Commons Chamber

Order for Second Reading read.

I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."

I enjoy, Mr. Speaker, the fortunate privilege of being the first private member to address you since your accession to the Chair. May I respectfully say that I regard the change as a memorable one, and should it not seem presumptuous either to you or the House, may I venture to express the earnest hope, which I am sure is shared by all, that your health and strength may be maintained for many years to come to discharge the onerous duties of your high office. I also venture to hope that the occasion may be a happy augury for the safe passage through Parliament of my most excellent Bill. In the early part of this week the House was engaged in considering Imperial revenue and expenditure. Fortunately, in the same week, owing to the Motion for the Second Reading of this Bill, we are now able to consider important questions affecting local revenue and expenditure which in the past has been divorced far too much from the consideration of Imperial expenditure. After all, the same backs bear those two burdens. I hope that this may form a precedent, and that in future the consideration of those two burdens may be reviewed together much more closely than has been the case in the past, because without that close review I do not see how the real financial position of the country can be properly considered, or how the taxable capacity of the subject can be brought under proper review. It seems to me that having gained the position of victors, we are now engaged in the very harassing and tedious process of consolidating and making good our position. One of our strong lines of defence is the state of our local and national finances, and if there are leakages or defects in our system either locally or imperially, then the first opportunity should be taken to make good those leakages and defects.

This measure deals with some very important and patent defects in regard to our local finances. These defects have been pointed out and considered by important Committees, and they have not only considered the nature of the defects but they have in most cases pointed out a remedy. My Bill provides the remedies suggested in most cases by those Committees, and without further detaining the House I propose to explain the Bill itself very shortly. I am sure the House will agree that we owe it as our duty to the ratepayers to give very close attention to these matters, and I cannot help thinking that this Bill will allay a good deal of anxiety now shown on the part of the ratepayers, and will materially strengthen and give confidence to the position of all local bodies representing those ratepayers.

There are only four clauses in the Bill. The first Clause, which is a very important one, sets up for all local bodies statutory finance committees; that is to say, committees which derive their authority, not from the body of which they form part, but directly from the statute. Those statutory finance committees do exist at the present time in the case of all county councils and London boroughs under the Local Government Act, 1888, and the London Government Act, 1899, but there are no statutory finance committees on any other body. This Bill under Clause 1 seeks to bring about uniformity, and every local body will have a statutory finance committee constituted on much the same basis as exists in the case of the county councils and the London borough councils. I do not think that any particular objection has been taken to that proposal, but I am sure the fact that there is a statutory finance committee on every council will materially strengthen that council and give confidence to the ratepayer. I should add that these local bodies have to handle huge sums of money. In 1913–14 the local expenditure amounted to something like £200,000,000, just equivalent to our national expenditure. I have no figures available up to the present time, but I should imagine, as the rates are about double, that local bodies must now be handling something near £400,000,000. That being so, I am sure this House will agree that each body taking part in the expenditure of that sum ought to have a properly constituted statutory finance committee controlling its estimates and expenditure in order to promote general efficiency.

Clause 2 seeks to transfer from the Ministry of Health powers which it now possesses in regard to loans and the disposal of the property of local bodies and to transfer them to the Treasury. I may tell the House that up to 1888 that was actually the state of affairs. At that time the Treasury had control in all these matters, but under the Local Government Act, 1888, and another Act passed about the same time that control was removed and given to the Local Government Board. Since that date a great deal has happened. The local Government Board, when those powers were given to it, was something in the nature of an auditing Department for our local bodies. Since that Department became converted into the Ministry of Health it has become a huge spending Department which, in many cases very rightly, while in other cases there may be some question, is forcing schemes of its own on local bodies. Those schemes come up with regard to cost and other things before the very selfsame body interested in promoting them, with no check or control by any other body at all. Whether those proposals are absolutely right in all their details or not it is not for me to say. What I am quite sure about is that the country demands that something of this nature should be done, and that the Ministry of Health, being such a huge spending Department, should be under some control in regard to its local expenditure. I am sure that the local bodies themselves in many cases would feel it a very great improvement if they had something in the nature of a court of appeal like the Treasury to consider their financial position before those schemes were forced upon them. I should add that this Clause was recommended in the Report of the Machinery of Government Committee which sat in 1918, of which Lord Haldane was Chairman and the Secretary of State for India and Sir George Murray, formerly Financial Secretary to the Treasury, were members. It was a very important Committee dealing with a question which they were eminently capable of understanding. That was the recommendation which they made, and it is embodied in Clause 2 of this Bill. Clause 3 sets up machinery in order to give effect to a recommendation of the Select Committee which reported last December and of which the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Peebles (Sir D. Maclean) was Chairman. That Select Committee reported: to consider any Amendments which will meet the views of those important bodies. I can sympathise with them in not liking their accounts being overhauled by a County Council, which may not be nearly such an important body as, say, in the case of Northumberland, the Corporation of Newcastle, but there is no reason, as far as I can see, why they should not send in their accounts and information required under this Clause direct to the Treasury, because the sole object is to get information.

These county boroughs would themselves benefit by the arrangement. I saw a report of a meeting of the Hull Corporation in the "Yorkshire Post," and the chairman of the Finance Committee, I think, said that it would be a very great advantage to them if they could get the Hull Board of Guardians and other persons responsible to them who have the power of levying rates, to send such information to them in good time, so that they might have an opportunity of considering their financial position as a whole. This year they thought their rates were going up 9d. in the £, but there came in a precept of the Guardians raising the rate by 2s. 9d. If they had only had that information in time it would have enabled them to review the whole situation, and it would have given them an opportunity of saying something on the subject. That is a typical case. It would not only be useful to this House and the Treasury, but it would be exceedingly useful to all local bodies in the country. They would be able to compare their statements one with another, and see where they were extravagant and where they were not. Besides that, one ratepayer is rated sometimes by as many as six different rating authorities, not related to one another, as they ought to be. They do not work on any uniform basis, nor does one consider what the other is spending. It is, however, important to the ratepayer that he should know what each of these bodies is spending, so that he may know what really is his position. At the present time he has no means of getting this information. This collecting and collating of information will illuminate the whole position, will disarm a great deal of suspicion which now exists, and which very likely should not exist, and will be exceedingly helpful to all local authorities and rate- payers in understanding the real situation.

Although there may have been a town's meeting to consider a Bill promoted by a local authority, and although that meeting may have approved the Bill by a large majority, Clause 4 enables 5 per cent. of the ratepayers or any number, not being less than 100, to petition against the Bill, of course at their own risk. That was strongly recommended by the Select Committee presided over by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Peebles. It gives very great protection to the ratepayer. I happened to pick up the "Yorkshire Post" yesterday, and I found that the chairman of the New-castle-on-Tyne Finance Committee made-these observations on this very subject:

With regard to the Bill as a whole, of course, it does not pretend to be perfect, but it is an honest endeavour to remedy defects which have been pointed out in a manner suggested by very competent and capable people. There are, of course, some objections to the proposals contained in the measure. Possibly what I have said may have met the most important. But I feel it would be a most unfortunate thing if we did not at this moment pass this Bill, seeing that it does attempt to remedy very serious defects in our existing local system on perfectly sound lines. I trust, therefore, the House will be good enough to give the Bill a Second Reading, leaving it to Committee to effect any improvement that may be desired.

I beg to second the Motion.

Many of us may be feeling that a topic of this kind could better have been dealt with by the Government, seeing that it relates to a very wide subject and one which in itself is hardly appropriate to a private Bill. I would like to congratulate my hon. Friend on having dealt with the question on such limited and practical lines. I think he has, within the compass of what may be fairly dealt with in a private Member's Bill, covered all that is possible for a private Member to deal with in connection with this very difficult question of local rating. I notice that the Title he has selected for the Bill is to "Prevent Increase in Local Rates." I cannot help thinking that he is a little sanguine. I should be rather inclined to think a better word would have been "obstruct." In this Parliament the word "obstruct" might have been safely used, because we are almost forgetting what it means, but I have sat in Parliaments where the word would have been looked upon perhaps as rather offensive. The Bill really amounts to a proposal for putting obstacles in the path of those altruistic people who are so fond of trying experiments at other people's expense. I do not discount the value of the altruistic services which have been given so freely in local Government. Many of the proposals emanating from these sources have been excellent but the position to-day financially is very different from what it used to be before the War, and although it may be necessary to vote really necessary social expenditure we can no longer afford to experiment on it.

What this Bill is designed to do is that, when altruistic experiments are proposed, the searchlight of finance shall be brought to bear upon them, and they will be much more thoroughly examined than they are at present. It is to be hoped that some good may result, and that no longer expenditure will be incurred at the expense of local rates which people cannot in these days afford to pay. In rural districts this matter is particularly important. We are mainly an industrial community, and in an industrial community we incur expenditure on a scale quite impossible for an agricultural district; yet a large portion of the industrial expenditure falls upon purely rural communities which are totally unable to afford it. I for one believe that in the restriction of expenditure which it is hoped that this Bill will produce there will be great advantage to rural districts. My hon. Friend has most clearly explained the scope of the Bill, and I feel that in a debate of this kind it is not for the supporters of the Bill to take up much time in submitting it, but it is for those who object to its Second Reading to make their case clear and for those who support the Second Reading to answer their objections. I can hardly think there will be much objection to the Second Reading of this Bill, because, as my hon. Friend has pointed out, all the proposals in it have considerable expert authority behind them and they are very reasonable and very limited in scope. They all appear to be quite practicable, and I am sure everyone will agree that though they may require careful examination in detail, it is those hon. Members who have had real experience in local government who can bring their experience to bear in Committee. Actually the proposal contained within the four corners of the Bill, while they may be subjected to useful criticism, cannot be open to any real objection.

One of the most difficult clauses, the one to which my hon. Friend devoted a great deal of his time, is Clause 3. That does appear to me to require a good deal of consideration in Committee, particularly from the point of view of those who are familiar with the way in which demands for rates are printed, partly in one colour and partly in another. We are told that the authority which sends out the demand is only responsible for a very small proportion of it, and that the remainder is demanded by precept from some other authority which is not brought into contact with the ratepayers at all. That seems to be a very unfortunate division of responsibility, and it is certainly a direct incentive to extravagance. This Bill, however, does not prevent it. It could not prevent it, but it provides machinery by which, if the clause is modified in Committee, any authority which has actually to present a demand for rates shall have a full estimate and full opportunity of considering the estimate from any body which issues the precept upon which it is levying the rate. It seems to me that a body which makes a rate on a precept from some other body which has no direct responsibility to the ratepayers ought to have an opportunity of knowing what is to be the total demand upon the ratepayers. Unless opportunity is given it cannot make for economy. What really matters to the ratepayer is riot how much one particular authority demands, but what the actual demand is. Figures have already been given in this House in regard to rates, and my own experience in the rural area in which I live is that while the rates 30 years ago were 8d. in the pound now they run from 13s. to 15s. in the pound.

This is not at all an unusual experience. In some districts they are even higher. I should think that the general average of local rates in rural districts—I am speaking only of rural districts now—used before the War to be about 4s. in the £. They were higher in towns, but in that case a proportion was for actual services rendered, and could not be regarded merely as local rates for public purposes. We have not the actual figures for the present time, but I should think every Member of the House would agree with me if I were to say that, at a low estimate, the general level of rates in rural areas has gone up from 4s. to at least 12s. in the £—that is to say, they are trebled. I would also venture to remind the House that these rates are largely levied, both in the towns and in the rural areas, upon small house property, and that there is no property which has suffered more from the financial conditions since the War than that kind of property. This House, while leaving the rates to go on mounting up—to be trebled, assuming my figures to be fairly correct—has, in the public interest, placed restrictions upon the owners of that kind of property, which prevent them from receiving money from the only source from which they can meet the increased charges for rates. When the House has imposed such restrictions upon them, it is bound to do its utmost to prevent the taking of their money for the purpose of being expended on experiments which may turn out to be of very little use to the community, and which will certainly drain their pockets very heavily.

The real fact is that we are a much poorer country than we were before the War, and we have to cut our coat according to our cloth, whether as a nation or as private individuals. The only result of over-spending will be more misery in the future. That is unanswerable. There is a great deal of talk about economy in this House, but we are in very great difficulty in dealing with Government proposals from the point of view of economy, for the unfortunate reason that we cannot vote against a Government proposal to spend money on its merits; it is always made a vote of confidence. When we go and speak at meet- ings in the country, we are apt to be met by the question, "Well, what have you done to try and stop it?" and that is not always an easy question to answer. The-country is looking to the House to take some actual, concrete step to show a desire to reduce the pressure of expenditure upon the ratepayers and the taxpayers. We are also told that private Members in the House leave too much to the Government. We have not left this to the Government; this is a private Member's Bill, brought in on a Friday, and it is a concrete and actual attempt to do something to make it more difficult to waste the nation's money than it is now. As such, and on its general principle—leaving Amendments for the Committee stage—I hope that the House will give it a Second reading, and that a division will not be necessary.

I beg to move to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words "upon this day six months."

I move this Amendment on behalf of the Labour party in this House, because we believe that the general principle embodied in the Bill cuts right across every form of democratic government, and also that, if the general provision of the Bill in regard to the setting up of statutory committees were conceded, even the operation of those committees would not tend in the direction of sound economy and efficient public administration. We further believe that the proposals embodied in this Bill are, in the main, a reversal of the well-advertised declarations, and well-propagated schemes of social reconstruction with which we were familiarised some time ago. We are ready to admit that there are in local rating many anomalies the amendment of which is long overdue; but we assert that there is nothing in this Bill that would remove those anomalies, and that the result would be rather to intensify and increase them. The first Clause of the Bill, which proposes to set up a statutory finance committee, is, surely, a contradiction of everything that democracy has proclaimed. It suggests that a small committee—not more than one-fourth of the members of the authority—should have the responsibility of all matters relating to finance, and that a majority of that committee should be entitled to exercise that power. There are scores of urban district councils in different parts of the country with somewhere about a dozen members. This special committee would in such cases be composed of three members. The majority would be two, and in the hands of a couple of men you would place the financial business of the whole area. They may themselves be largely interested in particular undertakings or concerns, and their sole interest may be to keep down the rates rather than to exercise a wise discretion in regard to expenditure and administration in that area. We suggest that to entrust this statutory power over expenditure to a number of individuals on the lines suggested, is a complete reversal of every democratic principle which has been recognised in local and national government.

Another objection that we have against the Bill, and, if anything, a more important one, is that not only would it give into the hands of one or two individuals the power to determine finance, but it would also give them the power to determine the policy of the local authority. Sub-section (4) of Clause 1 provides that the small committee is to be satisfied that the proposed expenditure is necessary. This small committee, therefore, is set up both as judge and jury in respect to the requirements of that particular neighbourhood. It is called upon to exercise its judgment in regard to any scheme or proposal that may be put forward, and it has the power to veto the particular things which it is suggested should be done. We are entitled to ask, if a small committee of this character is to be set up, how it can be expected to discriminate between the needs, say, of the highways department and of the education authority? If there were a conflict between the needs, say, of health, highways, and education, we have no sort of security that the claims of the respective departments would be equitably adjusted by a committee of that character.

Further, Sub-section (1) of Clause 1 makes provision that any costs, debt, or liability over £50 shall not be incurred without the sanction and approval of this autocratic committee. Throughout the whole range of public administration there are matters, like the appointment of officials, which, very often, have to be undertaken fairly quickly; and the salaries of the officials of local authorities are sometimes increased, or they have been in recent times. All these details come within the purview of the particular committee which is responsible for those officials. The health committee is acquainted with the duties of the medical officer of health. It knows whether he is doing his work efficiently and satisfactorily or not, and is able to judge whether or not he is entitled to an increase of salary. The highways department will deal with its engineer and surveyor, and so on, and the special knowledge that these committees have justifies them in any action that they take. But we are to put into the hands of a committee of two or three people, who have little knowledge as to the work of these Departments, the power to veto the appointment of an official or the salary that he will receive or any increase in salary which may be given to existing officials.

It may be said that there are many things in connection with these matters which could reasonably wait until the meeting of this committee comes round and then they could arrive at some decision, but all the municipalities in the country, and many public authorities, are now engaged in trading undertakings. There are hon. Members who believe that that is a very undesirable proceeding for municipalities to undertake, but they are being undertaken and they are going to be undertaken more extensively in the future. Whether we like it or not, the whole trend of local government is in that direction. Gas and water undertakings, tramways and electricity and all the ramifications of the operations of these particular departments are charged to a particular committee elected by the ratepayers and answerable to the Council, and they carry on year in and year out the functions of these authorities, and if we remove out of the hands of this committee any part of its functions and its activities and enable a small committee to say that certain work is unnecessary and consequently they decline to foot the Bill, we are going to have chaos rather than order in the avenues of public administration. Further, purchases are often made and sales have to be effected, often very quickly, and if we hamper local authorities in this direction it is going to be all to the disadvantage of the ratepayer. Suppose a gas committee is touring the country for coal and it comes across a job lot. This has happened in connection with local authorities that I know and they may come across 100 tons of coal stacked somewhere and they drive a bargain with the individual or undertaking that owns the coal. Under the provisions of this Bill they can talk about it with the person who has it to sell, but they would have to wait until this committee passed a resolution or decided that the Gas committee of a large municipality could spend £100 in purchasing coal for its gas works. Surely a provision of that sort is comical in its interpretation having regard to the duties and responsibilities of local authorities. By no stretch of imagination can it be suggested that this special committee would be able to judge the requirements of a Department dealing with gas, electricity, tramways or water.

1.0 P.M.

Every safeguard that the Bill seeks to ensure is at present in the hands of local authorities. Every local authority has its Finance Committee which each month has the accounts of every other department. Not only have the accounts of these Departments to run the gauntlet of the monthly meeting of the council or the local authority but also the decisions of the Finance Committee have to pass that test also and so there are any number of safeguards. The Finance Committee handles the accounts of the other Departments and the council as a whole handles the accounts of the lot and there is every check that is necessary from the point of view of the public interest. Even if the local authority does not exercise the check that it ought to in this direction there is the great Court of public opinion to appeal to which usually takes these matters into its hands as occasion arises, and when the annual estimates of the local authority are brought together at the beginning of the financial year all these estimates find their way to the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee are asked to levy a local rate to meet these estimates. The estimates are then dissected and analysed both by the local authority and by the Council itself so I suggest that every check that is necessary is incorporated in the conditions prevailing at present. In this Bill we were left to doubt what was exactly the status of county boroughs and we were wondering whether a county borough would retain the same responsibility as a county council, but we gather from the hon. and gallant Gentleman (Lieut.-Colonel Royds) that a county borough despite the fact that it has the same powers as a county council must also submit its accounts to a committee of the county council. It seems to me to be a contradiction. We give a county borough and a county council similar local government powers and we call upon a county borough in this Bill to submit its accounts to a small statutory committee which has been set up by the council itself. Obviously movements of that character are not making either for economy or efficiency but for a wider entanglement in public administration. County Councils are not prepared to undertake these responsibilities so far as we can judge. I have a letter from the Secretary to the West Riding County Council on this matter. He says: When a local authority has to promote a scheme of water works, a tramway undertaking and the like, it has to scour the country for experts, and we have these experts, limited in number, of each authority competing with each other and rushing up their scale of payment to an artificial standard, and I have always believed that if a staff of experts were retained by the Ministry of Health—engineers, surveyors, electricians and the like—and was put at the service of any authority that needed them real sound economy could be effected. As it is, all these schemes are submitted to the Ministry of Health, and if it needs a better understanding between the Ministry of Health and the Treasury as to what the responsibilities of the local authorities are in a financial sense it hardly needs an Act of Parliament to ensure that being done. There is one provision in this Bill in regard to which something favourable may be said, and that is in regard to the voice of the ratepayers and the community at large being heard when Private Bills are being promoted. There does not seem to me to be the opportunity that there should be for private ratepayers expressing their opinion upon these matters. I agree that when local inquiries are held any ratepayer can be heard at the inquiry, but when the venue is shifted from the locality to a Committee Room of this House upstairs the local feeling in so far as it is held by private individuals has not that freedom of expression that it ought to have, but I look with some measure of suspicion upon the proposal made by the hon. Gentleman in introducing the Bill when he said that a few people who could raise money to employ counsel might have permission to do so, or that there might be some arrangement made in the Bill to enable that to be done. I am not enamoured of the idea of two or three people gathering together and bringing their finances into a common pool and engaging a counsel on their own account to look after their own interests. It is usually their own interests and not the public interests that they are after. Leaving that out of consideration, I should be prepared to concede the point that greater possibility should be given for the expression of the views of the ordinary individual ratepayer upon these matters, but an Act of Parliament is not necessary in order to ensure that being done.

We believe that the general principle of this Bill is retrograde. The provision of the Bill does not really seek to effect wise and judicious economy. The central provision of the Bill is to curtail expenditure, but to curtail expenditure in public administration is not always a wise move. The soundest economy in public administration is judicious expenditure of those funds that are available, rather than cutting down without reasonable consideration the expenditure upon that particular locality. We may save the rates, but we may starve the community of those services which the community of that particular locality requires. I agree that we need economy in public administration, and I believe there is room for it to be exercised, but I do not think that this Bill moves in that direction. I once heard of a Yorkshire-man who was walking on a road between two Yorkshire towns, and not sure of his direction he asked a man if he was on the right road to a particular town that he named "Yes, you are on the right road, but you are going the wrong way," was the reply. This Bill is on the right road but it is going the wrong way. It will not effect the economy that it seeks by the provisions of the Bill. We know that local rates are high; we do not need to be reminded of that fact. Could we expect anything else after five years of war, when public administration was at a standstill, when schemes were neglected, when schools were not erected, when highways were not repaired, and all those things which ought to have been done in the ordinary current activities of the twelve months were neglected. At the end of the war we had five years arrears to make up. We could not do otherwise than expect the rates to be high, even if other conditions were normal. The cost of materials is heavy. The local authorities have not had the protection to which they were entitled from the Government and from this House in respect of the high prices of the materials that they have been called upon to use for their public services. We might have effected economy in public administration in that direction.

We heard in the Budget statement that out of every pound of revenue raised 7s. went in debt charges. Local authorities have exactly the same trouble and the same responsibility. In 1914 out of every pound of local rates raised in England and Wales roughly 6s. went in interest charges. The interest rate at that date was 3½ per cent., but now it is 6 per cent. While it is difficult to get replies from the Ministry of Health as to the amount of interest which is now being paid by local authorities we know that it is a tremendous sum in comparison with what it was in 1914. If we want to cut down the local rates and to economise in public administration let us move in the direction of the re-adjustment of the financial responsibilities of local authorities. Public administration cannot be carried on in future on a 6 per cent basis. The Minister of Health told us the other day that we were at present embarking upon housing schemes, under consideration and prospectively, equal to £200,000,000. The prospective financial responsibility in connection with those housing schemes, with the money borrowed at 6 per cent., repayable in 60 years, is no less than £700,000,000. That is staggering in its magnitude, and we have only touched the fringe of the problem, and with every development of public administration that has to be financed on these lines we are going to be confronted with a tremendous mountain of debt for the future generations to meet. There is no sounder line of economy in public administration than readjusting the financial obligations and endeavouring to find out some new and more up-to-date method of financing municipal and public development. We should also enlarge the function of local authorities and extend their productive undertakings as a set-off against the rising rates. We should open up new sources of revenue such as are referred to in an Amendment on the Paper.

My final word is that in this House we can only make the law. We can only lay down the letter of the law. We have to rely upon the local authorities to administer the law. Morally, materially and intellectually, the welfare of the wider community is in the hands of the administration of our local authorities, and this House ought not to do anything which will cripple the authority of those local authorities. This Bill is restrictive. It cannot possibly safeguard the wise expenditure of local authorities. It endeavours to stop expenditure. That is the central argument behind the Bill. Having regard to the responsibilities that the local authorities have in the direction of the health education and the moral wellbeing of the community, they need to be assisted, and not hampered, and this Bill would limit the sphere of their activities all along the line.

I beg to second the Amendment. It is not often that I find myself in agreement with the hon. Member who has just sat down, but on this occasion I am whole-heartedly with him in his opposition to this Bill. I regret that in some parts of his speech he seemed to me rather to weaken his case by what sounded like justification of further expenditure by local authorities at the present time. I base my opposition to this Bill upon two grounds. The first is that it seems to me in some of its provisions to be an unwarrantable interference with the powers and responsibilities of those local bodies which have made such a reputation in this country for efficient and progressive local government. Secondly, it would not carry out the object for which it is introduced, and so far from preventing increase in rates the only effect of it, if it were passed into law as it stands, would be to increase the rates. The title of this Bill reminds me of the joke about a well-known journal, that there was more truth in the title than in the whole of the contents put together. Every one of the clauses would have the effect of hampering local authorities in their duties, and increasing the expenditure and therefore the rates. The right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr. Pretyman) appealed to those who had experience of local government to offer their criticism of this Bill in Committee, but, as I understood, not on the Second Reading, I would like to be able to respond to his appeal. But if on examining a Bill of this kind you find that there is not a single clause that you can support, I do not see how you can vote for the second reading on the principle that you can get the Bill turned inside out and practically made into a new Bill in Committee. Yet, short of that, I do not see how this Bill can be made into a Bill which I can support.

The first Clause begins by saying that no payment can be made by a local authority unless in pursuance of a resolu- tion which has been passed by that authority based upon the recommendation of this new Statutory Finance Committee. That means that this Finance Committee consisting of not more than one-fourth of the whole Council is to control not merely expenditure, but all rates of wages, all salaries and every single new appointment, and indeed every single item of policy of the whole Council. Take the Town Council of Birmingham. It consists of 120 members, and has a Finance Committee of twelve. So if seven members of that Finance Committee chose to act together they might absolutely dominate the whole Council, and vote down every proposition put up, even though that proposition might be one which the majority of the Council were elected to support. That is not local self-government or democratic self government. That is turning town councils into bodies subject to oligarchies and absolutely at the mercy of small cliques of men. It goes on to say that no liability exceeding £50 may be incurred without a similar resolution of the Council based again on the recommendation of the Statutory Committee. Surely the promoters of this Bill must have forgotten that the great county boroughs and many of the municipal boroughs own their own public utilities, such as gas, water, electricity, and trams, which are nothing but huge commercial undertakings. The gas undertaking of the City of Birmingham is the largest trading undertaking in the city. It has a turnover of £3,700,000 a year. Its annual purchases amount to nearly £3,000,000, and it has a weekly wage bill of £14,000. That undertaking, of course, is managed by men of the first commercial standing who have got to make contracts and purchase material and plant. To say that they are not to make a bargain of £50 without waiting for a meeting of the Finance Committee, and a meeting of the Council to pass a Resolution on the recommendation of the Finance Committee is a reductio ad absurdum.

In the case of county councils and borough councils where this statutory obligation exists what they have to do, to get over the practical difficulty which I have pointed out, is at one of their quarterly meetings, on the recommendation of the Finance Committee, to vote a lump sum to each of the spending Com- mittees to carry them along until the next meeting of the Council, and then each spending Committee has an absolutely free hand to spend that lump sum how it chooses, and the pretence that the Finance Committee is going to control these small items of expenditure is absolutely swept away. If you consider the case of a great borough, one of our large provincial towns, subject to a restriction of this kind, what would happen would be either that you must follow the example of the county councils and metropolitan borough councils, to which I have referred, and vote these lump sums, in which case you would have to vote the largest sum conceivably necessary to carry you over the quarter, and the control of your Finance Committee is gone completely, or you would have to put on some sort of restriction which will hamper the Council, and therefore you either increase expenditure or increase inefficiency, and in either case increase the rates.

Clause 2 provides for the transfer to the Treasury of the powers of the Ministry of Health as regards property and inquiries for the sanction of loans. Again, this is going to mean an increase of rates and an increase of taxes, too. Most hon. Members have, I suppose, received a circular from the society which, I understand, is responsible for the production of this Bill. They meet the possible objection that the Treasury has not got the requisite staff for this purpose by saying they can take over these officials from the Ministry of Health, but hon. Members should understand what this means. Reference has been made to projects which have been thrust upon local authorities by the Ministry of Health, but take a project which is not thrust upon them, which they themselves are anxious to carry through. Take the case of a proposal for a new water supply or a new sewage plant, or the purchase of house property or any one of half a dozen things requiring a loan. There has got to be an inquiry. Finance is not the only thing which has got to be inquired into. The officer of the Ministry of Health has got to go down and inquire into the whole purpose and scope and cause of the proposal being made, and he has got to see whether it is a proper proposal to make and whether it is going to be effective for the purpose for which it is put forward. The Ministry of Health will not be able to divest itself of these duties merely by handing over to the Treasury the inquiry into finance, but must still make its own investigation into these aspects. Therefore the only result of this clause would be that there would have to be two inquiries instead of one, two inspectors, two sets of officials, and all that extra cost to the ratepayers and to the taxpayers by reason of the additional bureaucracy which would be set up. That is not going to be a measure likely to decrease rates.

I am in sympathy which what I believe to be the intention of Clause 3. I think it is desirable that publicity should be given to the amount of local expenditure throughout the country; but I do not think that this clause is necessary to obtain that information, and to the clause I see some serious objections. The Clause begins by saying that certain estimates are to be sent by every local authority to the Finance Committee of the council of the county in which the local authority is situated. To begin with, local authorities are to send before 1st March a statement of the actual receipts and expenditure for the current year. That is the year which will expire on 31st March, a month after they are to send in the statement. The thing is not physically possible. What is to happen to the unfortunate mayor or lord mayor and town clerk of the local authority which fails to carry out this physical impossibility? The Mover and Seconder of the Second Reading of the Bill are callous enough to ask that they shall be fined £21 on summary conviction. It really is an outrage to ask people who are willing to take up these arduous duties to submit themselves to risks of this kind.

Not only are they to send in a statement of the account for the year of which a month has still to expire, but they are also to send in a number of estimates with regard to the forthcoming year, and when these have been sent in the clerk of the county council has to collate them and prepare a statement under the various heads of expenditure and receipts, showing the total expenditure, the total rates to be raised, the total receipts from other sources, the total loans outstanding, and the total loans proposed to be raised by all the local authorities to which the Bill would apply in the county. How long is it going to take him to do that, and what in the meantime are the other local authorities to do? The Bill goes on to say that it is not to be lawful for any such local authority to pass or approve the estimates for the forthcoming year before receiving and considering the county financial statement. Therefore they will not be able to levy their rates until well on in the financial year, the whole machinery of administration of a town of many hundreds of thousands of inhabitants will be held up while the clerk of the County Council is sweating over his returns, and if they venture to go on with their ordinary business they are to be brought up and fined £25. What is the object of this statement? Are we to say that the Town Council of Birmingham is not to fix its rates until it sees what the Town Council of Warwick or Leamington has decided what shall be its rate?

It cannot apply to county boroughs.

I agree it cannot do so in practice, but according to the Bill it does. If hon. Members will look at Clause 5 they will see that "local authority" includes any county borough.

I said that if it did apply to county boroughs and mixed up their finances with those of the county, in Committee the county boroughs would be treated as separate units.

I cannot think there can be any doubt of the intention of those who drafted the Bill, because they say most plainly in Clause 5 that "local authority" does mean the council of a county borough. I accept my hon. Friend's assurance that he is prepared to make the county borough a financial unit. That removes a good deal of the objection naturally taken by the great local bodies. I have said nothing about the objection which I think would naturally be felt by very large and important bodies in being asked to send their statement of accounts to bodies very much inferior to themselves in size and rateable value and in every standard by which you could measure their importance in a matter of this kind. I will assume that the Clause is to be so modified as to remove that objection altogether. If that be so, it does not seem that there is very much left in it, because you can perfectly well get the information desired from the Ministry of Health. They can collate and publish it, not in time to enable local authorities to regulate their rates accordingly for that year, but I do not think it is possible to do that in any case. That arrangement would mean that we should avoid all this passing about of correspondence between one authority and another where there is no connection whatever between the rates of one authority and those of another.

I come now to Clause 4. I do not agree with the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Mr. Myers) that there is anything to be said for this Clause. I have had some experience in promoting private Bills, and I know what the present procedure means. There are thorough safeguards for the protection of the ratepayers. The provisions of a private Bill have in the first place to be approved by an absolute majority of the council. Then they have to come before a public meeting. A poll may be demanded and you have to secure a majority there. You have an arrangement by which the people have an opportunity of electing their own representatives to govern them, and elections take place every year, so that the proceedings of a council are constantly under revision. It seems to me that it is going too far to suggest that when you have all those safeguards it should still be open to a few malcontents to come together and to be in opposition to the Bill. I have known of very considerable sums of money wasted in taking a poll on a private Bill. I have known very valuable and important provisions in a private Bill which have been lost or have had to be dropped in consequence of factious opposition from a few interested persons in the community. From my experience I have no hesitation in saying that if any reform is needed in the procedure regarding private Bills it is needed in the direction of giving greater power to the local authority and less opportunity to the factious malcontents to hamper and delay operations.

I hope I have said enough to convince the House that this Bill will not do. Practically every Clause has to go by the Board if it is to be a workable arrangement. However much one may sympathise with the title of the Bill—I could quite understand that hon. Members may wander in when the division is called and having asked what the Bill is about and having been told that it is something to prevent an increase of rates, they will immediately go into the lobby in support of it—I think it is quite irrelevant to say that the time has come when we ought to have great economy in local expenditure. That is not the question. The question is, will this Bill secure that object, and I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that it cannot do so, but on the contrary must do exactly the opposite.

I only intervene in this Debate, because the Bill which has been introduced to-day endeavours, in Clause 2, to affect, in a very serious manner, the functions of my Department and also the functions of the Treasury. Although I have listened carefully to the speeches of the Mover and the Seconder, and although it is stated the object of the Bill is to prevent increases of local rates, I am afraid there is little in it which will achieve that object. I do not propose to deal with the general clauses of the Bill. I understand that very strong opposition is manifested to them by that important body the Association of Municipal Corporations, and the hon. Member who spoke last, and who is an acknowledged authority on municipal affairs, has dealt with them very fully. In regard to Clause 2, I must state that the Government cannot possibly accept this Clause and, if it is persisted in, the Government will have to oppose the Bill. The object of Clause 2 as drafted is, in some matters and in some matters only, to transfer the function of the examination and sanction of loans to local authorities, from the Ministry of Health to the Treasury. Now the Ministry of Health, as hon. Members are aware, has taken over the functions of the old Local Government Board. The Local Government Board exercised the function of supervising local authorities and their finance to the satisfaction, I think, of both parties concerned, for a great many years. The Department has been organised and equipped with machinery for dealing with this very important work.

The work of sanctioning local loans is not merely the work of a financier; it is not merely the work of some experienced civil servant. It is work which, in its very nature, must consist very largely of careful and expert technical examination. When you have to deal with waterworks, tramways and similar forms of expenditure it is obvious you must have expert engineering advice as to whether a scheme in itself, as proposed by a local authority, is a good scheme from a technical point of view. My Department is equipped with a large body of technical officials whose duty it is to hold local inquiries, to go into schemes of this character when they are put forward, and to report on them to my Ministry. It is only when all these steps are taken that the question of sanctioning the loan arises and finance enters into the matter. It is evident that if this function is to be transferred to the Treasury, the Treasury will have to take over a very large portion of the staff and the duties of the Ministry of Health on the technical side. It is a function which the Treasury has never taken up and which I understand, in consultation with Treasury representatives, they are not anxious or ready to undertake.

I will go further than that. I would like to point out that, after all, the whole position of Municipalities is to some extent independent. The rateable value, the general conduct of municipal affairs by the local authority, the personnel in the way of permanent staff, are all questions which arise in the consideration of whether local proposals are likely to be sound or not. The Ministry of Health has for years past acted almost as the guardian of local authorities. They met local representatives every day and they were very well acquainted with the town clerks, the engineers, the mayors, and the members of different committees of municipalities. Apart, therefore, from any mere cut and dry kind of examination done in a perfunctory way, they knew the facts about a particular town—its expansion, its rateable value, its personnel and all the other facts to be considered in dealing with such questions. Therefore it is most irrational to my mind to try, as it were, to tear this system into two parts and no real argument has been advanced in favour of that course. It is quite true that a Committee which sat at the time the Ministry was reconstructed suggested in one short paragraph of its report—although there was no recommendation as to how the suggestion was to be carried out—that in regard to the redistribution of work they thought it desirable that such relations as the central Government maintained with the finance of local authorities should be in the hands of the Treasury rather than the Local Government Board. That seems to be one of the many happy thoughts which that Committee threw out, on very insufficient examination. They gave no reason why they arrived at that conclusion and they gave absolutely no indication how the matter was to be carried out. As I have pointed out, such a proposal would be disastrous to the relations of my Ministry with local authorities and its work in that respect, but it is not wished for, in fact it is opposed by the Treasury, and the Government certainly are not prepared to accept it.

I wish to point out to the House how misleading is one of the arguments adduced in favour of this proposal. We are told that the Ministry of Health, unlike the old Local Government Board, has new functions in matters relating to health and is pressing local authorities to carry out expensive schemes and that the local authorities, apparently not having enough trouble in dealing with one Government Department, are anxious to be able to appeal to another Government Department for protection against the Ministry of Health. I thought if there was one thing that local authorities or individuals hated it was being continually referred from one Government Department to another. I always found it was one of the great complaints that nobody could ever find out the Government Department they should go to to get a particular thing done. I cannot imagine that local authorities would in the least welcome the idea that after having with some trouble convinced the Ministry of Health of the justice of their demand and of their scheme they should then be asked to repeat the whole process at great length a little further down the street with an entirely new set of officials. That seems to me a curious form of economy. The expenses of local authorities in keeping people here to interview Government Departments would lead to an increase in the expenditure of the ratepayers' money rather than a diminution. Let us look for a moment at the salient facts. I have here a list of the sanctions of the Ministry in England and Wales during the year ended 31st March, 1921, for purposes other than housing. I will take the medical services of which we have heard so much in a certain section of the House—tuberculosis, sanatoria and dispensary purposes, £432,000; maternity and child welfare purposes, £118,000; venereal disease hospitals, £65,000; total, £615,000. The other purposes of local authorities, which are certainly not pressed on them by my Department, amount to £21,336,000. The Ministry of Health has to sanction loans for schemes originating within the purview of the members of the local authorities, and which are certainly not stimulated by the Ministry of Health, to the extent of £21,336,000, and the total amount of any schemes for which it might itself be responsible is £600,000. Has anybody ever seen a more inverted pyramid on which to base an argument, or a greater case of putting the cart before the horse?

There is a further argument which I would also like to advance. The Treasury in some respects is a competitor of local authorities regarding loans. The Treasury goes into the market to borrow for the Government, and the local authority goes into the market to borrow for the ratepayers. I do not say that the Treasury would ever take any undue advantage in this way, but I wonder whether local authorities would be quite happy and content in feeling, when they applied for sanction to a loan that might or might not be refused, that possibly at that time the Treasury itself was going into the market for money on its own behalf, and might have, I will not say the temptation, but some slight tendency rather, to wish to diminish municipal borrowing at that moment in order to promote its own schemes. At the present moment the local authority knows that it comes to a Department whose function and whose duty it is to look after the interests of the local authorities and of the ratepayers, who are an impartial and judicial body, who are not borrowing for the Government on their own account, and that in itself provides a great deal of confidence. I do not think it can be alleged that my Department has been reckless, hazardous, or spendthrift in allowing local authorities to borrow. I think local authorities who have been in contact with it will admit that questions are carefully and competently inquired into, that no undue extravagance is encouraged, and that the work is properly performed.

There has been no argument, except a theoretical argument which does not bear investigation, for what is after all a very violent administrative change, a change, I may say, which if carried out will require a very different clause from Clause 2, because Clause 2 only deals with certain sections of local authorities. The Ministry of Health has to deal with a large number of other questions and other authorities with regard to loans which are not covered by Clause 2. If such a change, therefore, was decided on, it could only be decided on after very careful investigation by the Cabinet into the whole matter in consultation with the Treasury and the Department most affected, and quite a different clause would have to be drafted from the one which is now on the Paper. I hope, therefore, that the promoters of the Bill will see their way to give me an assurance that they will not propose, having stated their case, to proceed any further with Clause 2. The Government are naturally very reluctant to interfere with Private Members' Bills or to use the influence which they possess in the division lobby against Private Members' Bills, but they cannot allow Private Members' Bills to interfere, without their consent, in the administration of Government Departments, and they will be reluctantly compelled to oppose this Bill with all their power if Clause 2 remains part of the Bill.

I may perhaps be allowed without impertinence to speak from the point of view of county councils and of the County Councils' Association, of which body I have the honour to be chairman, on a measure which involves in every line of it the relations of local authorities to the central authority. I do not propose to say anything myself upon Clause 2. The Minister of Health has pointed out that it is both inadequate in scope and open to the gravest objections in its object, and I have no doubt my hon. Friends who are responsible for this Bill, with that Parliamentary wisdom which would rather get a small thing than see a big thing killed, will take the action which the Minister of Health has rather suggested they should take with regard to Clause 2. First of all, this Bill does not proceed from county councils or from the County Councils' Association, and I think it desirable that that should be said, and said as early in debate as may be, because it might have the appearance, if that were not understood, of an attempt made by county councils to acquire new powers over other local authorities. It would easily be misrepresented as interfering with the very delicate poise and balance of the local authorities at the present time, and would really be, if carried in anything like this form, an embarrassment to the county councils in their endeavour to develop and facilitate friendly and workable relations with other local authorities.

Like the previous speaker, I desire to deal with this Bill clause by clause. As regards the first Clause, that is one with which I personally have much sympathy and which I think contains a very important practical suggestion. At present every county council—and that includes the London County Council, which is in essence a great, and indeed the greatest, municipality—works under regulations and enactments identical with this first Clause, and I think that, however well other great cities and county boroughs do their work—and it is well known that all of them do it excellently—they do not do their work conspicuously better than it is done by the London County Council, and therefore there is nothing in this particular enactment which of itself would of necessity embarrass or deteriorate the work of great municipalities, but I am sure the House recognises that it is not always a bad thing to have two types of local government, and we know that the great municipalities of the country have grown up historically in different ways. For my own part, if this Bill passes its Second Reading and goes into Committee, I hope the promoters will make it perfectly clear that they are not trying to apply Clause 1 to the great county boroughs. It is a very different thing when you come to deal with non-county boroughs and with urban and rural district councils. As a matter of fact, it would be a great help to sound local administration if the principle of submitting estimates to a finance committee and requiring the authorisation of a finance committee for all considerable expenditure, which is now the case in the county councils and in the London County Council, were also the rule and method of what are called the minor local authorities.

I should be very sorry, indeed, having said that, for it to be thought, either in this House or out of it, that there is any movement on the part of county councils as such to get this provision placed upon other local authorities. It is a suggestion made entirely independently of any local authority to which anyone here may belong, but I do say that the method which, on the whole, has worked well in the London County Council, and has worked well in all the county councils of England and Wales, is a matter for which there is much to be said, if it could be said to be of universal application, in reference to the great county boroughs, on the ground of their traditions, and of the different way they have received and acquired properties, and the way in which they are undertaking great trading concerns, that does not apply to other local authorities who may very well prefer their present method of financial expenditure and control. I, therefore, not speaking on behalf of the county councils at all, but in my individual capacity, respectfully submit to the House that there is a great deal to be said for this clause with its application limited, as I have suggested, and I am quite certain that more and more as local government develops in intensity, and has to do with a greater variety of subjects, you require to have, before its decisions are taken, not only the opinion of the administrative committee charged with the particular subject of expenditure, but also the judgment of a body of local administrators who look at it from what we may call the Treasury point of view. Over and over again it has occurred in the county council, of which I am a member, that legitimate and proper projects put forward by one of the great spending committees have had to be modified by the Finance Committee, because there were a number of them, and all could not be taken up at once fully. Other hon. Members, I am sure, who have had experience of county council administration, will agree with me that passing matters of importance to a financial committee has not hindered enterprise, has not lowered the standard of local government, but has given it force, precision and balance, where those qualities are most thoroughly and properly needed.

2.0 P.M.

Passing from Clause 1, my attitude towards this Bill is very different. On Clause 2, I will say nothing but that I agree with the Minister of Health. You cannot at this time and in this way transfer the powers referred to from one Department to another. There is a great deal to be said as to the relations of the local authorities and the central Government. There are overwhelming reasons why those relations should be modified, and I am glad the County Councils' Association the day before yesterday appointed a special committee to go into this particular matter with the object of making constructive proposals, which, in one form or another, I hope, will be submitted to this House before long. But certainly, at the present time, the arguments of the Minister of Health appear to me quite conclusive against Clause 2. With regard to Clause 3, which proposes to have brought together the various items of local expenditure by different local authorities, there is a great deal to be said, as my hon. Friend, the Member for the Lady-wood Division (Mr. N. Chamberlain) himself admitted, for such information being accurately obtained, and made easily available. But the provisions of this Clause go far beyond that. It really would not work in county government to ask minor local authorities to delay levying their rates and issuing their precepts until they got a report from the county council on the general finances in the county. The relations between county councils and the other councils are at once so delicate, and in many matters so imperfectly defined, and they depend so much on mutual goodwill, that to try to stereotype, as this Clause does, procedure of this kind, would, I am convinced, do more harm in promoting friction than it could do good in securing valuable information. I, therefore, agree with my hon. Friend, the Member for the Lady-wood Division, in approving the object lying behind this Clause of getting this kind of information, butt I am quite sure that this Clause is not well adapted to that purpose, and I incline myself to the view that it is the duty of the Ministry of Health, or whatever Government Department is charged with the local government problem, to secure this information direct, and to promulgate it to all local authorities of all kinds. It is perfectly obvious that no county council in its senses would ever dream of trying to get information about expenditure of county boroughs. We have already heard from the promoters of the Bill that that is an error or oversight in drafting. County councils have not the slightest wish to interfere in any way with county boroughs, and they have no right whatever to ask county boroughs for information, any more than county boroughs have the right to ask them for information. As a matter of fact, information is constantly changed between the two authorities, who are on the best of terms.

Clause 4 proposes to facilitate the rights of a comparatively few ratepayers in an area to oppose Parliamentary Private Bill enterprise on the part of the local authority. I think there must be a great deal of sympathy in this House with a proposal to empower those who are opposed to great expenditure under private Bills to make their voices heard promptly, and it may be effectively, but, considering that most local legislation of this kind is promoted, not by means of private Bill, but by means of Provisional Order, I think the true line of action in this matter is not that proposed under Clause 4, but what has already been suggested by an advisory council of the Ministry of Health, that in all Provisional Orders those holding the local inquiry should have power to reject all or part of the proposals, and so get a decision given locally at the very first stage, which might avoid unnecessary expenditure and controversy, which is incapable of success when it comes to the sphere of Parliament. On those grounds, I am bound to say that I think, numerically, the greater provisions of this Bill are not well calculated to carry out their object; but I attach great importance to Clause 1, limited as I have ventured to suggest it should be limited. Therefore, if I vote for the Second Reading, it will be with the hope and intention of eviscerating the greater part of the Bill in Committee. If I vote against the Second Reading, it will be on the ground that there is so little left in its present form to support that my voting for it might give rise to misconstruction. I await the utterances, which we are sure to have from the promotors, to show how far they are prepared to save little by sacrificing much.

It is only natural that the Minister of Health should champion his Department in not wishing any further control of the expenditure of the Department by the Treasury, but he must remember that the past record of the Department, over which he has only recently come to preside, is not a good one, and that we have been led to look upon the Ministry of Health, which has now taken the place of the old Local Government Board, as one of the big spending Departments of the State, and that as such it appears to us quite necessary that there should be proper control from the Treasury. However that may be, we quite realise, those of us who are supporting this Bill, that perhaps the time is not ripe for setting up control over the Ministry of Health, which is more or less at the present moment in its infancy. I have the word of my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham (Lieut.-Colonel Royds) that he is prepared to give up Clause 2 altogether if the Government will undertake not to oppose the Second Reading. So far as I know the Government are prepared not to oppose the Second Reading on the understanding that we shall not proceed with Clause 2. May I ask the right hon. Gentleman if that is so?

I can only speak by leave of the House, but I can say to my hon. and gallant Friend that, on that undertaking, the Government will withdraw its opposition.

I am very much obliged to the right hon. Gentleman. With regard to the opposition from other quarters of the House, obviously the most important is from the hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham (Mr. N. Chamberlain), who everybody acknowledges is a great expert on this particular subject, having had great experience in local government. The objections which he raised to this Bill and to the provisions of the different Clauses are exaggerated. In regard to Clause 1 with which he made great play, after all, the provisions are as regards county councils the law to-day. The wording of the Clause is identical with the provisions of the Local Government Act, 1888, as they apply to county councils. I fail to see, in regard to local authorities, that there would be any hardship involved or that any loss of efficiency would be likely to arise. I quite understand, when one considers the great local authorities, the city of Birmingham, say, and the great reputation it enjoys, the world-wide reputation for efficient administration, the representatives from that borough being very anxious that no particular control should be put upon boroughs of that kind. I quite appreciate the objections raised to that particular Clause, but that Clause as well as others can be amended in Committee to remove particular objections which the hon. Gentleman has put forward. It is the general principle of the Bill that we ask the House to support. So much for Clause 1. We have dealt with Clause 2. Now we come to Clause 3.

The object of Clause 3 is to give publicity to the amount of expenditure which will be incurred so as to collate, if I may use the expression, local expenditure with national expenditure. We shall then be in a position to judge what are the actual obligations of the country. Really it seems a step in advance being able to consider what we are able to afford. The hon. Member for the Spen Valley said the object of local authorities was judicious expenditure of the money available. To take the records of some local authorities they seem to have adopted a system of injudicious expenditure of money that is not available. That is a kind of expenditure which it is the object of this Bill to prevent. No one, so far as I am aware, is anxious to curtail necessary expenditure. Everybody, however, must agree that at the present moment this country is not in a financial position to incur what I may call speculative expenditure, or to make experiments at the public expense. Consequently it becomes necessary that some further check or supervision should be set up which would consider the expenditure of local authorities. Obviously no unnecessary check will be put upon the efficient necessary expenditure of public bodies. I see no reason whatever why this Clause, just as other Clauses, should not be amended in Committee to meet the objections put forward to-day. The principle in that Clause is to give publicity to the expenditure of local authorities, and this must be one acceptable to every true economist here.

Objection was raised by the hon. Member for Birmingham who said it would be an impossible position if the Estimates of expenditure of a subordinate local authority had to be passed by some other authority before it could be incurred. That is a difficulty which can be easily overcome by amendments in Committee. No difficulty arises on that, because all that the local authority has to do is to give an estimate of its proposed expendi- ture. That is done by the Government at the present time. The Government of the day does not have a free hand to make any expenditure it likes. At the beginning of the year it has to give an estimate of the probable expenditure for the year. I see no reason why local authorities should not have to submit to the same process. Such action obviously would lead to economy in the right direction and efficiency. I think I have dealt with the particular points of substance raised in the various speeches in opposition. I repeat that the promoters are willing and anxious to meet objections by Amendments in Committee. They submit that the point of this Bill and the principle involved is one upon which they can ask the House to vote; for that reason I hope the House will give a Second Reading to the Bill.

I hope the House will bear with me in addressing hon. Members for the first time upon a Bill which has a far-reaching importance as far as local governing authorities are concerned. I want to say at once that I am quite in harmony with hon. and right hon. Gentlemen who are responsible for this Bill in their argument that there is every need for economy, both national and local. During the number of years which I have had the privilege of serving upon a local authority I have always held that to embark upon improvident and ill-considered schemes was a wicked waste of our financial and national resources, and I think that the surest way to prevent waste in that direction is to place the responsibility for expenditure upon the people who are most directly elected and responsible to the ratepayers in any given locality. If that is accepted as a general principle, I submit to the House that there is not a single argument to be adduced in favour of any single clause in this Bill.

I feel quite sure that there is no intention on the part of the seconder of this measure to cast any reflection upon the hundreds of men and women who are rendering signal service from one end of the country to the other, on many of our local administrative bodies. Many business men are rendering signal service at the expense of neglecting their own business. Hundreds of working men are rendering service upon our local bodies at the cost of losing work and wages, and I think it would be a mistake and calculated to do grievous harm if it were felt in the country that this House did not appreciate to the fullest possible extent the value of the services which are now being so rendered. Although I am quite satisfied that that was not the intention of the Mover or the Seconder of this Bill, I submit that the provisions of this measure will bear that interpretation, and can be misconstrued in that way. It is for that reason that I take this opportunity of making that point clear, and I am sure it will be accepted by the promoters of this measure.

It has been argued by those supporting this measure, more especially in connection with Clause 1, that at the moment there is no provision for reviewing and revising the recommendations of the spending committees of our local bodies under the existing lay. I am distinctly opposed to Clause 1 of this Bill because it cuts right across the first principle which I ask the House to accept. In this Clause you deny to a local authority absolutely unless with the permission of the majority of the Finance Committee—such Committee consisting only of a quarter of the members of the local authority—the right of considering any proposal from any Committee unless it is based upon a recommendation of the majority of the members of the Finance Committee of that local authority. That appears to me to cut right across all the principles of democratic government for which this House so strenuously contends from time to time. It is assumed that at the present moment local authorities have the power to run riot under the existing law, and to do just what they like, when they like, and as they like. I submit, however, that assumption is quite foreign to the facts. There are no local authorities at the moment who can do that, because by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1882, local authorities must have their finance committees. I will quote from the Standing Orders of the authority upon which I have the honour to serve, and which is also common to all local authorities from one end of the country to the other. This is one of the provisions:

I will go even beyond that. Supposing that a council were to approve of a scheme which cannot yet be given effect to until it receives the sanction of the Ministry of Health for powers to borrow or receive a loan to finance the scheme. If there is an assumption that the Ministry of Health merely occupy their time in handing out coupons conferring borrowing powers on the local authorities, I submit to the House that my experience in local administration falsifies that assumption. My complaint against the Ministry of Health is that they have been far too ready to lay the heavy leaden hand on local authorities to prevent them giving effect to schemes which would have been of great advantage to the local authorities. I do not suppose that the vigilant eye of the Minister of Health will be in any way relaxed under the present Minister. I submit with all these provisions that there are adequate safeguards against municipal and local authorities running riot and spending the people's money recklessly and wastefully.

Clause 2, against which I have the greatest objection, has been withdrawn, but when I turn to Clause 3 I find that there has not been, in my opinion, a single argument adduced in favour of it, nor has any advantage been suggested that would accrue to the community or the country as a whole through giving effect to this Clause. I know what would be the effect of this Clause. It would create a great feeling of intense bitterness and resentment on the part of many small local authorities against the county council in their area. I heard only the other afternoon several hon. Members making speeches in opposition to the Government because they thought that the Government had unduly encroached upon the rights of private Members in this House. I have no doubt that those speeches were quite sincere, but, if this Clause became the law of the land, it would create the same feeling of antipathy and bitterness among local government bodies, because it gives an outside authority, a Second Chamber within their own county, power to supervise and unduly interfere with their functions and duties to the people whom they have the honour and privilege to represent.

Clause 4 is a very objectionable Clause. I have every sympathy with minorities, but there are fairly good safeguards for minorities of ratepayers at the present moment. Last Friday an hon. Member, discussing the measure then under consideration, said that it was promoted by a trade for a trade and in the interests of a trade, and I think it would be equally true to say, although I do not suggest that the promoters are influenced by it, that this is a Clause promoted by the legal profession in the interests of that profession. During the whole of my association with public work, I have always suggested that agreement ought to be come to locally if possible, and that measures, when they come to Parliament for sanction, ought to come as unopposed Bills, if that be at all possible. I have always suggested, before submitting Bills to Parliament, that every attempt to arrive at a settlement locally ought to be made in order to make the passage of the Bill less expensive. In my judgment, the ratepayers at present have safeguards fairly adequate and extensive with regard to the promotion of Bills. A meeting of ratepayers in the locality has to be held to consider the provisions of the Bill, and, if a small number of electors at that meeting dissent from any or every pro- vision in the Bill, they have the right to demand a poll.

This Clause goes very much further. It says, in effect, that if a small body of ratepayers numbering 100 object to any or every provision, they shall have the right to come here and be represented by solicitor or counsel in opposition to a Bill which has already received the sanction of a large majority of the people who will feel the effects of it. That would be a very good thing for the lawyers of this country, but in my experience the interests of the ratepayers generally are better safeguarded if they keep the lawyers' fingers out of the pie. It is because I believe that this provision cuts right across economy and is calculated to involve the electors in legal expenses not warranted in the circumstances that I give my most strenuous opposition to the Clause. I suggest, if there be any substance in the points which I have mentioned, that now that Clause 2 is withdrawn there is no justification for giving this measure a Second Reading. It fails in every one of the virtues claimed for it, and it is not calculated to do anything more to economise than is being done by hundreds of men and women who are struggling to-day on local government bodies to do the best that can be done under the circumstances in which we live. On the other hand, it is calculated to involve local authorities in vast expenditure which no one can estimate, and it is because that expenditure is not justified that I oppose the Second Reading of the Bill.

I want to state one or two reasons why I am going to vote against this Bill. When I first read the title of it, I had some hopes that it might lead to a reduction in local rates, and I feel that that is really the motive behind the promoters of the Bill. Whilst appreciative of that motive, one has to scrutinise the Bill very carefully with a view of ascertaining whether it is likely to realise its avowed purpose. I take very strong objection to the proposal to make compulsory the establishment of a statutory finance committee within every corporate body. It is quite true that it is not a new principle, because it is copied from the Acts of 1888 and 1899, but it is not clear that those proposals have worked out entirely satisfactorily, and, even if they have not been objectionable, no reason has been shown why they should be extended throughout municipal government. After all, the only final check upon local expenditure must rely upon the interest and sense of responsibility of the citizens themselves. Whatever safeguards we devise will be doomed to failure if there be indifference among the people themselves. A local authority is elected on a broad democratic basis, and it is necessary that citizens, when they are called upon to elect their local representatives, should recognise that they are shouldering a very heavy responsibility, and that they should take a deeper interest in those elections than they have done previously. I submit that whatever safeguards we devise to protect the interests of the ratepayers, the ratepayers themselves must take up their own responsibility of safeguarding their own interests.

Moreover, it appears to me that the universal adoption of this principle may lead to a good deal of irritation, for, after all, a statutory body ranks equally with the council itself, and it seems to me to cut across entirely the principle of local self-government. I feel therefore that that is a very dangerous proposal, for if I am able to judge aright the trend of modern development is towards casting upon the local authorities greater rather than less responsibility. This House is overburdened with work, and we constantly hear of schemes of devolution. This proposal however seems to be reactionary, contemplated from that point of view. As a matter of fact every local authority now has a finance committee. That finance committee is responsible to the council itself, and I cannot see how, even if you set up a statutory body, the work can be carried out more efficiently and economically than is the case to-day. The finance committee is selected from the elected members of the council and is responsible to that council, and it is for the council to determine whether or not it will accept the recommendations of the committee. To give to a body statutory authority to flout the desires of the majority of the council seems to me to be a very serious proposal and one that ought to be resisted.

With respect to Clause 2, the Minister himself has already stated the Government attitude on it, and the promoters of the Bill have agreed to the deletion of the Clause. If I am able to interpret their motive aright I think they have destroyed what they have previously regarded as the most important provision of this Bill. Undoubtedly there has been a very strong desire to re-transfer to the Treasury the power over local authorities. This is not an entirely new proposal. It is a reversion to the old practice which was found unsatisfactory and certainly the promoters of the Bill have been compelled to admit, first of all as a result of the very penetrating criticism of the hon. Member for Birmingham (Mr. Chamberlain), and, secondly, as a result of the statement of the Minister of Health, that it is absolutely impracticable for them to secure the enactment of this proposal. It appears to me that, having agreed to the elimination of this Clause, there is very little of importance left in the Bill, and I should have thought they would have deemed it hardly worth while to occupy the time of the House in pressing the Bill.

There is no harm in it.

My right hon. Friend says there is no harm in it. Perhaps he may think it would be better to devote the time of the House to this Bill rather than to some other proposal on the Order Paper. That I cannot say. But with respect to Clause 3 it has been admitted that there is something in it. It is desirable that local expenditure should be collated, and that the House should be in a position, when considering proposals for the raising of national revenue and for the expenditure of that revenue, to compare the money that is being used by and spent on behalf of local authorities. There is some value in a proposal of that sort. But this seems to me to be a very cumbrous device in order to secure what is generally admitted to be a desirable purpose. The mere requirement that local authorities shall make a return to the Ministry of Health would seem to me to suffice to serve all that is useful in this proposal. But certainly the Minister of Health is much more competent to collate and make available this information than are the county councils upon whom the Bill proposes to thrust the responsibility. Certainly if we persisted in making the county councils responsible for securing and returning this information, it would tend to increase rather than diminish local expenditure. If it is desirable to secure it, it seems to be proper to put on the appropriate Government Department—the Ministry of Health—the duty of doing it.

With respect to the last Clause, I urge that there are adequate safeguards already, and the proposal of the Bill would not tend to diminish but would rather increase local expenditure, because if a recalcitrant minority—a small proportion of the ratepayers—are able to pursue their opposition to a Bill a great deal further than they can do now it must necessarily involve the county council or borough council in a greater outlay for legal expenditure in resisting that opposition. The practice now is that a question of the acquisition of works of public utility is agitated in an area for a very long period. It is invariably the most important question that is thrashed out at municipal elections, and that it is for the people who are in favour, or who are opposed, to the particular scheme to make known their opinions on the matter. But so long as they can feel there are plenty of obstacles in the way, and that other persons will oppose, they themselves will not undertake the responsibility of opposing, and I think it simply tends to increased indifference on the part of the ratepayers.

After such a question has been made the subject of agitation in municipal elections, after the proposals have been carried by an absolute majority on the council, it is not now competent for any interested person or party to secure a snatch vote on the council in a matter of this sort. If the opposition are not satisfied they have the right to demand a poll on the question. A most important matter was recently settled in my own constituency in regard to the acquisition of the water works. All that procedure had to be gone through. The question has been one of importance in our public affairs for at least a quarter of a century. It then became a live question in the municipal elections. It is quite true that the constituents did not show a very close interest in the matter, not so close as they ought to have done, but ultimately the acquisition of the works was decided upon by a clear majority of the Council and the opposition not being satisfied demanded a poll. It is true that the result of the poll was by no means satisfying, for a very small proportion of the people troubled to vote one way or the other. It would have been possible, if this Bill had been made the law of the land, for those opposed to the Bill to carry their opposition a stage further, and that would have had no other result than to have increased expenditure on the part of the local authority. All that is required is that the citizens themselves must recognise that it is their duty to take an active interest in local affairs, and if they fail to do it they must accept responsibility for their own indifference. Undoubtedly, there is an aspect of the rating question which must be considered, and if this Bill had had the effect of inducing the Government to make some announcement to-day, it would have served a useful purpose. The relationship of local and national finance must be dealt with sooner or later. In my experience, in contact with local authorities, I know that they repeatedly aver that it is not so much a matter of their controlling their own finance as the fact that Parliament is constantly thrusting upon them additional responsibilities without making adequate provision for their being met. If this Bill had indicated any direction in which the burden of local ratepayers might have been eased, it would have been acceptable to the majority of this House; but, after the deletion to which the promoters have given assent, there is little remaining, and certainly nothing that can prove to be of any real or substantial benefit to the ratepayers of the country.

With the view of the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. Roberts), that the important part of this Bill has gone, I thoroughly agree. Clause 2, to my mind, was a vital feature of the Bill. It did provide what everyone who has the interests of this country at heart desires, namely, an effective check on the rapidly growing local expenditure. When we remember that local taxes have increased in country districts from an average, probably, of 4s. in the £, within ten years, to an average now of 13s. to 15s. in the £ that before the War the total rate levied and raised was £200,000,000, running neck and neck with the Imperial expenditure, which at that time had reached £200,000,000, and that the rates since the War, taking London alone, have approximately trebled, it is absolutely essential, unless we are to be snowed under by Imperial and local debt, that there should be some means of controlling the expenditure of our local authorities. Clause 2 did provide an effective check, and I deeply regret that the Minister of Health has come here to defend without argument the maintenance of his Department, which is really indefensible. I am not going to deal at any length with this point, because the promoters have chosen to agree to the proposal which he made that Clause 2 should be deleted, but I would ask the House to consider his position. Prior to the establishment of the Ministry of Health we had the Local Government Board, which was a controlling and regulating authority and practically nothing else. A few ambitious people succeeded in obtaining the destruction of the Local Government Board, and the Ministry of Health was set up. It has now become a huge spending Department. It controls national insurance; it controls housing and expenditure on housing—the most extravagant Department of State ever set up; it has a number of other Acts of Parliament to administer which all involve expenditure, and its functions also entail the compelling of the local authorities to do their duty and spend money. It is perfectly absurd that this spending authority can be expected to be, or can in practice effectually be, any check at all on local expenditure. We may hope that the introduction of this Bill, with this Clause calling attention to the new position and functions of the Ministry of Health as compared with the Local Government Board—which, in my opinion, did its work effectively—will at any rate have done good. But, so far as the remainder of the Bill is concerned, I am afraid it represents very little. What is left, however, will be of some advantage. The main feature of Clause 1 is that it does provide some check, in the local authority itself, on the expenditure which that local authority is proposing. I heard the speech of the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Mr. Myers), and I was rather surprised that a man who speaks on local government affairs with such knowledge and moderation, should actually describe this measure as cutting right across democratic principles. It does nothing of the kind. All that it seeks to do is to provide that the democratic body should exercise for itself the same checks that are exercised by every other body; and when the hon. Member behind me (Mr. N. Chamberlain), who speaks with the authority of the great corporation of Birmingham, tells us that this proposal would damage or interfere with that body, I venture to say that he is simply throwing dust in the eyes of the House of Commons.

You are throwing gold dust.

This House of Commons has been a democratic body for, at any rate, the last twenty or thirty years. It has had to consider local government in three Acts of Parliament. In 1888 it set up the county councils; in 1899 it established the borough councils of London; in 1902 it established the Metropolitan Water Board, which replaced the London water companies, and it established it on a democratic footing. All of those Acts setting up large spending bodies included exactly the same Clause, almost word for word, as Clause 1 of this Bill.

Did that stop the trouble?

I agree with my hon. Friend that this Bill does not go far enough. If it went further, I would the more gladly support it, but I support it for what it is. The hon. Member for Birmingham (Mr. N. Chamberlain) tells us that a county council which carries on a large commercial undertaking like the London tramways will be hampered and harrassed by this Clause. It carries on its work as efficiently as the great corporation that he represents, and to say that the Birmingham Corporation cannot carry on its gas works is, I say, throwing dust in the eyes of the House of Commons. All that the Clause requires is that a finance committee shall be set up, and that this finance committee shall consider expenditure in the form of estimates, before it is passed by the local authority. It is quite true, as the hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J. Jones) says, that it will not go far enough. It is quite true that this Clause has not prevented extravagance by the London County Council or the Metropolitan Board of Works, but it has done something. It is some check while the local authorities now have none. For that reason I shall support it. Clause 3 may have some objections to people who are not well versed in the methods of local government, but the principle tends for good. What it does—and this is the greatest protection democracy has—is to ensure publicity, and the main feature of Clause 3 is that we shall know, in the counties or the county boroughs where we live, what is the total local expenditure that is proposed even before it is passed. It is intolerable that we should have in some cases, as we have been informed to-day, as many as six rating authorities levying rates without regard one to the other and without everyone knowing or considering the total amount of indebtedness that is being put on the locality. It will ensure publicity as to the total indebtedness, and the ratepayer will perceive the slippery slope down which he is being led to this abyss of expenditure which, if we are not careful, is going to drown the whole of us. For these reasons I support the Bill. I regard it as a very attenuated thing, but what remains of it is good.

While agreeing entirely with the line of argument which has been adopted by the hon. Member for Ladywood (Mr. N. Chamberlain), I want to raise another objection from an entirely different point of view. By mere chance I read over the Bill to-day, and I discovered at the end of it a Clause to this effect:

"This Act shall apply to Scotland with the following modification."

In other words, a very important Bill is to be applied to us by one of these Clauses which, from the point of view merely of legislation for Scotland, we have always objected to. But, in addition to that, I am certain the very fact that it has been put on to the Bill in this way has not attracted the attention in Scotland which it deserves. I have not received so far as I know a single communication about it. For that reason, as a Scottish Member, I rise to put in a caveat against our being legislated for in this way. Our local government legislation has always been different from that of England, and in recent housing legislation and other matters of that sort we have always had a Bill of our own, for the reason that it is so absolutely different, and to put us at the end of an English Bill of this kind is bad legislation. Let me test it for a moment by what would happen to the county I represent. In that county there are, as the Bill describes them, Royal, Parliamentary, and police boroughs. What would happen to the borough of Renfrew, one of the oldest boroughs in Scotland, the Parliamentary borough of Greenock and the Royal borough of Port Glasgow, which I represent. They would have, under this Bill, to submit their accounts to the County Council of Renfrewshire. The Bill has been sufficiently riddled. Clause 2 has gone. I suggest that the promoters had better drop Clause 6 and leave Scotland out of it altogether. There is one other reason why this should be done. I am speaking entirely on my own and in no sense on behalf of the office with which I am more or less connected. It is a pure chance that I came in this morning. The Secretary for Scotland has recently set up a Committee to inquire into rating in Scotland. Until we have their report it will be entirely unwise to interfere with our local government in Scotland, and especially by a Bill of this sort. On these grounds I ask the hon. and gallant Gentleman to withdraw that Clause, but in any event I shall vote against the Bill.

3.0 P.M.

So much has been taken out of the Bill that some of the chief objections which have been urged to it have of course gone by the board. I regret that it has not been found necessary to do something in the way of passing Clause 2, or something in that direction, but after hearing what the Minister of Health has said about it I realise that the promoters have no possible course to take, if they wish to secure the Bill, except to withdraw the Clause. One sees the difficulty of giving the Treasury immediate control without their coming to Parliament. The only thing I can suggest is that the House should do its best to ginger up the Treasury and the other Departments to exercise financial control more effectively than it has done in the past. Another Clause which has gone out of the Bill is the review of the finance of county boroughs by county councils. We have only to consider what the effect of that would be to see how absurd and ridiculous the proposal would be in working. One only has to consider the finance committee of the West Riding County Council having to review the accounts of the great cities of Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and Halifax and being expected to do that in anything like a reasonable time. I do not know what the object of the review is, but it is obvious that the mere absence of staff would make it perfectly impossible to carry out any proposal of that kind. I do not entertain the same feeling of anxiety about the proposal of a statutory finance committee which some hon. Members do. I have seen the system work very well for many years. The West Riding County Council has succeeded in carrying out a certain number of trading concerns. Some people in the West Riding say it does too much and spends too much money, but the finance committee has worked very well. It has always been thoroughly representative of all the other committees. I do not think anyone in the West Riding would wish to abolish the system or regard it as an undue check. It has been a very useful check on extravagance. How is this going to work? It seems to me that the minor local authority is the one authority on which no check is to be put. The minor local authority is to send down its estimates to the county council, which will consider them and collate them. I can see a great many figures floating about, and a great many officials employed. The county council can only say to these minor authorities, "You are spending a lot of money, and therefore we must spend less." They have no power to say to the minor local authorities, "You must spend less, and we will spend more." They can only say, "You are spending a great deal. How very dreadful! How economical we must be!" Then the figures come up to the Treasury, and the Treasury goes through the vast process of collating them, and there is a great array of figures, covering acres of paper and employing a great number of officials. The result is that they present an indigestible mass of statistics. Who is going to read those statistics? I do not believe that the publicity that has been urged as a reason for this is going to have the effect which some people think.

The person you want to influence in order to get the rates down is the person who votes at municipal elections, and he will not read this enormous mass of statistics. The people who may read them will be the authorities themselves, and maybe one authority which has had a great difficulty in regard to spending will say: "Here is an authority next door to us who have spent a great deal more than we have. They are no richer than we are. We are not so bad as we are made out to be." Therefore they will increase their expenditure. It is not suggested that there should be any direct Treasury control. Direct Treasury control of all the actions of our great municipal authorities would be impossible. All that is suggested is simply that they should collate the figures, and that I do not think is going to be of very great service. A great danger of establishing anything of that sort is that a certain number of people will imagine that something is being done which is really useful. A measure of this sort may be actually mischievous because it will make people imagine that some safeguard has been established, whereas no real safeguard has been established, and possibly the cause of reform will have been put back rather than forward. Had the Ministry of Health remained under the management of the Minister who has recently left it, I would far rather that the Treasury had control than the Ministry of Health. It is not fair to say that the chief cause of the increase in the expenditure of local authorities is due to the Ministry of Health. The chief increase in the expenditure of local authorities is due entirely to the House of Commons. The chief expenditure has been mainly on education, police and highways. We passed the Education Act, and we should resent any suggestion that education should be crippled merely in order to reduce the rates. We also passed what I consider an unnecessary increase in the money paid to the police. As regards the highways, this House has insisted and the Ministry of Transport has insisted upon a higher standard. Therefore, we have no right to say that the responsibility for the increase in the expenditure of local authorities is due to the Ministry of Health alone. A system which this House regularly sanctions is the system of grants ad hoc. A grant is given by a Department to a particular body in consideration of the local authority spending so much more, and the local authority says, "We must spend this money in order to get what the Government will give us." Therefore, the expenditure grows like a snowball. The principle of compounding in regard to small houses has a very bad effect in causing neglect and indifference as to the increase of rates. I am aware of the convenience of that system, but I maintain that the more people we can make really feel what the rates mean the more economy there will be. It may be said that I have offered no constructive suggestion. I do think that a Bill like this may be dangerous, as it encourages people to think that there are real safeguards. I believe that the principle in Clause 1, in spite of what was said by the hon. Member for Ladywood, will be a salutary and useful change, but as to the rest of the Bill, I find no help.

The further this discussion goes the clearer becomes the un-wisdom of giving this Bill a Second Reading. It has a most attractive title. If we could believe that the result of the Bill would be to prevent increases in the rates, the House would be unanimously in favour of it and no one would be more marked in their unanimity than those who sit on these benches. It is clear that the burden of the rates falls upon the poorer classes in the community. That was made clear when we passed the Rent Restriction Act, and laid down the provision that any increase in the rates should be passed on to the occupier. Our opposition to this Bill is not based on any desire for an increase in rates, or on any antagonism to anything that is likely to prevent that increase. We oppose this Bill because we do not think that it is going to do what it sets out to do, and because we think that it will not prevent any increase in rates, and will do a great deal to interfere with efficient local government. I do not think the attitude of the Government is very heroic in the matter. They say that in so far as the principle of the Bill applies to them they resist it, but in so far as it applies to local authorities they are indifferent. That is consistent with the general attitude of the Government towards the local authorities in this country.

The strong point for the Bill, undoubtedly, is the fact that the Clause which is proposed to be inserted is not new. It already exists in Bills passed by this House for setting up local authorities. The hon. and learned Member for East Grinstead (Mr. Cautley) gave us a little historic survey of that fact. I would only comment on what he said by saying that whenever a Clause of that kind was inserted in the Bill there was a Conservative majority in the House of Commons, and it would be quite in keeping with that circumstance if the Conservative majority in the present House of Commons were to insist upon passing this Clause to-day. The insertion of that Clause has not had the effect of preventing increases of rates. I have here the very valuable and useful document which was published by the Ministry of Health, giving the amount of local rates during the years 1913–14, 1919–20, and 1920–21.

The hon. Member who moved the Second Reading of this Bill (Lieut.-Colonel Royds) read a speech by the Chairman of the finance committee of the corporation of Newcastle-on-Tyne which might be construed as giving some support to this Bill. I do not think it was directed to the general principle of the Bill; it was a comment made on Clause 4. But whatever may be the views of the chairman of the finance committee, the corporaton of the city of Newcastle are against this Bill as are all the corporations of the great cities of this country.

Every Member will have received, as I have received, a communication from the Association of Municipal Corporations, showing that the people on whom it is sought to impose these restrictions are unanimously opposed to it. In the city of Newcastle-on-Tyne there has been a percentage increase in the rates since 1913–14 of 101·3 and it might be thought that the absence of this provision in that city was the cause of the large increase. But let me quote figures from some of the metropolitan boroughs in London which have had this provision since the Act under which they were constituted was passed. Bermondsey has an increase of 110·7, Bethnal Green 149, Camberwell 102, Deptford 119, Greenwich 107, Hackney 108, St. Pancras 106, Shoreditch 110, Southwark 140. So whatever the existence of a finance committee of the kind suggested may do for a corporation, it does not prevent an increase in the rates which may be a great deal more than the increase in those places where no such committee exists.

Was that not due to the existence of a Labour majority?

No; what about Kensington?

I think that if I leave that point to be settled between the right hon. Baronet and my hon. Friend, I shall be wise. Where you have had this limitation imposed—and it is a limitation upon the general powers of the council—it has been at the beginning of their histories when they were being set up. On all these occasions you had new bodies created. It is an entirely different thing to start a local authority with this restriction and to impose it on a local authority which has had many years of historic development free from it. You are going to strike a great blow at municipal efficiency if, against the will of the great corporations of this country, you impose this limitation upon them. As the hon. Member for Birmingham (Mr. N. Chamberlain) well said, you introduce practically an oligarchy into what is a democratic governing body. You take one-fourth of the members of the council and vest them with statutory powers which enable the majority of one-fourth to override the will of the majority of the council. That does not make for efficiency in municipal life.

The hon. and learned Member for Middleton (Sir R. Adkins) is a member of a county council and a member of the County Councils' Association, and yet he expressed the opinion that the great county boroughs of this country should be eliminated from this Bill. If the promoters accede to that request, and as the Ministry of Health, in effect, is exempted, there is nothing left but the small bodies, and these are bodies who do not need the provisions of the Bill, because the aim of the Bill is to withdraw the supervision of finance from a large body of people with general interests and concentrate it in the hands of a small body who can give particular attention to it. That was a pertinent argument in dealing with great councils, but in dealing with small bodies of few members the main force of that argument is lost. So the House has to impose either on the great cities of this country, who are unanimous in resistance to this Bill, a restriction from which they have always been exempt, or it has to eliminate them from this Bill, which is already emasculated, and to pass a Bill which is going to serve no practical purpose, and may well, as the hon. Member (Mr. Lane-Fox) has said, have a dangerous effect in inducing in the minds of the people the opinion that it is going to do what it will fail entirely to do. For those reasons I ask the House to refuse a Second Reading to the Bill.

I consider that this Bill is a very good instalment in connection with the idea of reducing local expenditure, and therefore I shall give it my support. I am constantly bombarded with complaints from all parts of the division which I represent as to the rapid increase in local burdens and I do not see how this can be remedied unless some effort is made to put some limitation on the increase of rates. The hon. Member for Birmingham probably lost sight of the fact that the great city of Birmingham recently passed a resolution to limit its local rates to a certain percentage in the pound. I think that a Clause to that effect would have been a great advantage in the Bill, and I submit to the promoters that they might endeavour to submit that idea when the Bill comes before a Committee. Supporters of the Bill have referred to the fact that in certain districts where finance committees exist, rates have advanced by leaps and bounds, and I notice that there was strong objection by the hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J. Jones) to the suggestion that the Labour party to some extent is responsible for some of these increases. I do not want to go into that controversy, but the fact remains, that where Labour has been in a majority on local bodies, it has always shown a strong desire to spend public money. We ought to put a check on all this expenditure by every means, and I hope that this Bill in Committee will be so revised as to ensure complete supervision of these local rates.

I would also like to see inserted a provision which would limit the power of this House to impose burdens on local authorities without consulting these local authorities. We want to put a check on the present system under which Government Departments issue Regulations and Orders in Council which impose heavy burdens on local authorities without any discussion in this House. I do not think that that makes for peace in our local government. I put a question on this subject in the House yesterday, and the Prime Minister in replying rather combated my suggestion that these expenses imposed on local authorities by Orders in Council and Departmental Regulations had increased during the War. In my judgment, the measures during the War period were, to a large extent, responsible for the increases. An hon. Member has mentioned that the Education Act, the Housing Act, and other Acts have imposed heavy burdens on local authorities. We are losing sight of the fact that we have almost reached a limit. When you find that a man living in a house rated at £15 a year has to pay in rates £20 a year, the situation is very serious. It is time that some check was put on this everlasting increase in local rates. The hon. Member for Spen Valley (Mr. Myers) suggested that the Bill would put a veto on the appointment of all officials by local authorities. I fail to see how he reached that conclusion. I do not apprehend that there is any desire to add to the number of officials. Already we have enough of them, not only in our local authorities, but in our Imperial organisations.

Too many.

It is said that the Bill would destroy the democratic principle. It would do nothing of the sort. A finance committee would be appointed and it would be elected every year. The members of that committee would be amenable to the votes of the other members of the authority, and on the expiration of their term of office as members of the local authority, they would have to answer to the community for their actions, if they sought re-election. The hon. Member for Birmingham (Mr. N. Chamberlain), in referring to the Birmingham gas undertaking, said that a great concern like that should not be called upon to check its expenditure. The simple idea of the Bill is that each department of an authority should present its estimate. In this House expenditure is dealt with by means of Estimates, which are submitted to and approved by the House. Surely there can be no great hardship if local authorities are asked to adopt the same procedure, so that estimates might be discussed before expenditure is incurred. The Bill is a move in the right direction. It aims at reducing the burden of local rates, which is one of the most pressing matters of the moment.

The Bill is entitled a Bill to prevent the increase in local rates. So far as I have been able to judge from the discussion, nobody has yet suggested how local rates would be decreased by the passing of the Bill. When I look at Clause 4 I find that local rates are likely to be increased, for the Clause gives to a very small minority of the people, even after a poll has been taken, the right to compel a local authority to protect itself by legal arrangements before a Committee of this House or of another place can approve an application to introduce any kind of local reform which the authority might desire to initiate. Those of us who are members of local authorities know what an expensive business it is to go to law and yet those who are responsible for this Bill provide that an almost infinitesimal minority of people in any town or city may compel the local authority to spend thousands of pounds of the ratepayers' money in order to approve something to which the local authority is already guaranteed the right under its constitution. I am a constitutionalist, but I might describe this Bill as a Bolshevist Bill, as providing for the dictatorship of the minority. It is a soviet of people who think they have something to grumble at. It is Bolshevism in excelsis —Bolshevism in tall hats.

We Labour Members are told that we have no capacity to understand local expenditure. We have had figures presented to us. I am not much of a hand at figures. The only figures I know are those in the streets. The figures presented to us show that there has been an average increase of 100 per cent. in local rates. Those who are members of local authorities know that the increase in the cost of administration has been anything from 200 to 300 per cent. Materials, wages, and all things we have to buy have gone up in price from 200 to 300 per cent. Yet the great charge of extravagance is made against us because, in order to meet these increased costs, we have increased our rates on the average about 100 per cent. On that charge we are not guilty. We have our local finance committees. I am a member of a council in which the Labour party has a majority. We are not business men and we plead guilty to the fact. It is the only virtue we possess. I generally find business men take more out of the others than we are able to do. We have a finance committee, and we have estimates presented from every department before we present our final figures to the Council. Yet we are only working men. Expenditure is not agreed to until the estimates are presented to the council. There is nothing in this Bill to prevent officers of the council from spending more money than is estimated for, if necessity demands it from their expert point of view. What can you do with them? The very people who this afternoon have protested against local authorities spending money without consent and without proper estimates are the very people who will walk into the Lobby tamely when the Government present Estimates, not for a few thousands, but hundreds of millions of pounds. They do not ask for figures, but they back the Government. Yet local authorities are to be "cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd."

If you are really anxious to reduce rates find some further means of raising revenue for local purposes. There is one means which has not been suggested. There is one form of property which pays nothing to local rates. Nothing is paid to local rates even by the people who own ground values. I come from a district which 50 years ago was almost derelict. To-day it is one of the most valuable properties in the East End, with huge docks in the neighbourhood. Give us a right to levy a small tax upon that property which has increased in value, but not in consequence of the efforts of the people who own the land. Give us the right to raise revenue in that way and we shall reduce rates in our own borough by 25 per cent.

By putting it on somebody else.

We want to take it off the people who are least able to bear it and put it on to those who are making money out of the exploitation of these ground values. There are men who hold small offices and who make thousands a year in the City of London, and who pay very little in rates, because they hold a small amount of property, and there are other men in various districts who have to carry on business in big premises, and because of the big premises have to pay very high rates. [An HON. MEMBER: "What about the farmer?"] The farmer is in exactly the same position, and a large number of people who get rid of their responsibilities in this way come to this House with Bills showing that we are not raising revenue in a proper manner, and putting the blame upon local authorities who are trying to do their best in difficult circumstances. What is the position in my district? We have a population of 300,000 people, and 70,000 children attending public elementary schools. Our education rate is very high, and there are other districts in London whose education rate is lower than ours, because in proportion to their population their rates are lower, but their rateable valuation is higher. I have quoted this case before, and I will quote it again. The City of Westminster for a 1d. rate can raise as much money as we can raise for a 6½d. rate, yet we are called extravagant and they are called economical, although they spend twice as much money in 12 months on public administration as we do. They are the economists, while we are charged with being squandermaniacs. The whole system should be reconsidered from the standpoint of the capacity of the people to pay, and Bills of this kind are only camouflaging the situation. For that reason I oppose it, and hope that this House will some time or other take into consideration the whole question of rating, and make every district pay in proportion to its capacity, and make all sections of the community pay according to their means.

In common with other Members, I much regret the deletion of Clause 2 from this Bill. I think it was one of the great safeguards in the Bill, but the Minister of Health, not realising that his has become a spending Department instead of a Department for overlooking local authorities, stated he could not agree to Clause 2 remaining, otherwise the Bill would be opposed. Certain parts of the Bill are quite good, and I instance Clause 1. I have served on a local authority for many years which has this Clause, and it has been a great safeguard to the rates as well as a great advantage to the authority, because the Finance Committee have taken into consideration these very points which are mentioned in Sub-section (4). They have taken into account the existing financial commitments, and the liabilities of the authority, including any liability to make payments in furtherance of a precept from another authority. When you have precepts coming in from bodies like the London County Council and other bodies, you must take them into consideration, and that is really the only reason I can see for Clause 3, because it does make the authority which has the co-ordination of all these figures look into these matters and hear the representations of their various members upon it, and as many of the minor local authorities have representatives upon the major authorities, it does to a certain extent form a check. The hon. Member for East Newcastle (Major Barnes) suggested that the Clause in regard to the Finance Committee was of no advantage. He instanced Newcastle as going up 101 per cent. and he instanced the borough which I have the privilege to represent, St. Pancras, as being increased 106 per cent. Why? Simply because the people did not go to the poll, and we have a Labour majority on the borough council. Many other metropolitan boroughs that he instanced are in identically the same position. We are not surprised that the hon. Member for Newcastle-on-Tyne does not propose to support this Bill. Some hon. Members are always ready to give lip-service to economy, but when it comes to a real case of economy, then they say, "We are going to oppose it." We know what value to put upon that. In regard to Clause 3, I feel myself somewhat in sympathy with those Members who have raised the point as to large municipal corporations having to go to county councils to have their funds considered. But I think there is no power given here further than that of making representations to them in a friendly sort of way, and it is good that there should be an opportunity of co-ordinating the various amounts that have to be considered. I am inclined to think that this Bill, even in its emasculated form, would be a step in the right direction. There must be a stop put to this rake's progress with local rates. They have gone up and are continuing to go up, and unless some check is put upon them they will undoubtedly go up further and further. We see taxation at a terrific figure; we have seen a Budget introduced within the last two days which gives no relief from taxation. Perhaps I am not justified in saying that, because it does leave out the Excess Profits Duty.

And the wines and cigars.

I do not think the Government would have left out the Excess Profits Duty, had they not seen they were going to get hit if they kept it in.

"His master's voice."

I think it was a matter rather of necessity than of real giving away, but in any case we have got very high taxation. We have got rates, I believe, in one borough of 32s. 6d. in the £, and where are they going to end? There must come an end somewhere. Look at the effect of this upon housing policy. Many of the houses which have been built under the housing schemes have to bear additional rates. Some of them are bearing as much as 7s. a week for rates alone. If we do not have some method of checking the rise in local rates, which this Bill will do in a small form, I feel we are landing ourselves into local bankruptcy, and indeed, bankruptcy all round. I hope this Bill when it goes into Committee, as I trust it will go into Committee—I certainly will vote for it and many other Members will vote for it also—will have something inserted in the place of Clause 2, which was the substantial part of the Bill, and I am sorry to see that the new Minister of Health has stated that he will not agree to it. I shall, however, vote for the Bill.

The Bill has been so thoroughly discussed from all standpoints that I intend to refer to only one particular point. One hon. Member opposite stated that the words in Clause 1 were taken from the Local Government Act of 1888. I have got the Section before me, and at the end of that Section, which provides for committees to be constituted, the last Sub-section is: "This Section shall not apply to county boroughs." The Bill before us does apply to county boroughs, and as such part as I have had the honour of taking in local government work has been associated with county boroughs, I naturally look at it from that standpoint, and I look at this Bill as a practical man to see whether it will tend, in regard to county boroughs, in the direction that the promoters say it will. They state that their object is to prevent the increase of rates, but not one of them, so far as I have been able to hear, has given us the slightest indication of how that will be brought about. I submit, trying to look at the matter practically, that instead of its tending in the direction of preventing an increase of rates, such effect as it will have will tend exactly in the opposite direction, of increasing the rates. In all our county boroughs we have finance committees. I think we all regard the finance committee as one of the most important on the council. It is of vital importance that the finances of our boroughs should be most carefully considered, and so far as I know the constitution of such committees, they are practically always composed of the most responsible, the most thoughtful, and the most careful men upon the council.

I look at this Bill to see what the effect is likely to be on the constitution of these committees. Hon. Members support the Bill because they are afraid that county boroughs are guilty and will be guilty of extravagance. If they are guilty of extravagance, that extravagance must take place by a vote of the majority of the council. It could not be otherwise, but that council, the majority of which is now charged with being guilty of extravagance, is the very body which will select this finance committee, and when, as a result of this Bill, they find that their powers are completely taken away and that the committee which they appoint in their stead will have complete control over finance, then in the interests of the objects they wish to promote they will watch the formation and constitution of the finance committee as they have never done before. What will be the natural effect? I will use an illustration. A council is chosen with a majority directly in favour of promoting certain objects which necessarily involve expense. They are elected for that purpose, and they want to achieve that end. Under this Bill they will know that they will be absolutely barred from carrying out their objects if the finance committee is composed of men opposed to their views. They will take very great care every year so to constitute that committee that they may be absolutely certain of securing on that committee a majority in favour of the ends they have in view, and instead therefore of county boroughs having in the future the solid, careful, thoughtful finance committees which they have had, honestly striving their best under very great difficulties to protect the rates and the town, you will have a committee the very object of which in its appointment by reason of the majority of the council will be the direction of expenditure rather than the direction of economy, and it seems to me, looking at this Bill with the very object its promoters have in view, that instead of promoting that object, it will have the exactly opposite effect. If it is taken to a Division, I shall go into the Lobby against it.

The hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J. Jones) has a curious idea of the method of reducing the rates. District A has a rate of 15s. in the pound, and he will reduce that in this way. He will get District B to pay 5s. of that 15s., and then the inhabitants of District A, who reap the advantage, will only have to pay 10s., and that is what he calls reducing the rates. If I have an income of £1,000, derived from investments or from a salary, and I spend £1,200, I do not reduce my expenditure of £1,200, but I get the hon. Gentleman to give me £200 a year, and that is what he calls reducing expenditure. I think we have had a very effective reason for the great rise in the rates which has taken place in those districts in which the hon. Member and his friends have the predominating influence. I may point out to the hon. Gentleman, when he said that this was a Bolshevik Bill and talked about the minority, that I was under the impression the Bolsheviks were in a majority in Russia. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] I believe I am also entitled to say that the real meaning of the word "Bolshevik" is "a majority," and therefore, if they are not in a majority, that description is erroneous. The hon. Member who has just sat down (Mr. G. Thorne) asked what is the object of the Bill unless it is to reduce rates, and he drew a picture of a county council or a borough council, which must naturally be an extravagant council to make his argument pointed, and which, previous to the passing of this Bill, had a finance committee which was perfectly useless and did whatever the extravagant gentlemen upon that body desired. Now, he says, what will be the result of this Bill? There may possibly be an effective finance committee, and therefore the majority, who are extravagant and reckless, will take care that the finance committee is not effective but is tarred with the same brush as they are themselves. We will suppose that that is so. Then this Bill cannot be called an undemocratic Bill, because in that case the majority would still rule. Further, I would point out that the effect of that would be to enlighten the ratepayers and the electors of that council as to the actual objects which their representatives have in view, and at the next election it is to be hoped that they would return other people with saner and more businesslike views. We must have a decrease in the rates. We cannot go on spending these enormous sums, and we shall do no good by endeavouring to shuffle the burden from our shoulders on to somebody else. What we want to do is to reduce expenditure, and not to alter the incidence of the rates. The hon. and gallant Member for Newcastle East (Major Barnes) said that county boroughs had been taken out of the Bill, but that is not so. So far as I understand, the effect of the undertaking given by the promoters is that county boroughs shall send their figures direct to the Treasury, instead of sending them to the county council. I think that is a very good Amendment in the Bill. I do not think you could ask the Corporation of London, for instance, to send its accounts to the London County Council. It is a far older body. Comparisons are odious, and I will not say which, in my opinion, is the better, but, at any rate, the Corporation is by far the older body—

And gives the best dinners.

And if the accounts are to be sent to any other body, they should be sent to the Treasury. The same applies to the great body which my hon. Friend opposite so well represents, though I am sorry at the present moment he is opposed to this Bill. His position, however, is natural, because anybody who has any authority never cares to have anybody else put over him or to have his actions challenged by a superior authority or anybody else. We are asked in what way this Bill is going to promote economy. It may seem a foolish thing on my part to say what I am going to say; nevertheless, it is correct. It will draw the attention of the elector to the amount of money that the particular authority in which he is interested is spending. At the present moment, I believe, the vast majority of electors do not in the least know what is going on, and I might almost say that within the last few months the fact that a demand note has been presented almost as great as one's rent, and in some cases exceeding that amount, has awakened people to the fact that very great and unnecessary extravagance is going on, and even if the expenditure is neither unnecessary nor extravagant, they have not the money to meet it. If the accounts are first investigated by a finance committee, and that committee, as I hope, consists of business men who are also economists, then I hope that that finance committee will have the courage of its opinions, and will, at any rate, endeavour to bring about a decrease in expenditure. If it does not do so, and if, at the next annual election that committee, or the majority of it, are turned out, and other people are put in, then the ratepayers will know of it, and those men who are turned out will be able to go to the ratepayers and point out that they lost their position on the committee because they were economists. I think, under those circumstances, they would very likely be reelected.

Does the right hon. Gentleman realise that we have a finance committee in Birmingham, that it has effected economies with no statutory rights?

4.0 P.M.

I am aware of that, and, therefore, I cannot understand the argument of my hon. Friend. I have always been brought up to consider Birmingham as the Mecca of corporations, and I am not in the least surprised to hear that the corporation has already a finance committee. Then why object? Why not allow the mantle to descend on other less fortunate corporations?

We are perfectly ready to let everybody do the same, but this Bill seeks to do something entirely different and detrimental.

What I understand this Bill is going to do is to set a statutory finance committee which is to control expenditure, but if the county council, or county borough council, or other authority disagree with the findings of the finance committee, they can, at the end of the year, elect another committee. What harm is there in that? I cannot conceive there can be any harm, but I can conceive good. Another point has been made, and that is that these different authorities are to present their accounts to the Treasury, and it is asked, what is the use of that, because the Treasury has no power to compel any alteration in the accounts? I had the honour of serving on a Committee—a very small Committee—consisting of well-known Members of the House which sat last December, I think, to consider the question of what was to be done with regard to local legislation. The Committee was composed of Members of all parts of the House with the possible exception of the Irish Nationalists, and that Committee passed unanimously a Resolution recommending that with every Budget there should be presented to this House a statement of the local expenditure. This Bill endeavours to carry out that principle, which, I think, is absolutely necessary. I venture to say that the great majority of people in this country have not the faintest idea what the cost of local administration is, and it is very difficult for them to find out. I, as a ratepayer in a particular district, may possibly find out what the rates are in my district, but it is very difficult for me, without expending a very considerable amount of time, to find out what the rates are all over the country. This Bill will enable that to be done. There has been already this year a step taken in that direction, because in the Finance Bill there is a column stating what the local expenditure is, and, in view of the very serious financial position in which we are, it is very necessary to know not only what the expenditure for Imperial purposes is, but what the expenditure for local purposes is, too. After all, it all comes out of the pockets of the same people. There is little difference between the ratepayer and the taxpayer, except in some districts, such as alluded to by hon. Members, the electors are not ratepayers—

But they are.

Then there is a difference of opinion on that. I say they are not ratepayers.

On a point of Order. May I ask, Sir, whether under the Rent Restriction Act the tenants are not made liable for the rates?

That is not a point of Order.

The hon. Gentleman who has intervened says that, though they do not pay in rates, they pay in their rent. That argument has been advanced over and over again, and I think it is to a very great extent fallacious. The rents were in the old days based upon supply and demand. Now they are fixed not by supply and demand, but by some arbitrary law foolishly passed by this House. These people do not pay directly. If they pay indirectly they do not see it. They see the advantages, or think they see them, in this indirect payment.

Another point in the recommendation of this Committee, of which I have the honour to be a Member, was the question of empowering certain people to protest before a Committee of this House against any legislation which might be proposed. We passed that, so far as I remember, unanimously. What was the object of it? We were told by the hon. Member for Norwich that a poll could be taken in the district. Well, notices of poll are put up on the church door with a number of other notices, and the vast majority of people never see them. If they go to a poll it is easy enough to arrange the matter, especially in certain districts where again, as I say, a great number of the people who will vote, perhaps the majority, will be in favour of expenditure: they do not pay any rates at all, or if they do, indirectly. Therefore we recommended that there should be power on the part of certain people to have a locus standi before the Committee upstairs. This, it may be said, is going to cost a little money. Will it?

A large amount!

There is a difference of opinion between my idea of what is a little money and that of hon. Members opposite. Their ideas are much grander than mine. Leaving that aside, however, for the moment, let us say it will cost a certain amount in fees for counsel and other legal expenses. But the very fact that such a Bill can be opposed, if it is a foolish and a reckless Bill, may induce the authority to say: "If we go before a Committee of the House of Commons, at a cost of £2,000 or £3,000, a judicial committee in the calm atmosphere of the Committee Room, we shall likely lose the Bill; we may get what we want"—which is perhaps £10,000—"but it will cost us £2,000 or £3,000, and we will, therefore, drop the Bill." If they go forward with their Bill, though it will cost £2,000 or £3,000, it may have saved £10,000, £15,000, or £20,000 a year. I do not think the argu- ment of going to add to the rates and not reduce them is justified by the proposals of the Bill. Personally, I very much regret that Clause 2 has been dropped. I should be the last person to require or demand that the Government should have any control over local authorities in these matters except that which the old Local Government Board used to have. The Government ought not to be continually interfering in these matters.

On the other hand, there were certatin matters over which the old Local Government Board had control, and they were generally exercised in an extremely proper and able manner. Unfortunately, the Local Government Board has now got tmixed up with the Ministry of Health, and the result has been that that body has become a very great spending Department. I hope under the new direction it will be more economical in the future. The Treasury should be the watch-dog over expenditure, and if this House is to exercise a certain control over the local loans that power should be in the hands of the Treasury. I do not know whether the Secretary to the Treasury will agree with me, but my own opinion is that the vast majority of hon. Members of this House will prefer that the control should be exercised by the Treasury and not by the Ministry of Health.

I rise, not to repeat the arguments which have been used and so well put forward, but being connected as I am with the Urban District Councils Association I think I can put in a few words the views of this body. They represent very numerous bodies and cover a large part of the country. They consider all these matters, and the Executive of that Association has considered this Bill and has unanimously disapproved of it on the grounds which have been put forward, that it would interfere with efficiency and would really not promote economy, but in the long run would be the cause of extravagance. I hope that nobody will say that when these local governing bodies disapprove of this Bill it is because they desire to waste the ratepayers' money. Those who know what local government is know that that is far from being the case. The members of these bodies are returned to carry out important work, and if they waste public money they are almost bound to produce a rising of the ratepayers, and those who have been guilty of extravagance are generally turned out. All those who feel the great necessity of economy I hope will proceed in a different way, and attempt to carry with them the great and small local authorities, and not attempt to come in and dictate to them. If they feel the necessity for legislation let them approach those bodies. They are as desirous as any of us for economical and efficient administration, and we should try to get their opinion and advice, consult them at every step, and do our best to obtain their co-operation.

I was very much surprised by one or two statements which were made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury). He rightly directed a good deal of attention to the question of publicity. I cannot speak for the practice in England, but in Scotland, in the matter of local accounts and local rates, it is the uniform practice, not merely to advertise substantial and leading facts, but also to invite the ratepayers themselves, as individuals, to examine the accounts. What is the response in the average locality to that widely-published appeal? There is practically no response at all. My right hon. Friend, therefore, is attacking the deplorable apathy of local ratepayers at the present time, and the device which he proposes would do absolutely nothing to remedy it. It is a state of affairs which we must all sincerely regret, and, if this Bill would help it, we should support it, but we cannot take that view. Other hon. Members opposite have committed themselves to statements regarding the Labour party, which we cannot allow to pass unchallenged. It is suggested that in boroughs where Labour is in power the rates have bounded up, the argument being that the increases there have been far in excess of similar increases in other districts. A few days ago I saw a return for a number of the London boroughs, and I think it is correct to say that that return shows that they have been able to effect economies in a larger number of boroughs in which they were in power than was the case in other boroughs in which they were not in office.

That is not the only point. I am quite satisfied that hon. Members opposite want to be fair and just in their judgment. What is the case of the average borough in which Labour is in power? It will be found, almost uniformly, that it is an area in which social conditions are deplorable, where the needs in public health and other departments of public service are very great, and, above all, in which the rateable value is very low. It is therefore perfectly unjust to make comparisons between a depressed area of that kind with a poor rateable value and an area in which housing and other conditions are totally different and in which a smaller rate produces a much larger sum. One of my main purposes is to make the most violent attack of which I am capable on Clause 6. It is the Parliamentary and public outrage which is always committed on the Scottish people. The structure of local government in Scotland is different in many respects from the structure of local government in England, and, above all, the rating system in Scotland is in many important particulars vitally different. Yet this is a Bill which in a single Clause applies all these proposals to Scottish conditions at a time when the Secretary for Scotland has appointed a Committee to make full inquiry into the incidence of local rates. The proposals of the Bill, I suggest in the light of Scottish experience, could not be worked north of the Tweed at all. I therefore hope, if the Bill lives—which seems very doubtful after the criticism to which it has been exposed—that it will not apply to Scotland.

A Bill of this kind affords us an opportunity of making constructive suggestions regarding the future of local rating in this country. Most hon. Members will agree that municipal services, and at all events municipal expenditure, are not likely to be seriously diminished in the near future. We all recognise that the burden of local rating in this country has imposed a handicap on the development of local industry. In some of our Scottish urban centres we have considered the advisability of giving a certain preference in rates to what are known as new industries, because we feel that the burden of local rating was such that new industries would not normally settle in the locality. That proposal has practically broken down. It would be in effect a subsidy to a new industry. A large number of schemes of that kind have been discarded. We have to keep clearly in mind what has happened in consequence of the War, and what is the effect on present day conditions. Up to the outbreak of war national and local expenditure proceeded neck and neck in a steady increase. After the War broke out there was of course a very great increase in national expenditure, but for the time being local expenditure remained practically in the same state as before, owing to the fact that in many of the localities a large amount of urgent and necessary work was postponed. In some cases the rates even fell, but the local authorities to-day are now confronted with the arrears of that period, a very large portion of which must be undertaken in the interests of public safety and public health. Take the condition of the streets and roads in many of our large urban centres. I am not exaggerating when I say that they are a positive danger to public safety. We have in this respect heavy arrears in practically every locality, and unfortunately we are compelled to undertake those arrears at a time when prices for both material and labour have risen inordinately, and that makes the position very difficult indeed.

Surely hon. Members will agree that it is fallacious from almost every point of view to dwell on the mere increase in the rate. What has happened since 1914? Hon. Members will forgive me, perhaps, if I deal with the subject more particularly in the light of Scottish experience. A very careful return which has been issued by the Scottish Board of Health indicates that since 1914 valuation in Scotland has been practically at a standstill. I do not know what the English practice is, but the assessors in Scotland are compelled to take the actual rent of the property. The rents have not risen, or they have been definitely restricted within certain limits. Those amounts are entered in the valuation roll, and they become the basis of the local assessments; and the result is that we have imposed the burden of greatly extended needs and services on a foundation which has not expanded as it normally should have done, had there been no war and had no device of restriction been introduced. Rateable value or valuation is, therefore, almost static, but the needs and demands of the locality have enormously increased, and yet no hon. Member in defence of this Bill has brought forward that argument. It is an argument which seems to me to be vital to the consideration of the case. I should like to mention three points which this country will require to consider in the near future in dealing with municipal expenditure and municipal rates. It is not the interest of any hon. Member on this side of the House, and certainly not of any Labour Member, to promote extravagant expenditure. It can only bring the representatives of his party in the local authorities into disrepute, and, in the long run, bring about their defeat at the polls. But we shall never meet this difficulty by a tinkering Bill of this kind, which only effects some minor changes in the machinery, and which does not go to the heart of local rating.

It is a beginning.

I suggest that there are three things which do go to the heart of rating. There is, first of all, the relationship of Imperial to local taxation. Inquiry after inquiry has been conducted on that subject, and practically no effective steps have been taken. The localities are carrying burdens to-day which are properly, in whole or in part, the duty of the State. That is the first field in which we require action, based either on the investigations of recent years or on such further inquiry as we can make. In the second place—although this is a thorny and difficult subject—it will become the duty, not merely of this House, but of the whole country, to give the revenue-producing undertakings of the local authorities a full and a free chance Hon. Members, however much they oppose our views on these matters, have themselves conceded, by their legislation in the past and by many of their public declarations to-day, that certain duties must be overtaken by the local authorities. If we are agreed on that policy, then, I say, give the local authorities a fair field, and do not crab and confine their enterprise by making inroads upon it by legislative and other devices. Many a local authority to-day would do much to ease its local rates if its own enterprises had something like free play and expression.

In the third place, there is a suggestion which I know has a great deal of support, not merely in Labour quarters, but in the minds of many thinkers who have given consideration to questions of national and local expenditure. What is the position to-day in regard to any improvement of property? Rent is immediately raised, and, on the very improvement that the individual has effected, he is taxed for all time to come. I have felt more and more that there is something unreal and mischievous in taking property purely as the basis for local rates. It may have absolutely no reference to an individual's ability to pay. There is no doubt that many businesses require large premises, on which they have to pay high local rates, and from which they make from year to year sums which cannot for a moment be compared with the sums which are made by men occupying small offices on which they pay practically no rates, or very little. I am speaking now more particularly of the provincial districts of this country. It is no reply on that point to suggest that the wrong is made good in Income Tax or Super-tax or the other devices of the fiscal machinery of this country. It may be that it is to some extent, but the anomaly and the weakness and all the mischief of the existing system remains. I therefore think the time has come when the Government must apply its mind either to some question of local Income Tax for local purposes, based upon the individual's ability to pay, or try to work out some scheme of setting aside that portion of the national Income Tax which could more properly be used for local purposes. These are only three out of numerous suggestions which have been discussed within recent times. I think the line of remedy lies in a constructive scheme of that character, rather than in the useless and misleading devices which this Bill would seek to introduce.

The hon. Member for Central Edinburgh (Mr. Graham), in one of his usual thoughtful speeches, has drawn attention to the great drawback to the development of industries in areas where the local rates are heavy. At the present time the national taxation is so heavy that it is throttling industry and causing unemployment, which is being further increased by the steadily increasing rates, and therefore, in my view, it is only natural that people should look round to see what may be possible to put some check upon the increase. I do not believe this is a perfect Bill. If it is read a Second time I hope it will be very considerably modified in Committee. I should like to leave it to the Ministry of Health to decide a certain level of local taxation to be fixed with due regard to rateable value of the locality, and a local authority that did not exceed that level should be considered a well managed local authority and not be excluded from the action of this Bill. I think that would meet the difficulty of the hon. Member for Lady-wood (Mr. N. Chamberlain) and it would meet all well-managed cities in this country and a great many of the smaller authorities, because there is a magnificent amount of public service rendered by those who devote themselves to local government. In this House we have a check which we are so accustomed to that we often forget it. It is that no private Member is permitted to propose that even an additional £5 should be expended by the nation and if we wish the country to spend more money we have to move that the expenditure be reduced, which is an excellent device introduced by our forefathers, and it is because they have not got that device in many nations that Great Britain is better governed financially than almost any other country in the world. I believe the object of the promoters of the Bill is to introduce a similar check on the expenditure of our local bodies. Therefore, when this Bill goes to a Division I propose to support it, but I hope that it will be considerably modified in Committee, as it is quite unnecessary in the case of a great number of our important local bodies which are excellently managed.

There is no problem that this House could more usefully apply itself to at the present time than the problem of rating. With all that has been said as to the injurious effects of the present rating system, and the increase of rates under the present system, I am in complete and hearty agreement. The burden of rates at the present time seriously interferes with the solution of the housing problem. It discourages improvements of all kinds. It tends to induce those who are erecting factories and workshops to put them up at a minimum of cost, with the result that there is often less air space for the workers, and less satisfactory opportunities for them. The people who are erecting the buildings fear not the initial expense of the larger and better building, but the heavy toll which would fall upon them annually in the shape of increased rates. From that point of view, the promoters of the Bill ought to be congratulated for bringing this subject before the House; but I am bound to say that the general effect of the discussion so far is that it is more likely to be injurious than advantageous. After the concessions made by the promoters, and after the deletion of the Clauses which have been so riddled with criticism that, obviously, they cannot survive in Committee, the effect of the Bill will be so infinitesimal in regard to this problem that it can only result in giving the impression that the House has really made some effort to deal with the matter, when no real effective effort has been made.

The Bill consists of 7 Clauses. Claus 2 has gone. The Minister of Health stated that the Government would be bound to offer the strongest opposition to that Clause, and, therefore, the promoters have withdrawn it. Clause 3 has had support from scarcely any section of the House. It has been objected to alike by representatives of the minor local authorities, who are required to submit their budgets to the county councils, and by representatives of the county councils who do not wish to undertake the task of supervising these budgets. Clause 3 has had only one defender, the right hon. Baronet the Member for the City of London. It would appear that this Clause would do nothing except to increase the very heavy cost of Private Bill legislation, and, therefore, instead of decreasing the rates it would be more likely to increase them. Clause 5 is a mere definition Clause, and Clause 6, which applies the Bill to Scotland, has had the strongest opposition from every Scottish Member who has spoken. We are informed that whatever may be the merits of the proposal they have not been considered by the Scottish local authorities, by the Scottish Convention of Burghs, by the Scottish County Councils' Association, or any of those great national bodies which are entitled to have their views heard before a measure of this kind is passed.

The last Scottish Member who spoke showed that in Scotland as in England the difficulties are great, although they are under a different system, and that the people are equally apprehensive.

Whatever may be the merits or demerits of the Bill it ought not to be applied to the local authorities in Scotland until those authorities have had an opportunity of expressing their views upon it. If the Bill goes upstairs to a Committee I cannot conceive this Clause passing against the united opposition of the Scottish Members. Clause 7 says that the Act shall not apply to Ireland. That will add nothing towards securing the prevention of an increase of rates in Great Britain. A measure so attenuated could have no effect in dealing with this problem, and speeches of hon. Members opposite show that they do not so regard it. It is evident that the addition to the Bill which these Members think would be most likely to secure the end which they have in view would be a provision that no council should be allowed to have a Labour majority. I hold no brief for the Labour party on local public bodies. I have been for a great many years a member of a county council which has a Labour majority. I am not a member of that majority. They do a great many things of which I disapprove, but it is only fair that we should know where the I increase of rates has taken place. I have here a statement issued by the Ministry of Health showing the amount of local rates and the assessable value, in every borough in England and Wales and of 100 typical rural parishes for 1914 and for 1920. I find that in the metropolitan boroughs where the Labour party were successful in obtaining a majority the increase has been 90 per cent. In the county boroughs, where they were not so successful, the increase has been 95 per cent., and in the outer areas the increase was 96 per cent., and in the 100 typical rural parishes the increase was 116 per cent. In the typical rural parishes the Labour party has not secured a majority to anything like the same extent as in the metropolitan boroughs. Therefore, even if the wishes of hon. Members in reference to the Labour party could be carried out, it would not secure the end which they desire. In reference to the total increase of rates during those years the hon. Member for East Grinstead (Mr. Cautley) stated, as I understood him, that the total burden for local expenditure had increased from £200,000,000 in 1913 to £350,000,000 last year.

Somewhere about that.

I am certain that my hon. and learned Friend, who is extremely accurate in any statements which he brings before the House, must have had some official estimate for these figures, but they differ entirely from this statement which I have here, which estimates that the total amount of local rates collected for local government purposes in England and Wales in 1913–14 was £71,276,000, and in 1919–20 was £103,000,000, and that, while it is not possible to give an accurate estimate for the year ended 31st March last, it is expected that it may approach £149,000,000. I am dealing with rates, and my hon. and learned Friend may have been dealing with total expenditure, including grants in aid. Even in that case, I do not think there would be such a great difference. The point between us is not material, and the point I want to make can be established on his figures. This year the total amount in rates will be double what it was in 1913–14, and on the figures of the hon. and learned Gentleman it would be not quite double. What has happened in England and Wales is exactly what the hon. Member for Central Edinburgh (Mr. W. Graham) stated has happened in Scotland. While the total sum spent is double, the total assessable value of all rated properties has remained almost stationary—it has increased from £211,000,000 to £223,000,000, or only 5¾ per cent.

It is fair to the local authorities to say that if their total expenditure has increased by about 100 per cent., that is not more than the increase which has taken place in the expenditure of any business firm or private individual, in view of the changed value of money. I do not think it can be said with any accuracy that there has been during those years any large and extravagant expenditure upon schemes which could have been avoided. On the contrary,

as the hon. Member for Central Edinburgh pointed out, what has happened has been that there has been a slowing down in the matter of carrying out schemes which are urgently needed in the interests of public health. While it is right that we should view with apprehension any great increase in the rate in the pound imposed upon individual ratepayers, it is essential too that we should never forget why the Ministry of Health was established, and should keep an eye constantly on the death-rate in our great cities and among our industrial populations. The rating system of the country has broken down. There can be no defence of a system which calls upon ratepayers to provide £149,000,000 on an assessable value of £223,000,000. That cannot go on. What is necessary is that there should be a new and different rating system. We must consider whether local authorities cannot adapt for their purposes the increase in the value of land in their respective areas, which local expenditure and local effort create and maintain. It cannot be denied that during the period of the War, while the valuation has been almost stationary, the land value of the country has almost doubled. There is here a great fund available, without injury to anyone and without risk of depressing industry. On the contrary, if we were able to impose a tax of that kind we would assist house building and provide a solution of many of our social problems. In that way we should do far more to solve the rating problem than by passing a wretched little Bill of this character, which cannot in the slightest degree affect the total expenditure of local authorities—or if it does affect it at all, can only have an effect which will be injurious.

Question put, "That the word 'now' stand part of the Question."

The House divided: Ayes, 96; Noes, 60:

Division No.86.]	AYES.	[4.53 P.m.
Agg-Gardner, Sir James Tynte	Bennett, Sir Thomas Jewell	Coats, Sir Stuart
Allen, Lieut.-Colonel William James	Blair, Sir Reginald	Cobb, Sir Cyril
Archer-Shee, Lieut.-Colonel Martin	Borwick, Major G. O.	Colfox, Major Wm. Phillips
Baird, Sir John Lawrence	Bowyer, Captain G. E. W.	Craik, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry
Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley	Bridgeman, Rt. Hon. William Clive	Curzon, Captain Viscount
Banbury, Rt. Hon. Sir Frederick G.	Bull, Rt. Hon. Sir William James	Davidson, J. C. C. (Hemel Hempstead)
Barnett, Major R. W.	Burn, Col. C. R. (Devon, Torquay)	Davies, Thomas (Cirencester)
Barnston, Major Harry	Carter, R. A. D. (Man., Withington)	Davison, Sir W. H. (Kensington, S.)
Bellairs, Commander Carlyon W.	Cecil, Rt. Hon. Lord R. (Hitchin)	Doyle, N. Grattan
Du Pre, Colonel William Baring	Lorden, John William	Roundell, Colonel R. F.
Edgar, Clifford B.	McLaren, Hon. H. D. (Leicester)	Samuel, A. M. (Surrey, Farnham)
Fildes, Henry	McNeill, Ronald (Kent, Canterbury)	Samuel, Rt. Hon. Sir H. (Norwood)
FitzRoy, Captain Hon. E. A.	Macquisten, F. A.	Sanders, Colonel Sir Robert A.
Foxcroft, Captain Charles Talbot	Magnus, Sir Philip	Shaw, William T. (Forfar)
Gardner, Ernest	Mallaby-Deeley, Harry	Smith, Sir Harold (Warrington)
Goff, Sir R. Park	Malone, Major P. B. (Tottenham, S.)	Sprot, Colonel Sir Alexander
Greene, Lt.-Col. Sir W. (Hack'y, N.)	Morrison-Bell, Major A. C.	Stanley, Major Hon. G. (Preston)
Greer, Harry	Mosley, Oswald	Sugden, W. H.
Gretton, Colonel John	Newman, Colonel J. R. P. (Finchley)	Surtees, Brigadier-General H. C.
Harmsworth, Hon. E. C. (Kent)	Nicholson, William G. (Petersfield)	Terrell, George (Wilts, Chippenham)
Herbert, Hon. A. (Somerset, Yeovil)	Nield, Sir Herbert	Thomas-Stanford, Charles
Hickman, Brig.-Gen. Thomas E.	Norton-Griffiths, Lieut.-Col. Sir John	Thomson, Sir W. Mitchell- (Mayhill)
Hills, Major John Waller	Palmer, Major Godfrey Mark	Townshend, Sir Charles V. F.
Hohler, Gerald Fitzroy	Parker, James	Tryon, Major George Clement
Holbrook, Sir Arthur Richard	Philipps, Sir Owen C. (Chester, City)	Warner, Sir T. Courtenay T.
Hood, Joseph	Pownall, Lieut.-Colonel Assheton	Watson, Captain John Bertrand
Horne, Edgar (Surrey, Guildford)	Prescott, Major W. H.	White, Lieut.-Col. G. D. (Southport)
Hunter, General Sir A. (Lancaster)	Pretyman, Rt. Hon. Ernest G.	Wilson, Colonel Leslie O. (Reading)
Hurd, Percy A.	Randies, Sir John S.	Wilson, Lt.-Col. Sir M. (Bethnal Gn.)
James, Lieut.-Colonel Hon. Cuthbert	Rees, Sir J. D. (Nottingham, East)	Yate, Colonel Sir Charles Edward
Jameson, J. Gordon	Rees, Capt. J. Tudor- (Barnstaple)
Kinloch-Cooke, Sir Clement	Remer, J. R.	TELLERS FOR THE AYES.—
Lonsdale, James Rolston	Roberts, Samuel (Hereford, Hereford)	Lieut.-Colonel Royds and Mr. Cautley

NOES.
Acland, Rt. Hon. F. D.	Hannon, Patrick Joseph Henry	Newton, Major Harry Kottingham
Balfour, George (Hampstead)	Hanson, Sir Charles Augustin	Nicholson, Reginald (Doncaster)
Barrand, A. R.	Hinds, John	O'Connor, Thomas P.
Beauchamp, Sir Edward	Hodge, Rt. Hon. John	O'Grady, Captain James
Bowerman, Rt. Hon. Charles W.	Hogge, James Myles	Raffan, Peter Wilson
Boyd-Carpenter, Major A.	Irving, Dan	Roberts, Rt. Hon. G. H. (Norwich)
Breese, Major Charles E.	Johnstone, Joseph	Robinson, Sir T (Lanes., Stretford)
Butcher, Sir John George	Jones, J. T. (Carmarthen, Lianelly)	Rose, Frank H.
Davies, Evan (Ebbw Vale)	Kelley, Major Fred (Rotherham)	Shaw, Hon. Alex. (Kilmarnock)
Davies, Sir Joseph (Chester, Crewe)	Kennedy, Thomas	Shaw, Thomas (Preston)
Dennis, J. W. (Birmingham, Deritend)	Law, Alfred J. (Rochdale)	Sutherland, Sir William
Edwards, G. (Norfolk, South)	Lawson, John J.	Sykes, Sir Charles (Huddersfield)
Edwards, Major J. (Aberavon)	Lort-Williams, J.	Taylor, J.
Farquharson, Major A. C.	Lowe, Sir Francis William	Ward, Col. J. (Stoke-upon-Trent)
Forrest, Walter	Lyle-Samuel, Alexander	Williams, Aneurin (Durham, Consett)
France, Gerald Ashburner	M'Donald, Dr. Bouverie F. P.	Wilson, James (Dudley)
Galbraith, Samuel	Macpherson, Rt. Hon. James I.	Young, Robert (Lancaster, Newton)
Graham, W. (Edinburgh, Central).	Molson, Major John Elsdale	Young, W. (Perth & Kinross, Perth)
Greenwood, William (Stockport)	Murray, Dr. D. (Inverness & Ross)
Hall, Lieut.-Col. Sir F (Dulwich)	Myers, Thomas	TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—
Hallas, Eldred	Neal, Arthur	Mr. N. Chamberlain and Mr. J. Jones.

Bill read a Second time.

Motion made, and Question put, "That

the Bill be committed to a Committee of the whole House."—[ Mr. T. Shaw. ]

The House divided: Ayes 51; Noes, 91.

Division No. 87.]	AYES.	[5.0 p.m.
Acland, Rt. Hon. F. D.	Hudson, R. M.	Norton-Griffiths, Lieut.-Col. Sir John
Barrand, A. R.	Irving, Dan	O'Connor, Thomas P.
Bowerman, Rt. Hon. Charles W.	Johnstone, Joseph	O'Grady, Captain James
Boyd-Carpenter, Major A.	Jones, J. J. (West Ham, Silvertown)	Raffan, Peter Wilson
Breese, Major Charles E.	Jones, J. T. (Carmarthen, Llanelly)	Roberts, Rt. Hon. G. H. (Norwich)
Davies, Evan (Ebbw Vale)	Kelley, Major Fred (Rotherham)	Robinson, Sir T. (Lanes., Stretford)
Edwards, G. (Norfolk, South)	Kennedy, Thomas	Rose, Frank H.
Edwards, Major J. (Aberavon)	Law, Alfred J. (Rochdale)	Shaw, Thomas (Preston)
Farquharson, Major A. C.	Lawson, John J.	Sykes, Sir Charles (Huddersfield)
Forrest, Walter	Lewis, Rt. Hon. J. H. (Univ., Wales)	Taylor, J.
Galbraith, Samuel	Lort-Williams, J.	Townshend, Sir Charles V. F.
Graham, W. (Edinburgh, Central)	Lowe, Sir Francis William	Williams, Aneurin (Durham, Consett)
Greenwood, William (Stockport)	Lyle-Samuel, Alexander	Wilson, James (Dudley)
Hall, Lieut.-Col. Sir F. (Dulwich)	Macpherson, Rt. Hon. James I.	Young, Robert (Lancaster, Newton)
Hannon, Patrick Joseph Henry	Molson, Major John Elsdale	Young, W. (Perth & Kinross, Perth)
Hinds, John	Murray, Dr. D. (Inverness & Ross)
Hodge, Rt. Hon. John	Neal, Arthur	TELLERS FOR THE AYES.—
Hogge, James Myles	Nicholson, Reginald (Doncaster)	Mr. N. Chamberlain and Colonel J. Ward.

NOES.
Agg-Gardner, Sir James Tynte	Baird, Sir John Lawrence	Barnett, Major R. W.
Allen, Lieut.-Colonel William James	Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley	Barnston, Major Harry
Archer-Shee, Lieut.-Colonel Martin	Balfour, George (Hampstead)	Beauchamp, Sir Edward
Bagley, Captain E. Ashton	Banbury, Rt. Hon. Sir Frederick G.	Bellairs, Commander Carlyon W.
Bennett, Sir Thomas Jewell	Herbert, Hon. A. (Somerset, Yeovil)	Rees, Sir J. D. (Nottingham, East)
Bird, Sir A. (Wolverhampton, West)	Hills, Major John Waller	Rees, Capt. J. Tudor- (Barnstaple)
Blair, Sir Reginald	Hohler, Gerald Fitzroy	Remer, J. R.
Berwick, Major G. O.	Holbrook, Sir Arthur Richard	Roberts, Samuel (Hereford, Hereford)
Bowyer, Captain G. E. W.	Hood, Joseph	Roundell, Colonel R. F.
Bridgeman, Rt. Hon. William Clive	Horne, Edgar (Surrey, Guildford)	Samuel, A. M. (Surrey, Farnham)
Bull, Rt. Hon. Sir William James	Hunter, General Sir A. (Lancaster)	Samuel, Rt. Hon. Sir H. (Norwood)
Burn, Col. C. R. (Devon, Torquay)	Hurd, Percy A.	Sanders, Colonel Sir Robert A.
Carter, R. A. D. (Man., Withington)	James, Lieut.-Colonel Hon. Cuthbert	Shaw, William T. (Forfar)
Cecil, Rt. Hon. Lord R. (Hitchin)	Jameson, J. Gordon	Sprot, Colonel Sir Alexander
Coats, Sir Stuart	Kinloch-Cooke, Sir Clement	Stanley, Major Hon. G. (Preston)
Cobb, Sir Cyril	Lonsdale, James Rolston	Sugden, W. H.
Colfox, Major Wm. Phillips	Lorden, John William	Surtees, Brigadier-General H. C.
Craik, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry	M'Donald, Dr. Bouverie F. P.	Terrell, George, (Wilts, Chippenham)
Curzon, Captain Viscount	McLaren, Hon. H. D. (Leicester)	Thomas-Stanford, Charles
Davies, Thomas (Cirencester)	McNeill, Ronald (Kent, Canterbury)	Thomson, Sir W. Mitchell- (Maryhill)
Davison, Sir W. H. (Kensington, S.)	Magnus, Sir Philip	Tryon, Major George Clement
Dennis, J. W. (Birmingham, Deritend)	Mallaby-Deeley, Harry	Warner, Sir T. Courtenay T.
Doyle, N. Grattan	Malone, Major P. B. (Tottenham, S.)	Watson, Captain John Bertrand
Edgar, Clifford B	Morrison-Bell, Major A. C.	White, Lieut.-Col. G. D. (Southport)
Fildes, Henry	Mosley, Oswald	Wilson, Colonel Leslie O. (Reading)
FitzRoy, Captain Hon. E. A.	Nicholson, William G. (Petersfield)	Wilson, Lt.-Col. Sir M. (Bethnal Gn.)
Foxcroft, Captain Charles Talbot	Nield, Sir Herbert	Yate, Colonel Sir Charles Edward
Goff, Sir R. Park	Palmer, Major Godfrey Mark
Greene, Lt.-Col. Sir W. (Hack'y, N.)	Philipps, Sir Owen C. (Chester, City)	TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—
Greer, Harry	Pownall, Lieut.-Colonel Assheton	Lieut.-Colonel Royds and Mr. Cautley
Gretton, Colonel John	Prescott, Major W. H.
Harmsworth, Hon. E. C. (Kent)	Randles, Sir John S.

Bill committed to a Standing Committee.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

Whereupon Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to Standing Order No. 3, till Monday next (2nd May).

Adjourned at Seven Minutes after Five o'clock.

Hansard

Volume 141: debated on Friday 29 April 1921

House of Commons

Oral Answers to Questions

Question

Executions, Cork

Coal Industry Dispute

Orders of the Day

Local Rates (Increase Prevention) Bill