Last night I rose to place before the Committee a few figures which I thought would be interesting, and show the position of the building trades in a new light. I should not have spoken on this matter but, for what I believe to be an unwarranted attack upon the building trades by Members of His Majesty's Government. Last night I learned two things. One was that it is all right for Members on the Government benches to talk, but when Members of the Opposition benches talk they are wasting time and holding up business. The other thing was that if I had been a really nice person I would not have intervened after the Minister of Health had spoken, But if the Government will allow their back benchers to use a Token Vote as an opportunity for making attacks upon any section of the worker.; of this country they can only expect us to resent it and seek the earliest opportunity of rebutting such attack. My hon. Friend the Member for Reading (Mr. H. G. Williams) is a very capable person. He has worked hard, he has studied hard, and he has got on, and I cannot for the life of me see why he should object to a bricklayer doing exactly the same thing. Members on the other side of the House, or Members of the class represented by them, write books on economics, and we foolish workmen read them. Part of their teaching is that we all try to get our living along the line of least resistance. That applies to bricklayers, and it applies to everybody on the benches on the other side of the House. The other theory is wrong. Why they are unwilling to carry out their own doctrines so far as bricklayers are concerned I cannot imagine.

The hon. and gallant Member for St. Albans (Lieut.-Colonel Fremantle) intervened when a Member on this side of the Committee, whose Constituency I have forgotten, was speaking, and said, "Then you will hold up building." We do not desire in the least to hold up building; we desire to get on with the job, but we also desire decent conditions of living for those who want to get on with the job. The hon. and gallant Member for St. Albans is connected with the medical profession. Not so long ago I read in the Press—the Press is not always right—that medical men in this country were threatening to hold up the country, were going to cut off medical service, would not act under the Ministry of Health because they could not get what they believed to ne adequate remuneration for their services. Many years ago medical men in Stockton approached me asking if I could help them to get an increase of the per capita fee paid for friendly societies. In those days the fee ranged from as low as 2s. per head, I think, to about 5s. per head per annum per member of the lodge of the friendly society. In Stockton the fee was 3s. 6d. per head, and the medical men thought they were entitled to 4s. 6d. So did I, and I helped them to get their 4s. 6d., because I believe that not only the labourer, in the sense of the manual worker, is worthy of his hire, but that the brain worker also is worthy of his hire. Why the brain worker turns round and objects to the manual worker having a fair share is beyond my comprehension. Please note that figure of 3s. 6d., because when the medical profession was threatening to refuse to serve under the Ministry of Health I believe, if my memory serves me rightly, they were demanding 13s. Will you also remember another thing, that away back in those bad old days a doctor would attend a maternity case for 10s.

The pay of the medical faculty is a subject that is rather wide of a grant of a token Vote for demonstration houses.

That is what I thought last night about bricklayers' wages. My speech is no more in order than other speeches last night were, and it is the bad example they have set that gets me on my feet. I will leave out details and just put this position before the Committee, that in principle there is absolutely no difference between the building trades and the medical profession, though there is in degree, and the bricklayer is a beacon light of modesty in comparison with the other people and the charges they are making for their services. On the question of the number of bricks laid, I suggest that ever since one man employed another the workmen never did enough work for his employer; and I believe it to be equally true that ever since one man received wages from another those wages were never high enough, and I hope they never will be. I do not want a stationary society of human beings. I would like them to be happy, I would like them to live in amity, but I want progress, and I want that progress, when it comes, to be shared among the whole lot of us, and not be for any one particular class. The figures the Minister of Health might have given the other day when he was rather claiming the credit of having got built—I do not think he claimed the credit for having built, if he did that was a euphemism, and we will forgive him for it—the figures he might have given to show the splendid support he had had from the building trades were these. The first set of figures for 1911 are taken from the Census, and the second set are taken from the number of insured persons under the Unemployment Insurance Act. In 1911 there were employed in the building trades in this country 729,092 persons. In January, 1924, there were 367,030 persons employed, or slightly over one-half of the number of people that were employed in 1911. I will take a common denominator of six. Then we see that three-sixths of the men in the trade in 1924 built five-sixths of the number of houses that were built in the record year to which the Minister of Health referred; in other words, three persons employed in the building trades in 1924 did as much work as five persons did in 1911. If these figures are accurate then they destroy the fiction of the paper with the biggest circulation that the building trades are slacking and not doing their bit.

Last night the Minister of Health told us that he has nothing to do with the dispute about demarcation. I thought he was taking too much of an isolated position of apparent security. I suggest if his big battalions behind him and his secure majority of 200 is making him put his head into the clouds, I would remind him that he has feet of clay and they have to stay on the earth. If the Minister of Health has nothing to do with the dispute in the building trades, who has? I know it is not a matter at this particular moment for the Minister of Labour, but it will be, and I want to suggest that it would be wise for the Minister of Health to consider his attitude on that particular point and take some little interest in the matter. I understand that this House, in its wisdom some years ago, passed a Resolution to the effect that in all Government contracts there should be inserted a Fair Wages Clause, and whilst this House had no right to dictate to municipalities, it recommended to them that they should adopt a similar Clause. Experimental houses are now going to be built by municipalities and private individuals and they will be subsidised by this House. That I think will make this House require that the Fair Wages Clause should be carried out in those contracts.

Why should we wait? It may be all right when we are sailing in smooth seas, but often storms blow up very rapidly in our industrial life, and why wait until the storm comes? Why not see the danger ahead and take a hand in the matter now? In the steel trade we did not wait until the storm blew up. We appointed a neutral committee to get the facts of the case and see whether we could afford to be isolated while the two disputing parties quarrelled. We decided that if we could not settle it in this way that we would take the matter to arbitration. I do not want to hold up houses. I believe that the building of the Weir houses is going to bring work to thousands of unemployed iron and steel workers, but I want to say here that it would be better for the industrial life of this country that never a house of this kind should be built if it is going to involve the degradation of the building industry of this country. You have nearly 400,000 persons employed in the industry. Most of them are married men with wives and families, and in all probability there are not fewer than 1,500,000 dependent for their daily bread upon that industry. It is, therefore, not a question whether Lord Weir is to get more profit or not, but it is a question whether a whole trade should be degraded and have to suffer reductions in wages, and have its working conditions made worse merely in order that this person may try tins experiment and see how much money lie can get out of it.

In the steel trade we do another thing which I would suggest might be useful to many of my colleagues on this side of the House- to know. Sometimes an employer believes that he can gain a mean advantage for himself by persuading his work-people to leave the Union, and often that is his first 'step. Sometimes he will persuade his workpeople to accept conditions contrary to the agreement laid down in the trade. In a case of this kind we generally go along to the rest of the employers in the trade and demand that they should keep their house in order. Very often an industrial dispute has been avoided merely because the employers have sent a recalcitrant employer to Coventry for a time, and he has found it so jolly uncomfortable that he has had to become a decent chap, whether he liked it or not. If I were an employer in the building trade, I should be exercising all my wits to oppose Lord Weir's scheme, because it is not only injuring the workmen who get 4d. or 5d. an hour less, but it is injuring every employer in the building trade.

Do hon. Members know what is going to happen? Last night the Minister of Health mentioned four of five people who are now building steel houses. If this reduction of wages extends to these men, the minute it operates there will be a stoppage of work. That will not only involve those men, but it will involve the rest of those employed in the building trade. This is what is called the thin end of the wedge of trouble. It looks all right on paper from the other side if hon. Members think they can get, wages reduced from 1s. 3d. to 10½d. per hour, but in this matter they seem to be leaving us out of account altogether. I have no hesitation in saying that we are going to extend that trouble right through the country, and I think it would be wise of the Minister of Health to reconsider his position, and see if he cannot take an interest in this matter in the interests of industrial peace. I should very much regret to see such a fight take place, but I shall not shirk it any more than I would think of shirking this discussion.

One of the things I was afraid of last night when I heard hon. Members opposite slating my class, was that I should not have the courage to protest because I should have put myself in a false position. I had, however, to get rid of that difficulty and I will not shirk the second issue when it arises any more than I would shirk the first. Last night when the Minister of Health was making suggestions for avoiding trouble in this matter we asked for a guarantee that this Token Vote would not be used for the purpose of injuring the men in the building trades. During the discussion I observed two or three faces opposite, but I could not see the face of the Minister of Health, and I am satisfied that the men whose faces I saw on the benches opposite thought that was a reasonable assurance to give. But it was not given. What is the logical reason for the withholding of such a promise? It is the intention of the Minister of Health—either his deliberate intention or his intention by the neglect of his position and power to put things right—that this Weir scheme shall go through in the hope of smashing the bricklayers. When you start smashing things, look out that you do not get smashed yourself. It is inevitable when there is a row that someone gets hurt, and it is not always the person whom you want to smash who gets smashed. The Minister of Health charged the ex-Minister of Health with having taken sides on this matter. That is what we are here for. The workers in times past sent to this House capitalists and landlords of all brands, Liberals and Tories, and they could never get a fair show. Therefore, they altered their policy, and they sent here a group of men from their own rank to make an effort to get fair play. That is all that we are asking for.

The Minister of Health said that he has not taken sides. I am afraid that his logic was neglected when he was at college. He is in the position of taking sides when doing nothing. All that he has to do is to sit still and lie automatically takes sides and decides in favour of Lord Weir. If he wants to be a fair man—and I hope he wants to be fair—he will get a copy of the Fair Wages Clause, ask himself how far he is responsible for carrying it out, how far these conditions laid down by Lord Weir contravene that Clause, and if he is not satisfied on the point he will insist on the Clause being carried out. I am informed by a personal friend of mine, who is interested in sheeters and erectors and that type of labour, and who is somewhat involved in this dispute, that Lord Weir is taking up the attitude that he is not going to pay building rates of wages, that he is not going to meet the building trade union to discuss the matter, and that they have nothing to do with it. So long as he takes up that position of splendid isolation, I for one am compelled to vote against any money being provided for this scheme. I do not think that the Minister of Health has a right to put me in that position, knowing that I want houses, by saying, "You can have houses if you will assist Lord Weir to reduce wages in the building trade." I am not going to enter into any such agreement.

I should have hesitated, as a new Member, in joining in this Debate but for a somewhat extraordinary statement made last night by the hon. Member for Springburn (Mr. Hardie). He informed the Committee that it was impossible to obtain any information from Lord Weir as to the length of life of the houses contemplated under his scheme. I do not know where the hon. Gentleman obtained his information. I do not know whether he ever went to see Lord Weir, or made any inquiries. But I can tell the Committee that I have seen Lord Weir and have discussed the question of the estimated length of life of the house with him and with the manager who he has specially appointed to undertake the management of Messrs. Weir's housing department. I was informed that so long as these particular houses were painted at reasonable periods, say from five to seven years, there was no reason why, in the opinion of Lord Weir, they should not last for at least from 40 to 50 years. Therefore, the statement that has been made that Lord Weir is reluctant to express any opinion whatever as to the estimated length of life of this house is, I venture to suggest, not entirely correct; in fact, I go so far as to say that it is entirely incorrect.

When listening to the speeches made from the Opposition Benches last night, I noticed that every speaker, as far as I heard them, had nothing good to say for the Weir house, but everything to its disadvantage. All sorts of drawbacks were pointed out. In particular, the hon. Member for Springburn said that within a period of 18 months, and over an area of 18 inches as from the foundations—I notice that his area synchronised with his idea of time—the Weir house would become rusted, with the result that it would be of no use whatever. Then I understood from the hon. Member for West Willesden (Mr. Viant) that his chief objection to the Weir house was that it was not vermin-proof, and that in course of time, owing to the interior arrangement of compressed pulp or three-ply boards, whichever method was adopted, the house would become full of vermin. If the hon. Member for Spring-burn he correct in his view that the foundations of this house will fall away within 18 months, I do not think one need have very much fear on the subject of vermin, because, if infantile paralysis attacks the feet of this particular house, there will be no time for the vermin to get a footing, and so dislodge those people who are in occupation.

I do not know why Members opposite, and particularly Scottish Members have what appears to be a violent objection to Lord Weir and his methods, but it is perfectly clear that they have. They have painted two pictures of him. The first shows him as a very hard, keen man of business. I am not sure that that description does not apply to a great many captains of industry in Scotland and England. They have also painted him as a man unscrupulous, and desirous of doing some hardship and wrong to those engaged in the building trade. That is on one side. On the other, we have the picture of an individual who is persisting in endeavouring to build a large number of houses that will be of no value whatever inasmuch as they will not last. The short space of 18 months will see them rotting at their foundations and presumably falling to the ground. Therefore, you have, on the one side, the hard, unscrupulous man, and on the other the fool. I ask hon. Gentlemen on the Opposition Benches which of those two pictures they are going to select. Are they going to have the hard and unscrupulous Bothwell or the foolish and feckless Darnley?

Then I venture to suggest that they have been doing the Members of their own union—the Building Operatives—a great injustice in all that they have said to the detriment of the Weir house. According to hon. Members opposite, these houses are hopelessly insufficient. They will not last any length of time; they will be of no use. They will be prone to vermin. In other words, it is useless spending any money on them and a waste of time for any operatives to put any work into them. Yet the building trade are prepared to assist in the construction of these houses, provided that they are paid the full rate of trade union wages. I venture to suggest that the gentlemen who ran down the Weir houses, and said that they are hopelessly ineffective and will be no good, have done a very grave injustice to the building operatives, because, if that be carried to a logical conclusion, it comes to this, that the building operatives know, through their leaders, that to build these houses is a waste of time; that they will not provide the accommodation for those who seek accommodation, because the houses will not last; that they will not be storm-proof, and that, under various atmospheric conditions, they will bulge this way or the other way, and altogether that they will be unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, the building operatives, if hon. Gentlemen on the other side are correct, so long as they can get their full rate of pay, are willing to have these houses erected, and by so doing prevent other experiments with different types of housing.

I do not believe that those hon. Gentlemen on the other side really understood what they were doing when they adopted the extraordinary attitude of saying everything to the detriment of the Weir houses, and nothing at all in their favour. Had they gone into it closely, they would have seen that the more they ran down the Weir houses, the more they made it clear that these houses were of no value whatsoever, the more they were casting reflections on the building operatives and on the building unions. In my opinion, the real reason why hon. Members on the other side do not want these houses erected—or rather, do not want these experimental houses put up throughout the country—is that they do not want those people who are going to occupy them, and who wish to occupy them, ever to see them, because the moment they see them they will want them. When I was in Glasgow discussing the matter with Lord Weir, he told me that when the first house was put up at Cathcart, nearly 4,000 people went over that house, and the question that was invariably put to him was, "When can we have one of them?" That is what is going to happen. When these experimental houses are put up throughout the country, as I hope they will be, the moment those who today are living in squalor and misery see those houses—and, mark you, they are good houses; I have gone over them—they will at once put the same question to the municipal authorities or whoever put them up, "When can we have one of them?" The answer is going to be——

Did the hon. Member ask that question for himself?

The answer is going to be, "You can have them if the building operatives withdraw their claim that unskilled labour is to be paid the full skilled rate." And when those who want to live in these houses realise that the reason why they cannot get them is, not that we on this side are not doing anything for the working classes in need of accommodation but that those engaged in the building trade are deliberately adopting a dog-in-the-manger attitude, I venture to suggest that there will then be a good deal to be said between those who want the houses and those who are preventing them from getting them. I say, further, that when those men who are to-day unemployed, and drawing the dole know that their unskilled labour can and could be employed on the erection and construction of these particular houses, they also will have a few words to say to the leaders of the building operatives and the building unions. I hope and trust that no further question will be raised as to these houses, but that they will be erected all over the Kingdom, so that those who really are in dire need of housing accommodation can see and judge for themselves.

It is difficult always to do oneself justice in a maiden speech, and, indeed, it seemed very hard to believe that the speech to which we have just listened was a maiden speech, because the hon. Member showed such fluency and competence that many of us older Members might well envy him. My suggestion is, if I may say so, that it has been a very interesting contribution to the discussion. I approach this matter of the Weir houses with quite an unprejudiced mind. I recognise that the housing problem has become so acute that we are bound to give every encouragement to every experiment. I should, however, like the Parliamentary Secretary, who, I assume, will reply to the discussion, to deal with one or two matters. The first is, Is this typo patented? Is there a chance of a manufacturer of it having a monoply in the materials and in the system of building? That is a very important matter upon which we ought. to be enlightened. If it is likely to be a monoply, that is a matter for consideration, because this is a question of mass production. Lord Weir has made that clear, and the producer who has the first start is going to have a very great advantage over other competitors. We have had considerable discussion about the merits of this particular type of houses. My hon. Friends above the Gangway, and especially the hon. Member for Spring-burn (Mr. Hardie), have given lurid pictures of the unsuitability of these materials for housing purposes, and the hon. Member who has just sat clown did not give us very much encouragement. He told us that at the most the houses would last 40 or 50 years. That is going to be a very serious handicap to the house when it comes to letting it, because the capital cost will have to be wiped out in 40 years. Then be said that they would have to be painted every five or seven years, but an ordinary brick house has not to be painted, and painting is a very expensive matter. Even if it is only done at intervals of five to seven years, it will have to be counted in considering the cost.

A number of experiments are going to be made, and every hon. Member is anxious to see some of these houses. In a few weeks' time two of them will be erected within a stone's throw of this House, at Millbank, and I am going to make a sporting proposal. I will do my best to try and get the first letting for two Members of this House——[HON. MEMBERS: "On which side?"] One of that side and one on this side; and when they have been thoroughly tested I shall be only too delighted to have a try at them myself. They will be very convenient for the House of Commons, because they will be built on Millbank, just by the Tate Gallery, on the site of the old Millbank Prison. Perhaps that is why the site was chosen. The site is being provided by the County Council, and all hon. Members of the House will be able to see the buildings not only erected but occupied. If there are two volunteers willing to offer their services to the County Council. I will do my best to get them the chance of occupying them. Joking apart, there are one or two matters which the Minister of Health did not make quite clear. I thought that hon. Members above the Gangway made a very strong case on the labour question. They made it quite clear that they did not require, for the men engaged in constructing these houses, the rates paid to skilled labour in the building trade. All that they ask, and it is a very reasonable request, is that the rates paid should be the same as those paid for equivalent labour employed in the building trade. That is a most reasonable request; and I would go further. These houses will not be going through a fair test unless they are subject. to the same rates and the same conditions of labour as other houses. I do not suggest that the metal sheets which will be manufactured in the factory should be governed by the building trade. Obviously, they would be governed by the engineering trade. But the actual construction of these houses should be done by men paid at the rate of wages paid for equivalent labour employed in constructing brick or other kinds of houses. I think the Parliamentary Secretary should make the position clear on that head.

There is another matter, and a very serious one, which was put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for West Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson), and also by the late Minister of Health, namely, the question of building rings. A great point was made that, actually since the new Government has come into existence, there has been a very serious increase in the cost of light castings—something like 12½ per cent. on the average. Anyone who is occupied in the building of these houses Knows that the question of light casting is a constant worry and trouble to all contractors and local authoritites, and I think we are entitled to ask that at this stage of the housing problem there should be some guarantee against these rings being used to exploit the demand by raising prices excessively. The present Minister of Health, when he was last in Office, set up a committee, I do not know if it still functions, but I think they ought to keep their eyes very wide open and the Minister should show his willingness to take very drastic action if these rings and combines are to be kept in their place, because after all, all these substitutes, whether steel houses or concrete blocks, are a very poor substitute for bricks. Bricks have stood the test of centuries, and there is not much doubt that the most satisfactory kind of house is that which is built of bricks, and we are only justified in going into these experiments because on the one hand there is a shortage of material and on the other a shortage of skilled labour.

That there is a shortage of skilled labour I do not think there is any question in the construction of brick houses I have the figures affecting London, and it might be of interest to the Committee if some hon. Members above the Gangway interested in the building trade would give us some enlightenment. We are employing on the County Council on various estates less than 1,000 skilled Workers. In order to meet the requirements of labour for constructing brick houses on the County Council estates alone, apart from other local authorities in Greater London, we want nearly 6,000 additional skilled labourers, we want 2,000 extra bricklayers, 2,000 extra carpenters, over 1,000 extra plasterers, 500 extra plumbers, and 170 slaters and tilers. That is a great army of men, and as far as we can ascertain those numbers are not available. I have the figures here of the number of men out of work in these trades last November. They are practically nil. Among the bricklayers there are only 1·6 per cent. in Greater London out of work. Amongst the plasteres there were only just 2 per cent. Out of work. The total number is 73. It is the same amongst slaters. Practically in all the skilled trades the labour is not there, and if we do not go in for some kind of experiment of this kind we shall not be able to get the houses unless we can largely add to the number of men in the trade. It is a very interesting fact that while there are very few men out of work in the skilled branches of the building trade, there is a total of 14·6 per cent. Out of work in the building trade, there is as a whole. Of course, these men are mostly unskilled. There are over 26·7 per cent. of unskilled workers in the building trade out of work.

12 N.

Is it an unreasonable thing to ask the various interests in the trade to come together and try to get some of these 26·7 per cent. trained to build, brick houses, and then we can abandon this experiment of Weir houses? They are only makeshifts. If we can put our heads together, and enable these men to become skilled workers, we can scrap these Weir houses. I believe there is a way out if we could come together and agree to a scheme for a period of years. The scheme of the late Minister of Health is too long. If we gave a guarantee to the building trade that for 10 or 15 years we will employ x number of men to build x houses, all the difficulties of the building trade would disappear. The building trade in the past has suffered from long cycles of unemployment. They are naturally suspicious of dilution. They have seen the failure of dilution in the engineering trade. During the War the engineering trade agreed to a large number of men being brought into the industry, and to-day they are walking the streets. They are naturally afraid that if they accept a decrease of the period of apprenticeship, in a few years' time the attitude of the nation and of Parliament may change. If, on the other hand, we now agree to give a guarantee for a period of years, their whole case disappears. In London we already have a 10 years' programme, starting with 12,000 houses and increasing to 20,000.

The hon. Member is going on the housing policy generally, and not on the particular subject that comes under the Vote.

All I wish to press on the Committee is that we should proceed with this £10 token by all means as an experiment, but if the labour difficulty could be got over—if we could agree to a programme for a long period of years—this token will not have to be very largely increased. Meantime, I hope the Under-Secretary will remove a doubt in many of our minds on the two points of the building rings and the rate of wages to be paid to the men. Confidence is everything, suspicion is fatal. If we could only get confidence in the building trade, I believe we should at last get a move on in constructing the houses which are so badly required. I have in my pocket, as probably most other hon. Members have, distressing letters about whole families living in one room. They are anxious to get houses, but the houses are not available. It is an urgent question, and I think we have a responsibility to make every effort to encourage every experiment, providing it is made on satisfactory lines.

One thing is quite evident in this Debate, and that is that the Opposition has very great difficulty in keeping to the subject. As far as I understand, the question under discussion is whether the sum of £50,000 is adequate or inadequate for assisting new methods of construction, and whether that money is to be spent in the right way, or whether there are other and better methods in which it could be spent in assisting new methods of construction. So far, from the Opposition side, the discussion has ranged largely round the question as to whether the bricklayers are sure to have their wages forced down by these new methods of construction: That point does not arise out of the subject matter of the Debate, which is whether the sum to be devoted is adequate or not, and whether it is to be spent in the right manner. I suggest, first of all, that it is not adequate, and secondly, that I think it is being spent in the wrong manner. In order to get a proper perspective, we might look at it in f his way: We are spending £60,000,000 a year upon the provision of houses, and the amount of £50,000 asked for is only equivalent to two hours of labour per year for the building trade. That is to say, all we are suggesting to spend in trying to improve the position is equivalent to two hours of labour throughout the whole building trade for one year. If the Committee will consider it from that point of view, and purely as a business question, I feel sure they will agree with me that the amount is inadequate if a business firm is in great difficulty with regard to one of its branches, and if the whole business depends upon the proper functioning of that branch, would the heads of that business consider that such a very limited amount for research work for the development of that company was sufficient to get them out of the difficulty We have to approach this subject on a very much broader basis from that from which we have approached it so far.

What is the real problem we have to consider? It is the question of providing houses by methods of mass production. It is agreed on all sides that the present building trades cannot supply the required number of houses. Therefore, we are only concerned to-day, as far as I can see it, with providing alternative methods in order to give us, perhaps, 100,000 houses per year. For the provision of that number we must obviously, come down to mass production. The problem in regard to mass production is not really the finding of new materials and not the finding of new methods of construction, but it is the providing of a factory which will automatically turn out the houses.

The provision of new material and of new methods of construction is merely incidental to and dependent upon the method of finding a mass production factory. Therefore, I think the Minister of Health should look upon this problem not so much as to finding a new material or a new method or construction, but the main point is to develop and organise the factory which is to turn out houses automatically and to provide a test which will really give him some figure of cost which will allow him to make up his mind.

When you come to a point of that character, it is obvious that new materials and new methods will be entailed. We have hail that point emphasised in regard to the Weir houses. The criticism which has been levelled in regard to that type of house has been entirely on technical grounds: that they will not last, that they will rot and rust, and so forth. This House and the Minister must depend upon real investigations by scientists and physicists as to whether the new material will last and whether it is satisfactory. Therefore, the true criterion as to the Minister's position is whether he has armed himself with a proper research department and a proper research staff, with sufficient appliances, in order that he may make up his mind whether the new material is satisfactory or not. He told us last night that he had an industrial research committee, which is established at Acton. Has he had time to go to Acton and to look at the Department himself? It is a miserable outfit. It is housed in temporary wooden buildings, with poor apparatus. The staff is very efficient, I am glad to say, and they work very hard but they are quite inadequately provided with apparatus suited to the performance of their work, namely, advising the Minister whether materials are satisfactory or otherwise.

I should like a definite understanding from the Minister that he will include in his Estimates this year a sufficient sum to provide himself with a proper Research Department, properly equipped and manned by an adequate staff. He said, last night, that he was considering the matter. I hope that he will consider it not to the extent of the miserable allocation of £12,000 a year, which is, I believe, the account that the Research Department now gets from the Budget, but that he will put the amount on a scale consistent with the magnitude of the problem which we have to consider. We are spending £60,000,000 a year on the provision of houses. or more than £1,000,000 a week. Can any Minister justify spending only £10,000 or £12,000 a year in providing expert means of deciding by what method that money is to be spent? From the business point of view, I consider it is absolutely ludicrous, and I hope that before this Debate closes we may get from the Minister a definite undertaking that he will provide in the Estimates this year a sufficient sum to defray the cost.

There is a further point as to the organisation that has been set up to deal with the whole method of handling this question. The Minister or his predecessor has set up a committee, the Moir Committee, and the Minister is at the present time sheltering himself behind the reports of that Committee. The Moir Committee, on the other hand, is depending for its reports upon materials upon the results given to it by the Industrial Research Committee. If inquiry is made into the position, it will be found that the Moir Committee can act upon an adverse report upon materials, but if a report upon material is satisfactory they say that they must see that material put into houses and that these houses must remain in being for several years before a recommendation can be made. The Moir Committee wish to put upon the Industrial Research Committee the responsibility of reporting as to whether or not that material will last for the length of period for which this Act is working. Therefore, we have this position at the present time, that the Minister will not take the responsibility, the Moir Committee will not take the responsibility, and the Industrial Research Committee says that that responsibility is not its function, that its function is simply to report what is the result of the Lest, and that those who are responsible for the houses must make up their minds as to what action is taken upon their report. There is little doubt that, as things are to-day, the organisation as it exists is not helping as it might help in the provision of the new methods and new material, Let me say a few words as to the advisability or otherwise of dotting the country with various specimen houses. I do riot propose to criticise in any way the Weir house. Is it a sound policy to dot the country with these forms of specimen houses? What is happening is this: the Minister says that ho wants the public to make up their minds whether they want these houses or not. What is he really doing? He is saying to the public, "Here are these houses. You can live in them. They are satisfactory and comfortable." Everybody admits that, and everybody admits that when they are new they are satisfactory. The Minister is asking the public to take the responsibility for technical opinion. He is sheltering himself behind public opinion, instead of setting up his research department, thoroughly investigating the matter and himself taking the responsibility. It is in this respect that I think the policy of dotting the country with these specimen houses is bad. Another reason why I think it is bad is that no attempt is being made to turn out these houses on mass produc- tion lines. You cannot turn out 50 houses on mass production lines.

What is going to happen? Suppose that the country likes these houses. There will be a great demand for them but it will be impossible for the commercial resources of the country to supply them under a great many months, because first of all they have to set down the factory. Therefore all that the Minister will be doing by stimulating a demand for these houses will be to expose himself to the odium of Press attacks for many months, for the simple reason that after orders have been given there will be great delay before they can be provided. Therefore I would suggest that this Committee should consider the question on a very much broader basis, hearing in mind the whole time that we are spending at the rate of £1,000,000 a week on these houses. I think that the Minister should first of all provide himself with a technical staff which will make all these investigations, so that he should be able, in about six months' time, to select the four or five best methods which should be adopted for the mass production of houses and then make a real test of massed production. That cannot be done with fewer than 4,000 to 5,000 houses of each type. Then he will be able to visualise the real cost of these houses.

This question of cost is fundamental, and studying from that point of view we arrive at this conclusion, that if you take a brick house to-day it can be built at an average cost of about 1s. ld. per cubic foot, and if under mass production the price can be got down to 8½d. per cubic foot the question of the life of the house will cease to be so important, for the simple reason that on the same capital provision as an equivalent brick house the money locked up is sufficient to redeem any loan charges at a very much earlier date. Under these conditions many of the questions of the possible life of houses disappear. It. is impossible for any person to guarantee definitely what is going to happen in 50 years' time. But if the price of houses can be very greatly reduced the question is not so important, and therefore the price of the house is largely bound up with the loan period. But the price of the house depends entirely upon the output. Therefore, unless the Minister is able to make what is a real test of mass production, a test on a large scale, I do not see that what he is now doing will have any real bearing upon the settlement of the housing problem.

Now another point. That is in regard to the charges for labour. The proposal for mass production has been opposed by hon. Members opposite, because they think it will have the effect of reducing wages. I suggest to them that it is only on lines of mass production that wages can be increased, and largely increased. If they would consider what is done to-day they would find that on an average it takes one man a year to build a house. If under proper scientific management the production can be increased so that one man can build six houses a year, then the labour cost spread over those houses will be a very small proportion of the total cost of a house. If therefore wages were doubled the price of houses could still be reduced. You have the same principle of course operating on a Very large scale in the Ford factories in America.

Those who had the opportunity of going over these factories Will agree with me that the wages paid there range between 25s. and 30s. a day, and although the apparatus which is sold from that factory is the cheapest in the world for its size, yet the fact is that they are able to pay those very high wages owing to the mass production. The same thing will apply with regard to the mass production of houses in this country, and I do not think that wages will be cut down, but I believe that wages will be raised greatly if proper scientific methods are employed for the provision of our houses. Therefore, on those grounds, I venture to criticise the policy of the present Government. I think that they are still thinking upon municipal and not upon national lines. Liverpool alone is laying down 3,500 houses, and therefore the experiment I suggest of producing some 20,000 houses under mass production methods is not out of proportion to the problem as a whole, nor is it many when you are thinking of millions of houses and when you are spending over £1,000,000 a week. I do hope that the Minister will satisfy us in his statement that he will include in his Budget sufficient money to provide himself with a proper technical advisory body.

The speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Uxbridge (Lieut.-Commander Burney) seems to me to be one of the most useful and constructive delivered clueing the course of this Debate. I would like to say a word about his suggestion that more money should be devoted to the equipment of the Industrial Research Department. I agree with him, and I think that his idea of considering the housing question from a national rather than from a pettifogging municipal point of view is an admirable one. But if public money to the extent of £60,000,000 a year, which is the amount actually being spent on housing now, is to be supplemented by public expenditure upon an efficient Research Department I am inclined to ask, For whose benefit is this experiment to be undertaken? Is it for the purpose of putting money into the pockets of Lord Weir? Hon. Members opposite are very fond of telling us that private enterprise is all-sufficient to solve our industrial problems and that public enterprise is essentially a failure. I would suggest to the hon. and gallant Member that his statement proves that, so far as real enterprise and efficiency are concerned, private enterprise on housing is a failure, and that it requires public enterprise and expenditure to proceed with housing efficiently in this country.

The conditions with regard to housing are very special for this reason, that no method of construction can be employed unless it has been approved by the Minister and the local authorities. Therefore so long as that condition exists, no private enterprise can go forward until it has got their approval. My suggestion to the Minister was to equip himself with sufficient staff and apparatus to investigate the matter thoroughly and to be able to give that approval, and, when that approval is given, to be able to stand by it.

I do not think that the explanation of the hon. and gallant Member interferes very much with the point which I am putting. The condition of housing in this country is of great national importance, and if it is desirable to spend public money in large measure in order to assist private enterprise to deal with housing it would be much better, it seems to me, if the nation took the whole problem into its own hands and dealt with the question in precisely the spirit which the hon. and gallant Member desires. I wish to apologise for interrupting a maiden speech, but I think that I may be excused for doing so because the tone of the speech did not suggest that it was a maiden effort. I do not wish to offend against the procedure of this House, but I was much interested in that particular speech and in the suggestion which the hon. Member made of a new form of conscientious objection. The suggestion was that because the building industry had the temerity to criticise the Weir houses the building industry should refuse to build or to assist in any way this experiment with regard to the Weir type of house. I think that if the hon. Member pressed that kind of argument a little further he would find considerable difficulties in other directions.

There is quite a lot of people who object to war and to expenditure on armaments. Yet I think that the hon. Member would be the first to have a great deal to say if they carried their objection to the extent of refusing to build battleships or to take part in anything connected' directly or indirectly with war and preparations for war. The building industry is entitled to criticise the Weir house. The building operatives are not only entitled to criticise, but they are capable of criticising. They know considerably more about the Weir house or about the conditions of building and the materials used than the average Member opposite knows. When it is suggested that the operatives are standing in the way of these experiments, I want to correct the suggestion. It is not, true. The operatives are not standing in the way of experiments with any kind of substitute material, I have here the official statement of the Federation of Building Operatives, which includes all sections of the building trade. The document was published only yesterday, and with the permission of the Committee I will read two sentences from it: whoever speaks on his behalf later, will come to closer grips with this financial question.

There was a speech yesterday by the hon. Member for Reading (Mr. H. Williams) which I thought a singularly unfortunate one. Like other hon. Members on this side, I resent these continued attacks upon the trade union forces of the country. They are unjustified and are based upon wrong implications altogether. If an attack is usefully to be made upon the attitude of building trade workers it should be on something that at least can be corrected, and some correction should be suggested. If an attack is to be made, I ask that it should be based upon accurate information about the technique of the trade itself. It was stated yesterday that is possible for an unskilled man trained for three months in bricklaying to lay between 2,000 and 3,000 bricks a day. With all respect to the hon. Member, that is an absurd statement. The hon. Member suggested that we should encourage the building of houses by people themselves, that we should encourage private persons to build their own houses. That is a very useful and practical suggestion to make, considering that if you push that particular idea to its logical conclusion there is no reason why people should not bake their own bread, or make their own clothes, or make their own footwear, or serve their own purposes in every way. To suggest that you can solve the slum problem and bad housing conditions by enabling the people who live in my constituency of West Islington to build their own houses in their spare time is absurd. Of course do not want to misrepresent the hon. Member.

I have not so far spoken in the Debate.

I was referring to the speech of the hon. Member for Reading. It is true that I was looking at the hon. Member who interrupted, but that was to concentrate my thoughts. I know of cases where people can build their houses in their spare time, and if people work for 24 hours a day and do not pay very much attention to the appearance of the house when it is built and are prepared to put up with any sort of erection for bungalow and week-end purposes, it is quite possible to put in, I will not say 3,000 bricks a day, but considerably more than what the average bricklayer lays. But what kind of comparison is that? It is possible for an ordinary bricklayer or for many bricklayers to put down 1,000 bricks a day, provided he has a particular type of work to do. When he has that particular type of simple work he can do that, and do it without offending any of the restrictions that are supposed to exist. It is already admitted that there are no building trade rules which interfere with the output of the bricklayer or any other section of building trade workers.

The building worker has to consider the conditions of the industry as a whole, the fact that until the State undertakes the housing of the people he is necessarily employed by private firms when he is in Work. He has to consider the private employer; he has to consider the future conditions of the industry as between employer and workman; and he knows, from practical experience, that, however quickly you may be able to train a few semi-skilled or unskilled men to build a plain wall or do simple kinds of building work, such a person is not an economic unit in the building industry. That person not being an economic unit is an industrial danger. We want all-round men, and the employers want all-round men, and I defy any employer, or any State school, to make a man of no technical knowledge, after a month or two of tuition, into an efficient workman, either in laying bricks or in any other department of building work. The hon. Member for South-West Bethnal Green (Mr. Harris) referred to a certain building which is being erected under the London County Council, and said they wanted 2,000 extra bricklayers, 2,000 extra carpenters, 1,000 extra plasterers, and so forth. In this connection, may I say that all the attention seems to be directed to the bricklayer and his supposed policy of "ca'canny"? What about the carpenter and the plasterer? We may be able to do away with a considerable amount of plastering work in the Weir houses or by the use of some other substitute, but we cannot do away with the carpenters' work. There is just as much carpenters' work in a Weir house as there is bricklaying work in an ordinary house—if not more—and the lack of carpenters would have to be taken into consideration just as much as the lack of bricklayers or the lack of plasterers has to be considered now. I am perfectly sure that the idea of training unskilled men of any age to do efficient carpentry work in a month or two is quite fanciful.

These are problems which have to be faced. I feel it is disastrous that the plan which was accepted and which was being put into working order under the last Government should be, if not sabotaged, at any rate looked upon in an exceedingly unfriendly spirit at the present moment. From my knowledge of the building trade operatives, it seems to me they are beginning to feel that they have been let down, and there is not that feeling of sympathy which was leading to a rapid augmentation of labour in the building trade and to a better spirit between the employers and the operatives, and between both of them on the one hand and the State on the other. I agree that this Debate has gone a long way round the subject, but that has not been our fault. We have been compelled to reply to slanderous attacks upon the building unions which ought not to have been made on this Vote, if at any time. Coming to the real question in debate, that of experiment, I ask: What do you mean by experiment? I have pointed out that the building industry is quite prepared to agree to the Weir experiment. They are not opposing it at all, and, as a matter of fact, I myself would be inclined to express more dissent than the building trade has officially expressed in this connection. But if you desire to experiment you should begin by experimenting upon yourselves. No one upon the other side is, I think, prepared to experiment to the extent of living in a steel house—at any rate not permanently or not sufficiently to be able to form an accurate judgment of the value of the steel house and its amenities. Putting up one or two of these so-called steel houses and allowing a few interested people to walk through them is not an experiment worth talking about. If we are to experiment effectively with constructions of this character the experiments must extend over a term of years, must apply to the conditions of the people living in the houses and must ascertain the effects from every point of view, dealing with the question of whether they are vermin-proof or not, with acoustics, with temperature, and so forth.

A number of objections could be put forward on these various grounds, but I insist it is traducing the building trade operatives to say that they are standing in the way of these experiments. They are quite prepared to allow them to go on and to allow mass production of the Weir houses, if it is proved that these are suitable structures for their own class to live in, but they are not prepared to allow the housing problem to be used as a lever to depress the industry and undermine the structure of trade unionism in the industry. Hon. Members should bear in mind that before the War building operatives worked under abominable conditions. They worked from 50 to 60 hours a week for wages that were disgraceful, and many sections suffered from the unfortunate conditions of wet time, and so forth. Only by hard struggle, self-sacrifice in organisation, and the expenditure of hardly earned wages to support strikes here and there where necessary and industrial action, were they able to get a national agreement upon rates of wages. Those wages are not high. They do not mean that the men have what would be regarded by hon. Members opposite as a suitable standard of life. The trade conditions are not extremely favourable, though very much better than they were before the War, and the men feel there is a great amount of opinion and effort and thought on the part of those opposing them to-day, the real object and motive of which is to undermine their organisation in the building trade industry as part of a general attack on trade union principles in this country. If that be not true, then prove it is not true by doing justice to the workmen of the building trade and endeavouring to be accurately informed as to the point of view of the building trade operatives. That will do more to create the better spirit which is required than statements based on Press stunts and inaccurate information, leading the workers to believe that this is really a class struggle and that you are as much supporters of the class war as you say we are.

I desire to offer a few observations in reply to certain questions which have been put during this morning's Debate. With the permission of the Committee I should like, in the first place, to refer to a personal matter which was raised yesterday by the Member for the Gorton division of Manchester (Mr. Compton). I do not think the hon. Member is here this morning, He is a new Member, and therefore I quite understand that he did not know that he should have given me notice that there was a personal matter which he desired to raise in connection with myself. I dare say hon. Members here were present when the question was raised yesterday, but unfortunately when the hon. Member spoke I was elsewhere. I have communicated with the hon. Member this morning asking him to give me particulars of the matter of complaint and of the case to which he referred, as reported in the OFFICIAL REPORT of this morning, and with which he states my firm was connected. I shall be very glad to receive those particulars because, of course, it is not possible to identify the case from the way in which he put it. I may say that I have made inquiries at my office and elsewhere, and the case has not been identified; nor in the Department itself has any complaint of the nature referred to been put forward. As I understand, the hon. Member complained that certain advice was given in connection with a man who wanted compensation, and who ultimately got a bigger sum when he had gone elsewhere. I can quite understand that happening, but I should like to have further particulars of the case.

Apart from that, I should like to tell the Committee that, of course, the question of the employment of legal firms is not a matter for the Department, but is a domestic matter for the societies themselves. I can, however, assure hon. Members, as I dare say many of them who are connected with trade union work, especially in workmen's compensation cases, know, that there need be no anxiety about any sum agreed upon in any of these cases, because in every case where a settlement is arrived at, the matter has to be reported to the Court and has to be examined into by the Registrar or the County Court Judge as to whether or not the sum is suitable. Therefore, there need be no anxiety on that score. I hope to receive particulars from the hon. Member in due course, when I shall be, very glad to make inquiries.

I want to say a word or two in reply to the general observations that have been made. I remember the right hon. Member for Shettleston (Mr. Wheatley) making a complaint that the Weir houses were being unduly advertised. Whether the result of the debate yesterday and to-day has been to give the Weir house any further advertisement, I will leave him to judge, but all that is being done in connection with the Weir house and other houses is very simple. The right hon. Member for Shettleston set up an expert Committee, with a view to advising the Ministry on these various methods of construction, and as to whether or not they should go forward. The very first Report on the Weir house was not, in fact, addressed to the present Minister of Health, but to the right hon. Member for Shettleston, and its first sentence is as follows: I have heard complaints during the Debate about the Weir house being cold in winter and warm in summer, but what do Mr. Hicks and his colleagues say about that? They say:

May I point out that there has been no Minority Report in connection with that Committee? But I think I can say, with a certain amount of reservation, from my personal knowledge of Mr. Hicks' point of view, that the Report was signed as a general Report, as a member of the Committee, but that he did actually on the Committee reserve his judgment upon quite a number of those points.

I am surprised to hear the hon. Gentleman say that, because in my hand is a copy of the official document. It is not a document which says that the Committee have agreed to the Report generally, but, following the observations I have read, appear the signatures, without any reservations, of all the members of the Committee who bring in this Report, and the sixth is that of Mr. George Hicks. There is no footnote and no statement or reservation whatever.

But he made, those reservations in the Committee itself.

There is no sign of it, at any rate, on this document, and I think I am entitled to say that, in quoting what Mr. Hicks and others have said in this document without any reservation at all, I have taken a perfectly proper course. This is the first time I have heard that a gentleman of Mr. Hicks' capacity has signed a document containing all those recommendations, and apparently has made some mental reservation which hitherto he has not communicated to anybody. I want to tell the Committee the final recommendations of this expert Committee, signed by Mr. Hicks and his colleagues. They say: having this experiment made, and properly tested, is doing the right and proper thing.

An hon. Gentleman who spoke a little time ago referred to the attitude of the building operatives, and rather indicated the view that a different course had been adopted by my right hon. Friend towards them from that adopted by the right hon. Gentleman the late Minister of Health. I know of no difference in the attitude of my right hon. Friend. I was present when the building operatives and employers representatives from the Building Industry Committee saw the present Minister of Health. He discussed the position freely and frankly with them. He told them he would be glad to encourage them in the work they were doing on the Committee which had been set up by the late Minister of Health. They were perfectly satisfied with the position. They went away stating that they were going on with their work, and setting up their committees up and down the country. A little time ago the Committee issued a circular to their local associations. Was there one word of complaint in the circular as to the attitude of my right hon. Friend? Far from it. At the very beginning of the circular, they stated that they were glad to be able to announce that my right hon. Friend was pursuing with them exactly the same policy as had been adopted by his predecessor.

10 P.M.

Why, then, the complaints? Why are people making trouble when there is no trouble existing at the present time? I know very well that, at the present moment there are in the schemes of the local authorities sufficient houses authorised already to keep the building trade of this country going until the end of 1926. Experiments are being made to endeavour, as a supplementary method, to improve housing conditions. I do not want to be controversial, but I must say that I am surprised at the attitude of many Members opposite. I should have thought they would have welcomed any effort made to get people out of the slums. What reasonable hope is there of people living, say, in the slums of Bethnal Green being rescued from those slums unless some effort in connection with supplementary buildings is made? How much longer are you going to condemn these people to live there? I think over 10,000 people have visited the experimental house set up by Lord Weir in Glasgow. I should not like to say how many communication' have been made by people only too willing and anxious to get that house. I was at Manchester the other day. The Manchester Corporation announced in the papers that they were going to put up three types of experimental houses. It was announced, think, in the "Manchester Guardian" the day afterwards that already scores of people were applying to the corporation to be able to live in these houses. Why should they not? The house may not last more than a certain number of years, but that is no reason why the people should not be better housed in the meantime than they are now. Why should Labour Members and others endeavour to prevent them from getting, at any rate, better accommodation—temporary accommodation if you like?

Will the hon. Gentleman clear up the labour question—the rate of wages paid? We all agree with what he has just said.

The position in relation to the labour trouble is simply this. If the corporation undertake to embody a fair wages clause, which complies with the requirements of the House of Commons Resolution as regards Government contracts, in any contract entered into with Messrs Weir, the Board of Health will pay subsidies in respect of the houses erected under that, contract. Therefore, in every agreement made in connection with these supplementary house's a fair wages clause must appear.

May I ask what that means? Does the fair wages clause mean in the engineering industry or the building industry? That is where we are puzzled in the matter.

I am not, nor, I venture to anticipate, is the hon. and gallant Member who put the question in a position to judge. For instance, Lord Weir contends, on the one hand, that he has adopted in full, and is complying in full with, the fair wages clause. On the other hand, the building operatives contend that he has not. In most of the contracts—perhaps in every contract—entered into in connection with these houses, there is another clause, namely, an arbitration clause. Any question of dispute as to whether the terms of the contract are being carried out or not has to be referred to arbitration. Therefore, if a dispute arises as to whether the fair wages clause is being complied with or not, it will have to be decided in connection with the clause in the contract. [An HON. MEMBER: "That will not settle the issue !"] An hon. Gentleman opposite says it will not settle the issue, and the Minister of Health is invited to settle. Would they accept his judgment?

It is not a question of arbitrators settling the fair wages clause; it is, which is the fair wages clause that is to apply?

I should like to make this clear, as it is important. In every contract in connection with these houses and others, there is a standard clause called the fair wages clause. Its phraseology is the same as regards all kinds of houses, having been the subject of very careful examination, and having been very carefully drafted. That clause will appear in every contract. The question as to whether that clause is or is not complied with, in the event of a dispute arising, will be, as I ventured to suggest, decided in accordance with the arbitration clause in the contract. I then remarked that apparently hon. Members opposite were making the complaint that the Minister of Health had not decided this question, and I put the question to them, Would they accept his decision? It is useless for the Minister of Health to intervene, unless the parties agreed to his decision, as it would be alleged, whatever his decision, that he had taken sides in the matter. Obviously, it is a matter which ought to be, and, I think, would be, the subject of very careful examination—a question of fact as to whether the fair wages clause is being complied with or not. I have not the slightest doubt that, when the occasion arises, there will be a proper method of examination as to whether the fair wages clause is or is not being applied.

Is not the question whether or not these erections are houses?

The hon. Gentleman has put the issue perhaps a little more briefly than I should have done, but if lie puts the question to me on behalf of the building operatives of the country, may I ask if he is prepared to accept my decision or that of the Department? If so, then I may venture to give the point some consideration. Until that time arrives I do not think I ought to intervene and complicate the issue by giving a decision which certainly one of the parties would not accept.

In conclusion, let me just say in relation to the question put to me by the hon. Member for South West Bethnal Green (Mr. P. Harris) as to the building rings and the attitude of the Light Castings Association, that this matter is one which is receiving the very serious consideration of my right hon. Friend, who will have no hesitation in taking any necessary action he can properly take. At the present moment, I repeat, the matter is receiving the careful attention of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Health. As regards the question put to me as to the importance of promoting research, I need hardly say that anything we can do to further this aspect of experimental housing will be done. I am not, however, in a position to anticipate what may he proposed until we bring forward our Estimates for the year. I can assure hon. Members, however, that we will give this matter very careful consideration, for I am sure everyone values the observations that the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Lieut.-Commander Burney) has quite properly addressed to the House. I hope that, with this short reply, hon. Members will be satisfied that at any rate a full opportunity has been given in the Committee for a full discussion of this matter, and I trust that, having replied to the best of my ability to the various criticisms, the Committee will give us the Vote.

I should like to put one or two points to the Minister of Health, whom I see in his place. One has regard to the Light Castings Association referred to by the hon. Member for Bethnal Green. Everyone of these demonstration houses for which this Vote is required will have to be furnished in some point or other with the products of the Light Castings Association. Therefore, I think it very much in order that something should he made known of the 'Government attitude towards the Light Castings Association before we let this token Vote go through. I happen to be the only Member of the House of Commons on the Committee which the Minister of Health appointed in 1923 to examine the whole question of the flow of building prices. I am sure the Minister will remember that in 1923, almost as soon as what has come to be regarded as the Chamberlain Act was put into operation, the same Light Castings Association increased their prices by 10 per cent. They did not, however, increase their prices by 10 per cent. over the whole of their products, but increased them 10 per cent. on those specific products which are required for working-class houses and some others. The Chairman of that Committee, Sir Holford Mackinder, and a number of other Members, were appointed a Sub-Committee to make special inquiry, and they went to Glasgow. Here they have a local inquiry into the operations of the Light Castings Association. After many weeks' investigation they were unable to come to any satisfactory solution of the difficulty, as they could not get all the information they required. No step was taken as a result of the report of that Sub-Committee on the question of controlling in any way the prices of the Light Castings Association.

There is another point. At a later stage in the proceedings of the Committee a Report was presented, dated 29th May, 1924, which reads at the finish like this: would seek further powers. I want to ask the Minister, therefore, whether, having regard to the attitude of the Light Castings Association who have now raised their prices for the specific products required to 12½ per cent., what steps he proposes, to take in view of the Report of this Committee which he himself set up for dealing with the general trend of prices. There was a proposal to bring a Bill before Parliament definitely to deal with profiteering in building materials. My information at present is that that Bill is not to be proceeded with nor have we any word at present that a Bill on similar lines is likely to be introduced by the Government. May I, therefore, ask for rather more specific information than has been given in the statement of the Parliamentary Secretary, as to what is the attitude of the Government in view of the Report of the Committee which was set up with the specific purpose of dealing with the matter, and whether we may anticipate, having regard to the operations of the Light Castings Association with regard to the prices of products and other materials, that he will ask for further powers in order that we may have proper security for the people of the country?

The hon. Gentleman has asked me for information, firstly, as to the recently announced advances in the prices of the Light Castings Association; and, secondly, as to the Report of the Committee which said they had been unable to satisfy themselves as to information on the causes of previous increases. I have got to go carefully through what is the bearing of this last increase, of the Light Castings Association. I notice on the part of hon. Members opposite a tendency, going rather beyond what is warranted, to assume that any increase in the price of materials is what they call profiteering. [An HON. MEMBER: "Hear, hear !"] An hon. Member admits that—that any in-increase in the price is ipso facto profiteering. I am not satisfied of that, and I am quite certain of this, that unless it was profiteering, and unless it could be shown to be profiteering, it would be impossible to control it by any Act of Parliament.

There is another point, and that is the relative importance of these increases of price. How much does the 12 per cent. increase on the present prices of light castings add to the cost of a house? I am obliged to call attention to this matter, for although it does not affect the general principle it is an important aspect of it, because I notice that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Shettleston (Mr. Wheatley) spoke last night of the increase of the price of light castings as, I think he said,

Having said that as to the relative importance of this matter, I wish to say further that I am not myself satisfied that this increase in price is justified. I am not satisfied that the reason which, I understand, has been given for the increase in price is a reason which is sufficient to justify it, and I am going to ask the Committee to make an investigation into this recently announced rise and report to me what information they can obtain on the subject. As to further general powers, I am not prepared at the present time to give any indication of an intention on my part to introduce legislation on that subject. I still reserve my position. I am still prepared, when I think circumstances are such as to make it desirable, to come to the House of Commons and ask for further powers, but I am not going to try to get further powers merely to gratify people on the other side of this House who want to try and make an increase of this kind an excuse to stir up trouble between Capital and Labour.

In regard to this question of profiteering, would the right hon. Gentleman consider cases like that of a merchant who agreed to supply certain builders with cement at a certain price and then was stopped from selling it at that price by the producers of cement by the threat of having his supplies cut off; if he did not charge the prices that the producers asked him or compelled him to charge, they would cut off his supplies I have a case in point of a certain Manchester merchant who undertook to provide cement at £3 per ton for a local builder and was compelled to charge 66s. per ton because he will have his supplies cut off by the producers of cement if he does not charge that sum.

What is the amount that the £1 7s. is an increase on l What is the total amount?

I cannot answer that question, but I will find out.

I had intended to raise a new line on this Vote, but in view of the appeal made by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health I propose to reserve the comments I have to make until the Report stage. At the same time I would like to inform the right hon. Gentleman that this question of the steel house, with the various topics ranging round it, does pot by any means exhaust the important matters that I think will require elucidation at a later stage. The only comment I wish to make now is that, great as is the acquisition of the hon. Gentleman the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health to the debating powers of the Government Front Bench, I hope he will not repeat his observation about causing trouble. I am not referring to the statement about causing trouble between capital and labour that his chief the Minister of Health made; but when ale Parliamentary Secretary accuses us on this side of the House of causing trouble, I hope he will understand that we are following- the example that he set in the last Parliament and quite rightly set. He was sent to cause trouble in other words, to oppose and to stir up the Government as far as possible, and as far as I am concerned I am going to cause all the trouble I possibly can to the Government, because I think it is in the best interests of the country.

I will not keep the Government more than a moment or two from getting their Vote, because hope to speak on the Report stage, but I had hoped that the statement which the Parliamentary Secretary has read—the statement of the Moir Committee signed by Mr. G. Hicks—will destroy many of the charges made from his own benches as to the position of the building trade operatives towards this question of steel houses. I think all the criticism that has been urged against the steel house is justified. A body of experts like the Housing and Town Planning Association are thoroughly opposed to the steel house. They will not have it on any consideration. They will not have it on the point of cost, or on the point of repairs, and they still adhere to the idea as to vermin. The right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Health himself says steel houses would not be worse than slum houses, anyhow. But that does not take us very far; and if they will not be any worse than the slums, it cannot be denied that they may be, and probably will be, an attraction for vermin. If there are any public authorities foolish enough to spend their money on houses of this description on the ground of necessity, and if the State also is foolish enough to spend its money, the possible shorter life of the steel house is, to my mind, a virtue. I do not want steel houses. I object to them. I think the time has come when we ought to think of houses in connection with something else than their utility; houses ought to have more beauty about them: and that the life of a steel house should be short is a virtue If public authorities are prepared to waste their money, let them, and if the steel house lasts only 10 years, good luck to it, let it die, and the sooner it goes the better, so far as I am concerned. I would urge that it should be the duty of the Ministry of Health to exercise all their powers towards getting an augmentation of labour, in order that we may have houses built in the traditional manner of English building, of good earthen material like brick, which will weather and become beautiful with age, and be an adornment instead of an excrescence.

Good old Conservative !

Question put, and agreed to

Scottish Board of Health

Motion made, and Question proposed,

"That a Supplementary sum, not exceeding £10, be granted to His Majesty, to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1925, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Scottish Board of Health, including Grants and other Expenses in connection with Housing, Grants to Local Authorities, etc., sundry Grants in respect of Benefits and Expenses of Administration under the National Health Insurance Acts. 1911 to 1924, certain Grants-in-Aid, and certain Special Services arising out of the War."

I beg to move to reduce the Vote by £5.

It is rather peculiar that one has to move the reduction of a Vote although he holds the opinion that more money should in fact be expended than the sum set down for the purpose of making experiments in housing. In my opinion it is a criminal offence for anyone who understands the suffering of the working classes in the congested areas of a city like Glasgow to put anything in the way of stopping the building of houses for the working classes. I do not believe that any hon. Member opposite is justified in making an accusation of that kind against hon. Members on this side of the House. Within my own knowledge I am aware that no one has been more anxious that houses should be provided than my colleagues in the representation of the City of Glasgow.

I want to ask the Committee to consider for a moment the houses that have been erected in the City of Glasgow, and that will at once show the great need for further experiments in connection with housing schemes. In the ease of one scheme undertaken by the Corporation, it is within my own personal knowledge that they were built of composition, cement and other materials, and the inmates of those houses had to bale out the water that came in through the main walls of the houses. I think there might have been some experimental work done before the Corporation erected these houses, and it is because I am fully convinced that it is necessary to have this work done that I am taking this opportunity of moving a reduction in order that a larger sum may be expended for this purpose.

I want to deal with the question of the Weir houses. I may say that I am speaking from a practical experience of 35 years. I have had experience as a worker taking part in the installation of steel work intended to provide a complete internal atmosphere unaffected by the external atmosphere. I have had almost every kind of installation and compositions under my hand. I have taken them down in some cases after two years, and they were simply in a rotten condition, and it is because I believe the inferior composition which is proposed to be used inside the Weir houses will not stand the test and is bound to corrode and create a state of things that will affect the inmates of the house, that I am desirous of asking the Government to make further experiments with that type of house before it is actually agreed upon.

With regard to Lord Weir's position in this matter, he has been responsible for all the criticisms that have been made on this question in the City of Glasgow. When Lord Weir started his Press campaign—and he had a wonderfully successful Press—he did not deal with his own houses at all, but principally with the necessity of lowering the cost of production. When we came to analyse what he actually meant it was discovered that the cost of production was to be lowered by reducing the wages of those employed in the industry. Therefore we at once be-Game very dubious about the houses which Lord Weir was going to build. I would like to ask hon. Members opposite if they hove ever seen a section plan of a Weir house, because I have never seen one. Those erecting such houses are very careful about showing a full plan of the house, or at least they hide from the average man with practical knowledge those things which would give them some idea as to the dangers of the Weir houses. I hope hon. Members opposite have not forgotten the interesting interlude in yesterday's Debate provided by the hon. Member for Springburn (Mr. Hardie) and the convincing scientific arguments which he adduced. There is no doubt that where you affix steel to a wooden erection, with atmospheric conditions prevailing on the external side, you are hound to have rottenness and damp created inside that house. After all, there are plenty of other methods to be examined of building which should be investigated and tested. I want the horrible conditions that exist in the constituency which I represent altered, and that is why I am asking the Scottish Board of Health not to be content with Weir houses, but make further examination of other types. As a workman of 35 years' experience, and as a member of one of the building trades, I would like to suggest that we have no opposition to offer to the Weir houses, and all we want to secure is that fair conditions shall prevail in erecting those houses. We understand Lord Weir is not- a philanthropist, and he desires to erect houses for the working classes at a profit., and if he is not going to get a profit out of the houses, he is not prepared to erect them. Lord Weir has tried during his Press campaign to produce a feeling in Scotland at least that so far as his houses are concerned he is going to employ a lower paid class of workmen in their production. I hope that will not be allowed, and I hope a settlement will be come to which will provide not only for Weir houses, but for every other kind of house that can be proved to be acceptable and good for the working people of our country.

I want to say a word or two with regard to certain statements made in the Debate about houses, which naturally overlap into this Debate, because the grant in this Vote is in some way identified with the sum included in the Vote that preceded it. We have had this afternoon, as on other occasions, sweeping attacks made upon the trade unionists who are engaged in the building industry, and we are being asked in these two Votes to provide money for demonstration houses, particularly of the Weir type. As the previous speaker has said, if any trouble arise over these demonstration or experimental houses which we are being asked to subsidise, that trouble in a large degree will be due to the action and utterances of Lord Weir himself. To all attempts that have been made by trade union representatives to obtain a guarantee that a living wage will be paid to those engaged in the manufacture of these houses Lord Weir says that he is going to pay the wages that he thinks should be paid.

We are determined, if the House is going to give a subsidy towards these houses, that the wages that are to be paid shall not be those that may be looked upon as sweated wages. We go further and say, knowing Lord Weir as we do, that he is not going to use Government money in a general attack upon the living conditions and wages of the building operatives of Scotland or anywhere else. As far as we are concerned, that is our determination. Lord Weir may, if he cares, enter into the building trade with a new type of house, but he is not going to enter the building trade with the sweated conditions of labour which he tries to operate in his other industry. His writings and speeches have always demonstrated to us the danger that is likely to arise unless the Government lay down conditions. We, taking part in this Vote, have a right to see that the Government ensure that the present conditions in' the building industry are going to be continued.

We have had a lot of talk this afternoon about steel houses being better than no houses. We agree. Wooden houses are better than no houses. A shelter in a cave in a hillside is better than no shelter. We can go right back and dig holes in the ground in inclement weather. But that is not the point. The point is what civilisation to-day can give to the people in the way of shelter, and that question has got to be answered Lord Weir himself shows very clearly that he is not placing very much faith in a steel erection as a suitable shelter, because only recently he had to have a garage built for his motor cars and some stables erected for his live animals. He did not have steel erections put up by his own workmen from his Cardonald factory. He had a garage built of beautiful stone and brick by competent tradesmen. If an erection of brick and of stone is the only kind suitable for the valuable motor cars of Lord Weir, then I contend that steel houses are not good suitable accommodation for the valuable human lives that you have to shelter. I am glad to see that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Scottish Board of Health agrees with me, and I hope, as one who is going to have charge of the expenditure of this money. so far as Scotland is concerned, that he will see that these condition,: are laid down and that Lord Weir is kept to them.

There have been certain statements made about the cost of building. As a matter of fact, the employers, some of whose representatives are in this House, are not themselves so very free from the charge of rushing up the price of these houses. When the agreements were being made, pledges were to have been given that prices of building materials were to remain as they were. Those prices have not remained as they were. If you take the price of bricks alone, in January, 1924, the price per 1,000 at the works was 42s.; to-day the price is 56s. per 1,000. There has been no increase in wages to those who are engaged in the manufacture of bricks. Whence comes this difference the price? There has been no difference in the method of production. There has been no increase in the cost of production. What happened, seemingly, is that the manufacturers of bricks, looking ahead and realising that there is likely to be a great demand for the particular corn modity they are selling, determined to charge a higher price.

The same thing applies with regard to light castings. The Minister of Health seemed to imagine that he had disposed of the whole argument when he said that he had gone into the recent increase upon those articles that were under the control of the Light Castings Association, and that the total increase was only £1 7s. per house. Well, that upon 1,000 houses is almost £1,500 additional profit, which is not justified, because the employés themselves have not received very much of an increase. I should like to see the figures which the Minister of Health promised to a colleague of mine with regard to the original cost of light castings in a single dwelling. As a matter of fact, the average increase in light castings during recent months has been 12 per cent. That is the average increase on all the commodities marketed by this association. The workers in the light castings industry have only received an increase of 3 per cent. Again, I want to know whether the increased price that is being charged to the consumer as against what has been termed the increased cost of production, represented by the 3 per cent. paid to the workers. is justified. These are matters about which we want some information.

Here is a demand for something which Members on the other side believe to be necessary, and which we from our own experience know is bitterly necessary—the provision of good, healthy, habitable dwellings for large numbers of the people in this country—and we have men and companies, who are prepared out of the sheer necessity of the people, and out of the sympathy of the nation in trying to provide those people with shelter, trying to make even more profit that they would originally have made in ordinary times and out of its necessities. I think it comes very ill from Members on the other side to taunt Members on this side with creating trouble which they themselves, in their sheer lust for profits, in their sheer desire to crush even the workers down to lower wages——

No!

It is quite evident that there is one member of the Tory party present who dissents. Whether he is really dissenting, or merely soliloquising, I cannot. say.

I dissented strongly.

No doubt Lord Weir also will dissent strongly from anything I am saying, but, so far as I am concerned, I am not worrying about his dissent or the hon. Member's either. It is that dissent, expressed more strongly by Members on the other side, that has caused a great deal of trouble in the country as well as in this House. We are determined to see that these matters shall be gone into very fully and very carefully before Lord Weir or anyone else is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the nation, and get higher profits than he otherwise would get, but for the fact that we are in a state of necessity to-day.

I do not want to say anything about the Lord Weir house, partly for the reason that I know nothing about it, but chiefly for the reason that it has been discussed at great length in all quarters of the Committee during the present Debate and the one that preceded it. I should, however, like to ask the Under-Secretary for Scotland to seize the golden opportunity that has come his way, not to fight Lord Weir—although, perhaps, he will do that also—hut to fight a much more dangerous menace to housing in Scotland, and that is Lord Rothschild; because, whatever Lord Weir may be doing to the standard of housing and the wage standard in Scotland, this, at least, is absolutely certain, that the financial system, the method by which housing schemes in Scotland are financed, is very much more dangerous to the standard of working-class life in Scotland than any other cause can be held to be. Let me briefly explain precisely what happens. In a Scottish burgh the workers are invited to put their money into a Government institution called the Post Office Savings Bank. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gets that money, and he gives the workers 24 per cent. for it. He allows per cent. for working expenses, making a total charge to the Imperial Treasury of per cent. for that money. Then those workers, through their town councils, say they want to build houses, and they go to the Under-Secretary for Scotland and say they want so much money with which to do it. He, in turn, goes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer says, "Yes, I will give you back a loan of your money, but it will be at 5 per cent." That is done in the case of every housing scheme. I am not speaking about Wales. because I know nothing about it, but it certainly is the case with every housing scheme in Scotland.

There is a plunder, a usury taken, on every housing scheme in Scotland, and as a matter of fact not a penny of subsidy is given to any working-class houses in Scotland. It is the other way about: the workers' money is invested cheap with the Government, and the Government lends the money back dear to the workers for their housing schemes. If the present Under-Secretary for Scotland wishes to make a name for himself that will live in history—and I hope he will do so—he will take the necessary steps, which I can assure him are very easy to take, to see that every Local Authority in Scotland is encouraged to set up a Municipal Savings Bank. I live in a town where that is done, and l know we get the money at 3 per cent. I know that neighbouring towns have to pay 5 per cent., and if the Under-Secretary for Scotland will take a leaf out of the books of experience that are already open to him in Scotland, and will encourage Local Authorities to retain their own working-class money, and use that money for the cheap financing of housing schemes, and not send it away to the National Debt Commissioners, which in reality means the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, as I have said, gets the money at 2¾ per cent. and lends it back at 5 per cent., he will confer a very considerable benefit upon his native land. Let me show him what, it means. On a £500 house the money borrowed at 3 per cent. is an annual interest charge of £15, but with the money borrowed at 5 per cent. the annual interest charged is £25, a clear £10 being unnecessarily taken for the financial money-box in this country. There are, of course, other charges in connection with the Housing Fund to which the Under-Secretary ought to attend, but that is the big one—the unnecessary charge for increased interest that is paid upon these houses. Secondly, there is a great waste in administration. Perhaps the Under-Secretary will kindly give me his attention on this——

I am not only doing that, but am drawing the attention of the Prime Minister to it.

Then this is probably the first time in recent British history that we have had an Under-Secretary for Scotland who is so keenly interested in his job, and so keenly interested in the arguments that are, adduced from the Socialist Benches, that he has directed the attention of his Prime Minister to the fact; and we shall look for the resultant benefits which will accrue from the interest taken on the Front Government Bench. If we do not get those benefits, we shall be all the more disappointed, because we shall know that the failure is not due to lack of knowledge on the part of the Prime Minister, but due to lack of will and lack of interest.

To take another point, I hope the Under-Secretary will pay attention to the architects' union. We have heard a good deal about the bricklayers' union, the steelmakers' union, and the plasterers' union; what about the architects? First-class plans are sent down by the Scottish Board of Health to local town councils. We examine them, we agree upon Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, or Plan D, and we think that that is the finish. Not at all. We accept the plans, but the Scottish Board of Health insist upon our taking two architects—not one. In that respect England gets off more simply; we have to take two architects, and we have to carry those two architects upon our housing scheme, although the plans may have been produced by a State architect in a State Government Department. I know of one housing scheme where we had to pay £3,500 for architects' fees. I know of another slum clearance scheme where we had to carry two architects upon it, and I do not know what fees we shall have to carry there. That is an unnecessary charge, and I hope the Under-Secretary will see that something is done about it. I should also like to ask the Under-Secretary what he is going to do for the large cities, where the problem is perhaps even more grievous than at Glasgow. Glasgow has had the fierce light that beats upon the throne for a long time, but I want to direct some of that light to Dundee. We have there 2,000 houses inhabited which are officially certified as uninhabitable, Rents are raised on them, do not forget that. These houses are produced by the social system you defend. What are you going to do about these 2,000 diseased houses, polluted homes, in which people are compelled to live and to pay rent? It is not only in the big cities. You get these conditions in the small villages.

We have our remedies, but you refuse them. You will not even have profiteering Bills. You will not deal with the glass trust. You will not deal with all the syndicates in house building, from cement. to light castings, which fatten on the industry. You will not deal with the land monopoly, and there are recent extraordinary instances of it in Glasgow. I think it is up to the Under-Secretary, in a Scotch housing debate, not to put us off with the perfunctory excuses and platitudes with which the English Board of Health succeeded in escaping, but that he will face up to the realities of the situation. Housing is too dear. The people cannot afford to pay the rents for the houses. They cannot afford to pay the rates for them, never mind the rent. They are put upon by a financial system, by a usury system, by a land system, by a capitalist profiteering system all of which we would scrap. I particularly want to know what the Under-Secretary is going to do for the 2,000 heads of households. There are two families in some of these hovels. In some of them 10 people are living. What is the Under-Secretary going to do about these grave problems? I trust he will give us an even more advanced programme than some of us were compelled, with very great regret, to accept last year even under an administration which we called our own.

2.0 P.M.

The question of insanitary houses is one of first-class and extreme importance. My hon. Friend who has just sat down has told us about 2,000 in Dundee. I am sure the Under-Secretary will agree that there must be close on 2,000 in his own division, and even from the point of view of his representation as a private Member of the House it is absolutely essential that something should be done. I have no great objection to the steel house as a steel house, in fact I will go further probably than some of my colleagues would be prepared to go. The other week, to the everlasting disgrace of the Under-Secretary, he being a doctor, he sanctioned in Lanarkshire single tenement dwellings—what we in Scotland formerly knew as but and ben. I think the general population, Liberal, Tory and Labour, in any enlightened town in Scotland had come to the conclusion that in 1925 we had seen the end of the old single compartment but and ben in our Scottish towns. Instead of that the new Tory Progressive party has come along and the first sign of democracy is not to improve houses but to lower the standard of housing of the last Government and to allow reactionary local authorities to build but and ben dwellings. I regret it, coming from a man who knows the medical and the housing conditions in those places. I have seen the steel house, and I would sooner have it by a long way than these but and bens that the hon. Gentleman has sanctioned in a Lanarkshire village. They are ahead in ventilation, in cleanliness, in everything you have in a but and ben, and, above all, they are ahead in the last point my hon. Friend made. The great thing about Scottish housing has been that you have had no chance of dealing with the sex problem. Whatever may be argued against the steel house, it does allow the sexes to be separated. Therefore, if I have to choose between the modern steel house and the but and ben, I am certainly for the Weir house. I have always considered that if I asked for a thing for myself, if I think a good home is good enough to live in, I have an equal right to demand that for my constituents, and if I had to choose for my home life between a Weir house and a house sanctioned to be built of stone of the but and ben type in Lanarkshire for the Board of Health, I would certainly choose the Weir type of house.

In regard to wages, even there the building trade workers have not been the selfish people the Tory party would make them out to be. They even went further than any Member of the House has yet declared. They said, "This is a new type of house. Let us have a special conference with Lord Weir to adjust the conditions and methods of employment under which the workers will be engaged," but Lord Weir would not have that. All he said was, "These are my wages and this is what I will insist on." We beard one hon. Member cry "shame" that is. 3d. per hour should be asked as the wage of a builder's labourer. Hon. Members opposite spend far more than 1s. 3d. on a dinner.

The hon. Member did not say "shame." but "shilling."

It is a question of 1s. 3d. an hour as against 10½d. an hour. I wish my hon. Friend opposite would get an elementary knowledge of industrial conditions. 10½d. an hour is the wage paid by Weir's firm to builders' labourers. I know the people to whom it is paid, because they are my constituents. That is the wage he proposes to pay to the builders' labourers engaged in the production of these houses. It has been stated in regard to the Weir houses that the bricklayer, the joiner, the plumber and the plasterer are holding up the houses. I am sure that the Under-Secretary for the Scottish Board of Health reads the Glasgow newspapers much more frequently than he did when he was Member for South Lanark. in the Glasgow newspapers, either last night or this morning, there appeared a notable paragraph to which I would direct the hon. Member's attention.

The great argument for the Weir house is the expedition with which it can be erected. What is happening in Glasgow? It is said there are hundreds of houses in Glasgow ready to be occupied, the bricklayers' work, the joiners' work and the plasterers' work having been accomplished. The occupation of those houses is not being kept back by the wicked plasterer or the wicked bricklayer, but because the local authority cannot get a supply of materials in order to provide the houses with adequate supplies of electricity, gas and water. In last night's "Glasgow Times" it was stated that even if the Weir houses were built they would not be ready for occupancy, because the local authority cannot get the necessary materials for the supply of electricity, gas and water. Therefore, you are not solving the problem when you erect a Weir house unless you can give the worker the supply necessary for his household. Even working people need water, electricity and gas. We are to have an extension Bill shortly because we need more air and sunshine in the city. What are the facts in regard to the building trade and their work on houses in Glasgow? I am tired of the terrible onslaughts upon building trade workers, because they are most unjustifiable. My father worked in the building trade, and in the old days was for three months in the year without work, and we had to exist for three months without a dole, or without parish pay, because there was no work in the building trade for three months of the year previous to the War. One of my colleagues, who comes from the same area as myself, is aware of these facts, and must have seen many people in the building trades with no income at all.

In Glasgow, although we have a very severe house shortage, the available men in the building trades are not engaged in the construction of working class houses. We have 3,00 joiners in Glasgow and, according to an estimate submitted to the Glasgow Corporation, only 132 of these 3,000 joiners, or 5 per cent., are engaged on housing schemes. There are 2,100 bricklayers and masons, and only 255 engaged on housing schemes, or 12·14 per cent. Of plasterers, the most wicked and cruel of all folk, there are 500 in Glasgow, and of that number only 25 are working on housing schemes, or under 5 per cent. The other building trade workers are engaged building banks and luxury buildings, and not in the construction of houses for the working classes.

The one thing that you want when you are in business is continuity in your business, and the working men equally want continuity in their work. The working man goes to the firm that can give him the most reasonable chance of a steady year's work. I suggest to the Under-Secretary to the Scottish Board of Health that he should take this matter into consideration. The Glasgow Corporation know their requirements for the next 15 years; the Scottish Office also know the requirements of Glasgow for the next 15 years. The Glasgow Corporation could to-morrow employ, provided that the men give reasonable work in return, not 132 joiners, 255 bricklayers and 25 plasterers, or, roughly speaking, 400 men on housing, but they could employ for the next 15 years, at least 4,000 men.

If the Glasgow Corporation came along and said to these men, "During the next 15 years, as a corporation, we are going to employ you building houses," what would happen? In Glasgow, a corporation job is a great attraction. The men know that once they get established they are secure in their employment, that they are guaranteed decent conditions, and that they get superannuation in their old age, which is a great thing to working people. Therefore, if for the next 15 years the Glasgow Corporation were to say, "We can employ you for 15 years if you give us a reasonable return in your work for that period of employment," instead of these men being engaged on banks and luxury dwellings, they would come along and instead of 5 per cent. being engaged in house building, you would get 5 per cent. only engaged on banks and luxury building, with the 95 per cent. engaged on houses.

I wish to draw attention to another astounding feature in regard to housing in Scotland. It is said that the workmen by their combination in their trade unions form a monopoly, but I wish that those who constantly sneer at the working men would look at the other side of the question. We are told that we are living under a competitive system. There might be something to be said for it if it were really a competitive system, but it is not In Glasgow we have three big housing schemes, the Shawlands, the Possil and the Langlands. I understand that there are something like 300 firms engaged in the building trade in She west of Scotland and only four of these hundreds tendered in the case of the Shawlands work. Out of the four the two lowest ultimately withdrew their offer, then the next lowest asked for an increase of 7½ per cent., and in the end only one offer was left, and that is the highest offer. Yet hon. Members talk as if we lived under a competitive system and if trade unions had a monopoly of combination while here in the centre of Glasgow only one firm tendered for one of the biggest schemes. The Possil scheme was advertised in two sections. For the joinery work only two offers were received, while for the other section only one offer was received. In the case of the Langlands scheme the same thing occurred, and to-day in Glasgow, as indeed in England as well, you have practically no competition in connection with the schemes of housing.

If you do want to attract the best type of workmen to housing schemes, if you wish to attract them from luxury building, you have to guarantee continuity, and you have to guarantee that decent work manship will be expended on those houses. That his one advantage if you allow the municipality to go on building houses. Everyone here knows that it is an unfortunate characteristic of the building trade that you have smaller employers than you have in any other industries. For instance the engineering industry attracts larger capitalists than the building trade. The building trade is notorious for the small employer being rampant. The small employer has every disadvantage as compared with the large employers, and in so far as he goes on with the work it has to be at much higher cost than that Which faces the Glasgow Corporation who have an incentive to go on with schemes because they can borrow money more cheaply than small employers. I would appeal to the Scottish Board of Health to allow the Glasgow Corporation for the next 15 years to go on with housing and to employ their own men. That will be one of the biggest steps forward that- could be taken. We are all agreed as to the terrible conditions of housing. I have cited times without number the conditions in my constituency. There are similar conditions in the constituency of the hon. and gallant Member for Kelvingrove (Captain Elliot). I know streets like Clyde Street where you can see eight persons living in a single apartment and where you have disease rampant.

It is not good enough for hon. Members to ask for increased sentences for crimes which those people commit. That is not the way to solve that problem. As long as you have housing conditions like that you will have crime and immorality and all the foul things which spring from foul conditions. I was for years a prison visitor in Scotland. It was my work to go to prison, and in my constituency men are better housed when they commit crime than when they remain honest outside. They have more air, more sunshine and more everything in prison than they have outside. Here is a chance for this Government. They have started reaction, their progress has been backward so far, but I would plead with the Secretary to the Scottish Board of Health not for the sake of his Government or his party to do what is asked. We heard yesterday about the Prince of Wales needing £2,000 and on the other hand of poor people having to live in slums. Those poor folk down there are worth having as good a chance as the Prince of Wales or any other man. I appeal to the hon. and gallant Member to reverse the policy which has been established and to see that in Scotland this building scandal is as speedily as possible removed.

I crave the indulgence of the Committee for intervening in this Debate, but I feel that it would be well to state the results of the experience which I have had in my previous career in dealing with this subject of housing. We have heard the question argued as one between the capitalist and the worker, and one between the skilled and the unskilled worker, but it seems to me that the subjects which are really worth considering are, first, the question of urgency, second, the question of materials and methods used in building, and third, the question of labour. Urgency, is, after all, the one which matters now. If you are going to consider the question of urgency, I may be allowed to refer to a procedure which might be adopted in this respect. After all, I was in the engineering branch of the Army, in which we had to provide, both by construction and reconstruction, every form of both temporary and permanent buildings and practically in every climate. We had to provide small married quarters and large married quarters and officers' quarters, so that I am able, perhaps, to deal with a rather open mind with the accommodation which is required now.

There is no getting away from the fact that when there is a question of urgency butting is justifiable, though it was never justified if any permanent work was to be done, because economic conditions come in then; but this is a question of urgency, and in that case hutting, I hold, is necessary. I had an opportunity of visiting some Weir houses, and though we have heard of steel houses, I found that after all they were merely the huts which we had been using in the Army, and which I have built very largely myself, improved, of course, and brought up to date; but one cannot get away from the fact that the Weir house is that but, and that as such it is justifiable to meet the requirements of the moment. I go so far, therefore, as to suggest that some money might be put aside to accommodate the population in this way. That is particularly necessary when one considers the crowded areas in places like Glasgow and other big cities where the need is most urgent. Much has been said about slum clearance, but very little said as to how to do it. The first necessity is to reconstruct the existing buildings which are known as slums. A great many of them are near the work of those who occupy them. Much could be done by having some hutting erected and by clearing the population in sections. That would be treating them as men are treated in the Army; that is to say, putting them into huts until barracks are reconstructed. I do not see why such methods should not be applied to the present housing shortage. Hutting is justified as an expedient, because of the urgent need of the workers in congested districts.

I now turn to the requirements of areas where there is no congestion and where houses can be put up of the bungalow type, that is to say, the two-storey or the single-storey parlour and non-parlour house. In my own constituency there is little urgency in that except in the mining areas. It has to be remembered that many of the pits have a very short life, and owing to subsidence it is very desirable to have a, light form of structure. I recommend Weir houses there and where there is overcrowding, but I do not think they should be adopted in rural districts or in certain towns and villages where a more pleasant style of architecture is desired. Weir houses must be taken on their merits where they can be best applied. It is not a case of Weir houses only, but of some more or less temporary structure to fulfil the purpose for the time being. Such a method would enable housing to be carried on until normal conditions apply, when brick and other alternative forms of construction are the only real solution.

We come next to the methods. It is not a question of Weir houses only We have to consider different styles. It is clear that, if you are to accelerate building and do it on cheap lines, you must standardise in some form or other. You want to standardise the system rather than the pattern. That is the only solution. I have seen and have had advice upon one or two forms. One is referred to in this last Report It happens to be more of a wood construction than anything else, but I do not bold that that is necessarily a solution, because the details of cost are not yet completed. At all events, it deals with a system which is a long way in the direction of solution, and that is a system which provides for sections for the walls, sections for the doors and windows, and thus enables anything from an outhouse to a cathedral to be built. It is only by standardised construction that you can reduce cost.

You come to the last question, how far ice can use unskilled labour? I agree with many of the contentions put forward by hon. Members opposite. You want skilled labour for erection, but in the factory you can do a great deal to satisfy union regulations by employing various grades of labour, unskilled or otherwise. I was much interested, in the Debate on the Address, to hear hon. Members opposite say that there was no such thing as unskilled labour. If that were the case There would not be much difficulty about dilution. I agree that there may not be anything like unskilled labour, and I refer to it now merely as a technical term. In the Army we always used to deal with certain men as unskilled. They might have been labourers and excavators, who require skill and training. Equally skilled is the shirker who lives on the dole, his is a skilled employment also. We can dismiss the subject of unskilled labour as not entering into the argument. What I would like to impress upon hon. Members opposite relates to be unions as we have heard a great deal about an alleged desire to smash the unions. I must say that I think hon. Gentlemen opposite on the Socialist Benches, instead of representing labour, misrepresent it. I say that for this reason. The amount of interest they seem to display in foreigners, and also the unfortunate attitude taken up by certain unions, is making the public rather shy of Labour as such. I think that shyness is fully justified. I have dealt with all forms of labour, and I am a supporter of unions. It is desirable that efficiency and the men's interests should be maintained. But I hold that if a union claims to have its privileges and hours of work on a datum line, it is equally fair that those who employ them should ask for a datum line of efficiency and output. It is in the interests of the unions that they should see to this. There is no question of smashing the unions. The unions know that that is impossible, but they could do a great deal to put their own house in order.

I hope that the result of this appeal will be to lead a little in that direction. I hope that particularly in the building trade they will consider some method of grading their labour. In the Engineers we are accustomed to grading -the various trades according to skill, and it is a very sound system. In the Territorial Army one of the chief troubles is in grading, because the certificates of employers are not similar in form to the trade rating in the Engineers; there is nothing in civil life corresponding to the military rating. I think that this grading should commend itself to the unions. Many Members opposite have talked about apprenticeship. We know that it takes a certain number of years before a man gets his ticket. They must know, however, that that ticket does not necessarily ensure a man getting the best salary. The man who is really a skilled workman can always get employment; the man who is less skilled might have to look for it. A great deal could be done by some adjustment in the unions to grade the various trades. The task would not be difficult.

We have heard a great deal of very loose talk about the number of bricks that can be laid in a day. The hon. Member for Reading (Mr. H. Williams), with whom I have been associated on many occasions, rather surprised me by stating that two men could lay 5,000 bricks in a day. It may be possible in competition and without rest, but the statement is not quite applicable to this discussion. I have employed a good many bricklayers in my time and have seen a good many employed, and I am satisfied with 700 to 1,000 bricks being laid in a day. Only on straight work could you look for more than 1,000. When it comes to housing, there are corners and doors and windows and fireplaces, and anyone would be thoroughly pleased with 600 per day in high class work. Bricklaying is of two or three classes. You have the highest type in London and the big cities down to another class of work in which joints are not so well struck and is afterwards plastered. There is no reason why men who are good at that class of work should not reach as many as 1,000 bricks a day. That is why I ask hon. Members opposite to use such influence as they possess with the unions in getting those bodies to co-operate. It is not a question of employing sweated labour but of employing men according to their capacity. A certain number of unskilled men are always on the market, and these we should like to see employed. I am sure there is no reason why men who are out of employment should not make themselves available to assist in building. In that way, we have some chance of getting the houses which we require, and if there is that co-operation, for which I ask, the public generally will owe a debt of gratitude for it to the building industry.

I am sure all hon. Members will be ready to congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend who 'has just spoken upon his maiden speech. His knowledge and his experience as an officer of the Royal Engineers should be useful to us in our Debates here and more especially in De bates with regard to housing methods. The proposal before the Committee is to grant a token Vote of £10 for the construction of demonstration houses in different parts of Scotland to exemplify various new modes of construction. A similar proposal has been adopted for England; it is, I think, an eminently sensible proposal and I hope it will be sanctioned for Scotland as well as England. Much has been said about the Weir steel house, though that is not the only -pattern which is being kept in view. I, like many other hon. Members, have had an opportunity of inspecting the Weir steel house, and I agree that it is suitable for the purpose which we have in view, namely, to accommodate the people temporarily, or as long as the houses can reasonably be expected to last, while the other housing schemes are being carried out. In my view it will be extremely useful to have such accommodation.

I do not wish, however, to say anything about the houses just now. I would prefer to say something about the factories in which the houses are produced. An hon. Member has asserted that there is no factory in which these materials can be quickly produced, and has argued that there would be a great deal of delay before such houses could be made generally available. That is not the case. I went round the Weir factory, which is a very large building. It was a munition factory or something of that sort during the War, and the central shed in which the materials are stored is, I should say, double or three times the size of this Chamber, while. there are all sorts of other buildings besides. The factory is capable of producing a great deal of material. It is a matter of mass production, and just as you have the Ford car, the parts of which can be obtained quickly all over the world and assembled together to form a car, so you can see in that factory all the different parts necessary to form a house being prepared and manufactured. I believe it is estimated that in seven days a house can be put together on a suitable site and any number of houses could be very speedily erected by any local authority or any body or person desiring houses of this type. It would prove very advantageous to have demonstration houses erected all over Scotland, so that the local authorities might have an opportunity of inspecting them and deciding whether or not they wished to go in for them. I have been for many years a county councillor in a rural district of Scotland, and I know what happens. Houses fall into bad repair and are sometimes pronounced unfit for human habitation, but the local authority hesitates to take the step of closing them altogether because there is nowhere else to which the people can go. If a number of Weir houses or similar houses were erected it would facilitate the process of temporarily accommodating the people who are turned out of insanitary houses while the main body of houses under the various housing schemes is being prepared. I view the proposal as a useful one, and I hope this Committee will enable the Ministry of Health to adopt it.

I wish to raise a matter which has not been dealt with so far in the course of the Debate, namely, the question of rural housing in Scotland, particularly as it affects the more remote parts of that country. This problem is very different from the housing problem in large industrial centres like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee or Berwick-on-Tweed. I would not have felt it necessary to intervene had the representatives of the Far North been present in the Committee. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) in a recent speech in the country, referring to the fact that the Liberal strongholds were in the extreme North of Scotland and the wilds of Wales, said that liberty when in danger always took to the hills and that in the hills the Liberal party were upholding the standard of liberty. They seem to be there this afternoon. There is not a solitary Member for a Scottish Highland constituency here to say one word on their behalf in connection with the very serious housing problem which exists in these parts. I do not think it is a problem which can he solved by any of the schemes presently before the country or by the various Acts which are operating for the supply of working-class houses.

I must point out that if it cannot be solved by any schemes, and, therefore, will require fresh legislation, it cannot now be debated.

I would hesitate many times- before I would question your ruling, Mr. Hope, but I think if, by special distribution by the Scottish Office of the fund available for this purpose, the Highland constituencies got special consideration, that would not involve new legislation, but merely——

If it be within the power of the competent authority in Scotland to deal with it under the Act of last year, then undoubtedly the hon. Member will be in order.

The Act of last year, if adjusted by a benevolent administration at the Scottish Office——

It is not within the competence of Government Departments to adjust Acts of Parliament, but to administer them.

I listened with considerable interest, under very great difficulty, on Wednesday evening of this week when the hon. Member for Forfarshire (Sir Harry Hope) endeavoured, at a very awkward time of the day, to move a Resolution on this subject, and I endeavoured to follow him in debate on that point. He was calling attention to the very evil conditions under which rural workers were being housed. Now in the cities, the housing problem and the labour problem are very seriously complicated. We have all sorts of employers of labour and owners of houses, and the employers of labour and the owners of houses are invariably different sets of people. We have Labour town councillors, Socialist agitators, trade union leaders, lazy bricklayers, and all those things that are supposed to have created this desperate housing problem of the day. We have also got increasing populations in most cases. But here in the Highlands of Scotland, we have got either static populations or diminishing populations. We have had practically no trade union organisations. We have not a solitary Labour representative on any public body. As a matter of fact, a colleague and I a fortnight ago were hailed as the missionaries of a new evangel when we went into the county of Caithness to lay down the very simple, very plain, and very sensible propositions for which the Labour party stands.

We have in these rural districts the landowner of the district the house owner at the same time, the man who has been responsible for building the houses and at the same time the big employer of labour of the community, who is able, owing to the absence of strong organisation among agricultural workers, practically to dictate the standard of wages that shall be paid throughout the area. He is the man who decides what the standard of house accommodation is to be, and he decides what the rate of wages is to be. There is no trade union, no Bolshevist agitator, to stir up the decent workers against his good, kind landowner, who is at the same time the provider of his house and the provider of his wage. And yet here, in this ideal paradise of landowners we find, on the statement of the hon. Member for Forfarshire, that the housing conditions are not merely deplorable, but almost bestial. He referred to the bothie system, under which young men are housed about the farms. The cottages in which married men and their wives and children are housed are every bit as bad, and the hon. Member for Forfar comes forward asking for the State to step in and cure a state of affairs which foreign competition has not created, which trade unionism has not created, which labour agitation has not created, a state of affairs which the Scottish landowning class, who have drawn the rents, paid the wages, built the houses—they have to all intents and purposes been absolute lords and masters of all they survey—have themselves created. It seems to me a piece of impertinence, and——

I presume the hon. Member is about to explain how the Minister, under the powers of the 1924 Act, can remedy this deplorable state of affairs.

If your ruling had allowed me to go beyond the limits of the Vote, I would have said that the practical proposition——

Yes. The hon. Member is exercising a very commendable ingenuity, but when that ingenuity is directed to subverting the ruling of the Chair, in the opinion of the Chairman it may cease to be amusing.

Two years' experience of this House, one of them under your Chairmanship, Mr. Hope, has led me to know perfectly well that no ingenuity can get round your very definite rulings, once they are given, and I can assure you that I am not endeavouring to be amusing, but merely trying to advance the arguments that seem necessary to establish the point that has to be made if this Act is to be of any use in the remote parts of the Highlands of Scotland. The position, I say, has been created by the Scottish landlord class, who have not done their duty to the community. As custodians for the nation they have been unfaithful in their stewardship of Scottish land, and the State ought to take from them their estates, without compensation or consideration, instead of giving them grants to remedy the evil which they have definitely created. But the point I want to put is this, that it is recognised in Scottish local rating and in our educa- tional service in Scotland that out of the Scotch educational fund that is available for educational purposes in Scotland from the British Treasury, a total sum is given to Scotland to cover Scotland's needs. In a city like Glasgow, the proportion borne by the local rates is something less than 50 per cent., and the Treasury proportion is something over 50 per cent. In counties like Inverness and the Western Isles, the proportion of the Treasury——

This is clearly out of order. We are now discussing the grant towards housing schemes under the Housing Act of 1924, and a Token Vote is proposed. The hon. Member is perfectly in order in showing how the Minister and his Department in Scotland may administer their powers under that Act, but that is the only question. If it can be done under any other Acts or general powers, that is not in order on this particular Vote. It may no doubt be in order on the salary of the Secretary for Scotland, but not on this particular Vote. of which a reduction has now been moved.

I have sat here listening to discussions on this same Vote which have ranged all over Europe. I followed the hon. and gallant Member for Berwick and Haddington (Colonel Crookshank) away into the Far East, and another hon. Member into several odd corners of the world. The subsidy that is granted under the 1924 Act makes a differentiation between the urban problem and the rural problem of, I think, £9 in the one case, and £13 10s. in the other. I cannot believe that that difference meets the needs of very remote parts of Scotland, and the hon. Gentleman, in using the Fund that is available, will have to consider whether there are not means by which the amounts we are voting to-day are really made available to those districts which have very special difficulties. Those difficulties are recognised by other Departments of the Scottish Office in dealing with problems such as education and health services. I hope that, in using this money we are voting to-day under this particular head, it will be seen that the conditions are such that the remote Highland districts of Scotland will get a sufficient share to enable them to tackle this problem which has grown up there under the Scottish landholding system, and under the administration of Scottish landowners.

Far be it from me to attempt to curtail in any way the legitimate, or even illigitimate, activities of Members from my own part of the country, but I may have to keep my own remarks shorter than I would otherwise have done, because, after all, the Debate has ranged over a very considerable field, and I think hon. Members opposite showed the greatest ingenuity in introducing matters, which, it seems to me, might require legislation, and legislation of a sufficiently drastic kind. The hon. Member for Bridgeton (Mr. Maxton) has just laid down his remedy for the housing system, which is the confiscation, without compensation, of the whole estates of Highland landlords.

I think that would clearly require legislation, and therefore, the hon. and gallant Gentleman cannot pursue it.

I did not put forward that policy as one for the Treasury Bench, or even on behalf of the Labour party. I merely said that would be my policy.

3.0 P.M.

Soliloquy, we all know, is often a relief to the charged bosom. My hon. Friend will excuse me from dealing with the subject, more particularly as you, Mr. Chairman, would rule me out of order. On the particular proposals which the hon. Member put forward, I am sure he will be glad to know that we, have arranged that in the distribution of these demonstration houses practically the whole will be available for rural districts and the outlying districts of Scotland, and that the particular needs of the Highland counties have not been lost sight of. We are arranging for at least two and, possibly, three demonstration houses, for the Island of Lewis, one each for Orkney and Shetland, and other houses will be available for the border counties and the northern towns such as Dingwall and Inverness. These. will have the additional advantage, which I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Springburn (Mr. Hardie) will appreciate, of providing a very drastic test, because any house that can stand up through the continual battering of the rain-laden gales of the west coast of Scotland will have, I am sure he will agree, a fairly strong test put upon it, that will be a great compliment to the house.

It is not a question of pressure. There is much quicker rust when you have no wind, and if my arguments are going to be dealt with, I hope they will be dealt with on a scientific basis, and not merely with a swinging of the arm.

Of course, the scientific side of the hon. Member's argument is not one into which I intend to enter at the present moment. It would be useless to debate all these subjects to-day, and the Debate has ranged over a considerable series of subjects of interest, which were discussed on the previous Vote for England, The hon. Member, therefore, will excuse rue if I confine myself strictly to the points raised in the course of the Debate. The general course of the discussion has been, apart from wider criticisms, mere favourable, I think, to the suggestion of the steel house in Scotland than the course of the Debate with regard to the English situation. I think the hon. Member for Gorbals (Mr. Buchanan) particularly made a very strong appeal that these new methods should get due consideration because, as he very rightly said, there is no proposal to make anything less than a three-roomed house under the factory system of production, whereas at present we are obliged, owing to the necessities of the ease, to sanction two-roomed houses in Scotland. Two-roomed houses were sanctioned by the previous administration. The proportion in some cases has been increased under this administration, owing to the shortage with which we are faced, and I think it is a testimony to our desire, our anxiety, and our determination to erect houses, so impressed are we of the necessity for putting forward in Scotland every effort that will reduce the present slums and overcrowding in our great cities, and also, to some extent, in our rural areas.

I have no time at my disposal to enter into the general question, or into the merits or demerits of Lord Weir's schemes. All I can say is that hon. Members representing Scotland will ad- mit that there has been no suggestion, at any rate in Scotland, of booming one system of construction to the disadvantage of another. All systems have been discussed and put forward equally, and I do not propose to go further into the matter now, except to say we shall be very glad to see any system, and we will give the utmost facility to any system which goes through the ordinary standards of examination which the Weir house, like all other houses, has had to undergo. On the general question of factory as against housebuilding, and the respective rates of wages, I will not enter into, because that aspect of the question has already been discussed. I would only say, however, that indoor work, as all hon. Members with industrial experience know, supplies an upstanding wage, in contrast to the different conditions obtaining in outdoor work in which there is lost time, and in which the work is subject to serious interruption. The general criticism, I think, is that the scheme does not go far enough. All one can say upon that is that we have made a start. We are attempting to distribute these houses so that the whole country shall have a chance of observing them. There will be in every area people of experience themselves testing the houses by living in them. This, after all, is the only test that can be accounted final. I am not interested, in the long run, about the final report of the Moir Committee, or the Housing and Town Planning Committee, or the final report of any scientific expert, whatever his authority. The only person I am interested in, and on whose verdict I rely, is the verdict of the housewife who has to live in the house, to cook her man's dinner, and so on. The test is her opinion which, in the long run, will carry the day for or against these houses. We have brought this thing to a stage at which it is possible for this big practical test to be entered upon. Consequently, I hope, that without further discussion it may be possible for the House to pass this Vote and to allow the next stage of the experiment to be entered upon, namely, the actual test of living by these people who in the long run will give a verdict for or against the houses.

There is one point I should like the hon. and gallant Gentle- man to deal with. In Glasgow, houses have had all the bricklaying work done, and they are finished ready for occupancy, yet the local authority who supplies the water, gas and electricity cannot complete them because the material cannot be got for these latter. I should like to ask the Parliamentary Secretary if he will do what he can to remedy this, for these things are needed in the Weir houses just as much as in brick houses. Is he taking any steps to deal with this?

The hon. Gentleman has not explained what it is that is lacking; whether the pipes or the water?

The general materials that are required for both pipes and fittings to accommodate the electricity, the gas, and the water.

There has been no general body of complaint from the local authorities that there is one particular class of material in respect of which they are being "held up," but if any such complaint comes up, I shall certainly go into it. At present the situation is that in which the labour more than the material itself is the thing required. I have reports from the local authorities showing the shortage of labour on many housing schemes. If, in addition, there is a shortage of material, then I promise the hon. Gentleman I will go into it and to do my very best to have it removed. He himself admits that he has only gone upon the reports in the newspapers. In view of that, it is impossible for me to discuss all the reasons there may be for what he has told us, because I have not the whole facts at my disposal. It may be one of a thousand things that is holding up the work. If there is any other question which I have not been able to deal with in the short time at my disposal. I shall be glad to deal with it, apart from the question of the re-casting of our financial system suggested by the hon. Member for Dundee, or the suggestion of the hon. Member for Gorbals, as to a 15 years' programme of direct labour by the Glasgow Corporation. I think I have dealt with the important points that have been raised in the Debate, consequently, I hope the House will be able now to give us this Vote.

I do not think the statement of the Parliamentary Secretary very satisfactory. I feel that we in Scot- land deserve a much fuller reply than we have got on this occasion. The conditions so far as Glasgow is concerned seem to me to be very much worse than they are in Edinburgh. Consequently the Scottish Secretary should have refused to allow himself to be rushed in the way in which he has been rushed at the present time. I would like him to explain how increasing the number of but and ben houses, room-and-kitchen houses, is going to solve the emergency problem in connection with Scottish housing. You may be able to build the smaller type of house a little bit quicker, but I would like him to tell me how much time he estimates will be saved by reducing the standard of housing in this way. I would also like to point out to him that by launching out in this way, as is the case in Lanarkshire, he is only going to accentuate the problem. The difficulty has arisen in some measure because decent houses have not been provided for the members of the working class in the past. If one belonged to the working class, anything was considered good enough. I can understand the urgency of the question all right, but I do not see how this but and ben business is going to solve it. If I go into my own constituency I am sure to meet several people who ask me what I can do towards getting them a bigger house. They tell me they have a room-and-kitchen house, and that there are father and mother and eight of the family in the house. If the Scottish Office is going to try to solve the problem by increasing the number of room-and-kitchen houses, T. would like to get from the Minister some reasonable explanation of how that is going to happen. Sometimes one finds a father and mother and eight of a family in a single-apartment house, and to offer them a room and kitchen is not really dealing with the question.

I would have liked the Under-Secretary for Health to say something also with regard it houses that are being condemned unsuitable for human habitation. There were 13,000 of them in Glasgow some time ago, and in my own division there are a good many of them, and the strange thing is that these houses, condemned as unfit for human habitation, are yet yielding to the proprietors rent at the increased standard. I wonder what the Scottish Office is thinking about in allowing people to go on drawing those increased rents from houses condemned as unfit for human habitation. One night during the General Election my opponent and I were asked to go into see one of 'hose houses. We went into a single-apartment house occupied by the widow of a man who gave his life in service for the country. The individual who asked us to come in was a man who was a painter, who was giving his spare time to redecorate the house for this widow and her family. When he began his job he started to tear off the paper from the walls, but when he saw what was under the paper he told the woman that she and her family should not continue to live in that house, that they should not stay even for the night. The walls were alive with bugs. Yet for every one of those houses, and I went into some of the others in the tenement., the factors were taking an increased rent at the rate allowed under the Act. I think that the Scottish Office ought to do something in this connection. I notice that under the heading of sickness, disablement, and maternity benefits it is not quite clear, and I would like a little information as to how the suggested saving is going to take place. I have had constant complaints with regard to the maternity benefit. People who are unemployed and in the most desperate circumstances find that when there is an infant coming into the home, because they have been unable to maintain their payments under the National Health Insurance, the maternity benefit is not given. I wonder whether this saving is the reason for the discontent of these people. I would like the Under-Secretary to go into this matter to see what can be clone to help these poor people. If he will give me this promise I shall be pleased, because I think an examination of the circumstances in connection with maternity benefit in the case of unemployed people will lead the Scottish Office to do something to improve this very deplorable state of things.

I will certainly look into this matter. I would point out, however, that there is no actual saving and no reduction in the money paid over.

Question, "That a Supplementary sum, not exceeding £5, be granted for the said Service," put, and negatived.

Original Question put, and agreed to

Ministry of Labour

Motion made and Question proposed,

"That a Supplementary sum, not exceeding £422,000, be granted to His Majesty, to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1925, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Ministry of Labour and Subordinate Departments, including tie Contributions to the Unemployment Fund, and to Special Schemes, and Payments to Associations, Local Education Authorities and others for administration under the Unemployment Insurance and Labour Exchanges Acts; Expenditure in connection with the Training of Demobilised Officers. Non-Commissioned Officers and Men and Nurses; Grants for Resettlement in Civil Life; and the Expenses of the Industrial Court; also Expenses in connection with the International Labour Organisation (League of Nations); and certain Grants-in-Aid."

I beg to move to reduce the Vote by £10.

I move this Amendment in order to call attention to the uneconomic administration of the Unemployment Insurance Act as it is being conducted at the present time. The right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Labour will have had communications on many of the points that I desire to raise, but there are one or two additional facts that probably I shall be able to give him in a few minutes that I shall occupy his attention. We have a colliery in the County of Durham, the Dunston Colliery, that has been idle for a long time. The local Employment Exchange informed a large number of these men that there was employment in the coal-mines in the Barnsley district, and quite a number of them went to Barnsley on the understanding that they would not only secure work, but that they would be able to find lodgings in order to enable them to continue their work from day to day. When they arrived at Barnsley and commenced their work, they found that it was impossible to secure lodgings. They went to the Employment Exchange, and the Exchange gave them a long list of the names and addresses of people who, they said, would take them in as lodgers.

Might I ask the hon. Member how he connects this particular matter with the items of increase which the Committee is now invited to vote? He may be in order, but, on the face of it, it would seem to be general criticism of the methods of the Department.

I was taking it that the matter to which I was referring was in order because in the heading I see there are "Payments to Associations, Local Education Authorities, and others for administration under the Unemployment Insurance and Labour Exchanges Act."

That is a very common mistake which hon. Members fall into on Supplementary Estimates. Undoubtedly, the question of order is not an easy one. The recital includes all the objects of the main Vote. This is not the main Vote, but a Supplementary Vote, and the discussion must be on the items lower down on the paper for certain increases or new grants. In this case, they are "Claims and Record Office, Kew; Outstations, Salaries, Wages and Allowances, Contributions to the Unemployment Fund and to special schemes, and Grants to Associations under the Labour Exchanges Act." References to reasons for those increases or new grants and any requests for explanations will be in order, but the matter is not necessarily in order because it is covered by some words in the recital.

Page 50 deals with the question of contributions of employers and employed, and we claim that the hon. Member would be in order in dealing with that.

It may be that the matter is in order, but I did not understand that that was the argument of the hon. Member for Durham (Mr. Whiteley).

That is what he is leading to.

Well, I will hear what the hon. Member has to say.

I was saying that these men, when they arrived at Barnsley, failed to secure lodgings. They reported to the Employment Exchange and were given a list of names and addresses where they might secure lodgings. After going to the first five places, they found that nobody could accommodate them, and they returned home. They had to walk the whole distance, because they had no money at all. Therefore, we made a request that the Employment Exchange which had sent these men to Barnsley should see that money was pro- vided in order that they might return from Barnsley to their homes, seeing that the conditions laid down had not been fulfilled by the officials of the Exchange.

I am afraid that this is clearly a matter for argument on the main Vote for the salary of the Minister when it comes forward. It cannot be connected with any of these specific increases.

I am sorry, Sir, that you have ruled my hon. Friend out of order. We want to explain that we are not entering into this Debate merely for the purpose of delaying this Estimate. A desire has been expressed that this Estimate should be got through, and we do not want deliberately to oppose it, but we have waited for two full days wanting to raise these points, because they affect so many of our men. We come from a county where the coal industry was never in a worse state than it is now. We have over 30,000 miners unemployed, and the bulk of them are suffering from the danger of their unemployment benefit being attacked in three ways. One is where they are said not to be genuinely seeking work; the second is where married men are being ordered down to Yorkshire. We have been discussing the question of housing for two days——

I am not attempting to stop the hon. Members on account of any suspicion that they have any desire to infringe the Rules of Order, but the Rules of the House with regard to Supplementary Estimates are very strict, and, I quite admit, somewhat difficult to grasp. I think there is no doubt that these arguments cannot be got in under any of these particular increases. I do not know whether the Minister can make any statement on this matter. If it were possible to have a short Debate on -die matter, I should be very glad to allow it, but, as I read the Estimate, it really is not possible.

I naturally bow to your ruling, and venture to agree with it. May I just say that I am exceedingly sorry, because I was very ready to listen to any representations from the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Whiteley) and the hon. Member for Spennymoor (Mr. Batey). I know that this is the sort of point which, although opinions may differ upon it, one would want to have discussed. Might I point out to the hon. Members that there will be an opportunity very soon for a general discussion on an occasion such as the Vote on Account? It will not be very long hence, and it would then be entirely in order, and I for one should be very glad indeed to have such a discussion. I suggest that to the hon. Members, because, while I venture to think that a discussion on these present Votes, to be in order, must be strictly confined to the reasons for the increases, yet I realise what their natural desires are, and I think they could be satisfied quite soon on the Vote on Account.

May I see if it is possible to get in somehow? I have been reading this afternoon in one of the London evening papers that the editor of that paper is glad that the Minister of Labour is tightening up the administration of Unemployment Benefit. We want to get to that point because we feel up in the North that there is too much tightening up, and that the Minister is listening too much to the Capitalist Press.

I am afraid that this really cannot be connected with the increases asked for in the present Vote. I can only suggest that the matter should be brought on at 11 o'clock some day next week.

May I submit that the Note on Subhead M, Appropriations-in-Aid (Ordinary Services), states that

"This increase arises from the fact that the amount receivable from the Unemployment Fund as being the cost of administering the Unemployment Insurance Acts is expected to exceed the amount originally estimated."

I submit that this money is for the purpose of the administration of the Unemployment Insurance Act. Surely it is perfectly in order under that heading to criticise as we are granting an extra sum of money for the administration of the Act. I submit that that point of the administration of the fund is one which can be covered, in so far as people are refused benefit, and that it may be criticised.

It is perfectly in order for the hon. Member to ask and for the Minister to give an explanation as to the appropriation-in-aid. If it can he shown that it has arisen through some act of his in tightening up the administration, further criticism would also be in order, but for the moment I can say no more than that it would be in order to ask how any appropriation-in-aid comes about.

Then I put that question to the Minister of Labour.

I am willing to try to meet hon. Members in any way so that they may see exactly whether they would be in order or not. The extra costs involved, which is the reason for the main item on the paper, are £240,000 under A and £375,000 under sub-head I. They are really due to three main causes. The first is largely due to the fact that under the Act of 1924 passed by my predecessor certain compensation can be claimed in respect of past premiums paid by a man over 60, and was given ex gratia to men between 50 and 60, and a good deal of extra work has been caused by that and part of the increase in the staff is due to that. Then again a great deal of extra work has been caused by the fact, arising from the same Act passed in August last year, that the waiting period has been reduced from six to three days, so that there has been a considerably larger number of claims, and that again has caused an increase of the staff.

Are you sure the Act really has reduced it from six to three days?

That I am not discussing. I am discussing the estimated effect of the Act on that account, and it is that there has been an amount of work which has helped to cause that excess of staff. There is also at present a rather larger number on the live register. Those are the three causes of the increase of the staff, and in just the same way the increases in contributions are due partly to the same cause, that there is more short time being worked of an unsystematic kind, so that some of the contributions are paid during the same weeks as unemployment benefit is also paid, and that also, owing to these compensation claims being paid, there is a rather quicker production of books, and it is thought, therefore, that the purchase of stamps has been anticipated to a greater extent than previously. Those are the causes of that sum of £375,000 which, though it may look considerable in itself, is a very small proportion, as my predecessor knows, of the total sum. The £300,000 is merely an Appropriation-in-Aid from the fund, which is a bookkeeping transaction to meet the extra expense of administration. As regards the £240,000, it is due to the same facts to which I have already alluded, and, the rest of the amount, is due practically entirely to the fact that, in making an estimate with regard to the pensions of the staff, up till now we have paid the cost as it has accrued from day to day, but we are now making allowance for accruing liability to pension charge instead of the actual amount incurred. Those are the whole reasons for the increase.

I have no desire to prevent the Minister getting his Vote, and I hope that he will get it before we rise. Is it not strictly in order, whenever money is demanded, either by original Estimates, or by Supplementary Estimates, to discuss the Service for which the money is asked. If that be the stile, evidently it would be impossible thoroughly to discuss this matter and to give the Minister his Estimate before the end of this day's sitting. The Minister does not desire to avoid discussion, and you would be helping discussion, Mr. Hope, you would be helping the Minister, and helping those of us on these benches who wish to discuss the matter, by suggesting a method whereby this important question cars be discussed at the earliest possible moment.

It is true that when money is asked to be voted by Committee of this House, it is in order to discuss the purpose for which the money is required. We are asked to vote certain increases of Votes agreed to last year, and it is in order to discuss the reasons for those increases, how they have come about, and whether the Department is making proper use of the money; but it is not in order to discuss the reasons for the original Votes, or the manner in which the original Votes have been administered. There is a very old Rule of the House that discussion must be confined to the increases of the Votes. I have no wish to curtail discussion, and I do not suggest that hon. Members would unnecessarily prolong it, but I am bound by the very strict Rule that prevails.

Whilst moving a reduction, cannot we move that the £375,000 be increased?

No private Member can move that any Vote be increased.

I do not wish to move that the Vote be increased, but in moving a reduction of £10, cannot we argue that the sum should be increased?

No, I think not.

There is one item in these Estimates which, as far as I understand it, appears to be completely new expenditure. I refer to the item on page 50, "Grants to Associations under the Labour Exchanges Act, 1909" in respect of which there is a revised Estimate of £3,800. In a note on the same page it is stated that this sum is in respect of:

All who have studied the problem will agree that it is not a question of employment for these children at all. It is not a question which ought to come within the purview of the Minister of Labour. It is admitted by Sir George Newman, in his report for the year, that there is provision for educating and dealing with only about 40,000 mentally and physically defective children, whereas so far as has been ascertained there are at least from 200,000 to 250,000 children who are not catered for in any degree in any institution in this country. I submit that this money is being wasted for the simple reason that you are not educating these children. There are no institutions in the provinces, as apart from London, in which these children could he made fit for taking part in any employment of any kind, and it is useless to try to find work for children who have not had previous training, which they can use in any occupation that might be found. Therefore I suggest that this money is being largely wasted. The real problem for the Government is to provide educational institutions and to transfer these children entirely to the care of the Education Department, and not lose them amid the conflict of various Departments as the Government are doing at present. I hope that the Minister—I do not know whether he has the power—will, if he can, transfer this money to the Board of Education, and tell the Board of Education to get on with the work which it ought to be doing, and say to it, "It is your business to find money to stimulate the local authorities in order to make provision for a couple of hundred thousand mentally and physically defective children who have had no training whatever.

I wish to ask certain questions with regard to Subhead I,

"Contributions to the Unemployment Feuds, and to special schemes."

What amount has been allocated and how is it going to be allocated to relief work for women? Women pay their weekly contribution to the Unemployment Fund. In addition they pay their levy of 2d. per week the same as men, and beyond a grant of £50,000 which has been paid, I think some two years ago, to the Central Committee for the employment of women nothing has been done to provide any special schemes for relief work for women. This £50,000 of the Central Committee has been used largely in providing a few grants for the training of individuals and for domestic service schemes. I suggest that nothing has been done under these special schemes, and I ask the Minister whether, under the £375,000 here, any- thing can be done to meet the needs of the women in the industrial areas?

I am not quite clear whether or not the hon. Member is in order.

I hope that hon. Members do not think that I wish to be obstructive. The hon. Member is really raising a point which is not under this Vote at all. It is not under Class 7, Vote 3; it may be under Unclassified Services, No. 2, though I am very much afraid that it would be ruled out of order there. I am exceedingly sorry, because I have not created these rules of order, though they are really necessary. I think the hon. Member is asking questions on general policy, which would be in order when the Vote comes up for general discussion.

I suggest that the hon. Member should come to me outside the Chamber, and we will see when there is an opportunity for her to raise her point and be in order.

Thank you, very much.

I wish to ask the Minister a few questions regarding Vote A, salaries, wages and allowances, Claims and Record Office. It states that provision has to be made for additional temporary staff to deal with claims or refunds of compensation under -Section 9 under the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1924. I quite well understand that as the result of that Act an additional staff will be necessary. I would like some information as to the number of claims put in and as to the possibility of the Ministry intimating to each of the individuals under the Unemployment Insurance scheme the possibility of their making application for a refund under the Act. I dare say that the Minister as a private Member in his own constituency has had many people inquiring what the new Act does in this connection and what is the possibility of the individual making a claim. I have been deluged with inquiries on the point. I hope that the Ministry will avoid the position that has arisen in connection with the Ministry of Pensions and final awards, and the trouble which has occurred because people did not know what their position was or the time during which they could make their claims. As the Minister is providing an additional staff to deal with this matter, it would be worth while for him to make known to each individual whether he is entitled to claim or not. I want the Department, in its interpretation of the Act, to take upon itself the duty of intimating to individuals whether or not they can claim. I know it will cost money and that the Minister is anxious to effect necessary economies.

I should like to know how the hon. Member connects this with the item in the Vote?

I will try to show how I connect it. The Act of 1924 made certain provisions regarding possible rebates to people over 60 and people between 50 and 00, and this Estimate is put forward by the Minister because that provision entailed the employment of extra staff, temporarily, in order to deal with these claims. I suggest that this additional expenditure Might be justified if the Minister is going to allow these claims to be made in the most effective fashion.

I take it the hon. Member is justifying the Estimate.

I am not necessarily justifying it. I was putting a question to the Minister and was then suggesting to him the conditions under which, if his answer were on certain lines, I might be prepared to justify the Vote. Otherwise I would be compelled to move its reduction.

The hon. Member appears to be on the border line, but I give him the benefit of the doubt.

I thank you Sir, for the concession, but as a matter of fact I had just about finished with that point. To me the matter is of great importance, and I have no dought it is of great importance to the Minister also, that this should be cleared up as effectively as possible. Therefore, I ask him if he will consider the possibility of letting the persons on his books know whether they are entitled to make a claim in this respect or not. There is another item on which I want some information. Under subhead P (Services arising out of the War), relating to the industrial training of ex- officers and men, an explanatory note states that the number of men entering training and the average duration of the courses have proved greater than was originally anticipated. Can the Minister give the Committee any details of the additional number of men for whom courses of instruction have been provided? Why has the average duration of the courses beer extended? I wonder what is at the bottom of this extension. I have had some experience in connection with this training and I can see various reasons why the numbers should be increased, but if the administration in connection with this extension is like the administration of the general scheme then I have some misgivings. One can have a great deal of sympathy, but unless from these additional courses this additional number of men are going to get something of real value to them in finding places in the labour market it is no good going on to waste any more money.

For example, there is the case of a man where I wonder whether it could be included under this course of additional training, or whether- it could be given a more extended course of training. It is a neurasthenia case. A man after his service in the Army got a course of training as a laboratory assistant, and then he was informed, in a laboratory in which he found employment, that the course of training that had been given to him was inadequate. I wonder if the Minister would be prepared to consider the possibility of including such a case under this extension. There is another case of a somewhat different kind, and I wonder if it comes under the new conditions or under the possibilities of this extension. It is the ease of a man who has his trade union backing him in his statement that he is not capable of taking up his former occupation, who has asked for a course of training, but because some medical authority decided that he was quite fit for his previous occupation, the man has been rejected. I wonder if the Minister is con- templating in his extension dealing with such a case. The man's employer, his trade union, the man himself, and his own medical attendant have all agreed that he is not fit for his former employment, but some medical officer connected with the Ministry decided in the past, on the industrial question, that the man was fit, and I would like an answer from the Minister as to -whether it is not possible that in two cases like those we could get some information. Certainly I want information as to the number of men, because I feel that in the past the administration in this respect has not been at all generous. Then I come to the heading "KK.2: Grant-in-Aid of the Registration and Placing Work of the Officers' Branch of the British Legion (Grant-in-Aid)."

I notice that there is an asterisk to indicate a footnote, which states:

It being Four of the Clock, the Chairman left the Chair to make his Report to the House.

Resolutions to be reported upon Tuesday next.

Committee report Progress; to sit again upon Monday next.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

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

Adjourned at One Minute after Four o'Clock until Monday next (16th February).