Orders Of The Day

Consumer Test Registration Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

11.5 a.m.

Mr. Philip Goodhart  (Beckenham)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. Last year I had the privilege of being the chairman of a small committee of members of the Conservative Party—including my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire (Mr. MacArthur), and my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West (Mrs. MacLaughlin), who cannot be present today because she has influenza—which produced a report on consumer protection. In that report we made a substantial number of recommendations for legislative action. Virtually on the day that the report was published, I was also lucky enough to draw a very high place in the Ballot for Private Members' Bills, so it seemed to me that it would be only right and proper to try to put into practice some of the things that we had just been preaching about. Here, alas, we run into some fairly obvious difficulties. The fact is that a Departmental Committee, the Molony Committee, is studying at the moment—although it is coming nearly to the end of those studies—this whole question of consumer protection. I can understand, even though I do not support, the Government's reluctance to consider any legislation without first having had an opportunity of studying the Departmental Committee's Report, but I do not believe that the establishment of such a Committee as that can, or ought to, stop Members of this House from touching on a whole aspect of legislation. I therefore felt that it would be right to look into the highways and  byeways of this subject and to concentrate on an isolated issue; one of importance, but one outside the main stream of consumer protection. Before I leave the subject of the Molony Committee, I should like to trespass for a moment on the functions of the Leader of the House and consider what is bound to happen soon after the Committee's Report is published, as we can expect it to be, later this year. People who are interested in this question, but who have not studied the complexities very closely, may imagine that, after due consideration, the Government will introduce a consumers' charter which, in one sweep, will cover the whole range of consumer protection. But, of course, this is legislatively impossible because the Molony Committee's recommendations will be concerned with weights and measures legislation, hire purchase, the Merchandise Marks Act, the Sale of Goods Act, and many other facets of our legislative fabric. What will happen is, I think, reasonably clear. We shall, next Session, see some major weights and measures legislation. I hope that the Weights and Measures Bill will at least lay the foundations of a local consumer protection service, a local consumer protection service which would be based on the weights and measures inspectorate—to which we look forward in our pamphlet—and which, I believe, will do more than anything to give British consumers the feeling that they are being protected. Certainly, there is bound to be major legislation next Session. It is also plain that there will be major hire-purchase legislation and this, by any standards, will be an immensely complicated matter. No doubt some hon. Members present today will be on the Standing Committee which will consider that piece of legislation. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams) will certainly wish to be on it. I do not look forward to that particular piece of legislation with any great enthusiasm. It will mean spending a great deal of time studying the Bill. It seems that next Session the legislation I have described will just about complete the amount of consumer legislation that the Board of Trade can possibly  contemplate. There is, after all, a limit to the amount of legislative work that Ministers can take on their shoulders, however broad they may be. I do not see how they will be able to cope with more than two such major Bills in one Session. This means that what I might call the "Molony muckage", the less important recommendations that Committee is bound to make, will inevitably get pushed back from next Session to the one following that and to the one after that, and so on. Thus, if we do not take this opportunity of doing something it may be two to five years—whatever the Molony Committee says—before we will have an opportunity to return to this theme. The reform which I propose stands on its own, for it is not dependent on action being taken in other respects and it affects no other facets of consumer protection. I believe it to be worth while and to have wide support.

Mr. Dudley Williams  (Exeter)
I think that my hon. Friend is wrong there. I understand that every time a proposed seal will be affixed by a society or organisation, that fact must be registered. What happens when the seal that is affixed is the Lion seal on eggs? Surely my hon. Friend's proposed reform covers a wide field.

Mr. Goodhart
My hon. Friend, who is one of our Friday experts, usually reads Bills before making interventions. On this occasion, however, he cannot have read this Bill with very great care. I will try to explain the points that are troubling him when I deal with that aspect of my proposals. The idea of the reform, as I say, has very wide support. From the evidence to the Molony Committee that has already been published we know that the T.U.C. is in favour of the reform, just as we know that it is supported by the Citizens Advice Bureaux, which play an important part in this field and which, I hope, will play an increasingly important part. The Women's Institute has recommended it, just as it is supported by the Co-operative Guild, the Retail Trade Standards Association, the Consumers' Advisory Council, the British Standards Institution and the Consumers' Association. The Labour Party, in its unofficial recommendations, has recommended the reform and I am glad to have the support of some hon. Gentlemen opposite. I think that the Liberal Party is in favour of it. I have lost that party's pamphlet, in which its recommendations were set forth, but I see the right hon. Gentleman the leader of the Liberal Party in his place and perhaps he will inform me of his party's views.

Mr. J. Grimond  (Orkney and Shetland)
I will gladly send the hon. Gentleman another copy of the pamphlet free and give him as much support as we can. I would inform the hon. Gentleman that one-sixth of my party is present.

Mr. Goodhart
I am grateful that we have the support of the major portion of the Liberal Party. In our unofficial pamphlet some hon. Members of the Conservative Party have suggested the reform. We said in that pamphlet that: "Those who set themselves up as testers should be themselves subject to test." We added: "A growing number of guarantee seals and certification marks has shown that there is a demand among consumers for a reliable independent indication, that goods are of sound quality and fit for their intended use. As with independent testing houses, it is important that the organisations giving these seals should be above suspicion and should be seen to be so. But in this field there is now some cause for anxiety." We are all aware of the tremendous increase in interest in consumer protection in recent years. There has been a great wave of prosperity and people are buying far more goods than they ever did before. These goods, however, are far more complicated than in the past. There is, of course, a far greater variety of goods, many of which have changed in their appearance and make-up. In the old days "Old Mother Grumble's" soap flakes were, perhaps, considered to be the best. That fact was handed down from mother to daughter. New packages of detergents are now arriving on the grocers' shelves each week and it seems that the old certainties are giving way to a greater choice, although there is increasing doubt about what really is the best product. This has happened in other countries as well, and there have been different responses to this problem in various countries. For instance, in Scandinavia there is much greater emphasis than there is here on labelling. America and this country have led the world in the establishment of independent testing magazines, such as Which? and the Shopper's Guide. In France and Belgium there has been much greater emphasis on quality seals. I do not think that these seals are mutually exclusive. I would like, for instance, to see some of the labelling schemes in Scandinavia introduced into this country with the support of the British Standards Institution. I believe that there is definitely room for the growth of the use of proper seals and guarantee labels in this country. Even to men they are of some importance. I enjoy doing a bit of Saturday morning shopping, and I must admit that if I see a packet with a "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval on it I am prejudiced in favour of that product, possibly wrongly. But how much are some of these seals worth? If the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade were to leave the Government tomorrow—I hope he has a long and distinguished Ministerial career ahead of him—I believe that he could the very next day register a Scottish Consumer Research Establishment, go on to design the most elaborate seal and issue it for a substantial fee, if he could persuade anybody to pay it, to any manufacturer or retailer. They would put the stamp upon their products and no doubt tens of thousands of housewives might be influenced by it. But it could be absolutely worthless. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem, because there have been registered a large number of curious companies with high-sounding consumer protection names, and we in the Consumers' Association keep a watch on these things. Some of these companies are at the moment issuing seals of approval which, on the face of it, seem to be absolutely valueless. This is a field in which there has been considerable controversy and even acrimony. Here, I am indebted to Miss Elizabeth Gundrey, who has made an exhaustive study of seals of approval which are now in circulation, at some  risk to herself because she has been threatened with libel actions on a number of occasions. I suppose that perhaps the best known of all the seals of approval in this country is the "Good Housekeeping" seal, but even here there is considerable criticism, to put it no higher than that. For instance, yesterday I received a letter from a chief inspector of weights and measures, who had had some difficulty with a weighing machine which had the "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval. He writes: "As the scales were obviously inferior I requested sight of the Institute's standard After a delay of six weeks details of the 'standard' were submitted and these proved to be complete nonsense." It may be that the chief inspector is wrong in saying this. It may be that the standard of this organisation for weighing machines is not complete nonsense, but one does not know because the standards on which this important seal is based are not published and so the public cannot tell whether the seal is of value or not. More important, the watchdogs of the public cannot tell. There is a substantial body of experts in this field, but if they do not know the criteria of a test they are incapable of forming an expert judgment of the value of the test. We need to compel people who issue these seals to make public the basis and the criteria of standards on which their seals are based. The same applies to the criticism of the British Safety Council, about which there has been some acrimony in the past. No doubt, hon. Members will recall it. It would be possible to tell whether they were of value if the standards were seen and could be checked, but at the moment it is not possible. This is a field in which Gresham's Law definitely applies. The fact that there is doubt about a number of the seals that are in existence detracts from the value of seals in general to the housewife. If we merely ask people to state their test criteria in a register that can be inspected by the public, it may be that the information that they give will be absolutely meaningless. Therefore, I believe that it is necessary in this legislation to have some sort of stick to make people give the information about the genuine criteria on which they are basing the award of the seal. It would be possible, for instance, if there were no penalty clause at all, for the "Good Housekeeping" organisation to state in a register that it was awarding a seal on the basis of standards which were kept in that organisation's own secret register, and thus still not inform the public of the real basis behind its activities. But there is a penalty clause, and there is a threat that they can be struck off the register and prevented from issuing their seals. This will, I believe, ensure that they do put dawn the valid criteria on the register where they can be inspected. The penalties are not required so much to enable the Board of Trade to wipe people out on a whim of its own as to compel people to put down valid information on the register which will, I hope, soon be set up. In these matters it is possible to draw the net too widely. The House will see that the Long Title of the Bill includes those who publish comparative reports on consumer goods or services. Although this is in the Long Title, it is not in the text of the Bill because, after long consideration, it seemed to me to be quite impossible to draw up a definition of consumer reports which would not drag in all sorts of people whom one had no desire at all to bring within the net. It could, I suppose, be argued that a film review which criticised one film in terms of another could be held to be a comparative test, but to make anyone who published a film review came within the terms of the Bill would, I think, be absurd. Then there are Paris fashions. The dresses which are on display are consumer goods, but, if the fashion reporter of the Evening Standard says that Dior is better than Yves St. Laurent, I see no reason why the Evening Standard should then be registered as issuing consumer reports within the meaning of the Bill. Therefore, with some regret, we have abandoned that field altogether. It has been suggested that we should ask to be registered the charges which are made for the issue of seals, in order that we might have an idea of the financial transactions which go on. Here again, I do not think that the cost and complexity of the operation would be worth while. After all, if someone  wishes to be dishonest, there is any number of ways in which money can change hands under the counter which would not come within any possible registration of financial dealings which we put forward. At the same time, there is the possibility that, through lax drafting, one could bring in agricultural shows, shows in parish halls and the like, which, again, one has no desire to do. I remember very well that in my school days I lived near a farm which produced superb milk. This milk used to win prizes at all the local agricultural shows. Indeed, the farmer got so bored with winning these prizes year after year that once he took a small pinch of manure and dropped it into the milk he was submitting to the judges for test, but still won the first prize. Of course, this particular farmer, with that unparalleled run of successes at agricultural shows, used to advertise that his milk had won all those prizes. Clearly, we do not want every agricultural show and every village show in the country to register the criteria of their judgment on the central register at the Board of Trade. We have, therefore, taken care in the drafting of the Bill that they should be excluded and that only those bodies issuing seals designed specifically as quality seals should be included. This clearly rules out prizes of that sort. The Egg Marketing Board will, I think, be brought within the scheme in that the criteria, if any, which it has for applying the British Lion would have to be registered on the register which I hope will soon be instituted by the Board of Trade. But it is only the criteria of tests that we ask should be put down. The result of the tests would not be put down. In the particular case of the Egg Marketing Board, if the result of every test that the Board carried out had to be recorded on the register, the whole thing would become an absolute nonsense.

Mr. Dudley Williams
It is my case that the Bill is nonsense. Under Clause 1 (3, a), the name and address of the person issuing a seal of approval must be registered. That means that every time a person bangs the seal on an egg those particulars must be registered. The Bill is nonsense.

Mr. Goodhart
I have never considered that those words would be interpreted in that way. It is my understanding that one expects the laws of the land to be interpreted by reasonable men, and I do not imagine that it could conceivably be held—except, perhaps, by my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter—that every single stamper employed by the Egg Marketing Board, if, indeed, there are such stampers, should have his name and address kept on a permanent register at the Board of Trade. It is the name and address of the Egg Marketing Board which would be registered. Incidentally, the Board's address is in Shaftesbury Avenue, for some absurd reason. I hope that it will soon move to more suitable accommodation elsewhere.

Mr. H. P. G. Channon  (Southend, West)
Is not the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter covered by Clause 7 (2), which provides that "A person shall be deemed to issue a seal of approval…who authorises the use of such seal"? So it would not be everyone who stamps the eggs who would be registered, but the person authorising.

Mr. Goodhart
The Egg Marketing Board itself—

Mr. Dudley Williams
The foreman.

Mr. Goodhart
No, not the foreman. The Egg Marketing Board, which is situated in Shaftesbury Avenue, for some odd reason. I commend the Bill to the House and to the Government. I believe that its provisions will give the maximum protection for the minimum of inconvenience, because I believe that the best test by far is for the basis on which these tests are made to be readily available to the public. I am not indisolubly wedded to all the provisions of the Bill. If the Government can think of better ways to achieve the same objective, I shall not resist any Amendment. We know that the Molony Committee is nearing the end of its deliberations. Possibly the views of the Committee on this issue have been formulated. Surely the Board of Trade could, either formally or informally, seek the advice of  the Committee on this single, isolated issue. I presume that the Molony Committee will desire action to be taken on its recommendations, because it will not have spent many months studying these matters as a purely theoretical exercise. The Committee will wish a practical application of its recommendations, and the strong evidence submitted already would appear to make it plain that the Committee will make recommendations for action in this matter. If we do not take action now, it may well be that there will be no further chance to do so for a very long time. As I have already pointed out, once the full Molony Report has been published, the time of this House in respect of consumer protection will be at an absolute premium. So I offer to the Government a Bill; but, more than that, I offer them time and opportunity to put through an isolated but I think important reform. I hope that the response of the Parliamentary Secretary and of the House will not be ungenerous.

11.43 a.m.

Mr. J. Grimond  (Orkney and Shetland)
May I start, Mr. Speaker, by apologising to you, and to the House, for the fact that "one-sixth of the Liberal Party" will have to withdraw from the Chamber shortly owing to a previous engagement. I am all too well aware that the hon. Member for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart) who introduced the Bill with such lucidity and charm has not too thick an audience as it is. I share the desire of the hon. Member for Beckenham to see something on the lines he is suggesting put into force. But the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams) is not the only hon. Member who does not wish to see the machinery of Government or the Statute Book cluttered up with unnecessary provisions. The hon. Member for Beckenham went a long way to answer one of my questions. When I read the Long Title of the Bill I was rather alarmed. It seemed clear from the Long Title that most of the newspapers of this country would have to register. Certainly the Spectator, which has a special consumer interest, would have to register and so would the Observer, and similar  papers. And, of course, so would the publishers of Which? But I understand that that is not the intention. I presume that the hon. Member has been advised that there is no danger in leaving the Long Title as it is; or it may be his intention to amend it in Committee. I hope that the hon. Member for Beckenham will have another look at Clause 7, the Interpretation Clause. I do not think he intends that every cricketer who gives his signature to an advertisement for hair oil would have to register. Would John Arlott have to register? So far as I can see, he would have to do so under the definition of "seal of approval" in that Clause, and I do not think it is the intention of the hon. Member that this should be so. There may be one or two other points, which could be taken up during the Committee stage, about the drafting of Clause 1. I should like to ask one question about Clause 3. I confess that perhaps I ought to know the answer, and it may be that there is a well-established precedent, in which case I shall be raising an unnecessary question. I should be grateful for an assurance from the hon. Member that he is satisfied that the public advantage referred to in subsection (1) is sufficiently defined. That subsection reads: "The Board of Trade may, on the application in the prescribed manner of any person or on the application of the comptroller, make such order as they think fit for expunging an entry in the register…" The sole ground given in the subsection for doing that is: "that it is not to the public advantage." As I say, it may well be that there are well-established methods of defining the public advantage in this context, but it is an extremely wide phrase and there seems to be no safeguard that a body to be struck off the register may even appear. There seems to be no publicity—

Mr. Dudley Williams
And no right of appeal either.

Mr. Grimond
and I think it might be an advantage to have a word or two more about that, anyway, for the benefit of people like myself.

Mr. Goodhart
This subsection was taken from the Trade Marks Act, 1938.  The wording is modelled on the certification of the trade mark.

Mr. Grimond
That is why I prefaced my remarks by saying that perhaps I ought to know the answer. If this is well-established and has worked well in another Measure, there is no danger, but I should like also to feel that the Trade Marks Act had worked well. There may be considerable difficulties over the egg mark. I think that now the lion is becoming a more popular animal than the lamb, but there was a time when people went a long way to avoid getting an egg which had the lion stamp on it, and if an application were made to expunge from the register the Egg Marketing Board, the Board of Trade might be forced to do so. However, I understand that now the situation is much better and I am glad to be reassured on that point. Those are the questions I desired to ask and I was reassured to some extent by the opening speech of the hon. Member for Beckenham.

11.49 a.m.

Mr. Ian MacArthur  (Perth and East Perthshire)
I have pleasure in supporting the Bill and in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart) on making such good use of his good fortune in the Ballot. My hon. Friend referred to a publication which followed the establishment of a small group of hon. Members and others, over which he presided. I am sure that he is right in regarding the recommendations embodied in this Bill as being a separate parcel, as it were, from the general consideration of consumer protection. I believe that they make a little package of their own which might well be dealt with separately from whatever wider consumer protection legislation may follow later. To try to avoid any difficulty, it should be made clear that the Bill refers, as I understand it, exclusively to consumer goods and services, not to cricketers and so on, which is the point that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) perhaps had in mind.

Mr. Grimond
Surely hair oil is a consumer article, and, indeed, a service. So, indeed, are cricket bats. Many cricketers inscribe their names on bottles  of hair oil and on cricket bats. I think that they would come within the Bill.

Mr. MacArthur
I beg the right hon. Gentleman's pardon. I thought he also referred to reports of cricket. I misunderstood him. The Bill is almost bold in its attempt to define consumer goods and services in Clause 7. There has, of course, been a great interest in the question of consumer protection in recent years. But I think that at times there has been perhaps some misunderstanding of what consumer protection is about—what it is that the consumer needs or seeks to be protected from. It may be thought that the forces of consumer protection try to protect the consumer from dishonest manufacturers and shoddy goods. Certainly there is some element of truth in that, but I suggest that the greater truth is that the vast mass of consumer products today is of good quality and that the protection the consumer needs and seeks is from the confusion that accompanies a wide and growing range of choice and the development of new and complicated products. At this point, I must declare an interest. I am in business life an associate director of an advertising agency. In my view, good and informative advertising will direct choice to a particular product, but the discriminating consumer is looking now also for an independent critical judgment to set beside the legitimate advocacy of the advertiser. In this, of course, the spread of seals of approval has a real influence. I am sure that all hon. Members will want to support any way of helping the discriminating consumer to become more discriminating, for that surely is one way towards a progressive competitive society. The Long Title of the Bill, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham has mentioned, refers to the publication of comparative reports, a matter which is not dealt with in the proposals of the Bill itself. I want to refer to the advances made by the two publications Which? and Shopper's Guide, whose reports on consumer goods are soon to be the basis for B.B.C. television and sound programmes. This is a welcome development, and I am sure that the B.B.C. will take care that these programmes are full and fair.  These comparative tests are very helpful to the consumer, provided that their limitations are understood. They cannot measure the subjective qualities of certain products. I have in mind fashion, line, colour, taste and smell—indefinable factors which are purely subjective. There are certain other problems to be considered. For example, the article concerned may have been bought some months before the publication of the report on it, and in some cases it might not be truly representative of the product available at the time of publication. Furthermore, if these tests are to be comprehensive they should, if possible, cover the whole range of a particular product field and not only a few selected brands. This is of special importance if these programmes are to be shown on television, as I understand they are.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade (Mr. Niall Macpherson)
Can my right hon. Friend tell us how he suggests that should be done? How is it possible for any consumer testing organisation to make certain that it covers an entire range?

Mr. MacArthur
I should have thought it reasonable for the nature of the testing to be such that goods nationally distributed are tested. I recognise the difficulties, but I hope that the B.B.C. will give a very careful thought to the grave harm that might be done to a manufacturer whose product is excluded from a series of tests, but which is, nevertheless, nationally available. I ask only that these difficulties should be considered, as I am sure they will be, by the B.B.C., whose standards in matters of this kind are very high. Independent tests of the quality and content of products are obviously in the interests of the consumer and also of trade here and abroad, provided that the methods of testing and the standards observed are fair and are seen to be fair. The recent spread of independent testing concerns and the seals of approval some of them issue have certainly helped to improve quality standards. There is no argument about that, but there is a danger that a testing concern may embark on tests beyond its capacity. There have already been one or two cases where the methods used have been  seriously contested. Similarly, even properly conducted tests may do more harm than good if the distribution and use of quality seals associated with them are not rigidly controlled by the testing concern. As I understand it, the Bill applies to seals of approval issued by any source. In this way, it applies not only to seals of approval issued by independent concerns but also to those issued by manufacturers themselves. As hon. Members will know, there is some difficulty in the maintenance of quality standards in textiles. Very often a large manufacturer of yarn and fibre—I have in mind Courtaulds and British Nylon Spinners—sells yarn or fibre which passes through many processes of manufacture which are often outside their control before it reaches the public in its final form. These companies, which have a very high standard of behaviour, very often carry out a system of testing or inspection of garments containing their fibres before they will allow their fibre or yarn trade mark to be applied to the final article. I am sure that it is not the intention, by this Bill, to restrict or cause restriction of operations of that kind. Equally, however, there is a tendency to introduce seals of approval for a manufacturer's own products or for products ultimately created from the initial product sold by a manufacturer. Here, it is reasonable to ask that the standards of the test applied in qualification for the seal should be registered and made available for public inspection, so that there cannot be any suggestion that a manufacturer's own seal is somehow escaping the restrictions which would govern the issuing of seals of a more independent concern. The safeguard this Bill proposes will protect not only the consumer but also the reputable testing concern. The requirements set out in subsection (3) of Clause 1 and throughout the rest of the Bill generally are reasonable, and I hope that they will meet with the approval of hon. Members.

12 noon.

Mr. George Darling  (Sheffield, Hillsborough)
I should like to congratulate the hon. Member for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart) on attempting to put right in this Bill what may be widely con  sidered to be a fault or weakness in the trading system of this country in consumer goods. I apologise to him for the small attendance on this side of the House. I can, however, assure him and the House that it is not because of lack of interest in the aims of the Bill, but I must confess to him, if I am to be perfectly honest in this discussion, that I have had some difficulty in persuading my more interested colleagues that the Bill is the best way of achieving the hon. Member's aims, with which we are in full agreement. I agree with the observations of the hon. Member for Perth and East Perthshire (Mr. MacArthur), that the starting point of all our discussions on the matter of consumer protection must be that most manufacturers, traders and dealers in this country are perfectly honest and above board and are trying to give service to their customers. Therefore, consumer protection must take two forms. It must help manufacturers and traders to give the fullest possible information to the public about goods and products, their qualities, services and performances. It must also have the final sanction of the law to deal with unscrupulous competitors who offend against any good standards which may be made voluntarily, and, when we come to safety appliances where we need legally imposed safety standards to deal with people who offend against those standards. We shall be running into very great danger if we think that we shall be able to put everything right by passing Acts of Parliament. I consider the informative job—the job of giving information to the public—to be far more important. Although an Act of Parliament may set up a body to provide information, I think that on the whole it is much better to leave the informative job to the trade associations, the reputable manufacturers and dealers and, by the pressure of public opinion, keep on compelling them to give more and more information about the products that they provide. In that regard, if I am in order, Mr. Speaker, in following up the remarks of the hon. Member for Perth and East Perthshire about the projected B.B.C. programmes, I would say that I completely agree with him. I do not know  whether it is our duty to warn the B.B.C. that it may be running into danger, as the Parliamentary Secretary hinted in his intervention, if its programmes are not comprehensive when it is trying to tell the public which are the best goods to buy. I would say that the B.B.C's job is to help and support the informative side of what I have called consumer protection services. It can do that by giving information about standards and showing customers what to look for when they go to buy products, how to find out from manufacturers and traders whether fabrics are shrink-proof and that kind of thing. I do not want to go into detailed cases because that would take us a little further away from the purposes of the Bill. I agree, as I have already hinted, with the Leader of the Liberal Party that we do not want too much legislation of this kind, especially where standards could better he raised by persuasion. We want far more public discussion about this, and we need the pressure of informed public opinion. We do, however, need legislation in the long run to provide the final legal sanction against unscrupulous people who cannot be made to conform in any other way to the standards or good practices which we should like to lay down in our trading system. I shall not follow the hon. Member for Beckenham by going into the well-merited publicity that might be given to the Labour Party policy statement on consumer protection in the way that he tried to publicise the Conservative Political Centre's document on this subject, with which, of course, he was so closely connected. On this matter of testing consumer goods and issuing seals of approval, there is, as he knows, a somewhat different approach between us. This, of course, is our difficulty, because, strange as it may seem to all political commentators who try falsely to persuade the public that the Socialist Party stands for great, massive, State bureaucracy, which of course, is perfectly untrue, the hon. Member is trying in this Bill to give us a far more bureaucratic method of dealing with this problem than we ourselves approve in our own policy statement. I appreciate his difficulty and that is why I am supporting his Bill, because the machinery which both of us would like to have set up is not here. We have not the Consumers Council and other bodies which may be proposed not only in our own policy statement but in the report of the Molony Committee when it comes. Therefore, we have to deal with the situation as it is, although our approach is somewhat different. We have no quarrel at all with the aims of the Bill. Any weaknesses there may be in the drafting are matters which, I am sure, can be put right in Committee. That is the reason I have attached my name as a supporter of the Bill. I think that it is necessary—we cannot go on waiting for the Molony Committee's Report for ever—to have some control over bodies issuing seals of approval or pretending to test products and influence consumers in their choice of goods, but which are, in fact, misleading them by giving false impressions of quality by seals of approval which have no validity. Some control is urgent, especially in the case of domestic appliances which, if they are badly made or do not come up to some recognised standard, could be dangerous in the home. At present, as I am sure hon. Members will be aware, there are electrical appliances which carry a seal of approval which has a very high-sounding title, but I have not been able to discover the standards worked to. They may be good standards, I do not know, but, certainly, those standards are not published. I am sure that the Parliamentary Secretary will agree that if we are to lay down standards for potentially dangerous domestic appliances, the only body to lay them down is the British Standards Institution. On that point—and this is an example to give support to what I am saying—we quite obviously would never agree to an unofficial body giving a seal of approval to oil burners or heaters, the standards of which were below the B.S.I. standards. We know the tragic consequences attaching to oil burners which do not come up to the high standards which are now to be imposed. Incidentally, that was not the fault of the manufacturers. Some had a standard which was not quite good enough to meet the higher standards now being imposed. It would be quite wrong for a seal of approval to be given to dangerous appliances of that kind which were not of B.S.I. standard. The hon. Member for Beckenham mentioned the Good Housekeeping Institute, which, I think, has done a very good job on the whole, but nobody knows, as far as I can discover, the standards it works to, and it would be far better if those standards were published. Of course, there is a drawback here in that the standards of the Institute are applied only to firms which advertise in the magazine, which is a restricted field of approval and needs, I think, to be looked at in consideration of consumer protection. I would agree with the hon. Member for Beckenham that, in the circumstances, it is the only approach which can be made to clear up this problem of seals of approval which may be issued without any standards behind them, without any proper standards being imposed, which could mislead the public and become dangerous. In any case, while seals of approval are being handed out by an unofficial body which has no standard and is putting seals of approval on articles merely to get them sold whether they deserve to be advertised or not, the public are going to be faced with this kind of false advertising. It is false advertising. As the hon. Member knows, the advertising trade itself is very much concerned to get out of its own business the people who go in for false advertising and so mislead the customers. Where a seal of approval is given which is not justified in any way, that is a form of false advertising we have got to deal with, and we have got to stop people being mislead. Therefore, although there are some minor criticisms of the drafting of the Bill, I support it, and I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will say that the Bill should at least be given a Second Reading so that in Committee we can clear up anything in the drafting which needs to be cleared up.

12.11 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade (Mr. Niall Macpherson)
First, I should like to join with the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Darling) and my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire (Mr. MacArthur) in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart) on the manner in which he  introduced his proposals and the cogent way in which he presented his argument. We know very well the very close interest which my hon. Friend takes in consumer protection. He has done a very valuable job, if I may say so, and I am sure that any criticism which I may make of his present proposals certainly will not damp his zeal in any way in promoting consumer protection. Consumer protection is, of course, one of the traditional functions of the Board of Trade in its general duty to promote fair trade, and there can be no doubt that the subject which the hon. Gentleman has chosen for today is a matter in which there is room for improvement. He said himself that he had strong personal reasons for bringing in the Bill. I hope that he will not mentally put too great emphasis on his personal reasons for bringing in the Bill. We fully understand those, but he accused the Government of reluctance to consider any legislation on matters covered by Molony; but, as I said before, when a committee is considering such matters I think that legislation in the meantime would have to be justified by urgency or by great public demand. With great respect to my hon. Friend, there is in the House today no great evidence of great public demand. On the Opposition benches the parties have been led from the van very much, and it is only the respective spokesmen on the subject who have been present in the House at all. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Liberal Party explained courteously that he had to leave from time to time for other engagements, and the hon. Member for Hillsborough has made a most considered and valuable contribution to the debate today; but the fact remains that there is no evidence of great public demand for the Bill. Even if there were urgency and a great public demand for the Bill—for which, my hon. Friend said, he had looked in the highways and byeways of this field—one would have to be able to justify the Bill on its own merits. I noticed that my hon. Friend said really remarkably little about the Bill itself. He did not go through the Bill in the normal way, Clause by Clause, to  explain it. He said he was not indissolubly wedded to the provisions in the Bill. Given that phrase, I am rather reminded of the chairman who, introducing a speaker, and having been told that he must not make too long a speech in making the introduction, said, "I understand that the less said about him the better." I think that it is true to say that this reform could stand on its own, and I would agree with my hon. Friend that we need not necessarily expect one huge consumers' charter as a result of the Molony Committee's recommendations, but, of course, I would not agree with him in saying that if the Bill does not reach the Statute Book this year there may not be another opportunity for many years to come. If this matter really does command the public support which he suggests it does, if it is a matter of such importance, I cannot imagine that there would not be an hon. Member who would introduce such a Bill next year after we have had the benefit of examining the Molony Report. My hon. Friend said that many seals were absolutely valueless, and he wanted, he said, to make people put down the valid criteria on which they awarded a seal. I hope that I shall not be considered captious in asking, if this is so, why has my hon. Friend refrained from registering in his Bill the valid criteria on which the Board of Trade should remove a seal from the register? He told the House in an intervention that he had lifted this provision bodily from the Trade Marks Act, 1938. That is true, but, of course, the criterion of public advantage in Schedule 1 is only one of the criteria for the admission of certification trade marks. The others are "whether the applicant is competent to certify the goods in respect of which the mark is to be registered" and—where there are regulations, that is to say, regulations in accordance with which the certification is to be used—  "whether the draft regulations are satisfactory". Again, there is another point here, and that is that the test of the public advantage in that case is quite different. A certification trade mark, unlike a seal of approval or a certificate or diploma, is an industrial property. I am advised that there is no industrial property in a seal of approval. Undoubtedly, if it  were usurped by somebody who issued a seal of approval, or if somebody used it who was not entitled to use it, was not authorised to use it by the owner of the seal, a criminal prosecution could arise for fraud or a prosecution for misdescription under the Merchandise Marks Act, but so far as I can find out there would be no case for a civil action for an infringement of a seal of approval in the same way as there would be an action for an infringement of a trade mark. The public advantage criterion in the certification trade mark is the fact that official recognition is being given to a monopoly right in a certification trade mark, and that, I would think, is a rather different sort of consideration from the consideration of public advantage in the case of a seal of approval. It so happens that although my hon. Friend has selected what appears to be a small and isolatable—if I may use the word—section of consumer protection, he has lighted on one of the most difficult issues in a field which, in any case, is far from easy. I hope, therefore, that he will forgive me for saying that there seems to be a gap between what I imagine he is seeking to achieve and what are the proposals of the Bill. I am not referring just to matters of detail. That a Bill should be workable and practicable is as much a matter of principle as is anything else. Provisions must be workable. My hon. Friend made his objective perfectly clear. He wants to eliminate bogus or misleading certificates of merit. He wants certificates of merit to be issued only in accordance with declared and approved standards duly registered so that the public may know what real merit there is in the goods to which a certificate is attached; in short may know what is the real merit in what is loosely referred to as a seal of approval. For that purpose my hon. Friend proposes compulsory registration of every such seal or certificate and provides for the subsequent removal of a seal from the register if it is not to the public advantage that it should continue to be issued. My hon. Friend pointed out that some seals are issued by bodies whose independence and technical qualifications are open to doubt and whose criteria for the issue of the seal are far from clear, if  there are any criteria. In short, he maintains that there is often little merit in some of these marks and that they serve only to mislead. Very careful safeguards are written into the Trade Marks Act for the certification of trade marks, including their registration by the Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks who would be the authority for registering the seals of approval. On the certification of trade marks, the Comptroller-General has to consider the competence of the applicant to certify the goods in question, the adequacy of the regulations in accordance with which he proposes to do so, and whether registration would be to the public advantage. I do not deny, and I hope that nothing I have said will be taken as denying, that something will have to be done in this field, but what, if anything, has to be done must depend in part on the scope of the problem. The first need, therefore, is to identify and define its scope. Various examples have been cited, but I do not intend to go into any particular example or mention any names. From what has already been said in the debate I confess that I have not been wholly convinced that the problem is as great or as urgent as has been suggested, or that the public is being duped on such a scale that immediate action is necessary and that the desirability of having the matter more fully considered is overridden by its urgency. Again I say that even if that were so, the first need would be to identify and define the problem. I do not know what consultation my hon. Friend had when he was drafting the Bill, but I would not be surprised if he found himself having to choose between two alternatives, not an easy choice. The first is to define seals of approval fairly closely. If that can be done, the result might well be administratively satisfactory. There is no objection to charging fees, although my hon. Friend does not make provision for doing so. In all the other spheres of the Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, fees are charged. That solution, however, has the disadvantage that those who want to escape from the burden which it seeks to impose can do so by not registering their  seals of approval, although if they did that might mean that they would have to forgo the use of certain words or designs which were reserved by the legislation for registered seals. But the general effect would be to confer on registered seals a prestige which would be denied to unregistered seals, and that, in turn, would mean that unregistered seals would carry very little weight with the consumer. That would be one way of dealing with it. The alternative, which my hon. Friend has chosen, is to make the definition very wide and to apply it very widely. In consequence, seals and certificates of which my hon. Friend would disapprove would have to be registered. But many other things as well would have to be registered and whatever was registered would have to stay on the register until someone successfully applied to the Board of Trade for its removal. Moreover, since every sort of design which is used in respect of consumer goods is involved, some very awkward questions of interpretation and administration would arise. Without doubt, there would be an area of vagueness about whether certain certificates or seals had to be registered, because the net is cast so wide. Another point is that there can be registered trade marks and unregistered trade marks. Registration establishes a property right in the mark. The presence of the mark on the register is, at any rate, prima facie evidence of the claim of the person named to the property right in the mark. There can also be unregistered trade marks, for there is nothing in the law to compel anyone to register a trade mark if he does not want to do so. On the other hand, the Bill makes registration of all seals of approval compulsory, and seals of approval may include both registered and unregistered trade marks and certainly include certification trade marks. I recognise that certification trade marks could be excluded in Committee, but there is bound to be duplication and it is right for me to point that out. No doubt wishing not to detain the House too long, my hon. Friend did not go into the Bill itself in any great detail. Clause 1 requires the registration by 1st January, 1963, of the names of those issuing seals of approval in  respect of any goods available for sale to the public at large—that is a very wide definition—together with particulars of the goods to which they may be applied and the standards by which those goods are to be judged. The core of a matter like this must be in the definition of a seal of approval—because that is what the Bill is about—and seals of approval are defined as "any diploma or document in the nature of a certificate or any device, emblem, symbol, brand, heading, label, ticket, name, signature, word, letter, numeral or any combination thereof specifically awarded or authorised for use in relation to consumer goods for the purpose of denoting approval of such goods or their compliance with standards relating to their composition, quality, value or performance." I do not propose to discuss with my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and East Perthshire whether one can award a certificate to oneself. I do not think that is what my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham meant by his definition; but if that were so, the scope of the Bill would be immensely widened still. It is already wide enough and probably covers phrases like "Pure silk" and "100 per cent. Virginia tobacco," which are included in advertising matter issued by a manufacturer for use in connection with goods that a packer or wholesaler sells under his own brand name. I am not absolutely sure that it would not include a simple phrase identifying a manufacturer with the product, saying, "This is a such-and-such toy." I am bound to say that, in my view, if the scheme is to have any meaning it must be based on a much clearer and probably more limited concept of what constitutes a seal of approval, and there must be a quite clear indication also of the goods to which the Bill applies. Those, I suggest, are fundamental, at least to the Bill, because upon the definition in this case depends the Bill. I have tried personally to envisage what would be covered by the Bill. I do not think that there is any doubt that a Book Society recommendation would be. Also, I do not see how one could avoid a seal authorised by an international exhibition having to be registered. I agree that the lion stamped on by an egg testing station—it is the testing station that does it, I think—would  have to be. Certainly, references on packages to certificates issued by analysts would. I am not quite certain whether certain stamps placed on certain parts of the anatomy of animals by the Departments of Agriculture would not have to be registered. It might even be—to carry it almost to the extent of the ridiculous—that a certificate issued to someone who beat the panel in "What's My Line?" would have to be registered if it concerned consumer goods; but, seriously, the point I am making is that the definition goes far wider than at first sight it appears to go. The Bill is applicable under Clause 1 (1) to "goods available for sale to the public at large," which in Clause 1 (2) for some reason becomes transformed into "consumer goods." When we came to the definition Clause we find that one is defined in terms of the other. Frankly, I do not think that this will do. It is too vague. I am not really sure whether it is too wide or too narrow. In one sense, perhaps, it is too narrow. Certification trade marks can be registered in respect of any goods and have been registered in respect of many things which my hon. Friend might not consider to be consumer goods, such as drainpipes and what is known as street furniture—bollards, and so on—and even sheep marking fluid. Are these to be held to be goods available to the public at large? If not, who benefits by their exclusion from the scope of the Bill? On the other hand, there are all sorts of things available for sale to the public at large, even if they are not very commonly bought by the public at large. The phrase is far from being confined to food, clothing and domestic and household goods. Another difficulty I would mention, in passing, is that there is nothing in the Bill to prevent a firm to which a seal of approval had been issued before the Bill came into operation from continuing to use it although the person who had issued the seal never registered it because he had ceased issuing seals before the Bill came into operation. For an offence is committed only if someone continues to use a seal which has been expunged from the register. However, registration is only the first stage in the Bill. After 1st January, 1963, the Board of Trade is given power to review a seal on the application of any member of the public or of the Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, who acts as Registrar of Trade Marks. After such an application, if the seal is not judged to be to the public advantage it has to be removed from the register. As I said, the trouble here is: what are the objectives that the Board of Trade has to have in mind? What are the criteria for judging? What is to be "to the public advantage"? It is a very different matter from the judging of the public advantage in the case of a certification trade mark. It is very flattering to the Board of Trade that it should be suggested that it should exercise unfettered judgment in this matter, but it would be an onerous and invidious task. It is true that the Board of Trade has to judge the public advantage, among other criteria, in the case of certification trade marks, but there the Board of Trade is, in effect, considering whether it is expedient that a monopoly should be granted in a certain mark. In the case of seals of approval, on the other hand, although I may say that there is no obligation on the Board of Trade to investigate the case laid on it by the Bill, the Board of Trade would have to satisfy itself of the applicant's status, competence, methods and reliability and a host of other things if the seal were challenged. The Board of Trade would thus need an inspectorate. This is not a small matter. The number of seals being put on the register would be very large indeed. The Comptroller would also need an inspectorate, because how could he make application for the removal of a seal from the register if he had not first investigated the case? The Registrar of Trade Marks has no inspectorate at his disposal, and one would have to be created. Also, in the Bill it is open to any person—not just my hon. Friend, or even the hon. Member for Swindon (Mr. F. Noel-Baker), but any Tom, Dick or Harry—to apply for the removal of a seal from the register. The Board of  Trade would then have to investigate and decide. The Bill provides for no appeal against that decision, nor so far as I can see is there even a right conferred upon the person issuing the seal, or upon those whom he has authorised to use the seal, to be heard. As the hon. Member for Hillsborough said, these are grave grounds for questioning the Bill. The hon. Member is supporting the Bill out of loyalty—I would not go further than that—having put his name to the Bill. I do not know whether the loyalty is to my hon. Friend, or to himself, but out of loyalty he is supporting the Bill. In fact, one can support the perfectly general purpose of the Bill, but it is very difficult to support a Bill of this kind where there seems to be a degree of unfairness either on the owner or, in this case, on the Board of Trade itself. The absence of criteria means that the Board of Trade will be subjected, undoubtedly, to immense pressure from interested people for and against the removal of a trade mark from the register. I have grave doubts whether this would not have the effect of turning the register into a political football. Hon. Members would be under constant pressure to ask Questions about why the Board of Trade had or had not expunged a seal. One has to ask oneself whether this is the best form of administration that could be devised. My hon. Friend suggested that if the criticisms that I have voiced and other criticisms made by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland and the hon. Member for Hillsborough are right, then, granted acceptance of the view that there exists here a wrong which should be put right, the Bill could be amended in Committee to become a workable and effective instrument. On matters of this kind the Government do not usually want to go against the general feeling of the House, although they would want it to be a fairly representative House before their own views were overridden in this matter. I think that they would do so only if it were felt that the Bill could be turned into a workable piece of legislation. If the Government are to be asked to approve a Bill it is only reasonable that they should draft the Long Title as  well. Frankly, this is not the Long Title which we would choose. The admirable pamphlet called "Choice," published by a group of six Conservatives, three of whom are Members of this House, and presided over by my hon. Friend, dealt, in Chapter 3, with what it termed "Consumer Guides". This is one of the subjects we are talking about. Under this heading it covered many other subjects such as independent testing and what it described as the growing number of seals and certification marks. My hon. Friend pointed out that, although his Bill provides for registration of all those engaging in the publication of comparative reports as recommended in the pamphlet, he has not felt it desirable to pursue that subject for the reasons which he gave. That is a matter which can be further examined, but I think that I would agree with him. Of course, there is nothing wrong in having a Long Title which goes further than the Bill, especially when, as we all know, a private Member has to think out the Long Title before he devises a Bill. I wonder, however, whether the Long Title does what my hon. Friend thinks it does. To paraphrase, it provides that bodies corporate and unincorporate which issue diplomas or authority to use marks or emblems of approval must register particulars of their financial state of affairs, control and management and of the criteria on which such diplomas or authority are granted together with—and here I quote because the purpose and effect are rather obscure: "the results of research or investigation carried out for the purposes of such reports or awards." I think that my hon. Friend has been wise to miss out reference to that in the Bill. I ought also to point out, in passing, that there is no provision in the Bill either for registering particulars as to the criteria and results of research and investigation but only "details of the standard by which the goods"— in question— "have been judged." This is undoubtedly a very difficult matter. The Book Society, for example—would it be able to put down satisfactorily details of the standards by  which it judges? Here we have two separate kinds of approval given. We have approval given by virtue of somebody's personal qualifications to judge because he is experienced in this field and has long experience in it so that people are prepared to rely on that experience. There may be a panel or people with experience in this field to say, perhaps, only whether the consumer gets value for money on a particular item. That is one side of the matter. On the other hand, we can have something like a Kite mark which is given in relation to British Standards clearly defined. That is exactly at the opposite end. But it is not what is in the Long Title so much as what is not there which is a matter for concern. I am advised that no individual who issued such awards would have to register under the Act in accordance with the Long Title. Only organisations, bodies corporate and unincorporate would have to do that. Obviously, there is a serious gap there. One of the few areas—and there have not been very many—which caused us some anxiety in this field, was that of an individual who issued, seals of approval to himself while manufacturing under another name. The most serious matter is that there is no precise indication as to the type of activity that is to be caught by the Bill. It is all very well to say that seals of approval are causing anxiety, and that we must do something about them. But this is not a Motion calling on the Government to do something about the matter; it is a Private Member's Bill proposing a specific remedy for a specific mischief. The problem is to isolate the mischief and to define closely the area in the Bill to ensure that the remedy proposed is workable. That is a task of great difficulty. I cannot blame my hon. Friend if he has not entirely succeeded in doing it. Frankly, the Board of Trade would not be able to do it either without long and careful consideration. Fortunately, we are being spared the need for the Board of Trade itself to give that long and careful consideration as we have appointed the Molony Committee to do it for us. When that Committee reports we shall give the matter consideration, which I think will  be careful, but it will not necessarily be long. Quite apart from that, we are not convinced that my hon. Friend has identified the field. We are not convinced that registration should be compulsory and automatic on application. That is not the way in which the trade marks and, trade mark registration work. We are not convinced that the Board of Trade should be left to remove a seal of approval with no guidance about why it should do so and that there should be no appeal from that decision. As we are not convinced, I must say to my hon. Friend that the Government would see great difficulty in introducing a Financial Resolution, especially at this time, for a Measure which they do not consider absolutely urgent or fully thought out. I do not blame my hon. Friend in the slightest for the fact that it is not fully thought out, because this is an exceedingly difficult field. I know that this news is bound to be a disappointment to my hon. Friend and his supporters—all of whom appear to be on this side of the House, apart from the hon. Member for Hillsborough. I know that my hon. Friend has devoted a great deal of time and effort to this matter, but I hope that he will accept that before venturing into a difficult professional field of this kind we want to get the matter as nearly right as we possibly can.

12.45 p.m.

Mr. Charles Doughty  (Surrey, East)
I am sorry that I did not hear the whole of the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary, but I did hear the whole speech of the mover of the Second Reading of this Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart). I listened with considerable care because I am always ready to be persuaded by him, knowing the care he takes in the preparation of Bills or speeches and other works he does, but I am sorry to tell him that, having read the Bill and listened to his forceful arguments in support of it, I still cannot give him my support for the Bill. To start with, the Bill is not well drafted. Perhaps as a lawyer I always begin at the end of any problem. I look at the definition Clause, which is much too widely drawn. It says: "consumer goods' means all such goods as are available for sale to the public at large;" That means everything, every single thing, every soap flake in a packet of soap flakes—

Mr. Dudley Williams
The "Queen Mary".

Mr. Doughty
As my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams) says, the "Queen Mary" as well, and every rowing boat on the Thames. The definition is much too wide and would cover too many articles. "Seal of approval" has a long definition. I do not propose to read it because it is so long. I am reminded of the old advertisement which we saw many years ago picturing a man writing a letter in which he states: "Twenty years ago I used your soap, since when I've used no other". That gentleman was a layabout tramp who, under this Bill, would find himself punished for the advertisement and implied approval in respect of a well-known brand of soap. Coming from the end to the beginning, I do not like the Long Title. It imports far too much. Looking at the purpose of the Bill, is there really any evil which it is intended to cure? Can it really be said, short of hunting through the highways and byeways, that we can find a case where a body of persons give approval to articles which they ought not to give, or give it on flimsy grounds? Newspapers—at any rate, the more reputable—rely enormously on revenue from advertisements, but they are extremely careful in respect of the claims made for the articles which are advertised in the newspapers. There is no evidence, except impliedly, that they have been giving approval for articles either recklessly or wrongly. The powers given in the Bill are much too wide. I am not saying a single word against the Board of Trade, whose Ministers and officials carry out their duties to the very best of their ability, but I wonder whether they and my hon. Friend who introduced the Bill realise the tremendous powers that are given to refuse registration and to strike people off just at a whim. They could put people out of business, and, indeed, do so, under Clause 3 (1)— "on the application…of any person" which, of course, would encourage anybody who might have a grudge or some feeling against a particular article to make a complaint anonymously to the Board of Trade, with the result that the person who carried on this type of business would be struck off the register without a right of appeal. Does this House want any Minister or Government Department to be given these wide, secret powers without any right of appeal, in respect of the use of these marks? The result will be pressure on Members of Parliament and this House and continual Adjournment debates or Questions on whether the X.Y.Z. association had been rightly or wrongly struck off the register. The Minister would give evidence and there would be the usual arguments, with which we are so familiar. This is not a case for the discussion of these matters, and for these reasons I am afraid that I cannot give my approval to the Bill. My hon. Friend threatened us in a pleasant way. He suggested that if we considered quality now, we should get ahead of the Molony Committee, and also get ahead of the Weights and Measures Bill, which has not yet been debated, and should be doing something which we should not have time to do later on. I listened with apprehension to his statement about what would happen in this House when we come to consider these very long Bills in Committee. He may be right or wrong, and we will deal with them when they come, but that is no reason for slipping in this Bill in advance of the main Government Measure. It must wait, and, indeed, this Bill must wait to be incorporated at a later stage in any other Bill after the Molony Committee has reported. The Committee has been working very hard, but until we see what the Committee recommends and what action the Government propose to take with respect to the findings of that Committee, we should not proceed further now. If the Committee reports in favour of this proposal and the Government do not follow up the report or its recommendations, my hon. Friend could introduce a Bill on these lines, but I hope it would be better drafted. In that connection, I would offer him my assistance in the drafting of it, if that is of any use to him. We can then consider the question when it arises. For the reasons  which I have given, and much as I regret it, I am not able to support the action of my hon. Friend and cannot give the Bill my support. I hope that he will wait until after the Molony Committee has reported and Government legislation has been introduced.

12.54 p.m.

Mr. Dudley Williams  (Exeter)
While I have been in the Chamber this morning, I felt that I could not fail to be conscious of the momentous stage which we have reached in our Parliamentary history. The serried ranks on both sides of the House, waiting for the words of wisdom to fall from the lips of my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Goodhart), were something which we have not seen here for a very long time. We have the spokesman for the Labour Party, the Leader of the Liberal Party, and about eight times as many Members on this side of the House as on the other, including my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade and his Parliamentary Private Secretary, constituting a House rarely seen in this Mother of Parliaments. Like the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. M. Foot), who made such an interesting speech last night, I believe that these matters should be thrashed out in Parliament and should not be settled in little hives of industry in the Palace of Westminster or outside it. We all know that this Bill is the result of considerable mental effort by the Conservative Political Centre and the publication "Choice." I should like to refer to a few words mentioned on one occasion by my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. J. Rodgers). I am sorry that he is not here today, but he once said that one cannot sharpen a razor blade by Government legislation and that neither can integrity be applied by legislation to testing and certifying bodies. There are two matters which arise here for discussion far too frequently—one being the subject of consumer protection and the other being anything to do with fox hunting, deer or stag hunting. I cannot imagine anything much more likely to irritate hon. Members than when these subjects are introduced in our debates. We frequently have debates of some sort on questions to do with consumer protection. Last year,  we had a Consumers' Protection Bill. I was the only Member to oppose it on Second Reading. I had a very strenuous time in Standing Committee C and I think that I would probably have prevented that Bill from becoming an Act of Parliament if, unfortunately, on coming to the House one morning to take my place in the Committee I had not sprained my ankle. I made a point which, I think, refers to the present proposals before the House in my Second Reading speech on the Consumer Protection Bill on 27th January, 1961, when I drew attention to the fact that it was desirable that we should define the word "consumer". I said that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary gave a simple definition, at which there was a very rude remark from an hon. Member who sits for a Scottish constituency. That definition is: "He who or that which consumes."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 27th January, 1961, Vol. 663, c. 531.] That gives an indication of the enormous field which we are considering when discussing consumer protection. That is why, during the speech of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty), I mentioned the "Queen Mary", which could be covered by regulations under this Bill. I was telling the truth, because the "Queen Mary" is a great consumer of fuel. It could be affected by fuel sold under a branded name or with a certificate of approval from a certifying body. The "Queen Mary" is also a great consumer of food, and many of these cartons of foods are sold under seals of approval from various bodies. I was quite right. I was not being frivolous, as I rarely am, when I said that this is a very far-reaching Measure which should not be discussed except under the crowded conditions which we now see confronting us. That is why I am very glad that there are so many hon. Members here to dispel the doubts of my hon. Friend whether there is sufficient interest in the Bill to ensure that the Government should give it their approval. Next, I wish to refer to the Molony Committee's Report. A great many Reports are presented to the House, and I strongly suspect that many hon. Members do not trouble to read them. I  read most of them assiduously. I think that I am right in saying that I am one of the few hon. Members who has read the Report on Corporal Punishment. I have read through that dreary tome.

Mr. Speaker
Order. I have some difficulty in seeing how the consumer is protected by corporal punishment.

Mr. Williams
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. There has been reference to the Molony Committee's Report today, and I hope that more hon. Members will read it, because it affects the whole principle behind the Bill. I wish to refer to paragraphs 48 and 49 of the interim Report of the Molony Committee. I think that for the benefit of those hon. Members who have not had the good fortune to read the Report, it would be not out of order if I read those two short paragraphs: "We do not recommend that the exhibition of a certification or other mark, registered or unregistered, should form part of the requirements imposed by Regulation under the proposed Act." Paragraph 49 reads: "As part of our main enquiry we are in process of examining the merits and the value to the consumer of seals of approval not registered as certification trade marks. In relation to articles with a danger potentiality we wish to place on record our opinion that in current conditions unregistered seals and symbols must be viewed with caution unless the standing of the issuing authority is unimpeachable." From those words hon. Members will realise that the Molony Committee is giving very careful thought to the whole of the principle which lies behind the Bill. With great respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham, who, I know, is very assiduously in attendance on Fridays and takes great interest in private Members' legislation, I do not think that he should introduce Measures of this sort while the Molony Committee is sitting, and I think that it would be most unwise if the House were to "jump the gun," as it were, before the Molony Committee has reported. I sincerely hope that, for that reason alone, my hon. Friend will take this proposal no further. Next, I want to consider the terms of the Bill and to refer to one or two of the Clauses and to the effect which they might have on people if the Bill were  passed. Before I come to the Clauses, I should like to refer to the Financial Memorandum and to the Money Resolution which will be necessary before the Bill can become an Act of Parliament. I was very glad to hear my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade saying that the Government would be very cautious before agreeing to the Money Resolution. We have frequent scenes in the House on the question of Government expenditure. I believe it fair to say—and I say this in no controversial sense—that hon. Members opposite are rather inclined to want more Government expenditure, while we on this side of the House want less. We have had scene after scene about this—and not only in the Chamber; for we have heard at meetings up and down the country that the Government should restrict their expenditure. I hope that I am in order, Mr. Speaker, although I do not propose to go any further into the question of Government expenditure. The Financial Memorandum is a direct incentive for more Government expenditure, and I hope that the Government will be quite firm on this issue and will not agree to the Money Resolution. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham knows full well, if the Money Resolution is not acceptable to the Government the Bill can never become law. Next, I wish to say a few words about the Bill. I agree with the fears expressed by the Leader of the Liberal Party, the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond), that the title is very comprehensive, and I remind my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham that one has to be very careful about the Titles of Bills before they are introduced into the House. I remember bringing in a Bill of three Clauses. It may astonish hon. Members to know that I got the Bill through. I do not think that I shall get many more through. That Bill was taken to another place, where their Lordships changed the Title, knocked out my three Clauses, put in seven new Clauses and sent it back to me saying that it was still my Bill. My hon. Friend may be encouraged by the fact that he may well find that when his Bill reaches another place—if it does—it will undergo quite a trans  formation before it is sent back to this House for final approval. I think that the Title is unnecessarily wide and that it should be changed in the course of its passage through the House, if the Bill receives a Second Reading. Clause 1 specifies that "Every person who has issued a seal of approval" shall register his seal with the Comptroller by 1st January, 1963. Has my hon. Friend made any examination of how many seals of approval there are? There may be a tremendous number. I do not know what registration will mean. Will it mean that the size of the seal must be laid down and registered? Will it mean a sample of the seal? Will it have to be done in colour? Will it have to include a complete list of all articles covered by the seal? Will it state what are the qualifications necessary for the seal to be issued by the issuing person? If all this information has to be included, it will be a heavy job for any society engaging in this activity, and, assuming that the Bill receives the Royal Assent by July, I do not think that it would be reasonable to expect issuing societies and authorities to do all that work in the short time which would be left to them before 1st January, 1963. I do not want to make a lot of this point. If this were the only criticism which I had to make, I should not think it a justification for throwing the Bill out, but it is a matter which, I think, will have to have attention during the Committee stage, which, it will be seen from my remaining remarks, will be rather lengthy. Clause 1 (2) lays down that anyone who issues a seal of approval after the passing of the Act "shall register with the comptroller the particulars specified in subsection (3) of this section"— that includes the details of the quality which is required before the seal can be used— "on or before the first day of January, nineteen hundred and sixty-three, or within thirteen weeks of the issue of such seal of approval, whichever is the later." If we are to have an adequate control of seals of approval, surely before their issue these people should say what the limitations are and then notify the Comptroller that they propose to issue  the seal in respect of a certain cooker, or washing machine, or so on. I think that my hon. Friend has it the wrong way round. To ensure that no difficulty is caused to the societies concerned or the consuming public, it would be better to say what the limitations are and which articles will have the seals applied to them before they are issued, rather than within thirteen weeks of issue. When I come to the particulars to be registered with the Comptroller, this is where I begin to have serious doubts about the desirability of the House giving the Bill a Second Reading. The first issue is one on which there has already been some discussion, and it concerns the name and address of the person first issuing a seal of approval. It is certainly questionable whether only the name of the society issuing the seal is sufficient. The example of the lion on the egg has been mentioned, and I do not want to weary the House by referring to it again, but I should have thought that there was quite a good case for saying that the first issuing authority was much lower down the scale than the Egg Marketing Board. If we are to ensure adequate control for the consumer, and if the House, in its wisdom, decides that this is desirable, I should have thought that at least the foreman in charge of the room in which the egg was stamped should have his name registered so that we know who is this budding criminal who has to be watched by Her Majesty's police to make certain that he does not send out any bad eggs. I do not know what restriction there is on the registration of seals. Does the Bookmakers' Protection Association have to register its seal? Several members of this association in the West Country are friends of mine. Some of them give me advice from time to time. I like to know that they are members of this important body, because it ensures that I get my money back on the rare occasions when my investment, as I believe it is called, has been successful. Is the seal of this association to be registered? Then there is Clause 1 (4), which I do not like very much. It says: "If any seal of approval is withdrawn in respect of all or any of the goods on the register or any change occurs in the particulars  specified in the foregoing subsection notice of the withdrawal or particulars of the change and of the effective date thereof shall be furnished to the comptroller within thirty days after such date." I should have thought that the important thing would be to tell the Comptroller. "This must be stopped. We are not having any more goods sold under our label because this article is now being sold in a sub-standard state". That is the way to do it. At the same time, if not before, the Comptroller should be furnished with details of the instructions given to the manufacturer stating that he can no longer make use of the facilities. Now I come to the provision in the Bill which I really do not like. This is subsection (5), which says: "If any person contravenes the provisions of this section he shall be liable to a fine not exceeding twenty pounds and to a daily fine not exceeding forty shillings." We have had these penalties provided for before. There was quite a disturbance on a Finance Bill a couple of years ago because the Inland Revenue was able to impose heavy penalties against anyone who attempted to evade tax. I will not weary the House with the details now. I think that the penalties for tax evasion are too light, but that is a personal opinion. Very heavy penalties were available for quite minor evasions of tax. There was much feeling in the House. As a result, the Chancellor of the Exchequer decided to bring in amending legislation in the Finance Act. The penalties provided in subsection (5) are very heavy. A man may forget to inform the Comptroller within thirty days after withdrawing his seal. He may decide, "I am not going to allow this washing machine to be sold, because the wiring is defective", for example. He may forget to inform the Comptroller. If he does, he is liable to a daily fine not exceeding 40s. That is a monstrously heavy fine to be liable to in respect of such a minor offence, which may have been committed purely as a result of forgetfulness. This provision should be changed in Committee. If a record is to be kept of seals of approval, I do not think that there is much in Clause 2 to which I take exception. However, I have a considerable amount of criticism to make of Clause 3. This is a direct encouragement to a Department of State to act on  information furnished, possibly by an anonymous person. It is quite wrong that "The Board of Trade…on the application in the prescribed manner of any person" should be able withdraw its approval of a seal. I am even more deeply concerned when I find that there is no provision in the Clause for an appeal if anyone believes that he has been hard done by. Presumably, the only appeal an aggrieved person could make would be to consult his Member of Parliament and appeal to the Board of Trade through him. It is reasonable to ask that somebody should be in a position to hear an appeal from an aggrieved person. In Clause 3 (3) there is provision that the Board of Trade can make an order expunging a seal from the register. It is provided that anyone who issues a seal after it has been expunged is liable to a severe penalty—not exceeding £20 and again to a daily fine not exceeding 40s. I can see no mention in the Clause to the effect that it is incumbent upon the President of the Board of Trade to inform the person or persons concerned that the seal is no longer on the register. A seal may be struck off the register and the person concerned may be a travelling salesman. Because he has not been informed by the President of the Board of Trade that the Board of Trade has expunged his seal from the register, the man is to be liable to a penalty of £20 if he fails to take certain action. This is wrong. It should be incumbent upon the President of the Board of Trade—I do not mean my right hon. Friend personally, but somebody should be made responsible for finding the man concerned and warning him that the seal should not be used any more. I come now to what I think it is fair to say is my annual "grouse" about Private Members' Bills. This is Clause 4

Mr. Darling
Did the hon. Member say "annual" or "weekly"?

Mr. Williams
The hon. Member knows that, fortunately, Private Members' Bills are not discussed every week, but usually, in the course of a year's proceedings, I make a few vigorous protests—perhaps it occurs biannually; I will not argue with the  hon. Member—about the proposal contained in Clause 4. I shall now read it, and I intend to read it to the House every year as long as I am a Member of Parliament: "The Board of Trade may by statutory instrument make regulations prescribing anything which by this Act is required or authorised to be prescribed." Everyone knows that private Members' day, Friday, is a day when private Members introduce legislation and the Whips are not on, at least not the official ones. I believe that some quiet Whips have been sent round today because my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham knew that I and some of my hon. Friends intended to do our best to ensure that this piece of tyrannical legislation should not reach the Statute Book. This is what I object to about Private Members' Bills. A piece of legislation is passed when there are no Whips on. Hon. Members are busy. I do not blame them for not coming here on Fridays as often as some of us do. They go away to their constituencies, or to some other activity, private or public, in which they are interested. They do not expect anything but unimportant Bills to be put through on days when Private Members' legislation can be dealt with. However, we are constantly coming up against this sort of behaviour. Bills are put through the House by private Members and we find that the Government have power to issue regulations. What happens when the regulations are issued? We all know that the Whips go on. Because of a Bill which a private Member has never heard of, he finds himself glaring grimly at the Patronage Secretary as he stands at the entrance to the Aye or No Division Lobby, whichever it is. He finds himself pushed in. I do not mean physically pushed in, but he is mentally pushed in to support a regulation issued under a Bill which is promoted privately. This is monstrous. I shall always resist Private Members' Bills as long as this manoeuvre—I think that it is fair to call it that—is indulged in by the promoter of a Bill. I hope that we shall not see much more of it. If regulations are necessary, they should be embodied in a Clause in the Bill. This would mean  much hard work for the Member concerned. It would probably mean a great deal of expense. This would be all to the good, because we should not have so much legislation—and I am all for that. But I will not support Private Members' Bills which put powers into the hands of the Executive, which then pushes me into the Lobby to support a Government Measure arising from a Private Member's Bill. For this reason, as well as the others I have made in the course of my brief remarks today, I hope that the House will not give a Second Reading to the Bill.

1.20 p.m.

Mr. H. P. G. Channon  (Southend, West)
There is one Private Member's Bill about which I can assure my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams) he will not have an opportunity to make his biannual protest. I came here today with the full intention of supporting my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Good-hart), but after hearing the brilliantly cogent speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter, and that of my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary for the Board of Trade, I have come to the conclusion that it would be futile so to do, because even if my hon. Friend obtains a Second Reading for his Bill the power of the Administration is such that, they having said that they will not sanction a Money Resolution, we know that the Bill would be a dead letter. Nevertheless, I should have thought that the tenor of this debate would have proved to my hon. Friend and to the Government that should the Report of the Molony Committee make recommendations on the lines of the Bill they will, in general—with the possible exception of my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter—find hon. Members' approval for a scheme that will enable some form of control to be exercised over seals of approval of this kind. I hope that this debate will, at least, be found to have had that effect in the not-long-distant future. The most attractive argument my hon. Friend gave for supporting the Bill was that it might well shorten discussion on the Weights and Measures Bill, whenever it is introduced, but, as I have said,  it would be futile to undertake a great range of discussion on this Bill today because of the Government's attitude to a Money Resolution. Although some of us think that there should be some control, I do not think my hon. Friend's Bill is the way to achieve it, but I hope that when framing legislation in the future the Government will be found to have taken note of the general feeling of the House today.

Question, That the Bill be now read a Second time, put and negatived.

Agricultural And Forestry Associations (Trading Agreements) Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

1.22 p.m.

Mr. W. T. Aitken  (Bury St. Edmunds)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. The Bill's object is to rectify a situation that has arisen as a result of the workings of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956. Experience has shown that the wording of that Act, and its interpretation, will greatly inconvenience, if not seriously jeopardise, the functions and future of practically all our organised trading bodies of farmers. The word "Associations" in the Bill's Title refers to agricultural and forestry associations only; the Bill does not apply to any other kind of organisation. There are in the United Kingdom nearly a thousand of these co-operative associations, with a combined total turnover of just over £300 million a year. About half of that amount comes from sales of requisites to farmers, and just under half is produced by sales of farmers' produce. It was at the request of and with the full support of the National Farmers' Union and the Agricultural Central Cooperative Association that I undertook to introduce this Bill under the private Member procedure. I think that all hon. Members are agreed that the development of an efficient and widespread agricultural cooperative movement is more essential than ever for the future of horticulture and agriculture in Great Britain. The Government are, of course, well aware of this. In 1960, Parliament passed the  Horticulture Act, one of the major objects of which was to encourage the formation of co-operatives, and last year we had the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, which doubled the individual shareholding permissible simply to help co-operatives to develop more efficiently. I therefore have high hopes that my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary will give some degree of approval to this Bill. Because the 1956 Act contains definitions of "trading associations" and of "restriction"—that is, restrictive terms in a trading agreement—and because those terms had to be very carefully drafted—severely drafted, I would say—in order to make them effective, it is now clear that, by interpretation, they must include co-operatives for agriculture and forestry. I do not think that when the Act was passed anybody would have expected the Restrictive Practices Court, which it set up, to interpret the Act quite so severely as it has done. I attended the Second Reading debate, and recollect that the then President of the Board of Trade, my right hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (Mr. Thorneycroft), made three very important exceptions from the application of the Act. The first exception was services, such as hairdressing, transport and a whole variety of similar occupations. The second exception was restrictive practices by workers, which my right hon. Friend felt could not be suitably dealt with by such a Measure. The third, and very wise exception, was any agreement that had to do exclusively with our exports. I must admit, too, that it never occurred to me and, apparently, did not occur to any other hon. Member with agricultural constituency interests, that agricultural co-operatives should also have been included in that list of exceptions. I am sure that had anyone realised that the interpretation of the Act could raise such serious difficulties as are now apparent, Amendments would have been moved. The fact is that, judging from the report of the Registrar of Restrictive Trading Agreements, it looks as though, far from trying to beat restrictive trade practices to death with a feather—as some hon. Members seemed to believe on its Second Reading—the 1956 Act  has turned out to be a very powerful bludgeon, not only for disciplining the guilty but, in its effects, bruising a lot of innocent bystanders as well. The first doubt about the effect of the Act on agricultural co-operatives really came about when the Restrictive Practices Court got to work. The permanent officials of the farmers' organisations and the co-operative societies, who are not exactly stupid about these things, very quickly realised that there might be some doubts about the application of the Act to co-operation. They therefore took expert advice, and, in 1960, they had a discussion with a Ministry of Agriculture working party under the chairmanship of probably one of the most efficient junior Ministers we have ever had, but who now, in the course of the nature of politics, has gone to the Foreign Office as Minister of State. I am not privy to what the working party told the officials of the societies and the N.F.U. but it obviously did not reassure them because, in the same year, the National Farmers' Union felt impelled to tell a number of horticultural associations that they should not make any recommendations about prices to be charged for their crops, as that might be construed as a restrictive agreement. There is a very great justification for excluding from the Act associations of farmers. Farming is in really quite a different position from the industrial activities which the Act was meant to cover. Farming is still primarily a family industry. Over 60 per cent. of the farmers in Britain work their holdings without paid assistants. Every farm is a small business in fierce competition with every other farm. In any other type of business such a multiplicity of individual holdings would not make sense. In fact, long before the days of Cotton and Clore there would have been amalgamations, deals and mergers galore. But small or moderate size farms do make sense in our agriculture because of the unpredictability of our climate, the nature of our soil and the varying skills required. In the same way, countries like Australia, Russia, and North America find that big farms make sense. As I live in an agricultural constituency  where there are a few very big farms, I know well that the big farms are not necessarily the most efficient ones. Most industries, particularly the manufacturing industries, can and do exercise a great degree of control over the prices at which they sell their products, whether wholesale or retail. They can vary the quantities they produce according to demand. These industries can switch from manufacturing pots to kettles simply by re-jigging a couple of machines and they can be very flexible about their production. These are things the farmer cannot do. He cannot close down plant or lay off men when prices fall or demand drops. Farmers exercise little influence over their selling prices. A crop is sown or a beast bought for fattening or rearing, and no agricultural genius has discovered how to switch production from cows to pigs or suddenly to change a field of barley into one of potatoes. Farmers cannot quickly alter their output to meet changing demands. Thus the farmer or grower must always be inherently a weak individual seller or buyer. The producer co-operative system is an effective way by which they can overcome these natural handicaps, and more of them are realising that this is much the best way not only to sell their produce but to buy their requisites, and thereby reduce production costs and increase efficiency. It is becoming more clear that the whale future of farming depends more on marketing than on anything else. There can be no doubt that the producer co-operative marketing organisation is the best answer. One has merely to go round the countryside to see that the modern market of today is the supermarket, the chain store and other big buyers. This modern market is very different from the stall in the centre of the town. The modern type of market insists on high standards of uniformity of supply, quality, good packaging and the utmost regularity in delivery. Direct sales to these organisations are the outlets on which the farmers and growers must increasingly rely if they are to reduce the present stranglehold of the middle-man. Economic marketing is a highly specialised job and far beyond the resources of the ordinary farmer. That is the function of co-operative associations. Because members can maintain their independence as producers they willingly subordinate to a common organisation their independence as buyers of their requisites and sellers of their produce. Even the most rugged individualist—and there are plenty of them in the farming industry—usually accepts the discipline imposed on him to make a success of his own cooperative. The power and importance of the commercial units from which the farmers buy, and to which they sell, continues to grow. One has only to look at the take-overs in the various manufacturing industries that sell to the farmers to see that this is so—the seed organisations, corn merchants and so on. It is only by co-operation that the farmer can match this power. That is why it is very much in the public interest to encourage all forms of voluntary co-operation among farmers, for efficiency in marketing nearly always means cheaper, better quality and better packaging of farm produce. In almost every country where agricultural co-operation thrives the cooperative organisations have invariably been excluded from anti-trust legislation. A good example of this, of course, is the Capper-Volstead Act in the United States which has been sustained by many Supreme Court decisions which have clearly recognised that such exemptions were necessary, not to give the farmer any special privileges but simply to put him in a position similar to that of any ordinary private trading concern. It is important to realise, too, that in practically every European country where anti-trust legislation has been enacted, the same situation prevails. What agricultural co-operative organisations in this country must now face is that the 1956 Act can be construed only in such a way that any agricultural or forestry co-operative is a trading association. Therefore, almost any term in a trading contract made by such associations, with its members or with third parties, can be interpreted by law as restrictive, and, therefore, in many cases, illegal. Intent is not material in  any way under this Act. The contract can be innocent in intent as far as restrictive practices are concerned—as understood in context with other types of business—but that will not necessarily save the association. I am sure that this is not what Parliament intended to happen to agricultural co-operative organisations. The Bill is comparatively short, though quite complicated, but its intent is simple enough. Clause 1 (1) exempts from Part I of the Act of 1956 co-operatives which satisfy all of three conditions; firstly, that they are registered under an appropriate Act, normally the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, but, in some cases, the Companies Act.

Mr. Anthony Kershaw  (Stroud)
What is the relevance of the Companies Act here? That is very unusual.

Mr. Aitken
I apprehend the reason for my hon. Friend's intervention.

Mr. George Darling  (Sheffield, Hills brough)
Quite a number of co-operatives are now registered as companies.

Mr. Kershaw
That is what I am asking about.

Mr. Aitken
It is true, but I think that my hon. Friend is concerned about the fact that under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, 1961, we doubled the amount of money which any individual shareholder could hold. But because of the way in which agricultural co-operatives are developing today, and the way we hope they will continue to develop, it sometimes happens that the amount of capital required is greater than can successfully be raised under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act. If a co-operative is going in for grading and packaging on a large scale—requiring expensive machinery, highly-skilled labour and perhaps expensive management—sometimes the Industrial and Provident Societies Act is not as suitable a way of raising the required money as is the Companies Act. Under the Companies Act nobody can get aay with any abuses under this Bill any more than they could under the Industrial and Provident Societies Acts. The second condition for exemption is that the overwhelming majority of the members of a society, measured by voting power, must be farmers or forestry  owners. The third condition is that the purpose of an association must be to market the members' produce or provide the members with requisites for use in a farming or foresty business. In subsection (2) of Clause I there is a definition of the kinds of agreements that may be exempted from the principal Act. They must be agreements of a kind that arise normally in connection with the types of business described in subsection (1), as in connection with the sale of members' produce or the supply to them of their requisites. Subsection (3) enables the Ministers to make Orders restricting the scope of these exemptions. This is a provision simply to deal with possible abuses, should it be found in practice that these exemptions are too wide and are being exploited, for example, by associations that are not bona fide co-operatives or for purposes not truly co-operative. This subsection would deal with that sort of thing. I do not think I need say anything about Clause 2 which simply deals with definitions, the commencement and the application to Scotland and Northern Ireland. The object of this Bill is to secure what Parliament would have wanted if it had known, in the light of today's experience, the meaning of the legal application of the Act. As I have already said, this Bill does not seek to confer any special advantage on agricultural co-operatives. It seeks only to remove a disability—that is, to put the agricultural societies in the same position, so far as the 1956 Act is concerned, as a private trader engaged in the same class of trade. This disability relates to Part I of the 1956 Act only. The cooperatives will still remain subject to Part III which relates to monopolies and also to the Monopolies Act, 1948. An agricultural co-operative association, or even an association of associtions, which is provided for in the Bill, is not in fact a monopoly, but if it were, either by itself or in association with interests outside agriculture—if, for instance the Yorkshire Woollen Cooperative Society took over a large Bradford firm—this Bill would in no way exempt them under the terms of the 1956 Act. In conclusion, a turnover of £300 million a year clearly illustrates what an important part the co-operative organisations play in British agriculture. I have given the reasons why we must do everything we can to encourage the greater expansion of this movement. Here is a threat not only to the present activities but to the future development of agricultural marketing—a threat which should be removed today. This co-operative development is more vital than ever before in agriculture. It is our duty and very much in the public interest that we should ensure that British agriculture is given every encouragement to market its produce efficiently and is not subject to a disability to which her principal future competitors are not exposed. This is the purpose of the Bill, and I hope it will get a Second Reading.

1.44 p.m.

Dr. Horace King  (Southampton, Itchen)
This is the second opportunity that I have had of commending to the House a Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken). It seems as though it is becoming a habit. I hope that it will not become an embarrassment to either of us. We share, among other things, a pride in and an affection for British agriculture, and I only hope that the farmers will not only be grateful to the hon. Member for introducing this Bill, but will study very carefully the thoughtful case that he made for the necessity of farmers not only to get together as they have done up to the present, but to increase the process of combining together and co-operating to market their produce, because I think that that will be good for British agriculture and for the consumer as well. The best way of supporting a Bill on a Friday, if one wants to be sure of getting the Bill through, is either not to speak at all or to speak very briefly. I shall speak very briefly today, especially when the members of the "active back benchers association" are here. Of course, we may yet have an intervention from the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams). May I say that I am bitterly opposed to his opinions. I wish that he were here. I regard him as the unmuted voice of reaction in most of  his opinions, but I think that he renders a public service on Fridays by his detailed and painstaking examination of new Bills which private Members propose. He renders a service to Parliament and it would be a bad thing if Private Members' Bills, no matter how worthy, were allowed simply to slip through. Some of the farming community in Hampshire have asked me to support this Bill, and I do so to show that it has the backing of hon. Members on both sides of the House who are keen on British agriculture. The proposer of the Bill was right when he called attention to the striking growth of the cooperative movement in agriculture. I am particularly aware of it in Western Europe. I think, for example, of wine growing co-operatives, demonstrating the way in which wine growers in France are getting together and building up co-operatives which are good for the professional interests of the wine growers and for the community, also. Their aim is to combine in the collection, packaging and marketing of their produce. We have some remarkably similar developments in England. I know of them in my own county. I have a letter from a very successful egg producing co-operative, the essential feature of this co-operative being that every member is an egg producing farmer. There is nobody from outside the industry financing what is called Early Eggs Ltd. Every member is in the industry. Like the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds, I welcome any developments in this field which cut out some of the middle men who stand between the primary producer of our food and the consumer. We have had a great example of this last year in the mystery of the extra millions of pounds provided by the Government to keep down the price of meat, which the farmers tell us they did not receive and which my wife and many other wives did not receive. I believe that if agriculture is to flourish—and whether or not we go into the Common Market, the challenge to British agriculture in the years ahead from the Continent is intense—and if, at the same time, the consumer is to get a square deal, it is important that British agriculture should unite against  the middle men. Our agriculture has not grown up on the lines of large collective farms. It consists of hundreds of small men doing a highly-skilled professional full-time job, often working nearly 24 hours a day and not getting very much out of it. It is essential that they combine together in every way for the benefit of themselves, of British agriculture in competing with the rest of the world, and of the housewife. As the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds has shown, the question has arisen whether the covenants entered into by such bona fide co-operative agricultural producers among themselves and with their customers are the kind of restrictive practice with which the Restrictive Trade Practices Act ought to deal. We hold the opinion that they are not, that the kind of restrictive practice in which they engage is one which is an essential feature of cooperation. It is difficult to argue what was in the mind of the Legislature when it passed an Act of Parliament. Indeed, it is futile to try, because what really matters is what is in the Act. No one can blame the Registrar who carries out his duty under an Act of Parliament for interpreting the law as it is. That is his job, whatever his opinion. However, those of us who attended all the debates, as did most hon. Members here, when we were passing the 1956 Act on to the Statute Book had no idea in our minds that we were passing an Act which might jeopardise the future of agriculture co-operatives. I understand from farming friends that some of the agreements which have come under the umbrella or the axe of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act can be indulged in by firms selling agricultural produce or machinery if they are not co-operatives. I hope, therefore, that the House will give the Bill a Second Reading with real good will and will send to the farmers a message in the spirit of the speech of the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds, that we hope that farmers will continue to co-operate, and that we reaffirm that anything that Parliament can do to foster the process will, at one and the same time, I believe, benefit the farming community and the consumer of food even though it does harm to the middle-man in between.

1.52 p.m.

Sir Richard Nugent  (Guildford)
I support the Bill which has been so lucidly introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken), and I am glad to know that it has support from the other side of the House by the voice of the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Dr. King). Evidently, its course is set fair, despite the return to the Chamber of my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams). From the position in which my hon. Friend is now sitting, I judge that the Bill is fairly safe. This is a very useful Measure to correct what I believe was an anomaly in the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956. That Act as now drawn would bring within its scope all agricultural and horticultural co-operative societies. I imagine that they are at this moment under an obligation to register their agreements. They have not done so and the Registrar of Restrictive Trading Agreements has not asked them to do so, but I suppose that at any time a hostile wholesaler of produce might write a rude letter to the Registrar and ask him to examine these agreements. Then the fat would be in the fire, because every agreement would have to be registered and the Registrar would be under an obligation to examine them in due course. There is a strong case for this Bill. My few remarks are intended to justify agricultural and horticultural cooperatives being given a favoured position before the law. I am sure that each one of us here is very conscious of his responsibility to give no section of the community a favoured position before the law unless there is a really convincing case for so doing. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds rightly referred to the situation in other countries. In the United States, where the anti-trust laws are even sterner than they are here, in Canada, in the countries of Western Europe, and probably, I apprehend, in Australia and New Zealand as well, there is a favoured position before the law for agricultural and horticultural co-operatives. The simple reason for this being so is that, if it were not, the societies could not exist. They need to be in existence  in this country, for instance, because of the structure of the industry where we have about 350,000 small producing units scattered throughout the land. Their geographical situation to a very large extent prevents their ever being combined. In my hon. Friend's part of the country, in the Eastern Counties, there have been many useful amalgamations in the big corn growing areas, and these have added to the efficiency of production. Among the livestock units, which preponderate in our countryside, it is impossible to have large amalgamations. Indeed, if there were large amalgamations they would, in the main, be less efficient than the smaller ones. This is a lesson which, I am quite certain, Mr. Khrushchev is slowly and painfully learning in spite of his enormous stake in collective farms in Russia. One cannot, in the very large unit, have the degree of personal attention and personal sacrifice which the individual farmer gives in looking after his livestock. This structure, with a very large number of smallholdings and a certain number of large ones, is likely to continue indefinitely. This means that, while we have a large number of small producing units, the demand end requires a steady flow of large quantities of produce regularly coming to the counters of large and small shops in our towns, standardised and graded produce, whether it be vegetables, fruit, meat or eggs, ready for the housewife in the condition she wants it. The development during the past decade of the chain store and the supermarket means that the buyer of produce is buying in larger quantities for very many stores spread about the country, with the consequence that the need of the distributive trading units, the retail trading units, is for a large supply of graded produce regularly arriving to be put on the counter ready for the consumer. The problem is to assemble the produce from a large number of producing units to meet that demand. The traditional method of meeting it has been the open market to which the producer sends his produce and hopes for the best price. If supplies are short, the price is not bad even if the condi  tion is not very good. The producer goes away fairly well satisfied, and the wholesaler then proceeds to bulk the stuff together and sell it to the large retailing chains. There are, however, two fundamental disadvantages in the open market system. The first arises when supplies are slightly in surplus. Even if the surplus is only very small, usually reckoned at not more than 2 per cent., this is enough to bring about a very steep drop in price to the producer which may seriously endanger his very existence as a producer. The other defect in the open market system from which we suffer particularly in horticulture and also, I think, in fatstock—the hon. Member for Itchen knows that I have some concern with that in another context—is that home produce comes to the market in all shapes, sizes and conditions, from the best to the worst. This is the picture of home produce—a mixed bag. Imported produce, on the other hand, whether it be fatstock or horticultural produce, comes into the country in a graded condition, according to uniform standards, in regular quantities which can be guaranteed to be up to the appropriate grade. The big buyers prefer that every time, because they can be certain of getting the quantity and quality that they require. This puts our growers at a serious disadvantage in competing with imported goods. The result is that our producers, on average, get a lower price than is paid for imported produce, although the quality of our best produce is undoubtedly superior to anything which can be imported. The agricultural or horticultural cooperative is designed to overcome these defects. Its function is to act for the members of the society by collecting their produce in sufficiently large quantities. Then the society is able to go to the big buyer—the chain store or the supermarket—and offer to deliver regular quantities of the kind which the big retailer wants at a guaranteed standard of quality which will be as good or better than anything imported. This puts the society in a position to make a contract on favourable terms for the producers. Unfortunately, due to their rugged individualism, to which reference has already been made by my hon. Friend, few farmers and horticulturists are willing to combine in this way and our co-operative movement has not made the progress which I should like to see, and nothing like the progress made in other countries which have been mentioned. At least we should see that our co-operatives, and the central cooperative organisation which tries to promote co-operative's, should not be further handicapped by the law and have their very existence endangered by the provisions of the Restrictive Practices Act. That is all that my hon. Friend is trying to do by this Bill—to give them a chance to live at all. The major point I seek to make is that there are substantial grounds for giving agriculturists, farmers and horticulturists a favoured position before the law, to enable them to organise themselves into effective trade units to meet the reasonable demands of the consumer and, indeed, to retain their existence. I suggest that by implication this House recognised that there is such a case by passing the Horticulture Act of 1960. If we do not accept the Bill, the whole purpose of the 1960 Act will be completely frustrated. There will be no co-operatives left to benefit. That Act was a useful one and some use has been made of it. I hope that further use may be made of it. Its value, however, depends on the existence of the co-operatives. I think that I have said enough to make the case that farmers and horticulturists have a special need, similar to that which has been catered for by Parliaments in other progressive countries by giving the agricultural and horticultural co-operatives a favoured position before the law. In this small Bill we ask that our co-operatives be given a favoured position to the extent of excluding them from the provisions of the Restrictive Practices Act. I am sure that that is justified. It would 'help this very valuable movement. I hope that farmers and horticulturists generally will realise that something useful is being done to help them, and that they will make even more use of this very valuable organisation than has been the case in the past.

2.5 p.m.

Mr. Ede  (South Shields)
I am quite sure that the House will join with me in congratulating the right hon. Member for Guildford (Sir R. Nugent) on his recent promotion to the Privy Council. He can rest assured that from now on his rising to speak in the House will be violently objected to by all the hon. Members sitting near to him. But the charm with which the right hon. Gentleman always addresses the House will, I am sure, go a long way to removing some of the more positive exhibitions of such hostility. I am not quite clear about this Measure. With a great flourish the Government promoted the Restrictive Practices Act. I do not think that anybody is satisfied with the way it has worked when people have tried to operate that legislation. The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) deplored the rugged individualism of the farmers. I thought that rugged individualism was just the frame of mind that the Conservative Party would not deplore in people—

Mr. Aitken
I am sorry to have to correct the right hon. Gentleman. I did not deplore rugged individualism. I said that even the rugged individualist was sometimes willing to accept the discipline imposed on him by the cooperative society.

Mr. Ede
Human nature is so weak that even the best fall into sin. Let us be quite frank about that. I am not clear about what is the position. Has there been a decision of any court against which we are asked to legislate today? Or are we really legislating on counsel's opinion? If that be the position, this might prove to be a dangerous precedent for the setting up of a privileged community which is to be protected against the provisions of what generally has been a very ineffective Act. I am in favour of co-operation. I am glad to know that anyone from the family of the hon. Member 'for Bury St. Edmunds can find any occasion on which co-operative societies ought to be encouraged and, in fact, have the law twisted so that they would be able to be established where otherwise they would not exist. I believe in co-operation. I deplore the continual attacks made in the Beaverbrook Press on co-operation, and I rejoice to see that even the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds is capable of a rugged individualism for the benefit of his constituents. We all know that our liberties in this House depend finally on the activities of the Eastern Association. I am glad to know that the spirit still survives. I ought to be in favour of this Bill, but I am very doubtful about legislating on counsel's opinion because I have found that, generally speaking, if one counsel gives an opinion, there is no difficulty in getting another counsel to assure one that the opinion given is wrong. Has this matter been tested in the courts? If it has not, is it wise—

Mr. Aitken
May I say to the right hon. Gentleman, without being too indiscreet, regarding the views about which he is concerned and counsel's opinion, that the advice which has been sought and the views taken on this matter go a good deal wider than a single counsel's opinion.

Mr. Darling
To their surprise, retail co-operative societies were compelled to register their boundary agreements and at the point when the court acted in that way the whole question of cooperative enterprise in relation to the Restrictive Practices Act was looked into.

Mr. Ede
That was a decision of the courts, I understand.

Mr. Darling
Yes. My right hon. Friend will probably know how this works. The Registrar must register all agreements. It was felt for a long time that the boundary agreements of retail co-operative societies were outside the Act. The Registrar, with the approval of the courts, decided that they were not outside the Act. From that point, the whole question of co-operative enterprise under the Act was looked at.

Mr. Ede
I thank my hon. Friend for that information. On the assumption that all the parties concerned are convinced that these cooperative enterprises should not be hindered, I should certainly support this  Bill. I myself suffered under a boundary arrangement made by our old friend, Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough, when, for a short time, I lived at Mitcham. When the boundary between the South Suburban Co-operative Society and the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society was drawn, my house was in between. For a long time I had difficulty in persuading either of these societies that I was eligible for membership. Anything that can be done to help the drawing of boundaries between cooperative societies is desirable. I hope that it will be possible, when the Bill reaches its Committee stage, to include some redress for persons who have suffered, as I did.

2.11 p.m.

Sir Richard Glyn  (Dorset, North)
I want warmly to support the Bill which, I believe, will also be supported by Members on both sides of the House and certainly by all those who have any personal experience of the problems with which the farming industry is faced. It has properly been pointed out that farming in this country is basically a family industry. The great majority of our farms employ no whole-time labour at all. The whole operation of the enterprise in these farms is carried out by the farmer and his wife, aided perhaps by their children or relatives, and sometimes with the use of some part-time help, though often with none. In this situation, which is a normal one, the family is not only the board of directors, but also includes the secretary of the organisation—if it can be described as such—the sales manager, the buying expert, the executives, and, of course, the workers and labourers. It all consists, perhaps, of only two or three or four people. This system has worked very well over the centuries and, compared with any other, British agriculture has nothing to be ashamed of in its record. But in the new situation which has arisen, in which the markets Which have served us for generations are going rather out of fashion, and have been largely replaced by the modern supermarket, which was not dreamed of even thirty years ago, and which buys enormous  quantities of foodstuff which must be graded so that it can advertise both grading and price. It must look to suppliers who can guarantee a regular supply of graded articles at a certain agreed price for each grade. That, of course, is out of the question for and beyond the capacity of any family farm. This applies throughout Europe and not only to Britain but to the other countries which are exporting their goods—agricultural, horticultural and, I would add, timber—to us and which may, if we enter the Common Market, be able to do so much more freely. That remains to be seen. But the reason that these foreign countries are able to supply supermarkets in this country is, I believe, entirely due to their farmers' co-operatives. Denmark is an obvious example. Danish bacon is famous throughout Britain. It is famous because it is widely advertised and is supplied regularly up to a recognised standard at a price which does not fluctuate very much. In these circumstances, it is acceptable to all the big British retailers, supermarkets and otherwise, and is sold and bought and very much relished by British families. How did the Danish farmers bring this about? Undoubtedly, by the use of cooperatives. Almost every bacon factory in Denmark—I say almost, but I know no exception—is owned by farmers' cooperatives, and this puts them in a particularly favourable position. These factories know exactly how many pigs they have coming along and can adjust their labour forces accordingly. They can see the pigs a month before they arrive at the factories. They know that their member farmers must send along their pigs, for they are under contract to do so. In this way, those factories have an enormous advantage. Our factories are not in that happy position as a rule. They cannot tell from week to week what supplies will be available, and they often work at a 25 per cent. throughput which is very expensive and wasteful to the process. That situation could be corrected if it were possible for British farmers to combine, to own bacon factories in the way that is done in Denmark. Since the passing of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, this has not been possible, but  before that Act at least one farmers' cooperative in Yorkshire succeeded in doing it. I visited this factory about eighteen months ago and it was showing a much better throughput—about 50 per cent., which was then about double the national average—and was giving great advantages to its farmer members, advantages which were shared by their customers the housewives. I would like to see more farmers' cooperatives. I believe that this is the best road for the development of British farming, which is good on the production side but very weak on the sales side. The Bill will enable our farmers to co-operate as their rivals in other countries have done. It will enable them to co-operate in selling. It is a practice which is unusual in this country at the moment, for nearly all the farmers' cooperatives are buying co-operatives. They work well, but what we need is selling co-operatives working amongst groups of small farmers, perhaps with the help of larger farmers, and using proper installations where the produce can be sorted, graded and packed. This applies to horticulture as well as to agriculture. We could then compete on terms of equality with our foreign competitors by marketing British produce, which is as good as any, as well graded and as attractively packed as the imported foodstuffs which are at present so much preferred by the supermarkets and the big wholesalers for reasons which have been explained. For these reasons, I believe that the Bill will have the support of everyone who has studied this very acute agricultural problem—a problem which will be very much increased if we join the Common Market. The right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) said that he did not see why the law should be twisted in favour of farmers. I am sure that no farmer and no friend of the farmer would ask that the law should be so twisted. All that we ask, and it is not unreasonable, is that we shall be put in the same position as our foreign competitors, whose national laws permit them to combine in the way in which at present we are not permitted to combine. We ask to be allowed to compete with them on their own terms, and it is for these reasons that I warmly support the Bill.

2.20 p.m.

Mr. George Darling  (Sheffield, Hillsborough)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) on bringing in this very useful and necessary Bill. I am sure that all hon. Members present in the House today will give it enthusiastic support, and I hope that it will have a speedy passage through Committee. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) has now left the Chamber. I was going to tell him that I am afraid that the retail societies will have to work out their own solution about their boundary agreements, because this Bill, quite rightly, applies only to agriculture, forestry and horticultural societies. As the right hon. Member for Guildford (Sir R. Nugent) has pointed out, one of the many reasons why we need the Bill is because we are now running into danger of making the Horticultural Act, which we passed just over a year ago, a completely dead letter. There is one point on which I quarrel with him. He repeated several times that it was desirable to give the co-operative enterprise side of agriculture a favourable position in the law. I do not think that, either in this Bill or in anything else that we are doing in this regard, we are asking for a favourable position. What the Bill is attempting to do, and I 'hope that it will succeed, is to adapt the law to the circumstances of cooperative enterprise, which is an entirely different thing. The fact that the Restrictive Trades Practices Act was applied to manufacturing industries and the trading operations associated with the manufacture of goods, does not mean that the law can be applied to extractive industries like agriculture. I shall not develop that point, except to say that I do not see that the proposed legislation is giving agricultural societies any favourable position at all. We are merely adapting the law to the circumstances. The National Farmers' Union and, think, hon. Members in the House today and everyone in the country who is interested, believe that this form of enterprise is desirable. I should like to follow up a further point made by the right hon. Member for Guildford when he was talking about  the defects of the open market. We shall have an opportunity to do this a little later when we discuss certain Estimates. I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman now agrees that without cooperation in some form of co-operative enterprise we cannot satisfactorily operate the price support system in the open market. I am glad that the warnings we have given since 1954 have at last borne fruit.

Sir R. Nugent
The hon. Gentleman, in his enthusiasm for his own beliefs, has gone a little further than I did. I pointed out the defects, but I did not say that I believed that the open market was impossible as a basis for operating a price support system.

Mr. Darling
We shall look forward to the right hon. Member's contribution when we come to discuss what is being spent in the open market. We would agree that, even though this is not the only solution, one solution to the problem that we now face is to have large-scale co-operative enterprise on the marketing side. I am sure that all of us want to see more co-operative societies not only in connection with the buying of farmers' requisites but more particularly in the marketing of their products. Everything that the hon. Member for Dorset, North (Sir Richard Glyn) was asking for in regard to bacon production, bacon marketing and processing and so on would now run into grave danger of becoming an impossible enterprise unless we made absolutely sure that the Restrictive Trade Practices Act does not inhibit this kind of development. We are in favour of this Bill and we hope that it will go through because, in our view, it is bringing common sense into a situation which looked as if it were potentially dangerous. I played an active part in the discussions on the Restrictive Trade Practices Act and I cannot remember—I have not looked up the debates—that this issue was raised at all in the course of those discussions. I know that some hon. Members on this side of the House, rightly or wrongly, suggested that that Act was much too tightly drawn and did not provide sufficient flexibility for the various kinds of enterprise with which we are so much concerned. I am confident that no one anticipated  that the Act would work in this way. Therefore, I quite agree that this form of co-operative enterprise, which all of us think is very desirable, should be encouraged and not held back or handicapped in any way by legal provisions which really do not apply to it. Finally, I hope that none of us will say that in this Bill, which I hope will soon become an Act, we are giving the co-operative societies a favourable position in the law. I think that we are taking note of the special and valuable characteristics of co-operative enterprise and that the law would be wrong if it did not take account of these things.

2.26 p.m.

Mr. Jasper More  (Ludlow)
I should like to add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) for introducing the Bill and for the very happy speech which he made in doing so. Had my right hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Sir R. Nugent) still been in the Chamber, I should like to have said to him that from one hon. Member at least there was no resentment when he rose to make his charming speech in support of the Bill. When the history of British farming in the twentieth century comes to be written, I am sure that its salient feature will be the growth of our farmers' co-operative societies. The speeches which we have listened to today have emphasised, quite rightly, the marketing and selling aspects of these societies. I think that we are all conscious of the fact that many of the societies which we now know had their origin primarily in the need and ambition to supply at reasonable prices to farmers the goods that they needed for the purpose of that production. That is specifically recognised in the Bill in Clause 1 (1, c). I had the honour in my own constituency last year of attending the opening of a very large extension to one of our co-operative societies which has been active in both these directions. It was an impressive and very satisfactory occasion. I knew the early history of the society which, like many, was founded in the early years of the twentieth century. It went through very hard and difficult times and was pulled  through really by the loyalty of its farmer supporters and by the hard and efficient management at its headquarters. We have also, I am glad to say, in our part of the country started what I am sure many of us believe to be an important and very relevant branch of our co-operatives. That is the part which deals in livestock marketing. I am certain that societies of both these kinds deserve the support of the House. They are invaluable for the producer, and I beg leave to think that they may make a significant contribution to the solution of the problem which lies on so many of us now—the question of agricultural support when marketing prices in the present market drop. It has been suggested from one quarter that this Bill is not necessary. It may be that we are legislating today for only the removal of doubts, but there are very respectable and venerable precedents for legislating for the removal of doubts, and even if that is all we are doing today I am sure it is a desirable Bill and I am very glad to give it my support.

2.30 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. W. M. F. Vane)
I wonder if it would help if at this point I intervened to tell the House that the Government are glad to echo the welcome which has been accorded to this Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken). I should like to offer my congratulations to him on the way he has done it and upon the interesting speech which he made telling us about the background to the Bill and also the importance of agricultural co-operation. I think we can put on record that every hon. and right hon. Member who has spoken in this debate has at least ended his speech by approving the Bill. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) suffered a sort of mid-speech conversion, because he was doubtful when he started his speech, but I understand that he was in support of the Bill by the time he sat down. As my hon. Friend has said, the purpose of the Bill is to amend the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956, and at this stage I should say that my  right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade sees no objection to the Bill. All hon. Members subscribe to the view that the curbing of restrictive practices is important to the competitive well-being of the economy as a whole, and this, of course, was the main principle of the 1956 Act. When that Act was drafted it seemed essential to avoid leaving loopholes, otherwise the effectiveness of the legislation as a whole might have been seriously impaired. I am sure that is the reason why the Act provided severe definitions of trade association and restriction. This was asked about during the debate. As a result of these severe definitions there is, I am advised, some risk that some of the ordinary activities of agricultural and co-operative societies might not meet the requirements of the Act as these are interpreted by the Restrictive Practices Court. I cannot assert that that is the position; in fact, no one can since the courts have not yet heard and decided on a relevant case. Most of us think that it is important that the work of agricultural co-operatives should go on and be encouraged particularly in marketing and better quality. This Bill would put the matter beyond doubt, and it is on this basis that the Government support it. The Bill covers, as hon. Members will have noticed, only the genuine agricultural activities of properly constituted agricultural co-operative associations, and not such activities as the factory production of foodstuffs or furniture manufacture or the supply of consumer goods to farmers. I am sure that hon. Members will agree that it is proper that arrangements of the latter kind should be left for consideration by the court. To my mind the real value of the Bill is that it would make quite clear that agricultural co-operatives can make ordinary trading agreements without fear of having to defend them in a court, thereby enabling them to plan ahead with more confidence and give better service to their members and to the public. As my hon. Friend has said—and I wholeheartily agree with him—the improvement of marketing is one of the most important tasks facing the agricultural and horticultural industries today, and, in achieving that, the co-operatives  will have a large part to play. I, therefore, hope that the House will help this Bill on its way to its next stage.

2.34 p.m.

Lieut.-Commander S. L. C. Maydon  (Wells)
I rise to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) on presenting this Bill and to speak very briefly in support of it. I think that the first thing which we must make quite clear is that the Bill does not seek to give farmers a position of special advantage or privilege, but to remove existing disabilities. Co-operation is increasingly necessary for small farmers and for horticulturists, many of whom are small men, too. It has been said that over 60 per cent. of agriculture and horticulture by acreage are family businesses not employing any permanent outside labour. That is obviously true, and it is very much more so in the south-west of England. In my own constituency, we have recently had the misfortune of seeing two bacon factories close down. Had those bacon factories been working on a co-operative basis, it could never have happened. It is ironical that the ownership of one of those bacon factories lay in a co-operative wholesale society. Of course, that society is not undertaking co-operative business as envisaged by the Bill. For some time farmers in various parts of England have been combining together on a syndicate basis in the use of machinery and equipment. Of course, as farming grows more technical and complicated the equipment required is more expensive, and it is much more necessary. There are the economics of installing grain-drying plant, silage-making plant, cheese and butter-making plant, and getting grading and packaging equipment. For the small farmer, this is just "not on". His farm is not in a positon to support large-scale capital investment in such equipment, and that, of course, is where co-operation comes in, and makes this Measure so very much more important both in the selling of produce and buying the use of such equipment. I welcome the Bill and I hope that it will have a swift and easy passage through the House.

2.37 p.m.

Mr. Percy Browne  (Torrington)
The Bill has been generally welcomed on both sides of the House. Most hon. Members have stressed the fact that it will enable farming co-operatives to act in the future for the purpose for which they were properly set up. My hon. Friend the Member for Dorset, North (Sir Richard Glyn) specifically called this a Bill to help farmers. He said "we" all the time. I speak as a farmer representing farmers, but I should like to echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) said, that this is a Bill which would not only help farmers, but help consumers as well. It is important to recognise this fact. The Bill comes at an interesting time, a time when we have seen a near-breakdown in our system of support and when—though I suppose I should not mention it in detail now—we have seen prices lo the farmers low and yet to the consumers too high in comparison. I have always felt, talking from a farmer's point of view, that a Bill of this description is really one to solve a social problem which we have and which at some stage we have to face. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds talked about rugged individualism. That has been mentioned since. I would put it this way. We have a social pattern in the countryside, centred on our church or chapel, our village hall, and so on, a pattern which we think is worth while and something we want to keep. If we are to keep it, then our problem is: can we allow this 'evolution towards larger holdings to grow more rapidly? Do we want to cushion the blow or to put the clock back? What we want to do is to cushion the blow, and the Bill is a Measure which will help us to do that. In other words, the Bill will enable farmers to get together in co-operation. I have been preaching this word in my constituency for the last three years, partly for this reason, partly because, without the discipline of a co-operative society, it is impossible the persuade individualists to support that society—that is why our meat marketing has fallen down in the past few months—and partly because also, as has been mentioned, there is more integration of retail supply, in the form of large co-operatives  and supermarkets. We have to supply them with what they want, when they want it, at the right price, and we will do that only through co-operatives. During the past year we have seen a sudden surge of buying groups and the start of selling groups. It is vital for the National Farmers' Union, as it is doing, to encourage the buying and selling groups to put themselves under the umbrella of the farming co-operative movement, for it is the farming co-operative movement which will stand the farmers in good stead in the future, not only so that they may live on their holdings as individualists and prosper, but also to the benefit of taxpayers and the country as a whole if we go into the Common Market. For that reason, I give my whole-hearted support to the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend on its introduction.

2.42 p.m.

Mr. Ronald Bell  (Buckinghamshire, South)
I add my congratulations to the others offered to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) on introducing this excellent and valuable Bill. Perhaps the Opposition ought to form an agricultural co-operative. I am sorry to see the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Peart) as the sole representative of a party, some 200 strong, on the benches opposite this afternoon.

Mr. Frederick Peart  (Workington)
It is rather childish to inject that sort of controversy into the debate. I do not complain, if the hon. Member thinks that one Opposition Member is the equivalent of eight Government supporters. I understand but I assure him that the Opposition wholeheartedly support the Bill. It is not contentious and we wish it to go through smoothly. We do not want to delay it and it would be better if the hon. Member were rather brief.

Mr. Bell
My only comment on that is that if the hon. Member cannot count— when he is facing the benches—

Mr. Peart
The hon. Member should count those behind him.

Mr. Bell
I am counting those behind me. I can believe that it is possible for the Opposition to be wholehearted when only one of them is present. I have never known the Opposition to be  united about anything when more than one is present. What I thought was a rather fortuitous state of affairs appears to be the result of Socialist planning, and to that extent I congratulate the hon. Member, but it is a pity that so large a party, of which he is a member, should show such little interest in agriculture as to be represented by only one hon. Member. That was all I was saying and I thought it was a harmless observation and that the hon. Member would agree with me. I did not want to be controversial, but we are dealing with-co-operatives. The importance of this subject, in which I have taken an interest for some time, is that the farming industry and the farming community have the dual problem of an industry and a way of life. There are many people who do not want to obtain the advantages which come from size if in doing so they lose the independence and individuality of being on their own. That is a great problem in farming. It is especially the case in constituencies such as mine, where the farming units tend to be rather small. It is no solution to the economic problems which smallness brings to say that many small units should be merged into one large unit. That is to take away from the farmer something which he greatly prizes. The solution is the creation of the co-operative movement. I remember that the late Lord Bledisloe, who played a large and honourable part in the promotion of this movement, once went so far as to say that the payment of subsidy should be made in some measure dependent on the progress of the co-operative movement. That went too far, but there is still immense scope for the extension of the movement in British agriculture. It would be ridiculous if the movement, which for some years has engaged the active attention of the National Farmers' Union, which has taken under its wing almost the whole of the agricultural co-operative movement in the country, were to be wrecked at this early stage by quite accidental legal restrictions against it. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds has performed a major service to the agricultural community by bringing forward the Bill, and I am delighted to support him.

2.47 p.m.

Mr. Frederick Peart  (Workington)
I was tempted by the speech of the hon. Member for Buckinghamshire, South (Mr. Ronald Bell) but I will not indulge in controversy which would be unnecessary and rather churlish and probably childish. I compliment the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) on making a major contribution to clearing up a part of the law so that cooperatives which we wish to be encouraged will not be harmed by any action or decision of the courts. We support the Bill and I am very glad that the hon. Member for Buckinghamshire, South, who taunted the Opposition, is now a great supporter of co-operation. He said that he had always been, but I have never heard him speak about it enthusiastically in a debate on agriculture, and I have heard practically every one of them since 1945. I welcome his conversion today. I think that other hon. Members opposite who represent agricultural constituencies are genuine in their praise for the Bill. The speech of the hon. Member for Torrington (Mr. P. Browne) was admirable. He posed the problem of the countryside—the growth of large organisations, particularly retail organisations and how individual farmers must co-operate to meet that challenge. We accept that, but surely this is not a party matter. Surely hon. Members opposite want us to approach these issues on a non-party basis. I have welcomed the tone of the speeches I have heard today and I pay tribute to what was said by the hon. Member for Torrington and to the initiative of the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds. There may well be differences of opinion. I know that it is easy to taunt an Opposition, but are hon. Members opposite quite sure that there are not differences of opinion in their own party about what should be Government policy towards agriculture and the Common Market? Can the hon. Member for Buckinghamshire, South say that his party is united on that issue? All hon. Members know of the controversy in agriculture and it must be recognised as inevitable that there will be differences of opinion in the countryside on this issue. I think we can all agree, whatever decision we may make about the Common Market, that it is essential in their own interests that the British producers, particularly the small farmers, should co-operate. I am glad to boast of the existence in my area of Cumberland of a very fine producer co-operative enterprise, the West Cumberland Farmers.

Mr. Vane
The remarks of the hon. Gentleman have reminded me that I omitted to make the customary declaration. I am a member of the West Cumberland Trading Association and another, the West Cumberland Farmers, which is the largest in the country.

Mr. Peart
I represent a Cumberland constituency, and I am glad to find that the hon. Gentleman, who represents a neighbouring county, appreciates that this organisation, which extends up the Solway and into Scotland and all over the North-East, performs a great service to the individual farmer. I agree with the argument that it is not only the producer but the consumer as well, who benefits. I have always thought that the argument of producer rivalry as against the consumer was wrong. We must get away from it now when we discuss support. If the producer suffers, the consumer suffers. To argue about such a rivalry in agriculture is to give a wrong emphasis. We must always stress that if the producers make their organisation efficient and, by cooperating, increase that efficiency, in the end it is the consumer who benefits. More than that, the British people generally, including the taxpayers, benefit as well. My hon. Friends and I do not wish to oppose the Bill, and so I shall not go into any detail. There is common agreement about this. We are anxious to have further co-operation. We welcome the Bill, and pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds for introducing it.

2.52 p.m.

Mr. R. J. Maxwell-Hyslop  (Tiverton)
I join other hon. Members in welcoming this excellent Bill. I would stress one aspect of producer-co-operatives which is sometimes overlooked, and that is that they give to  the consumers a consistency of quality which is not always to be found when a number of independent producers are selling in a disorganised manner. There have been many jokes over the years about the little lion which appears on eggs. The Egg Marketing Board had its initial troubles, but it has endeavoured to establish a system of quality control in which the public can have confidence. It would be very unfortunate if at any stage the Bill were represented to the public merely as a means of giving semi-monopoly powers to the producer, as there will always be considerable competition between different producer co-operatives. I am convinced that the passing of the Bill into law will result not in increased prices to the consumer but in more efficient production and distribution and in quality reliability in which the consumer will be able to place confidence.

2.54 p.m.

Sir Douglas Glover  (Ormskirk)
I draw to the attention my hon. Friend the Member for Buckinghamshire, South (Mr. Ronald Bell) the fact that when one twits the Opposition in politics the result is that one brings in more support. I am glad to welcome to the Chamber my old friend the hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Kenyon), who probably knows as much about agriculture as any other occupant of the benches now in the Chamber, not only as a producer but at different stages of his life as a transporter of temperate foodstuffs from the other side of the world. He knows a great deal about all the ramifications of this problem. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Aitken) upon bringing in the Bill, which, I think, should receive the very warmest welcome from the whole House. The only reason I intervene is to say that everything that we do in this House to bring about co-operation, whether it be through official co-operative organisations, or even merely by the very fact of talking about co-operation between farmers, is much to be desired. I am very proud that in this nation there is rugged individualism, but in farming there is a little too much of it. I remember speaking to an agricultural society, not in my constitency, but most of its members come from my constituency. It is known as the "Lads Club" in Liverpool; it is the Lancashire and District Agricultural Discussion Society. I was talking about co-operation, and I said that in agriculture perhaps the time had come for more limited liability companies, just as co-operation between commercial enterprises grew up in days gone by. A man rose and said that he had never heard such an outrageous speech in his life. The chairman leant across and told me that that fellow had been borrowing a tractor from the chap next door for the last fortnight. There is this attitude of mind, and I believe that we have some responsibility to try to break it down. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton (Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop) spoke about quality. In this era when we have a higher standard of living, price is important, but quality is just as important. The people concerned with chains and multiples want to feel that they are able to offer the same quality day in and day out. They do not want to buy odd lots from the average farmer with 20 or 50 acres. It is only by cooperation in marketing and in production before the marketing stage that the farmers will be able to offer the chains the quality of product that they want to sell over the counter. I am convinced that it is through this growing cooperation over the years that we can maintain a healthy agricultural community. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds deserves the thanks of all of us for selecting the Bill to introduce today. I warmly support it.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee pursuant to Standing Order No. 38 (Committal of Bills).

Shops (Airports) Bill

Order for Second Reading read.

2.57 p.m.

Commander J. S. Kerans  (The Hartlepools)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. This Bill is, I feel, a liberalising one, which I shall endeavour to show in the course of my remarks. In the Shops Act, 1950, Part I, and Part IV dealing with Sunday trading, are found the governing rules for the closing of shops in airports. In the Bill it is proposed to exempt traders at certain airports as designated by the Minister of Aviation. The Bill does not affect Part II of the 1950 Shops Act, which deals with conditions of employment. Under present legislation, shops are required to close from the early evening and half a day once a week, and they are also required to close on Sundays except in Scotland. There are Sections of the Shops Act, 1950, which provide for extended hours of trading during the season at holiday resorts and certain types of trading on Sundays in England and Wales. I shall now attempt to go through the Bill Clause by Clause to explain some of its provisions. Clause 1 (1, a), taken with subsection (2), exempts all shops in parts of airports ordinarily used by passengers. Paragraph (b) is necessary since, under Section 67 of the Shops Act, the only provisions which affect Scotland are those in respect of barbers' and hairdressers' establishments which at present are prohibited from operating on a Sunday with the exception of Jewish barbers, who do not work on a Saturday. This paragraph will exempt Scottish airports on Sundays. Paragraph (c) covers the sale of goods from mobile trolleys and it is needed to make quite clear that exemptions given by the Bill extend to sales effected in areas in an airport other than actual shops. It helps to clarify Section 12 of the Shops Act. Subsection (2) excludes from the exemption shops in public enclosures. Subsection (3), which is not particularly clear, preserves for the benefit of airport establishments the exemption conferred by Section 59 of the Shops Act, 1950, from prosecution under three fairly ancient Acts. They are the Sunday Fairs  Act, 1448, the Act of the third year of His late Majesty King Charles I—namely, 1627, Chapter 3 of the further Reformation of Sundry Abuses Committed on the Lord's Day, commonly called Sunday—and the Sunday Observance Act, 1677. Since Section 59 conferring this exemption comes within Part IV of the 1950 Act, this subsection is needed to prevent the exemption from being removed by Clause 1 of the present Bill which, so far as international airports are concerned. in effect repeals Part IV. Section 59 of the 1950 Act refers, not to the opening of shops as such, but to the carrying on of trade and business. Hence the present subsection refers correspondingly to paragraphs (b) and (c) of subsection (1) and not to paragraph (a). Subsection (4) is a stock provision providing the Minister with power to vary or revoke any order he has made under the Acts. Changing circumstances might mean that the Minister would want to withdraw designation of any particular aerodrome. Subsection (5) provides that orders designating international airports shall be made by Statutory Instrument. This means that such orders will be printed and published as Statutory Instruments. No provision is made for them to be laid before Parliament or to be annulled by negative Resolution of the House. Subsection (6) accords to expressions in this Measure the same meanings as they have in the Shops Act, 1950. Clause 2 (2) states that the Act shall not extend to Northern Ireland since the Shops Act, 1950, does not extend there. There is no doubt that these limitations at international airports are singularly inappropriate in this modern age, especially so at Heathrow and other major airports in the United Kingdom. Traffic through international airports fluctuates tremendously, even allowing for ordinary seasonal peaks. It is safe to say that about 75 per cent. to 85 per cent. of ordinary passengers pass through the airports at times when shops are normally closed. Even taking twenty-four hours a day, there are considerable numbers of transit and other passengers awaiting embarkation. There is no doubt that there would be a demand for increased facilities, but I should make clear that under the Bill there is no  compulsion for traders to keep open all round the clock. In fact, there are more restrictions at London Airport and other airports in the country than at seaside resorts, exhibitions, and so on. I visited London Airport the other day and went round all the shops concerned—not, of course, those on the airport roof, which do not come under the provisions of the Bill. There are at Heathrow twenty shops, some of which sell goods of a very high standard and are a credit to our export trade. I visited those in the new extension. They are well laid out, pleasing to the eye, and undoubtedly attract customers. I was told by the airport manager that not very long ago one American spent £167 in one hour while waiting for an aircraft. There is no doubt that many travellers waiting at these airports have currency they wish to get rid of and time to look around and buy quite a lot of British goods. It must be somewhat galling to find a shop hermetically sealed when one has the time to waste and money to spend and cannot buy anything. I am confident that there is cogent necessity to bring our major airports into line with those of other nations. Prestige in these days counts for a great deal, especially with the travelling public. Once they have these facilities at other airports, they expect the same in this country. In its Fifth Report, Cmnd. 233 of 1960–61, the Estimates Committee stated, in paragraph 84 that it considered: "That passengers using a major airport are frequently irritated and inconvenienced when shops are closed." It added: "This is a service which ought to be provided for passengers." It could probably be argued that the additional cost would not be worth while, but surely this is a matter for experience and time to test, especially when one considers the cheap night fares that are available during the summer months. I remember taking an overnight trip, not so very long ago, to Malta, on a Sunday. I arrived at the terminal airport, where everything was hermetically sealed. We arrived at Rome Airport at 3 a.m., where everything was open. That illustrates the  difference that exists between conditions in this country and elsewhere. I notice that the Ministry of Aviation, in House of Commons Paper 46 of 20th December last, commenting on Recommendation 19, said that the Minister "will continue to keep in close consultation with the concessionaires on the matter as the use of airports at nights increases." This I hope my right hon. Friend will do. On the question of facilities for those who man these shops, it could well mean that their amenities are inadequate if they have longer hours. I can assure the House that I went into this matter very carefully, and that conditions in every way, at London Airport, for example, are those required by present legislation. On the question of trading facilities, I was given to understand that tenders for shops at London Airport are for five years and are not continuous on completion, which, I think, is a fair enough practice. Nor would the increased hours of opening affect the general public, due to distance from normal shopping centres and the fact that the general public do not have access to all of them. I wish now to refer briefly to the question of personal exports. This scheme operates in many shops in this country, but the goods have to be delivered to the port of embarkation. There is no reason why shops at London or other airports should not be enabled to increase this facility, and I think that if the Bill goes through, every assistance will be given by the Customs and Treasury to assist the Ministry of Aviation to improve and extend this very valuable asset to our export trade. I understand that the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers has no objection to the Bill, and that the employers' side of the Retail Distributive Trades Conference have also been consulted. It is not thought that they have any rooted objection. The local authorities have also been consulted, and, as far as I am aware, have no substantial objection to the Bill. In conclusion, may I say that the Bill is a small Measure to increase the convenience of the air travelling public and bring our own international airports in line with those of other countries. The  public expect these added facilities, and why not? We depend a good deal on the tourist trade, and anything that is designed to assist these facilities should be welcome. Today, there is no doubt that many foreign travellers can so easily divert themselves to other airports out of the sheer frustration of the kind which they sometimes experience in this country. The increased revenue would be welcome, but the good will engendered by this proposal probably outweighs the pecuniary advantages in trade. It is, in fact, a hidden asset. Furthermore, there is the slight—perhaps more than that—assistance given to some of our better-known exports, especially of china, pottery and similar goods. There is no doubt that many travellers like to buy goods which are traditionally made in the countries they visit. This is especially so abroad, and why should we not do likewise at London Airport and elsewhere in the United Kingdom? Finally, I do not think that this Measure would place any undue hardship on shopkeepers. It would not take away trade from other shops in the area because of distance, and, in regard to Sunday, it should not offend 99 per cent. of the public. The Bill is sound common sense in the 1960s and is designed to help our exports, to bring our airports into line with international usage, and to give adequate consideration to the travelling public, especially tourists—something which, I submit, is long overdue. Britain's international airports, and especially London Airport, should be a shop window of which this country should be proud.

3.11 p.m.

Sir Douglas Glover  (Ormskirk)
I rise only for a moment warmly to support my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for The Hartlepools (Commander Kerans) in presenting the Bill to the House. I wish that it applied to a far wider field than the airports, but as that would be a controversial proposition I will keep away from it. International air travel today annihilates time. It may be 6 p.m. at London Airport, but it is not necessarily 6 p.m. in the mind of a traveller who has just flown at 600 m.p.h.; as far as he is concerned, it may be the middle of the afternoon or even lunchtime. We  have already realised that special facilities are needed for the provision of intoxicating liquor at airports, although I recognise that my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) gives me an old-fashioned look when I mention the subject. We found that those special facilities were necessary in an international airport because we realised that what was 10 p.m. to us might be only 6 p.m. to a passenger who has flown from the United States, five hours back in time, to London Airport. We therefore, found it necessary to give facilities for people to obtain refreshment throughout the twenty-four hours. The same provisions, I am sure, ought to apply to these shops. My hon. and gallant Friend said—and this is true—that any passenger leaving an aeroplane is automatically conditioned by his first landfall in a new country. He wants to buy for his wife and children some souvenir or memento of his visit to that country. This applies even to those who are only in transit and who do not leave the airport. They like to say, "I bought this when I was at London Airport in the middle of the night". But in fact the passenger finds that the shops are closed, and trade is lost. The prestige of the country suffers. Moreover, the passenger gets back on his plane, when it takes off again, with a very strong feeling of frustration against the British people. When he lands two hours later in Rome he buys a memento for his wife and children because the shops there are open. In nearly all the other international airports in the world these facilities are provided round the clock. I reiterate what I said about air travel annihilating time. It is no longer a clock, it is like a spinning wheel. Anyone Who lands at an airport, wherever it is in the world, often feels in his or her own mind that the time is totally different from that which is shown on the clock in the airport. If a passenger gets out of bed at 8 a.m., goes to an airport and flies 2,000 miles, travelling for four hours, then four hours in time appears to have vanished, and as far as he is concerned it is only midday when he lands. Similarly, if he takes off at noon he may feel at his next port of call that it is only 2 p.m., and he is irritated if he sees that the airport clock gives the time as 6.30 p.m. and that he  cannot buy anything because all the shops are closed. Time is not a relevant reason in this respect for deciding whether the shops should be open or closed. I was glad to hear my hon. and gallant Friend say that the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers does not object to the Bill and that neither the retail distributors' associations nor the local authorities object to it. I am certain that in this second-half of the twentieth century, anybody who lands at an international airport in this country ought to be offered the facilities which he finds almost anywhere else in the world. I hope that the House will give the Bill a warm welcome.

3.15 p.m.

Sir Cyril Black  (Wimbledon)
This is a small Bill. It would be unwise to exaggerate its importance. Nevertheless, there is no reason why the House should give the Bill a Second Reading if, as I believe, the need for it is not fully demonstrated, if it is based upon principles which many people would regard with disfavour, and if it is introduced, as I hope to show, at a singularly inappropriate time. My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for The Hartlepools (Commander Kerans), who moved the Second Reading so persuasively, said a good deal about the excellent character of the shops at Heathrow. I do not wish for one moment to differ from him in that respect. I am a very frequent air traveller. I very frequently go out from and came into Heathrow. I know the shops there. I know the layout of the airport very well. I agree with all that has been said about the character of the trade carried on there. There could be no possible objection to these shops being open all the time++ if the only matter to be considered was the character of the shops and the business carried on there. The Bill does not raise the question whether these are good shops or bad shops. It seeks to establish an entirely new, and I suggest undesirable, principle as to the hours during which these shops are to be permitted to trade in competition with, and I suggest in unfair competition with, other shops in  the district and elsewhere. Hon.' Members will judge from what I have said that I am critical both of the contents of the Bill and of the time chosen for its introduction. I do not propose to address the House at length, but I should like to deal with what I have to say in two main sections. The first section is the Bill in so far as it relates to weekday trading. The second section is the Bill in so far as it relates to Sunday trading. I think that my hon. and gallant Friend and the whole House will agree that the considerations in respect of weekday trading are in some respects different from the considerations which apply in the minds of many people to Sunday trading and the opening of shops on Sunday. As regards weekday trading, as I understand the Bill's proposals—I have carefully followed the exposition given by my hon. and gallant Friend—the Bill would make it legally possible for these shops to be open twenty-four hours a day. However, my hon. and gallant Friend went on to point out—he may well be right—that shopkeepers are likely to open only for such number of hours as is justified by the demand. My hon. and gallant Friend therefore expressed the opinion that in practice, as distinct from in law, the shops would not open for twenty-four hours a day. This may very well be correct. It must depend on something about which we are not certain at the moment, namely, what the demand would prove to be if the Bill became an Act and the shops were free to open twenty-four hour a day. We are entitled to treat the matter for the purpose of this debate on the basis that the House is being asked to legalise the opening of these shops for twenty-four hours round the clock. We must examine the proposal from that point of view. This would be unfair and undesirable, for several reasons, which I shall attempt to show are good and sufficient. First, we have to remember that the customers of these shops do not by any means consist solely of people engaged in air travel, or international air travel. Vast numbers of visitors of all kinds came to Heathrow on both weekdays and Sundays in order to see the buildings, and to watch the aircraft going  out and coming in. No one would wish to discourage those large parties from seeing what is, after all, the country's major airport, and one of the major airports in the world—

Commander Kerans
This Bill does not include the spectators' enclosure at Heathrow. Those shops are not covered by it.

Sir C. Black
No, I am quite clear on that, but there are a great many other shops at the airport, as my hon. and gallant Friend knows, and those shops are not on the far side of the barrier through which air travellers alone are allowed to pass. They are in what might be described as the public part of the airport, which is frequented by people who have come to meet friends who have arrived by air, friends who are about to go on a journey; and by people who go there to pass the time of day. Anyone who is familiar with Heathrow knows that hundreds, perhaps thousands of such people visit during the day those parts of the airport in which the shops are situated. That means that we are now being asked to legalise what I submit is an entirely unfair form of competition with other tradesmen in the district. Let us take anyone living in the vicinity of Heathrow. We are living in days in which many, if not most families have motor cars, so that travel is not so difficult as it used to be. If this Bill were enacted, anybody who failed to make a purchase at his usual shop during normal trading hours would merely have to go to Heathrow and, to the detriment of the trade of his normal shopkeeper, who is confined to the normal shopping hours, could there satisfy his needs outside normal shop hours. I suggest that is grossly unfair to the other traders—

Mr. Brian Harrison  (Maldon)
Would my hon. Friend agree that fairness might be reconstituted by removing any farm of hourly limitation on any shop, provided that there was a limitation on the number of hours any individual could work in the shop?

Sir C. Black
I am not sure, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, how far I should be in order in developing that idea, but it is a proposal that I should be quite willing to examine with an open mind. That,  of course, would remove my objection to discrimination against the normal shopkeeper in favour of the Heathrow shopkeeper. It is with the inequality of treatment between the two that I am concerned, not the general question of shop hours, which I am quite sure I should be out of order in attempting to discuss now—

Sir D. Glover
I have listened to my hon. Friend's argument with great interest. It is valid to a point but, as a frequent user of Heathrow—or London Airport, as I call it—I am wondering where the shops are about which my hon. Friend is so concerned. There are, in fact, very few shops close to London Airport.

Sir C. Black
I am afraid that I cannot agree with my hon. Friend. I visit London Airport probably as often as most people, and anyone who drives down the arterial road that leads from Hammersmith to the airport must realise that there are a number of parades of shops that are in such a position as to suffer in their trade if the concession that this Bill seeks to make were conferred on the London Airport shopkeepers. Of that, I am in no doubt at all. I submit that this proposal is not only unfair to the other traders in the neighbourhood, who would continue to be bound by the normal shop hours, but that it is unfair to persons who are employed in the shops at London Airport. It has been suggested—the phrase used was not too definite—that the trade union concerned did not have any particularly strong objection to this. It does not follow that that comparative lack of objection applies equally to everyone, for instance, to those employed in staffing the shops concerned who may be required, as a result of the proposal, to open their shops at hours when most citizens prefer to be in bed. It is not sufficient merely to say that the trade union has the job of safeguarding the workers in these shops, for they, like other people, wish to work during ordinary hours and it is not reasonable, all the year round, to put them in the position of being under pressure. or even compulsion, to work hours when most people prefer to be at home. Surely it might also impose unfairness on some of London Airport's shopkeepers. It has been rightly said that if the Bill became law no shopkeeper would be required by law to open for any particular hours. I accept that that would be the position. But hon. Members who know anything about the struggle that went on years ago to establish a system of shop hours know that where some shops in a shopping area open for excessively long hours, other shopkeepers in the same area who may prefer to close during some of those hours are more or less compelled, by virtue of the competition from the traders who stay open, to remain open themselves for similar hours. Therefore, although by law no shopkeeper at London Airport would have to open for any particular hours, if it once became the practice for some of them to open virtually around the clock, those who do not want to do so will, by force of circumstance, be compelled to stay open if they are to maintain their power of competition.

Mr. H. P. G. Channon  (Southend, West)
I do not quite follow this part of my hon. Friend's argument. Is he really implying that a great many shops at London Airport are selling the same kind of goods and are thereby in active competition with each other? They cannot be in competition with the shops outside because, as was pointed out, the shops outside would already be shut.

Sir C. Black
While there may not be many shops where, in respect of all the goods they offer, they are in competition, they are directly competing with other shops selling some of the same kind of goods, for there is a great deal of overlapping in goods that are sold between one shop and another. A great many shops sell similar lines at London airport. It is clear that if some shops open around the clock other shops may feel constrained to do so. There is a drafting point in the Bill which gives me some doubt and about which we may have some elucidation when guidance on the Bill is given by the Ministry concerned. I refer to the phrase "…a substantial amount of international passenger traffic." I am not clear exactly what is the full import of that phrase. For example, London Airport carries a substantial amount of international passenger traffic. There can be no doubt about that. But many of these international travellers do not stop at London Airport. They may have booked on through-tickets to Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, or Belfast and will proceed to those destinations not by the international plane which brought them to London Airport but by one of the internal lines that operate between London and the other centres. Are these passengers, when they arrive at Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Belfast, to be classified for this purpose as international passengers at those other airports, and thereby set up a claim that those other airports are carrying a substantial amount of international passenger traffic? We ought to be a great deal more clear than we are at the moment as to exactly what is the extent and scope intended to be covered by this Bill. I now come to a further point. On the logic of my hon. Friend's argument, why does he apply his Bill only to airports and not to seaports? Is it not a fact that very large numbers of people coming on long sea journeys and arriving at Southampton or at Liverpool come in at hours when the shops at Southampton—

Mr. Anthony Kershaw  (Stroud)
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I have read the Bill with care and I see nothing in it about seaports. Is it in order for my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) to continue on this line?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Gordon Touche)
I understand that the hon. Member is making a comparison.

Sir C. Black
I would point out to my hon. Friend that this is not a Third Reading debate. It is a Second Reading debate. Surely I am justified in suggesting that to be put into satisfactory form there are things that the Bill ought to include which are not in it, as well as things that are in it that ought not to be in it. I do not want to develop the point at any great length, but, having listened  to my hon. and gallant Friend carefully in his Second Reading speech, it seems to me that the logic of everything that he said would apply quite equally to international seaports, like Southampton or Liverpool, as to airports like London Airport. Why, on his own argument, he does not suggest that the shops in the dock area at Southampton or Liverpool should have the same facility I cannot understand.

Sir D. Glover
My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) is making a good argument but it is not a valid argument. As I understand it, a passenger liner having cabin accommodation, as a rule does not decant its passengers on to the cold quayside until a reasonable hour, about half-past seven or eight o'clock in the morning, and then there is usually a train to take them to London, whereas at international airports people are all the time being decanted out into the cold, hard world with no facilities. At seaports this situation does not arise. Very few people at seaports are decanted on to the quay at queer hours as happens at airports.

Sir C. Black
I agree to this extent, that ships generally seek to arrive at such a time as people can be disembarked during convenient hours of daylight. But that is by no means an invariable rule. It seems to me that the logic which is being used to try to justify this concession for shops at international airports is certainly an argument that could be applied with some, if not equal, force to the case of seaports also. However, I will not develop that argument further, because I do not want to speak at undue length. I now come to the second aspect of the matter on which I want to say a little, and that is the proposal in the Bill that the ordinary rules for the closing of shops on Sundays should not apply to these international airport shops. Here, of course, we come to a matter where the arguments are not based merely on the considerations of expediency on which I have spoken so far, but, so far as many people are concerned, involve questions of deeply-held religious conviction. I do not think it would be appropriate for me at this comparatively late hour to speak at length on the considerations  which govern Sunday observance, but I will say that there is a substantial body of people in this country—far more, I tell my hon. and gallant Friend, than the 1 per cent. of people who, he suggested, had convictions about Sunday trading—who look with disfavour upon the continuing efforts in this House to eat away the laws which generally govern Sunday observance in this country and to make Sunday more and more a day on which trading is permitted and takes place.

Mr. Charles Doughty  (Surrey, East)
While, of course, one has the greatest respect for people who hold those views, they are not obliged themselves to trade with the shops. Does my hon. Friend think that they should try to impose their views upon others who hold different views?

Sir C. Black
The answer to that is that we in the House obviously have the duty of seeking to impose upon, the public, if I may use the phrase adopted by my hon. and learned Friend, those regulations which we believe to be right and in the best interests of the public. As I understand it, the logic of my hon. and learned Friend's intervention is that all laws which have to do with Sunday observance ought to be swept away because, according to his reasoning, any such laws are an imposition by people holding religious convictions on the activities and habits of people who do not. That is an argument which I could not accept for a moment and which would not, I think, find general acceptance in the House or in the country. I assure the House—I do not think that hon. Members will seriously disagree with this, whatever their own views may be—that there are very many people of the highest principles who hold the view that it is undesirable that further opportunities for Sunday trading should be given in this country. They would, for that as well as for the other reasons I have mentioned, oppose the proposal which my hon. and gallant Friend makes. What amazes me is the moment chosen for the introduction of this Bill. At this very time, there is sitting a Departmental Committee with the following purpose, "To review the law, other than the Licensing Acts, relating to Sunday entertainments,  sports, pastimes and trading in England and Wales, and to make recommendations." To seek to make an alteration in the law affecting Sunday trading at the very time when the whole matter is under review by a Departmental Committee which will report in due course is, to say the least of it, to choose a singularly inappropriate and unfortunate moment. I should have expected my hon. and gallant Friend to think it better to leave his proposals regarding Sunday out of the Bill and confine its provisions to the weekday activities of the shops, taking the opportunity to tender his evidence, as no doubt he is entitled to do, to the Departmental Committee considering the matter. It clearly comes within the terms of reference of the Departmental Committee to consider airport shops along with all other establishments in which trade is carried on. I should assume that the Committee would certainly consider this aspect of Sunday trading and include in its report the conclusions it reached. To ask the House of Commons to legislate at this moment in favour of opening the door to further Sunday trading when such a Departmental Committee is sitting seems to me to be singularly inappropriate. I hope that the House will decline to give the Bill a Second Reading.

3.39 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Kershaw  (Stroud)
With respect to him, I thought that the arguments advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black) in the first half of his speech were so extraordinarily bad and wrong that I suspected that the real reason behind his opposition to the Bill was to be found in the feelings he expressed in the second half of his speech. As I understand it, my hon. Friend's first point was that the competition from these shops which would be likely to remain open at London Airport would be unfair to the local people. While he was speaking I asked myself whether in Feltham—I see that the hon. Member for Feltham (Mr. Hunter) is present to guard the interests of his constituents—it would be possible to buy the sort of things which are to be sold in the shops at London Airport that it is expected will keep open. It is a rather ludicrous—

Mr. A. E. Hunter  (Feltham)
May I interrupt the hon. Member to remind him that London Airport joins not only Feltham, but Heston and Isleworth, Hayes and Harlington, West Drayton, Yiewsley and a number of other boroughs?

Mr. Kershaw
Certainly. I was merely complimenting the hon. Gentleman on being present to look after the interests of those living in his constituency. Even if it is to be imagined that in the parts the hon. Member mentioned they sell the sort of goods to be found in the shops at London Airport, it is slightly ludicrous to imagine long-distance air travellers, who may be in need of a packet of razor blades or of a sweater to guard themselves against the English climate, jumping into motor cars and going out into the wastes of Hayes and Harlington to start shopping for such things in the middle of the night.

Sir C. Black
My hon. Friend has not followed my argument with due care, if that is what he is now dealing with. It is not so much a case of the international air travellers going to other shops to buy, as of people in the district outside, who cannot shop where they normally shop because the shops are closed owing to the restriction on shopping hours, coming to London Airport to buy from the shops there.

Mr. Kershaw
That argument is equally fatuous, because it produces a ludicrous picture of housewives jumping into motor cars and going, at considerable trouble and danger to themselves, into the middle of London Airport and parking their cars—if they stay longer than 30 minutes it will cost them 4s.—to buy for their husband the kipper which they forgot to buy from the ordinary shop. That is not the sort of thing which will happen. The second argument was that shopkeepers will have to submit to the rigours of competition and will have to stay open longer than at the moment. As was pointed out in the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West (Mr. Channon), competition can arise only where other shops are selling the same goods. In point of fact, there is one shop which sells each sort of commodity and the com  petition suffered by Messrs. Jaeger selling woolly sweaters in the middle of the night is not likely to keep up young ladies beyond the time when they would normally be up in any case. London Airport is uncomfortable and bad enough as it is. It is one of the worst international airports at the present time—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] I am not blaming London Airport for this. There is no airport in Europe which anticipated the extraordinary growth of air traffic which has taken place. London Airport got off the mark a little quicker than some and so, necessarily, it is a little smaller in comparison with the traffic which is carried and, necessarily, it is a little more inconvenient. One has to put up with these things. There are other international airports which do not carry so much traffic, and which were built rather more for the future, where one can lose oneself wandering about in vast marble corridors. But there is no doubt that there is discomfort at the present time at London Airport which is realised, because one finds that the authorities have put courteous messages on the walls saying that they are extremely sorry for the discomfort which passengers are suffering, and which they hope will be obviated before long. This is one way in which passengers could be made a little more comfortable at London Airport. I think that the point about Sunday observance is a very small one. This does not represent a large breach of the principle which we respect, and the interest taken in it by my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon is well known. I should not have thought that principle would be breached at an international airport. The comparison with ships was not a sound one, because ships do not arrive at their ports every ten minutes and in the middle of the night as do aeroplanes at airports. In any case, passengers on ships are looked after and can buy what they require on the boat where such articles would be available.

3.45 p.m.

Mr. Eric Fletcher  (Islington, East)
I must begin by apologising to the hon. and gallant Member for The Hartlepools (Commander Kerans) for the fact that I was unavoidably unable to be here to  listen to his speech, but I have heard a good deal of the debate and it is right that I should intervene to indicate my views on the subject. I would like, in particular, to deal with the speech of the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Sir C. Black), who is opposing the Bill on grounds which I am sure all of us who appreciate his convictions must recognise. My own view is that the Bill should receive a Second Reading. It is desirable in the interests of the general international comity of nations that we should make available facilities at London Airport for the convenience of international traffic which passes through it. That is part of our duty as a civilised nation. It seems to me that the regulations under the Shops Acts, in so far as they affect shops at an airport, are quite different from the general considerations which should apply to our standard legislation in the Shops Acts generally. After all, this concerns a very limited number of shops open at London Airport or at any other airport which serves international traffic. They are of quite a different order from shops open throughout the country for the general mass of inhabitants. The more international traffic by air develops, the more necessary it is that we should conform to the ordinary reasonable requirements of the passengers. The hon. Member for Wimbledon raised two objections. Like him, I have had a letter on this subject from the Lord's Day Observance Society, and like him I am always disposed to take a very sympathetic attitude to any observations that are sent to me by this society for the protection and preservation of our traditional regard for the Sabbath. I do not yield to the hon. Gentleman in support of his general thesis that the Sabbath as we have come to observe it in this country is something on which we should pride ourselves and which we should cherish and regard as part of our national heritage. On the other hand, I think that it is going too far to take the rather arrogant attitude that the British—for the Scottish idea of the Sabbath is even stricter than that of the English—idea of the Sabbath is something inherently superior to the continental idea of the Sabbath. I hope that the hon. Member for Wimbledon is  not about to leave us, although he has risen from his seat, because I am anxious to deal with this part of his speech.

Mr. Dudley Williams  (Exeter)
The hon. Member refers to the continental Sabbath. Would he also like to have in this country the continental working week, which is six days?

Mr. Fletcher
I do not see what that has to do with the subject and I do not propose to answer that question. I shall confine myself to dealing with the very interesting observations of the hon. Member for Wimbledon. While we are perfectly entitled to cherish our own traditional British view about the observance of the Sabbath, and to think that it is something upon which we can rightly pride ourselves as being distinguishable from the continental observance of Sunday, it is going too far to suggest, as the hon. Member for Wimbledon suggested, that there is something of inherent religious sanctity about the way in which we observe the Sabbath. I would, therefore, remind the House that on the Continent there are other bodies of Christians whose views about the observance of Sunday on grounds of Christianity are at least entitled to as much respect as those of our own. There is no warrant for saying that the British idea of Sabbath observance has some religious Christian sanction that can be denied to the kind of continental Sunday, which is not based on agnostic principles but which has its roots in a very different kind of Christian tradition. I do not think that we need attach too much weight to the arguments of the hon. Member far Wimbledon on that score. It seems to me that we are not, in accepting the principles of the Bill, invading in any way the traditional observance of the Sabbath in this country. What we are doing is, I think, equally important. We are recognising that there are obligations of international comity which not merely justify us but require us to bring the amenities of our international airports into line with the kind of conditions and facilities that international passengers, many of whom are Christians with the same upbringing as the hon. Gentleman, are entitled to expect at international airports, whether in Europe, the United States of America or other parts of the world. The shopping facilities at an international airport are quite distinctive from the shopping facilities elsewhere. One might reasonably assume that most people do not travel by air on a Sunday in preference to a weekday, unless there is a compelling reason which requires them to do so. My experience, which can be verified by the examination of any international air timetable, is that, on the whole, international air transport, like railway transport in this country, is rather more difficult, more tiresome and more irksome on a Sunday than on a weekday. I cannot see any reason based either on the question of competition with the traders of Feltham or still less on religious principles for denying those who have to travel by air on Sundays reasonable facilities which, as the result of the comity of international relations, have been established at international airports throughout the world.

Sir D. Glover
Is not one difficulty that of deciding what is Sunday? When people are travelling at the present rate of travel, and land, so far as they are concerned it may not be Sunday. There is also this argument. Supposing there is a Jewish assistant in a shop serving a Moslem who has just arrived from Karachi, there could be hardship. They 'would not be breaking the Sabbath because for them the Sabbath occurs on a different day of the week.

Mr. Fletcher
That is a minor but additional reason for not wanting to oppose the Bill. We have a duty as legislators to take into account the legitimate views with regard to religious observance not only of Christians, as the hon. Member has said, but of Jews and Moslems and, indeed, of those who have no particular religious beliefs. Therefore, while, in general, I have some sympathy with the view which the hon. Member for Wimbledon has expressed, my own view is that the overriding requirements not only of international comity but, I would also say, of Christian charity would be in support of the Bill. The hon. Gentleman has also drawn attention to the fact that there is indeed a Departmental Committee of the Home Office at present in session conducting an inquiry into the law relating to trading on Sundays, and we are all looking forward with very great interest to  seeing what that Departmental Committee will have to report. It would be wrong to anticipate what its conclusions will be, but I think that he would be a very rash person who thought that the recommendations of that Committee would be in favour of tightening up the present regulations rather than in favour of a method of liberalisation, or, at any rate, rationalisation of the present legislation. I cannot really believe that if the House decides to give a Second Reading to the Bill we shall in any way impair the advantages to be derived from the Report of that Departmental Committee, and I cannot really think that, whatever that Departmental Committee may recommend to this House, or whatever this House may eventually decide to do as a result of those recommendations, we shall really be effecting the validity of those recommendations by passing the Bill, which is dealing with a very limited and specific problem, and for which I think, whether we join the Common Market or not, there are very good grounds. I would only say that if we do join the Common Market, then it would seem to me that the reasons for having a Measure of this kind on our Statute Book would be even more compelling and overwhelming than they are at present.

3.57 p.m.

Mr. Clifford Kenyon  (Chorley)
I think that before we vote on this Bill we should hear something from the Department concerned. We have heard nothing so far, and I fear that we shall not hear anything before a decision is taken on the Bill.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation (Mr. C. M. Woodhouse)
In the very limited time available I did my best to indicate the Government's view by nodding at practically every sentence uttered by the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. Fletcher).

Mr. Kenyon
I cannot allow the Bill to go through on the nod. I rather think that my hon. Friend minimised to a great extent—

Commander Kerans
rose in his place, and claimed to move, That the Question  be now put, but Mr. SPEAKER withheld his assent and declined then to put that Question.

Mr. Kenyon
the effect of this Bill, in view of the fact that the Departmental Committee is now sitting I feel very strongly that as the Government have set up such a committee to consider all these different questions relating to the trading conditions in this country we should wait till it has considered every aspect before we make a decision. The hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for The Hartlepools (Commander Kerans), who has brought forward the Bill, has placed his views before the House. He could have put before the Departmental Committee everything he has said in the House today. There are one or two questions which I should like to ask the hon. and gallant Gentleman before I sit down. He said that the trade union concerned was not in opposition to the Bill. When was that trade union approached and who approached it?

It being Four o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.

Debate to be resumed upon Friday next.

Air Guns And Shot Guns, Etc, Bill

Bill read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee pursuant to Standing Order No. 38 (Committal of Bills).

Recorded Delivery Service Bill

Bill read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee pursuant to Standing Order No. 38 (Committal of Bills).

Coal Consumers' Councils (Northern Irish Interests) Bill

Bill read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee pursuant to Standing Order No. 38 (Committal of Bills).

Law Reform (Damages And Solatium) (Scotland) Bill

Bill read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee pursuant to Standing Order No. 38 (Committal of Bills).

East Africa (Civil Servants)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[ Mr. McLaren.]

4.2 p.m.

Mr. Patrick Wall  (Haltemprice)
Tribute to the civil servants serving in our overseas dependencies and the need for trained administrators to serve those countries as they move towards independence within the Commonwealth have been stressed year after year in this Chamber. But if we expect these officers to carry on serving during the critical period just before and after independence, it is clear that they must require certain assurances both as regards their salaries and pensions and possible discrimination against them because of their race and similar matters. It is because it was believed that these assurances were given that more than 75 per cent. of the expatriate civil servants in Tanganyika decided to stay on in that country after independence. I am sorry to say that since December last year, when Tanganyika became independent, the situation has deteriorated. It is now clear that the assurances given to certain categories of these civil servants have not been implemented. Anxiety is therefore spreading to both Kenya and Uganda, which still come under the control of the Colonial Office. Broadly speaking, there are three categories of civil servants. There are those who belong to Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service and who are called designated officers, the non-designated expatriate officers, and the local officers. I want to explain to the House why members of the last two of those categories believe that Her Majesty's Government have broken their pledges to them. Before I do so, I should like just to mention the agreements reached for members of Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. The House will recall that in 1954 the Colonial Service was  reorganised. The details are contained in a White Paper, Colonial No. 306. Later, further amplification to this reorganisation was given in Command 1193 of October, 1960. The second paper introduced the principle of inducement pay by which Her Majesty's Government in this country would pay the difference in salary required by the expatriate civil servant compared to the local, indigenous civil servant and thus make it easier for expatriates to continue to serve. The subsequent negotiations about the future of members of Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service were satisfactorily concluded. It is fair to say that members of the Service who wish to retire upon independence being attained will receive adequate compensation and that there are good terms for those who intend to stay on. I am sure that the House will agree with me when I say that we hope that as many as possible of these officers will decide to stay on in all the countries of East Africa as and when they reach independence. It is, however, about the latter two categories that I want to speak in a little more detail. Taking first the non-designated expatriates, there are about 8,000 of these officers in East Africa, of whom some 500 are European. These officers are permanently employed and are pensionable, and have their leave home to India, Pakistan or the United Kingdom paid. This category of officer received an assurance in the White Paper, Colonial No. 306, in 1954, of which paragraph 12 says: "Her Majesty's Government recognise that there are certain other categories of overseas pensionable officers who have been appointed to the service of territorial governments other than by selection by the Secretary of State." This is the key sentence: "These officers may be assured that their interests will not be overlooked when the agreements referred to in paragraph 7 are being negotiated." Paragraph 7 refers to the agreements made between Her Majesty's Government and these States as they reach independence. It says: "…and when the territory obtains self-government, to ensure the observance of those conditions by securing their embodiment in a formal agreement…" I have already referred to the second White Paper published in October, 1960, which repeats this promise. Just over a year after that, in December last year, these promises appear to have been broken. Tanganyika reached its independence without officers of this category having received any assurance about their future. The same applies to the officers serving in the East African High Commission which was wound up, the officers being transferred to the new Common Service Organisation at about the same date. I want briefly to examine the course of negotiations. In December, 1960, talks took place in London, and there was an understanding, given by the Colonial Office, that soon after there would be a statement: "on compensation rights and security of conditions and pensions of these non-designated officers". That statement was expected about February or March, 1961. However, no statement was issued. Further negotiations then proceeded on a scheme for retirement benefits. This reached a deadlock on the question of whether or not this category of officer should have the option to leave on the independence of the territory in question. A further round of talks took place in London in October and November last year, and I am glad to say that on 6th November a satisfactory compromise agreement was reached one month before the independence of Tanganyika and the establishment of the East African Common Service Organisation. At that time an undertaking was given to reconvene this conference in the event of any major changes in the agreement. The agreement was sent for ratification to the East African Governments concerned. I understand that quite recently it has been rejected by the Government of Tanganyika as being too expensive and that the staff association concerned—that is the staff side of the Whitley Council—in Nairobi has been informed by the Kenya Government—I quote a Press release issued in Nairobi a few days ago—that it was "not possible to commit itself to the principle that pensionable non-designated officers should be permitted to give notice of retirement on pension earned to date when full voluntary retirement pensions scheme for designated officers comes into operation in Kenya." I take it to mean that these non-designated expatriate officers are required to stay on, and perhaps be discriminated against and jettisoned when they are no longer required. The staff association representing them has been put in a completely impossible situation. First, it started negotiations locally in East Africa but came to deadlock, and then it came over to London and reached a compromise agreement, but that agreement has now been rejected locally. I hope that my hon. Friend may be able to give me an assurance that the Secretary of State will reconvene this conference as soon as possible, which I understand was the undertaking given in November should things go wrong. There is one other category of officers about which I want to speak, namely those officers who were recruited locally. Here I think there is a considerable difference between European and non-European. The non-European, generally speaking, is an indigenous inhabitant of the country and he intends to stay on there. That does not always follow, but quite a number do wish to stay. In terms of numbers, there are very few Europeans. These Europeans fall under four main categories. There are those recruited from or in the United Kingdom and who have their passage paid to East Africa. There are ex-Service men who left the Army in East Africa and then entered the Civil Service. There are those recruited from civilian firms in East Africa and there are those who were born in the country and are therefore citizens of East Africa. I claim that Her Majesty's Government have some—I emphasise "some"—responsibility for the first two of these categories. There are 362 Europeans in Kenya who are permanent and pensionable and known as local officers. Those who were recruited before the Lidbury Committee were treated as members of H.M.O.C.S., but those recruited after the Lidbury Committee reported were treated as local civil servants. It is true that when they signed on they knew the terms, but when the Lidbury Committee reported it was expected that the status quo would be retained for at least ten years. I will quote an example. An officer serving in the Army in East Africa dis  cussed the possibility of entering the police force in Kenya. He returned to the United Kingdom on demobilisation and was then offered a job in the police force in Kenya while in England. He had his passage back to Mombassa paid, yet he was treated as a locally-recruited officer. In Tanganyika there are about 120 European local officers, mostly ex-Service men. Of these some sixty want to return to the United Kingdom. They are now employed in training local Africans to relieve them. In some cases, their leave has been stopped in order to speed up the training of these reliefs. Surely they should at least be assisted with their passage and finding a job in the United Kingdom. These men received no increases of pay under the Flemming Report and are very hard up, but they want to return home and have not the wherewithal to do so and to establish themselves in some sort of business on arrival. The Parliamentary Secretary will know that I have raised this case with him and his predecessor for the past eighteen months. I have been told that negotiations are proceeding but now that Tanganyika is independent it is going to be very difficult for the Colonial Office to bring pressure to bear. In all these categories of officers when they joined there was no expectation of independence coming in so short a period. There is discrimination against them even today. In Tanganyika a senior Minister has said: "As between an African and a non-African of similar qualifications, I shall always choose the African." In Kenya a Minister said: "It is the Government's intention to reflect the population ratios in the Civil Service." Discrimination, therefore, is certain and careers are bound to be damaged. We have paid many tributes to the value of the Civil Service. I think most hon. Members will agree that the retention of qualified administrators is one of the prerequisites of satisfactory transfer of power in East Africa. I believe that the Government have failed to live up to their promises especially in Tanganyika and in the East African High Commission. This has caused great dismay in Kenya and Uganda which could result in positive action which could only  cause a further deterioration of the present unstable conditions in those countries. I hope that when he replies to the debate my hon. Friend will be able to tell me what Her Majesty's Government are to do to redeem the categorical promises made in 1954 and 1960. To put it bluntly, I call upon the Government to make an agreement with the East African Governments concerned and a very early statement on the safeguards for non-designated officers in East Africa in accordance with the agreement negotiated freely with the staff associations in London last year. I hope that statement will include a scheme for assisting local officers who desire to be repatriated to the United Kingdom.

4.15 p.m.

Mr. Dingle Foot  (Ipswich)
I wish to add only a very few words to the extremely clear exposition which we have had from the hon. Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall), but I should like to refer to the position of the Asian civil servants in East Africa. We have already had experience of what has happened in Tanganyika. There, there were about 1,000 Asian civil servants, of whom approximately 750 were Indian nationals. When independence drew near, they were offered terms Which were very substantially worse than those offered to European officers. The Europeans, or at least the designated officers, were given the option of retiring on compensation, but the position of the Asians was very different. It was made clear that in future the Asian officer would be by-passed in promotion if there was an African who was capable of taking his job, irrespective of comparative merit. Secondly, it was made clear that the Asian would be bound to go if the Government required him to do so. That meant two things. First, the Asian officer had no alternative. He did not have the option of retiring. Secondly, when he came to leave, either at his own request because somebody else was promoted over his head, or because he was required to leave, he would receive only the pension appropriate to his years of service, without any compensation at all. I think that the House will agree  that, by any standards, those were very harsh and unjust terms. We have seen what has happened in Tanganyika, and I hope that the Government will pursue this matter, as I understand they have undertaken to do, with the Government of Tanganyika. Last year, I had a meeting in Nairobi with representatives of the Asian civil servants in the service of the Kenya Government. They were looking into the future with great apprehension, and I am quite certain that the same thing must be true of Uganda. All of us in this House understand and fully sympathise with the desire of newly-independent African States to Africanise their public services with all convenient speed. Nevertheless, I think that we should also have sympathy for the Asian civil servants who have carried out a vital public service in all these territories. They are not indigenous, and they have very little to look forward to. I hope that we shall hear something from the Minister today about the provision to be made for them.

4.18 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies (Mr. Hugh Fraser)
I should like to thank, as I am sure the whole House would, my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall) and the hon. and learned Member for Ipswich (Mr. D. Foot) who have raised this vital matter, which is of such great importance to us and to East Africa. It would probably be best if I looked over the whole field, so far as I can, and subject as I am to the negotiations, which are necessarily not yet complete, with the two East African Governments of Uganda and Kenya. Therefore, I hope that the hon. Members will bear with me if I do not touch on the possibilities of further consultation beyond what I propose to say. It is important that we should look at the three categories which have made these vital contributions to the welfare of these three States and the Inter-Territorial Commission. As my hon. Friend said, the case of the designated officer is infinitely easier than that of the other two, and the reason is that Her Majesty's Government and this country have to them a special obligation. The special status of these officers is recognised, and it was recognised in  1954, as my hon. Friend said, when there was this reorganisation. It was recognised in Colonial Paper 306, and undertakings were given there to those members of Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. My hon. Friend referred to paragraph 12 of that Paper, in which the key words are that "the interest of these others"—that is, the non-designated officers—would not be overlooked. As I shall show in the course of my speech, we have attempted to do what we can in their interests, but our obligation is not the same here as it is to those who are members of Her Majesty's Civil Service. Broadly speaking, arrangements have been reached with the Governments of East Africa to the effect that once the Public Service Commission comes into effect the full weight of our Public Officers Agreement with those countries and their membership of our Overseas Aid Scheme takes effect. Full weight has been given to these undertakings, which were reaffirmed in 1960, and they are having a considerable effect in East Africa. The latest figures which I have received—they are some months out-of-date—are that in Tanganyika, out of a total of 1,650 officers under this scheme, 416 have decided to move because of the change in the conditions of employment. This is very much smaller than the loss to the Tanganyika Government which at one time was expected. I believe that the scheme which we have put forward has had a very considerable effect. We are also able to report that it seems to be working satisfactorily in the East African Inter-Territorial Commission. Unfortunately, we are left with those two other categories who present the real problem to us. It must be remembered that it is also a problem to the local Governments, which are faced, on the one hand, with their belief that there is a need for Africanisation and, on the other, with their duty to see that these individuals are looked after. This is one of the problems which always occurs when a country obtains independence and when thousands of people are involved. It is easy to carry my hon. Friend's argument in respect of local service even further, when not just thousands but tens of thousands would be involved, and the danger could  emerge of attempting discrimination in favour of the purely local officer because he was European, taking him out of the category to which he must be regarded as belonging—the category which includes all these people. I will, therefore, address the bulk of my remarks to the question of the so-called non-designated officers. In East Africa, unlike a number of other territories which have achieved self-government in recent years, there is a considerable number of officers with overseas connections who are not the direct responsibility of the British Government, who were not recruited by or on behalf of the Secretary of State for the Colonies and who are therefore not members of Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. The majority of these officers are Asian in origin, although there are several hundred European officers serving mainly in Kenya and with the Common Services' Organisation. These officers are recruited direct by the East African Governments and administrations, some from overseas and some locally, but their overseas origin is recognised by the fact that while their salaries are the same as those of local officers their terms of service include overseas leave privileges. By definition, they do not come within the undertakings given by the British Government in Colonial Paper 306 to members of Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. The question whether the transfer of power which is proceeding should entitle them to special retirement benefits has to be considered on its merits and in the light of the fact that no undertakings have been given by either the British or the local Governments. This is precisely the point of their complaint, the point of the local Governments' difficulty, and to some extent our embarrassment because of the great service these men have rendered. The facts of the situation are these. As the East African territories advance towards independence, there is, naturally, an increasing pressure to associate local officers with the senior posts of responsibility or, to use the jargon of the times, to "localise." This is inevitable and is perfectly proper. In principle, it is desirable, and, indeed, essential, that this localisation should  proceed as quickly as possible. However, if good government is to be maintained the process must be subject to two checks. First, the Civil Services must throughout retain the experience and the quality to enable them to maintain the fabric of administration and, secondly, overseas officers who suffer through this process of localisation must receive appropriate retirement terms. For the designated officer this second problem has been met, or to a large extent has been met. However, for the second category—that is, the overseas non-designated officer with no direct link with the British Government—the question of appropriate retirement terms is a very real one which has exercised the Government, my hon. Friend and many of these people over the past year. The problem is, and must remain, a problem for the East African Governments, since they both recruited and employed these officers, who have never had any prospect of a career outside the territory of their immediate employment. Because of our obligation to do what we could for these people, after a series of exchanges with the East African Governments the Secretary of State for the Colonies invited these Governments and representatives of the officers to discuss these matters here in London last autumn. The purpose of these discussions was not to reach decisions, since these must be for the East African Governments, but was to bring all the parties together to see whether common recommendations could be made to the East African Governments. Following these discussions the Secretary of State for the Colonies invited the East African Government to consider retirement terms for these officers, and these Governments are in the process of reaching decisions. The Government of Tanganyika did not at that time feel able to associate themselves with the London talks, but I understand—I speak  as one who is no longer responsible for Tanganyika affairs—that very shortly before independence they reached the conclusion that officers required to retire in favour of local officers, or superseded for promotion out of turn by local officers, should be entitled to retire with pensions earned to date and, in addition, a payment in a form which has yet to be settled and on which I gather that negotiations are still proceeding. I turn to Kenya and Uganda. No final solution is needed in Kenya until the stage of self-government is reached. Meanwhile, the staff there have asked the Secretary of State to receive another deputation in London, and he will give this request urgent consideration on his return from the West Indies. But whether or not he considers it opportune to receive a further delegation, the basic position—I again stress this—still remains that these officers are the direct responsibility of the East African Governments. What we do, and what we shall continue to do, is to ensure that as these countries achieve independence appointments, promotions and discipline are put in the hands of public service commissions which are as independent of the influence of the executive Government as constitutional provisions can make them. I believe that this is our key approach to these matters. There is the question of the interests of the local people employed. We must bear this in mind, also, because I believe that it is in the overwhelming interests of the local Governments to ensure that a high level of Government administration is maintained. To this end, I believe that it is absolutely vital that those who have served them so well over the last decade and more should continue to serve them over the next few years.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-nine minutes to Five o'clock.