll commissioned by End Violence Against Women showed that 42 per cent of young people knew girls whose boyfriends had hit them, and that 40 per cent knew girls whose boyfriends had coerced or pressurised them into having sex—yet there is minimal work with children and young people to challenge attitudes that tolerate violence against women.

Map of Gaps, the document that was published jointly yesterday of which I spoke earlier, has for the first time mapped specialist violence-against-women services across the UK. It shows that for the 3 million women across the UK who experience violence each year and for the many more coping with legacies of abuse, specialist services are essential for their access to safety and justice and their ability to move on with their lives. The document is a useful tool for determining where and what services are required and where more funding and support are needed.

Most women across the UK have no access to rape crisis centres; and less than one-third of local authorities have any sexual violence service at all. A very small proportion of the UK is currently covered by the existing sexual assault referral centres, though the Government are extending the network. These centres are a place where victims can receive medical care and counselling and assist the police investigation through a forensic examination. There were five centres in 2001, but today there are 19. By the end of financial year 2008-09, there will be at least 36 centres.

Fewer than one in 10 local authorities have specialist services for ethnic-minority women, services which could address forced marriage, female genital mutilation and crimes of honour as well as other forms of violence, or services for women in prostitution. The End Violence Against Women coalition and the Equality and Human Rights Commission yesterday called on national government and local authorities to take urgent action to ensure that there is consistent national coverage and funding of specialised third-sector support services for all women.

Rape is one of the worst offences against women. It is estimated that a minimum of 47,000 women in England and Wales are raped each year. Most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows, often a partner or ex-partner. Up to 95 per cent of rapes are never reported to the police. The number of rape convictions has remained relatively stable, but the number of rapes reported to the police has been increasing year on year. The result has been that the number of rapes resulting in conviction has declined from 33 per cent in 1977 to 7.5 per cent in 1999 and to 5.29 per cent in 2004. Although there is a steady increase in the number of reported incidents, there has not been an increase in the number of convictions. Overall, less than 6 per cent of cases reported to the police in England and Wales result in a conviction, though the figures vary across England and Wales.

I shall take the rape conviction rates for 2004 as an example. The overall figure for all police forces in England and Wales was 5.29 per cent, but in Northamptonshire it was 13.79 per cent; in Cumbria, 12.7 per cent; and in south Wales, 12.18 per cent. Those are the three highest. The lowest three were Cambridgeshire, at 1.75 per cent; Suffolk, 1.6 per cent; and Gloucestershire, amazingly, at 0.86 per cent. The consequence is that men who commit rape in those police force areas know that they will never have to worry too much about being convicted. I do not know why some police areas have a better conviction rate than others, but it would be good to discover why. Perhaps their methods could be used in other parts of the country. The chief constable in south Wales, with one of the three highest conviction rates, is Barbara Wilding, a wonderful woman who works very hard on these issues.

While I believe that it is so important to do everything possible to achieve a better conviction rate, I also believe that efforts should be made to try to reduce the number of incidents of rape. In January, Dr Katherine Rake, the director of the Fawcett Society, said:

“More fundamentally we need to change the public debate about rape in which violence against women is often seen as acceptable and victims of rape are frequently blamed or disbelieved. The Government must take the lead in exposing the realities of rape and challenging the myths and stereotypes that surround them”.

For example, an Amnesty International opinion poll showed that a third of people believe that the woman who is raped is partially or totally responsible if she behaves in a flirtatious manner or is drunk or wearing “sexy or revealing clothes”. It is an amazing assumption: when a woman is raped, she and not the man is to blame.

How can we change the culture of our society and give a clear indication that violence against women in all its forms is totally unacceptable? One method would be an education programme which starts at an early age and teaches children about respect, including respect, certainly, for girls and women. Good programmes already exist, such as those that have been promoted by WOMANKIND, which has for past three years led research into the prevalence of violence against young women in UK schools and the accompanying attitudes and beliefs. WOMANKIND will tonight be launching its findings and recommendations, and those have important implications for the Government, local authorities and teachers. I look forward to reading the conclusions of that research.

I should like to say a few words about the White Ribbon Campaign. I knew very little about this campaign until recently when, on 25 November, to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I was invited to a service in Llandaff Cathedral, where I wore my white ribbon for the first time. The campaign was started by men whose aim is to end violence against women, and the wearing of a white ribbon signifies a commitment never to commit, condone or remain silent about violence against women. Men and boys are asked to wear a white ribbon to show their support, and the campaign encourages men to talk in schools, workplaces and places of worship about the problem of violence. It deserves our support. When men show other men that violence against women is unacceptable, it is a step forward in changing perceptions and attitudes.

I wish to put a suggestion to my noble and learned friend, and I ask her to comment on it in her response. Does she agree that there should be a long-term and sustained campaign to highlight the fact that violence against women in all its forms is totally unacceptable? I am aware that it takes a very long time to change a culture—but let us consider other campaigns, such as the one to highlight the dangers of drink-driving. That long-term and sustained campaign brought home the dangers of drink-driving to both drivers and victims and people now regard such behaviour as unacceptable. It was the same with the campaign highlighting the dangers of smoking, and there is now a smoking ban everywhere in the UK; but it took many years of campaigning, highlighting the health dangers to smoker and passive smoker alike, to achieve it. One can think of other campaigns that have changed attitudes—on the wearing of seat belts, for motorcyclists to wear crash helmets, and the recent ban on the use of mobile phones while driving. Those were evidence-based campaigns in which Governments have undertaken over the years to persuade the public that a behaviour is unacceptable because it harms people or damages their health.

The same sort of campaign targeting violence against women could be carried out by central government, the devolved nations and local authorities, and through education at school. It is government, passing laws, who can help change the culture. The Government have a great record on supporting women who suffer sexual and domestic violence: passing laws and setting up institutions to assist and support women victims; ensuring better training for the police and a better understanding of the nature of violence against women. Women have benefited from the Government’s actions in the past 10 years, and changes are occurring in society as a result. Although we are still some way from addressing the present culture and attitude towards women and from bringing about a society where all are treated equally, I believe that we are starting to get there. I beg to move for Papers.

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, for initiating this debate. She is a most doughty fighter on a practical and theoretical level for equality of rights for women and is universally admired in this House on that basis. I particularly welcome the comments that she made in the last part of her speech about the need to educate the public about the evil of violence against women. I join her in asking the Government whether they will consider conducting a campaign of the sort that she suggested.

My noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford will wind up on behalf of these Benches. His knowledge of the management and prosecution of offences is incomparably greater than mine, so I shall not trespass on what I consider to be his territory. Equally, new measures to be taken with respect to reforms of the criminal justice system for the benefit of complainants, announced yesterday by the Attorney-General’s Office, will no doubt inform the Minister’s response to this debate. I therefore propose to speak on a rather broader range of topics than might seem to be encompassed by a narrow interpretation of the title of this debate.

A report entitled Map of Gaps: The Postcode Lottery of Violence against Women Support Services was published yesterday. The work was carried out by the Child & Woman Abuse Studies Unit, published by End Violence Against Women and endorsed at its launch in a speech by Trevor Phillips, chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. It highlights the patchy and inadequate provision of support services for the 3 million women who experience violence each year in the United Kingdom. Is not that in itself a rather frightening piece of information? Headline conclusions are that most women in the UK have no access to a rape crisis centre and that fewer than 25 per cent of local authorities have any sexual violence support service at all. Fewer than 10 per cent of local authorities across the UK provide services for black and minority ethnic women suffering from forced marriage, female genital mutilation and so-called honour crimes. I am sure that reference will be made to that later in the debate. London and the south-east are among the areas that are particularly ill served in this respect and, given the weight of population in those two regions, that is rather disgraceful.

In contrast to the rest of the UK, Scotland is singled out in the report for taking a strategic view of the problems of violence against women and for allocating core funding for specialised services to deal with it. Can the Minister tell the House to what extent the recently announced government measures to change court practice and to provide more support services to victims of violence at a local level are in response to the information collected in this report? Do these court reforms, inasmuch as they affect court practice, have the support of the judiciary? Is legislation required to implement them, and will the Government take note of the strategic and practical approach of the Scottish authorities?

Turning briefly to the issue of women in prison, which has been much discussed in the House in recent months, I simply remind the Minister that women are sent to prison for relatively minor and non-violent crimes, that they are far more likely to self-harm and commit suicide than male prisoners and that it is very widely held that the imprisonment of women is particularly damaging both to them and to their families. Furthermore, women committed to prison are apparently more likely than the general female population to have been sexually abused at a young age. Do the Government have any plans to address these apparent differences in sentencing practices?

The trafficking of women and children for sexual purposes has recently been described as a worldwide crisis constituting the highest ever level of worldwide slavery. It is plain that this phenomenon is proving extremely hard to tackle. It is controlled by criminal gangs aided by electronic communication, which is difficult to intercept. Trafficked women are, as the Minister for Women in the other place pointed out in a speech last July, openly advertised in personal ads in local newspapers. The women are appallingly badly treated by what I am tempted to call their criminal gangmasters. They do not hold their own papers or passports, they do not earn their money directly and they do not even get the financial rewards of their activities. If they escape, they are likely to find themselves put into detention while decisions are taken about their return to their country of origin as illegal immigrants.

Trafficked children are in an even worse position. Their detention has been condemned by United Nation officials as being incompatible with current UN declarations on these matters. Will the Minister say what the Government propose to do about these women and children who are the victims of crime rather than criminals themselves? Are the Government concerned about the criticism from United Nations authorities of the United Kingdom’s manner of dealing with these people? Is there any hope that the Government will start to treat trafficked children as children in care rather than as children awaiting punishment for crimes that are not their own?

My speech has been brief because I have looked at the list of speakers and have guessed—I hope correctly—that they will cover virtually every topic that could be covered under this title. I look forward to the rest of the debate and to the Minister’s answers to all our questions.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Gale not only on initiating the debate but on the timing of it, coinciding as it does with the White Ribbon Campaign on violence against women. I also congratulate her on her persistence in pursuing this subject and on her opening address today.

The report published yesterday mapping out the services across the country for victims of violence, to which both noble Baronesses have referred, shows that only one-third of local authorities have any specialist support services for violence against women, even though one in 10 women in the country suffers from some form of violence each year. The End Violence Against Women coalition and the Equality and Human Rights Commission deserve great credit for instigating this important study. I hope that we might have time to have a full debate on the report in your Lordships’ House.

The Government’s recent announcement of the new public service agreement and the fact that national indicators will for the first time include violence targets should pave the way for improved and increased support by local authorities for women and child victims of violence. Today I will concentrate on two aspects of sexual offences: rape and offences against children. However, as has been said, they are only parts of the whole area of violence against women and children. Sexual offences are serious crimes against the person—crimes that deeply affect the lives of victims and their families. A number of pieces of legislation, particularly the Sexual Offences Act 2003, and supportive non-legislative initiatives have attempted to lay down acceptable standards of behaviour and outline the penalties if those standards are breached.

The crime of rape is an offence that is almost always carried out by men, mainly against women and girls and to a lesser extent by men against other men and boys. It is the ultimate expression of the power of one person over another. As my noble friend said, in the past five years the number of recorded rapes has nearly doubled from 8,593 in 2001 to 14,409 in 2005-06. Up to 95 per cent of rapes are never reported to the police. It is estimated that the total number is something like 47,000.

There are many reasons why victims decide not to go to the police, principally because they are uncertain of how the criminal justice system will treat them. Of the relatively few cases that are brought to trial, the 5.7 per cent conviction rate is lower than that for other sexual and violent offences. Eighty per cent of cases do not pass the investigation stage, with the CPS deciding that there is insufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution. Many cases also get withdrawn because people have little confidence in the system, as well as being concerned about going through what can be a humiliating and traumatic experience.

Measures to help jurors to understand the reality of rape will certainly help. The Solicitor-General’s announcement this week that every rape complainant will have the opportunity to have their final statement videoed and automatically admitted in court will help to reduce the amount of time during which she will have to relive her ordeal in court. More than that, the provision of advocacy and support is crucial. The introduction of specially trained officers, specialist prosecutors and the new sexual violence advisers should provide better support for victims before trial, as should the need for all police forces to develop action plans to implement improvements to rape investigations, as recommended in the guidelines Without Consent published in January this year.

However, the mainstay of support for victims of rape is rape crisis centres, many of which are facing financial difficulties resulting in closures and many women not having access to crucial support. In a recent press release, Rape Crisis says that it believes that part of its problems have arisen from the lack of local targets for dealing with sexual violence. The new PSA determined by the Government could, and I hope will, resolve the financial problems and ensure the continuity of these vital services.

Support also comes from the sexual assault referral centres, to which my noble friend referred. The first was established in 1986 and it is hoped that there will be up to 40 in about two years’ time. SARCs can be excellent in providing comprehensive care and multidisciplinary services, covering forensic examinations, counselling and working with the police. Few investigations into rape do not require some form of medical or forensic input, yet there is currently no formal specialist recognition within the medical establishment for forensic physicians who examine rape victims. Some police forces now outsource these services to commercial companies that employ doctors without the specialist knowledge, skills and attitudes to gather evidence objectively.

Well run SARCs can have a dramatic effect on conviction rates. The first SARC, St Mary’s in Manchester, is a centre of excellence and shows a local conviction rate for rape of 10 per cent, almost twice the national average. I ask my noble and learned friend whether there is not a case for speeding up the development of these referral centres, ensuring that they have the resources to be of a high standard, with fully trained forensic physicians and other staff working closely with the police to provide objective evidence for the courts.

A worrying trend is that the question of lesser sentences for so-called date rape is back on the agenda. Men must not be able to rape with impunity women and men with whom they have previously had sexual relations. Accepting a lift believing it to be the safest way to get home, or being invited in for coffee, is not consent or an invitation to sexual activity. The Government were right to resist pressure to distinguish differing types of rape, as they do not exist: rape is rape. The focus in a rape trial must be the legality of the conduct of the defendant, not the propriety of the complainant’s actions.

All sex crimes are abhorrent, none more so than those committed against children. Sexual health work with young people is complex and presents many challenges. I recently chaired a meeting for the FPA and the NSPCC on the subject of consent, power and coercion in relation to young people. We looked at the effect of the Sexual Offences Act and the 2006 revision of Working Together to Safeguard Children, which provide the legal and procedural framework for professionals working with young people. In spite of these and other guidance, the professionals present had a number of recurring concerns. For example, there is a lack of basic knowledge and understanding among young people about sex; some of them do not even know whether they actually had sex. That brings me once again to the need for statutory PSHE and SRE in schools, but that is another debate.

The major concern was around confidentiality. Concerns about confidentiality can deter young people from using sexual health services and can have a significant impact on the most vulnerable young people. Although a young person’s right to confidentiality is not absolute, protecting it can enable a young person to seek advice from a trained professional. However, some police forces are requiring professionals in their local area to report all young people under the age of 16 who are sexually active, regardless of whether the professionals think that they are at risk or whether both participants were of the same age and the sex was consensual. Whether we agree with it or not, it is a fact of life that young adolescents will engage in sexual behaviour. These police forces intend to keep a record of their investigations, even if they do not intend to take legal action. That can have an effect on those youngsters in their future life. I ask my noble and learned friend for a re-examination of the development of protocols in order to ensure confidentiality, as appropriate, and to provide greater safety for young people.

The Government have seriously attempted to reduce the level of sexual offences by a programme of legislation and guidance and they must be congratulated on doing so, but I end by asking my noble and learned friend whether that could not be taken one stage further by the development of a strategy and the suggestion of a campaign to bring together all strands of violence against women and children, whatever its form.

My Lords, like, I am sure, every Member of the House, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, on her initiative in relation to this debate and on the measured and moderate way in which she presented her case.

I shall concentrate my remarks on rape. The field is so wide ranging that I am sure it is not inappropriate to do that. I agree completely with everything the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, said in her most effective contribution. Rape is one of the vilest offences in the criminal calendar. It has the effect of shattering and destroying a life and a personality. In the courts, I have often felt that of the two evils, in relation to women, rape is probably a far more dreadful experience than the worst case of attempted murder.

Like everyone else, I looked with disquiet at the statistics published by the Fawcett Society earlier this month. I appreciate that the figures are extremely distressing. In 2005-06, 14,449 rapes were recorded in England and Wales and there were 728 convictions. Whether the exact figure is 5.4 per cent or 5.5 per cent matters not. There is a huge gap between the totality of the problem and the small number of convictions. Having said that, the number of cases reported is a very different figure from the number of cases presented in court. I have no figures after 2004—no doubt the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General will assist—but I understand that the figure for convictions, which must have included pleas of guilty, for 2004 was 28 per cent. That is not very far away from the figure for other very serious offences, most of which go to trial. On the other hand, one appreciates that of the thousands of reported cases, many are withdrawn by the complainant herself, very often out of terror of reprisals, or a feeling of inadequacy to face the embarrassment of a trial with all the protections that exist at the moment, or an inability to face what is regarded as the crudity, with the best will in the world, of the system of investigation and preparation for trial.

One appreciates that special, if not unique, circumstances apply to the offence of rape. In nearly all cases, only the complainant and the defendant will be present. In many cases, they will have known each other. Those are the difficult cases, not the cases in which the rapist hides behind a bush or in a dark alley. They may very well have cohabited with each other. They may even be married to each other.

The situation is further complicated by the element of drink. If drink has been taken in such a volume as to make it impossible for consent to be given, one appreciates that the reality of that consent is vitiated. Drink can affect a person’s memory of what exactly happened. It is also a great disinhibiter. There must be very many women who have consented to intercourse on account of drink when they would not have so consented without it. That does not make their consent invalid. That is a grey area, on which the jury must decide.

In my experience at the Bar, in most cases one was greatly impressed by the capacity of a jury to decide a case on the evidence, but rape juries were very often an exception. I do not know exactly why. I suspect that it may have had something to do with men who hated and despised women, women who hated and despised men, older women who did not like younger women, and so on. I suspect that it had much to do with a whole package of subliminal prejudices than it had to do, in some cases, with the evidence. One cannot change human nature in that way, but one can sometimes attempt to educate the community in that regard.

What are we to do? I suggest first what we should not do. There is no case at all for changing the legal definition of rape in the Sexual Offences Act 2003. That legislation was preceded by a great deal of consultation and study, and it is as clean-cut a series of issues to be put to the jury as one can have in any criminal legislation. Secondly, we should not for a moment contemplate having different levels of punishment. A wise judge looking at the facts as proven and as they appear to him or her in trying that case will be able to adjust the penalty properly in any conviction. Thirdly, I am somewhat horrified by the idea that the prosecution should be allowed to call expert evidence on the proclivities of men and women in this connection. If the prosecution is entitled to call such evidence, so must the defence. Before you know it, the jury will be cast adrift on a sea of uncertainty, dealing with all manner of irrelevant theorisations. Let us avoid that.

Nor is there a case for upping the penalties. The Leader of the Opposition in a speech a fortnight ago made that very point and, with great respect, I disagree with him. The maximum penalties are already up to ceiling height. The discretion allowed to a judge is total within his judicial capacity. Indeed, it would merely divert attention from the realities of the situation to think of adding to the penalties that already exist. Furthermore, they would make conviction less likely, rather than more likely, in most cases.

What is to be done of a positive nature? There is no panacean answer or comprehensive solution. I firmly believe that, as those who have preceded me have suggested, a great deal must be done to educate public opinion and young people in particular. There have been a number of surveys over the past five years. One of the most disquieting facts that I have seen is the number of young people who are blasé about having intercourse with a partner when that partner does not consent. I have seen figures of 40 per cent, 50 per cent and 60 per cent quoted: whatever the correct figure, it is extremely and shatteringly disquieting. Young people must be assisted to regard rape as utterly abhorrent and to have respect for their own bodies and their own lives, but, far more than that, to regard the lives and bodies of other people as sacrosanct. I know that it sounds very much like one generation preaching to another. These things, I have no doubt, have been said throughout history, but they are more relevant now than ever and the Government have their part to play.

I welcome the fact that women will be allowed to give video-recorded evidence. It has rather puzzled me why that did not happen earlier under the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999. It would be most proper for the evidence in chief to be the video-recorded complaint and for the woman to be cross-examined down the line by video link. More humane conditions and practices during investigations are certainly called for. We must reduce that huge percentage of people who see fit either not to complain or to withdraw their complaint at an earlier stage. There are many other matters to discuss, but time has forestalled me. I have no doubt that we shall return time and time again to this topic, which is one of the most violently disgraceful of criminal offences.

My Lords, that was a brilliant speech. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Gale on securing the debate. She will know, however, that while I want more convictions, I worry about false accusations. Earlier this year, a woman who had made a series of false allegations of sexual assault was named in Parliament, and there are many such cases. Recently, a Midlands businessman of impeccable reputation was released after three years of a sentence. His conviction was based on a tissue of lies. His accuser had a long history of false allegations and convictions for robbery. It was only following a referral from the CCRC and a police investigation that the accuser’s full record was exposed. Over 17 years and under eight different aliases, the accuser had made accusations of rape against her father in 1984, her step-father, a local boy in 1983 and further rapes and sexual attacks in 1998, in 1999, in March, July and December 2000 and in June 2001. On three separate occasions she alleged that she had been attacked from behind with a knife.

Astonishingly, the police had most of this information on file and hid it from the accused’s defence team. The woman was well known to the police as a serial liar. But for the diligence of a policeman and a barrister, Annie Johnston, the allegations would have destroyed his life. It was an outrage: but there is more. The accused then appealed against conviction. The CPS, which, unbelievably, was dissatisfied with the original sentence, applied in the name of the Attorney-General to have the sentence increased—I repeat, increased. It now argues that it was unaware of the reputation of the accused, but it should have been. Unbelievably, the sentence was increased to five years.

In 2004, the CCRC intervened. It was then that the whole sordid background of the accuser came out. It revealed that the police had hidden the truth from the defence and that an officer on the case had even been commended for his meticulous detective work. The law has become an ass. It is riddled with the potential for injustice. The police are cutting corners to secure convictions. The pressure for prosecutions and convictions is costing innocent men their liberty. Jurors—women jurors, in particular—are becoming suspicious. False accusers are gravely damaging the rights of women to have their cases properly handled by the police and the courts. We have to make it more difficult for women who lie. It is one way to restore confidence in the law.

The police need to carry out more detailed background checks on accusers. We should properly enforce with criminal sanctions the duty on the police to reveal evidence which is helpful to the defence: a few policemen in the dock might help. The right to lifelong anonymity for accusers under the 1992 Act should be amended. Under the law, the trial judge has, under a get-out clause in Section 3, discretion to remove lifelong anonymity. In the Court of Appeal the judge does not have that right. In the Warren Blackwell case, the judge wanted to name a serial accuser of rape, but could not do so. In that case, Lady Justice Hallett said:

“The judgment we have delivered gives rise to the concern that there may in the future be another case in which this complainant makes similar allegations against another man. If that were to happen, it would be in the interests of justice that the alleged attacker should be able to find out about, and use in his defence, the information contained in the report of the [CCRC] and referred to in this judgment. Parliament does not appear to have contemplated the risk of a complainant acting as this complainant is alleged to have done. We are concerned that there appears to be no means by which we can displace a complainant’s entitlement to anonymity in the interests of justice for any person against whom she may make allegations in the future”.

I am not arguing that anonymity of the accuser should automatically be lifted where a defendant is found not guilty. The rape may have taken place and acquittal may be as a result of insufficient evidence. However, in cases where evidence is fabricated, it is right that the trial judge should be able to lift anonymity. Surely it follows that this right should be extended to Appeal Court judges.

The question of prosecution for perjury by false accusers in rape cases should be reviewed. While the media now report more rape perjury prosecutions, there are inevitably cases which invite prosecution but where for medical reasons prosecution is inadvisable. In these cases a judge should direct that DNA is taken from the false accuser. While considering prosecution of the unfit we need, however, to recognise that many trials already take place where the defendant is not of sound mind. For example, if a defendant has a history of violence arising out of a psychiatric condition, he or she can still be prosecuted. If unfit to stand trial, the court already has the power to act under mental health legislation. I believe that a national register should be kept of persons deemed by the police to be false accusers. Where the identity of an accuser may be in doubt, DNA should be taken but destroyed if no match is found in the national database identifying the accuser as having made previous false allegations.

Innocent men should have the right to be protected from false allegations. Where accusers make false allegations and change their names to hide their identity, judges should be free to reveal all former identities. Without DNA safeguards and lifting anonymity, false accusers can run rings around the law and destroy lives. Why should a man who is found innocent not enjoy the same anonymity rights as a woman? Thanks to the 1976 Bill of my noble friend Lord Corbett, both men and women were given anonymity rights. In the case of men, anonymity would last up to conviction. But in 1988 there was a change in the law and the anonymity of men, once charged, was removed. It meant that thousands of men have had their reputations destroyed on the back of false allegations. The law now needs to change.

We also need new statistical data. The 5 per cent conviction rate is repeatedly used, while the 41 per cent rate for conviction is rarely mentioned—forgive me, but I have to dispute the statistics produced by my noble friend. That conviction rate is one of the highest in the criminal justice system. We need statistics on the number of allegations where no action is taken because the police disbelieve the complainant or where allegations are withdrawn because of a loss of confidence in the criminal justice system by the accuser. The work by Kelley, Lovatt and Regan, which I have always found very interesting, is immensely helpful in this area, but it concludes with the need for greater consistency in reporting statistics.

We need an in-depth investigation into the attitudes of juries to the issue of rape, but I know that it is difficult. Some jurors refuse to accept that date rape is on a par with rape with a knife on the towpath. For many, it is not “real rape”. “She asked for it” is still deeply ingrained in public prejudice. The fact that the trauma for the woman is the same is often not understood. No doubt the general public need to be educated and I am pleased that the response yesterday to the consultation paper did enforce that measure. Indeed, I agree strongly with what my noble friend Lady Gale said about these matters in her contribution. But jurors often recoil at the prospect of an eight-year sentence for rape where the parties are known to each other, and the police are well aware of that when deciding on whether to bring a case. The judges are well aware of the issue of gravity, and often set the sentence accordingly, but many jurors do not understand that when they are deciding on guilt.

We should consider the New Zealand practice where there are two different crimes: one of sexual violation, which would turn on the issue of consent, and the other of aggravated sexual violence, which would provide for even greater penalty and turn on whether the victim was unconscious, unlawfully detained, subject to a deception, unable to communicate a lack of consent, subject to a rape through impersonation, a minor or threatened with a weapon. This would avoid creating the lesser offence of date rape which many resist. Aggravated sexual violence could happen in all circumstances, whether it be date rape, marital rape or rape by a stranger. The conviction rates in New Zealand are far higher than ours.

The question remains: how many innocent men are now in prison for a rape they never committed and where the false accuser remains free? Far worse, how many guilty men are there out there who “got away with it”? We have a broken back system of investigation, prosecution and bad law. We need a rewrite of the law.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on her fortitude in the way she has championed women’s issues and for the clear and concise way in which she opened the debate.

Kofi Annan said:

“Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights violation and it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality development and peace”.

Violence against women is widespread all around the world. Amnesty International states that between 20 and 60 per cent of women worldwide report to have been beaten by their partners; and between 40 and 80 per cent of all physical abuse suffered by women is at the hands of a close family member or friend. While the problem tends to affect the poorest most severely, it affects women of all classes and ethnicities; poverty and marginal isolation leave some women more vulnerable to violence. Without the right kind of assistance, it is difficult for those living in poverty to escape abusive situations, to obtain protection and to access the criminal justice system to seek redress.

Gender abuse is broad-based. It includes physical, sexual and psychological abuse—for example, rape, female genital mutilation, sexual harassment, sexual assault, trafficking, forced prostitution and female infanticide. The abuse of women has an indelible impact on many aspects of women’s lives, including their psychological well-being, self-esteem, bodily integrity, public participation, autonomy and the well-being of their children.

The UN declaration on the elimination of violence against women states that,

“violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men … and that violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared to men”.

For the enslaved African woman, this clearly was the case. In fact, it has its origins in the days of the enslavement of African peoples. It was common practice for enslavers to further abuse young African women by raping them and using them to give sexual experience to their sons. Sad to say, the descendants of the enslaved still carry on the practice. Hardly a week goes by when there is not a report of some young woman being so abused by either her peers, her father, a male relative or a family friend.

Let me inject a story here which follows well on the position taken by the previous speaker on men. Cassie was a highly intelligent young woman who was brutally murdered in her home by a sex offender. In October 2001, Cassie was alone at home; she was murdered and left to be discovered by her sisters, who still suffer from the sight that met their eyes. After months of police investigation, her ex-boyfriend was charged and brought to trial for her murder. The trial took place one year later and the accused was acquitted by the jury due to a lack of forensic evidence. The police had no other suspect. The investigating officers, friends and family still remain certain that it was her ex-boyfriend who carried out the brutal attack, but without forensic evidence the jury felt unable to find him guilty.

Cassie was aged 14 when she met her ex-boyfriend. She did not know that he had been involved in the criminal justice system and had served a sentence for rape. Cassie’s relationship, even at that early stage, had all the elements of violence; it lasted two years. It was only after the trial that the family was told of his violent and abusive behaviour towards women. In every violent relationship there are victims; unfortunately Cassie was no exception and she ultimately paid the price with her life. Her family, through loyalty to Cassie, did not tell anyone of the degrading violence she suffered; it was too horrific. Cassie’s attacker has since gone on to commit crimes of this nature and I am told he is awaiting trial.

The second case is that of a 10 year-old who was raped by two men. The judge in the case said this 10 year-old child dressed as a young woman. In his summing up he further said that the young child had regularly worn make up, strappy tops and jeans. He said that she was a very difficult and needy child; that she was sexually precocious and liked to dress provocatively; he said that she looked 16. In turn, the judge gave the attackers lenient sentences. One attacker received concurrent sentences of two years and 18 months; he was free after nine months. The other attacker was given nine months; he served only four weeks. The judge suggested that the child should be given money to buy a bicycle to take her mind off things.

This is why I believe the Government should consider encouraging courses where men can unlearn the way they are brought up to believe that their strength is a hallmark for obtaining sex or for beating women without any thought of how the victim feels. The judge showed more sympathy to the offenders than the 10 year-old child. More could be done to listen to the victims. The Minister may wish to take on board the fact that several years ago we began a movement in Britain teaching racism awareness that was very successful. We should consider how we can introduce awareness training in sexual offences so that not only those who commit the offence but those who are judging the offenders are aware of what they are really dealing with.

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, is receiving a bouquet of tributes today and I wish to add my own laurel. She has been a great champion of women. She is admired widely for her persistence on the subject, and I hope she is warmed by the great affection she is receiving today in this House.

I also congratulate the Government on the steps they have taken to deal with criminal justice issues affecting women. It cannot be sufficiently emphasised that no Government have ever been as active on the issues of rape, domestic violence, honour killing, prostitution, sex trafficking or sexual abuse. No Government have done as much as this one about that list of issues, and proper tribute should be paid to the Ministers who have struggled to find ways to improve the criminal justice system for the female half of the population.

Confidence in the law requires that the concerns of women are addressed. As the Attorney-General will confirm, whenever she or any woman lawyer addresses a public gathering, these are the issues that women raise and where they too often describe a negative experience. I have been speaking and writing on these issues now for some 30-odd years. I also remember that when I first wrote the book Eve was Framed back in the early 1990s—I recently rewrote it—I took part in many debates with judges and they would all insist that the law was gender-blind. I remember appearing with one such judge on a television programme and him saying to me afterwards, “Helena, I don’t want you to think that I’m against women. I voted for them to join the Kennel Club”.

I am afraid that even today there are still too many within the law who believe that the law is neutral—an objective set of rules. It is slowly being recognised that the law from the beginning of time was made largely with men in mind or from a male perspective. That was not a result of some act of male conspiracy perpetrated by men in long wigs. It was simply a reflection of the absence of women within the law and within Parliament because of women’s place within society. Women’s experience was absent from the law. That is why so many of us for so long argued for greater diversity within the judiciary or for steps to be taken to increase the presence of women in Parliament.

While the numbers game may encourage us to believe that discrimination is all in the past—women are now in the profession in significant numbers, and there are more women on the Bench—it has yet to be sufficiently acknowledged that legal cultures are still entrenched, as indeed are social attitudes, which are still premised too often on notions of good, bad and mad women, those who are worthy of the law’s protection and those who are less so. Women coming before the courts still too often encounter myths and stereotypes that disfigure the legal process. If a woman was drunk, has a history of mental illness or has been promiscuous, even today she might well forfeit the sympathy of the court, her testimony treated with caution and her account deemed suspect, however marauding her assailant has been.

Rape is the perfect example of the inadequacy of legal reform to challenge the more immutable forces operating in the law. All the changes designed to secure justice for women who have been raped, from removal of the corroboration requirement to restrictions on the right to cross-examine, have amounted to little, as the Fawcett statistics show. Despite all the efforts to improve the system, the stumbling block is that the woman knows that cross-examination will expose her to all the double standards that confront women and to all the ways she will be questioned differently from a man, and ultimately it will be her word against his.

Jurors hold complex and unspoken biases when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality. There are two important initiatives that have to be central to any cultural shift. I am glad that the Government have abandoned their interest in expert testimony to be called by the Crown, for all the reasons that have been described by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. I remember a book being published here called The Ultimate Violation, to which I wrote the foreword. It was written back in the early 1990s by an American lawyer and it advocated such a role for experts. I opposed it then and I oppose it now, for the reasons the noble Lord has given.

I welcome the efforts to improve judicial training in this sphere. That is one of the key initiatives. Too many judges still think that drunken consent is good enough. I also think it is vital that judges themselves are educated about the ways in which women often respond to rape. Many fail to report immediately because they are traumatised or ashamed. The stigma attached to rape still remains. Juries should therefore have it explained that a delay in reporting does not automatically mean the allegation is a concoction but may well reflect an understandable reaction. Women often confide in family or friends soon after the event but delay in going to the police, and that evidence of early reporting should be admissible, as the Government are recommending.

I also see the power of showing a video of the woman making her complaint. The reason why that can be so important is that by the time a woman comes to the witness box to testify, and I have seen this, she is often very controlled and unemotional about her experience—what psychologists describe as having “lack of affect”. That is because the only way to live with the trauma and emotional pain of so terrible an event is to distance yourself emotionally from what has happened. For juries, that can make the complainant very flat and uncompelling. Judges should be made aware of how rape operates on a victim and sum up to the jury accordingly.

There also has to be a greater campaign for public awareness. The Government should take every opportunity to raise understanding about the psychological effects of rape and other forms of violence. A public information campaign, particularly in our schools, would have more impact than any fine tuning of the law.

The question is still asked why reforms of the rape law never seem to have the impact we desire; they never seem to address such a serious injustice. One of the difficulties is that rape will almost invariably be a crime committed in private, as the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, said. Often the incidents take place between people who are known to each other and juries are always reluctant to convict on one person’s word against another’s, especially where there is so much cultural and social baggage.

The gap in the provision of services that has been described by other speakers is sometimes reflected in the gap in policing responses around the country. To what extent is the CPS introducing specialist teams to deal with sexual offences?

I shall deal briefly with the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. He has railed against injustice, as I do frequently. Of course there are occasions when false allegations are made. In my experience, they are rare. I am afraid that I disagreed with him before on the issue of anonymity, and I do so again. Anonymity is very important if we are to encourage women to come forward and seek justice for these offences. He has described police behaving unfairly to an accused. I am afraid that happens, and I hope he will have those thoughts in his mind when he is busy supporting identity cards and the erosion of civil liberties.

The reason for law reform’s failure is that rape is the ultimate buffer. It is where the law crashes up against the rawest display of the continuing power imbalance between men and women. It is where distorted notions of masculinity, misogyny and male entitlement surface. As our society becomes fairer, women are genuinely seen and treated as the equal of men and sex takes place in a spirit of real mutuality; it will be only then that we will see real justice for women. In the mean time, I applaud the Government for their latest efforts.

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, and expressing admiration and respect for her. I express my admiration also for my noble and learned friend the Attorney-General. When I was a non-executive director in the Home Office, I witnessed her dedicated, persistent and creative approach as a Minister there. We have much to be grateful to her for, and I am proud of the Government’s record in this area.

The extent to which violence is perpetrated against women in our society is a stain on it. It is a stain of which we must be aware and which we must be unstinting in our efforts to remove, be it in the form of domestic violence against wives, partners and children, or of so-called “honour” killings, the dishonour of which shames those who do not condemn them, or of the violent pornography which is becoming all too common in many forms of our media, or of the despicable sexual violence against women, particularly those who have been trafficked, that takes place in the form of prostitution. There are many more examples. They are all issues which we must redouble our efforts to address.

I shall not speak for very long, because others have spoken with much more flair, energy and experience. I am grateful to those who have expressed some of my own ideas and thoughts. However, I ask the Government to make unlawful the purchase of sex. We should stand up and condemn the commodification of women through the purchase of sex, particularly since most statistics suggest that a substantial number of women are engaged in the sex trade not through consent or for any reason other than economic need or being forced by slave masters of one kind or another because they are trafficked. I ask the Government carefully to consider whether a new sexual offence outlawing the purchase of sex could be introduced. It has been done in Scandinavia to significant effect.

I support those noble Lords who have asked for a campaign to highlight the horrors and extent of sexual violence against women. However, the campaign should emphasise not so much the victim and how awful they feel—although we have all been made aware in graphic terms of that today through stories such as those related by my noble friend Lady Howells, which fill us all with shock and upset—as the violent impulses of men who perpetrate violence against women. Most men are good, decent human beings—indeed, I am married to one, as is my daughter, and I would recommend it highly. However, there is a small proportion of men whose masculinity has become so distorted by the oversexualisation of our society and the extent to which violence is seen as a solution to many problems that they are desperately in need of help. Any campaign that raises awareness of the extent of sexual violence against women should emphasise in particular the need for men to readdress the violent aspects of their nature.

My Lords, I am glad that my noble friend Lady Gale has given us the opportunity to discuss this important issue, and I am delighted that my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland will respond. She has always been sympathetic to representations made to her on sexual offences, and I look forward to her response today. It is a subject that we should all keep on the agenda.

I shall speak about young people and sexual exploitation, and include briefly the issue of trafficking. As my noble friend Lady Gould said earlier, the exploitation of children is particularly horrendous. Sexual exploitation is the use of children for the sexual satisfaction of adults. Unequal power relations are implicit in this, and the child is exploited for her or his youth and sexuality, as set out by the UN in 2001. Sexual exploitation involves a sexual component without consent. Sexually exploited children and young people are victims of abuse. They should not be treated as offenders in relation to prostitution. This has been clearly stated in the Department of Health’s guidance for safeguarding young people, and by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Home Office.

There has been much research on exploited children. I am grateful particularly to Professor Jenny Pearce, who is chair of the National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People, for sharing her thoughts with me. She points out that those young people who persistently return to selling sex are the most vulnerable, most damaged and most in need of welfare services. They are most likely to be trapped in abusive relationships with paedophile rings. Criminalising young people does not help. What they need is support; what they need is therapeutic secure provision. I know that this matter has been put to the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which is rewriting guidance. I look forward to seeing that guidance at a later point.

The National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People supports 129 projects across the country. It recommends the removal of all forms of criminalisation of offences related to prostitution involving children and young people, and the removal of the use of ASBOs in such circumstances . I quote from Dr Pearce:

“All sexually exploited children and young people, especially those whose behaviour is challenging and difficult, need to be understood as victims of sexual abuse. Their challenging behaviour is a result of abuse and they should be worked with through the child protection welfare procedures”.

Every local safeguarding children board should have a strategy on this. It would mean addressing the need for local therapeutic services and secure therapeutic services for the most damaged and vulnerable young people. They must not be criminalised.

Research suggests that support for such vulnerable young people at an early stage of risk can prevent a descent into prostitution. Barnardo’s has recently carried out a cost-benefit analysis. Early prevention can halt escalation of young people’s use of intensive support services, which can cost more than £300,000 a year.

Local safeguarding children boards need a protocol for safeguarding sexually exploited children and young people, which includes identifying how risk assessment is carried out. Each board needs a multi-agency subgroup which focuses on reviewing and developing care plans. They need also a dedicated service that can undertake outreach work for sexually exploited young people. Research and practice have shown that if such strategies are in place, children will be better protected—and there is good practice around; for example, in Blackpool, Sheffield, London and Derby. I repeat: these children are not criminals; they are children in need.

Inspectorates need to identify and review progress of each local safeguarding children board in relation to their protocols for sexually exploited children and young people. Particular attention needs to be given to those young people at the extreme edge of exploitation: those selling sex, living away from home, often in an abuser’s accommodation, or suffering self-abuse and drug and alcohol problems. Often all these problems apply to one child. Multi-agency work must be encouraged, particularly between police and child protection services and between child and adolescent mental health services and safeguarding children boards. I know that ongoing research funded by the Home Office is looking into improving practice on gathering evidence against abusers and taking cases to court. There is legislation which enables this—for example, the Child Abduction Act 1984 and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004. I understand that the Sexual Offences Act 2003, while being welcome, is underused. How might the Government pull together various departments to tackle the issue of sexual exploitation of children? Also, will the 2001 national plan on safeguarding sexually exploited children and young people be updated, as it is seriously out of date?

On the trafficking of people for sexual or other purposes, the majority of the 800,000 people who are trafficked are women, especially for the sex industries. Women trapped in poverty and denied education are more likely to be desperate and to be misused in this way. Many are the victims of abuse and rape. According to the UNHCR one in five women are victims of rape and between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of these are against girls under 16 years of age. Organisations such as Plan International and Stop the Traffik and other humanitarian organisations give many examples of the dreadful abuse of young men and women when trafficked either internally or across international borders.

In the case of trafficked young people, research suggests that better provision of interpreters at airports and reception points is essential. A review of the “going missing” population suggests that over 50 per cent of trafficked young people placed into local authority care go missing within 72 hours. This can be tackled by better interpreter provision, specialised foster care provision, a review of private foster care arrangements and specialist youth services that can support the young person. There are examples of good practice in Sheffield, Hillingdon and Croydon. There is research and guidance—for example, by the NSPCC and the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Could cross-government initiatives be instigated? Such children should be helped and supported, not criminalised. Child protection, in whatever form it takes, is a serious issue for all government departments. I look forward to the Minister's response.

My Lords, I join others in congratulating my noble friend on securing this debate and on her indefatigable pursuit of related topics, especially her defence of women who have been raped. We all have cause to be grateful to her and to a Government who take this subject so seriously and have done, and are doing, so much in legislation and public education, as personified by my noble and learned friend the Attorney-General, who will be replying to this debate.

I am sure that we were all delighted with Wednesday’s announcement about the guidance to be given to courts on the treatment of woman who have been raped. I am as shocked as any feeling person must be about the low rate of conviction for rape and, indeed, about the extraordinarily low rate of reporting this terrible crime When I was in New Zealand earlier this year, where the conviction rate is much higher, as my noble friend said, I was struck by the difference in attitudes to women who are raped. There, attitudes start with sympathy, understanding and belief, rather than an attempt to apportion blame to the woman because of her perceived complicity, either because of her dress, because she has been drinking or because of her sexual history—all attitudes with which we are sadly familiar in our country. So I very much welcome the new proposals.

Today I shall focus on pornography—its availability, its effect and the Government’s efforts to control it. In the early 1990s, I attended one of the Civil Service top management programmes. I remember a session on the future of IT and how it would transform all our lives. It seems incredible now but back then we had not yet come to see the internet as such an integral part of our lives; in fact, I may just have been struggling to come to terms with faxes. I remember the lecturer telling us that by far the majority of what we now call “hits” on the internet were then, and in his view always would be, to access pornographic sites. I remember how shocked and disbelieving all the participants were, taken up as we were with the possibilities for increasing the sum of human knowledge that the internet offered and its ability to educate and inform and to increase participation in just about every way you can imagine.

Later in the same week, we moved on to one of our case studies—the Metropolitan Police—where we were exposed to the widespread use of the internet among paedophile rings for the exploitation of women and especially of children. I am a social worker and have worked in very rough areas of the country and among very distressed people, but I was shocked by the films and photographs that the police had to monitor and very glad that they were doing it so that others did not have to.

Since then, how much worse and more widespread this has become. I am thankful for the filters that our IT systems provide in your Lordships’ House, but I know that most people are bombarded with the offers that pop up constantly on their screens, offering access to images that once were available only through great effort and through channels that were sufficiently risky as to put most people off. I do not wish to sound unduly censorious on this matter. I suppose what adults do in the privacy of their own homes is their business and anyone who has ever been engaged in counselling work or sexuality workshops, as I have, knows that fantasies can work wonders for a couple’s fading sex life. But most pornography is not about what most of us would call “normal” sex; it is about violence, humiliation and exploitation of one human being by another and we have a duty to protect its victims.

There is little reliable evidence about whether viewing pornography leads to sexual offences, but I do not find it difficult to conclude that the very availability of such material must inure people to its existence. The fact that you can access this stuff in the total privacy of your bedroom so that no one need know and you do not run the risk of being found out must mean that the moral censure that we all fear does not exist as a restraining factor. Moreover, the constant viewing of women or, worse, children—the so-called PTHC factor; in case your Lordships are not familiar with that acronym, I am afraid that it stands for “pre-teen hardcore”—being abused must surely to some extent numb one to the outrage of such behaviour.

We must never forget that behind most pornographic images of children is an abused child and that, like women who have been raped, they will suffer for years, probably all their lives, not only from the offence itself but from the knowledge that such material will be pored over for years by viewers. According to the Internet Watch Foundation, access to this type of material has quadrupled over three years and the more serious degrading images are growing in number fastest. Of course, the police are overwhelmed by the time taken to track down those who download this stuff, but there is an increasing understanding that we must also devote time to discover the producers, often part of big international concerns, not just the distributors and buyers. We cannot ignore the part that poverty plays in this; when people are poor they are, as we know, driven to desperation, which leads to them being vulnerable to abusers.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 has succeeded in providing a clear legal framework to tackle sexual offending in the 21st century. The extension of what constitutes the offence of rape and the introduction of other offences was very much to be welcomed. In particular, it offered a coherent regime of offences to tackle sexual offending against children, especially those aged under 13. This ability to offer greater protection to vulnerable members of the community, especially children, was a great step forward, particularly identifying predatory acts such as grooming.

Through the Internet Watch Foundation, progress has continued to be made in regulating the internet. Perhaps we can find some small measure of comfort in the fact that less than 1 per cent of child abuse content appears to be hosted here in the United Kingdom. Recently, there have also been welcome signs that internet service providers are taking a more proactive approach themselves. Of course, the Government actively support efforts within the European Union and more widely to combat child pornography on the internet.

The recently introduced criminal justice Bill, now in its Committee stage in the House of Commons, is also to be welcomed, as it covers aspects of pornography such as the possession of images that are both extreme and pornographic. The proposals are based on extensive consultation, but I am afraid that they are still subject to criticism about what constitutes “extreme” or indeed “pornographic”.

Of course, some will see such proposals as a restriction of personal freedom and will tell us again that there is no firm evidence that possession of such material is bound to corrupt. For my part, it is self-evident that when the general tendency is to be more accepting of pornography than we have ever been—where images once available only in back rooms in hushed tones now scream at you from your local newspaper shop—that is bound to lead to a loss of inhibition and increased leniency about what is and is not morally acceptable. I believe that this is liable to damage not only the potential victim but the potential perpetrator; it damages overall the community and its moral standards. I hope that when the Bill comes to this House, which I believe will be in January, we will give it a very positive response. I also hope that the Government and all those who have anything to do with lawmaking will continue to be vigilant in tackling this horrendous issue.

My Lords, it is not unusual for me to speak on female genital mutilation in your Lordships’ House, but I believe that putting an end to it is so serious and important a goal that raising the subject frequently is essential. Indeed, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Gale for giving me the opportunity to do so once again by instituting this debate and I congratulate her on all aspects of what she said.

Sexual offences against women are a wound on the body of our society, and none more so, I suggest, than genital mutilation, which is literally a wound that never truly heals in the whole of a woman’s lifetime. It is a rape of the grossest kind, for it is always performed either against a woman’s will—more probably a small female child’s will—or with a reluctant consent that she sees as inevitable. I have gone into the cruel and ugly details of this procedure here in this House too often to enter into them again. Suffice it to say that once a woman—or baby or infant, no matter which so long as she is female—has undergone this brutal procedure, she will suffer from its effects for her whole childbearing life and beyond. Her risk of giving birth to a dead child will be increased, as will her own chance of dying, apart from the degrading results present in all aspects of her sexual and reproductive existence. At present, the most reliable figures obtainable show that 15,000 women and girls are, as my noble friend Lady Gale pointed out, at risk of undergoing the mutilation of their sexual organs; this is not in Africa, where the threat is far higher, but here in the United Kingdom.

Immigrants from Africa, particularly the Horn of Africa, practise FGM. Most of them carry it out with the mistaken aim of benefiting a daughter or granddaughter. They believe that only by these means can they guarantee a girl a husband and, in their eyes, a husband is essential to a woman’s well-being and sometimes, indeed, to her survival. She will be told that only in this way can she “become a woman”. Her contemporaries will ask her, expecting a positive answer, whether she has been “cut”. In Somalia, for instance, the FGM rate is as much as 99 per cent of the female population. Immigrants bring the custom here. When health professionals first saw the results of FGM in immigrant women in the 1970s, they believed that they were looking at a congenital malformation of a woman’s sexual and reproductive organs. Only its prevalence and their experience taught them that this was the result of mutilation carried out with a sharp stone or an often infected knife and without anaesthesia. Incidentally, the procedure is carried out by women, never by men.

Governments have not been slow to introduce legislation making this procedure, in its various forms, illegal. The first legislation was the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985, which was superseded 19 years later by the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, introduced as a Private Member’s Bill and supported by the present Government. This provided a maximum penalty of 14 years’ imprisonment for anyone carrying out the procedure or taking a woman or female child out of this country to have it performed overseas where it may not be against the law.

That is an excellent measure, yet under it no prosecution has yet been brought. This, I now believe, is in no way due to lack of effort on the part of the police or the social services, though it is true that still too few teachers in primary schools are aware of the threat to their small female pupils and too few nurses and midwives yet know what FGM is and what they should be on the watch for. There are still only a very few local authority-maintained refuges available to women trying to escape FGM, although the appalling fact is that, even if there were hundreds, most victims would be far too young to have recourse to them.

Last summer, the Metropolitan Police offered a reward of £20,000 to anyone giving information that would lead to a successful prosecution for FGM. However, although we hear of ongoing investigations, no prosecution has yet been brought. Twenty thousand pounds is a substantial sum, large to anyone, but enormous to most of those living in the probably straitened circumstances of African immigrant communities. Yet there has been no prosecution. That leads us to believe what we had already begun to suspect, which is that people who practise this rite—I hurry to say that I spell the word RITE—hold it almost as an article of faith that their practice must at all cost be kept secret and, indeed, never be spoken of.

Does my noble and learned friend agree that this is a taboo that must be broken and that those who speak, in this particular instance, of ancient traditions being respected must not be listened to? As recently as the spring of this year, at a conference in Kenya, Sheikh Harun Rashid spoke for Muslim leaders when he said that,

“circumcising girls is not a requirement in Islam”.

Sheikh Mohamed Abdi said:

“The practice has done a lot of damage to our girls”.

FGM is supported by no holy book and by no religion, only by a custom whose origins are lost in the mists of time.

In ridding this country, if not the world, of this practice, we have a hard task ahead of us—a task for the Government, social services, the police, schools, hospitals and ordinary people who may be neighbours or friends of those perpetrators who are themselves often ignorant of the law and perceive themselves to be innocent of wrongdoing. I have spoken to women who have voluntarily taken on the task of telling other women in their community what the law is and what the penalties involve. This is essential because many speak no English and even in their own language lack terms for sexual organs and sexual practices that we, in ours, have come to take for granted. They are making some headway. One woman with whom I had a conversation told me that, by persuasion and an explanation of the law, she had prevented a neighbour from taking her five daughters home to Somalia for FGM.

Persuasion and enlightenment must continue, because it is inconceivable in a civilised society that women should continue, in the 21st century, to have their married lives made shameful and ugly and their childbearing an agony through damage intentionally carried out in their defenceless childhoods. The truly sad thing is that this damage is the result not of wanton cruelty or uncontrolled vengefulness, as rape is, but of a mistaken kindness and desire to secure a young girl’s happiness and the approbation of the society in which she lives.

My Lords, it must be heart-warming for the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, to note that this very important debate has ranged widely over issues such as pornography, criminalising the purchase of sex, trafficking, and genital mutilation. All those are very big subjects. I hope that your Lordships will forgive me if I do not pursue each and every one of them but focus instead on rape and the announcements made yesterday by the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General.

I concur wholeheartedly with the description of that crime given by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, in his brilliant speech. I am proud that I voted for him in 1964 when he was a Plaid Cymru candidate in my home town. I want to focus on the unacceptable rate of attrition of rape complaints which has led to low conviction rates. It is disappointing that that attrition has not improved with the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. I declare an interest as a practising criminal advocate who has perhaps prosecuted more often than defended and sat on many rape trials.

There is a very serious problem to be addressed. Jurors who come blinking into the jury box will never have had any experience of a rape or child case. They find themselves plunged into an alien environment which is very unsettling. Many come with fixed views which the more enlightened among us may find unacceptable. These are the subliminal prejudices to which the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, referred. The problem is that this is the way that a large number of the public think, and we have to face that even though it may not be politically correct for them to do so.

Prejudices exist as much as, if not more, among women, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, conceded. Often they harshly criticise the behaviour of other women. The sort of comments that we hear in the courts include the following. “Partner rape is not really rape”. Provocative clothing: “What did she expect? What is a man supposed to do?”. Drunkenness: “What did she think she was doing getting into a state like that?”. Accepting an invitation to coffee at 3 am and consenting to being kissed: “What did she expect?”. “She must have consented; otherwise she would have been injured”. “Women are emotional and hysterical”. “If she didn’t shout and scream it can’t be rape”. “Why didn’t she tell her mum straight away?”. “Women are filled with malice towards their past lovers”. And so on. All these are subliminal prejudices. They are entrenched views. Many people with such views become jurors. It is important that we address this problem, but how do we deal with it?

No option should be entirely ruled out but experience tells me that the danger of stereotyping a victim’s response to rape should be addressed at the very beginning of the trial before the case is opened and before the complainant gives her evidence. This rules out comment by the prosecutor or directions by the judge in his summing-up towards the close of the trial—the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, suggested that this might be a way forward—by which time the jurors will already have made up their minds about the credibility of the complainant based on their prejudices. Those prejudices need to be countered from the outset. That is why there has been discussion about expert evidence being called in court on oath.

The introduction of an expert to give evidence in the course of a trial gives rise to what we call a satellite trial. Who is an expert for these purposes? It is not like a pathologist, a scientist specialising in DNA or a fingerprint expert, who look at something that has occurred in a case. Who do you call—a social anthropologist? I once called one to explain the habits and customs of the Dinka tribe in the Sudan. However, I do not think that we need to have one to tell a Swansea jury about the habits and customs of the people of Swansea.

Should a statistician be called? Noble Lords will remember the Sally Clark case, where the pathologist Sir Roy Meadow said that the chances of two children dying by chance were 73 million to one. In the appeal the Royal Statistical Society determined that the true figure was 200:1. So we should call experts in what—statistics? An expert’s evidence would obviously have to be tested by the defence. The reliability of his opinion and of the statistics he produced would be subject to challenge, and the defence would be entitled—as the Government’s consultation document issued last spring conceded—to call another expert in rebuttal. The conflict between experts would become inextricably mixed up with the real issue: was the complainant raped, or was there consensual intercourse? I am happy that the Government have already rejected that idea, and I note that those with experience of rape trials who have spoken today have all agreed.

I favour the production of a standard video in the form of a neutral public information film which should be shown to juries at the very commencement of the trial and before the case is opened by the prosecution. The film would fully and fairly address prejudices and stereotypes and require jurors to approach the case they are about to hear with an open mind and not with the baggage that they have brought with them. In the interests of fairness such a film would obviously have to refer to the fact that false allegations of rape are sometimes made, an issue which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, spoke about. The statistics show that about 12 per cent of complaints are not “crimed” by the police—that is, a fair proportion—because they have verifiable information that no crime took place. A significant number of false accusations arise for all sorts of reasons which I shall not go into at present.

If there was a standard and agreed production, a video would not give rise to controversy, and its contents could, where relevant, be referred to during the trial by the prosecution, the defence, and indeed by the judge. We should start by facing the jury with the prejudices that they might have. We should face them with that and tell them that they have to judge these cases with an open mind.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, referred to the broken-backed system of investigation and prosecution and mentioned New Zealand. He will recall, as may others, that I put forward the New Zealand model in the course of the Sexual Offences Bill but that it was rejected. One of the unintended consequences of that legislation was that the two Peers leading from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench got married; that is, myself and my noble friend Lady Walmsley.

The noble Baroness, Lady Gale, referred to variations in rape convictions in different police force areas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, said that South Wales and Manchester had a better conviction rate. There is no substitute for the careful building up of a case. I am indebted to Judge Roger Dutton, who specialises in rape and sexual offences cases on the Wales and Chester circuit, for a whole series of practical recommendations. Unfortunately, the clock is against me. However, I should mention the need for the accurate recording of a complaint; the accurate recording of recent complaints from witnesses; the taking of quick action to obtain material for the purpose of scientific examination; and obtaining a proper video recording that is short and to the point and does not involve lengthy cross-examination of the victim by inadequate police officers. Young witnesses should be prepared for giving evidence. The first time that anyone openly doubts the word of the witness, it often comes as a serious shock and leads to tears, and the case is stopped. One problem with the Government’s proposal for having a video of the evidence in chief is that the first time that the witness is asked a question, she is being challenged on her account. I am not sure that that is the right way to go about things.

We must deal with the issue of inexperienced prosecutors. In the old days, when Silks appeared on both sides and High Court judges tried rapes, cases were handled rather better than today. The Government suggest that pre-trial witness interviews should be introduced widely; I agree. The purpose of interviewing the complainant is to enable the prosecutor to assess the reliability of the evidence that they can give or to understand complex evidence. Provided that the purpose is strictly adhered to and an audio copy of the video is made available automatically to the defence as unused material, it is unobjectionable.

This is a big topic. I am sorry that I have gone over my limit. I end by again thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, and emphasising the need for education—attacking those hidden prejudices and bringing about a change in attitude to the relationship between a man and a woman in our society.

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, on the persistent—indeed, tenacious—way in which she has stuck to her guns on these issues over the years. The House owes a great debt to her.

As your Lordships are all aware, the debate happily coincides with the Government’s response to their 2006 consultation on the offence of rape, to which I will turn in a minute. However, it is vital to emphasise, as many of your Lordships have done, that rape is just one example—although a particularly dreadful one—of our more general and mounting alarm over the growth of violence against women in our society, of which domestic violence is a significant factor. Indeed—again, as many of your Lordships pointed out—a high percentage of rapes are inflicted on victims who are in some kind of relationship with the perpetrator, often a very close one.

We cannot escape the conclusion that much of that growth in violence is explained by changes in our society’s culture, often exhibited on television and in films. The media frequently portray young women, principally or sometimes exclusively, as sex objects. This reflects a deep cultural malaise to which there is no short-term solution. Perhaps our best chance of success is in our schools, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Gale and Lady Gould, suggested. They emphasised that respect for women should be a crucial ingredient in children’s education. Indeed, my right honourable friend the leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, said on 12 November that we would never make progress in this area until we were prepared to teach values in school.

Much has been made of the statistics for rape. It was pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, among others, that whereas there is a low rate of conviction in the context of reported offences, nevertheless, if you put convicted perpetrators in the context of the number of cases brought to trial, we are talking about a respectable success rate. I have seen different statistics; some have been as high as 50 per cent, some as low as the early 40s. These are by no means unfavourable in comparison to murder, for example.

Rape cases present particular evidential difficulties, as a number of your Lordships have explained, because there are usually no witnesses to the offence and because there is often no forensic evidence that is admissible in court. As noble Lords know, over the past decade there have been a number of substantial changes in our evidential rules. I shall briefly remind the House of what they are. There has been a change in the definition of consent in statutory law. An “honest belief” that consent was available is now replaced by the expression,

“no reasonable belief that consent was given”.

Parliament has widened the circumstances in which hearsay can be admissible. It has limited the circumstances in which a victim’s previous sexual history is admissible in court. It has expanded the circumstances in which evidence of the defendant’s bad character is admissible in court, and now we have experiments in pre-trial interviews with witnesses by counsel. Those have made some changes to the conviction statistics, but not dramatic ones.

The Government have come forward with a number of suggestions to which many of your Lordships have referred; I should like briefly to touch on them. I hope that the noble and learned Baroness will not think that my remarks are conclusive of our views, because we must wait to see what proposals the Government come up with. I shall, telegraphically, indicate how we are thinking.

First, I respectfully say to the noble and learned Baroness that we think that the Government are right to leave the issue of capacity to the courts. There has been a recent case that I am sure that she considers helpful. Society would be best served by the development of the concept in the courts rather than trying to set down a rigorous rule in statute.

Secondly, one issue that we have debated today is that of the victim who is reluctant to talk about the event at an early stage, either to her family or to her friends, and equally does not go to the police until a rather late stage. The Government propose that hearsay evidence, at any stage between the act and the prosecution, in principle, ought to be admissible in the proceeding. I assume that the noble and learned Baroness will contemplate adding to that proposal the normal limitation that a judge may in his discretion decide that a particular item of hearsay evidence is not admissible, even in this context.

The third question is that of video-recorded evidence for adults. Again, we are not in principle against that, but the noble and learned Baroness will agree when I say that here, above all, the devil is in the detail. For example, we do not know whether additional questions in chief may be put by the prosecution to the alleged victim in court, or whether the only evidence in chief will be that on video. We do not know when the video recording will be made. Will it be at the time of the alleged victim’s first interview with the police, or later? If it comes later, will that be after the CPS has been involved? What role will the CPS have in the preparation of a recording? I am asking these questions because the Government will have to address them before they come up with a statutory provision.

On the final matter, which has received the most attention in your Lordships’ House, to introduce what has been referred to as general expert material to dispel myths about rape victims’ behaviour, again I am neutral on that until I see what the Government have proposed. I very much take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, about the subliminal factors that might influence the way in which a jury might approach a particular case, which would prejudice it in principle against a conviction. Difficult though it is, I can see circumstances when, if the right sort of document is produced, it could play a constructive role. It would, however, have to reflect prejudices or otherwise against both parties in the litigation.

These proposals will undoubtedly increase the conviction rate to, I suspect, only a modest degree. The real difficulty is the period between the reporting of an offence and the conviction. That is where the failure of the system lies. I shall be most interested to hear what the noble and learned Baroness has to say about that in her final remarks.

Rape crisis support centres have been referred to by a number of noble Lords. I know that noble Lords will agree that they are proving vital in helping women to overcome what has happened to them. But there are far too few of them; and those that exist are undermined by short-term, usually annual, funding, with funding often having to be decided half way through the financial year. Many of them face the constant threat of imminent closure. We need more of these institutions, and we need to give them the support that they deserve. Among other items in his speech on 12 November, my right honourable friend David Cameron, the leader of the Opposition, announced that a Conservative Government, when elected, will replace annual funding decisions with a three-year funding cycle.

My Lords, I add my voice to all those who have commended my noble friend Lady Gale for instigating this timely and really excellent debate on this most important of issues. I commend all sides of the House for taking up arms against this monstrous sea of troubles in an attempt to bring it to an end. This debate has done something quite extraordinary, which I hope that all sides of this House will have noticed. Through the debate, my noble friend has managed to get assent and consent from all the lawyers who sit on each of the Benches in this House. I do not know whether that is a first, but it certainly feels like one.

I agree with the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, described the offence of rape. It is truly the vilest of offences. As my noble friend Lady Kingsmill said, it is a stain on our country and it is something that we absolutely must address. I also take the opportunity to warmly welcome what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. We know of his commitment, but I celebrate the fact that his right honourable friend in the other place has finally made his party join the party. It is very warming indeed at last to hear from him the voice of the Conservative Party on these matters, which our party has struggled so long to highlight, improve and change. It is a very welcome moment, which I am sure that all on our Benches will savour, when we have at last assent from that side too.

Sexual violence is one of the most feared and damaging crimes in our society. It is more prevalent than most people think, and I was glad to hear that echoed in the comments that were made. Five per cent of women and 0.4 per cent of men have been raped as adults, and it devastates the lives of victims, who are often some of the most vulnerable people in our society. The harm caused can be severe and long-lasting, affecting the sexual, physical and mental health of the victim.

I thank those in the House who have commended me for the efforts that I have made, but as I look around the Chamber I see many people who have been on this journey with me. Over the past 30 years, my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws and others on all Benches, including all those who have spoken in this debate, I count as journeymen on that path. As my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws said, it takes enormous courage for a victim of sexual violence to report the crime, and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect and to see justice done. It is right that the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, said that the period between making the statement and the matter being brought to court is vital. He is also right to say that the details will have to be very carefully examined.

That is why the new public service agreements will for the first time make it clear that tackling serious sexual offences must be a priority across England and Wales, and it is why we have worked in consultation with our stakeholders to develop a cross-government action plan aimed at preventing sexual violence, increasing access to support for victims and improving the way in which cases are investigated and prosecuted. My noble friend Lady Gould was right to say that this vehicle could be used and should be successfully used to bring about the change that we all want to see.

I would like to take the objectives in turn and explain some of the significant progress that has already been made, as well as the work that we will be taking forward in the future. All noble Lords who have identified prevention as being of critical importance are right. I was pleased to hear that alluded to by my noble friends Lady Gale and Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, and many others. Ultimately, it must be our aim to prevent sexual violence occurring. We must challenge the culture which tolerates sexual violence, we must support those at risk of victimisation or, in domestic cases, of revictimisation and we must manage the risk posed by those who have committed a sexual offence. My noble friend Lady Howells highlighted and gave us some graphic examples of why that must be so.

A survey published by Amnesty International in 2005 revealed that around a third of people in the United Kingdom believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she has been flirting, drinking or has worn revealing clothing. From the experience of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, it is clear that is what we see worked out in our courts across the country day after day. The perpetuation of those unacceptable, stigmatising stereotypes can create a culture where sexual violence is seemingly legitimised.

I absolutely agree with all of those who say that addressing those attitudes must start in the education system. All secondary schools are required to deliver sex and relationship education, and by the end of 2009 we expect all schools to qualify as “healthy schools”. That means that specific standards must be met for personal, social and health education, including on sex and relationships and emotional health and well-being. We must challenge also the behaviour of the minority of men who think that it is okay to have sex without consent. Last year the Government ran a hard-hitting and effective campaign stressing the importance of active consent to sex and earlier this week my colleague Vernon Coaker helped to launch the Men’s Coalition, a group of leading men’s organisations which aims to provide a male voice to challenge the culture that colludes with all forms of violence. We will continue to look at what more can be done to support this work.

Noble Lords will know that we believe that awareness-raising campaigns, mentioned by a number of noble Lords, are of great importance. In the past few years, we have run a number of campaigns aimed at addressing attitudes and behaviour regarding violence against women. We have had the Consent campaign aimed at men obtaining consent, the Enough campaign aimed at third parties reporting domestic violence, and a kerb-crawler campaign aimed at deterring men from kerb crawling. I am confident that these campaigns will go on. We need to do this, just as we have eventually brought about change regarding other pernicious forms of crime that we have campaigned on for a number of years. I can assure noble Lords who have spoken that we will look at this very seriously indeed. We will continue to look at what more we can do, working with our partners, to raise awareness of these crimes.

We know that some groups in society are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence, such as people with a learning disability or those involved in prostitution. We have introduced specific offences in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to offer additional protection to these groups, and continue to support initiatives, such as schemes to share information on sex buyers who are violent, and personal safety training for women involved in prostitution. I say to my noble friend Lady Kingsmill that we recognise that there is considerable support for our work on tackling the demand for prostitution and the impact that this work has on trafficking. Earlier this week, my colleague Vernon Coaker announced a short-term review of what more we can do in this area. This will involve further exploration of approaches adopted in other jurisdictions—including Sweden, which has a specific offence of paying for sex—and consultation with stakeholders. We expect this work to take about six months.

Those who commit sexual offences face a tough regime. The average length of sentence for rape has doubled since 1984 and we have introduced indeterminate sentences for public protection. On release, serious sex offenders are managed through Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements—MAPPA—by the police and offender management services. The evidence shows that MAPPA works, because in 2006-07 only 0.08 per cent of high-risk offenders managed within MAPPA were charged with a serious further offence. The police have a range of tools to help minimise risk of reoffending, including sex offender registration, civil orders and information-sharing systems. But sex offenders should also be offered treatment to try and reduce the motivation and opportunity to offend. We are delivering sex offender treatment programmes to more than 1,000 sex offenders in prison and to some 1,200 sex offenders in the community every year.

The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours—for different reasons—indicated that the figures are not as bad as they might appear at first blush. I should say immediately that they are certainly not as acceptable as any of us would like and need to get a lot better. As a number of noble Lords have said, rape is a very difficult offence to prosecute. According to the British survey of 2001, some 54 per cent of rapists were current or former partners of the victim and only 17 per cent were strangers. So for the very reasons that have been mentioned today, these offences are incredibly difficult to prosecute.

One thing we must do is enable more people to come forward; we should celebrate the fact that many more people are having the courage to come forward, because the real problem was not people lying about these terrible, vicious offences, but the fact that they have been too frightened and intimidated to say anything at all. We need to direct our attention to changing that balance. Therefore, all the things that we have done in providing health and support services—the £10 million to increase the opportunity to give that support—are important.

My Lords, this seems a logical moment to ask the noble and learned Baroness about that period between the person having the courage to come to the police and the trial. I entirely agree with her that there are considerable difficulties regarding people coming forward, but it seems that the deficiencies are really stark where, once a report has been made to the police, in the end only a small percentage of such cases are tried. She may be about to address that point, but I hope that it will not escape her during the remainder of her speech.

My Lords, that is why we have properly concentrated on the work of sexual assault referral centres and the support from the Independent Sexual Violence Advisory Service, whose advisers walk with the individual. One of the big issues is that, even after someone comes forward, the enormity of what going to court actually means can so oppress the victim that they do not have the courage to go further. Thereby, all the things that we are doing in that regard have become critical.

Sexual assault referral centres were first created a while ago and represent a holistic approach to meeting the support and health needs of victims and the evidential needs of the police. As my noble friend Lady Gale said, there are now 19 SARCs with a further 17 under development, supported by funding from the Home Office. The evidence shows that these centres work and ultimately we want to see access to a SARC for all victims of serious sexual assault. The Home Office is also funding and evaluating 38 independent sexual violence advisers, based in SARCs and voluntary organisations. These trained professionals carry out risk assessments for victims of sexual violence, help them to access the services they need and ensure that clients who go through the criminal justice process are supported from start to finish.

Noble Lords will know that we took such action in relation to domestic violence. We created independent domestic violence advisers, who I refer to always as “divas”, because they are so wonderful—and we have male and female divas. They have massively improved the ability of the victim to remain engaged in the process and have supported and enabled victims to go right the way through. We see creating a specialist sexual violence voluntary sector as crucial in the provision of therapeutic services for victims. The Home Office has supported the sector through the Victims Fund during the past four years. We recognise that sustainability for these organisations continues to be an issue and we are working with our stakeholder advisory group on sexual violence to look at how we can increase stability and capacity in these services. We are already implementing some of its early recommendations. We have funded two national umbrella groups—Rape Crisis England and Wales and the Survivors Trust—to strengthen support for the sector and are working with them to develop national service standards, commissioning guidance for local authorities and primary care trusts and an indicator for local strategic partnerships, all aimed at increasing access to these services for victims of sexual violence.

I turn now to the delivery of justice for victims of rape. If we are to improve the criminal justice response, it is important to understand what underlies the low conviction rate. The first and greatest cause of attrition is in the decision by up to 85 per cent of victims not to report the offence to the police, in some cases because they fear they will not be believed or lack confidence in the system. As I have already indicated, the willingness of victims to report and stay in the system is one of the most important things.

Therefore, we have invested not only in support for the victim but also in training and support for those who carry out other duties within the system. Specially trained officers and specialist rape prosecutors have been introduced across England and Wales, and we continue to improve training and guidance for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. We are now working with the Bar Council to deliver accredited training to all counsel who act in rape cases, be they for the defence or the prosecution. We have overhauled the procedure in a way that we think will strengthen the opportunity for a successful prosecution.

I heard the concerns expressed by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours about the system and his condemnation of the law but I have to say to him that the assessment of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, was right. We now have the system—the law and the structure—about right.

My Lords, yesterday’s response document, says that appropriate specimen directions on the issue of capacity of consent would be necessary. If those directions included references to alcohol, would that not mean that we were effectively rewriting Section 30(2) of the 2003 Act because we would be bypassing a debate in Parliament? I am not convinced that Parliament would support what those appropriate specimen directions might include. In any case, what is the intention of Parliament? The document refers to “operated as intended” by Parliament. Where is what Parliament intended on these issues defined?

My Lords, because he follows these matters very closely, my noble friend will know that the Court of Appeal had an opportunity, in a case called Regina v Bree, to look at the definition given in the 2003 Act. That case settled the issues quite well and clarified precisely what was meant in the 2003 Act. On that basis, we felt that there was no need for further legislative change because that matter had been clarified. There is now an opportunity for training from the Judicial Studies Board and others to ensure that it is followed through.

Many issues have been raised in the debate, all of which I agree with—for example, the matter of female genital mutilation raised by my noble friend Lady Rendell. It is absolutely right that these issues should be looked at and I agree with the calls that she made.

In relation to a point made by my noble friend Lady Massey, although the national plan has not been formally updated, it has been implemented and a number of improvements have been made. In April 2006, we saw the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre publication—the main inter-agency guidelines. It is important not just to update but to implement that plan to ensure that our aspirations are followed through.

We agree with my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley on the issue of pornography. We have continued to address these matters rigorously and believe that they need to go further.

I am sorry that I have run out of time—

There are another four minutes.

My Lords, I thought that I was limited to 20 minutes but I am glad that I can say a little more.

As I said, the importance of these issues cannot be overstated. The work of the umbrella groups and the strengthening of that work, together with investigation and prosecution, will be of enormous importance.

The increase in the willingness of victims to come forward has meant that we have seen some improvement, and I want to say a word or two about the figures. The conviction rate, which stands at 5.7 per cent for 2005-06, represents the percentage of convictions against reported crimes. Although it is right that the overall conviction rate has fallen since 1997 from 9.3 to 5.7 per cent, that has to be seen in the light of a significant rise in the number of reported cases. They rose from 6,628 in 1997 to 14,449 in 2005-06 and that is indeed welcome.

The importance of all the participants in the criminal justice system playing their part cannot be overstated. Your Lordships will know that the report on rape published in January by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate made a telling observation. It said:

“In many respects, the policies are sound and in place. It is not a question of changing the approach, but of ensuring that what should be done is actually done in practice and that full effect is given to the existing sound good policies and good practice”.

The recommendations from the inspection focused on the importance of the police and the CPS working together to build cases, on ensuring that cases are effectively supervised and reviewed, and on learning lessons from case outcomes. Every police force has put in place an action plan to implement the recommendations from the inspection, assisted by an operational support team funded by the Home Office. The CPS has established a Rape Delivery Unit to ensure that the prosecution recommendations are delivered, and rape co-ordinators from every area now provide a quarterly report to chief Crown prosecutors and to headquarters identifying trends, good practice and aspects for improvement.

It is also vital that we in central government understand and manage performance effectively. We have established a Cross-CJS Rape Performance Group, which monitors the performance of police and the CPS and raises any concerns with chief constables and chief Crown prosecutors. In turn, they are provided with support by the operational support team that I mentioned earlier to address the particular issues facing their area. The criminal justice strategic plan, published earlier this month, makes it clear that local criminal justice boards should include a key focus on the most serious offences, such as rape, that cause the most harm to victims.

I hope that all those matters will ensure that we do not have a postcode lottery and that all victims in our country will receive a similar standard of support.

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said, we have covered a very wide range of topics under the title of sexual offences. I thank my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland of Asthal for her excellent response and for reminding us of the work that the Government have already done and will do, I know, in the future. Many suggestions have been put to her and I hope that she will look at them and come back to us. If what my noble and learned friend said about having chalked up one first today is correct—that is, agreement among all the lawyers—that is absolutely fantastic.

Once again, I thank everyone. I am sure that this is a topic that we shall come back to at some point but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend Peter Hain, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The Statement is as follows:

“I wish to make a Statement on the modernisation of Remploy. Since Remploy was founded in 1945, it has played a central role in the lives of thousands of disabled men and women by providing supported employment for those who need it and, increasingly, placing others in mainstream employment.

“Both as a local MP and as a Minister, I have for the past 17 years worked closely with and supported Remploy and, as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Remploy workers will continue to have my full support. May I also record the grateful thanks of the House for the diligence and commitment of my honourable friend the Minister for Disabled People?

“Of course, the world has developed dramatically since the end of the Second World War, not least in how the aspirations and expectations of disabled people have changed, and changed for the better. The vast majority want jobs in mainstream employment, and that is the Government’s priority. That is why we extended the scope of the Disability Discrimination Act. That is why we have been transforming the support that we give to disabled people, moving away from a system that abandons people at the margins to one which helps them to realise their potential.

“That is why we spent £66 million last year on the Workstep programme to support 17,000 people. That is why we spent £62 million on Access to Work to help 24,000 people. These programmes are already helping disabled people to take their place in an inclusive society. That is why we are introducing the employment and support allowance which will replace incapacity benefit next autumn. That is why we are extending Pathways to Work across the country by April of next year, offering tailored support to help people on incapacity benefit back into work. That is why last year, Remploy’s employment services division placed 5,000 disabled people into mainstream employment, for the first time outstripping the number employed by the factory network.

“We have helped more disabled people into jobs than ever before. For example, since 2001, the New Deal for Disabled People has helped more than 150,000 into work. None the less, there remains a vital role for supported employment, providing a chance to work for thousands of disabled people who might not otherwise be immediately ready for mainstream work. That has been a central part of Remploy’s work since it was founded. But increasingly, Remploy has struggled to fulfil its role effectively.

“Low-wage, low-skill competition from countries such as China and the EU accession states have put Remploy factories under enormous pressure. In turn, Remploy has failed adequately to move into higher value, higher skill work. Losses have spiralled, and Remploy’s ability to support disabled people has been put at risk. Change is therefore essential for Remploy’s 83 factories across the country, and the 5,000 people they employ.

“Following the National Audit Office’s report in 2005 and the independent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Dr. Stephen Duckworth of Disability Matters last summer, Ministers asked Remploy to develop a new five-year restructuring plan. This was to modernise the business, avoid compulsory redundancy for Remploy’s disabled workers, support substantially larger numbers of disabled people into mainstream work, and to stay within a funding envelope of a £550 million taxpayer subsidy over five years to ensure that escalating costs do not put at risk funding for other DWP programmes for disabled people.

“The reality is that without modernisation, Remploy deficits would obliterate our other programmes to help disabled people into mainstream work. With no change, on current trends, in five years’ time Remploy would require £171 million a year—in other words £60 million over the £111 million funding envelope. This represents nearly the entire current annual Workstep budget.

“In May 2007 Remploy proposed for consultation with the trade unions to close or merge 43 of the 83 Remploy factories. But when I took over as Secretary of State a month later, it was clear that national and local management had not exhausted procurement opportunities to maintain the maximum number of Remploy sites. There was a huge gulf between Remploy management and the trade unions, and the likelihood of destructive confrontation. So, in August, I asked Roger Poole, a former assistant general secretary of Unison to act as the independent chairman of fresh negotiations. I record my thanks for the way in which he managed to achieve real dialogue and progress.

Although there was no agreement on factory closures, there was for the first time very significant common ground. There was agreement on: the £555 million funding subsidy; quadrupling to 20,000 the number of disabled people Remploy would help into mainstream work; significant cuts in management jobs and costs; more efficient working practices; the vital importance of generating more public sector contracts and, in consequence, the need for fewer factory closures.

“In September I reaffirmed government policy on Remploy: that everyone should do their utmost to get a negotiated outcome; no factory closures without ministerial agreement; and that all public authorities should be encouraged to take advantage of European procurement rules allowing contracts to be reserved for supported businesses. I reaffirmed, as I do again today, that there would be no compulsory redundancies for Remploy’s disabled workers and that they would retain the protection of Remploy’s terms and conditions, including—uniquely for workers facing plant closures or transfers—their salaries and final salary pensions. Both workers and management now need certainty to end the insecurity and worry for Remploy employees and their families, and to allow Remploy management to begin the radical changes that we all recognise are needed.

“The final proposals I am announcing today represent the best package for Remploy’s disabled employees in these difficult circumstances. Copies of the modernisation plan are available in the Vote Office and a letter with agreed proposals to the trade unions has been deposited in the Library. There will be 15 fewer factory closures with 55 factories remaining open and 11 merging—down from 32 closures to 17. The sales target for public sector procurement will increase to £461 million over five years, up from £298 million since the company’s proposal in May. This is a huge and challenging 130 per cent increase over the current rate of sales of £200 million. There will be a cost saving of £59 million from around 25 per cent fewer managers, changes in working practices and reductions in non-wage costs.

“Last week I had productive discussions with the leaders of the GMB, Unite and Community, joined by Remploy chairman, Ian Russell. I pay tribute to Ian Russell for his energy and commitment to get the best for Remploy workers. As a result we have reached further agreements to protect Remploy’s future and its workers. New skills in public procurement will be brought in to ensure that its marketing and sales effort is targeted appropriately. Appropriate employment advice will be available to all disabled employees whose factories are closing. Remploy will provide a travel-to-work package wherever necessary, when employees transfer as a result of mergers.

“Furthermore, Remploy has been contacted by third parties interested in keeping some form of production or training at six of the sites due for closure: Lydney, Glasgow Hillington, St Helens, Treforest, Ystradgynlais and Brynamman. At four other sites—Mansfield, Pinxton, Plymouth and York—there is the possibility of staff transfers to nearby and mostly local authority-supported plants.

“I know that there will be disappointment that we are unable to keep even more factories open but the reality is that it is simply not viable. For those sites, including those mentioned above, my message is this: if management, trade unions, MPs and others come up with a credible option involving a takeover or transfer, we will of course co-operate and Remploy will help facilitate. But time is very short. The new funding envelope starts in four months from 1 April 2008. We have managed to keep open 55 sites only on the basis of very stretching procurement targets and a tough forward plan. It will be up to everyone with an interest in Remploy— government, management, trade unions, local MPs and other political representatives—to pull together to ensure that these factories meet their ambitious targets. Otherwise, they too could be put at risk.

“The proposals I have presented today are both realistic about the challenges facing Remploy and ambitious for the future. The plan makes some difficult choices, and many in the House would wish that circumstances were different. But we are where we are. What is now vital is that everyone concentrates their efforts on making the new Remploy a success. There will be a top-to-bottom restructuring and reskilling of Remploy. This plan will deliver a new beginning for Remploy requiring a radically new approach across the entire operation, which must include better management and better union relations. Last week, I agreed with union leaders that the modernisation and procurement plan will be properly monitored to ensure that it remains on course, so that Remploy can look to the future with a degree of confidence not enjoyed for some years. The people it was set up to serve deserve no less. I commend this Statement to the House”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement on the future of Remploy, which, as the Statement says, was set up after the war to give employment to disabled people. The Statement is an amelioration of the original proposals, which were designed to reduce the losses, and hence the government subsidy, to Remploy which have been going on for some time.

As long ago as 2005 the National Audit Office described many of the factories as “unsustainable”. We also learn that, under the department’s normal scheme, the cost of supporting a disabled person into a mainstream job is £5,300. By contrast, the average cost of supporting a disabled person in a Remploy factory has increased inexorably from £11,400 a year in 1994 to more than £20,000 today. I assume that the figures which I have just read out are in today’s prices; perhaps the Minister can confirm that. If they are, that is of course an exponential increase.

The proposals in this Statement affect many employees who already live the most difficult of lives, which most of us cannot imagine—people whose lives will be totally disrupted as a result. I do not know, and the Statement does not reveal, just how many disabled people—people, your Lordships will remember, who are pursuing active employment—will lose their jobs in the factories due for closure. Just how many people will be made redundant? Can the Minister tell us, too, whether, in the 11 mergers that are to take place, any redundancies are envisaged? Clearly it is the case that managers will have to go, but I am more concerned with the shop-floor employees.

Whatever the answers to these questions, we are used to government Statements starting in what I rather irreverently like to think of as the gung-ho tones of the noble Lord, Lord Jones of Birmingham, so the first three and half pages of this one come as no surprise. However, is it not a bit rich for the Secretary of State to claim, by implication anyway, that Remploy was in the minds of Ministers when they planned the Disability Discrimination Bill? During the debates in this House—I stand to be corrected on this—I do not recall Remploy being mentioned at all.

Nevertheless, I share with the Government the objective of having as many disabled people as possible in mainstream work. That may—may—be the result of the Welfare Reform Act, which, as the House will remember, is intended to reduce the number of people claiming incapacity benefit. Under current proposals, however, it is only the newly disabled people who will attract the employment and support allowance which replaces IB.

Be that as it may, today I am concerned with a small but important group of disabled people who are employed by Remploy. It helps to place them in mainstream employment. Earlier this year, we heard of plans to close 32 and merge 11 of its 83 factories. Until late September, this was to happen. However, the pre-non-election Labour Party conference changed all that, and we now know the Government’s revised plans. The Statement describes these plans as “final”, involving the closure of 17 factories—a reduction from 32, but 11 are still to merge.

Ministers are to be urged to use their powers to allocate public sector procurement contracts to Remploy. The new Remploy plan intends to increase such sales by about 35 per cent, from £298 million to £461 million. While this is not a new pledge, I would like to know what progress has been made with other departments in this regard.

The Government also pledged that no individual factory would close without direct ministerial approval. Is that still the case? Will the Minister list those factories that are to close? I know that a close reading of the modernisation plan—I am grateful to the Minister for putting it in the Printed Paper Office—will give me the answer. However, I think the word for it is probably “verbose”. There are so many words that it is difficult to extract, in the short period I have had available, a simple list from the rationale of each factory. I hope that the Minister, even if he cannot do it now—and perhaps that would not be appropriate—will be prepared to reply to that point by means of a Written Answer.

While I am asking questions, the Statement speaks of ambitious targets. On page 7, it speaks of,

“quadrupling to 20,000 the number of disabled people Remploy would help into mainstream work”.

Given the reduction in the number of factories and the amalgamation of others, how exactly will the rise from 5,000 to 20,000 be achieved?

Finally, I note that the major charities agree that Remploy must be restructured, as do the relevant unions. I agree with them. On these Benches, however, we will be watching carefully for signs that those employees who can no longer have a Remploy job will be transferred to private sector employment, if necessary with a short period on the new employment and support allowance.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. It will mean that more Remploy factories can stay open through better marketing and procurement of Remploy products. We welcome that, but clearly no Government can give a blank cheque to keep factories open indefinitely where they have no realistic long-term prospect of paying their way in the face of low-cost competition in low-value-added activities from the Far East. That has frankly been the problem for many of the Remploy factories.

We therefore agree that promoting mainstream employment must be the right way to deliver independent living, and expanding Remploy’s successful programmes is the right way to do that. Can the Minister confirm that the expansion of Remploy’s inter-work programme to help 20,000 people into mainstream work every year will still go ahead? The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, rightly referred to the extremely ambitious targets, as the Secretary of State calls them. His letter to Paul Kenny of the GMB, referring to both extremely ambitious targets for sales and stretching procurement targets, feels rather like Sir Humphrey in “Yes Minister” saying “Very bold” to some scheme that he thinks looks frankly pretty wild.

So while it is a nice surprise to hear extreme ambition from the DWP for a change, what is going to happen if the targets are not met? Will the priority be retaining factories or helping many more disabled people into work? Will the Secretary of State provide additional support for Remploy if it needs it to meet its target of 20,000 people?

Today’s Statement is still a real shock to the current Remploy workforce, often working, it is fair to say, in a happy family atmosphere, many of them for many years, in factories to be closed. That is like a bereavement. We should always remember that work is not just about money; it is people’s lives.

There is also quite a strong regional dimension to this. One just has to listen to the Minister reading out the list of factories to be closed: Lydney, Glasgow Hillington, St Helens, Treforest, Ystradgynlais and Brynamman. Many of them are in areas where it will not be easy for people to get another job, and unfortunately I am afraid that we again see the complete failure of government economic policy, with so much economic activity and growth over the past 10 years going on in the overheated south-east. Over what time period will the closures be phased? How long will the affected employees have to find alternative employment? Is there additional capacity to help provide the counselling and skill-focused help needed for workers in these areas?

As the Statement said, the announcement cannot be isolated from wider policies for helping people into work, but will the Government put their money where their mouth is on the procurement proposals? It is all very well to have an ambitious target, and we know the DWP has done its stuff on this, but many departments have not followed the DWP; indeed, many are using no Remploy products or services. What will happen to encourage Cabinet colleagues to improve on that record and set an example for the public sector? The Government have a responsibility to help all disabled people into work. Until they really get on with it, the warm words of reassurance we have been hearing will bring cold comfort to disabled people, including thousands of loyal and long-standing employees of Remploy.

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lords, Lord Skelmersdale and Lord Oakeshott, for their contributions. I believe we are at one in agreeing that helping disabled people into mainstream employment is an objective that we share and should be promoting.

I shall try to deal with the specific points raised. The noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, asked about costings and the 5,000 and the 20,000 people. Those are outturn prices, but he is right that, as the Statement recognises, that is a very steep increase in the cost and support per individual employee, which is why, under the new proposals, one of the monitoring arrangements is to see that factories reduce that to £9,000 per year by 2013.

I reiterate that there will be no compulsory redundancies for disabled people. It is expected that there will be 200 compulsory redundancies for non-disabled people. We expect that between 70 and 80 managers will be affected. I take this opportunity to stress the support that will be available for disabled people, a matter that was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott. Not only will there be no compulsory redundancies, but they can stay on Remploy terms and conditions. Disabled workers will be offered a period in which to consider their options. They include a job with a mainstream employer, with support if necessary, on Remploy’s terms and conditions; additional training and development to facilitate a move into mainstream employment; creating a job with an employer on a subsidised basis; being placed with a charity or similar organisation as a transitional activity; being placed in another supportive workshop or a local authority workshop; a permanent placement with a charity or social organisation; and, for those where there has been a merger of factories, the opportunity to transfer to another Remploy factory. If any disabled person does not wish to continue with any of those options, he will have the opportunity of a voluntary redundancy package; voluntary redundancy and help to find another job; or voluntary early retirement with a redundancy payment, where eligible. I believe noble Lords will agree that there is substantial support in the challenging exercise we are facing.

Both noble Lords raised procurement and what has happened so far. Ministers have arranged meetings with other government departments to discuss public procurement opportunities. Those meetings, which involve trades unions, officials and Remploy, are ongoing, and the PM has given his support to that effort. Alongside that, the management of Remploy is required under the proposals to come forward within three months with specific proposals for the various business streams.

The noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, asked over what period the closures will be phased. The process will begin from 1 December and closures are expected to be completed by 31 March 2008 since the new funding envelope will be put in place from 1 April 2008. Additional support will be provided; the modernisation fund will provide £111 million in addition to the £555 million envelope of support.

The noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, asked us to confirm that the expansion in the employment services will still go ahead. The answer is yes. The plan includes £164 million for expanding the employment services, and that money will be ring-fenced. That also addresses the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, about how we are going to achieve the target of 20,000 people a year being helped into mainstream employment.

Not quite, my Lords. It is clear that if there are fewer factories and the number of disabled people being helped into employment through them is to be quadrupled, a lot more work must be produced from those factories. That is what I was getting at, and that is what I would eventually like an answer about.

My Lords, we are talking about opportunities with other employers, not in the supported factories. That is what happens at the moment. When we are talking about supported work, we are partly talking about those who are supported by being directly employed by the factory network and partly about people being supported in other employment through a range of programmes and flexible support. Both of those things happen at the moment, and we see the latter component as the key to hitting the 20,000 target.

The noble Lord asked us to list the particular sites. I am happy to list the sites proposed for closure, but I will make sure that a full list is available. They are: Aintree, Brixton, Halifax, Hartlepool, Hillington, Hull, Leatherhead, Lydney, Mansfield, Medway, Pinxton, Plymouth, Southend, St Helens, Stockton, Treforest and York. In repeating the Statement, I made the point that in some cases proposals are already coming forward from local communities and others to rebadge some opportunities so that those locations do not necessarily disappear from the network in their entirety.

I was asked what will happen if the targets are not met. The remaining 55 factories will need to make satisfactory progress towards reducing the cost of employing disabled people—I mentioned the £9,000 subsidy—and in addition factories that have been kept open as a result of the further look will potentially have additional targets to meet, so the monitoring of this plan is very important.

I shall review the record, and if I have not answered all the questions I shall write further.

My Lords, the noble Lord mentioned monitoring. In his letter to Mr Kenny, the Secretary of State said the monitoring group would report to Ministers. Could it also report to Parliament?

My Lords, I am sure there will be opportunities for us to discuss and report back, but if there is no formal process, noble Lords are experienced at asking appropriate Questions and holding Ministers to account, which is as it should be. I shall take this opportunity to emphasise that the key points in this are reskilling and the top-to-bottom reorganisation of Remploy. We do not believe that the management in general has done a particularly good job. Getting the skills right and public and private sector procurement are vital.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for repeating the Statement. When I was at the TUC in September this year, there was a large demonstration by Remploy employees at a time when the Secretary of State, my right honourable friend Peter Hain, was attending congress. It was clear that the people concerned were suffering a great deal of shock at the possibility of Remploy modernisation and what could happen to their factories and jobs. In response to their demonstration, they were promised that there would be no compulsory redundancies. They were quite pleased about that, but all of us who have had anything to do with industrial relations know that “no compulsory redundancies” does not necessarily mean no redundancies. People will find that their jobs no longer exist if their factory closes. They have the double disadvantage not only of having no job because the factory has closed but of being disabled, so their transfer to mainstream employment may be particularly difficult for them because they have been used to working in a protected environment in a Remploy factory.

I therefore welcome the detailed questions that have been put by noble Lords on the other side, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, because the questions that he has raised are very important. I would like to ensure that there is a report back on how progress is being made on this reorganisation. When reorganisation is mentioned, people immediately wonder whether their job is safe. Very often it is not. The factory may close and there may be no job at all for them, except in another area to which they have to transfer. It may not be possible for them to transfer, and there is the emotional difficulty of losing the security that they have lived with for many years. This is a very serious matter for Remploy employees, which I am sure my noble friend understands.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for her contribution. I agree and acknowledge, as I think we all do, that this has been an unsettling period for Remploy employees. That is why we have had to reach conclusions and make them clear, as my right honourable friend the Secretary of State did in his Statement today.

The promise of no compulsory redundancies for disabled people has been, and I believe will be, met; that is clearly on the record. As I mentioned a moment ago, a range of components of the offer is available to disabled workers. There are, for example, jobs in mainstream employment, additional training, jobs created specifically as I have outlined, and placements in charities or similar organisations. There is a whole raft of support and the opportunity for them to retain their Remploy terms and conditions, including access to the pension scheme. I hope that that will in some measure ameliorate people’s concern.

When the plan was drawn up and identified the factories that should be closed, account was taken not only of factories with low volumes and low margins but of the prospects for being able to help people in those areas into other employment opportunities. That analysis on behalf of the workforce was a component of the decision-making process.

My Lords, most people who are familiar with Remploy would accept that modernisation was inevitable, if not overdue. They would also recognise that the Government and Remploy have worked very hard to put a generous package of support in place for the disabled workers who are affected by this restructure.

As a number of charities representing disabled people have stressed, a refocusing of Remploy’s work towards integrating disabled people into mainstream jobs is also very welcome. Does the Minister accept, however, that although that refocusing towards mainstream employment is obviously at the heart of what Remploy should be about, it is also important that Remploy factories are used to provide a network—a hub—of centres for supported mainstream employment across the country, as suggested by the group of MPs, chaired by Helen Goodman, who studied these proposals? This network of centres would also provide worthwhile jobs for those whose progression into mainstream employment was not a realistic possibility at the moment or at any time.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his comments. I think we agree across the Chamber that the refocus in helping people into mainstream employment is right, which is a large part of the thrust of the Statement today, and that we should ensure that a proper network remains to help people who need supported employment. At the end of the day, 55 factories across the country will remain open. Importantly, the announcement today seeks to ensure that that network of 55 factories is viable and sustainable and does not pre-empt the resources that are needed for the other vital work of getting people into mainstream employment. So, yes, I do agree with that.

My Lords, the Minister has been asked twice—once by his own Back-Benchers and once by the Liberal spokesman—for a formal report back to this House. It is not sufficient for him to say that there are devious ways to get at him. This is too important to be treated in such a manner, so can we have a categoric assurance from the Minister that there will be a formal report back from the Government on progress?

My Lords, I am sorry; I did not wish to appear frivolous in my response. Let me comment on two things. First, as I mentioned, a monitoring group has been set up to oversee this plan. The group will be staffed by DWP officials, with places reserved for senior individuals nominated by the trade unions and for the chair and chief executive of Remploy. So there will be a process of regular monitoring and discussion by that group. That proposal does not build in a formal report back to Parliament, but there is no difficulty in me giving an undertaking that we keep the House in touch with that group’s deliberations. Perhaps that can be used as the channel to inform noble Lords.

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Statement on Remploy repeated on behalf of the Secretary of State. I am sure that Remploy employees will be reassured by much of what is being said. I have a couple of points to make. Some noble Lords mentioned our bold ambition. With great respect, I do not believe that any ambition can be bold enough to address the issue of mainstreaming disabled workers, which is absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the business of government.

Will the Minister say whether the monitoring group to which he has referred is independent? If not, what independent element will be available to the monitoring group to ensure that the best interests of disabled workers are in the forefront of everyone’s mind? Given the new ambition and the new target for mainstream employment solutions for disabled workers, I very much want to inquire whether consideration will be given to beginning negotiations with some of the NGOs in this area about providing some of those supported work placements and work experience, because the existence of Remploy may have institutionalised for far too long—unacceptably so in my humble opinion—the rights of disabled workers and the obligations of institutions, including our own Government.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend. This is ambitious, and I agree that no ambition should be too high in helping and supporting disabled people, particularly in relation to employment. I stress, however, just how challenging that procurement target is—a 130 per cent increase on where we started. A lot of effort must go into that.

My noble friend asked whether NGOs and other bodies are engaged in this process. There has already been engagement with some of the charities, which have acknowledged that they would be able to offer transitional or perhaps permanent employment to people who would be displaced where a particular factory was being closed. That sort of work is already under way. The more of that that we can see, the better.

rose to call attention to the growth in passenger and freight traffic on Britain’s railways; and to move for Papers.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to introduce this debate on the success of the railways; I feel very honoured to be opening it. It is good that we have only a fairly small, but very expert, number of Members participating. I cannot help but wonder at the lack of Tory Back-Bench interest in the railways. In my capacity as chairman of the Rail Freight Group, which I declare, I was invited to speak at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference in October on how rail freight would fit into a Conservative railway policy. It is difficult to respond before knowing the policy, but I am sure that the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, will tell us today.

It is time to reflect on the success of the railways: 13 years after privatisation—though I probably prefer the word “liberalisation”—it has taken a long time. But let us not remember Railtrack. We were probably the first in Europe to liberalise, and we made some mistakes, but now we should look at the successes. I shall present a few statistics. Passenger traffic is up 43 per cent since liberalisation. The highest number of passengers ever will soon be carried on the UK’s railways. Freight is up 60 per cent. Safety is very important. Not only is safety increasing all the time; since privatisation it has increased at a faster rate. The private sector has invested £1.5 billion in freight, and we have the newest passenger fleet in Europe. Network Rail is spending more on investment than on maintenance and operations. I am sure that my noble friend will be pleased to say in reply that government expenditure has been reduced from a very high figure and that more goes into investment than into subsidy.

Let us not forget the technical leadership that our railway industry has demonstrated, or the world-class design and construction management, or, alongside it, the financial services and IT which are now recognised around the world. To give a couple of comparisons with our European colleagues, we have the highest gross rate of passengers in Europe and the second most reliable railway after Switzerland. We all know that the Swiss Government spend a great deal more on their railways as a proportion of GDP than we do. For freight, we have the highest gross rate in Europe. Our reliability is such that 80 per cent of arrivals—sometimes 98 per cent—are within half an hour of schedule. Compare that with the intermodal services run by the incumbent railways on the Continent where less than 50 per cent of trains arrive within 30 minutes and 10 per cent do not arrive within 24 hours. And that is probably their most reliable sector.

There is clear evidence that our structure allows full and fair competition above the tracks. The total separation of the infrastructure manager and the operators is the best—probably the only—way to achieve growth and better service quality and to contain government expenditure. That is why, like everyone else in the industry, I was very irritated when we were criticised a year or two ago by the German Government and the German railways. They gave totally inaccurate figures about the disaster that was happening here. Over the years, I hope that we have been able to put it right.

Emissions are a serious problem which we have discussed quite often in your Lordships’ House. There is a link between different types of transport and the emissions that they produce. The Government recently put out a response to the Eddington and Stern reports. It is interesting because, of the five sectors of the economy mentioned, transport came out worst. It forecast that by 2020 there will be only a 10 per cent reduction on the 2000 level in transport emissions, which includes air, road and rail, much worse than all the other sectors. ATOC recently produced an interesting report showing that road transport produces double the amount of carbon emissions per kilometre than those produced by passenger rail transport, and air transport produces four times the amount. For freight, rail transport is four times better than road transport, as one would expect. Those are significant figures.

Like many noble Lords, I hope, looking into the future, I would seek to curb some of the short to medium-haul flights that could be transferred to rail. We had a discussion about that yesterday in your Lordships' House, as we have many times before. Journeys of less than four hours’ travel time from centre-to-centre—and that covers journeys almost to Glasgow and Edinburgh, to most of the UK, to Paris, Brussels and Cologne, and, in future, to Amsterdam—should be encouraged to be taken by rail. But it appears that the Government do not agree. Paragraph 21 of their response to Eddington says that they are arguing strongly for an emissions trading policy which provides that every extra tonne of carbon resulting from aviation growth above the 2005 level must be matched by a tonne saved somewhere else. In other words, let us go on flying until kingdom come; it can be paid for by road freight, rail freight, rail passengers and cars, because the air sector is so important. It is a very odd policy. Of course there is no alternative for long haul, but I hope that the Government will have a rethink on short haul.

As for the future, we face getting Network Rail’s costs down and creating a 24/7 railway for passengers and freight. It is a very serious problem, as many have said before. Network Rail has been talking about it for many years, but not a great deal is happening. There is still congestion in many places. There is enormous potential for getting more trains on existing tracks before we talk about new ones, a topic which I shall come to. But let us get it right, first, by having the tracks open for customers for more hours.

I was in Belgium on Tuesday at a conference. I heard the chief executive of the Belgian railways infrastructure—Infrabel—say that it has for some years had 24/7 railway operations on all the main routes to Antwerp because the customers wanted it. It is either single-line working or a diversion route, which is its normal practice. Many of us criticise Belgium. It has not had a Government for six months, but its railways seem to be working all right. Two years ago, I visited the Canadian National railway. It managed to change a set of 60 mile-per-hour points in eight hours. It took Network Rail nine days to do so at Wootton Bassett two years ago. Network Rail wants to become a world-class company—I want that for it, too—but it needs to move a bit faster. I trust that Ministers and the regulator will encourage that process.

Our industry forecasts show that the volume of rail freight will more than double by 2030, less than 25 years away. I suspect that passenger organisations will say the same—provided, of course, that there is no change in the economics, tax and duties. But first there has to be the capacity. We have to ask whether the network can cope. We have done an analysis looking at the extra trains that would be required for freight, without changing the passenger trains at all by 2030. I found that there would be a shortage of 190 train paths a day on the west coast main line. That is the sum of both directions. Nearly 200 trains will not be able to operate because there will be a shortage of capacity. I could go through the rest of the network around London but will not; the information is available.

Are the forecasts robust enough, and are we looking at the whole economy and the change in modal split that may occur? I heard this week that Rotterdam, the biggest port in Europe, plans a 10 per cent annual increase in the number of containers going through it for the next 10 years. Because of changes in modal shift, it plans an increase of six times the number of rail freight trains between now and 2020. I do not think that Rotterdam and that part of Europe are much different from the UK. If freight needs to be moved, it will move. It will either go by road or rail in this country. Whether it goes via Rotterdam is a question of port capacity and many other things. On the rail freight side, I am not sure whether the forecast we have produced so far, which the Government largely support, is adequate.

As I mentioned in the debate on the Queen’s Speech, is it not time for the Government to look at the consequences of changes in the price of oil? I do not want to go into detail, but if oil prices go up so much that petrol and diesel become very much more expensive, there will be a demand for more public transport because it is relatively cheaper than using a car over long distances. There will be more demand for rail freight and, unless the Government continue to offer tax-free treatment to air passengers, a reduction in air movements too. Are we looking at more than a doubling of the demand for railway traffic over the next 20 to 25 years, or are we looking at three or four times as much? I do not know the answer. But, in his report, even Sir Rod Eddington—who from his previous role in running British Airways is clearly in favour good old air travel—states:

“On the west coast main line corridor, capacity can be boosted by 50 per cent, but if current demand growth continues, very substantial additional capacity will once again be needed by 2024”.

That is some 17 years away, and how long does it take to plan a new railway?

Crossrail will probably take 30 years from when it was first talked about to being built. The latest Crossrail opening date is 2017. The first Bill was presented to the House of Commons in 1991 and rejected for reasons that I do not fully understand. I recall talking about the rail link in the 1980s, when working on the Channel Tunnel. The rail link opened this month and what a success it is, but it has taken a great deal of time. Given the forecasts of enormous increases in demand and the time it takes to develop and build new rail infrastructure, I suggest to the Minister that we ought to start looking at these issues now. To that end, it was good to see the planning Bill published yesterday, because it may help us along the way. I need to read the Bill in detail but I am glad to see it.

What has not worked out right yet is the Channel Tunnel, and I am sure that other speakers will want to talk about it. Regardless of whether it comes right, and I hope very much that it does, the railway industry on the Continent is, as I said, expanding fast. There are leasing companies such as Angel and Arriva that are running passenger and freight trains in Germany and other countries, and EWS Railway is bringing much needed rail competition to France. These companies are operating in markets that are less developed and still strongly protected. My message to my noble friend is this. Can the Government be a bit more proactive in ensuring that our industry and the model it has created is encouraged as they seek to influence the thinking of the European Commission and other member states? I say that because yesterday I was given a copy of one of the many explanatory memoranda on EU documentation to do with new proposals for a freight-orientated network across Europe.

Perhaps I may give one or two examples. One suggestion is that the Commission should define a freight-oriented network. The Government’s response is that the Commission should not do this because the network is not owned by the Commission. What they could have said is that we have probably got it right in the UK. We may need a freight-priority network in the future, but in other member states where capacity and its allocation is, frankly, a disaster, it might be a good idea; so let us examine it further. The second example concerns priority for international freight, which is already covered by directive 2001/14/EC. The Government say that they cannot do that because the UK already has route utilisation strategies and that there would likely be significant cost implications for passengers using either domestic or international passenger service routes affected by these proposals. Given the problems of freight on the Continent and the success we have had, could they not be a bit more generous and positive in their responses? I heard at the other end of the building that the Commission is desperate for support from the British Government because it is a bit out on its own and surrounded by railway organisations which are 20 or 30 years out of date and losing traffic.

I conclude by making a plea to my noble friend, first, to help export our success for the benefit of UK business, which could start seriously and comprehensively to get business on the Continent; and, secondly, please to start looking urgently at the options for growth linked with emissions, and see where we end up. I beg to move for Papers.

My Lords, we must all thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for the opportunity to debate this subject, which no one can deny is relevant in the dual world of mass passenger transport and logistics transfer. My noble friends are quite enthusiastic about this debate. My noble friend Lord Glasgow will speak about the need for a high-speed line towards Scotland and the need to make long-term plans for such a network. My noble friend Lord Methuen will talk about signalling development and ERTMS, while my noble friend Lord Greaves will discuss, among other things, fares and rolling stock. My noble friend Lord Dykes will consider the Channel Tunnel dimension and its regulation, particularly for freight—or at least I believe that he is going to speak about that. Last, my noble friend Lord Bradshaw will speak about the price of oil, the need for forward planning and the franchise process, particularly the need for rolling franchises.

As a railway enthusiast for the past 43 years and indeed a consumer of vast amounts of long-distance passenger rail travel, it pleases me enormously that the railway is enjoying a sustained resurgence both for positive reasons—speed, comfort, reliability and ease of boarding, and for negative reasons—road congestion, airport security procedures, carbon emissions and global warming. People need to meet and freight is needed throughout the economies of these islands and elsewhere. The railway is a British invention and needs to be at the forefront of our transport systems. The technology is well understood, yet other countries have overtaken our rail network, due in part to faltering conviction among politicians. Clearly, a railway system can be procured only collectively, so politicians are a key to railway development, or possibly a block to it.

Many minor problems need attention, and these are well known: older passenger rolling stock; lack of passenger rolling stock; lack of car park space; the shift of funding from the Treasury to the fare box, as we read in the newspapers this morning; reliability; lack of freight paths; lack of gauge enhancement, and lack of freight terminals. I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, say that reliability in Great Britain is very high, but the perception of unreliability stems from either relatively understandable engineering possessions or the less well-tolerated network congestion. It is a principal complaint of commuters and may well be perceived as a form of fraud. Fortunately, major engineering work on the west coast main line is subsiding, at least in the south, but nevertheless, less than perfect reliability is used as an excuse by those who do not want to get out of their cars, along with, “I don’t believe there will be a car parking space for me”. What they forgo may well be work or leisure time while driving. This intervention was developed this morning on the 0700 GNER service from Edinburgh down the east coast main line. It may be the last time I put “GNER” into the Official Report. We will now have to get our tongues around “NXEC” in future, or refer to it more easily as the “east coast main line” or “east coast line”.

However, the solution to today’s problems of a congested network and increasing demand lies in investment. As a start, a new high-speed network is needed. This should be a new dedicated railway linking Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds with Heathrow, St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel. International services should start from what I call the south-north of England and run through to Brussels, Paris and beyond. Services from the real north of England and Scotland would join the high-speed network outside the cities mentioned. Indeed, the existing network would be used to enter Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds for the last few miles.

Once this has been established, a further high-speed network should be planned and invested in. I accept that this is major investment. However, if we are serious about reducing carbon emissions, reducing road congestion, promoting rail-for-air substitution and enabling travel we must do it. The restricted new high-speed two network that I am talking about will produce benefits quickly, enabling confidence to be gained for the extension to the west of England, Wales, the north of England and Scotland. I believe that the real success of such a project will be direct rail services to Europe and not only to London.

On a different topic, the arrival of the much heralded 1,300 new carriages of varying designs must happen soon. It has been announced four times by government and there will be a need for more carriages by the time the 1,300 have arrived. Why are the Government holding back this order? Rising demand requires the seats now.

Why does the Department for Transport insist on saying that it is not in charge of timetabling or the rolling stock cascade? The specification of the franchises is very tightly drawn by the department and leads, for example, to the decision to make everyone on the cross-country network change trains in Birmingham. This was not a franchisee’s decision.

Why does not Network Rail want to delegate the running of the track to anyone despite the success of the Merseyrail franchise in doing so? Is Network Rail frightened of being shown up on costs? Will the Government do anything to improve the governance of Network Rail, or are they content with the wide group of stakeholders that make up the governance at present?

The railway is set to do ever more for this island and its various economies. Will it be able to deliver, or will politicians restrict its performance?

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Earl. I join him in thanking my noble friend Lord Berkeley for giving us the opportunity to debate the railways today.

I was struck by the optimistic tone of my noble friend’s speech, which is long overdue. It is not so much overdue as far as he is concerned—he is always an optimist—but it is about time that we recognised, in your Lordships’ House and elsewhere, the enormous contribution that the railways have made, and are making, to the British economy and how much they have improved in recent years. As my noble friend said, they are the most successful in Europe. Yet occasionally, those of us known as the political gricers, who sit through these debates and listen to noble Lords on all sides of the House, might think that the railway industry was on its knees instead of being the success story it is at the present time.

Of course, when things go wrong, people get cross, but more things are going right now than they have been for years. I say that as someone who, in the other place, vigorously opposed from the then Opposition Front Bench the privatisation of the railway industry 13 years ago. I was probably wrong in reflecting the current thinking at that time which was all gloom and doom. But it has not been gloom and doom. It has been remarkably successful, although I do not say it would not have been otherwise.

I see in his place the distinguished former chairman of the Railways Board. I shall come to the question of the financing of the railways and Network Rail in a moment but, while I have the noble Lord’s attention, I suspect that if he had been told in his time of the funding he could have for the next five years it would have been a cause for celebration. The great problem in the nationalised railways era was that it was done on a year-to-year basis. Indeed, depending on the economic crisis to strike whichever Chancellor was in No. 11 at that time, it was sometimes on a month-to-month basis. Capital projects were started and then halted—I am thinking particularly of the 1960s and the modernisation of what is now Manchester Piccadilly station, which was a virtual ruin for five years largely because the Government apparently ran out of money and certainly ran out of will. Although there have been some problems about financing over the past five years, certainly the noble Lord and, I suspect, one of his distinguished successors, the late Sir Peter Parker, would have danced with joy—their dancing days may well be over—in those days at the prospect of a proper laid-down five-year plan.

I shall come in a moment to whether the money is sufficient, but we should acknowledge that the Government have done a fair job in producing the White Paper and the associated documents. I return to a point made by my noble friend Lord Berkeley about rail freight. Again, those of us who remember the nationalised railways—and I promise not to bore your Lordships with yet more stories about the signal box windows that I have peered through in the past—will be aware that rail freight, whatever it was called, was always the poor relation of the railways industry. Many of us saw freight virtually melting away before our eyes and disappearing onto the road network. The creation of competition within rail freight, particularly through the efforts of Freightliner Heavy Haul and EWS, now under German ownership, has meant a dramatic increase in the amount of freight carried on our railways.

Again, there is a different attitude among railway managers. Many of the managers I met during my time in the railway industry were very good at their jobs but they were resigned to managing an orderly decline, as it was described to me, of the railway industry. Orderly decline will not do now, and that is not the objective that is being pursued; rather, it is orderly expansion, which for years many of us have called for. I wish that those who profess to love the railways the most could occasionally praise them a little more than they do, particularly the three trade union general secretaries. Railway accidents happen very rarely, but every time one happens one of the general secretaries appears on television speaking as though the railway industry was like the wall of death, and saying that because there has been an accident something is terribly wrong. Of course things go wrong, but the fact that the railways are as safe as they are is a direct result of safety matters being taken so seriously.

All three secretaries are united in demanding the renationalisation of the railways. I speak as a former member of the National Union of Railwaymen. I look at their own membership. At the time of nationalisation in 1948, the NUR had 1 million members. When I retired officially from BR, membership was down to 60,000. I think it is about 80,000 now; the NUR has increased its membership, as have the other two rail unions. Do we as a nation seriously want to go back to the days when senior civil servants acquiesced—or, more often than not, refused permission—to railway managers borrowing money to improve the railway system? Do we really want to go back to when a request for three extra high-speed trains for the then east coast main line could be refused by the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Transport, or whatever it is called these days? Such a policy would not be sensible, and I am glad that we are not doing that.

I turn to the question of financing and to what extent the railways are to be financed in the next control period—number four. There has been considerable debate in the railway publications, two of which I have in front of me. In the editorial column, entitled “Railtalk”, of Modern Railways magazine, the question of the funding gap is addressed:

“We put the gap between funding available and the SBP’s interpretation of the SoFA at between £3 billion and £5 billion”.

I apologise for the acronyms. The SBP is Network Rail’s strategic business plan, and the SoFA is not what it might appear: it is the statement of funds available. There is undoubtedly a gap there. Will the Minister address that problem? It is widely acknowledged throughout the rail industry, despite the kind things I have said about a five-year period. The problem is summed up a bit more bluntly in the current issue of Rail magazine:

“Railway needs more cash to meet Kelly targets”,

says Network Rail. There is undoubtedly a funding gap. What do the Government propose to do about it?

There is another big gap in the White Paper and the associated documents that the Government issued this year. Where is the mention of any further electrification? There is none. Maybe we know something the rest of the world does not. I go to Spain occasionally, and I notice the Spanish are electrifying the line down as far as Malaga. I cannot see a great business case for doing so, but who am I to comment on what someone else is doing? Yet we are apparently unable even to consider the electrification of one of our many main lines. I hear, although I do not know if it is true—perhaps the Minister could comment—that there is a belief at the department of energy that we will return at some unspecified time in the future to $20 a barrel for fuel so we should stick with diesel trains. If that is the case, I have heard some optimistic forecasts from governments of both political hues over the years but that is probably the most optimistic I have ever heard.

Are we really going to be dependent on expensive fossil fuels rather than having a proper long-term programme of electrification? The latter has virtually been ruled out. The same issue of Rail magazine, under the headline, “Minister rejects more electrification”, says:

“Rail Minister Tom Harris has ruled out further electrification schemes for the time being. He spelt out his vision for the railways”—

it is not much of a vision if there are no sparks there, but that is another matter—

“at the Sustainable Future conference in London on October 31”.

That is another example of Scottish Ministers irritating the rest of us madly: the Minister tells the English we cannot have the benefits of electrification, yet almost in the same week the Scottish Parliament announces the further electrification of the Edinburgh-Glasgow line. He will be fine in his home country riding up and down on an electrified railway, but he will not let the English enjoy such benefits. That is the sort of irritating anomaly that those of us who care about the railway industry are anxious to do something about.

I return to rail freight. The Road Haulage Association, greedy as ever, is now demanding 84-tonne lorries on the nation’s roads. I understand that the department is considering a trial of these juggernauts on our roads. They are road trains, and would do even more damage than the current crop of heavy goods vehicles do at present. The Germans, despite having thousands of miles of autobahn compared with our relatively few miles of motorway, have already refused such a trial in their country. The Department for Transport has done some daft things over the years, but I cannot believe that it is really going to allow 84-tonne lorries on to our roads. As well as the damage that would be caused to our road network, long-distance rail freight would immediately be undermined because someone else would pay the true track cost, as someone else does now. Despite the bully-boys of the Road Haulage Association threatening yet another blockade of our fuel stations, the two major inquiries into heavy goods vehicles during my political lifetime have both concluded that such vehicles do not pay their full track cost. Indeed, they have an 11 per cent price advantage after 10 years of a Labour Government compared to that which applied in 1997. I hope that the Minister will reject such a trial out of hand and that he will look again at the funding gap to which I referred earlier.

My Lords, it is surely self-evident by now that the railways are the only long-term solution to our transport problems. According to all forecasts, we can expect an ever-increasing demand for rail travel and a rise in the population in Britain.

Surely we do no want further to ruin the British landscape by building more motorways or dual carriageways, except in exceptional circumstances. If we are serious about the threat of global warming, we must cut down the number of cars and lorries on our roads. For the same reason, we must limit air travel, particularly within the United Kingdom.

What other means of travel are we left with? Buses have to compete with the rest of the traffic on our overcrowded roads, so they can never be reliable, and are unlikely ever to be comfortable unless they are half-empty. Moreover, they are hardly carbon-emission free.

Bicycling makes sense in towns and cities if you are prepared to take your life in your own hands and if it is not raining, but is not much use if you are planning to travel from London to Manchester for a business meeting. You could perhaps do that on a motorbike, but motorbikes, like buses, can hardly claim to be a clean and environmentally friendly mode of travel. Unless someone comes up with a completely new method of travelling in the next 10 years, railways are the only answer.

Network Rail already claims the railways to be the most reliable form of travel. It is only recently that that can be said. It claims them also to be the safest, though aeroplane operators might contest that. It claims them to be the most efficient. That is certainly controversial. They should be the most comfortable and civilised form of travel, but they cannot claim to be that unless every passenger can be certain of a seat.

However, as many noble Lords have already said, passenger travel has grown by 40 per cent in the past few years and rail freight by 60 per cent. Do not let the Conservatives tell you that that is a result of privatisation; it is because the roads have become intolerably congested and parking is nearly impossible. It appears that the Government are committed to spending hundreds of millions of pounds during the next few years on upgrading the existing network. Network Rail, we hear, is going improve security at stations, lengthen platforms and release pressure on bottleneck stations such as Reading and Birmingham New Street, and train operators are going to introduce longer trains and provide improved facilities. All this sounds like good news, and it is welcome, but I would like the Minister’s assurance that it is really going to happen. Even if it is, the Government and Network Rail are doing no more than attempting to keep up with demands as they perceive them. They are not attempting to get ahead of demand. With the exception of improvements to Thameslink and the belated go-ahead for Crossrail, there are no plans to build any more railway lines, high-speed or otherwise, or, as far as I know, to reopen old ones.

The Government do not seem to have any co-ordinated transport plan for the future. How are we going to travel from one part of the country to the other in, let us say, 2020? The Government say that they do not want to commit themselves to any long-term investment, because circumstances may have changed by 2014, when they propose next to consider it. However, you do not have to be Nostradamus or the Delphic oracle to foresee that, in times of greater restraints on carbon-emitting forms of transport, the relatively clean option of the railways is the only way forward.

The Government must start to plan new railways now, the most obvious being the high-speed line from Scotland to London that links into the existing line to the Channel Tunnel. More than any other project, that would greatly reduce the necessity for so many polluting internal flights.

I imagine that the Government’s reluctance to commit to a larger rail network for the future is due primarily to cost, yet surely the planning and budgeting for proposed new lines do not cost too much. However, as far as I know, they are not planning to go ahead even with that.

It seems likely that much of the money for funding future railways will have to come from green taxes on road users and plane operators. That does not seem to be a vote-winner for any Government. All Governments suffer from short-termism. They will get no credit now, and certainly no extra votes, for providing the country with an excellent rail service in 2025. Perhaps future planning for transport should be taken out of the Government’s hands altogether and made the responsibility of some all-party executive whose members will be young enough still to be sitting there in 25 years’ time. But that is just a thought.

In another sense, cost is a very real concern to those of us who believe in the future of the railways. Travelling by train is already too expensive and if newspaper reports are anything to go by the price is about to go up again. How can we hope to wean motorists away from their cars and businesses away from their lorries if the alternative mode of transport is actually more expensive? I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, although I thank him for allowing us to speak on this subject; I have always been opposed to the privatisation of the railways, partly because higher costs for travel is one of the inevitable consequences. How on earth anybody could believe that privatisation could make rail travel cheaper is a mystery to me. The only way in which to keep prices under control is by government subsidy, and there will never be a chance of that under a Conservative Government. My only hope is that this Government might use the regulator to control this danger. I should like to know whether the Minister is seriously considering that.

I have always believed that the railways should primarily be a service managed by a competent businessman, not a business that only incidentally provides a service. As time goes by, this distinction will seem more and more important.

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Berkeley on securing this debate. It would be churlish of me not to commend the Liberal Democrats on the ingenious way in which they have carved the debate up into bite-sized chunks. We look forward to the later contributions from those Benches in the afternoon.

I have no financial interests to declare although, as the House may be aware, I chair the Railway Heritage Committee, I am a vice president of the Campaign for Better Transport, which your Lordships may know better by its old title of Transport 2000, and president of the Cotswold Line Promotion Group. Like my noble friend Lord Snape, I have spent the whole of my adult life campaigning for a better understanding and a fairer deal for our country's railways and, like him, there were times in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s when I almost despaired, under successive Governments, for their future. The emphasis always seemed to be on contraction, cost-cutting, and closures. Indeed, I remember that when a senior official from the Department of Transport arrived as a new board member on the British Railways Board, he announced that he was there at the Minister’s behest to preside over the orderly rundown of the railways. That was the mood of the time.

Most of today's problems of overcrowding and lack of capacity stem directly from the short-sighted decisions taken by successive Governments in the past 40 years, including many closures following the Beeching report and the singling of long sections of double-track main line railway, such as that from Salisbury to Exeter and the Cotswold line between Oxford and Worcester. However, at least we were able to prevent the implementation of the lunacy contained in the Serpell report, which would have left the nation's railway network looking a bit like that of Argentina, with closed routes and rusted lines more or less everywhere.

How different it all looks today. For the first time that I can remember, we have a White Paper that explicitly rules out all passenger line closures, and the discussion has moved on to how we provide for growth and not look at ways in which we choke it off by cutting services. As we have heard from my noble friends, the railway's problems now are problems of success. We now run 19,700 trains each day, which is 20 per cent more than 10 years ago, and more than any other European country except Germany. Those trains carry more than 3 million people each day, which is more than at any time since 1946, when the network was almost twice as large. Demand is growing at over 6 per cent a year, which is the fastest growing demand in Europe. The latest interim report from Network Rail shows that punctuality is getting better. There was a long way to go there, but improvements have occurred. The punctuality figure of 90.87 per cent for the past six months is the highest for nine years.

In recent days, the most stunning success in the railway has been the opening of the new St Pancras Eurostar station and the completion of High Speed One, the Channel Tunnel rail link; all of it on time and on budget. I was particularly pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, and John Prescott MP belatedly got the recognition that they deserve for their part in delivering that project.

Less publicised and less recognised has been what has been happening on the west coast main line—a source of much irritation to your Lordships, certainly in the years that I have been in this House. The west coast main line modernisation is not yet complete. It will have cost far more than originally envisaged, but at least Virgin Trains is now able to demonstrate improvements in punctuality and service quality, with the promise of three trains off-peak an hour to Manchester and Birmingham. Picking up a point made by my noble friend Lord Berkeley, there is also a possibility that we may get close at last to a seven-day-a-week railway and an end to lengthy diversions and bus substitutions at weekends.

Virgin will just about be able to cope with that within the new Virgin high-frequency timetable, but there will be no spare capacity after 2012 unless the Government are prepared to allow Virgin to add two extra coaches to each train. To have those coaches in place by 2012, the order will have to be placed now and I hope that when my noble friend replies to this debate he will be able to offer some words of encouragement on that score.

Looking further ahead, I see that the Department for Transport already appears to accept that the London-Birmingham-Manchester corridor will be completely saturated by 2024. I am delighted that a number of speakers have referred to plans for a new high-speed line from London to the North of England and on to Scotland. I sit on an advisory board called Greengauge 21 as an honorary member. Until recently, one of our members was my noble friend Lord Jones of Birmingham, but he sadly had to depart when he joined the Government. It is a worthwhile project and I am pleased that it is getting support from your Lordships in this debate, because it will take the opportunity to take all long-distance travel off the existing network, which will be freed up for local traffic, commuting and freight. We are talking about a new railway built to a specification similar to that of the Channel Tunnel high-speed line, with all the advantages of links and interchanges to the conventional railway that can be achieved.

In the short term, a lot can be done to improve services, increase capacity and satisfy rising demand. One is to give Network Rail every encouragement to reinstate some double track on lines that were singled 30 years ago—the sort of routes that I mentioned a moment ago, particularly on the old western region and in the south. Another is to embark on a programme of reopenings in England such as the east-west line from Cambridge to Oxford and that down to the south coast from Uckfield to Lewes. Much more is happening in Scotland and Wales in terms of line reinstatement and reopening than in England and we should give full marks to the devolved Administrations in those two countries for recognising the potential of rail.

I warmly welcome the commitment contained in the gracious Speech to proceed with Crossrail. It is an excellent scheme and it is a pity that it has taken so long to come to fruition. I hope that when noble Lords come to examine the Bill in Committee they will look very carefully at the proposed western terminus. Maidenhead is not the logical location for that. The obvious solution is to ensure that, when Network Rail spends its promised £455 million on enhancements at Reading, Crossrail platforms are incorporated into that station as part of that scheme.

Then there is the case for electrification referred to by my noble friend. I hope that the Government take seriously a letter that was sent to them recently by Iain Coucher of Network Rail and Adrian Shooter, the ATOC chairman. I do not have time today to restate all the arguments that they use, but they are absolutely right to question the assumptions contained in the energy White Paper. I quote one section from the letter:

“Today we have absolutely no idea about the source of energy in the future. We can immunise the railway from changing fuels (and indeed the cost of new fuels) by an electrification programme that puts those decisions elsewhere. For example, it seems extraordinarily incautious to be spending millions of pounds equipping a railway to run on one type of fossil fuel … only to find we—as an industry—have bet on the wrong fuel type”.

I would like to see a commitment to electrify all our main lines eventually but I appreciate that that is likely to be some way off. In the first instance we should be starting on a programme of infill electrification to link existing electrified routes and to provide extra capacity through the high acceleration electrification gives us. This should include lines such as Leeds to York, Liverpool to Manchester and from Bedford to Kettering and on to Leicester.

I cannot conclude my speech without saying a word about air travel. This is not an occasion for a debate about the wisdom of airport expansion in the south-east of England, although my noble friend will know that I intend to continue to oppose the third runway at Heathrow as strongly as I can, up to the point where I hope that the decision can be reversed. I would, though, like to draw your Lordships' attention to a ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority on a complaint made by me about misleading advertising by Flybe, one of the low-cost airlines which seems to delight in knocking the railways. I complained about three statements made by Flybe, which included a claim that rail fares were,

“set to soar 30 per cent”,

and that its air fares were cheaper than the train. My complaint was upheld by the ASA in every respect. It said that Flybe's ads breached the ASA code in six different ways, covering truthfulness, substantiation and comparison. I hope that it has taken notice of that.

Already, an increasing number of your Lordships who travel down here from Scotland prefer the train to flying, and I have no doubt that more will follow their example as the reliability of the west coast line continues to improve. I hope that those who continue to fly will take account of air quality and climate change issues too. They should remember that the CO₂ output per passenger kilometre on a rail journey from London to Edinburgh is 11.9; and that for an equivalent air journey is 96.4.

The renaissance of the railway in recent years has been remarkable and astonishing, and I pay tribute to the thousands of men and women who work as members of the railway community in our country. They are generally unappreciated, often abused and yet set the highest standards of public service. I remember warning back in the 1970s that if the country were foolish enough to imagine that it could do without its railway, it would come bitterly to regret it in 20 or 30 years' time. The fact that today's debate is about expansion, not contraction, shows just how far we have travelled in our appreciation of how vital the railway is.

My Lords, I welcome this debate drawing attention to the growth in passenger and freight traffic, and I look forward to hearing more about the Government’s paper, Delivering a Sustainable Railway.

I am particularly interested in the proposed infrastructure changes at Reading and Birmingham. It is interesting to note that the proposals for Reading station will not be the first major reconfiguration of that station. The original Brunel station was built with a single long platform for both up and down trains—a layout which survives to this day at Cambridge. It did not take long for the Great Western Railway to find out what an operational inconvenience this was, and to rebuild the station to approximately what it is today. It is now time for further development to provide yet more capacity.

I must express my disappointment that in connection with the now almost certain advent of the Crossrail scheme, there is no sign of any intention to electrify that part of the Great Western lines, as stated by the noble Lord, Lord Snape. I would have thought that Crossrail should merely be a precursor for a scheme similar to Thameslink, providing a through electrified service from at least Newbury, Swindon and Oxford, with a longer term goal of going even further west to Bristol and north-west to Birmingham and using Crossrail continuing east to Ipswich and Colchester.

Last week, as a member of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers, I had the benefit of attending a day-long seminar on ERTMS, the European Rail Traffic Management System, and ETCS, the European Train Control System. It was very well attended by some 200 people. The keynote speech was by a senior member of the Department for Transport. ERTMS has, since its inception in the 1980s, been the panacea for the European railway industry's problems.

The original idea was to provide the international train driver with a uniform presentation of information as to how to drive his train, irrespective of the signalling style of the country in which he found himself. Not only that but—due to the multiplicity of track-to-train communication systems, every European country having its own special non-compatible brand—an ERTMS-equipped train should need but one set of equipment.

ERTMS will provide interoperability, increased safety and, due to its moving block concept, increased traffic capacity—the answer to everyone’s prayers. The main problem up to now has been cost. In spite of that, a number of schemes are being implemented in Europe, and at last year’s railway signalling convention in Interlaken we were taken for a run on the Swiss SBB ERTMS train—so it actually works. As a passenger on the train, one was not aware that there was anything special about it, but we were shown the type of display the driver saw, which is what is significant for the operation. One of the problems of systems involving many manufacturers and different operating regimes is to ensure that everybody operates to the same standards and change level and does not go off and do their own thing, which has been common in the past. It has cost the Netherlands railways €30 million to overcome a problem due to the change in standard levels.

In the UK, our first ERTMS system is being installed on the Cambrian lines between Shrewsbury, Aberystwyth and Pwllheli. I will comment on some operator concerns about that later. ERTMS costs in the UK have up to now been too high, with the payback period being too long. A critical re-examination, the “red diamond challenge”, has recently taken place to establish a business case for ERTMS. As a result, a national implementation plan has been established, running to 2044. The breakthrough is to co-ordinate the implementation of ERTMS with the phased replacement and rollout of life-expired existing railway signalling systems and rolling stock, rather than superimposing ERTMS on the existing installations. That way, costs are minimised as less equipment should be needed on the ground, and the business case can be made.

One benefit of ERTMS is expected to be increased track capacity, due to the provision of moving block capability. I am not convinced that that will be achieved in practice on a route handling a mixture of fast express trains, suburban services and freight. Another fact is that the system relies on GPS to provide train position. That is unlikely to be sufficiently precise in densely tracked areas such as London terminals, so it is likely that conventional track circuits will still have to be used in such areas, again reducing the cost benefits.

I would like to comment on the practicalities of implementing ERTMS, as presented to the IRSE’s seminar by an operational staff member who has to make it happen. He said:

“ERTMS is not a technical project, but predominantly an operational one”.

That organisation, which has the Cambrian franchise, is not geared up to undertake a major project of this nature as part of the day-to-day job. He has to design, install and maintain a whole new set of signalling equipment on a train that was not built for it, which may result in loss of passenger accommodation to accommodate an equipment cubicle. He has to train drivers, gain safety approvals, maintain the service and manage the costs. There are a lot of practical questions. Where do you put the kit? Is there an adequate electrical supply on the train? What is the effect on traffic of releasing trains from a limited fleet for modification? Who pays for new driving techniques and new operating rules, and so on?

Such problems will occur just as much on the other major routes when ERTMS is rolled out nationwide over the next 40 years. The various ROSCO and ATOC contracts will need to take account of those considerations. ERTMS will take time to establish itself; I hope that it will be worth the wait.

Finally, when will something be done about the dreadful and disgraceful state of Derby station? It has been falling down for a very long time.

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for introducing this debate. The noble Lord spoke eloquently of the success and growth that permeate much of the railway in this country. I want to talk about some problems, as other noble Lords have done, but we should not let the problems that exist detract from the fact that there is a real success story at the moment. My noble friend Lord Mar and Kellie said that he had been a train enthusiast for 43 years. I thought; only 43 years! What it is to still have the joys of youth.

I want to talk about some aspects of the north of England. A lot of the growth that has taken place and a lot of the proposed investment as the Government and the industry chase that growth have occurred and are occurring in the south of England, particularly the south-east of England and, as other noble Lords have said, in Scotland, where a different political system has produced a more ambitious approach to rail openings. Not everything in the north of England is gloom by all means. The services to London are now incredible and would have been unimaginable in the days when I used to stand as a train-spotter at Wakefield station. Northern Rail took over a very difficult franchise that was thought to be a basket case and went through an inquiry which many people thought was going to result in a lot of service reductions. However, Northern Rail is really doing quite a good job. The growth in traffic that is taking place in the north of England is a credit to it, as is the improvement in services and reliability. The new TransPennine franchise, against the expectations of many of us, is turning into quite a success, with the fancy new class 185 trains.

Nevertheless, there are still many examples of lack of a joined-up railway and a lack of connectivity, as people might say, partly due to the continued fragmentation of operational services and partly due to the dismantling of large amounts of the railway that took place in the 1960s and progressively in little ways for the 30 years afterwards. I will not talk about the need for a high-speed railway to the north of England; other noble Lords have mentioned that. The two glaring examples where electrification is needed in the north are strategic lines; the Leeds to York line and the Manchester to Preston line, which are an integral part of the east coast and west coast operations—and they could be far more so if they were electrified, not least as diverting lines. We can dream and look ahead to the future to the electrification of the Settle and Carlisle and what that could do. Not very long ago, we were all campaigning to stop people closing that line down.

On a much more local level, here is an example of a lack of common sense in the operation of services. I often get the 20.30 from Kings Cross to Leeds when I am going home. That has an advertised connection at Wakefield Westgate with the last train to Huddersfield. Time and again, passengers are advised to stay on the Leeds train and take a much longer journey to Leeds, because the Leeds trains are a few minutes late and the Huddersfield train is going to leave on time from the other platform across the station bridge. People sit on the train watching the Huddersfield train set off while they are still on the Leeds train. This last week, people were advised to stay on the Leeds train, and a few enterprising people got out, raced across the bridge and got on the Huddersfield train. Others were sitting watching them do that. It is crackers. It is all to do with the fact that they are under different ownership and because there are tight targets on punctuality. It is the last train at night; that train is not going to hold anything else up. It is just about a lack of common sense in providing the good service that could be provided.

I give another example. On Monday this week, my daughter went to Colne station for the Preston train, on her way to work in Manchester. It should have left at just after seven o’clock, but it did not arrive. There were no indications or announcements on the Tannoy to say that it was not going to arrive. There were 20 passengers waiting at Colne to go to work who had to wait an hour for the next train, because it is only an hourly service. Why? It was because the train had been late getting to the section of line between Gannow junction and Burnley and Colne, an 11-mile single-track siding. Once a train is on it, no other train can get on it for the best part of an hour, so the trains are turned around early. It is madness. How on earth can you persuade people to take the train regularly and not find other ways of travel when that happens more often than it ought to? It seems to happen about once a month. The answer is to reinstate the passing loop at Nelson, where there is an island platform and where, even after they singled the whole line from Gannow junction, there used to be a passing loop. It is common sense that that should be reinstated to allow a proper, flexible and reliable service. Otherwise, how on earth do you expect people to use that line to go to work?

Those are just examples of joining up missing links on a very small scale. For the rest of my time, I want to talk about the railway line between Colne and Skipton. Of course, it is not a railway line, because it does not exist. It is a missing link. It was closed down in 1970. Since 2001, when the campaign group SELRAP, the Skipton East Lancashire Railway Action Partnership, was formed, it has had tremendous success; indeed, a number of noble Lords in this Chamber have signed up to the campaign. Some 10 years ago, pretty well everyone thought that the line was a lost cause. It is now being looked at as a serious proposition. If anyone wants to know more, they can Google SELRAP and will find a most impressive website.

It is topical today, because tomorrow in Skipton there will be the official launch of a SELRAP study, commissioned from independent consultants JMP Consulting, into the business case for reopening the railway line. If people tell me that reopening railway lines is not a possibility and a hopeless dream, I merely produce in evidence my noble friend Lord Mar and Kellie, who will wax lyrical, when asked, about the reopening of the line to Alloa, with which he has had something to do. We are talking about increasing patronage of railways by passengers. SELRAP has made its own small contribution to this. On 1 April this year, a special train called the Missing Link was commissioned by SELRAP to travel from Colne to Skipton. It had to go a long way around and took five hours. It was the subject of a cartoon in the local newspaper, the Colne Times, showing a drawing of a train at Skipton station with the following caption:

“We apologise for the 37-year delay to the Colne train. This was caused by vandals removing 11 miles of track”.

I hope that I live long enough to see the service reinstated.

The 70-page report is embargoed until tomorrow, but I have permission from SELRAP to tell noble Lords a little bit about it today. The study was carried out at the suggestion of the Department for Transport and Network Rail, which told the campaigners that if they wanted to have their case taken seriously, they had to produce a business case and feed into the Lancashire and Cumbria Route Utilisation Strategy, which is being prepared and is due to be published next year. It would provide a missing link between central Lancashire—which the Government think is a city region—and the Leeds city region. It would provide Pennine Lancashire—towns such as Blackburn, Accrington, Burnley, Nelson and Colne—with a link to better rail services to the west to Manchester and to Leeds and Bradford. It would also increase overall trans-Pennine rail capacity. The Northern Way, an organisation which the Government tell us is leading the way in the north of England, has put forward the concept of a Pennine or north of England Crossrail. The idea arises from the need to increase the capacity and amount of trans-Pennine, east-to-west rail traffic in the north of England.

Many of the Government’s policies on railways seem to be based on what, in road terms, has been discredited as “predict and provide”. Clearly, if there is increasing rail traffic in some areas, you have to provide for it, but there is also a need to use investment in railways as part of regenerating areas. The regeneration of East Lancashire—in housing terms, the Elevate area, now branded as Pennine Lancashire—is absolutely crucial. Reinstating the Colne to Skipton rail service can play a real part in the regeneration of the old Pennine Lancashire textile towns. According to the study, the cost is between £43 million and £81 million, but the cost-benefit analysis suggests that there is real potential. The study mentions a positive cost-benefit ratio for single track reinstatement with potential for a positive cost-benefit ratio on a double track, wider economic and social benefits for employment, new businesses, visitors to the region and to the Yorkshire Dales, and a positive environmental impact with a net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. I commend the report to the Government and to all your Lordships who are interested in these matters, and we look forward to its launch tomorrow.

My Lords, the principal difference between my humble contribution to this debate and those of the previous speakers is that they all know a great deal about the railways in seriously profound detail and I sometimes pretend to know a little about it.

There is also an emotional content to what I have to say, forced on me compulsorily by my very close friendship with the late Robert Adley MP in the other place. He became one of the most famous pro-railway characters in British political society as a result of his noble campaigns and very interesting visits to foreign railway systems, including in China, where I was the humble PPS and equipment carrier. He, the artiste, took dramatic photographs of wonderful locomotives and train sheds and so on, and I was lumbered with carrying the heavy equipment. None the less, it was a privilege. In those days, a tiny number of Conservative MPs were pro-railway in a practical as well as an emotional sense and they wanted to see it succeed. Like me—I was a Conservative MP then as well—they were horrified at the details of the Government’s railway privatisation scheme. I agree with the remarks of my noble friend Lord Glasgow, who said that he regretted that privatisation ever occurred.

I remember those days very vividly but shall reminisce only briefly because it was a long time ago. I remember how shocked people were to see the plundering of state assets that went on with these schemes for railway privatisation. New companies were launched together with the original infrastructure company, and company ownership and control changed hands several times. There were a number of examples of that, of which the Great Western Railway was just one. Although I shall not say who it was, just by chance I happened to know a non-executive director of the board of the first company that was then sold on to another buyer. He said, “I know nothing about railways at all but have just made £850,000 clear profit as a result of this transaction”.

Then there were the leasing companies that suddenly sprang up. They made enormous supernormal profits from an artificial situation involving state assets. The taxpayers wrote off all the debts to ensure that they were in a perfectly good, pure and pristine state for flotation and issue, and they were then released on to the market. South American politicians were heard to comment in various countries, “Gosh. I wish we could still do that kind of thing in South American countries like we used to in the old days, but fancy the British doing it!”. Therefore, the country that invented railways went through a very sad and sombre time, with City-oriented plundering of assets for private gain. To be fair to the eccentric thinkers who sat in boxes with people pushing food through twice a day asking, “How are you getting on with that scheme for railway privatisation, Cedric?”, they were producing a slightly dotty scheme, to say the least, for separating the infrastructure company from the train services as a way of bringing about the tension of competition and therefore cost-reduction pressures on the assets coming from the interlinking of these activities. It was all theory, written by Friedman and others in a sort of miasma of nightmarish ideas of right-wing economic theory rather than practice. It was a horrible initial period that lasted for many years; it took years for new trains to come along. Before ceasing to be a Conservative MP in 1997—

My Lords, I am interested in the noble Lord’s horror story, but is it not a fact that he was a Member in another place and a supporter of the Government who put that hotchpotch through?

My Lords, I am on the record with a small number of other colleagues who proposed a series of amendments to try to mitigate the effects of the legislation. The pressure is very great on Members because of the Whip system, but the most important amendment that we tabled was to allow British Rail to carry on as an entity and main, principal franchise applicant. We had no chance because no one else would support the amendment of a small group of colleagues, of which I was one. British Rail would have been able to apply and presumably get a number of the franchises successfully, which would have mitigated the disastrous effects of that initial period.

Later on, just before I ceased to be a Conservative MP, I remember pleading with a number of Opposition spokesmen who dealt with transport matters in the other place to try to reverse the policy as soon as possible when taking over. Tellingly, they all refused to do anything of the kind as ultimately it would have been that great department of state—the Treasury—that would determine the amount of money needed to bail out bona fide shareholders in these companies, and all the rest of it, which would have been far too expensive. I foolishly and naively had a session on a plane to Hong Kong with the then shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury who wisely refused to listen to my blandishments. He was a shadow Treasury spokesman who became Chief Secretary later on.

Rightly too, as the Government—accidentally, I suppose—have a success story in one or two aspects. What has happened to the railways is a genuine, real success story, which to some extent is chance but also because of the Government’s actions since then. I commend the Labour Party in government since 1997 for the wise way in which the Government said that they would think about the matter long term to see what happened. I know that they had an emergency to deal with when they had to replace the old infrastructure company with Network Rail. That was a genuine emergency, and they rightly nationalised it. I was pleased about that; at least it was partial deprivatisation.

They took on the rest of the issues and gradually new trains came along. I suppose that subsidies are beginning to taper off now, although they got larger in the initial period after the plundering and flotations of those artificially constructed companies, which City investors loved to the utmost degree, as did their international friends, in buying the assets of these new companies. The situation has improved over a long period with a lot of patience from the Government, which is why they should be commended. The Minister deserves the same plaudits as his other colleagues in that the Government have patiently and gradually persuaded the companies to improve their management, including all the technical people who run the railways—those in between the senior managers and the strategic board—the people lower down who do the physical day-to-day work.

I do not think that the subsidy system will ever be satisfactory, as my noble friend said. Indeed, railways have to have financial input to some extent to succeed. That is the pattern everywhere. If you do not do it, as in the United States, you have a truncated, limited system of a few long-distance services, and then the dense network in the north-east around New York city.

We have to think about the future. I believe that the public want to travel more by train than by car. Even if they own their car—there is a psychological need for ownership—they recognise the need to restrict its use both in urban and intercity settings. That is the great example that we have, and there is an opportunity to do something.

I agree with all the remarks that have been made hitherto by noble Lords. I am proud that six of the 12 speakers today are members of the Liberal Democrat Party. I hope that the public will notice that we are primordial in the promotion of a modern railway system. The UK system has the capacity to be extremely effective, but we are in the difficult intermediate stage of horrendously overcrowded trains that are still putting people off and causing lots of grumbling. There are overloaded platforms; the one at Banbury Station was a telling example from the chief executive in his statement a few days ago. As the Government are once again part-owners of the total entity through renationalisation, which I am glad about, they have a strong obligation with the rail regulator to try to get this right in the long term, at long last. They must make this country, the inventor of trains, the great leading train country of Europe again.

I was grateful to attend the opening of High Speed 1 the other day; it was a great occasion. I took the opportunity of speaking to a number of French executives and businesspeople who have been involved in many of the subsidiary construction activities, both of the station and the high-speed trains. What a pity that the Hitachi locomotive could not have been British-made, but at least it was substantially made in Britain despite being originally a Japanese model. The French executives paid tribute to the work done in the creation of this modern railway system.

The nightmare period is over and we can think about the future. I conclude with one or two brief points about that. We now have 110 kilometres of high-speed line; France has 7,000 with another 2,000 already on the stocks ready to come through. The dense high-speed networks of the European countries which we have seen recently in Spain, Germany, France, Belgium and Italy—now with trains coming from the east of France—and so on, are all linking up together into a Europe-wide network. We have got High Speed 1 just in time to play a part in that, but we must have a high-speed line going up as far north as possible in the United Kingdom to make that total network logical. It will presumably gradually go up even into the Scandinavian countries; although their trains are very modern anyway, so maybe they do not need it. That is therefore an obligation upon the Government.

Finally, I refer to the Bill now coming through from the other place. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Mar and Kellie for telling me what I was going to talk about today, so I have left this to the end. Clause 2 of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (Supplementary Provisions) Bill is about the rail regulator’s function, under an amendment, for the Channel Tunnel rail link. Importantly, will the Minister today make a point of assuring us that this does not mean any reduction in the competitive free-access system which we believe in for all these and future high-speed lines; and that both foreign and British applicants will be able to play a full part in these matters, including, of course, freight through high-speed lines into the Channel Tunnel? Now that the Channel Tunnel company mark 2 has been reformed so successfully by Jacques Gounon, the French chairman, there will be freight on freight trucks as well as lorries on freight-carrying coaches, as in the present Channel Tunnel system. Those are important matters. We need reassurance on Clause 2, because some people are worried about its implications unless the Government react accordingly.

My Lords, I am not a railway enthusiast. Like the noble Lord, Lord Snape, I simply laboured at the mill in trying to run the system, as we both did also in the bus industry. One of the most important things we can focus on today is oil prices; I mentioned it in my question to the Minister yesterday. What oil price scenario is built into the planning of the airports and the railway? If people are thinking of $20 a barrel, I can tell them that they are in cloud-cuckoo land. I am still convinced that by 2035, if not sooner, it will cost £4 a litre to put petrol or diesel into a car or lorry.

The world is short of oil, demand is going up and people are increasingly willing to use oil as a political weapon to get their own way. The House needs a real explanation of the basis on which the Government are building models through which they can condemn possible expansions of the railway and justify the expansion of Heathrow. The Minister was not present last Tuesday at the Second Reading of the Climate Change Bill, but the scenarios that were painted by a number of noble Lords, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, were quite frightening, and the only way that we can confidently predict providing a railway service is if it is electrically driven because electricity can be got from all sorts of power sources. I believe that it will come from nuclear power, which will give a firm basis for our economy. It almost ranks as one of the essential elements in the defence of our national life because if the oil is turned off a lot of problems will arise. We must plan for that fairly early because even if the Minister, in a fit of generosity, were to get up today and say that we will go ahead with some electrification and with the high-speed line—which I do not expect—we shall wait years before we have the locomotives and the track, get through the planning processes and weather the protests that we shall, no doubt, have on the way.

Can the Minister give us some justification for the fare rises that are taking place? The people who get franchises seem to have extracted from them promises that can only lead to fares going up. There is nothing else they can do. If they want the franchise, they have to agree to increase the fares. The Government may like to shelter behind the fact that it is the private companies that put up the fares, but the decisions behind that are all made in Marsham Street or in the Treasury.

The franchising process is one of the products of the system that the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, so rightly condemned. It is a very good system for keeping lots of consultants in work and for employing lots of civil servants at the Department for Transport and it is well subscribed to by paint manufacturers because often the only new thing on a train is the coat of paint and otherwise it is the same service as before. Why can we not have a franchising process that is longer, demands that the franchisee invests money— that is presumably what the Government are most short of—and contains a clause whereby if somebody does a good job they can put that towards their franchise bid? The people who used to run Midland Mainline recently lost their franchise, but it was voted the best railway company in the country. It is ironic and ridiculous that the system should be so. It is not beyond the wit of man to invent a franchising process that gets lots of investment, steadily improves performance and serves the country far better than the crazy system designed by OPRAF in the run-up to privatisation. The Government need to be taken to task because they have not got their mind around this major problem. I am quite happy for people who do not live up to their promises to lose their franchise and to do so quickly, but if somebody is doing a good job and is investing money, I cannot see that the public interest is in any way served by terminating the franchise.

One of my noble friends mentioned that we have been told four times that we will get 1,300 new carriages. It may be that we will hear that a few more times before some orders are placed. When are they going to be placed? Many franchises around the country are absolutely desperate for more capacity. I could mention the Great Northern franchise and the First Great Western franchise, and could take the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, to many other places where that is a major problem.

The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, may say that he does not have the money to buy new rolling stock, or that the rolling-stock companies will not lease it, or that they are so concerned with being brought before the Competition Commission that they will not lease it, but there seems to be nothing to prevent the Government leasing it. You do not actually have to pay; you pay an annual rental charge. A market that is as sclerotic as the rolling-stock market in this country wants a good bit of old fashioned competition. The Government should buy 200 or 300 new trains and put them on the railway. Let us see what that does to the ridiculous prices that are being charged for the Pacer trains that are about to be reintroduced to Devon and Cornwall. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, might agree that introducing in 2007 what were Leyland National buses, which I think the bus industry got rid of 25 years ago, is absolutely disgraceful.

The Government might also consider safety regulation, which is almost strangling parts of the railway. It has been put together in bits, and because of it, we close two lines of railway on a Sunday. There used to be single-line working on the railway for which the noble Lord, Lord Snape, and I used to work. Much of our railway is now signalled for two-way working, but we do not use the second way. If the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, cannot tell me now, will he find out later why we are not using it? We did not go around killing lots of people; that is a complete misinterpretation of the facts.

When the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, answered a Question from me on Monday, he cited,

“the likelihood that, on current projected trends, over the next decade there will be an increase in the number of rail passengers of about 30 per cent”.—[Official Report, 26/11/07; col. 1026.]

He does know, does he not, that we are at present getting more than 6 per cent? If, at the end of 10 years, one trajectory is at 3 per cent and another is at 6 per cent, there will be a very big gap that will be filled with dissatisfied, disaffected customers, despite the eulogy started by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who said that things were getting better. Doubtless they are in some places—they are certainly getting better for freight, for which British Rail had almost a death wish. However, it is the satisfaction of customers to which the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, should turn his attention, because in the end the customers are voters who will get very cross with him and his Government if something more positive does not come forward.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for introducing the debate this afternoon. I am acutely aware of my limitations in this because I have no background in the railway industry. I do, however, understand technology a little.

Whenever I talk to anyone who has expertise on the railway industry outside this House, one name always comes up: that of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. He is not some anorak who will tell you some obscure detail about the utilisation of a particular piece of rolling stock. He had a substantial track record, and few noble Lords can match his experience. He continues his excellent work with his chairmanship of the Rail Freight Group.

The noble Lord teased me slightly about our policy on these Benches, but actually we are quite enjoying watching the business flourish in the private sector and in the way he described. He said that in the UK we were about 30 years ahead of our EU partners.

I noted the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Dykes. Like the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, I am not quite sure why the noble Lord did not join the Liberal Democrats much earlier than he did. But it would be quite easy for me to be really—

My Lords, perhaps I may remind the noble Earl that I was sorely tempted from 1995 onwards. I have always disapproved strongly of crossing the Floor of the House because you usually cheat the public by not having a by-election and the mandate therefore is distorted. It is a party system rather than a personal system. Once I was freed from that by being defeated in 1997, some while later I joined another party.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that comment. My MP is the Member for Grantham and Stamford. It would be easy for me to be quite negative. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, might have expected me to be. But we are talking about a problem of success. I shall not repeat the figures that we have heard today, but the challenge is to increase capacity, reliability and utilisation.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, started with a predictable attack on my noble friends. None of them is contributing to the debate, and it is disappointing. But last week we had a debate on defence. Yes, there were two Labour Back-Benchers, but only one of them could be remotely said to be supporting the Government. We are all poor at supporting each other’s debates, but the underlying problem is another matter.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, talked about the carbon cost of road and aviation transport, compared with rail transport. He suggested a four-hour rule. But how would overseas businessmen coming to Scotland feel about that? What would be the effect on the Scottish economy? I would not want to be responsible for implementing that policy. It seems to me that the railway system comprises civil engineering assets, the permanent way, the signalling and power systems, the rolling stock, the staff, and then the passengers and freight customers. As far as I can see post-privatisation, the problem of the poor condition of rolling stock is largely solved, but I listened very carefully to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw.

Because of the system of penalties for breakdowns and the need to attract customers in order to maximise revenue, operators have gone for better rolling stock. Old or unreliable rolling stock does not make commercial sense, but in the day of the noble Lord, Lord Snape, it kept plenty of rail maintenance personnel in work, as he indicated. At one time I thought that the noble Lord was auditioning to join these Benches. He then slightly spoilt it by resurrecting the road-rail debate, and longer and heavier vehicles. I am surprised that he did not challenge me on the policy on that. But we should wait and see what the report from the Heriot-Watt University says.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl for giving way. I have been a member of the Labour Party all my life because my father was, too.

My Lords, I do not think that I need to respond to that.

The noble Lord made some quite forceful observations about the road haulage industry. I can see little advantage for the road haulage industry in going to longer and heavier vehicles because all the productivity advantages would go to the consumer, as they did with the advent of 38-tonners and 44-tonners.

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, made several detailed observations about rail connections, and he is right. The disappointment is that it is taking so long to sort out these problems. No doubt, long waits or the disruption of connections are a real deterrent to the use of rail rather than car. This month, Network Rail published its strategic business plan, which was derived from the high-level output statement. It is certainly exciting and seeks to address some of the problems arising from the success of railways post-privatisation. The SBP covers control period 4 from 2009-14.

In asking questions about the long-term budgets, I accept that the situation is much better than the one described by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, many years ago when we had very short-term budgets, but can the Minister tell us whether the strategic business plan is all funded in the CSR in future expenditure plans, or is it an aspiration, just like most of the 10-year transport plan? Is it really going to happen, and is it enough? Can the system cope in the future, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked? What can be afforded?

Prior to privatisation in the mid-1990s, I read a report about capacity constraints. This was many years ago so I cannot remember all the bottlenecks, though there many even then. But, for example, I recall that the Welwyn viaduct was mentioned. Can the Minister arrange for details of all the current bottlenecks in the rail transport system to be placed in the Library? The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, painted what I am told is an accurate picture of the increase in requirements for transport. The Freight Transport Association is extremely exercised about the lack of capacity both of the ports and from them, so I hope that the HLOS does enough to provide an increased freight capacity.

I share the concern of many noble Lords about the poor utilisation of the Channel Tunnel. It is bizarre to have lorries going from the Midlands all the way to Italy when their freight could go by train. Can the Minister indicate what the problem is, what he is doing about it, and whether he will follow up the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and have a go at the EU Commission?

Prior to privatisation there seemed to be some confusion in the rail industry as to whether it existed for the benefit of those within it or its passengers and freight customers. There is little doubt about the answer today, at least in the UK. The noble Earl, Lord Glasgow, suggested that it was not privatisation which raised the utilisation of the railway system, but that congestion elsewhere made it essential. I do not know the answer, but if we had not reformed the industry, we really would be in a mess now. However, passenger care still has some way to go. This week we had some interesting media reports about the lady annunciator, if that is the right term, who will be experiencing severe delays before her next assignment arrives. But why are some of the announcements so dreary, Stalinist and unintelligible? There is plenty of good practice around, so why is it not universal?

I use the Tube system extensively, but I never bother to buy a ticket because I use an Oyster card. For how long are we going to persist with the antediluvian system of buying a ticket immediately before starting an ad hoc train journey? Why can there not be some form of national Oyster card? Of course it would have to be smarter than the current system, but it would avoid the risk of missing a train by a few minutes and the associated stress of that, and it would save the cost of issuing tickets in terms of labour, capital and space. I hope sincerely that the Minister can also tell us what progress is being made in extending the Oyster card system to all of the London commuter rail system. It would be interesting to compare the number of ticket machines at Victoria station with the number of retail outlets. Quite often at Victoria you see queues of very frustrated customers at each and every ticket machine, trying to buy a ticket before their train departs.

Finally, the signalling system is clearly key to safety, reliability, productivity and even fuel emissions, and we have been extremely lucky to have the contribution this afternoon of the noble Lord, Lord Methuen. I understand that the safety problems associated with SPAD have largely been solved, but now accidents at level crossings are the biggest risk to the system. Noble Lords did as much as they could during the passage of the Road Safety Bill to reduce that risk, but I am unhappy about the reliability of the signalling system. I do not understand why, from a technical point of view, we have such reliability problems. I am guessing, but I would not be surprised if a more sophisticated signalling system could produce a nugatory acceleration and deceleration of trains, which are very heavy, thus saving even more emissions. However, I recognise that rail transport is already very efficient on emissions.

Fortunately, my noble friend Lord Pearson of Rannoch is not in his place and so I can safely mention the European rail traffic management system so well described by the noble Lord, Lord Methuen. I am told that it will provide greater capacity, efficiency and reliability. If we want a pan-European rail freight system, as advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, we will need to accept this European system.

As to our aspirations of what we can do with signalling in the long term, we have to ask whether they are ambitious enough. I am not an expert on signalling—I cannot answer the question—but if I were the Minister I would look very closely at it.

My Lords, I join in the general congratulations to my noble friend Lord Berkeley on securing the debate. In fact, I will go further than that and say that I have benefited greatly today from listening to the contributors to the debate. They obviously know far more about the history and development of the rail network than I do and I feel somewhat humble and inadequate in their presence. There is a wealth of knowledge in your Lordships’ House, both on the Opposition Benches and on the Benches behind me, on the rail network and its development. I pay tribute to all noble Lords who have contributed.

It has been a good debate because it was framed in a positive mode and was full of encouragement. It is a rare pleasure these days to be involved in debating issues where there is a genuine recognition that great improvements have been made, particularly over the past decade or so.

I share the sadness that was expressed at the outset by my noble friend Lord Berkeley about the absence of contributors on the Conservative Benches. I pay tribute to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for playing his part. It is sad that there has not been more of a contribution because the Conservative Party has a lot of explaining to do for the damage it did to the rail network during its 18 years in government. We have worked hard to put that right. Many of the problems we still have are because of the long-term lead-in necessary to solve them. This prefigures what we have to do in order to roll out continuous improvement.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, was right to discuss a renaissance in the railway network. That is certainly what is happening and we want to continue that renaissance. As many noble Lords have said, we are seeing record levels of train patronage. In the most recent full-year figures the railways saw annual growth in passenger numbers accelerating to 7.5 per cent, up from 3.6 per cent in 2005. That takes the number of of passenger journeys to well over 1.1 billion, the highest level for 60 years, which is a real achievement when the railway network is now between 30 and 40 per cent smaller than it was in the 1940s. This makes our railway network the fastest growing in Europe.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, made a good point when he said that we will have to take account of this more recent rapid growth when considering our forward plans and our current prediction of a 30 per cent growth in passenger numbers. It is a fair point that has not escaped my attention; I have made it to officials on more than one occasion.

Like the passenger railway, rail freight is now growing after a long period of decline, a point made by a number of noble Lords, in particular by my noble friends Lord Berkeley and Lord Faulkner. The amount of freight moved has increased by 66 per cent since 1995 and we expect it to grow by another 30 per cent in the next 10 years. Noble Lords will appreciate that that growth, coupled with rising passenger numbers, will substantially increase the competition for space on the network. To cope with those ever-increasing numbers, we are taking steps to increase capacity. Over the next two years Network Rail plans to more than double its average annual investment in enhancement schemes to expand network capacity. Platforms will be lengthened, new platforms added, new tracks laid and line speeds raised.

The rail White Paper that was published in July, much praised during the debate, is a vote of confidence in rail travel. It is the most positive statement about the growth and development of Britain’s railways in 50 years. It sets out the funds we intend to make available for the railways in the medium term, together with the improvements we expect the rail industry to deliver in return. It covers the period from 2009 to 2014. The aim is to develop a modern, sustainable system that is accessible and easy for passengers to use. In addition, it sets out our plans in the context of a long-term strategy covering the next 30 years. The White Paper is unique in delivering the single biggest programme of investment for a generation. More than £10 billion will be invested in enhancing capacity between 2009 and 2014. Overall government support for the railway will total some £15 billion.

Much has been said during the debate about the 1,300 extra carriages that are to come into service between now and 2014 and will go to the routes and services with the worst overcrowding problems. That will provide nearly 100,000 new seats for passengers on intercity commuter trains to our major cities. It will increase that capacity and will help us cope with the 30 per cent increase we currently project for the decade ahead. Roughly 900 of those new additional carriages are expected to go to London and the south-east, with the remainder being allocated to regional cities and inter-urban areas. Precise details have still to be finalised.

The next step in the process is for Network Rail and the industry to consider in more detail how best to deliver the Government’s targets on capacity, safety and reliability through the introduction of more rolling stock. The department will publish a rolling stock plan in January 2008 setting out its proposals in more detail. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, was particularly keen to learn about that. We hope to see the introduction of new rolling stock following on swiftly from that plan.

We are aiming for a network that can handle—

My Lords, before my noble friend leaves rolling stock, will he confirm that the review in January will cover the issue of the Virgin request for two extra coaches for its Pendolino service? That is crucial for matching the supply of seats to the demand that is likely to exist in 2012.

My Lords, I do not have that detail but I will write, as I will have to on a number of the issues today. I appreciate the point the noble Lord has made. I had already made a careful note of it in my notes, and we will try to come to that in correspondence.

The Secretary of State has also specified an increase in reliability, which has been one of the hallmarks of our recent success, from 88 per cent to 92.6 per cent in 2014, and a further 25 per cent reduction in delays of more than 30 minutes. It is important to tackle both those issues.

The new InterCity Express programme vehicles will be introduced in addition to the 1,300 new carriages identified in the White Paper. The IEP will create a new design of train that will be lighter and more environmentally friendly than current long-distance trains. They will also be longer and capable of carrying significantly more passengers than current stock. This is a flexible train that can be deployed on different lines in different lengths and with different sources of power. We aim to award the contract to the successful bidder in the winter of 2008-09.

In planning future passenger services we need to ensure that the needs of freight are properly taken into account. We are investing £200 million in a strategic freight network that will help to reduce congestion on our roads. The Government see the productivity element of the transport innovation fund as a potential funding stream to enhance the network. It also represents the first steps towards the development of a strategic freight network.

Some passengers are concerned about possible fare increases—we have heard comments on that in today’s debate. Now that industry costs are under better control, our aim is to return the balance of taxpayer funding to historic levels. In the past six years, the amount invested in rail has risen. However, nearly all of that increase has been met by taxpayers. Our objective is to restore the balance.

Under the franchise system, nearly 300 million more passengers a year use the trains. The revenue earned by franchise operators is paying for the capacity to accommodate the 180 million more passengers a year that we are expecting by 2014. We are delivering record numbers of new passengers and delivering the investment necessary to accommodate them. Our emphasis on increasing capacity means that we can make a start on tackling some of the worst overcrowding.

More than half of all rail journeys are on regulated fares, which we are continuing to protect at RPI plus 1 per cent up to 2014. Regulated fares are still on average 2 per cent lower in real terms than they were in 1996. They compare well with the cost of using a car if all motoring costs, and not just the cost of fuel, are taken fully into account.

Other fares, as noble Lords will know, are unregulated and can be set at operators’ discretion. That does not mean that operators can simply increase fares as they wish, because they have to compete with cars, coaches and airlines. We want to see operators pricing people back on to trains and making train travel more affordable. In this way, we will maximise the benefit of the rail network to passengers, as well as reducing road congestion and helping the environment. If fares rise, it is because they are helping to pay for new carriages, more frequent trains, improved stations and refurbished tracks.

My Lords, I hope that the Minister will forgive me for interrupting at this stage. He spoke about making trains more comfortable and affordable, and more attractive for other non-fare reasons as well. Will the Government put their full weight behind a move to have more quiet coaches, where mobile phones are not used, with people using their phones in between rather than in the carriages?

My Lords, that is an aspect of passenger comfort. Like the noble Lord, I suffer from the excessive noise of people sitting beside me and the overuse of mobile phones. It is an issue that we continue to raise with the train operators.

To make it easier for passengers to identify and buy the ticket they need, we are bringing greater transparency to the fares structure. We are radically simplifying the fares structure by creating four simple categories across the whole network. They will be: anytime, off-peak, super off-peak and advance. The rail industry needs more efficient ways to sell tickets if it is to cope with the predicted growth in demand. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, referred to the success of the Oyster card. We certainly support those developments, and other developments such as using a mobile phone to buy tickets. Increasingly, people want to be able to access services on their own terms, at a time and place of their convenience. As noble Lords will I am sure appreciate—I certainly do—they do not want to queue. That is why we will roll out ITSO smartcards across the rail system, supported where appropriate by ticket-to-mobile and print-at-home facilities. Additional internet-only fares will be allowed where they bring real value, responding to the recent growth in the trend for buying tickets over the internet. For the more traditionally minded among us, tickets will be available to purchase at stations. The National Rail Enquiry Service will provide a single source of comprehensive information through its website and over the telephone. Details about timetables, service disruption, real-time train running, fares and facilities will be available. Passengers will be able to find information about any fare available on the network and will be able more easily to plan their route.

A number of noble Lords mentioned standards of physical access and facilities at stations, which vary across the network. The noble Lord, Lord Methuen, raised the sad case of Derby station, which he thought was badly in need of attention. That is one of the 150 mid-size stations for whose refurbishment and modernisation the Government have set aside £150 million. Of course, that money has been set aside on top of the £370 million of accessibility funding that we have announced at an earlier time. Precise costed plans for the near future include approval for the £5.5 billion Thameslink project, a £120 million grant for the major redevelopment of Birmingham New Street to improve passenger capacity and station environment and works at Reading station to eliminate a major bottleneck on that particular part of the network.

A number of noble Lords referred to the Crossrail project. Of course, much is known about that—it is a new east-west railway, linking Maidenhead and Heathrow with Shenfield and Abbey Wood through new tunnels under the centre of London. It is to be funded by the Government, Transport for London and businesses that will directly benefit from that link. Work on this massive £16 billion project will begin in 2010 and the first trains are expected to run in 2017. It will carry nearly 200 million passengers a year, significantly increasing capacity on the network into and across London. That will be achieved by increasing peak east-west capacity by some 40 per cent, adding 21 per cent to total rail capacity to the City and 54 per cent to Canary Wharf. Its contribution towards relieving congestion and overcrowding on the existing national rail and underground networks should not be underestimated. Ultimately, Crossrail will help to meet the substantial growth in demand for travel in the capital expected over the coming decades and continue the important regeneration and growth in London's economy.

Crossrail is and should be recognised not just as a project for London but as a project for the nation, as it will benefit not only London but the country as a whole, providing strategic interchanges for local, national and international rail passengers.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that Crossrail would be much more effective if it was extended as I suggested?

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a fair and reasonable point. No doubt that is one of the issues that will be reviewed over time.

It is estimated that Crossrail will add some £200 billion to the UK’s GDP and attract an additional 80,000 jobs to regeneration areas.

In their positive contributions noble Lords made important points and raised important issues. One of those was the air versus rail substitution issue. We of course support the use of rail when it can provide a reasonable alternative to short-haul air services. Studies suggest that rail competes well with air on point-to-point journeys of two to three hours. For longer journeys, air travel is a mode of choice and investments to improve our inter-urban rail network will over time increase the attractiveness of rail as an alternative, as will more attractive pricing packages offered by the rail companies.

It is not up to the Government to dictate how and when people travel, as that is obviously a matter for personal choice, but we are keen to get more people on to the rail network and it is true that as a percentage or proportion fewer people travel by plane and more by train. To give an example, over the past five years passenger numbers on the rail network have increased by some 15 per cent. Rail’s share of travel between London and Manchester has switched, for example, and now two-thirds of passengers travel by train rather than plane, up from one-third in 2004. There have been similar improvements on the main links between London and Scotland. So we can see and look forward to continuing improvements in that regard.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, made one interesting point—of special interest to me, as I share an interest in planning issues. He praised the Government for introducing the Planning Reform Bill—and I welcome that support—because of its potential for ensuring that strategic rail freight interchanges benefit from the careful consideration that will no doubt be given to them through the new Infrastructure Planning Commission, which means that they will be subject to statutory timetables and that the potential for delay will be much reduced. In that context, we may well see that Birmingham New Street, Reading and the other smaller upgrades announced in the rail White Paper could be considered by the Infrastructure Planning Commission. That would helpfully speed considerations.

Several noble Lords referred to the European Rail Traffic Management System. The noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Methuen, made some important points about that. It is an important advanced signalling system, which will eventually replace line-side signals with in-cab signals with all the benefits that that might bring, potentially offering the ability to run trains closer together and increase capacity on the network. However, the technology is still being developed and trials are being set up. I think the noble Lord, Lord Methuen, referred to the Cambrian coast line pilot for which money is already allocated. We launched the technical strategy at the same time as the publication of the White Paper and we made it clear that the ERTMS is part of our medium-term to long-term thinking. It has great potential for the future.

Reference was made, particularly by noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches, to the value of introducing high-speed lines. Interest has focused on this with the opening of the Channel Tunnel high-speed link. I understand the argument that noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches made for this and it is welcome that they want to enter into this debate, but it should be fairly said that high-speed lines do not address the priorities for the railway system as it is. The danger is that the sort of investment in high-speed lines that those noble Lords are asking for could distort our budgets and absorb large sums of money for gains that are not so apparent. The commitment to a network of that sort could lead to expenditure somewhere in the region of £30 billion. I would be interested to hear from the Liberal Democrats where they see that money coming from.

The Eddington transport study recommended pursuing high-speed rail options only where they have been demonstrated to be the highest value for money option to relieve the congested corridors, which makes good sense. We need to ensure that we increase capacity in order to tackle congestion on the network. Our belief is that the measures in the high-level output statement and strategy will do this in the foreseeable future.

To add to the argument, the economic geography of the United Kingdom is different from that of our European partners with their emphasis on high-speed lines. Our main challenges are congestion and reliability, and rather less so journey times and connections. I understand the force of the argument and I am encouraged by the commitment to debate on the issue, but we will get greater value for investment in the intercity express programme. I have spoken a fair bit about that and the increase in vehicles that we will have to service that commitment.

My noble friend Lord Snape made some telling comments. I was grateful to him for his support for the Government’s programme and his general encouragement. He asked questions about the funding gap. We cannot expect the Network Rail business plan to match the high level output statement and White Paper exactly. After all, it is an iterative process. The so-called funding gap largely relates to items that are optional extras rather than commitments such as the 1,300 new carriages. We are in continued discussions with the Office of Rail Regulation and we will be developing the next version of its business plan which is not finalised until the start of the HLOS period in 2009. There is much discussion to continue, quite properly, and we have to look at issues such as assumed rates of return and put in place some precautionary schemes which may or may not be required to deliver on reliability and improvements.

My noble friend also drew our attention to the importance of electrification. We do not rule out further electrification. We obviously recognise the benefits of electrifying some routes and certainly recognise and understand the environmental arguments for it. We have to measure the priority for electrification in good business terms and in terms of operational need. If we can reduce the cost of electrification, the case for it can be strengthened. The key question is whether the investment will recover its costs within a 10- to 15- year period so that it can pay for itself regardless of what the optimum longer-term carbon choices turn out to be.

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt my noble friend but if we are to have a diesel-hauled railway in financial control period four up to 2014, what is the Government’s estimate of the price of a barrel of oil between now and 2014?

My Lords, I intend to come to that point because the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, asked a similar question about our projected costs. As regards my noble friend’s other point about the heavier goods vehicles, there has been a lot of coverage on this and I think there was an article in the Times on 26 November. There are no plans to allow LHVs in the UK. The Transport Research Laboratory—one noble Lord also referred to the Heriot-Watt study—is undertaking a desk study to assess what the effects might be if LHVs were to be committed. That study was commissioned in response to a growing interest within the rail freight industry. However, I reiterate that we have no plans to allow LHVs in the UK.

I am conscious of the time. I realise that I am running over but I shall comment on oil. The noble Lord, Lord Dykes, gave an interesting historical discourse and made important points about the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and freight. The opening of section two of the CTRL does not threaten its use by freight in any way; in fact it will free up more paths on those parts of the conventional network not currently used by Eurostar. We are in continued consultation on the charging regime for CTRL and that covers passenger and freight operations. There is no doubt that freight operators will continue to let us have their views and that will inform our negotiations and discussions.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, asked me at Question Time yesterday about the assumptions made on fuel prices that underpin the DfT forecasts. Those assumptions are set out in the UK air passenger demand and CO₂ forecast November 2007 report. The forecasts are based on the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s central forecasts on oil prices. Its forecast is that oil prices will fall from $65 per barrel in 2006 to some $53 dollars per barrel in 2030, with most of the decline occurring from 2012. That is the basis on which those projections are made. Of course, there will be a wide-ranging debate and continued reflection on that and no doubt there will be considerable disagreement too, but that is the model on which we currently base our view.

I shall stop now as I recognise that I have gone on for far too long. However, this has been a very helpful, enjoyable and positive debate. Noble Lords asked many questions. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, asked me quite a few detailed questions that I have not dealt with. I shall endeavour to put my answers together in a compendium letter which I shall circulate not just to those who asked the questions but to all other noble Lords who contributed to this very useful and positive discussion on the future of our rail network.

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. It demonstrated the wide-ranging expertise and knowledge about railways in your Lordships' House, and has been really good. As my noble friend Lord Snape said, this is the first time that we have had a five-year plan financed for the railways. Most of us have debated where growth should come, which is very positive.

I leave your Lordships with one interesting statistic. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, mentioned that the reopening of his line from Skipton to Colne was estimated to cost between £43 million and £81 million. I am told that that is the price of delaying the Crossrail project next summer by one month, so that gives us some food for thought as to where the allocation of new investment should go. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

My Lords—

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.

Both this and the Manchester City Council Bill were deemed to have been read a second time. However, petitions were lodged against them, as a result of which they were referred to a Select Committee of this House chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison. He and his colleagues on the Select Committee did a really thorough job of examining both the terms of the Bill and the views of the petitioners. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for that. As noble Lords will know, their conclusions have been published in a special report.

I have an interest to declare in that, for nearly 30 years, I was MP for the constituency of Bournemouth West. It is 24 years since I ceased to be a Member of Parliament for it, and I am proud of the fact that I am an honorary freeman of the borough of Bournemouth.

The Bill deals with street trading, which has generally been subject to statutory control by local authorities. Schedule 4 to the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 enables local authorities to control street trading by designating streets in their area as prohibited streets, where it is not permitted, or as consent or licensed streets, where it is permitted subject to the grant of the licence. The 1982 Act enabled councils to control the sale of goods, but not the sale of services. Clause 4 of the Bill proposes to give powers to the council to enable it to control services. Examples of services are, as I have been given them, hair braiding, tooth whitening and henna tattooing.

Bournemouth is a premier holiday destination. In the last year, more than 5 million visitors came either as day visitors or to stay one night or more, so noble Lords will understand that tourism is of key significance to the borough’s economy. The council must be constantly vigilant in a highly competitive environment to ensure that the appeal, attractions and overall image of Bournemouth remain to the fore, both nationally and internationally. Illegal traders are beginning to tarnish that image. They descend on Bournemouth from Easter to Christmas and focus on the main favoured locations where there is the greatest concentration of visitors and holidaymakers. It requires a very considerable effort on the part of the authorities to control those activities. In fact, the present control regime is totally inadequate.

Illegal street trading covers not only services but the sale of goods. Examples are the vendors of sunglasses, kites and items such as rattlesnake eggs, which are a combination of two magnets which, if moved around or thrown up in the air, rattle together resembling the sound of a rattlesnake. Because they contain magnets, noble Lords will readily appreciate that if they are used by or in the vicinity of someone who has a pacemaker they could cause serious mischief.

Many of the goods are of dubious quality and are certainly below the minimum standards for health and safety purposes. They are often sold by people who describe themselves as pedlars. Trading by a person acting as an authorised pedlar is exempt from the street-trading regime under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982. To be a legitimate pedlar, the person must have a certificate issued by the police and must keep on the move in the pursuit of the trade. A pedlar’s licence costs only £12.50 per annum. Once issued, the activity can be carried on anywhere in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, except where an Act in terms similar to this Bill exists.

The right to be a licensed pedlar is derived from the Pedlars Act 1871. The Act defines, in words delightfully resonant of an age long gone, what a pedlar is:

“The term pedlar means any hawker, pedlar, petty chapman, tinker, castor of metals, mender of chairs, or other person who, without any horse or other beast bearing or drawing burden, travels and trades on foot and goes from town to town or to other men’s houses carrying to sell or exposing for sale any goods, wares or merchandise or procuring orders for goods, wares or merchandise immediately to be delivered, or selling or offering for sale his skill in handicraft”.

I am sure noble Lords can imagine the great difficulties of bringing before a court a case where an attempt was being made to prosecute a so-called pedlar for not being an authorised pedlar. What happens in practice is that the pedlars sometimes wait to be challenged, and they can stay at the end of a street for something like 20 minutes. As like as not, they will move to the other end of the street, where they will stay for another 20 minutes, and so it goes on. If a prosecution is successful, the fine is extremely limited, probably less than £100, but the legal fees for the council could be in excess of £1,000, so it hardly recoups even its basic costs from the exercise on which it has embarked. The production of evidence is extremely difficult to secure and involves time-consuming work by officials and police. Last year in the borough of Bournemouth it is estimated that it cost the council about £12,000 in enforcement and prosecution of illegal traders. All of this is extremely unfair for legitimate market traders and shopkeepers. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, will give some expression to that view, because he is knowledgeable on the subject and has wide experience of the marketplace.

Pedlars should not be street traders. They are required to move from place to place. Clause 5 amends the appropriate schedule to the 1982 Act to make it clear that a pedlar will not be able to trade in a prohibited street unless trading from place to place, and will not be able to trade in a consent street unless he has first obtained consent from the council, which involves both parties in thorough research and investigation. However, in any street that is neither a consent street nor a prohibited street, the pedlar will be able to carry on trading as before.

Clauses 6 to 9 set out a regime by which council officers and police are able to seize items which they believe are being used in the course of unlawful street- trading, and the courts are given power to forfeit such items if a successful prosecution is secured. Clauses 10 to 14 set out a fixed penalty regime for street trading offences. The provisions enable the recipient of a fixed penalty notice to discharge any criminal liability by the payment of a fixed penalty.

The Select Committee made a strong recommendation that the time is surely long since past when individual councils should be put to the heavy cost of bringing forward private legislation to deal with this nuisance. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, will speak to that point and I may safely leave it to the Minister to answer it, but there is a great deal of strength in the case that the committee put forward in the recommendation in its special report.

There is no doubt that this Bill is urgently needed. Many improvements are under way further to enhance the reputation and prestige of Bournemouth. It would be a grave error if these were allowed to be damaged by illicit street trading. To underpin the planned work to ensure that Bournemouth remains a first-class destination resort, I hope that this Bill will find its way quickly to the statute book.

Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Eden of Winton.)

My Lords, I hope that it might be helpful to the House if I intervene briefly, because opposed private Bills do not come before your Lordships as frequently as they used to and not all noble Lords may be familiar with our proceedings on them. Although we are debating the Bournemouth Borough Council Bill, the debate should include the Manchester City Council Bill. I suggest that the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, the sponsor of the Manchester Bill, speaks next, followed by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, who chaired the Opposed Bill Committee which considered both Bills. Other noble Lords may then speak and I think that the Minister will wind up the debate, before the noble Lord, Lord Eden, winds up and the Motion that the Bill do now pass is decided on. The noble Lord, Lord Bradley, will then move formally the Third Reading and passing of the Manchester Bill.

As these are Private Bills, the question of their principle has not been decided at Second Reading and, in those circumstances, speeches on the Motion are permitted, although the usual rules of debate apply. If there are any questions on Private Bill procedure, I shall be happy to try to answer them during the debate.

My Lords, I shall speak briefly in support of the Manchester City Council Bill and I declare an interest as a former Member of Parliament and councillor in that city. I start by associating myself fully with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Eden, in relation to the Bournemouth Borough Council Bill and I shall not rehearse the arguments which are very similar to those concerning Manchester.

Manchester has an efficient street-trading system which allows it to grant licences and consents, and there are a number of prohibited streets, particularly in the city centre and notably around the newly refurbished Exchange Square area of the city. A licensed pitch in the areas where street trading is allowed is, as we have heard, a valuable asset, and a street-trading licence within the city currently costs about £625 annually. It is worth repeating what the noble Lord, Lord Eden, said—that the cost of a pedlar’s certificate is only £12.50 per year.

Manchester imposes conditions on its licences in relation to the hours of trading and the type of goods that can be sold at those street-trading pitches. That sort of control is unavailable in respect of pedlars and is a crucial issue addressed by the Bill. One thing that most concerns the legitimate street traders is the fact that all the enforcement activity which street-trading officers have to carry out against pedlars ends up being paid for to a great extent by the increase in charges against the street-trading licences. This is because the city council is able to cover the costs of enforcement across the piece and therefore enforcement against pedlars is put against the cost of street-trading licences.

It is worth noting that the services provided in Manchester which cannot be controlled—a situation similar to that in Bournemouth council—include activities such as windscreen washing at traffic lights, henna tattooing, hair braiding, face painting and, as one photograph that was presented to the Select Committee showed, even teeth whitening. Market Street in the city centre is a particularly popular location for pedlars and on any one day we can expect up to 24 pedlars working in just that one street, selling a range of goods such as sunglasses, toys and various other items. Therefore, we can see that the problems associated with Manchester, Bournemouth and many other cities in the country are similar but they have to be dealt with by single pieces of legislation.

In evidence, city council officers said that, if the pedlars are left alone, they tend not to move and they trade from a stationary position, which is not what they are meant to do. If they are challenged, clearly they move on, but often they move just a short distance in a street such as Market Street in the centre of the city and continue to trade from a new location. The problem is that the city council, through its enforcement officers, simply does not have the resources to keep policing this activity by the pedlars on the streets.

We have a similar and particular problem in the area around the Manchester Evening News Arena, where one finds unlawful traders selling counterfeit goods related to concerts that are regularly held at that venue. The Select Committee was told in evidence that in some cases the traders tended to congregate in the most dangerous areas around the arena because they wanted to capture as many people as possible going in and out. As I said, that is particularly dangerous and a public hazard.

Finally in this brief contribution I highlight the fact that Greater Manchester Police are fully supportive of the Manchester Bill. Indeed, a senior police officer attended the Select Committee to give evidence. I shall not dwell on the point about national legislation, which may well be dealt with by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, but Manchester certainly takes the view that it would be preferable to address these issues by national legislation rather than have to go to the trouble and expense of promoting private legislation in every case. On behalf of Manchester City Council, I thank members of the Select Committee who sat through two full days of evidence in July and gave both promoters and petitioners a full and fair hearing. I commend the Bill to the House.

My Lords, as chairman of the Opposed Bill Committee I start by thanking my four colleagues who sat with me for two days and all the officers who so ably helped us. I also thank the two sponsors of the Bills, who have explained the problems so well from their own experience of their towns. I am pleased to see the noble Lords, Lord Graham and Lord Turner, who will no doubt tell us that as members of the All-Party Group on the Markets Industry they have wide knowledge on this issue.

I also thank the opponents of the Bill and the agents, Mr McGerr and Mr Robert Campbell-Lloyd, for sending information on the Bill even at this late hour. We listened to them carefully, but neither I nor my committee was persuaded by their opposition. One minor recommendation we made was that local authorities should be minded in implementing the legislation to ensure that the officers are well and properly trained in how to advise street traders and in particular pedlars who wish to ply their trade.

The problem, which has been put before us so well, is the consequence of outdated legislation and concerns the distinction between a pedlar and a street trader. The pedlars’ legislation is ancient, dating from 1871 and 1881, and addresses the simple idea of someone plying their trade from door to door, hence carrying their wares; whereas a street trader has a pitch with a licence and typically has a stall from which he or she offers goods or services. The definition is now being abused. Street traders are using the cheaper pedlars’ licences. These licences are not only cheaper but can be issued in one town and used, in a portable way, across the length and breadth of Britain. Genuine street traders, who pay a lot more for their licences, are restricted in where they can obtain a licence and can set up their pitch only in that one town or city.

The regulation of these two different kinds of trader is enormously difficult not only for local authorities but for the police. I might add that responsibility for licensing pedlars falls to the police but for street traders to the local authorities. That also causes confusion. Alex Chadd, a member of South Wales Police, speaking on behalf of ACPO, believes that there should be reform. The police certainly want to offset their current charge of having to deal with pedlars’ licences.

My Lords, I had the pleasure of serving under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, on these two Bills. It is the second time that I have served on such a committee. Last year, I served on the Select Committee which looked at the Leicester, Maidstone and Liverpool Bills. In all details, these five Bills were the same. I understand from the Private Bill Office, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, that 10 or 11 more of these Bills are in the pipeline. I totally agree that it is high time to have national legislation to deal with this problem. We have heard the arguments from the objectors, who in fact have been more bona fide traders than the fly-by-nights who cause all the problems. There should be a regime to enable them to operate sensibly in parallel with the proper market traders whom we all respect. I heartily back everything that the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, has said and I commend this Bill to the House.

My Lords, I congratulate Bournemouth and Manchester on obtaining Third Readings of their Private Bills. I commend the words of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, who has done a very powerful job tonight for the many local authorities up and down this land. They are crying out for national legislation to deal with many problems, some of which have been enumerated by the noble Lord. I speak as the joint chairman of the All-Party Group on the Markets Industry. I am privileged to share that chairmanship with the noble Lord, Lord Wade.

I assure noble Lords that we have toiled endlessly for several years under the great tutelage of the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, who was our worthy secretary for several years and the founder of the group. Both Houses have worked together to assemble the evidence, which was produced by the National Association of British Market Authorities, the National Market Traders Federation, the Association of Private Market Operators and others. We have had endless meetings with Ministers. All the issues debated today were raised with Ministers. As has been said, the previous Minister for the Department of Trade and Industry, Mr Ian McCartney, was made well aware of the situation. He was very sympathetic, but he has moved on. Now we have to deal with the new Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. I hope that the message from this House, given by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, will assist us in bringing this matter forward. The honourable Brian Iddon will bring forward his Private Member’s Bill again.

I appeal to the Minister to take from this House the message that we need a national plan and that we need to repeal the Pedlars Act. We need to bring forward legislation that will give the support and protection so desperately needed by all local authorities, which is being achieved tonight in these two Bills for Bournemouth and Manchester. There are many Bills in the pipeline, and if we have to go through an endless process of dealing with them in this way, it will be a very long time before towns and cities up and down the country get the support and protection they need from Parliament. So I beg the Minister to take our message back to his department and the other departments of state that are involved. Their representatives have come to our meetings, and we have discussed the issues and produced the blueprint; in fact, we produced a Bill that will allow them to give us the response that is so desperately needed. I therefore ask the Minister to bring forward national legislation.

My Lords, when the noble Lord who spoke for Manchester talked about the persecution of face painters and hair braiders, I recalled that for many years London Transport persecuted buskers and thus deprived us of the pleasure of their company. It reminded me why my heart opposes this kind of legislation so deeply, but that is not the issue for today. Local authorities are entitled to make their towns and cities duller places if that is what they wish to do, although as someone who visits Bournemouth for the occasional conference, I think that would take some talent. But here the Government are making a real mess.

As the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, said, we have a plethora of these Bills. They are not all quite the same; there are minor differences between them so that we are putting together a patchwork of law around the country. Each little Bill contains its own innovations. We now have services coming in. How does that affect prostitution? Does it mesh with the law on prostitution, which quite clearly it covers? We are getting all sorts of inconsistencies and things which have not been thought through. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, said that this will create great expense for local authorities. It is difficult for those who want to set up in a trade to find out what the regulations are from one place to another. We are being inefficient and expensive and we are doing things wrong.

If the Government do not support these Bills, they should not allow them to pass. If they do, they should be doing something nationally. I suggest that the Minister should have a quiet word in the ear of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and point out to him the precedents of such as the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, which started as a Private Bill in the House of Lords and ended up as legislation without a great deal of trouble. It works very well that way round because it is hard for an MP to do this. But it is actually quite easy for us, so long as the Government give the proposal a fair wind.

My Lords, it is a pleasure for me to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Eden, and other noble Lords who have had an opportunity to air this situation in the House. The Minister will be under no illusion that as far as parliamentarians are concerned, and having listened to all that has been said, there is a need for national action. It is therefore with dismay that I have to tell the Minister, who clearly can say nothing positive about this matter today, that he should go back to his department and reflect on the fact that the national organisations representing traders—the National Federation of Market Traders, the Association of Private Market Operators and the National Association of British Market Authorities, representing local government—have been battering at the Government’s door in one way or another for the past few years. I cannot be precise, but I would say that this matter has been growing for the past 10 years.

I was grateful to see the noble Lord on his feet as the joint chairman. We had another joint chairman called Brian Iddon, and you can see the genesis of the agitation. It shows what authorities have been driven to do when faced with the insidious spread of malpractice by pedlars. The Pedlars Act is all very well, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Eden, said that it comes from a bygone age. That is right, but the situation has changed and something needs to be done about it.

I have had some influence in those organisations and I am still very concerned with them. More than once the Minister’s ministerial colleagues have addressed us and been very warm. I remember that when Gerry Sutcliffe was the Minister he was very warm and friendly towards us. Eventually civil servants came to address us on the practicalities, but they were less than lukewarm on doing something about it. We were told that this matter was not strictly for the Department of Trade and Industry but also concerned local government and the Home Office. If we believe that we are the party of joined-up government, why cannot we join up the government departments and do this kind of thing?

It was with dismay that I found that Newcastle, my home town, was driven into spending a great deal of ratepayers’ money. I was told earlier in the debate that 10 towns are queueing up with private Bills, including Leeds, Canterbury, Nottingham and Reading, but why should local authorities be put to this great expense and aggravation? They do not want to do it; they are driven to do it. A council—and I was once a leader of a council—would not easily or idly incur the enormous expense of legislation unless it was driven to do so. My noble friend the Minister should take this away, without commitment, and recognise that my good friend in the other place, Brian Iddon, is persistent and keeping well up on this.

I dearly miss my good friend Joe Dean—Lord Dean of Beswick—who was Manchester through and through. More than once he stood up in this Chamber and said that he was proud to represent the city of Manchester because it had the two finest football teams in the land—Manchester City and Manchester City reserves. He meant it. He was fiercely Manchester, the leader of the council, and he knew the area. I simply say, in the memory of my good friend Joe Dean, that I am grateful for what has been said about the needs of Manchester, which is a fine city.

The point was made that when the itinerant pedlar is driven out of a large city by Bills of this kind, he will go somewhere else and eventually the Government’s hand will be forced. I know about legislative restraint and time but pegs sometimes appear. The first decision we made was to say to the Government, “The action required is to abolish the Pedlars Act but to recognise that simply abolishing that Act will not solve the problem. You will need to do far more than that”.

Legitimate traders, who pay rent, rates, insurance, lighting, heating and congestion charges, and who pay for safety at work, holidays, sick pay and pensions, are carrying the burden and, unfairly, pedlars are riding on the back of the services provided. When we had meetings with representatives of the Local Government Associations, London Councils, trading standards officers and the police, they all said that there is a need for this legislation. So I say to my very good friend the Minister—I understand that he will be able to say very little positively today—will he make sure when Hansard is printed that his colleagues in other government departments are aware that there is a move and a mood that should not be ignored?

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the committee so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison. I concur with everything that the noble Lord and my noble friend Lord Methuen said. I hope the Government can do something about it—even hand out the Bill in another place.

My Lords, the Government are grateful to the Opposed Bill Committee, particularly its chairman, my noble friend Lord Harrison, for producing a special report concerning the Bournemouth Borough Council and Manchester City Council Private Bills. I understand that the House has relatively few occasions to debate in this way following a committee report. I am pleased, therefore, to have the opportunity to speak to the issues raised regarding both Bills.

I make it clear right from the start that as per normal the Government do not take any view on the Private Bills—they are a matter for Parliament to decide—so my remarks will be addressed to the powerful arguments that have been put forward from all sides of the House by experienced parliamentarians, some of whom originally came here from the other place while others have spent their distinguished careers in this House. I accept that the arguments have been put in a powerful and proper way by noble Lords. We have carefully considered the committee’s recommendation, based on general street trading policy concerns, that a national review should be undertaken of street trading with a view to introducing legislation. It may not come as a complete surprise to the House that the Government cannot support that particular recommendation. I shall explain why we have taken that decision.

We recognise that a number of interested parties strongly believe that there should be national street- trading legislation. We understand the concern about the proliferation of Private Bills to regulate street trading, and the legislation on pedlars is certainly very old. We go further: we accept that some local authorities may face particular difficulties with street trading, and that some of those difficulties may be caused by licensed pedlars. However, we do not believe that the case for national legislation across the 410 local authorities, boroughs and district councils in England and Wales has been made. In our view, these are essentially local matters for local authorities to tackle as and when necessary. Local authorities, as they often argue, are best placed to understand and respond to many issues that affect the well-being of their communities and the quality of life of their citizens. They can deal with issues causing significant harm or concern independently of what other local authorities may do.

We should not forget that local authorities, including those that face particular difficulties with street trading or pedlars, are already able to tackle illegal street trading and to tackle street traders selling counterfeit or dangerous goods. By way of example only, enforcement officers might conduct an initial advisory discussion or chat with an unlicensed trader on their first interaction with him. The enforcement officer might counsel the trader to obtain the necessary licence to trade or pedlar’s certificate and tell him the consequences of continuing to trade outside the law. A trader would immediately be subject to the attention of other enforcement partners such as the police or the Federation Against Copyright Theft if he was selling illegal, dangerous or counterfeit merchandise such as DVDs. In those circumstances, his goods may be seized, since seizure is within the scope of the legislation that applies there. Enforcement action against a persistent unlicensed trader who had already been subject to verbal or written warnings might ultimately result in a level 3 fine of up to £1,000. Where further powers are needed in particular locations, as we see by the Bills before us today, a local authority can make the case and obtain the requisite powers via a Private Bill.

Noble Lords should note that the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill received its Second Reading in this House yesterday. That legislation will, where appropriate, allow local authorities and other regulators to impose a range of administrative sanctions as an alternative to criminal prosecution when enforcing existing legislation, thereby reducing the need for local authorities to promote individual Private Bills.

We accept that there have been some complaints about this position from some local authorities, but the vast majority of local authorities have not complained. It may just be that the majority of authorities are able to enforce street-trading controls in their area efficiently and effectively. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, mentioned, in what I agree was a powerful speech, the Rogers review. Peter Rogers is the chief executive of Westminster City Council and his review was published in March. The Government’s decision not to carry out a full review of this area was influenced by the Rogers review of the national enforcement priorities for local authorities. The review used an evidence-based approach to prioritise more than 60 policy areas enforced by local regulatory services. It evaluated the risk that the policy area aimed to control, the effectiveness of actions taken by local authorities and the views of citizens, businesses, local authorities, central government regulators, departments and Ministers. The review established six national enforcement priorities: air quality; alcohol and entertainment licensing; hygiene and food safety; improving health in the workplace; fair trading; and animal and public health. Whether we like it or not, the review concluded that street trading was not in this context a priority.

The review of Mr Rogers does not provide a basis for thinking that new national powers are needed for all local authorities. Naturally, to carry out the full and detailed investigation that would be needed if we were to accept the recommendation of this House’s committee, we would need first a convincing case that all or at least the vast majority of local authorities face considerable enforcement difficulties in respect of street trading. In our view, therefore, it would not be appropriate for the Government now to undertake a review of an issue so recently subject to informed consideration.

A review by government would be needed before we could move in this field. I agree with my noble friend Lord Graham, who said that it would involve far more than just abolishing the Pedlars Act, which would not nearly be sufficient. To do a proper job, we would need to establish the views of all local authorities, consult other interested government departments—principally, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Home Office—and commission research into the views of businesses, street traders, the police and pedlars. Expenditure on research could be considerable, because street-trading stakeholders are a diverse community and unlikely to be easy to engage in discussion, particularly given their status as small, even micro- businesses. All the stakeholder views that we have heard so far have been from one side.

Having considered the matter carefully, we think that a review resourced in this way would take about a year to produce conclusions. It would not be a small undertaking, and we doubt that it would be proportionate to the scale of the problems and the Government’s priorities in this area.

I know that what I have said will be a disappointment to all noble Lords who have spoken and no doubt others who have listened to the debate or read its content in Hansard. However, there are 410 local authorities and only a few have so far seen a need for more powers. The new Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill to which I referred, which received its Second Reading yesterday, will allow local authorities a range of new powers that will enable enforcement to be carried out more quickly and easily. These include fixed penalty and stop notices.

Having given the House the bad news, I shall say two things that I have been invited by noble Lords to say. Of course, I shall ensure that the report of this important debate will be shown to the relevant Minister in my department and in other departments that have an interest in this matter. I also guarantee to talk to the Minister in my department about what attitude the Government should take to Dr Iddon’s Bill when it comes before another place. Those are the comments that I make on behalf of the Government.

My Lords, I am sure that all noble Lords will have listened with great care to what the Minister had to say. I hope that they will appreciate that it is not for me to comment in any way or detail on his observations. My concern is with the Bournemouth Borough Council Bill, which is most urgently needed. The Bill was presented in January. Will the Minister do all that he can with his colleagues and authorities in the other place to ensure that it reaches the statute book very quickly and does not suffer any further delay?

On Question, Bill passed, and sent to the Commons.

asked Her Majesty’s Government what arrangements will be made for parliamentary scrutiny of the operation of the new Statistics Board.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity, albeit at a somewhat later hour than I had anticipated, to return to an issue debated in both Houses during the passage of the Statistics and Registration Service Bill, as it then was; it is now an Act. As part of the Government’s expressed aim to restore public trust in the statistics system by distancing Ministers from influencing the production and distribution of official statistics, the Act establishes a new Statistics Board, with enhanced powers to promote and safeguard the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good.

Ministers have also made plain from the start their wish that the board should, instead of reporting to Ministers, be directly subject to monitoring and scrutiny by Parliament. The Act therefore lays a duty on the board to produce each year an annual report on its activities and plans and to lay that report before the UK Parliament and the devolved elected bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. However—and I say this quite properly—the Act is silent on the arrangements that each Parliament or Assembly may wish to make. The setting up of committees has traditionally been a matter for each House to decide for itself after discussion between the usual channels.

The issue that I wish to bring back to the House this evening is whether the monitoring and scrutiny of the Statistics Board’s reports by the UK Parliament should be for another place alone or whether there should be, more advantageously as I would contend, a Joint Committee of both Houses to discharge that function. Noble Lords who took part in debates on the Bill will recollect that at various stages of the Bill’s progress that issue was discussed. As the Bill reached us, it was strongly argued in many parts of the House that the Bill did not properly implement the Government’s aim of restoring trust. This is not the occasion to rehearse those arguments—certainly not at this late hour—except to remind the House of two things. First, we in this House amended the Bill in a number of important respects, all of which were designed to enhance public trust in the system. Secondly, when the Bill was returned to another place, almost all of our amendments were accepted in substance. Even though Ministers had resisted the amendments here, they decided in the event to advise the other place to accept them. Indeed, in one respect they went further. The Prime Minister himself announced a very welcome shortening of the time allowed to Ministers for the pre-release of statistics, for which we had argued long and hard.

That was an admirable example of the revising function of this House. A principal reason for that success was that a number of noble Lords—and I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Moser, in his place this evening—have a long experience and great expertise in the subject matter of the Bill and they deployed that to great effect in our debates.

The argument for a Joint Select Committee of both Houses has actually been acknowledged by Ministers. On 16 January this year, the Minister in charge of the Bill in another place, John Healey, who was then Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said:

“I see some merit in the proposal for a Joint Committee of the two Houses, although it is not a matter for me as a Minister. It would enable both Houses’ expertise and interest in such matters to be played in, and it would allow their breadth and depth of expertise to play a part in the strong and proper scrutiny of the system”.

I could not have put it better myself.

Nevertheless the honourable Member rejected the idea because,

“it would not assist in achieving the overall objectives of the Bill”.—[Official Report, Commons, Statistics and Registration Service Bill Committee, 16/01/07; cols. 67-69.]

I found that a very difficult argument to understand.

Perhaps I should say a brief word about Joint Committees. Although most committees of Parliament are set up by the two Houses separately and their roles and purposes can differ markedly, Joint Committees have a long history. That excellent book How Parliament Works, by Rogers and Walters, points out that the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments goes back many years. More recently, there have been rather more Joint Committees. For example, there were the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, which reported in 1999, and the Joint Committee on Conventions, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham of Felling, which reported in November last year. It is common ground that both those committees earned high praise for the clarity and wisdom that they brought to their respective tasks.

Perhaps a closer analogy of what I am arguing for is the Joint Committee on Human Rights. This is an ongoing committee of both Houses and the experience of that committee’s work has shown that it is valued by both Houses. It is of relevance—I say this in passing—that the then Leader in another place, the right honourable Margaret Beckett, did not announce a Joint Committee on Human Rights until after the Human Rights Bill had received Royal Assent. It is certainly not too late, therefore, for the same to happen with the statistics Bill, yet I sense that Ministers still seem chary of a Joint Committee on statistics.

One reason for that could be that for some years, statistics have been a Treasury responsibility. A sub-committee of the Treasury Select Committee of another place reported on the subject. However, on 1 April, that responsibility moves from the Treasury across to the Cabinet Office and the Treasury will no longer be in charge. That was one of the substantial amendments which we argued for and passed in this House and which was accepted in another place. Therefore, I think the argument that this should be done by a Treasury committee now disappears. It will have to be another committee. Happily, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, who will reply to this debate, represents both the Treasury and the Cabinet Office in this House, so we are very pleased to see him and there will be no change for him.

But fresh in everybody’s minds must be the recent pre-legislative Joint Committees on human tissue and embryos and on climate change. I was very privileged to serve on the former—the Joint Committee on human tissue and embryos—and I was very impressed by the different expertise that the Members from each House brought to the task and how they complemented each other. Their expertise was not the same. There was also a distinct reluctance to become involved in anything of the nature of party politics. At the other end there is some grandstanding from time to time in Select Committees, but that does not happen in a Joint Committee. I argue that those are good examples of a Joint Committee and that such a committee would be entirely appropriate to scrutinise statistics. So my own experience has strengthened my view that the committee that will be set up to scrutinise the work of the Statistics Board should also be a Joint Committee of both Houses.

I wish to refer to two other matters only. The chairman of the Statistics Commission which hands over to the board on 1 April, Professor David Rhind, sent a statement to me yesterday and I have his permission to read it. He said:

“The Statistics Commission believes that the success of the new statutory arrangements will depend in no small measure on close scrutiny by a suitable Parliamentary committee. And whilst we recognise that the form of scrutiny is a matter for Parliament itself, any new committee will need to be able to draw on a wide spectrum of relevant knowledge in order to fully engage with a field as all-embracing as official statistics”.

I emphasise the words,

“a wide spectrum of relevant knowledge”.

I think that is something that we can claim to have in this House.

I mention one other point, on which I end. I can tell the House that after discussions with my noble friends here and in another place, my honourable friend George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, has agreed to throw his weight, and that of his colleagues, behind the proposal for a Joint Committee. Why cannot Ministers do the same?

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, for initiating this short debate. The subject—the future role of Parliament in the reformed system of government statistics—is of enormous importance and I agree with the chairman of the Statistics Commission just quoted that the success of the reforms depends considerably on the role of Parliament.

As we have been reminded, your Lordships spent many productive hours earlier this year considering and improving the Bill. It is worth reminding ourselves of a little of the background. It all began with the idea from the then Chancellor, now Prime Minister, to find ways to improve public trust in government statistics—an aim crucial to all parts of government. The Chancellor’s aim received widespread support, not least in the statistical community, and was welcomed throughout the debates in this House, although we then had much to improve in the Bill. As a result we now have an Act which has every chance of achieving a better understood, used and trusted statistical system.

As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, reminded us, at the centre of the reforms is the new Statistics Board. We and the Government are extremely lucky that Sir Michael Scholar agreed to be chairman of the new board. He is a very distinguished public servant and has very wide experience relevant to the tasks of the board. He is now president of St John’s College in Oxford, equally successfully. That augurs well, as do the rumours that there is a strong field of applicants to serve on the board. The chances are that the whole thing will be in good and strong authoritative hands under Sir Michael Scholar.

So far, so good, but what about the board’s powers? They are extremely limited, which is where Parliament comes in. It has been clear from the beginning that Parliament will have a crucial role in the new structure. I quote from the Treasury document of November 2006 called Independence for Statistics: The Government Response:

“The Government expects Parliament to play the central role in holding the statistical system to account ... and expects that there will be full accountability to Parliament for the statistical system”.

Later, in response to the House of Commons Treasury Sub-Committee, it is said that,

“the Government places a high priority on the central role of Parliament”.

It cannot be clearer. What kind of role are we talking about? Of course, it is much more than putting questions to Ministers or laying reports before Parliament. It would be easy to conclude that the board would have to lay an annual report to Parliament, but we are talking about something much deeper. I shall try to illustrate it.

The board will deal with tricky policy and statistical issues going right across government and public concern. Take migration, on which there are many doubts about the statistics. Take crime—ditto. Pensions are very complicated. Population movement, health, transport, education and skills and so forth—those are the sort of issues on which government statistics, although professionally sound, get into a lot of trouble as regards public trust. They are the sort of issues on which I would expect the powerful new board to make authoritative reports. They are sensitive issues very relevant to public trust.

The reports and public discussions that will emanate from the board should not just be submitted to the relevant department—say, health statistics to the Department of Health—in the hope that it will do something about them. Much more is required. Those reports, which may be critical and sensitive, should come to some mechanism in Parliament from the board for authoritative final conclusions. Parliament is the final stage in the reformed system. That seems totally obvious.

I come finally to the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, which seems absolutely right. What is the mechanism in Parliament that can deal with such sensitive issues? That mechanism—a Joint Committee—should have several characteristics. First, its expertise, knowledge and interests should go well beyond economic matters. The Treasury Sub-Committee is therefore not the relevant committee, even though the Treasury will remain important for economic matters. Even if it remains interested in statistics, we are dealing with a whole range of policy issues; social, environmental, economic and so on. The committee would be very wide-ranging.

Secondly, the committee will not deal only with simple administrative or even financial issues. It will deal with very tricky and often technical issues to do with statistics. Therefore, it will need all the expertise in those fields to deal in depth with such issues; otherwise it will fail the role of the new board.

Thirdly, and following from that, it seems obvious that it would be a mistake for such a committee to be limited to the other place. It is obvious from all that we have seen in the past 12 months as the reforms have made their way through the two Houses that there is a great deal of expertise and interest in this House. It seems to me self-evident not only that there should be a very authoritative Select Committee but that it should be of both Houses.

Moreover, although I speak as a statistician, I do not think that this is a tricky issue, even politically. Such a committee could help the Government and Opposition; it could certainly help the new Minister, Mr Miliband, who now has the residual responsibility for statistics. It will be crucial in giving genuine power to the new board. I think I can speak for the statistical community in saying that it will also be crucial for the whole reforms to make sense for statisticians and how they serve the Government and society. I strongly support the argument for a Joint Committee in this area.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, for introducing the debate. There is almost a tradition in Parliament whereby we spend huge amounts of time discussing an issue and we feel very strongly about it and then the lighthouse beam of our attention goes to something else and we forget what we were worried about six months ago. We forget what we said during proceedings on a Bill and we forget to ask whether it is being implemented in the way that we wished it to be. It is important and timely for us to discuss this now. As a start, it is worth reminding ourselves, as previous speakers have, about the importance of statistics to society. If people are to understand the society in which they live and the public policy response to it, it is vital that they understand the factual basis of that policy which, in many cases, is based on the underlying statistics.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the evidence that we had when the Statistics and Registration Service Bill was going through the House. We heard that only a small minority of the population believes any statistics issued by the Government. Therefore, public trust in public policy is reduced. The Bill created a new framework about which we had many doubts as it went through the House. Although we amended it, a number of those doubts remained even as the Bill was passed.

Therefore, it is important for those broad reasons that parliamentary scrutiny of the work of the Statistics Board is adequate and effective. As the noble Lord, Lord Moser, said, this is not one of those cases where Parliament is going to look just at a dry annual report, although it will need to look at the annual report of the Statistics Board for some of the reasons that we spent some time in debates on the Bill worrying about. For example, is the role of the chairman, vis-à-vis the National Statistician, working out in the way that we hoped that it might, but feared it might not? Are the resources adequate for the job in hand? Are the priorities right? Are there any other constraints in terms of ministerial activity and involvement that in some way reduce the effectiveness of the board? Those are the mechanical matters that flow from the annual report but which are crucial if the board is to do its job properly.

The other role which a Joint Committee and Parliament have to play, and to which the noble Lord, Lord Moser, referred, relates to the way in which the board, the Government and Parliament look at statistics in relation to sensitive public policy areas. The noble Lord, Lord Moser, mentioned migration, population, health and crime as examples where the way in which statistics are produced and reported matters terrifically in terms of public perceptions of the issue. An example from the newspapers yesterday was regarding the production by the Office for National Statistics of some population figures. The headline in the Guardian stated:

“Forecasters say UK population may grow to 108m by 2081”.

That is a pretty alarming figure. The headline could equally have said, “Forecasters say UK population may grow to 63m by 2081”, because the Office for National Statistics said there was a range of possibilities and, needless to say, the newspapers took the most alarmist figure. That is not unusual, but in issues such as this—crime is another—where figures produced in good faith by the Office for National Statistics or a department can be used in an alarmist way, it is important that there is another body that can analyse the figures and ensure that there is a counterpoint to the way that the newspapers report them. Parliament is that body, because it will be able to command more coverage, and more respect in some ways, than a simple report by a government department or a set of statistics. This second area regarding the need for a committee and Parliament to make sure that statistics produced by the Statistics Board and departments are treated properly, and that there is proper understanding of the statistics, is hugely important.

How is this best done? The straightforward way would have been to carry on with a House of Commons committee. A sub-committee of the Treasury Select Committee will not do any more. It would make no logical sense, given that the Treasury has no ongoing responsibility for statistics. It would send out completely the wrong message, given the lengths to which we went to ensure that the Treasury was no longer in charge, if somehow responsibility reverted to the Treasury Select Committee. I know from colleagues on the committee that being on the Treasury Select Committee is an onerous job. It is a very political committee and is wholly unsuited to the role we are talking about.

The two main arguments for having a Joint Committee have already been expressed extremely well. First, in your Lordships’ House there is obviously tremendous expertise in this area which may rest in a number of individuals, of whom the noble Lord, Lord Moser, is one. Given the composition of your Lordships’ House and the fact that we tend to have people coming in with experience of the public services, academia and other disciplines relevant to statistics, we are likely to have for a longer period expertise in this area that can be brought to bear on this issue.

The other relevant feature of your Lordships’ House has to do with attitude and the way that committees deal with issues. As I said, the Treasury Select Committee is very political. Committees in your Lordships’ House tend to be less political. I am sure that in our parliamentary scrutiny of statistics we try to shine a light in a non-partisan way on issues as they arise. I think that your Lordships’ House would help very much in that respect.

The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said that his Treasury spokesman in the Commons supported the idea of a Joint Committee. The Treasury spokesman for the Liberal Democrats in another place—indeed, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats—is also supportive of a Joint Committee of both Houses on this issue. I therefore hope that the Minister will be able to agree that it is a very splendid idea.

My Lords, as is inevitable on a Thursday evening in the middle of winter, we are a rather select band who have gathered here this evening to debate a very important topic. First, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Bach, to this group of anoraks on statistics, who gather together from time to time. I am of course indebted to my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding for his continuing interest in how our arrangements for statistics will work in practice and, in particular, how the parliamentary scrutiny arrangements will work.

My noble friend has been unwavering in his conviction that the new Statistics Board should be overseen by a Joint Committee of both Houses. As we have heard, he received the support of all Benches in this House during the passage of the Statistics and Registration Service Bill and, as we have also heard, he had the support of both my honourable and right honourable friends in another place and also that of the Liberal Democrats, both declarations of support having been more recently affirmed and strengthened.

It is important to know what the Government’s position is and we are looking forward to hearing what the Minister says later. As we heard from my noble friend Lord Jenkin, when Mr John Healey was Financial Secretary to the Treasury, he seemed to be rather encouraging about the idea of a Joint Committee but then said that he was unconvinced. More recently, we have heard a slightly harder line emanating from his successor, so it will be very interesting to hear what the Minister has to say about the Government’s position.

When the Statistics and Registration Service Bill was debated last year, there was general support for the creation of the Statistics Board. We certainly had our differences on the detailed application of the policy and, as other noble Lords have said this evening, we were pleased that during its passage in your Lordships’ House we improved the Bill considerably.

What united us when we approached that Bill was a concern, verging on despair, about the state of public trust in statistics. A MORI survey about two years ago found that only 34 per cent thought that government figures were accurate and 59 per cent thought that the Government used figures dishonestly. Reform of the system, including an independent statistics board with a wide remit across government statistics, was acknowledged by all as a very important step towards rebuilding public trust.

Of course, public trust cannot be restored overnight. We certainly hope that the Statistics Board will have some quick wins and that it will establish itself very early as genuinely independent and determined to raise standards among the statistical community. But there will be a long process, starting with a code of conduct, going through the assessment process and then on towards the stage when the Statistics Board will be able to call in for assessment statistics which have not been designated as national statistics.

We have to see parliamentary scrutiny as a part of the framework for restoring confidence—the Statistics Board cannot be expected to do it all by itself. The roles that a parliamentary committee needs to undertake are of two kinds. First, the committee must oversee the Statistics Board itself. There are many important issues that have not yet been satisfactorily resolved. I do not, for example, think that anyone regards the relocation of the bulk of the activities of the ONS to Newport as a complete success. Some changes may yet be needed. There needs to be a forum in which difficulties can be aired, even if those difficulties and their airing are not to the taste of the Treasury.

Another important area will be whether the budgetary settlement has in fact given an adequate basis on which the new Statistics Board can operate. When we discussed the Statistics and Registration Service Bill, the Government made much play of the five-year settlement made outside the Comprehensive Spending Review process. However, we never quite believed in the substance of that. A five-year settlement is good only if it is set at the right level, and as anyone who has experienced this year’s CSR process will know, those who settle outside the main process, when the final decisions are taken, tend to be at the bottom end of the settlement range.

We see a parliamentary committee as having an important role in assessing the adequacy of resources devoted to statistics and to the Statistics Board. The committee should obviously have a role in seeing how well the new board establishes itself in practice. It will, of course, have a role in appointments made to the board in due course, in much the same way as the Treasury Select Committee had in another place when the chairman-elect was appointed in the summer. The committee clearly has a significant workload in examining the Statistics Board itself, at least initially while it establishes itself, but the core of the committee’s work will run alongside the work that the Statistics Board will be doing to examine statistics with a view to restoring confidence in those statistics. That must of course involve the work that the Statistics Board does with departments, as the majority of statistics will continue to be produced outside the board and within government departments.

When the Statistics Board begins its work in earnest, much of its effectiveness will depend on how well it establishes its natural authority in the statistics world within government. It will also depend on how well it uses quiet persuasion to achieve its ends. However, even if it does establish pre-eminent leadership and constructive relationships across government to deliver results, I am sure that issues will remain that are not easily resolved. We fully expect that the Statistics Board will be using its ability to report publicly on what it has found. We therefore see an important role for the committee in examining departments whose statistics have been found wanting.

We know that permanent secretaries quake at the thought of having to appear before the Public Accounts Committee following reports by the National Audit Office. I hope that the new parliamentary committee can establish itself similarly in respect of reports by the Statistics Board. If a visit to the committee to defend non-compliance with the code of practice or the deliberate exclusion of dodgy statistics from the ambit of national statistics becomes unpleasant for permanent secretaries, that will enhance the status and effectiveness of the Statistics Board. In that way, the committee can genuinely contribute directly to the restoration of trust in statistics.

It is clear that I have in mind a heavy-hitting parliamentary committee. Noble Lords might think that my reference to a visit to the committee as being unpleasant might rule out a committee that involved Members of your Lordships’ House. It is not an overstatement to say that the style and tone of the two Houses, both in the Chamber and in Committee, are somewhat different. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, referred to this when he spoke. I would hope, however, that the combination of the tough and somewhat political style of our colleagues in another place would blend very well with our rather quieter approach in this instance to produce highly effective parliamentary scrutiny. As others have said, Joint Committees already work extremely well. We know that they work well on draft legislation, but they also work well on human rights and statutory instruments, which offers sound evidence that the committee will work well for statistics.

I should say that the work done by the sub-committee of the Treasury Select Committee in another place, chaired by my honourable friend Mr Michael Fallon, has done excellent work on statistics in the past. As we have heard, the shift of responsibility for the board from the Treasury to the Cabinet Office means that the existing arrangements must be re-examined. That, of course, give us a golden opportunity to leverage the skills of both Houses in the cause of improving public trust in statistics.

I hope that the Minister will not break the spell of unanimity we have had in the Chamber this evening and will commit the Government to a Joint Committee. I know that he will say that it is not Governments who set up committees but Parliament. But we all know that, in practice, the usual channels have a great say, and the Government have a large say in the usual channels. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

My Lords, I thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, on obtaining this debate and introducing it in his usual skilful way. I feel rather like the new boy on his first day in class, particularly surrounded by those who have long experience of dealing with this matter in this House. I am also grateful to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for their welcome. I am not sure that it will survive the 12 minutes I have to put the Government’s case, but I will do my best.

Other noble Lords will forgive me if I say that the noble Lord, Lord Moser, has a reputation unmatched in this field in the country. I was particularly pleased about his support for the appointment of Sir Michael Scholar to the chairmanship of the new body; that is great support indeed.

Your Lordships’ comments have been very valuable and I will attempt to do them justice in my reply. We of course share many views. The Government have always been clear that we expect Parliament to play the central role in holding the reformed statistical system to account, and that that role will be enhanced under these reforms. We have sought views in the original consultation document and in debate in this House and the other place as to whether there were ways to strengthen the direct accountability of the board to Parliament. The Government believe—and this seems to be the general view—that it is primarily for Parliament to decide for itself the arrangements it wishes to make to scrutinise the new Statistics Board. Of course, the noble Baroness is right: the Government will obviously have a say in that decision.

Noble Lords will of course know, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, mentioned, that the residual ministerial responsibilities for the system are transferred to the Cabinet Office. One effect of this transfer is that responsibility for scrutinising the statistical system and the operations of the Statistics Board in the other place will transfer from the Treasury Select Committee to the Public Administration Select Committee. This reflects the generally accepted principle that parliamentary oversight of public bodies falls to the committee responsible for oversight of the home department.

The nub of this debate is the idea—widely supported around the House this evening, I concede—of a Joint Committee of both Houses being the relevant committee for the new commission. I am afraid that we cannot share the enthusiasm shown for this model, for a number of reasons which I will attempt to set out in the remaining time.

What should be the parliamentary mechanism for scrutinising this new set-up? As noble Lords are aware, under the new arrangements the board will report directly to Parliament, not to a Minister. The onus will be on Parliament to take an active interest in and respond to the reports that the board makes to it. We feel that such a committee—a Joint Committee of both Houses—would replicate what departmental and other Select Committees are already empowered to do.

We expect the Public Administration Select Committee to be the proper committee to scrutinise the operations of the board and the wider statistical system in the other place. It should be remembered that the departmental committees in the other place will continue to scrutinise statistics that relate to their areas of interest, and we have had references to some of those areas this evening. For example, crime statistics will be scrutinised by the Home Affairs Committee. The relevant committees in this House will be able to continue their valuable work in scrutinising statistics that relate to their areas of interest, including the Economic Affairs Committee.

We believe that the Public Administration Select Committee of another place will be able to take the cross-departmental, strategic view of the statistical system that noble Lords argue is so necessary to the scrutiny of the new Statistics Board. We feel that one of the advantages of the transfer of residual responsibilities from the Treasury to the Cabinet Office is that the scrutiny of the statistical system falls naturally to the Cabinet Office’s committee. The Cabinet Office has an overarching strategic view across government, and we think that not to choose that Select Committee would be unnecessarily to unpick one of the key advantages of this transfer of responsibilities. The Public Administration Select Committee will be able to call the chair of the Statistics Board to give evidence to it as well as the National Statistician, as at present. It will be able to take a cross-departmental strategic view of the statistical system, which is one of the advantages of the transfer.

We have always said that we see Parliament’s role as central to the successful implementation of these reforms, and we trust that the Public Administration Select Committee will gain a lot of its practical authority from having the active interest of MPs behind it. We agree with the noble Baroness that the Treasury Select Committee in the other place has done an excellent job in holding the system to account, despite having many other areas of responsibility.

In its report on the Government’s reforms, the committee expressed the wish that it would retain responsibility for scrutiny of the statistical system under the new arrangements, even though residual ministerial responsibilities have been transferred to the Cabinet Office. It shows that the committee considered the level of resource and attention it could apply to the scrutiny of the system.

My Lords, when was that comment made? That is not the information that I have. Mr Fallon told me expressly that he supported the idea of a Joint Committee of both Houses.

My Lords, I shall try to have the answer for the noble Lord before the end of my speech. If I do not get it, I shall write to him.

We believe that the Public Administration Select Committee will be able to take the cross-departmental strategic view.

Why not a Joint Committee of both Houses? The precedent referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, was the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We think there are some distinctions to be made. It is the only really comparable example, but one of the main reasons why that committee was created was that neither House had much of a track record of effective scrutiny of human rights. That is not true for statistics. Our second reason is that we can see no justification for undermining the overriding principle of departmental scrutiny. I shall not go into the issue of what the previous Financial Secretary said; that has been debated already. Of course, the depth of knowledge and wisdom shown by noble Lords has created the high-class debates that we have had. As I said earlier, it is for Parliament to decide what to do. It is for this House to decide how to make best use of the knowledge and expertise of its Members in its own arrangements for scrutinising the statistics system.

Of course, noble Lords are more than adept, using all the procedures available to them, to scrutinise the activity of all branches of government. We agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moser, that enhanced scrutiny is absolutely crucial to the success or otherwise of this undertaking. We know that Select Committees need and often have their own expert advisers, and there is no reason to believe that that would not occur if the Public Administration Select Committee was the scrutiny committee here. We also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that the Committee needs to be strong and must hold departments to account. If I may, I shall convey that message strongly from this House to the Leader in another place.

We are not persuaded that in this instance a Joint Committee of both Houses is the best answer. As I said, it is for Parliament to make up its mind whether that is what it wants. I shall end by answering one or two points that have been made. We are grateful for the offer of free expert advice from the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and of course there is that expert advice to be had. We are not alone; we have had a good response from applicants wishing to sit on the board to give advice.

The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said that the funding for the board might not be enough. I understand that the settlement for the new board was for £1.2 billion over a five-year period. I respectfully suggest that that is not a small sum.

My Lords, the noble Lord is new to this area. It sounds like a large sum, but when he understands the savings that need to be made and the cuts in resources necessary to achieve that, he might take a slightly different view. Let us not just be bemused by adding up five years’ worth and saying it is a lot of money.

My Lords, as someone who many years ago served in the Ministry of Defence, I certainly do not think that £1.2 billion is the largest sum in the world. We shall have to see whether or not it is enough.

The rejection of a Joint Committee—if it is to be rejected—is a matter for Parliament, but that does not mean that the Government do not take the need for scrutiny seriously. Even though noble Lords will be disappointed in the Government’s reaction, I hope that they will still believe that we are convinced that scrutiny is critical.

I just have time, I hope, to answer the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, a few minutes ago. The Treasury Select Committee made its comment that he asked me about in its report on the Government’s reforms.

My Lords, that was two years ago.

My Lords, if it was two years ago, I shall write to the noble Lord with the proper answer to his proper intervention.

I say again that it is for Parliament to decide how to employ the Select Committee process, to scrutinise the new statistical framework and to hold the board, in particular, to account. I repeat that each House is free to make the arrangements it sees fit. Noble Lords will no doubt go away today to consider further how best to use the expertise and experience available in this House. It remains for me to thank all noble Lords for taking part in this debate and for making their case as strongly as they have.

House adjourned at 7.05 pm.