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

The main object of this Bill arises from the grave difficulty in the Metropolitan area regarding the large and heavy increase of the local poor rate in the poorer boroughs of the Metropolis. London has always been a rather special problem. The segregation of a large part of the poor and industrial population within certain areas, and the segregation of the wealthier and richer part of the community in other rating districts, has always created in London a difficulty far more pronounced than it is in our great municipalities outside, namely, that the poorest boroughs have to maintain, in time of distress, the greatest number of sufferers, and they are the least capable of doing so. This difficulty, of course, is no new one, and has been the subject of controversy for very many years in this House. The whole question of the rating system of Greater London is not one on which I intend to touch this morning, or which is affected by the Bill. The subject, which has been referred to the Royal Commission, over which Lord Ullswater is presiding, is part of the larger question with which he is dealing, and I hope that when that Commission reports, the time will have arrived when the old standing questions can be finally settled.

In the meantime, we arrive at a position in which local government in parts of the Metropolis is on the point of breaking down. I will give a very few figures to show the House the variation between what I might call the wealthier and residential, and the poorer and industrial boroughs. On 1st October last, the number of able-bodied men in receipt of relief by reason of unemployment varied from 76 in Hampstead to 284 in Westminster, 156 in Chelsea. 455 in Fulham, 1,336 in Ber-mondsey, 1,253 in Greenwich, 1,560 in Shoreditch, 1,833 in Bethnal Green, and 4,091 in Poplar. That shows the entirely disproportionate burdens which are thrown on places like Shoreditch, Bermondsey, Bethnal Green and Poplar, and areas of that kind. The question arose, what could be done to meet the situation. For the difficulty is one that has been accentuated, undoubtedly, very much by the present unemployment. I called a Conference of all the local borough councils in the Metropolis in order to discuss this matter with me, and, after a very long sitting, the suggestion was thrown out by the Town Clerk of Westminster—one, if I may say so, of our ablest local government officials in London—that we should use the machinery of the Common Poor Fund, which is in existence at the present time, but which only relates to indoor relief, to deal with outdoor relief as well. This very helpful and fruitful suggestion met with a large amount of acceptance from the areas which I might call the paying and distributing boroughs, and, as a result, a small sub-committee representing both sides was set up, and, I am glad to say, came to a unanimous conclusion on which my Bill is founded.

Were any representatives from the London boards of guardians present?

This was a Conference of the borough councils, as in London the borough councils have to levy the precepts for the guardians, which is quite different from the practice in our country districts, and as the borough councils are the paying authorities, I felt, and, I think, rightly, that the people who are going to raise the rates should be consulted as to the best method by which it should be done. That was why I asked for their co-operation, for without their consent we can arrive at nothing at all. But, as I said when my hon. Friend interrupted, I want here to express my recognition of the broad spirited manner in which I have been met by the representatives of the great contributing boroughs like the City of London, Westminster, Kensington, Hampstead and the other boroughs to whom any scheme means an increase of rates to their ratepayers for the benefit of those less fortunately situated. I want to say that they fully realised the gravity of the position, and that they readily granted the desirability of the great Empire metropolis being a united London. They naturally felt—and of this I will say something in a moment —that you want jealously to guard the autonomy of the councils, and also carefully to guard any money of your ratepayers that is to be spent by other bodies. On the other hand, in this emergency, and in view of the cases put before them, they were fully prepared to go forward at very heavy expense to themselves in order to assist through the present crisis. It was on account of this atmosphere of general consent that I am able to base my Bill on its present foundation.

The machinery exists, and the method of working the Common Poor Fund is well known to Members who are interested in these matters. I want to say that the figure of indoor relief which may be charged on the common poor fund is raised from 5d. to 1s. 3d. I published a White Paper which clearly shows the effect this will have on the various areas concerned. It will be seen from that that unions like Woolwich, Limehouse, Shoreditch, Bermondsey and Poplar will have the rates levied by their unions very substantially decreased, though they will remain heavy enough even with the decrease. Note the variations in the rates in the Metropolis. The total rates of Poplar were 22s. 10d. in the pound in 1920–21. This contrasts with 12s. 10d. in Finsbury, 12s. 9d. in Hampstead, 11s. 1d. in Westminster, and 10s. 6d. in the City of London. Even when all this is done the burden will still remain heavy. Still, all that is proposed will be a substantial contribution, and it has been accepted in that spirit by all the parties concerned. As I have spoken on the boroughs that contribute, I should also like to say that at the conference there was a spirit of reasonable conciliation that animated all. The difficulties of all parties were fully realised. It was recognised that this would not be a final solution of a difficult problem. Yet it was generally accepted as a good measure to tide over the period of the next twelve months.

You are not here centralising the fund; you are equalising the fund, though the fund will have to be worked through my Department. It is natural enough that those who attended the conference should feel that in expenditure which is not to be under their control in future but of the individual boards of guardians there should be some kind of control. I may say at once, however, that there was no difficulty raised on that score. It has been the tendency to accuse the boards of guardians in the poorer areas of a great deal of extravagance in this matter. I am not going to enter upon that now: I am only going to say that they have a very difficult task, especially at the present moment. Thousands of people are clamouring for aid, and the shortness of the time required to make investigation into the cases does not decrease the difficulties, which are very great indeed, and in the matter of the responsibility for future charges in connection with this matter I propose to issue regulations, and to take such steps as I can in the way of appointing inspectors to see that, so far as is humanly possible under present circumstances, there is no undue extravagance by any board of guardians at the expense of the others. What is proposed will, amongst other things, unify the rates of relief for the whole of the London Poor Law area. A small Committee has been sitting representing the various boards of guardians to advise me as to laying down this scale for the whole of London. There will be this advantage in that: you will not have a varying scale or the tendency on the part of outdoor-relief recipients to drift from the more restrictive administrative areas perhaps to areas where more generous or more charitable feelings may prevail. I think that explains the matter sufficiently, because I do not suppose the House will be interested in any technical explanation of how the Common Poor Fund works. Those interested in local government and the work of the guardians know it well enough.

Clause 2 of the Bill is to provide a remedy for the state of things that has recently occurred in connection with Poplar, where the Council thought fit not to carry out their statutory duties in relation to the precepting authorities. Curiously enough, when I looked into it there was no machinery by which some other person could be authorised to collect the rates. We had the very clumsy artillery of a mandamus which had to be fired off, and the various proceedings in Court, whatever the result, did not produce any money. Therefore I think the House is agreed that it is impossible to continue London local government on those lines. In Clause 2, therefore, we have endeavoured to provide a remedy to the effect that where a metropolitan borough council refuses or neglects to levy the rate necessary to meet the precept issued by another authority the Minister of Health may by order authorise the authority to appoint, or himself may appoint, any officer of the council, or other person approved by the Minister, to raise by a rate the amount so payable by the council. Those who live in London know there is a difference between London and the country. In the provinces it is possible to distrain on the overseers. In London you have many rate-levying authorities. You have the London County Council, the Metropolitan Asylums Board, the Metropolitan Water Board and the Police—four precepts. Therefore it is difficult to get one body to undertake to collect all these rates, and the way I have drafted these Clauses is to authorise the precepting authorities, in such a case of default, to take action. We must have no further breakdown of London local government, and, therefore, I reserve myself the right to appoint an officer in the ultimate resort in order to carry out the law. I must say that I confidently anticipate that such powers will never come into operation. I do think that the local government of a city like London ought not to be allowed to be brought to a standstill, and its finances disordered and disarranged, by the action of any small constituent part of its great machinery of local government.

Have the local authorities also assented to that provision?

Yes; the local authorities quite readily agreed, for they all felt the absurdity of the position. In fact I rather fancy it will be a relief in a case of the sort to feel that they will be overridden, when they themselves do not want to act, rather than proceed to a position from which they can only extricate themselves with considerable difficulty. Clause 3 embodies a temporary measure in order to enable local authorities to seek a temporary overdraft to meet current expenses. This is partly necessary in connection with cases like the Poplar case. As I say, it was the proceedings at Poplar that caused the financial difficulty to the county council in their not having levied the rate, it would be impracticable to ask them to make up all their balances in one precept, and it will be necessary to have a temporary loan spread over a short period. It is also of assistance to the boards of guardians. At the present time we are in a state of abnormal depression which no one expects to remain indefinitely. We quite realise that there are special localities in which board of guardians find it almost impossible to raise the poor rate at the moment to meet the necessities. That is not a state of things which anybody anticipates will continue. Therefore we feel that by means of a temporary relief to tide over this period spread over a number of years the burden will be very much less than it is at the present time. The Exchequer has to go and borrow the money just like anybody else. There is no golden fund existing at the Treasury to relieve people, and we must not mix up our local finance with our national finance. In order to assist in this respect I have inserted Clause 3.

Clause 4 deals with the relaxation of the limit of borrowing powers of local authorities in certain cases. There are a number of local authorities who experience difficulties in raising funds for relief work at the present time. In the existing Statute there is a definite limitation on the borrowing powers of local authorities which precludes many of them from borrowing money to carry out works for the relief of the unemployed. This provision has been put in to meet representations made from some of the South Wales local authorities. This difficulty is met by Clause 4, which provides for the raising of money for the provision of work for the relief of unemployment. We extend the borrowing powers of these local authorities to enable them to deal with these various points. Of course these measures are only temporarily designed to meet a very grave emergency. I know they might be subject in ordinary times to a good deal of criticism on the ground of national security. I think the House will agree with me when I say that while having due regard to financial considerations we must stretch ourselves and give a little elasticity in order to get matters on and in order to overcome some of our difficulties. All these loans are subject to the approval of the Minister of Health, and I think that is a safeguard against any wild and reckless expenditure. We have the further safeguard that banks are accustomed to dealing with local authorities, and they are good judges of the limits to which they can safely go. With thees remarks I move the Second Reading of this Bill, and I hope the House will agree to it.

This Measure is one which lends itself specially to the powers of debate and specialized knowledge which hon. Members present no doubt possess. Therefore I hasten to assure them that my remarks will be very brief on the Second Reading of this Bill. My right hon. Friend has just said that some parts of his Bill are due to the action taken particularly in Poplar. I think it is a rather sorry comment upon the efficiency of our administration and powers of fore sight that improvements, or rather reforms, which have been not only put forward by what one may call zealous enthusiasts, but have been recommended for years by cool and experienced observers, and have been embodied substantially in blue books, should have been put on one side, and at last the first steps of practical action should be brought about by the results, the ineffective results, of a mandamus which my right hon. Friend says that whatever else it achieves it does not produce money, which, after all, is what was required.

I will make just one remark on the special case of London. We now realise by the terrible effects we see that London is one, and, subject to practical considerations in respect of all its benefits and its burdens, should be subdivided as little is possible. That, I think, is a proposition which is soundly founded on the reports to which I have already alluded. The idea that you can segregate the poor from the rich districts and ask them to bear the burdens of exceptional times of stress alone has completely broken down. I am very glad to notice that the rich boroughs in London have realised that for themselves. Indeed, I gather from what the Minister for Health has said that the suggestion upon which this Bill is mainly based came from the principal officials of the City of Westminster itself. That, at any rate, will be welcomed and very heartily welcomed, because it shows that they look in the future to fewer of those internecine struggles between the local authorities in London, and a more hopeful outlook of common effort to solve what, after all, is a common problem. This does not touch the question of Greater London, and that is another problem which will have to be dealt with. I entirely agree that we must take one step at a time, and let us make that step as sound and efficient as we possibly can. I simply indicate to my right hon. Friend that that problem is insistent and urgent and cannot be very long postponed.

I only want to add, in conclusion, that I hope that the Report of the Royal Commission presided over by Lord Ullswater will be presented as speedily as possible, and that its recommendations will not be pigeon-holed but will be acted upon. Let me recall to the House what is taking place. We had a very famous Royal Commission, and we had the well-known Majority and Minority Reports. It was thought for a long time that the differences between those who headed the respective contending forces were irreconcilable, but differences which we found almost impossible of reconciliation in peace were, as we know, settled during the War. That is exactly what happened with the protagonists of the first and more famous Royal Commission. In the Report of a Committee of which I had the honour to be chairman, there was a real fundamental agreement arrived at by very distinguished personages who had for a long time taken very strongly different views. It had nothing to do with my chairmanship. The thing settled itself. There was a very remarkable spirit there, and an endeavour was made to arrive at a practicable working agreement. That Report is in the hands of my right hon. Friend, and though it gives rise to very considerable differences of opinion—indeed, there are active and hostile criticisms—I should think that I am not very far wrong in saying that there is a gathering body of official and representative opinion behind it, though, up to this moment, it still remains ineffective from the administrative point of view, and I hope that the new Commission will speedily report and that its Report will be as speedily acted upon.

While congratulating Poplar and those who believe in direct action upon the results of their efforts in this particular matter as far as Inner London is concerned, I wish, as the representative of a constituency in Greater London, an extra-Metropolitan constituency, to offer our condolences to the right hon. Gentleman upon this little contribution which he has made to the solution of a great problem. If this had been a new matter, and the right hon. Gentleman had been suddenly confronted with it, I could have quite understood how timorous he would have been in daring to approach it, but we have a right to protest most emphatically against the interpretation that is always placed upon the term "London.' London is supposed to consist of what is called the administrative county, and yet West Ham, Tottenham, Edmonton, East Ham, Walthamstow, Woodford, and all the outer areas, north, south, east and west, are just as much dependent upon the centre of London as any other places. Most of our people find their employment in Inner London, and to all intents and purposes we are part and parcel of London as ordinarily understood. I sympathise with the people of Poplar, and I have in some degree helped their movement, but our rates are higher than theirs. Figures cannot lie, but there are a certain kind of people who can figure. We have 11,200 men and women drawing relief because of unemployment, or nearly three times as many as in Poplar. We are paying out every week £16,000 in relief through unemployment alone, and it is increasing every week. That is equivalent almost to a penny half-penny rate in one of the sections of the district which I happen to represent.

The proposals contained in this Bill are absolutely inadequate to meet the situation that exists, not merely so far as Inner London is concerned, but also so far as the great metropolis whole is concerned. For the purposes of police administration and the protection of property West Ham is part of London, but when it comes to getting anything West Ham does not belong to London. The poor have got to keep the poor, and the police have to look after the riches of the people who have got them. We venture to suggest that if any treatment is going to be meted out for the purpose of assisting poor authorities, then all poor authorities ought to receive equal treatment, and particularly those districts whose population is composed mainly of small business men and working men. Half the population of my constituency is composed of casual labourers, men who have to go down to the docks every day to look for a job. They have to work for their breakfasts before they can get them, and they generally see more dinner times than dinners. Because we happen to be a penny tram ride away from London proper, we are left out of consideration, and all we can get from the right hon. Gentleman is: "Live, horse, and you will get grass." He says: "You can borrow on short terms, and I will help you to borrow the money." Thank you for nothing.

We have reached the limit of our borrowing capacity. At the end of this year we shall have an overdraft at the bank of £250,000 to meet our existing responsibilities. We are paying this money out every week in the hope that something will be done, but, so far as we can see, nothing likely to relieve us of the serious financial difficulty we are in is going to be done as a result of this Measure. We asked that the Government shall meet us to the extent of 75 per cent. of the cost of the schemes of relief that we are going to try and put into operation. We of the Labour party, locally as well as nationally, have always insisted that this is not a local but a national problem, and that it is not fair, because you happen to live in a particular district, that you should escape responsibilities that people living in another district have to assume. I am very grateful to the people in the West End who have come to the assistance of the people in the East End, but I wish the right hon. Gentleman had taken notice of the recommendations made by the various committees and Royal Commissions who have considered this problem, and had gone in for comprehensive legislation, and not this piecemeal and panicky legislation. We have to-day two diseases which we deal with nationally, namely, the problem of unemployment to a certain extent and venereal diseases. If a man misconducts himself and becomes likely to be a candidate for medical treatment under the Public Health Acts, the Government will meet us to the extent of 75 per cent. of the charges necessary upon the treatment of that particular disease, for which the man himself is mainly responsible. Unemployment is a disease for which the man himself is not mainly responsible. It is due to a social condition over which the individual has no control; but whereas the man who misconducts himself can get treated at the expense of the State to the extent of 75 per cent., the unemployed man, the victim of social conditions, is assisted to the extent of 32½ per cent. only. In the proposals of this Bill we are only going to be guaranteed payment by the State to the extent of half the terms of the loan up to 65 per cent. That means in reality that the local authorities will have to bear about 50 per cent, of the total cost of any scheme of relief or of work that may be embarked upon. It is absolutely wrong to expect districts like West Ham and other districts which I know intimately as a result of personal experience to go on waiting until some Royal Commission reports. We ought to get immediate financial assistance from the Government to the extent of 75 per cent., and we say that when we have shouldered the burden to the extent of 25 per cent, we are making a big contribution towards the alleviation of the situation which now exists.

Clause 4 confines the assistance which the Government are going to give to those authorities which are subject to the Local Government Board audit. Certain authorities are free from an obligation of that character in certain departments, but as far as education and the Poor Law go we are subject to audit and Government inspection. The great towns and cities and county boroughs are not, and I want to know if they are not to have assistance, even if they decide to raise loans, simply because they are barred by law from some amount of that control which other authorities are under. Will the right hon. Gentleman guarantee the position of all authorities in the same form? We want it to be realised that, so far as authorities such as West Ham are concerned, it is impossible for us to raise money. The bankers have informed us that we have reached nearly the end of our tether, and they are not going willingly to give us further assistance in the matter of anticipating our responsibilities. What are we to do? We are a labour majority on the West Ham Council and we have reduced our rates by 6d. in the £ during the past year, although that has been counterbalanced by our friends the board of guardians, the majority of whom are opposed to labour, and who have raised the Poor Law rate by Is. 2d., so that what we have gained on the swings we have lost on the roundabouts. Yet labour is told that it is not fit to govern. Face to face as we are with the possibility next year of a rate of 28s. in the £, at present it is only 26s. Id., and we are not in a worse position than other districts, many of which, indeed, are worse placed—face to face as we are with these prospects, I ask the right hon. Gentleman if he cannot and if the Government cannot do something to meet the situation. In truth we are afraid of the winter and of the whole situation, and we do appeal for consideration. If Poplar can get consideration because their councillors went to gaol, perhaps the best way out of the difficulty is for all of us down at the East End of London to go to gaol. Then we may get some consideration. Up till now by constitutional appeals and by going down on our knees to the authorities we have got practically nothing. But we have done our best. All our people are poor men and women. We have to face this great responsibility. We say that this Bill is absolutely inadequate to meet the situation, and does not deal with the problem in the way it should do. It puts the responsibility on to those least able to bear it. Loans are of no use to these local authorities. This is a national and not a local responsibility. There is plenty of money for other purposes. Whenever this House goes in for a military or naval expedition because it thinks it is necessary, the money can be easily found and it is found on the ground that it is to meet a national necessity. We say that this too is a national problem and we say further that whatever assistance you deal out to the districts it should be in proportion to the necessities of the case.

I think the right hon. Gentleman who introduced this Bill will agree, as will everyone on both sides of the House, that however necessary it may be to have such a Measure, it is in principle thoroughly bad. It is bad from many points of view, but its chief badness lies in the fact that you are using the Metropolitan Common Poor Law Fund for the purpose of equalising the burden of poor relief. That means that the local relief authorities will be spending money which they have not themselves to raise. The Minister will be placed in the position of having to control them, and he has said he will do his best to prevent any extravagance on their part. We are sure he will do so, but the only way in which any Minister can exercise such control is by giving the relief authorities a fixed scale of relief per man, woman and child. I think most of us on both sides of the House will agree that as a principle that is wrong, and where the relief is granted in cash it is open to the gravest abuse. I am not for that reason going to vote against this Bill, I am going to support it for one main reason, and that is that I do not wish any action of mine to indicate to the Government opposition to the further equalisation of rates in London, a measure which I believe to be absolutely necessary. Six months ago the Minister for Health found himself in command of a thoroughly unseaworthy ship. It was unseaworthy enough before the War, but it has sprung many leaks since, and no one knows better than the right hon. Gentleman that all that he is now doing by this Bill is to cover those leaks with another coat of paint.

There are four main questions with which I wish to deal. Some of them are London questions, others are general questions, and I wish to point out in regard to them that the Government has specifically, in the case of London, failed to do its duty during the last three years. The first is the general question of the government of Greater London. The second is the question of the equalisation of the burden of poor relief—in the special case of London by the equalisation of rates as between boroughs, and in the country generally by grants in aid from national funds. The third question is that of the proper constitution of Poor Law authorities in the future, and the fourth is what authority is responsible for unemployment? Other speakers will be dealing with these general questions and I therefore will not detain the House by any treatment of them, but I do wish to remind the House and the Government of what the actual history of three of these questions has been in London recently. Let me say two things parenthetically. I do not wish anything I am going to say to be taken as representing the view of anybody else outside this House, and, secondly, I warmly sympathise with any Minister who has to deal with London in these respects. I would rather conduct a diplomatic mission to the Porte than have to deal with the varying authorities and varying points of view that are represented in London.

As regards the government of Greater London, the London County Council decided to send a deputation to the Prime Minister, and they had to wait on the doorstep of Downing Street for many months—I think for more than a year— before that first step could be taken. The London County Council is not always popular, but I think all authorities in London will agree that the way in which it raised that question of Greater London was, to say the least, extremely inoffensive, and could give rise to no jealousies on the part of other authorities.

That was the first delay. The second delay was in connection with the whole subject of equalisation. A scheme was passed by the London County Council on 17th December, 1918—a less drastic but much sounder form of equalisation than that embodied in this Bill. That resolution was re-affirmed two years later, namely, on 27th July, 1920. To be fair, I should say that the standing committee of the Metropolitan Borough Councils did not agree to it, but it was passed by all political parties in London on the London County Council, and, therefore, was not a party policy. In 1920, the London County Council wrote to the then Minister of Health and again pressed the scheme on his attention, in view of the Resolution passed by this House on 5th May of that year to the effect that a further equalisation of the rates in the County of London was a matter which should receive the early attention of the Government. When the London County Council wrote to the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor on the subject, they received the somewhat curious reply that he did not think that the Government could I introduce legislation pending the general I measure which the Government had in contemplation in connection with the I Report on the transfer of functions under the Poor Law. I do not know in what obscure corner of the Government that measure has been under consideration, but it has never seen the light of day, much as most of us have desired that it should.

I now come to the third point. The Report of the Committee, over which the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Peebles (Sir D. Maclean) presided, has been endorsed again by the London County Council, and, if I remember aright, has received the approval of most of the authorities in London other than the Poor Law authorities, who, being themselves the authorities to be reformed, are not, perhaps, to be expected to greet any proposal of reform with shouts of applause. Most of the other authorities however have endorsed it. But all that the Government have done has been to play off this question of the transfer of Poor Law functions against the equally urgent question of the equalisation of rates, and they have done neither. As I have said, these are things for which the right hon. Gentleman is not himself responsible, but he will be the first to recognise that this House must ask the Government, now that this Bill is before it showing clearly the absolute ineffectiveness of the present system, for an assurance that these questions with regard to Poor Law authorities in the future and the equalisation of the burden of poor relief between poor and rich authorities —and, indeed, the whole question of local government administration—shall be made the subject of early proposals by the Government; and, when I say "early," I hope it will be earlier than the "immediate attention" which the Government, on 5th May, 1920, was going to give to it.

12 N.

I rise to put the view, more or less, of the country necessitous districts. I do not wish in any way to break across the remarks that have been made by the hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J. Jones), except in so far as I regret the very meagre provision outlined in this Bill and in the speech of the Minister of Health. The Noble Lord the Member for Hastings (Lord E. Percy), said that it was bad in principle, and that the relief which had already been given, or was proposed to be given in future under the Bill, was inclined to be extravagant and could not be de- fended, but is it so? I shall confine myself principally to the position which at least nine unions, unfortunately, occupy at the present moment in the administrative county of Glamorgan, and the burdens that they will have to carry; and I imagine that, as them hon. Member for Silvertown says, it will not be taken as in any way disrespectful when I say that it will be very cold comfort that will be extended to the necessitous areas in England and Wales, whose representatives met, I think, on Wednesday of this week, in London, from either of the three schemes proposed by the Bills which have been before the House during the week on unemployment.

I am going to speak specially on behalf of the Poor Law boards of guardians, because there was a promise, more or less> made by the Prime Minister himself in September, 1919, that, as far as the Poor Law was concerned, a new world was going to be created. He said that the old world was one where unemployment, through the vicissitudes of industry, brought despair to a multitude of humble homes where they had to be maintained by the Poor Law of the country; and he said that if there was anyone who felt inclined to maintain it, let them beware lest it fall upon them and overwhelm them and their households in ruin. Those were the words of the Prime Minister in September, 1919. Very little has been done. We have heard to-day that the Government is unable to discharge its duties in respect of unemployment, and the bulk, at any rate in our districts, of the relief has fallen upon the boards of guardians, who have had to find nearly the whole of the money. Probably other speakers on this side of the House, if not on the other side, will deal with the perilous position in which our local government authorities are with regard to relief work. We have tabulated schemes in the county of Glamorgan, where we can find work to the extent of spending something a little over £1,000,000, but as compared with the number of unemployed, £1,000,000 would only last five weeks—a mere fleabite as far as relief work is concerned. I put before the Minister of Health and the Minister of Labour a scheme whereby something could be done to restore our coal industry in a productive sense, both by lessening the cost of production and also keeping the men at their work without opening out any relief works at all. We have heard nothing during the week with regard to that. I assume other matters have intervened and it will not be considered.

The matter has been referred to the Cabinet. I am not sure that they are not considering it to-day.

I am much obliged. I will illustrate my point by saying that, instead of spending £2 5s. or £2 10s. to give assistance through Poor Law relief, it would be far better, if we could find the money, to invest, it m the production of coal. Let it be a charge on the industry. I am not asking for a subsidy at all. It will be far better to spend £3 in getting six tons of coal out every week, keeping the man at work for which he is trained, and not bringing him out on the surface to try to engage him upon work for which he is totally unfitted and untrained. It will be money well spent. The guardians in these nine parishes in the Glamorgan area view with very serious alarm the situation with regard to unemployment. Take the parish of Pontypridd. We have at present 14,000 men unemployed out of a total number of miners of 42,000. Out of that number we have 6,000 odd registered at the employment exchange and we have 8,000 totally unprovided for. Some of them may come —I do not want to overstate the case— to claim benefit when the National Employment Insurance is reopened on the 3rd proximo, and there may be a few of them who still draw unemployment insurance benefit, but they are very few. The majority of them have exhausted their benefit and the board of guardians have now to maintain them. The Minister of Health said the situation was far more pronounced in the Metropolitan area than anywhere else. That is not quite true. The situation in South Wales is as acute, though we have not shouted a great deal about it, as anywhere else. The overdraft of the board of guardians in Glamorgan alone amounts to nearly £500,000 already. In the Rhondda parish alone we are paying out over £6,000 a week in unemployment relief. We regret exceedingly that we have had to reduce the necessitous poor who were with us before this calamity befell us below the living point. There is no money there to assist those who were, through no fault of their own, having to call upon Poor Law relief before the stoppage of trade took place.

I should prefer setting the coal industry on its feet to anything else. We do not want any money except to keep our men in production. Whatever our mistakes have been in the past, it is no good having recriminations. I have heard employers say, "Let us get down to rock bottom. Wait and see what is going to happen." Is that a statesmanlike policy for the House to adopt? We have had reductions in wages amounting to 41 per cent. We want to see other things come down. Our men realise that cheap coal is the life-blood of the country. We must get vitality put into the industry, and if you will help us in that direction we shall not want to bother you very much with regard to Poor Law relief or anything else. I am willing to back the coal trade, notwithstanding the poor state we are in to-day, but it is lamentable to think that in the Rhondda Valley, with the best quality of steam coal, we have 14,000 men idle, and we have all this money being spent, which might all be put down the drain for any use it is in a productive sense. We can find no money at all in South Wales. We are exactly in the same parlous condition as Poplar and Bethnal Green, and we urge that in the meantime, until some big scheme comes forward, the Public Works Commissioners should be authorised to find us money. We cannot find it anywhere else. It is absolutely hopeless. How is any board of guardians or local authority in South Wales going to compete with rich corporations like Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, and Liverpool? Manchester is going to launch out a loan of £1,000,000. They have stocks there, and they can fall back upon their securities and get their loan. Glamorgan, in the position it is in to-day, cannot go into the market and compete with Manchester to raise a loan to carry out relief work or anything else, and I appeal to the Minister to see what can be done in this direction. We have to put our shoulders to the wheel to restore the position to what it has been in the past. Then we need have no fear at all with regard to our country being able to compete with the other countries of the world as heretofore.

No one who heard the speech of the hon. Member for Silver-town (Mr. J. Jones) could fail to sympathise with him. I am not sure that the conditions in Silvertown and the immediate neighbourhood are not even worse than in Poplar. I have known those districts all my life, and during practically the whole of that time they have never been fully employed. I do not think that in any part of the country the conditions of unemployment have been so persistent and have caused so much suffering as in these districts of East London. Little or no relief is given to such districts as Silvertown in this Bill. I rise, however, to deal with a pleasanter side of the Bill. As the representative of an industrial district in the east end of London, I have, in conjunction with the representatives of East London, appealed for a long time for the equalisation of the Poor Law rates of London, and I look upon this Bill with great satisfaction, because it is a very large contribution towards equalisation. It has always seemed to me that the arguments in favour of the equalisation of the poor rate in London were irresistible. The hon. Member for Silvertown declared that the present decision of the Government would not have been arrived at had not the Mayor and the Borough Council of Poplar gone to prison. I do not think it is fair to give that as the reason. The case has been pleaded over and over again, and now, with the exceptional hard times of depression, the Government have come to see that equalisation, so far as London is concerned, must be effected.

The district that I represent, and similar districts in London, are fortunate in that they have neighbours who are better off. I congratulate the Minister of Health, and I am sure the House will agree with me, on the capable way in which he has managed the problem, and on having secured a measure of agreement from the richer authorities who, at last, see the necessity of coming to the help of their poorer brothers. This measure of equalisation makes it necessary to give the Minister power to frame Regulations for the standardisation of outdoor relief. Unless that is done it will only add to the discontent. One district may give more than another. Moreover, it would, very likely, seriously affect the migration of the population of London. People would migrate into the districts which gave the most generous contribution of outdoor relief, and there would be very unfortunate disturbances of the population of London. The Minister is taking powers to levy and collect rates in defaulting boroughs. That is absolutely necessary, and I am not at all sure that ever the borough councils that are in default will not welcome this escape from a most difficult and impossible position. I. understand that the Borough of Stepney had decided—but I do not know whether they intend to make it effective—that they would not collect the London County Council rate. I should think that they would be very glad to get out of that impossible position.

With respect to the Royal Commission that is going to consider the whole question of London government, I suggest that when these London questions are considered they are of such great interest that it is not wise to adopt the policy of not putting London Members of Parliament on the Royal Commission. London Members have been conversant with the problem all their lives, and I cannot see why they should be considered unfit to serve on a Royal Commission dealing with London. There seems to be an idea that a London Member must be guided by prejudice and partial affection, and, therefore, people with incomplete knowledge are often chosen when the Government establishes a Royal Commission to deal with London questions. The question of the government of London is very intricate, and the Government ought to get rid of the idea that London Members are not qualified to serve on Royal Commissions considering London problems. The problems involved are so vast and important that the people who have been concerned with them all their lives, who are deeply interested in them, are the best sort of Members to be selected to serve on the Royal Commission. While I thank the Government for this considerable step towards the equalisation of poor relief, I must say that the poor districts in London will never be satisfied until they get complete equalisation. This Bill, however, goes a long way. I hope that the Government may continue on the line that the Minister has taken, and will eventually provide that complete equalisation of poor relief which has been demanded for such a long time.

I wish to add my voice to the arguments which have been used in regard to the difficult position of some of the industrial areas outside London which are receiving attention under this Bill. I want to consider, broadly, the different methods of aid that are offered to local authorities and to see whether I have in my mind a complete category of the alternatives under which local authorities may be assisted. It seems to me that the Government have considered this matter, perhaps naturally and inevitably, from the point of view of seeing what they could do for roads, land drainage schemes, etc., and not from the point of view of the local authorities as to what will be done for them whether they happen to fall in with the particular schemes of the Government or not. This Bill enables local authorities to borrow for short periods which, under certain circumstances, may be extended. If a local authority is in a position to be able to undertake forestry schemes or schemes of arterial drainage there are grants which they may receive from the Ministry of Agriculture, but that does not apply to a great many urban authorities, because they are not within reach of the country districts where forestry and arterial drainage schemes can be carried out.

With regard to the road schemes, a great many local authorities have already proceeded with that kind of work to a con siderable extent, and the work has been exhausted. You cannot improve your roads for ever, and you cannot go on making roads for ever. There is a certain point at which the expenditure becomes wasteful, and from which there is no return. When local authorities cannot come into the road schemes or forestry schemes or arterial drainage schemes they must come under Circular 245 under which the Government will give assistance in respect of work undertaken to the amount of 65 per cent, of the expenditure for half the period of the loan. Sixty-five per cent, for half the period of the loan is equivalent to less than one-third. It only means 32½ per cent, spread over the whole period of the loan, and that is slightly less than one-third of the burden. The question which is in the minds of many local authorities and is making them very unwilling to undertake schemes which might bring relief is this: if the Government can give for arterial drainage, forestry, or roads assistance to the extent of 60 or 65 per cent, on the whole scheme, why should they only give up to a total of one-third of the money required for schemes of local authorities, which are somewhat similar in character?

There must be many authorities in the same position as the district which I represent. In my district in Cornwall tin—mining is absolutely failing as an industry. I was much interested in the woes of the coal-mining district in the Rhondda Valley, as described by the hon. Member for East Rhondda (Major Morgan), but I could not help remembering that it was the high price of coal which has killed the tin-mining industry on the other side of the channel in Cornwall. That industry appears to be dead, and we have this appalling position, that in the chief centre, Camborne, no less than 78 per cent, of the ratepayers, upon whom the burden of Poor Law relief falls, are themselves in receipt of unemployment benefit, or rather at the present time they are out of benefit, but benefit will come back to them for a limited number of weeks under the Government proposal.

Think of the position of having to go to those men in their capacity of ratepayers and raise from them money to give to them in their capacity of persons who must be relieved if they are not to starve. The position is made worse by the fact that the 20 per cent, of the ratepayers, who are not themselves absolutely unemployed at the present time, are largely the mines or which the assessments next year will have to be reduced because they have gone out of operation. The position is desperate, but these local authorities are pulling themselves together, so far as they can. They have at Redruth and Camborne a scheme of sewage disposal which would have been carried out but for the War, as it was postponed because of the high cost of labour and materials, but about which they are now asking, "Why, if the Government are willing to give up to 65 per cent, for labour expended, say, on roads or arterial drainage or forestry, are they only willing to give the amounts mentioned in these circulars towards these sewage-disposal schemes of ours?" They may well hesitate because when you look at the grant which is proposed you find that it will bring the local rates up to well over 10s. in the £, which is all right if local rateable value were to continue as it is now, but is a different thing when the mines which were the chief contributors to the rates will have to be wiped out of assessment, and the rates in these districts will have to go up to a sovereign in the £ or even higher.

In these circumstances I come back to the question whether the Government cannot see its way to increase the aid to such schemes as that of sewage disposal in Camborne and Redruth. This scheme has been pressed on them from time to time by the old Local Government Board and now by the Ministry of Health. The schemes in some other districts may be preparing land for allotments or for recreation grounds, but for all these schemes the Government can only advance half what they are prepared to do for schemes under different categories. If that is so, the condition is desperate, and Camborne and Redruth will not be able to feel justified, with the very great depreciation in their assessments, in embarking on these schemes. The position there is already terrible. They are collecting money in Cornwall and Devonshire now, not for the distressed miners, but for the starving miners, and there are actual instances of starvation. Is that the last word of the Government, or is the Government able to make special provision anywhere for these specially distressed areas, where the local industry has entirely vanished and where it is so much better that the relief given should be in the form of work performed rather than of doles from the poor rates, which are already so very high?

There is nothing in the Bill in its present form which covers the condition of affairs referred to by the right hon. Gentleman and by more than one other speaker, but I understand that those conditions will be dealt with later on, when the matter would be more relevant than under the present Bill. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman (Sir A. Mond) will say whether that is so.

Certainly there is nothing in this Bill dealing with the points raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Camborne (Mr. Acland) and by some other hon. Members, but when the Estimates for the Vote for £10,000,000 are introduced by me shortly, all these grants of this kind will be set forth and can be debated.

I desire to deal definitely with two Clauses of this Bill, Clause 1, which deals with the London Poor Law problem, and Clause 3. The right hon. Gentleman has been forced by circumstances to take this step in regard to London, and I think that circumstances will necessitate him at a very early date considering the Poor Law problem not merely in Greater London, but throughout the country. We who have pressed year after year these questions of Poor Law reform have the right to say that successive Governments, since the Report of the Poor Law Commission in 1909, have failed to face the problem of local government and the incidence of local taxation, and now they have been caught napping. These acute problems have now arisen all over the country. The boards of guardians feel them as they have never felt them before, and the Government will be forced to legislate at an early date in the coming Session. With that in mind, and having examined this problem—for I have represented a Poor Law Union for some time—I am sure that short cuts will not do what is necessary. It will require a great deal of consultation with the various local authorities in order to arrive at a solution of the overlapping between local authorities, and above all, of the impossible position you are getting into with regard to local taxation. The hon. Member for East Rhondda (Major Morgan) by no means exaggerated the position. The accounts which I have heard of the position in Bedwellty are appalling. It is going straight forward to local bankruptcy. You are running into a vicious circle. As unemployment goes up your rates go up, as rates go up and work goes down your assessment on all the ratepayers goes up and you are getting into a hopeless position. This has been going on for several months. It will be going on all through the winter, and next year you are going to be right up against the biggest local government problem that you have ever been up against in this country.

I come back to the specific proposals in regard to London. In spite of what the hon. Member for Limehouse (Sir W. Pearce) has said, the proposal in the Bill is open to criticism. It would have been open to less criticism if you had extended the Equalisation of Rates Act which is based upon a variety of considerations, taking into account population and the produce of the 1d. rate and things of that kind, rather than put the whole On to the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund. The two things are not the same. They involve complicated points. But there is a difference in the metropolis between the effect of including the service under the Equalisation of Rates Act and in putting it on the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund. The effect of putting the whole of outdoor relief on the Common Poor Fund, which now bears the cost of indoor relief, is to put the boards of guardians throughout London into the position of being merely agents with practically no responsibility. The only responsibility left to them is, of course, the rejection of a new application for relief and the payment on a fixed scale. That scale is not fixed by the board of guardians, not paid for by the ratepayers who elect that board of guardians, but by the whole of London, and they are bound to pay that fixed scale, bureaucratically laid down by Whitehall. That is bound to end in trouble, in overlapping and in abuses. It is inevitable. The only way to prevent overlapping, the only way to prevent the system from working with that rigidity which previous attempts with scales centrally fixed have always shown to be a failure, is by a most elaborate system of audit and inspection. Already the burden of auditing upon local authorities in London has become a serious matter. Under this proposal it will become an even more serious matter.

If you are to destroy the local financial responsibility of all the boards of guardians in London, you are bound to end, sooner or later, with the election by London of a single board of guardians. That is the inevitable and logical conclusion of the policy you are pursuing in this Bill. You will have to decide whether it would be wise to have an ad hoc board of guardians for London or whether you will adopt the London County Council. I say frankly that I hope you will not adopt the London County Council, because all experience has proved that once you mix up the distribution of relief with the work of county councils or even of municipal bodies, you introduce into municipal and county work an element which completely disorganises the work. I am sure that we have again been caught napping on this question of relief by this great wave of unemployment. Let us recall the fact that both the Majority Report and the Minority Report of the famous Royal Commission on the Poor Law adopted the recommendation of the County Councils' Association, an association which has never been a very revolutionary body. My Noble Friend the Member for Hastings (Lord Eustace Percy) reminds me that his father, the late Duke of Northumberland, was a member of that body at the time. That association and both the Majority and Minority Reports of the Royal Commission said that unemployment relief should be taken out of the Poor Law.

And boards of guardians be abolished.

Why have they not been abolished? I have always objected to the piecemeal tearing away of the functions of the boards of guardians while you retain the boards. The reason I opposed last year the proposals of the Maclean Committee with regard to Poor Law hospitals was that it was a piecemeal scheme. You would leave the boards of guardians with their statutory functions and their responsibilities and duties and take away from them the means of doing that work. That I have always resisted. I have always said that you must sooner or later deal with the Poor Law question as a whole. "Scrap the lot," certainly. That is an intelligible policy, but do not tinker with the problem. My fear is that this is another tinkering Bill. You will leave the boards of guardians with all their difficulties, with all the old prejudices against them, and you will tell them to deal with the great national problem of unemployment, with, all the difficulties that they have in connection with local taxation; you thrust that duty upon them, and at the same time you have not the common courtesy to consult the Poor Law authorities of London first. We all know that the Ministry of Health and its officials always ignore the boards of guardians, and yet they are always using the boards of guardians as an escape. They never ask the boards of guardians in London for advice, but ask the borough councils and the eminent authorities from the counties. You leave them in when you are up against the problem of the scale. I am sure that this method of equalising the rates in London is somewhat dangerous.

I have in my mind two proposals which, in Committee, I shall seek to put forward as alternatives. One would be that not necessarily the whole of the expenses should be paid out of the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund; that is to say, that in Clause 1, Sub-section (2), instead of the words "the expenses" you should say "two-thirds of the expenses." I do not care what the fraction is. That would leave still some responsibility and some discretion to the elected relief authority. The other alternative is that half should be paid out of the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund and half out of the extension of the Equalisation of Rates Act in this respect. That seems the only way out of this rather crude short cut which the right hon. Gentleman is proposing in the case of London. Another thing is this: I am sure that if you adopt the proposal of a fixed central scale of relief for unemployment throughout London, with all the varying conditions of the relief of the poor in London, and act according to regulations issued from the Ministry of Health, sooner or later you will have to form a centralised system of administration in London and no longer employ the boards of guardians as your agents. In these circumstances the sooner you do that the better. At least we could get a central registry of those in receipt of relief in London and of the various sources of relief.

Look what happens at present in the Metropolis. A man may be drawing money from unemployment insurance; his children may be receiving meals at school; he may be drawing milk from the borough council through the maternity and infant welfare centre; he may be drawing a pension from the Ministry of Pensions. There is hardly a Department of the State that is not now a relief authority. There is practically no machinery for co-ordination and no proper system of registration. It is left to individual boards of guardians to find out these facts for themselves if they can. It is left to the discretion of the relief committee or the relieving officers of the, boards of guardians. This Bill is admittedly a temporary measure brought in in an emergency, as a result of the visit of the Labour Mayors to Gairloch, and undoubtedly it does not really face the problem which we are going to be up against. We shall have the same demands and the same pressure coming from all over the country, and I am quite sure the only way of dealing with them is to come to the fundamentals. You are confronted by the fact that the whole reform of your rating system and your local government system is long overdue, and must be tackled by the Government. The unemployment problem is forcing it upon you. The Local Government Board has got to set to work now, not to nibble at questions concerning local boards of guardians, but to go in for a complete reform of our Poor Law system and our rating system.

As a London Member I feel bound to say something on this Bill. The Bill makes one realise how unfortunate it is that the reform of the Poor Law, so long overdue, still awaits carrying into effect. Since the Royal Commission reported in 1909 there has been ample time and ample material for such reform. I cannot help thinking that many Measures which have succeeded in reaching the Statute Book could better have been spared than one placing public assistance on a sounder and more equitable basis. Had London been unified, as recommended by the Royal Commission, for all purposes of public assistance with a proper central authority controlling expenditure, it would not now be necessary to come forward and propose what is described as a temporary extension of the charges upon the Common Poor Fund. Therefore cost could have been equalised in a perfectly legitimate manner. As it is, we are face to face with, and I suppose we shall have to swallow, a makeshift proposal which is absolutely unsound in principle, and which will, I am inclined to think, prove very expensive in practice. I have no objection to the proposal to increase the sum payable in respect of the maintenance of indoor paupers, but the proposal to place the whole cost of outdoor relief upon the Common Poor Fund is open to serious objection. It means that the 31 boards of guardians in London will defray their cost of outdoor relief not out of money raised by themselves, but out of money levied over the whole of London, and they will do so without the control of any body representing the interests of the London ratepayers. Every authority which considered this question, whether the Royal Commission, the London County Council, or the Committee set up by the Ministry of Reconstruction, came to the conclusion that it is not proper to place the whole cost of outdoor relief upon a common fund. I know it will be said that the Minister is going to supply a check. From the point of view of principle, I venture to suggest that while the Minister may be a good guardian of national funds, he is not a proper guardian of London funds. How is economy and uniformity to be secured under the proposed arrangements? If London is to foot the entire bill, London is entitled to know how these two objects are to be secured. What is the present position of Poor Law administration in London? Some unions are strict, some are emphatically not strict. Some put as few persons on outdoor relief as they can, some seem to put on as many as they can. There is a very wide divergence and I am tempted to quote a description of what exists in London, which was given in a very able speech by an alderman of Poplar, a description which remains true to-day. He said: Pensions and I had to devote a great deal of time in trying to persuade people as to the necessity of administering those regulations in a conscientious and effective manner. I even found it very difficult to do so myself. In this connection there is a passage from the Report of the Royal Commission which seems so apt to the present occasion that I cannot resist quoting it to the House. The Royal Commission said: Common Poor Fund, we should make an addition to the Equalisation of Rates Fund. I think that would be much fairer, much safer, and much more likely to secure economy.

I do not want to take up the position of one representing a comparatively rich district, who wants to deprive the poorer districts of proper relief. I have always been one who has considered that the poor of London should be treated as the poor of London, but I think we are entitled to ask that proper safeguards should be supplied and that we should not have to pay more than we can fairly be called upon to pay. I also ask whether the Minister does not want more powers. I suggest that he ought to have some officials sitting with the boards of guardians, in order to see that the Regulations are applied properly and that proper inquiries are made, because it is not sufficient to lay down scales. I venture to hope that the Minister will consider carefully whether he has sufficient powers to see that proper economy is secured, and that we are not exposed to excessive burdens. Expenditure on outdoor relief in 1918–19 amounted to £335,426. I gather from the White Paper that in the current half year it will amount to £1,355,000, so that it looks quite possible that it may amount to something like £3,000,000 for the year. It is impossible to say really what the expenditure will be, because the figures, I suppose, that are given are based on present expenditure. On the one hand, I suppose expenditure may be checked by the scales or by the Regulations, but on the other hand I think the whole Bill offers a great inducement to increased expenditure. There are many districts which are now strict in their administration, but which, I think, will be inclined to launch forth when the money is coming out of the common purse. This, therefore, is a very serious question for the ratepayers, and I venture to point out that in what are called the rich districts there are a very large number of very poor ratepayers, who are really living on the margin. Therefore, I hope the Minister of Health will consider very carefully what precautions he can take in order to ensure that the administration of this fund is conducted in a thoroughly economical manner.

1.0 P.M.

There is one district in my own constituency in South Wales where 12,000 out of 16,000 are maintained out of the poor rate, and I have been looking into this Bill to see whether there is anything in it to help relieve the situation as it is to-day. I am not going to deal with the London question, because I know very little about it. I understand that an arrangement has been come to between the different authorities, but whether that is fully given effect to in this Bill or not I am not able to say. I am dealing more particularly with those parts of the Bill which affect the whole country, Clauses 3 and 4, and under those Clauses increased borrowing powers are given. That is the point that I want to deal with. I shall be surprised to know that any authority in this country has asked for increased borrowing powers. I do not know whether that is so. I do know, however, that we have had many deputations form Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire within the last two or three weeks. There was one large deputation from Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire representing the county councils, the boards of guardians, the urban authorities, and so on, and they were putting forward, especially the Glamorganshire men, that many of the local authorities had borrowed up to the limit of their powers. The Minister fastened upon that and was dealing with that, and I said, "Do you state that merely as a fact, or are you asking for increased borrowing powers?" Every one of them, without exception, said, "We are not asking for increased borrowing powers"; because those that have borrowed up to the limit of their powers are carrying a burden already as heavy as it is possible for them to carry, and those that have not borrowed up to the limit of their powers do not need a Bill of this sort. I am judging, of course, by those two counties. I might be wrong, but I should be surprised to know that any authority in the whole country is asking for the powers that are given in the two Clauses to which I have referred. When these borrowing powers were given, they were doubtless carefully looked into, and I daresay it was thought then—and it is thought today—that that is a sufficiently heavy burden.

The hon. Gentleman the Member for Stafford (Mr. Ormsby-Gore) has been dealing with the boards of guardians. I agree with him that the guardians have been called upon to carry a burden that it was never intended they should carry. I do not think it was ever intended that the boards of guardians should deal with unemployment as we have it at the present moment. The guardians represented at the conference I have spoken of passed a resolution to the effect that the Government should meet the abnormal expenditure of the necessitous cases, that the Government themselves should deal with the unemployment question, and that these boards of guardians should deal only with the normal circumstances as they always have done. The Monmouthshire County Council sent out a questionnaire to the different Poor Law authorities in that county. I saw the letters and the replies. The first reply was from the Bedwellty Poor Law Union, which was a very serious case indeed. The next was from another authority in Monmouthshire, and the reply of that Poor Law authority was this: "We need not reply to the question. We have raised no additional taxation: we have no need of any additional taxation, because we have no unemployment." That brings me to the point that unemployment is a thing that ought to be dealt with on a national principle and not a local principle. Unemployment is confined to certain circumscribed areas, and generally it is found where the rates are highest, and from that standpoint it ought to be dealt with nationally. The whole burden of every deputation I have had anything to do with—and there have been a good many in the last few weeks—has been that this ought to be a national charge, and not confined to local areas. Of course, the War was a national, or rather international, affair. Europe, and in fact practically the whole civilised world, was impoverished because of the War. If that be so, and this unemployment is largely, if not altogether, a consequence of the War, surely that is a very strong argument for this being made a national charge. I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Stafford when he says that this must be dealt with in the near future.

I do not think this Bill touches the problem at all, or helps it in any particular. I do not believe that work will be found for a single individual because of Clauses 3 and 4. I do not know that any relief will be forthcoming in any district because of those two Clauses. I am leaving out London; I am no authority on that, but I am simply giving my opinion as to how it will affect other parts of the country, and I do not think that touches them in any particular. I am very surprised at the short term loan which is proposed. The Minister knows that it is impracticable from beginning to end. It states that the loan must be paid off the same year as it is borrowed. What good is that to any authority in London? The industries are not paying their share of the taxation because they are not going, and, so far as we can see, it will take a long time to get them going again. I listened to hon. Members last night dealing with the Scottish Bill, which deals with the same things as Clauses 3 and 4 of this Bill. It enables them to raise a loan for unemployment in the same way as this does. In that Bill the period for loans is five years; in this Bill it is one year. I know there is a proviso that the Minister may take the matter into consideration, but who would act upon this, or trust to a Minister upon the point? I do not know any authority that would do it. Why not put in something that is practicable, and still leave the Minister to deal with the matter later on? I do not know why such things are put in a Bill, because they must know better than I know that this is thoroughly impracticable and unworkable, and that no one will act upon it. On one of the deputations the Minister—I think it was the present Minister of Health—offered a loan up to two years. Even that period is not put in this Bill. Some of the delegates—one from the Merthyr Tydvil district more particularly—said that any loan for less than 10 years was no good. There is a good deal of difference, I know, between 10 years and one year, but this is perfectly hopeless. It may be said that it is a Committee point, but I think it ought to be stated to-day.

I sometimes feel that the Government are not serious in this matter, and that they are simply marking time, bringing in Bills that do not touch the problem at all, with the idea of satisfying people until the trouble has blown over, and everything has become normal again. Whenever we see anything in the paper that the Government propose to do so and so, and that local authorities will be supported to this and that extent, and then you come here with a deputation, you find all sorts of difficulties—for in- stance, that it is not a scheduled area. That should have been finished long ago. They told me that the areas were scheduled at the close of the War when there were so many unemployed ex-service men. Since 1920 they have been swallowed up, and become part of the whole population. If that point is to be raised against local authorities who want help, the areas ought to be scheduled again at once and another principle adopted. I have no hope at all of the Clauses to which I have referred. The short term loan is perfectly useless. However, we are not opposing the Second Reading of this Bill. It is the Government's proposals; they are responsible. However, I have given my views pretty frankly, I think, and no one can misunderstand me. I think the Clauses are perfectly hopeless.

First of all, I am sorry that the Minister in charge of the Bill is not present.

My right hon. Friend will be back in a few moments.

The Bill as drawn does not refer to Ireland, but it is just possible that if the Minister were here, he would be able to give me some assurance that would curtail my remarks, and perhaps take the sting out of them. Perhaps someone in charge will tell me if it is intended to apply the Bill to Ireland. I do not know that there is any legislation that has come before us that is more necessary than that which is adumbrated in this Bill. I am thoroughly in agreement with my hon. Friend who spoke last as to the uselessness of this Bill if Clause 3 be insisted upon. The Prime Minister, in his statement on all these Measures, dwelt on the use of the Bill now before the House with regard to the assistance for unemployment, and if I could have some assurance from the friends of the Bill who are present with regard to my country, it would assist me largely in what I am about to say. The Prime Minister said, with regard to relief works:

"We shall proceed with the relief works which we have already undertaken, and it is proposed that a sum of £10,000,000 shall he allocated for assisting those works."

I assume that the Bill now before the House is the Bill of which the Prime Minister was speaking at that time. He also said:

"There are some districts where there is a good deal of agricultural unemployment manifested. There will be a sum of money allocated for forestry and land drainage, and there will he further proposals with regard to roads."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th October, 1921; col. 92, Vol. 147.]

I need not go on reading what the Prime Minister said on that subject, but I take it that that particular portion of the Prime Minister's speech referred to the Measure now before the House. I am an Irishman, and it is rather irritating in Bills drawn up which ought to appeal to the United Kingdom to find that they are limited in this way.

May I be allowed to give my hon. and gallant Friend the assurance that the Minister intends that the Bill shall be made applicable to Ireland?

I am exceedingly obliged to my hon. Friend for giving me that information. It spikes all my guns. It is pretty satisfactory. I trust, however, that this stupid policy of insisting on the repayment by the local authority out of the revenue of the financial year will be dropped. It really is too ridiculous. There are small local authorities which are thoroughly solvent, which desire to raise, it may be, £10,000, £20,000, or £50,000 in order to provide immediate employment and it will take them perhaps 10 or 20 years to repay that money in the ordinary way, and it is provided that it should be repaid within the financial year. I hope whoever is present on behalf of the Ministry of Health will put that very strongly to the Minister in charge of the Bill. Note this provision:

"Provided that as respects money borrowed under this Section within twelve months after the passing of this Act the Minister may, if satisfied that the particular circumstances of the case justify such a course, extend the term within which such repayment is to be made to such extent as he may think fit."

I should not like to be the Minister who is responsible for that. In the case of" local authorities which are thoroughly solvent and prepared to go on with legislation of this character the repayment should be extended over a period of years. In all this legislation the question has been adumbrated, in almost every sentence, of the necessity of their being no delay on the part of the local authorities. My experience is that the delay has been on the part of the Government Departments. I have known cases where applications have been made for the purposes of relieving unemployment, the construction or the remaking of roads, and so on, and where the application has not met with a reply from London within three months. I would appeal to the Minister in charge to see that there is some authority to which these local authorities, particularly in the country, can go—whether it be the Local Government Board or one or other of the Ministries to which they can go direct— and get sanction to go on with the work, because in my part of the country, just as much as in any other, immediate relief of unemployment is needed. We do not ask for money. I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman who has spoken as to the existing borrowing powers. I myself think that that is an excellent part of this Bill. Note this:

"Any money borrowed by a local authority within twelve months after the passing of this Act, if certified by the Minister to have been borrowed for the purpose of any work undertaken by the authority with a view to the provision of employment for unemployed persons, and any money borrowed under the last foregoing Section, shall not be reckoned as part of the debt of the local authority for the purposes of any enactment limiting the powers of borrowing by that authority."

It is quite true that in my own country there may be local authorities who have borrowed beyond the limit of their borrowing powers, but who are thoroughly solvent to-day, and they are quite satisfied, and those concerned are thoroughly satisfied, as to their solvency; but they are prohibited because of this restriction from carrying out works of necessity and public utility. Therefore I am glad there is going to be introduced into this Bill the possibility of such local authorities being enabled to extend their borrowing powers. I would add that I am obliged for the information that a Clause will be introduced which will extend the Bill to my country, and I believe the local authority in Ireland will be delighted.

Members who, like myself, represent the poorer districts in London, have very strong ground of complaint against Ministers for the dilatory way the present situation has been faced—the dealing with this very important and very urgent matter of the equalisation of the poor rate. Time after time the matter has been brought under the notice of the Department. Royal Commissions have been appointed and recommended action. Even as recently as 1918 a Committee was set up by the former Minister of Health under his reconstruction scheme; it was known as the Maclean Committee, for over it the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Peebles presided. That Committee in 1918 made a request to the Government that they should take action on the lines of some furthr equalisation, but the Department chose again to ignore the requests which were made to them. It may be that the Departments concerned could not get the Government to take action, but there were other Departments and other Committees that were appointed about the same time to deal with other subjects, and in one case which I have particularly in mind, the recommendations of the Committee were put into effect. This other matter, however, which affected the poor, and because there was no political tendency in it, had to be laid to one side, and that is the position in which we find ourselves to-day.

Under the pressure of certain labour districts in London and the pressure they have been able to exercise on the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health, some action has been taken in the matter, the result of which we have before us. I would like to put in one other complaint, despite the Royal Commission and the Maclean Committee. A Debate took place in this House last year, and the matter was again raised, and in the report I have before me the Minister of Health admitted the grievance was a just one and ought to be remedied. He went so far as to promise that if I would take out of my Resolution the word "forthwith" he would, on behalf of the Government, accept the proposal. The ground he gave was that he was not master of the time of the House. I agreed to delete the word "forthwith" and the Resolution was adopted. It reads: the Government were concerned the Royal Commission was of no account. The Maclean Committee was of no account. The Resolution passed by this House had no effect. The only way the Government could be gingered up to do something was by the action of certain Labour people who went forward, and did what they did, so that to-day they are able—and very properly—to boast that they have achieved something that other Members that have been busy with this problem for many long years have not been able to achieve. Certainly our Labour friends have got results, and so far as I am concerned I congratulate them on their success. I only regret that some of us, myself and other friends, who have been working for all these years, have not been able to get satisfactory results. I should like to understand the proposals which the Minister has now put forward as a possible solution of the difficulty. I am anxious to know in what way the district of Whitechapel, which I represent, is going to benefit. It seems to me that all we are going to obtain from these proposals is an increased rate. I shall await with considerable interest the explanation of the Minister to the people of Whitechapel as to the benefits they will derive from this very important proposal.

There may be some explanation why Whitechapel instead of getting some substantial relief is going to get an increase of rates. Whitechapel has the reputation of being a careful administrative body. They have a good system of co-ordinating cases of relief. They have a close inquiry in touch with all other charitable institutions in the district, and they have a card index which gives a good account of the relief which applicants are fortunate enough to receive from other sources, and in this way they are able to exercise discretion and to see that those in need get relief and that those who are not so needy receive a smaller amount. As a result of this effective arrangement they are able to keep effective control, and as a reward for their care this is the way they are being treated under the Bill.

The suggestion was made by the hon. Member for Paddington (Sir H. Harris), that in certain cases the outdoor relief should not be given in full, but only in part. My hon. Friend did not elaborate his reasons for this. Personally I do not think it makes the slightest difference as far as the individual applicant is concerned or the boards whether the amount is given in full or in part. It makes no difference to them in the grants they make whether the Minister pays the 70 per cent, or the 100 per cent, of the amount required. The board considers the case on its merits, and they will give the amount they thought necessary, even though they have to find a substantial part of it themselves. I think it would be better that either the local authority or the Minister should find the full amount, and then you are more likely to get better supervision in that way than in any other way.

If a board is administering its own money they generally exercise a little more care, but when they are administering it jointly with somebody else experience shows that they are not so careful, as was the case under the milk scheme by which 50 per cent, of the cost was to be defrayed by the right hon. Gentleman's Department. The result of that scheme was that there were so many applicants and the distribution took place without any thorough investigation that a milk expenditure of something like £50,00 was incurred in that small part of London. Inquiry had to be made with the result that this expenditure dropped from £50,000 to £6,000. I refer to that to show the very great danger there is in any indiscriminate distribution or joint arrangement in connection with what I may term doles. I think the Minister is acting wisely in taking upon himself the granting of 100 per cent, of outdoor relief and exercising some control so that uniformity is brought about. We do not want one district where the family of an unemployed person may be receiving £2 11s., whilst a few streets away another unemployed person and his family are receiving £3 5s. If I were one of the recipients of £2 11s., I think I should desire to shift a few streets away in order to receive £3 5s. It would be no benefit to the people paying the higher relief to have a lot of people moving into their district from outside.

The need for a standard of uniformity is apparent to us all, and that is one of the reasons why we are so disappointed with the proposals now before us. When the Committee stage is reached I hope it will be possible to amend these proposals very substantially, and I trust that sufficient pressure will be brought to bear upon the Minister to induce him to immediately proceed with that long-delayed Measure for the equalisation of the rates. It is not much use talking about appointing Royal Commissions, because that will take months, if not years, and it would be no help in the case of the problem now before us and which is likely to remain with us for some considerable time. There is no reason why equalisation of the rates as regards the poorer parts of London should not be put into operation forthwith. I am convinced that it will be years before the Royal Commission reports, and why this urgent matter should be indefinitely delayed in this way I fail to understand. I trust if the Minister obtains the Second Reading of this Bill to-day he will be prepared not only to listen to the opinion of hon. Members, but that he will be able to give an undertaking that without any more shilly-shallying he will bring in a Bill for the equalisation of rates.

There are one or two proposals in this Bill which entirely undermine the long-established practice which prevails in London. The local authorities dispense outdoor relief, and they are able to pass on the relief granted to the Common Poor Law Fund. It is a most dangerous principle and should not be encouraged. It is going to lead to those generous-hearted guardians who are allowing their hearts to govern their heads, and who let sentiment run riot to dispense relief in such a way that it must ultimately involve a very much heavier charge. While we understand that we are to have Regulations, the fact that in many districts there is no co-ordination of relief such as was referred to by the hon. Member for Whitechapel, boards of guardians who administer the Poor Law relief will not exercise the care they should do in ascertaining the income from all sources of the people who apply for relief. It is most important that every district should be compelled to set up an authority which should register the relief which is being given from various sources. Reference has been made to the free distribution of milk. We know that it is the borough councils who distribute the milk. What cognisance has the board of guardians of the milk distributed when they grant relief under the Poor Law and under this Bill? Some effort should be made to compel every district to ascertain and register the relief given in this way.

Clause 3 gives power to borrow. It has been an established practice in local administration that you should as far as possible raise in the financial year the expenditure of that year, but it is practically impossible under this Bill to precept in advance to enable you to make a rate to cover the expenditure which will accrue from this method of Poor Law administration. I feel sure that it is only going to confuse to a very large degree local administration in our boroughs. I wish to call attention to a practice which is prevailing in many of our metropolitan boroughs and which is entirely against the public interest. I have had sent to me correspondence with the Ministry of Health in respect to a practice prevailing in Woolwich, and also, I believe, in Bexley and it may be elsewhere. The Association of the London Retail Meat Traders wrote to the Ministry of Health and asked them what was the law in the matter. I will read the letter: which is very undesirable not only from the point of view of the trader, but also from the point of view of the recipient of the relief, because the individual who would prefer to go to a particular shop in his own neighbourhood is compelled to go to one particular trader and may have to travel much further than he desires. It is a most undesirable sanction to have been given. I am almost persuaded to believe that the right hon. Gentleman does not know of it himself, and now that his attention is called to it, I hope that he will see that no such sanction is given in the future. I have nothing to say against the Co-operative Society. I should use exactly the same argument if it had been any other trader. It is against the public interest and unjustifiable that one trader should have a monopoly, especially at the present time when Poor Law Relief is extensively given. I can quite conceive the feelings of the traders of Woolwich under the circumstances, because, without going into the differences between the ordinary trader and the Co-operative Society in the matter of taxes, it is most unfair to allow a board of guardians to show its leaning towards a particular group of traders who may have some sympathy with the views now held in many Labour circles.

Reference has been made to a central authority. If we have a choice of evils, I prefer a local authority to administer the Poor Law. It is far better that you should have a scale fixed by the Ministry complete enough to meet all average cases, instead of having a central authority who would have to depute some local authority, non-elected, I presume, to administer the Poor Law. After all, the greatest safeguard in local administration is that those who administer the relief should be responsible to those who provide the means, and a proposal setting up a huge central authority in this great city of London cannot lead to economy, although it might in a small provincial city. I feel that when we get back to normal times we shall find that a solution of the problem of Poor Law administration far more in the direction of unemployment insurance than in Poor Law relief, because once you encourage the individual to accept relief and accustom him to it, its unpleasant aspects have no longer any fears for him, whereas, if, when normal times return, we develop to a greater degree than foreshadowed in the legislation of this week unemployment insurance, we shall make the individual feel that in times of good trade we are laying up reserves against times of bad trade, and that will preserve his independence and will not undermine his character or moral . In the consideration given to this question and the possibility in the near future of an entire change in the law, due regard should be given to the advantages and possibilities of further extending unemployment insurance with a State grant rather than encouraging this unsatisfactory administration of the Poor Law. Then the duties of the Poor Law administration will be narrowed down to people, called workers, it may be, but decrepit old people who are unable to be workers in the ordinary interpretation of the term. They will get the relief to which they are entitled, but the administration of the Poor Law will be narrowed down to the very narrowest limits, and the two things working together will be more beneficial.

I should like to join in the expression of opinion from all sides of the House that the impasse we are in to-day has been largely aggravated by the neglect of this and previous Governments to co-ordinate the local government services and in particular to deal with the question of the equalisation of rates on broad and, if I may say so, sane lines. One hopes that out of the evil of to-day good may come and that the Government will see, immediately the present position has been dealt with, that a really comprehensive scheme dealing with this particular question of rating and with the co-ordination of the various services will be the outcome of this Bill. With regard to the plea which the Minister put forward for the first and second Clauses of this Bill, I think he made an unanswerable case for the principle of equalisation. There is no doubt we may make detailed criticism of its application, because we are dealing in a hurry with what is bound to be a palliative. But I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman what ground he can give for refusing to Greater London, and to the Provinces, as much as he has so readily granted to London in the metropolitan area. He said, I think, that London was a special case in the sense that it stood on a different basis from others. To what extent does it present a special problem? Surely there is the same inequality of rating and the same inequality of burden, not merely in Greater London, but in outside districts.

Previous speakers have made claims for Greater London and for South Wales, and claims have also been put forward for other districts. I want to put forward a claim on behalf of the industrial North. There the position is as bad, and even worse, than in some of the London boroughs. It was my duty on Wednesday to attend a conference of necessitous local government areas, called by the borough of Walsall, to press on the Government the urgency of dealing with this question on national lines and not leaving the burden to be borne entirely by these localities. The conference represented over 50 local authorities, and the average rate at the present time of those authorities is in the neighbourhood of 20s. in the £. Norwich is paying 27s. 7d., and Walsall and other towns over 20s. Surely the urgency is as great in those districts as in the metropolitan area? The right hon. Gentleman gave the following illustration in support of his case for the principle of equalisation in the metropolitan area. He said that in the City of London the rate was 10s. 6d., whereas in Poplar it was 22s. 10d.— We as compared with 22s. 10d.! If the right hon. Gentleman will refer to a most useful statement issued by his Department earlier in the year, he will find the rates tabulated for last year for county boroughs, municipal boroughs and urban districts, and he will also find that the rate shows a disparity in the provinces, not only as great, but greater than it is in the metropolitan area. I cannot take the figures for to-day because they would be merely statements of estimates for the current year, but taking the official figures as published by the Minister himself for last year—and the position to-day is worse than it was last year—we have this result: Methyr Tydfil, 26s. 5d., and Stoke, 22s. 7d.—those are county boroughs—compared with Blackpool, 8s. 3d., and Oxford 8s. 7£d. Then I come to municipalities and larger urban districts. Pontypridd, 29s. 2d., and in the same principality, Llangollen, where the rate is only 8s. 11d. You have similarly Hendon, 8s. 10d., and Leyton, 24s. 5d. That shows that although the variation in the metropolitan area is in the neighbourhood of 100 per cent., when you come to the county boroughs and municipalities and large urban districts in the provinces it is from 300 per cent, to 400 per cent. Therefore I submit to the right hon. Gentleman that what is good where the variation is 100 per cent, must be equally good and more necessary where it is 300 per cent, or 400 per cent. I hope he may be able to bring influence to bear on the Treasury in order to grant to the rest of England this measure of justice which is being granted to the metropolitan area.

Otherwise I am afraid we shall have to draw the conclusion that this Government is prepared to yield to threats of direct action that which it will not yield to reason and justice put in the ordinary way. There never was a time when it was more necessary that it should be realised by the public that reason and good orderly government should prevail, and that appeals to force and to direct action should not be successful. Yet it is the obvious conclusion—that Poplar can achieve for the Metropolis that which the local authorities in the provinces have failed to secure, and that at a time when we all desire that good government should be respected. Local authorities elsewhere, I submit, should have the same justice granted to them. The right hon. Gentleman may say it is a question of machinery and that we have in the Metropolis machinery whereby this can be carried out, while it would be impossible to carry it out in the provinces. But in the provinces there is machinery in force with regard to the equalisation of rates in large industrial and education areas. There are the necessitous schools grant made on the same basis, and equalising the charge for education so that those districts where it is heaviest can be relieved by a special grant from the State. If that machinery is not possible in this case, then I ask as a palliative that temporary relief should be given by means of assistance from the Exchequer, if it is not possible to average Oxford with 8s. 7d. and Birmingham with its 17s. 1d., or Middlesbrough with its 20s. If you cannot do it in that way do not, because your machinery fails, refuse that elementary justice which the Minister has admitted to exist and which he has granted to the Metropolis and which I submit is more necessary for the provinces.

The inadequacy of this Measure is due to that which is common to nearly all the proposals of the Government in dealing with these problems. They have failed to deal with them on broad national lines. Where money is spent you must have local control. It is not fair under normal conditions to pay out of taxation money to be spent by people not responsible for raising it, and we do not ask that under normal conditions, but in so far as things are abnormal, then surely it is only right that assistance should be given form the Exchequer, so that these localities which are bearing so heavy a burden to-day shall be able to carry on at the present time. Previous speakers have given practical illustrations from their own districts, and I should like to add the experience of my own town of Middlesbrough. It is only by giving actual facts—not by theorising, generalising, or making special appeals on humane or any other grounds— that we can bring home to the Government and the Treasury what the position is. I am informed by our local guardians that, whereas in May of last year our relief was only £900 per week, it is now, in October, nearly £4,000 per week. I need only refer to the figures which the right hon. Gentleman himself gave, showing that there should be this measure of equalisation in the metropolitan area. He instanced how in Hampstead there were but a few hundred people out of work, while in the borough of Poplar there were something like 4,000. That £4,000 which is being paid out each week in Middlesbrough is paid to no less than 13,416 people, that is to say, to 4,000 men and their dependants, totalling altogether 13,416 people who are getting relief. If the claims of the 4,000 in the metropolitan area demand that they should receive a measure of equalisation, surely the claims of those in the North demand that they should have an equal measure of justice.

There is another test showing that this burden is mounting up to breaking point. In January the number passing through our casual wards was 177; in September it was 1,543. Surely it is impossible to expect that any locality—and we are no worse off than those which have been referred to in South Wales and elsewhere —can bear this increased charge, which is from 400 per cent, to 900 per cent, above the normal charge. We do not ask that the ordinary burden on the rates of poor relief in normal times shall be borne by the Exchequer. Each district is prepared to pay that. But we do say that, so far as this abnormal increase, going up to breaking point, is concerned, it is impossible for us to carry on, and that bankruptcy is the only outcome unless we get some real assistance. What does this Bill give us? It is a most disappointing Bill. It is called the Local Authorities (Financial Provisions) Bill, but what does it give? So meagre is the assistance that there is not even a Financial Resolution connected with it in order to provide any assistance for local authorities. Local authorities whose rates are 20s. or 30s. in the £ are simply told that they may borrow money, and pay the interest and redemption themselves, to get them out of their difficulties. How can local authorities whose burdens are so excessive borrow money to-day on satisfactory terms? How far is it sound finance that they should do so? It is most disappointing that this Measure does not give real financial help in those cases where the burden is the heaviest. When we have been criticising previous Measures, we have been told that we must not take this or that by itself, but must view the whole comprehensive system. We have had export credits and unemployment insurance, and now we come to this—a Measure supposed to deal with the immediate problem of the local authorities. No matter how we may talk here, no matter how we may plan for helping trade in the future, the immediate and pressing problem which the local authorities have to face to-day is that of thousands of clamouring men, women and children who are starving, while the local finances are absolutely bankrupt and there is nothing for them but destitution and despair. We do appeal that in the case of those necessitous areas the whole State should make itself responsible and help to bear the burden, and that the burden should not be left to be borne by those upon whom the strain is greatest and whose resources are absolutely inadequate, because they are strained to breaking point.

2.0 P.M.

The Prime Minister, in his speech the other day, referred to the £10,000,000 which is to be granted in order to assist local authorities to carry on relief work. As the Prime Minister well said, the schemes that had been outlined, excellent though they were, would still leave a large number of people who would have to go to the local authorities in order to get assistance. What are the Government doing, what is the State doing, and what are we doing, to assist local authorities to relieve that distress? By this Bill we are doing practically nothing. It is no use telling these people that they may be allowed to borrow when their rates are 20s. or 30s. in the £. I would appeal to the right hon. Gentleman, when he tables the Financial Resolution to which reference was made last week, but of which we have not seen the particulars, to provide liberal measures for giving real financial assistance to local authorities. We are told that Clauses 3 and 4 are put in in order to assist local authorities to borrow for relief work, but how can they carry on relief work when their rates are 20s. or 30s. in the £? Let me mention, as an illustration, what I know in my own district. There we have in hand, and have had for several months, relief work. We are told that if we want more we must borrow and pay it back the same year. We have £250,000 worth of work in hand, partly under Lord St. Davids' Committee and partly under the Roads Act; and for every 300 men employed upon that for six months there is imposed a cost of 9d. in the £ on the rates, even taking into account the grants which the Government have already given. That is what is happening to-day. We have in Middlesbrough 13,000 people to provide for to-day, and that costs 2s. 6d. in the £ for every 1,000 people. How is it possible for any municipality where the rates are over 20s. in the £ to face an additional rate of 2s. 6d. for every 1,000 more men put on relief work, when the total unemployed are 13,000? I know the right hon. Gentleman will say that it was never intended that we should put 13,000 people on relief work, but we must attempt to deal with the question. Our guardians are paying now thousands of pounds a week, and in the last six months I think we have paid out in relief £137,000. For that we have got nothing, whereas, if the Government would only co-ordinate its measures, would only grant real assistance to local authorities, we should be able to get good, valuable, permanent work carried out for even less money than we are spending at the present time. I put it to the Minister that the money he is granting now, and under the schemes outlined in the circulars of the Ministry of Health, is quite inadequate, because it does not amount to more, as has been said, than 32½ per cent, on non-remunerative work, or to more than 25 per cent, on remunerative work. This is work which is undertaken at the call of the nation to meet a national need. It is undertaken because of these abnormal conditions, due, as the Prime Minister has said, to the War. We say, as local authorities that we are quite prepared to organise and to do the work, and are quite prepared to bear our share of the cost, but that, so far as we are expediting this work because of this national need, it is only fair that the State as a whole should come in and assist us in the matter.

I do not want to press on the Minister the absolute futility of what has been done up to the present. Valuable as that work has been, it is no good telling a municipality, with rates of 20s. or 30s. in the £, that, if they will pay 60 per cent, or 65 per cent, or 70 per cent., the Government will pay the remainder. That is all the Minister offers at the present time. Therefore, I appeal to him, in the interests of the State as a whole, to realise that more must be done, particularly in the necessitous areas, where the position is worse than has ever been known in history, and where, unfortunately, I am afraid, it is likely to get worse unless something is done. It will be very difficult for those of us who are connected with local authorities to feel that we can face the winter, and that that wonderful patience of the people, which has been exercised for weary months, will not be exhausted, unless we provide something more adequate than we are providing at the present time. Our workhouses are overcrowded; the people are herded together even in insanitary conditions; and, when people are underfed, when disease is rampant, it is possible that, by neglecting to make proper provision at the present time, we are laying up evils which are infinitely worse than those which we now have to bear. Therefore, as a measure of health, as a measure of insurance, as a measure of self-preservation, apart from justice, I appeal to the Minister in the national interest to do more for necessitous local areas than he has contemplated or foreshadowed in his speech to-day.

I think we can truly say the hon. Member who has just sat down has carried the sense of the House with him to a great extent. I think there is a consensus of opinion that the Minister of Health has rendered no small service both to the community and to the nation at large by the statesmanship and insight that he has displayed in his Bill. The only fault we find with him is that while he has started on the right way he has not gone far enough, and I take it that the object of the Debate today is to help him along in that direction, and I am sure he will not object to any friendly criticism on that score. The great defect I find in the Bill is that it seeks to meet a diversity of need and resources with a uniformity of treatment. The Minister has rendered service to London by his recognition of the need of equalisation. He has also given to local authorities extended powers of borrowing. I should like to ask him if he could go a step further. It is not so much the power of borrowing that these local authorities suffer from. They really suffer from lack of means. You may give them the power of borrowing, but they do not know where to get the money. I came up on a deputation from my own constituency. We went to Lord St. Davids' Committee, we went to the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Labour. We were sympathetially received. They gave us a good percentage. But these local authorities have already exhausted their powers of borrowing, so they would have to go into the open market and find Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and other big cities in competition with them, and they could only secure the money at a very high rate of interest.

I suggest that £10,000,000 is totally inadequate. The position in South. Wales is-this. Unemployment is increasing, but the rateable value is decreasing in our great industrial districts. The collieries are being closed and there has been a depreciation in rateable value, so that these public authorities find themselves in this position. There is extra work thrown upon them, extra claims and extra applications, and yet they find them- selves with diminished resources. The whole thing comes back to the question of rates and taxes. Prior to the War this House, in its flush of enthusiasm for legislation, passed Measure after Measure conferring fresh powers on local authorities, allocating to them this duty and that duty, and so it went on. But these local bodies are crushed under the weight of their administrative powers and they have no money to carry it out. The House has been too ready in the past to devolve upon local authorities power of administration without supplying them with the sinews. They do not require more borrowing powers. They require the State to take upon itself an extra share of the burden. If it is a case of an increase of taxes or an increase of rates it would be better to have increased taxation on people who can bear it. You have communities who have profited during the War and they can bear the extra part of the tax. I would rather see increased taxes than increased rates on communities which cannot sustain the burden. It must come, and I have faith in my right hon. Friend. I think he will do it better than most men. He has shown statesmanship in this matter. He represents the constituency next to mine. That accounts for the plenitude of his wisdom and his statesmanship. If he were to consult his colleague, the little Minister from Scotland, who, I understand, has lately gone in for motoring, he will tell him that it is no use decorating your (Jar unless you have a good supply of Pratt's Perfection Spirit.

Shell is better.

I think my right hon. Friend will understand the allusion. It is no good giving these local bodies more power of borrowing unless you help them to get the money. Finance is the linchpin of the whole business, and if my right hon. Friend will bring to this task that insight and statesmanship which he has already shown— and he has not had much help from some of the mediocrities on that bench—he will render a great service to the country at large. He knows the conditions in South Wales. He has already made an exception in the case of London, and we are entitled to ask for preferential treatment in face of the exceptional difficulties with which we are confronted.

The Debate has now been carried on for such a long time and over such very wide ground that I think the time has arrived when I might be expected to reply to the very large number of arguments and questions which have been addressed to me. Of course, some of the eloquent speeches, like that of the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson) and appeals like that of the hon. Member for Neath (Mr. H. Edwards), go rather beyond the scope of the modest Measure I introduced this afternoon. No one can fail to recognise the difficulties of boards of guardians and local authorities in these very difficult times. I recognise also that in many areas of an industrial character the difficulties are greater than in others, but there is one point which it is only fair to put, and it has been put to me very strongly. Where was money made during the War except in these industrial areas?

Is it not a fact that the money was earned there but not spent there?

I hope it was not spent but saved there.

We saved as much as we could in War Savings Certificates.

The argument is put forward that taxpayers and ratepayers in areas which did not benefit during the War at all, or only very little, should now come to the assistance of the industrial areas. Undoubtedly the War benefited every class of the community—

Except the working classes.

That is not true. They benefited very much, and they invested in War Saving Certificates, and those investments are still being made. That is a point of fairness which I am bound to put forward. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough referred to the position of London and compared it with places as far distant as Birmingham and Oxford. That is no analogy at all. Middlesbrough is one unit and Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester are large units; but in London you have the extraordinary phenomenon that Hampstead, Kensington, the City, and the rich areas form watertight compartments, and Poplar, Woolwich and the poorer parts also form watertight compartments, and all that this Bill is doing is to put London in the position of other municipalities in regard to the Poor Rate. The question whether we ought to extend the Poor Law areas generally I have had under consideration. At the time of the cotton famine that was practically adopted in Lancashire; but these things can only be done by common consent, and that is why I am glad we have obtained consent in London. Hon. Members ask why the Treasury cannot do elsewhere what they are doing for London. The Treasury is doing nothing for London. So far as London is concerned, this Bill will not cost a penny piece. London is dealing with London in a very fine and generous spirit, and on the whole I thank hon. Members for the very kind way in which they have received the Bill. I have great sympathy with the hon. Member for West Ham in the unfortunate position in which that borough is placed. It has always suffered from being outside certain areas, and not sharing the equalisation of rates or other benefits which it would have enjoyed if it had been part of the Metropolitan area.

I have confined my Bill to small and practicable measures. The temptation is very great to launch out into great schemes. Hon. Members will have seen how much diversity of opinion has arisen even in the narrow ambit of this Bill. If I had extended it, it would have been impossible to carry it in this Session of Parliament. I am not prepared to attempt such a thing. It is all very well for hon. Members to say, "This is a small, miserable thing. Why do you not have some new great scheme of reform?" which, I may add, one would never get passed. There are thousands of people in the East End of London who are walking the streets, and are very badly off. The boards of guardians there are in a very difficult financial position, and I would sooner stand at this Box and put forward a Measure which I can pass now, and which I know will satisfy to a large extent and calm the agitation in the East End of London, by relieving distress and doing good, so far as it goes, than I would stand here and bring in the omnibus Measures that my predecessor so often was persuaded to introduce, and which landed him in such difficulties. I am not going to follow in those footsteps.

Criticisms have been made of the methods that have been adopted. I am informed that equalisation of rates under the Act of 1894 would have been much more acceptable than under the Common Poor Fund. There are two reasons why that course was not adopted. One was that the contributing boroughs disliked it and objected to it. The second reason was that the localities that wanted money the most would have got the least. Under the Common Poor Fund scheme there will be a decrease in the rates of Woolwich to the extent of £113,000 and of Poplar by £131,000. With universal consent it was decided to adopt the system of the Common Poor Fund. I am not pre-judging the much larger question with which Lord Ullswater's Commission will deal. Objection has been made to the proposal to fix the scale of relief. At the present time every board of guardians is operating under a scale of so much for a single man, so much for a married man with wife and family. A universal scale will be welcomed by many boards of guardians throughout the Metropolitan area. The Noble Lord the Member for Hastings (Lord E. Percy) said that I was only putting a new coat of paint on the leaking hull of a sinking ship. I am doing more than that. I am baling out the ship to help it to keep afloat in these difficult times, and if I can keep it afloat, keep the crew from drowning and the passengers from being washed overboard, I shall be quite satisfied.

My hon. Friends from South Wales presented again a case with which I am thoroughly familiar. I have had deputations more than once and have gone thoroughly into the disastrous circumstances of the districts in question. They have had all the luxury of a stoppage which lasted for a long time, and they are now, naturally, in serious difficulties. This is not the time for recrimination, and I would be the last person to indulge in recrimination, but neither I nor the Government nor any human agency can absolve people from consequences that they have largely brought about themselves. It would not be quite fair to ask those who have been seriously damaged by the action that was taken, and who had nothing to gain but everything to lose, to rush to the assistance of those who could have avoided much of the distress if they had abandoned earlier the theoretical aspirations which they now admit they never wished to obtain. I realise their difficulties, but they must, like all other human beings, to a certain extent, bear the consequence of their action.

I am astonished that objection has been raised to the proposal for the raising of loans by local authorities or boards of guardians to help them over their difficulties. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough is very concerned about Middlesbrough. Middlesbrough can scarcely be looked upon as a necessitous area. It is one of the greatest and most flourishing industrial centres in the country.

With 40 per cent, of the people out of work?

For the moment. That is Middlesbrough now, but it is not Middlesbrough two years ago, and it is not Middlesbrough two years hence. If Middlesbrough had always 47 per cent, of its people out of work it would be no use subsidising it, and no use starting relief works. You would need to take the people away and send them somewhere else where they could get some work to do. Middlesbrough's future is as great and as glorious as ever it was.

Hear, hear.

Therefore, it can well afford to borrow some money on the strength of its great and glorious future, to deal with the present situation. Although you may try to separate the ratepayer and the taxpayer, they are one human being, and, unfortunately, we have not two lots of people to draw upon, and we have not two lots of money in the country. There is only one lot of money in the country, and whether it is borrowed by the local authority or by the Chancellor of the Exchequer it has to be obtained from the money market, and the money market is not unlimited. The Government offer to assist the Poor Law guardians to borrow money if their banks will not lend them money, and the Government will see that they obtain it and, if necessary, will guarantee the loan in order to tide the Poor Law authorities over the present difficulties. I do not think it can be said that that is no assistance. I am sure that hon. Members will agree with me that it would be absolutely impossible to control such Exchequer grants to boards of guardians all over the country. In London I think we can manage by inspection and supervision to control extravagance, but now I am invited to advocate the pouring out of the taxpayers' money to the guardians where no administrative control whatever is possible.

That is why I am so much opposed to this proposal. I want some responsibility to be borne by the people who administer the money. I want them to feel that they have some responsibility towards somebody for keeping their expenditure within reasonable bounds. That is why I think that the system proposed in the Bill is a good one. There will be no starvation. The money will be forthcoming, and it will be infinitely better, both from the point of view of administration and of finance. It is said that we should begin with the most necessitous areas, but where are you going to stop? If the whole of the rates of the country were put on to the Treasury, let hon. Members imagine what would be the financial position of the country.

Responsible Members of this House, however hard they are pressed, ought to discountenance as much as they can the idea of getting over the difficulties in their constituencies, merely by coming here and endeavouring to get the Exchequer to take over local responsibilities and local finance. You always begin with some very small amount, but the fact is continually overlooked that the work done in the locality is done for the benefit of the locality and will inure to the benefit of the locality. I am talking of useful work because we only want useful work; but such work done locally will benefit the locality directly and indirectly, and it is not unreasonable to say that the major burden of that work ought to go on the locality which is going to be benefited and not on a locality which is not going to get any benefit at all.

The same thing applies to reproductive work. Complaint has been made as to the amount of assistance given in the case of waterworks and other schemes which will have to be carried out in any event, if not now at any rate in two or three years; and will it not be giving you a substantial inducement and help you materially to offer to pay half the interest on the charges for five years? Everybody seems to assume that two years hence everything will be cheaper than it is now, but that is a speculation and not a certainty. You may find the reverse taking place. A fall in prices is now taking place, but the one is a certainty and the other is a speculation, and people ought to keep that in their minds.

The hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Ormsby-Gore) had a number of criticisms to make. He is very familiar with the subject, but I find it difficult to follow his argument. He says, "Why do you not reform the Poor Law and reform Local Government? But for goodness' sake do not touch the Poor Law guardians, or if you touch them at all do not do anything small with them; cut their head off, but do not cut their hair."

Will the right hon. Gentleman not agree with me that execution is better than torture?

The hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that the existence of all these conflicting points of view is one of the reasons why nothing has been done. Great controversy exists about all these subjects. I have been giving very careful consideration to the various reports upon them and to none more than to the views of the hon. Member, and if time and opportunity are available, there is nothing which I would like better next Session than to proceed with some of these very necessary and long-delayed reforms, but I would like hon. Members to realise what a sea of trouble is likely to be raised by these matters, and every Government and every Chief Whip naturally tries to avoid a topic so sore and so difficult to deal with. Still, undoubtedly a reform will have to be faced.

Meanwhile I ask the House to give this Bill a Second Reading, and if there are any points raised in Committee I shall be glad to look into them. On the whole, I think that we are to be congratulated on having achieved a measure of agreement and a measure of success. It is obvious that unless we have the practical consent of all sections it would be impossible for me to take any legislation in this short Session, and we should thank those who, by their co-operation, have enabled us to do something which will give fruitful results. The fact that there are those who represent more or less antagonistic interests, but who yet take a common interest in this matter, will all help in the future when, by the slow process of cooperation, differences and jealousies which now exist would naturally tend to disappear. My hon. Friend the Member for Whitechapel (Mr. Kiley) is unhappy because under the scheme Whitechapel will have to contribute.

It is a poor district.

That is one of the difficulties. No matter what scheme you adopt, you always have the difficulty of the marginal case. I sympathise with Whitechapel, which has been remarkably well administered, and those who are responsible are entitled to credit for what they have done, but you cannot avoid these cases. I would appeal to my hon. Friend that his constituency should not think badly about contributing to the less fortunate districts which surround it. My hon. Friend the Member for Neath said that there were cases in which the powers had been exhausted.

I said that they had exhausted their powers, and that they tried to get more and were unable to do so.

I have not heard of such cases. Under Clause 4 they will have further powers. In the case of some of the South Wales authorities credit is extremely good.

Would the Minister of Health point out to us where we can obtain the money? I have told him that we have to compete with places like Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and Liverpool. We have no opportunity of obtaining money except at extravagant rates of interest, even if we can obtain it at all.

That is what I said.

Local authorities frequently obtain their money from their bankers, short loans certainly. If their borrowing powers are increased they may be able to get some more.

Can the right hon. Gentleman mention a single authority in Wales which has asked for increased borrowing powers?

If authorities do not want to use their borrowing powers, nobody can force them to do so, but, at any rate, the option remains. The county council of Glamorgan is in a position to do something. The fundamental fact is that you must get the coal mines going. Nobody knows more on that subject than the hon. and gallant Member for East Rhondda (Major Morgan). But that is not the purpose of the Bill. I hope the House will now give me the Second Reading of the Bill, because I want also to obtain the Second Reading of another Bill dealing with national health insurance, which is very urgent in that it involves keeping under insurance a very large number of people.

We have listened with interest to the very humorous way in which the right hon. Gentleman has dealt with some of the points raised. One has wondered whether the right hon. Gentleman and his Department really meant to deal seriously with the situation in which the local authorities find themselves when they brought forward this Bill on a Friday, and after 3½ hours' discussion the right hon. Gentleman appeals for the Second Reading in order that he might pass on to another Bill. I have come to the conclusion that, while he may be at the head of his Department, the Minister of Health does not realise as intensely as do members of local councils and county councils, what the situation is. I cannot help thinking that while the Bill is a good one from a certain point of view, it would have been as well if the right hon. Gentleman had suggested to the London Members that they should have a meeting upstairs in one of the Committee Rooms, that they should come to a common agreement as to what they want, and put that on the Orders of the Day to be passed formally after 11 o'clock at night. As far as the Members representing constituencies outside London are concerned, this Bill is of no value. It gives us a right to incur more debt. That is the extent of the Bill as far as the Provinces are concerned. I congratulate the London Labour mayors on the result of their work, and also the people of Poplar on the effect of their visit to gaol. It may be true that the meek inherit the earth, but that does not help us. If this is the way to get things you want, the Durham Labour Members will take their own course and get a slight release from ordinary everyday duty by spending a time, if not in Brixton gaol, at any rate, in some more commodious and well ventilated building. The right hon. Gentleman gives us the right to incur more debt. We can, under certain conditions, raise a loan. It must be dealt with during the current year.

Why does the hon. Member say "the current year?" I have sanctioned loans to boards of guardians for three, four, and five years.

It is solely at the discretion of the right hon. Gentleman himself. Sub-section (3) of Clause 3 says:

"All sums borrowed by a local authority under this Section together with the interest thereon shall be repaid out of the revenue of the local authority within the financial year in which the expenses were incurred."

The hon. Member has not read the whole of it.

Read it.

There is the following proviso:

"Provided that as respects money borrowed under this Section within twelve months after the passing of this Act the Minister may, if satisfied that the particular circumstances of the case justify such a course, extend the term within which such repayment is to be made to such extent as he may think fit."

It will thus be seen that we are in the hands of the Minister, as far as that point is concerned. Surely the right hon. Gentleman does not realise that local authorities are already so weighed down with debt that they have almost ceased to function? That is the exact position. I sat before the War, sometimes during the War, and I have sat since the War on local councils. One of the most disheartening tasks a man can undertake is membership of a local authority at the present time. It has been the custom in this House, although I am glad to say it has not been the method employed here to-day, to treat members of local authorities as though they were the enemies of the State. These men who do grinding, drudging, thankless work, are simply made the butts of the very people who are largely helping to lay the burdens upon them. The right hon. Gentleman in his humorous interlude said that somewhere in Wales they were suffering because of "the luxury of a stoppage." I do not know what are the particular circum- stances there, but we, in our area, had the luxury of a stoppage because we had had the luxury of an indemnity and the luxury of a Peace treaty.

That has nothing to do with the coal stoppage whatsoever.

What about the coal sent to France?

If anybody should know anything about economic cause and effect it is the right hon. Gentleman himself, and does he mean to tell us that the launching of 20,000,000 tons of German coal on to the market had nothing to do with the stoppage? Does he mean to assert that the placing of that coal in the hands of France, Italy, Belgium, and other countries did not do something towards torpedoing the prices and making the subsequent situation possible? Why, it is a well-known fact. I come from a county which has done trade with some of the Scandinavian countries for half a century, and the placing of the surplus of German coal upon the markets made our position absolutely impossible. The right hon. Gentleman is not dealing fairly when he treats in a humorous way a situation of that kind. The tactics may be questioned, the strategy may be questioned, which obtained during that discussion, but our men had to face a grave situation, and they met it like Britishers, and I, for one, as a representative of Labour, am proud of the way they faced it. I would point out to the right hon. Gentleman that this unemployment, as the Prime Minister said, is one of the natural results of the War. There are other results of the War as well. We get Coalition Governments, for example, as a result of the War. I would advise the right hon. Gentleman to read a page or two of "May's Constitutional History" as to what happened after the Napoleonic Wars, when those who made money and became the vulgar rich came for the first time before the eyes of history and made a Coalition Government, just the same as this one, in order to defend their position. In view of that, it is not surprising to hear what we have heard from the Front Bench. We are told Germany lost the War. She did, and we have found it, and the local authorities will be pleased to give the results of the discovery to anyone who wants it. The right hon. Gentleman's Department has issued a state- ment, or circular, with regard to relief works, in which local authorities are in structed that the rate of wages paid to unskilled labourers on relief-work schemes must not exceed 75 per cent, of the local authorities' rate—

On a point of Order. A circular of the Ministry of Health regarding relief work is, I submit, quite irrelevant to the Bill we are discussing.

I think that is the point to which I referred earlier in the Sitting. That would come up when we are dealing with the grant in Committee of Supply.

I am sorry I cannot deal with that matter now. The Minister of Health, I submit, is raising a very acute situation, and I see there is a strike mentioned to-day which seems to be directly the result of that position. I can assure him that this Bill will do nothing, as far as the authorities outside are concerned, for the unemployed. Indeed, since the House reassembled, we scarcely know where we are on this question. Some of the unemployed men in discussing this matter are asking each other whether they come under the Export Credits Scheme or the Insurance Scheme or the Local Authorities' Scheme. It seems to me the Government is doing its best to lose the unemployment question. It may do so in the House of Commons, but it cannot do so in the country. The only effective way in which these matters could have been faced was for the Government to have frankly recognised that it was a war question. The local authorities are burdened with arrears arising from the War. It is a common saying that debt is the result of having Labour councils. That is not very often said in this House because people are rather cautious, but the same thing is said by hon. Members outside this House where it cannot be so well contradicted. Everybody knows that most of the local councils throughout the country are non-Labour councils. I only wish there were more Labour councils. The non-Labour councils are in exactly the same position as the Labour councils. The Ministry of Health has sent out two documents in which they deal very definitely with that fact. These are two White Papers, one of which says:

"The whole of the increase, it is clear, has arisen in respect of the normal work of the local authorities. In common with other bodies and private individuals they find themselves in a position of having to pay larger sums of money than before the War for the equivalents of the pre-War quantities of service and commodities, and these larger sums of money they pay out of local rates to be levied on assessable values which for the most part remain on a pre-War basis, and necessarily they have had to increase the amount per £."

We have a later statement in White Paper No. 1155 which says:

"It may suffice to state the particulars which have become available since the publication of the previous Paper tend to confirm the analysis it contains as to the cause of the recent increases in the amount in the £ of local rates."

If you want to buy anything you have got to pay more now, and the same thing applies, from the most humble instruments right up to other matters, whether you are dealing with roads, or anything else. Anybody in public life who knows the actual situation which the authorities have to face and who makes the charge that Labour is responsible for the high rates, is making a statement which is unjustified, and is taking advantage of the well-known courtesies of public life. Unemployment is the direct result of the War, and the burden of rates is the direct result of the War, and the Government in coming to deal with unemployment ought to deal with the whole position. The local authorities are facing an unparalleled situation with a courage and a capacity and a patience that should earn the encouragement of this House and this country, rather than the criticism which is being bestowed upon them at the present time. That criticism is cheap, and, as far as the Government is concerned, they ought to help these people by dealing with unemployment and the question of these arrears as a War question. It may be asked, Where are you going to get the money? The people who ask that question are the people who spent £100,000,000 on Yudenitch in Russia, for which they did not get a brass farthing. He decamped with millions and left thousands of people starving and rotten with disease. We spend millions in Mesopotamia and we are told we must increase military staffs and that we must spend £40,000,000 on battleships which everybody agrees will be no use when we have them finished. The question as to where the money is to come from is never put when it is a question of Imperial policy. Take care and remember that we are dealing with an Empire which is so great that it will break in the middle if we do not deal with the real life of the Empire in the very centre. While important matters have been dealt with in the Bill so far as London is concerned, I do not give the right hon. Gentleman any thanks for his Bill so far as the rest of the country is concerned. We thank him for nothing, and he will soon find himself in a position whereby the local authorities in the provinces may manifest themselves in a way which will make him deal in a more drastic and generous way with this great and fundamental question, which the Government has thought it worth while to deal with in a few hours, on a Friday afternoon.

I have not intervened before because the points I would like to put have already been adequately expressed, particularly by the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Ormsby-Gore) and the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson), but I feel great disappointment at the reply of the Minister of Health, who appeared to base his defence upon two principal features. The first was that this is such a little Bill. "It is a small Measure," he said. The second was that the problem is really a local rather than a national one. I am, unfortunately, one of those who represent one of the necessitous areas, and I am not at this stage going to revert to the points which have been put forward stating the case of those areas. I only want at this stage to take a broad view of the matter, and to recognise, first, that after the National Unemployment Insurance Act this is clearly the direction in which I understand the Prime Minister and the Government most look for providing relief of the great unemployment problem, which is already with us, and which, I fear, we must anticipate is likely to get worse during the winter rather than better. When I consider the position of local authorities in the Black Country, which I happen to know best, and the opportunity which they will have of fulfilling, as adequately as need be, the relief of unemployment, I say that their position as regards borrowing and their financial position generally is one which cannot fairly stand the strain which this Bill will impose upon them if they are to do the utmost in their power to pro- vide profitable relief work for the unemployed.

3.0 P.M.

There is one thing to which the right hon. Gentleman made reference where, I am sure, most of us have an enormous sympathy with him, and that is in reference to the constant demands that are always being made upon the National Exchequer. I say that to-day because, as one of those who has always felt very strongly that the Government ought to have tackled this problem of finance much earlier, I recognise that the right hon. Gentleman in charge of the Bill happens to be the one Minister who appears to be the most active in trying to bring about retrenchment,. but in this great national problem of unemployment it seems to me that the attitude of the Government is to try and save their faces as regards national finance by throwing the obligation on the rates instead of on the taxpayers. It may be said that it does not matter very much whether it is thrown on the taxes or on the rates, but, admitting that this is a national problem and not a local problem, there is every argument for it being put on the taxes rather than on the rates. Whilst I could not agree with some of the financial views expressed by the hon. Member for Chester-le-Street (Mr. Lawson), yet in general principle there is an enormous amount in what he said. We are inevitably going to be driven by every month that passes to the need of most strictly reducing every penny of national expenditure we possibly can, yet we have got to keep the nation alive through a very difficult and trying time. Even if we had only the modicum of justice that the situation demands in just helping to keep our people alive, I am quite certain that something more than the provisions of this Bill has got to be devised at a very early date, particularly in these necessitous areas, and I would like to throw out one little suggestion which might be of some value. From my experience of Government administration, I am afraid that hon. and right hon. Gentlemen in charge of Bills and Measures are too liable to be misled by the reports they get from localities and principal officials in their Departments. In this case that I am trying to represent, the case of the Black Country, believing that this Bill will not do what the hon. Gentleman wants done, I suggest—it cannot cost very much; it might cost next to nothing—that the right hon. Gentleman should find some one or more persons, in whom he has absolute confidence, to look round that area, to meet the local authorities, the chambers of commerce, the representatives of labour, and so to learn really what is the position and what is likely to be the position of the unemployed in two or three months' time. It is quite an easy thing to do, and no effort ought to be too great if it is likely to do any good in this matter. I make that suggestion, and I think, perhaps, my right hon. Friend thinks very little of it; but in all sincerity I am sure there is going to be trouble in the area that I represent and in the district around unless something more is done than is offered to these necessitous areas in this Bill. I merely throw out the suggestion that if my right hon. Friend thinks my views are exaggerated, at any rate, he should not run too much risk in that great Black Country as to what may happen, that at least he should make sure at an early date whether there is any truth or reason at the back of the representations which I have endeavoured to put forward.

I would not intervene at this stage except that I represent a constituency which is being very hardly hit at the present time by unemployment. It is a mining district, with a number of small urban areas, and it is a district in which we have not been unduly burdened by the amenities of life. The rates have been increasing throughout the area and are now as high as 25s. to 27s. in the £, and that has brought about a position in which the workmen are having to pay what is practically equivalent to a double rent. The rates on an ordinary cottage in my area being some £9 to £12 a year, if you add the cost of the weekly rent, you can quite see that for rent and rates alone our workmen, many of them on short time, have an expenditure of 12s. or 15s. a week.

That, in itself, is a serious matter, and while the proposal of the right hon. Gentleman admittedly does something for London, and I think we ought to recognise that and welcome it, the case of the provinces is a different matter. I have said that my area is a mining area, and I would like to point out something in connection with the incidence of the rating in that area. Our mines are not treated like other business concerns, according to their extent or their buildings, but on the output—a matter of 5d. per ton rateable on the output of the mine. That really brings us back to the position that the worse the employment in the area, the less the income from the industrial concerns there, and, naturally, the larger the rate for the traders and the cottage occupiers. The trader in our area has to pay on his usual assessment, but in the mining industry in my locality the less the output, the less the rateable value, and, consequently, the larger the burden that has to be borne by the occupier of cottage property and the trader. It means that the less employment in the area, the larger the proportion of rates which thos6 workers must bear, and, as I say, it has created a serious position.

The hon. Member says the rates are based on the output of coal. Would the repeal of the Seven Hours' Act help by getting a larger output of coal?

I do not think that it would in the least. It is idle to suggest that that would be of any advantage when men already are not fully employed.

You would get a lower cost of production.

I do not think that would help. Instead of working three days a week, they might work two, or, instead of four days, three, but at the week end the result would be the same. The position is that already there is as much coal on the market as can be absorbed, and that was brought out by one of the hon. Members for Durham when he said the present position is not due to the miners' stoppage but to the Reparations Treaty. The feeling in these necessitous areas in rural districts has become so acute that the guardians are arriving at a position when they are not looking with favour on the proposals of the Minister, and are practically refusing to function in the near future unless something be done for them. Hemsworth guardians have decided that, so far as loans are concerned, they are not prepared to seek further loans to increase the burdens from which the poor suffer already. They believe, as I believe, that the burden of unemployment from which we are now suffering is a War problem brought about and produced by the War, and they believe that the burden of unemployment should be borne by the State, and not by any particular locality. The right hon. Member for Peebles (Sir D. Maclean) said that the time had gone when you could segregate communities for the purpose of the Poor Law. That is exactly what you are doing. The poor are herded together in our industrial districts, and they are segregated for this purpose. Something was said by the Minister himself about the money earned in the War in certain districts. I would point out to him that connected with these districts there are not only the workmen of the collieries, the managers and the rest of the staff, but that there are outside in places like Brighton, Bournemouth, Blackpool, and Scarborough shareholders who during the War received handsome dividends and who are to-day receiving handsome dividends. They reside at these places and they receive their dividends free of Income Tax. What are they doing to bear the burden of unemployment in the districts concerned? So far as I can see, nothing! There they are in luxury, happiness, and peace whilst the workmen who strive to produce these dividends are bearing the burden of this excessive unemployment which is bringing them to the verge of misery and despair. I do hope though my remarks may be very disconnected—and, in the opinion of the Minister, very unnecessary—that in any proposals he may make and in any influence he may bring to bear upon the Cabinet he will try to present the difficulty of these poor people throughout the whole of Britain, who are themselves, owing to the present system of taxation, having to bear burdens while the rich are able to go free.

I was very much disappointed by the statement made by the Minister of Health. I thought in view of the appeals which had been made and the arguments adduced in the Debate that in all probability we would get something further from him than that which is stated in Clauses 3 and 4. I find in his reply that he holds out no hope to what I may call the smaller urban and rural districts of the country where unemployment is rife. It seems to me that in the consideration of the form of drafting this Bill that large cities like London, Manchester, and Liverpool have overshadowed the smaller urban councils and that these urban councils have not got any consideration whatever from the Government. I am speaking now for an area of the North West coast, which is to all intents and purposes an industrial area, though not an area where there are large towns and cities. The area is largely composed of small urban councils and the district outside is governed by rural district councils. The proportion here of unemployment on the percentage basis has been to all intents as great as anywhere. In certain parts of the area there are men who have not been employed since October last year. They were not employed owing to what is called the coal dispute. They are in the iron ore mining industry. During the War the industry was briskly employed, and a large number of people were brought into the district to meet the necessities of extra-production. In that particular area some mines have been closed since October, 1920. The right hon. Gentleman stated in regard to the general situation that the workers had done well out of the War. I should like to remind him that in the majority of cases, assuming that they did do well, all they have been able to save has now gone because they have had to use it during the period of unemployment. The union funds in all these localities have all gone. The guardians have been appealed to, but they have borrowed to the utmost of their capacity. The local urban councils are desirous of starting relief works. They have not got much encouragement from the Minister of Health.

The hon. Member says that the urban councils have not had much assistance from the Minister of Health. I should be glad if he will give his reasons for that statement.

At any rate, they have not bad much assistance in regard to relief work, because already their borrowing powers have gone to the utmost limit. The only way in which you can give assistance to these councils is by the Government taking the full responsibility for a state of unemployment that exists, and making provision for these people by giving grants towards relief work. That is not being done. It is no good taking pre-War conditions as a guide to present conditions. During the War people were conveyed from one part of the country to another, and in many cases they remained there after the War. Therefore it is more important to us because the unemployed question is now more a national question than ever it was in our history.

What we do say is, that if we cannot get grants from the Government to help these areas where the urban councils are not functioning, at least, I ask the Minister of Health to give further consideration to Clause 3 and see if he cannot extend to us some better prospect by, not only allowing those councils to borrow money, but by giving every help to those people to borrow the money they require. When these small urban councils have to compete in money matters with larger districts, it is impossible for them to get these loans. Although I advocate grants instead of loans, first of all I would ask the Minister if he cannot see his way clear to give grants to these smaller areas. Will he give us a promise of some assistance, and that his Department will help us to get loans for these particular areas?

Certainly I will do my best.

If I allowed this opportunity to pass without taking part in the discussion I am afraid my constituency would want to know the reason. I will state the facts of the situation as they present themselves to us. I represent one of the worst areas in the country and one which has been hit probably harder than most other places. I want to impress upon the right hon. Gentleman the necessity of something being done for the necessitous areas. One might have imagined during the delivery of the right hon. Gentleman's speech and the genial manner he assumed that really we had no trouble in the country. He did not appear to realise that we were face to face in all probability with a very serious situation. The Prime Minister admitted that we were up against a very serious situation, and even the right hon. Gentleman had to go back 100 years to find a parallel. Since then we have had other Ministers giving their views, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in very choice language, pointed out the serious situation in which we find ourselves today. The Minister of Health in replying to the Debate rather assumed a genial and jocular mood, and made it clear that nothing further could be done than what was suggested in this Bill. I want to make it perfectly clear that there is nothing in the Bill for us outside London. We are not here for the purpose of seeking powers to borrow money; we are already so overburdened with debt that it is impossible for us to raise our heads and keep things going. I want to refer to a circular issued by the Minister of Health dealing with the percentage of help which they are prepared to give to local authorities.

I do not think the hon. Member was here when I dealt with that matter earlier in the afternoon. We shall have an opportunity of considering that on the Estimate under which these grants are to be made, and that will be the occasion for any detailed criticism on that point. I do not mean to say that a reference to it, as a matter of argument, would be out of order.

I appreciate your ruling, and I only want to refer to it in order to point out the difficulties we are up against. It appears to me to be a problem as a whole, and not one that can be dealt with in piecemeal fashion. Local authorities have certain work which they can perform, and I want to give the House some indication of the extent of that work. We have in the whole of Monmouthshire an employment register of about 25,000, and we have work to provide employment for about four weeks during the coming winter. For the rest, people will be left to drift in the way suggested by the Bill brought forward by the Minister of Labour. In the middle of August I was called upon, as the local Member of Parliament, to try to use my influence to prevent any real disturbance taking place in the Bedwellty Union. There were demonstrations of unemployed to the extent of 7,000 or 8,000. Men visited the board of guardians while they were deliberating and discussing the situation, and eventually the guardians adopted that which the right hon. Gentleman now suggests should be adopted in the London area, namely, a scale. That suggestion has been condemned. They fixed it at a point higher than their finances would bear, but as a result of an interview that the clerk of the guardians and myself had with the Minister of Health, we went back and recommended that the scale should be reduced in order to get more sympathetic treatment. It was a very unhappy suggestion of the right hon. Gentleman that the working hours per day in the mines should be eight instead of seven.

It was not a suggestion; it was a question.

The suggestion underlying the question was that it would be very wise to adopt that policy.

The hon. Member has no right to say that. I made no comment; I merely asked a question.

We have in the Bedwellty Union a rateable value of £550,000, and the present deficit is £96,000. There is no hope of getting the bank to advance any more money, and, moreover, to approach the bank with a view to securing further loans would only be inviting bankruptcy in the very near future. I have heard hon. Members suggest that a rate of 20s. in the £ is an extraordinary rate to ask people to pay, and references have been made to rates of 10s. and 15s in the £. The rates in this area, owing to the fact that the guardians have to ask for a supplementary 5s. in the £, are 38s. in the £. How can you expect a locality or union with rates amounting to 38s. in the £ to ask for powers to borrow further money and make their position absolutely impossible? The right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Gorbals division (Mr. Barnes) made reference to the fact that other Bills now before the House would benefit five-sixths of the people as they were not at present receiving relief from the board of guardians. He assumed that one out of every six of the people employed make application to boards of guardians for relief. That is not the situation in the Bedwellty unions. I want to assure the Minister for Health that the stoppage of work in that union is not due to any general stoppage or to the general condition of affairs. The Ebbw Vale steel and iron works there were stopped very early in the year. The collieries were stopped on 28th February, and these people have been living on charity and generosity ever since, and have resisted going to boards of guardians until absolutely compelled to do so. In the Blaina area we have an extraordinary state of things. Four large collieries have been stopped and two small ones are kept going. The stoppage it is feared may be permanent. We have a population in that district of 16,000 souls, and at this moment, owing to the extreme circumstances of the times, there are 12,000 people in receipt of Poor Law relief.

What we want to put to the Minister of Health and to the House is this question: How can he expect localities to thrive under these very special conditions? At the time the Ebbw Works were stopped the rateable value of the area was £550,000. It must be now reduced by about 40 per cent., or to about £400,000. While the rate on the normal rateable value was 38s. in the £, what is it likely to be with growing expenditure on the reduced rateable value? I seriously suggest to this House we shall be called upon to pay, not a rate of 38s. in the £, but one approaching 50s. in the £, and that, of course, is an impossible condition of affairs for any community to live under. Although we are accused sometimes on these benches of having no interest in capitalist concerns, I am one of those who believe that while we are living under the existing conditions, it is better for the concerns to be prosperous, as consequently the workmen would be prosperous. I am satisfied in my own mind, however, that, although the Ebbw Vale Steel Company may restart their works, it will be impossible for them to compete in the markets of the world if they have to pay a rate of 45s. or 50s. in the £. I feel from that standpoint that, in order to relieve the industries of the district, more consideration should be given to the suggestion that grants should be made to districts placed in these extraordinary circumstances. I should like to see the atmosphere that permeated the country and this House during the time of the great international crisis prevail now. It is admitted by all the Ministers that the present condition is one of the aftermaths of the War, and we seriously put it forward that it should be a national charge to relieve the extraordinary pressure caused by unemployment in this country. How the scheme should be developed in order to bring that about would be left to the Ministers and the Government to decide. While this state of things exists it is impossible to carry on the industries of the country. The Prime Minister made reference to the disturbances of 100 years ago. I do not want to suggest that there are going to be disturbances, but if you are going to get hungry men you will get angry men, and very serious trouble in different parts of the country may arise unless the Government take a more sympathetic view of the situation. I appeal to the Minister of Health and to the House to do something to recognise the position of those local authorities who find it impossible to live under the provisions that are in this Bill. I do not care whether you make it universal or not; but these particular localities cannot be left to the pressure of to-day. It is suggested that boards of guardians should borrow money and repay it in 12 months, but in the case of the Bedwellty Board of Guardians anything less than five or seven years is inadequate to enable them to repay. I ask the Minister of Health to consider that point, apart from the question of giving some necessary help in the form of a grant.

If the hon. Member will look at the Bill he will see that the 12 months can be extended by consent of the Ministry. There are a number of local loans which I have consented to extend far beyond one year. I know the case of Bedwellty very well. I was discussing it with the guardians when they came to see me. I forget the term that I proposed, but it was more than one year. I think more than three or four years.

I wish to draw attention to the position of those districts where there are a very large number of men who are out of employment through no fault of their own, and who have become a charge upon the local authorities. I should like to know whether the right hon. Gentleman was in touch with the various local authorities and understood the state of their liabilities before he draftd this Bill. During the last six months in many of these areas mines have been closed, and the local authorities, consisting of men with a well-considered judgment and knowledge of the political situation, feel that the mines have been closed by the action of the Government. At any rate, the men who have been thrown out of work have had to go to the Poor Law guardians for assistance. I have received a statement on the subject, which comes from a district where Labour have not charge of the administration. It says:

Another aspect I should like to put to the right hon. Baronet is this. As the mines have been closed the only remaining source from which rates can be collected is house property. Many of the people who have been working at the mines have purchased their houses or got a mortgage upon them—what we term a monkey on the back—and that is all the more reason why it ought to have greater consideration from the Government than it is receiving to-day through this Bill. Industrial sources of employment are closed and men are thrown on the market amongst the unemployed. The only source remaining is cottage property, and how is it possible for the local authorities to collect rates when the people who would normally be called upon to pay them have no income at all but are in debt? These men who, by their industry, have tried to purchase houses for themselves are thrown out of work, and because they have £50 or £100 invested in their house can get no relief. In the light of these circumstances, in broad human justice we suggest that this liability ought not to be left to authorities which are already bankrupt, but ought to be faced by the Government and the National Exchequer. If we can afford to spend £207,000,000 a year on armaments when we are supposed to be at peace with the world, there is a possibility of finding a substantial amount to carry on works whereby men can find employment which will enable them and their families to obtain the necessaries of life. The State should come to the aid of the local authorities, and instead of allowing them to sink into the mire of bankruptcy keep them in a state of solvency by finding useful work. It should be a national liability to find work for every man who is able and willing to work without recourse to the local rates, and I hope that will have due consideration.

May I appeal to the House now to come to a decision and let us have the Second Reading of this very important Bill?

I welcome this Bill as a long overdue measure of reform, particularly as regards the Metropolis. I rise, however, for the purpose of calling attention to what, in my opinion, is an omission from the Bill. We have been urging in the Metropolitan area—and I speak with some little authority, because, unfortunately, I have had a great deal to do with the borough that has lately come into prominence in connection with this question of equalisation—we have been urging that there should be equalisation, and that the richer boroughs should bear a larger proportion of the rate in respect of the maintenance of the poor. When this Bill was drafted, we were anticipating that, while it made provision in that direction, it would also provide for some form of central administration throughout London. I feel persuaded that, while the Bill goes a long way towards meeting the difficulty in calling upon the richer boroughs to bear their right proportion, they will regard it with a great deal of disfavour if it is to be permitted that, in the 14 or so Poor Law unions throughout London, there shall be varying methods of administration in relation to dealing with the poor.

Therefore, if it is to put into operation the Common Poor Law Fund, which in reality this means, for the whole of London, I should like to call the attention of the Minister and of those in charge of this Bill to what we regard as a grave omission. Central administration should have been provided, so that at least there should be some equality of method of treatment in all the Poor Law unions within the Metropolitan area, thereby removing a good deal of the scandal and a good deal of the acute feeling that has been aroused when this question of equalisation has been discussed in days gone by. I have been on this question for a great number of years, and I remember how, in the early days, I was abused by the various small wealthy boroughs, who said, and rightly, "What right have you to ask us for money to use upon your more or less adventurous schemes, without our having any voice as to how it is to be expended?" For this Measure to be of real value it should, in my opinion and in that of others with whom I have to do, provide for some common, central administration in respect of all the boroughs that come within this scheme of equalisation. I hope that, before the Measure goes through the House, the Minister will find some way of meeting that demand.

Question, "That the Bill be now read a Second time," put, and agreed to.

Bill read a Second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House, for Monday, 31st October.—[ Colonel Leslie Wilson .]

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

This Bill is very urgent and necessary, in order to meet the case of a large number of those who have been within the ambit of the National Health Insurance benefit for several years, but who, owing to prolonged unemployment, would fall out unless special provision was made. The Bill is designed to keep those people within the ambit of the National Health Insurance scheme. It is of a somewhat technical character, and I do not propose to enter into that at this stage, but it has been discussed with the approved societies, and has obtained the approval of the Consultative Council of the approved societies. The framework under which the Bill will work is as follows. There will be no charge on the State contribution. The cost of the increased period of benefit and the retention on the insurance of those who otherwise would not be retained, will be derived from the funds available which are in the hands of approved societies.

And from the Contingency Fund.

And I think from the contingency fund. It is a measure which has been approved by those on whom the responsibility will fall. The financial position of the approved societies has been very satisfactory, and there seems to be no risk that in putting what is an increased charge on their funds for the future, their position will be in any sense impaired. There is no charge at all on the Exchequer. This Bill will have the effect that insured persons will be maintained in cases in which they would otherwise fall out, and they will be entitled, up till the end of next year, to maternity benefit and sickness and disablement benefit in accordance with the scale appropriate to 26 contributions. They will further be entitled to medical benefit up to June, 1923. The House will therefore see that by this means we shall be able to keep in benefit a large section of subscribers who, unless this Bill were passed during the present Session, would fall out, and the House will agree with me that it would be very disastrous for that to happen, and that accordingly it is necessary that this Bill should pass into law as soon as possible.

We all recognise how very important this Bill is. No one would seek to delay its passage, but I do not think the statement contained in the Memorandum, even when amplified by the statement which the Minister has given to us as to the course of the new provisions, is at all satisfactory. I have inquired in the Vote Office and was surprised at not being able to find that there was any actuarial statement or White Paper or explanation of any sort with regard to this cost. You cannot give these increased benefits without its costing a great deal of money to somebody. If they are going to cost very little they are of very little advantage in relieving distress in the country. If they are going to relieve distress in the country to a considerable extent, they are going to cost a great deal of money. The memorandum is ambiguous. The right hon. Gentleman has said that the Exchequer will not have to pay anything in consequence of this Bill. I do not so understand the Memorandum, but if he says that is exactly what he means, I will accept it, but there are certain statutory payments which would be larger under this Bill than otherwise they would have been, and it is said that part of the cost is already provided by existing legislation. If so, there is something that will have to come out of the Exchequer in respect of these additional payments which will have to be made to insured persons. Then the remainder, and I presume the bulk of the cost, will fall upon the approved societies. Of course the approved societies have been consulted. Nevertheless, I think this House ought to be informed how much is the expenditure that will fall upon the approved societies and how far the societies are able to bear it. I am making no objection to the principle of the Bill, but I think the financial explanation given with regard to it is very inadequate. While offering no opposition to the Second Reading, I reserve the right to make any criticisms at a subsequent stage with regard to the financial aspects of the matter.

On behalf of the great approved friendly societies of the country, I wish to express thanks to the Minister of Health for the prompt way in which he has brought this Bill before the House, for his courtesy in receiving a deputation on the subject last week, and for the fact that within a few days the Measure is before Parliament. I am sure the House will appreciate the very difficult position in which many members of the approved societies find themselves owing to the unfortunate wave of unemployment. There are men under the National Health Insurance who have been paying contributions for anything up to nine years, who have had practically no benefit and who, unless some provision is made for them, will forfeit all they have paid during those nine years by falling into such a state of arrear as not to be qualified for benefit. It is eminently desirable that the House should regard the matter sympathetically. On the question of finance the Minister has taken counsel both with the consultative council and also with representatives of the National Conference of Friendly Societies who, in the main, having regard to the emergency, are generally agreed that the funds of approved societies, at any rate for the present, can fairly well bear this extra strain. There were considerable surpluses accruing at the last valuation. There has been a good deal of criticism and heart-burning as to how those surpluses would be applied. In many of the societies they still remain in very fair proportion. They would go a long way towards meeting the financial commitments of this Bill. They could be met further by a claim upon the Contingencies Fund. I hope the Bill will go through the House speedily and without amendment.

Question put, and agreed to.

Bill read a Second Time, and committed to a Committee of the whole House for Monday (31st October).—[ Colonel Leslie Wilson .]

The remaining Orders were read, postponed .

Whereupon Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to Standing Order No. 3.

Adjourned at Five Minutes before Four o'clock till Monday next (31st October).