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

The object of the Bill is to provide the Post Office with the capital necessary for the development of the telephone, telegraph and postal systems. The broad picture of the requirements is set out in the Financial Memorandum attached to the Bill. It will be seen that, of the total of £75 million asked for, £71 million is for the telephone service. The Bill is similar in form to those which have been presented in the past. Two Bills, just before the war, were for £35 million, in 1937, and £40 million in 1939. There was a Bill in 1942, the only one during the war, for ·35 million. The last Bill, presented in April, 1946, was for £50 million. That amount will take us up till February of this year, after providing for new capital works and for taking over useful telephone plant provided for war purposes out of Votes of Credit.

Hon. Members may feel some surprise, at a time when the policy of the Government is to reduce capital investment programmes, that the Bill should provide for a larger sum than has been authorised previously. There are two reasons for this. First, the Bill is intended to provide for capital expenditure up to December, 1950, that is to say, for a period of nearly three years. Secondly, it takes account of the considerable rise in the level of prices for telecommunications equipment. In fact, we have made every effort to conform with the Government's plans for bringing capital investment into proper relationship with available resources. The actual programme for which the Post Office needs this capital represents a drastically re- duced version of our original hopes, as I will explain later.

When he presented the previous Money Bill, the then Assistant Postmaster-General mentioned the enormous mass of arrears of telephone plant provision. He explained that this was due to the number of engineering personnel serving with the Forces, to shortages of supplies and materials during the war years, and to the concentration of the whole resources of the Post Office on the war effort. There was a waiting list of 300,000 applications for the telephone service. He hoped then to step up the rate of installation of new telephones and to effect a big reduction of that number. The years 1946 and 1947 have, indeed, seen an unprecedented development in the telephone service. The total number of new telephones which the Post Office provided in those two years was 1,322,000. I should like hon. Members to compare that figure with 791,000 in the peak years before the war, which were 1936 and 1937. It represents an increase of 67 per cent. Indeed, there have been times when the monthly rate of installation of new telephones has been double that achieved before the war. We have now reached the point when about one in every three of the telephones now in service has been provided since the end of the war. This is an achievement in which the Post Office takes considerable pride, but in spite of it the number of outstanding applications has continued to grow until there are now more than 450,000. This has been due to the phenomenal rate of new demand for telephone service during the war years.

This rapid development of the last few years has eaten deeply into our resources of spare underground cable and telephone exchange equipment. It has been a grand battle, but we have had to pay the price. There are now 136,000 cable distribution points at which all the wires are in use, and no spares are available for connecting new lines. There are more than 300,000 applications which cannot be met until new ducts or cables have been provided. At 1,500 of the 5,800 exchanges in this country, the equipment is fully in use and new subscribers cannot be accepted until it has been extended or a new exchange built.

This position is not the result of bad planning. We have been providing additional plant as rapidly as we could get supplies of stores and equipment, but we had the tremendous leeway of the war years to make up and we have been hampered all along by shortages of manpower, raw materials and buildings. In addition to all this, the demand for service remains high. To meet current applications and to clear the waiting list would need a capital expenditure of at least £36 million a year for the next five years; but under present conditions we are restricted to a figure of £24 million a year. That is the figure which, on balance, I feel justified in asking for the telephone service, after weighing carefully the needs for exports, the prospects of obtaining the necessary materials and the manpower position. It means, to my infinite regret, that, so far from diminishing, the waiting list is bound for a while to go on growing.

Let me explain what this restriction amounts to. In accordance with the White Paper on "Capital Investment in 1948", the Post Office is to reduce its ceiling of building and civil engineering labour from 6,000 to 4,000 men by June, 1948. This labour is employed for Post Office building work, for the laying of underground ducts to carry telephone cables, for the drawing in of cables and for maintenance work, such as painting kiosks and pillar boxes. The cut will force us drastically to reduce the rate of provision of the wide range of new plant which depends on such works, particularly ducts and cables for new subscribers. Before the war we spent £5 million a year on local ducts and cables; during the next few years the level will be equivalent to about £2 million per year at pre-war prices.

It is also proposed to restrict the amount of new equipment which the Post Office takes from our national telecommunications industry to a value of £5 million in 1948. This will release even more of the productive capacity which the industry is building up for export. This type of equipment, which is mainly for telephone exchanges and telegraph work, is of very great value for export. The value of the equipment which we had already ordered for delivery in 1948 amounts to £8,500,000. Thus an additional £3,500,000 worth of equipment should be available for export this year, some of which has already been diverted to foreign orders. The £5 million to which we are restricted is equivalent to about £2,500,000 at pre-war prices. In 1939 we spent £4 million. This means that we shall be receiving in the next few years less than 70 per cent. of the equipment we got before the war.

Hon. Members will understand that we need to keep a balance between the various parts of the programme, and as a result of these cuts, we have had to review the whole of our plans for developing the telephone system. The final result is an engineering works programme of capital expenditure, mainly on the telephone service, of about £24 million. It is a yearly programme of this magnitude, together with about £2 million for sites and buildings, which the Money Bill now before the House is intended to meet. This £24 million is equivalent to some £12 million to £13 million before the war. It will be apparent to the House that the cuts which I have described will reduce the capacity of the Post Office to meet the many demands being made on it. We have, therefore, had to consider very carefully the directions in which it would be best to spend our available resources. I indicated the policy which we intended to adopt in reply to the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Grimston) on 18th December last, but I may perhaps be permitted to make the following points.

It will be our first aim to make a positive contribution to the national recovery, in spite of our disabilities, and I have for this reason decided that certain features of the telephone service should have first call on our resources. We shall continue to provide telephone service as fully and as speedily as possible to those subscribers to whom it is really essential in the public interest. This will include businesses engaged in production for export or for saving imports, public utilities, health services, doctors and the like. We shall also allot a larger share of our resources to the provision of telephone service for farmers. We have about 11,000 applications from farmers on hand, and I hope that we shall clear the bulk of these by the end of next year.

We shall provide as fully as possible for the needs of the trunk telephone system. We realise fully the importance to industry in general of a speedy and reliable trunk service, and we shall strive to improve the quality of the service at the same time as we cater for the growth of traffic. This growth is extremely rapid, and has now reached a level more than double what it was before the war. The number of trunk circuits has also more than doubled, from 6,700 in September, 1939, to over 14,000 today. I am glad to say that at the same time the heavy wastage in telephone operators, hitherto one of our greatest troubles, especially in the London area, has fallen in recent months with the result that we have more experienced operators and greater efficiency. The average time to answer trunk calls for the country as a whole has improved from 14.2 seconds in September last to slightly over eight seconds now. In London the figures are from 24 seconds to 14.2 seconds. We also aim to improve the quality of the local telephone service. Here we hope to provide additional equipment to cater for increased traffic, and complete a thorough overhaul of the plant. We incurred heavy arrears of maintenance during the war, and these we want to make good, particularly as many manual exchanges which we had hoped soon to replace with automatic exchanges will now have to remain in service for some years.

So we come to the waiting list. We shall provide additional exchange equipment and line plant—so far as we have them to provide—but we shall give preference to predominantly business areas. There is, I am afraid, not likely to be much margin of new plant available to meet the needs of residential subscribers, but where spare plant is available we shall continue to provide service. We shall also make more use of party line working, as this makes it possible for us to serve the maximum number of applicants with the available plant. For this reason we shall be requiring all new and transferring residential subscribers to accept a liability to share their line. This and other devices which we are adopting to get the most out of existing plant should, in spite of the limitations imposed upon us by the shortage of materials and by the need for giving priority to exports, enable us to provide telephones each year for a larger number of new subscribers than we did before the war. However, the new telephones may not be spread as evenly as we could desire. In areas where we cannot provide the normal plant required to give individual service, we hope to give additional public telephone facilities. Here again, however, we are up against delays in supplies of telephone kiosks, and shortages of components; but we shall do all we can.

What I have said so far has been confined mainly to the inland telephone service. I would like to add a few words about some other services. In the inland telegraph system we are introducing switching methods which will accelerate the service by cutting down the handling of telegrams at intermediate offices. A scheme using manual switching is almost finished—it is already partly in use—and we have reduced the time for transmitting a telegram from the sending to the receiving office from 55 to 30 minutes since the beginning of 1946. Next year we hope to start fitting an automatic switching system. This will make it possible to transmit telegrams direct from one office to another on a far wider scale than at present without an intermediate operator, and this should give a further acceleration of service. Inland telegraph traffic received a new lease of life in the war, but it has been falling for some time and is now pretty well back to the pre-war level. With the telephone service growing as it is, this is, I regret to say, only to be expected. I am afraid there is little prospect of turning the tide again in telegraphs until we are once more in a position to restore greetings telegrams. I should like to do this very much, but we must wait until the paper position has improved.

In the overseas telegraph and telephone field we have now restored almost all the services, both by line and by wireless, which were in operation before the war. We have, in fact, extended and improved many of them. Telegraph traffic between this country and the Continent has been rising rapidly, and by 1947 had got back to about the 1938 level. A notable development on the telephone side is the new Anglo-Dutch cable which I formally opened for service a few weeks ago. This cable is a new type and is, indeed, the first of its kind to be used for commercial purposes. It can carry 84 simultaneous telephone conversations, and can be developed to carry more than twice that number. It will enable us to provide a first-class service for many years to come with Holland, Central Europe and Scandinavia.

Before I conclude, I should like again to refer to the very large number of new telephones which the Post Office, in defiance of many difficulties and setbacks, has succeeded in providing since the war. I think it is a fine achievement, and one that is a tribute to the strenuous exertions of the whole of the staff. I wish here to express my appreciation of the great efforts they have made. Finally, I must make it clear to the House how much I regret that the restrictions which this great public service has had to accept in the wider national interest will so limit its ability to meet the needs of the public. I am sure that this regret is shared by all hon. Members.

Before the Minister finishes his account of the projected work of the Post Office, could he say something about a service which has been promised for so very long—a night air letter service to Northern Ireland?

I could not put all these things into my speech, but that is one of the matters we have discussed, and if it is raised in the Debate, a reply will be given.

In conclusion, I know that the regret I have expressed is shared by thousands of Post Office employees whose desire it is to serve the public and to satisfy its demands. I make an appeal for the sympathetic understanding of the public in the difficult period which lies ahead, and I hope that those applicants for telephone service whose requirements cannot be met at the present time will realise that we in the Post Office are doing our best and trying our hardest, and that they will not take it as a personal matter when a Post Office worker has to turn down their request for a telephone. It is, I know, easier to offer comfort than to receive it gracefully. People who have to forego for a while the help and convenience of a telephone are contributing towards the expansion of our export trade and aiding the economic recovery of the country. It cannot fail to be of some consolation to them to know this.

The right hon. Gentleman has given us an interesting survey of developments which have taken place, but it really is a gloomy thought that over two years after the end of the war the waiting list for the telephone service is still growing larger. One cannot blame the Post Office entirely for that; indeed, I would say that the figures the right hon. Gentleman has given us of the installation of new telephones are impressive and, in all the circumstances, the Post Office and all those in it are to be congratulated on what they have done in that direction in spite of the difficulties. However, as I say, it is a gloomy thought that the waiting list is still lengthening, and also that the projected development of the Post Office has had to be further cut down owing to the Government decision on capital expenditure.

Here I question whether the Postmaster-General has not accepted too much of a cut in this direction. As he said, there is a tremendous leeway to make up, but I believe that this is one of the matters which can vitally affect production in this country, particularly in these days of controls and bottlenecks, and the necessity in many cases for several Government Departments to be consulted, and for permits, and so on. It is of the utmost importance that industrialists should have the free and unfettered use and quick service of the telephone. Inasmuch as they are not getting it—and they cannot be getting it entirely—it is a definite hindrance to production and the export drive. I hope that in the Cabinet the Postmaster-General will put up a good fight, not only to get nearer to the expansion programme originally envisaged, but to get the present cut reduced, in the interests of the overall production drive.

One thing which affects it, and which I and some of my hon. Friends as Members of the public have noticed lately, is that maintenance has been falling off, particularly in the case of telephone kiosks. They are even more necessary in these days when private subscribers cannot get installations. One very often goes to a telephone kiosk and finds that the telephone is out of order. The right hon. Gentleman should turn his attention to the maintenance of these kiosks. I was going to ask how much the programme had had to be curtailed and adjusted to conform with the Government plan, but the right hon. Gentleman gave us that figure, which I gathered was about one-third. I hope he will press to have that gap reduced. The right hon. Gentleman referred to the fact that the delay is due partly to shortage of equipment and buildings. Has he attempted to get over the building difficulty by using temporary buildings to house equipment? I believe that can be done, and he might be able to obviate some delay if he were prepared to do that. As I hope that in the future the trend will be for smaller exchanges, it might be easier to use some temporary buildings for this purpose.

During the Debate on a similar Bill nearly two years ago, the then Postmaster-General said that he expected that wartime plant from the Vote of Credit would be taken in to the amount of between £10 million and £15 million. If hon. Members will look at the Financial Memorandum, they will see that the figure now proposed to be taken in is £21 million. I want to know the basis of that calculation. Is the £21 million the cost of the wartime plant, less depreciation, which is being taken in, or is it the valuation of that plant at present-day prices? From the comparative figures, it looks as if the Post Office have been able to take rather more wartime plant into the peace-time service than was originally thought possible, and, if so, I think it is a very good thing; but until one knows on what basis the figure are calculated, it is difficult to tell. When the Assistant Postmaster-General replies, I would like to know whether the Post Office have found it possible to use more of this plant than was expected, or whether this is because of valuation at present-day prices. I wish also to know what proportion of the war-time plant has been adapted to the peace-time service. A great deal of plant had to be put down in remote areas, at aerodromes and so on, which could not possibly be brought into the peace-time service.

Another matter about which I would like to have information is the development of the trunk demand service, by which one may get trunk calls on demand. There is a technical development whereby it may be possible for subscribers themselves to dial trunk calls directly, and research was going on in that direction. Obviously, if that system could be introduced it would lead to enormous efficiency and speed in the telephone service. I think the more we can make the subscriber do for himself the better. Another rather technical matter is the development of the submarine repeater, which was produced by the engineering department of the Post Office. If it succeeds, it will revolutionise telecommunications. I was very interested to hear what the Postmaster-General said about the switching system for telegraphs and I am glad that the Post Office are going ahead with that.

The other day I noticed that there has been laid before the House the Inland Post Warrant, 1947. I do not know whether hon. Members have seen it. It announces increases in the parcel rates, and I very much hope that is not the only development which we are to see on the postal side. I should be out of Order in discussing this at great length, but I hope there will be some other opportunity to discuss it. I saw with dismay that the parcel post rates have been increased. I would like to know the position with regard to the development of the postal service. Last time we discussed the matter, we agreed that we ought to work up to a service whereby one could post about 6 o'clock in the evening, and the letter would be delivered anywhere in the country next morning. I also want to know about the introduction of new types of services, including the helicopter, about which we saw something in the newspapers the other day. How far is the development of the Post Office being held up by the cut in capital expenditure, and how far is the recent increase in the parcel postage due to the holding up of that development?

Reverting to the telephone service, I take it that all business requirements will be met fairly quickly, although I am not sure about that. However, I Was very pleased to hear that the right hon. Gentleman intended to adopt the more widespread use of the party line in order to bring the service to private subscribers who otherwise might not get it for same considerable time. That system was introduced during the war, particularly in the countryside, in order to give the people a service, although it was not an exclusive service. If the Postmaster-General is going to make it a condition of getting a new telephone that a subscriber has to accept liability to share a line with someone, I think it very unfair, unless he reduces the subscription rate. Perhaps the Assistant Postmaster-General will tell us about that, particularly in view of the fact that subscription rates and telephone charges which we pay at the moment were imposed as deterrent charges during the war. If new subscribers have to accept the liability, they should receive the service at a reduced rate compared with those who have a private line.

Is it not a fact that the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Grimston), when he was at the Post Office, made some kind of reduction in the rates for former exclusive users when they admitted party line subscribers?

I cannot quite recollect that at the moment; I cannot charge my memory with the exact details.

We on this side of the House, of course, are not going to oppose this Bill. I should be very grateful if the Assistant Postmaster-General would give some information on the questions I have asked. The staff of the Post Office deserve a tribute for all the work they have done in spite of handicaps. I very much hope that within his own Government the Postmaster-General will put up a good fight to see whether he cannot get rather more capital development in the Post Office, in the interests of the production drive.

I wish to congratulate the Department on their achievements, despite the difficulties they have met. One can appreciate that the difficulties have been almost insurmountable in many ways, particularly through lack of materials; but it has been exceedingly difficult to get people who were asking for the service exactly to appreciate the difficulties with which the Department have been confronted. I am afraid too many people imagine that it is as easy to obtain a telephone service as it is to obtain an electricity supply. They are unable to see that, while one may quite readily obtain an electric cable to supply electric current, the supply of a telephone installation is limited to the number of lines available in the area, and two lines are necessary for a subscriber. Some applicants have been quite indignant because they have been refused the service, and I have endeavoured to make them understand the difficulty and the difference between having the installation of a telephone service and a supply of electric current. It is not so easy for them to appreciate that fact, but the difficulty is nevertheless there.

I think my right hon. Friend will have an easy passage for his Bill today. Of course, if it were possible for us to oppose it, we should do so, not for what is being done, but because of the limitations being imposed by necessity in regard to future developments. We have had to cut down the potential capital expenditure by one-third, and that is a considerable sum. I rather doubt the wisdom of such a severe cut. I think it needs reconsideration, more especially as concerns the industrial areas, because it is not only the business establishments which need installations, but many of the people who are employed in these industrial or commercial establishments also need the telephone because they need to be kept in immediate touch with their establishments. This severe pruning of expenditure may be a deterrent to our export trade, and I think the Minister ought to ask the Cabinet to reconsider this severe cut.

I think the Department might do some useful propaganda in respect of the development of the party line. I suppose it would be reasonable to assume that, if one approached a dozen persons and asked them if they knew what a party line was, they would think that one was talking about party politics. Even if one approached a person who was having an installation of the telephone service, and mentioned to him the possibilities of having a party line, he would probably say, "What do you mean?" I think some educational work must be done in regard to that, more particularly in view of the cutting down of immediate capital expenditure. All of us, if we are already using the telephone, are desirous of seeing that everything is done to provide the service for others, but immediately we speak of a party line, people say, "No, I do not want anyone else to know anything about the business which I am conducting over the telephone." Therefore, some educational work must be done to persuade such people that, even though they are given a party line, they can have strict privacy as well.

The second point to which I want to refer has already been raised by the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Grimston). There should be some inducement given to people who accept a party line, and that can only be done by giving them a reduced charge. This is a point worth looking into, because I think that most people would be prepared to accept it, if it were given to them at a more reasonable charge. I think that, in the main, the Department are to be congratulated on the work which they have achieved, but it is deplorable that they have to reduce the number of employees engaged on this work, though this appears to be inevitable, unless the Postmaster-General can ask the Cabinet to reconsider this cut and take into consideration the possible adverse effect which it might have on the increase in our export trade.

In the course of his survey, the Postmaster-General quoted some big figures in money and equipment, but he devoted almost his entire speech to the development of the telephone and telegraph services.

Clause 1 of this Bill makes a grant for the development of postal services, as, well as telephonic and telegraphic services, and they are all interlocked. Obviously, if the postal services are badly delayed, it follows as a natural course that the trunk telephone services must be in greater demand, and I would like to ask the Postmaster-General, who has analysed this £24 million of expenditure, what part of it will be devoted to the development of the night air services from London to provincial centres. I do not know whether the charges for the development of these air services will fall entirely on the Post Office Vote or on the Vote for civil aviation, but I would like to inquire whether considerable sums will be spent in that direction during the coming year. I think we are justified in making that inquiry because the requirements of the postal service are really quite simply stated.

In the main, they are that a letter posted in London shall be delivered in any provincial centre—Edinburgh, Glasgow or Belfast—the following morning to enable business firms to deal adequately with their mail and send a reply to be received in London the next morning. Although we all hoped that the development of air services would bring that about, and would counteract the explanations given to us that trains are slower because of deferred repairs, and prevailing difficulties about cross-Channel services, I am getting a greater number of complaints than ever about these unaccountable delays. The only way in which they can now be effectively counteracted is by the development of air services. To attain an object which was commonplace in the late Victorian era, it seems to me that the only possibility is, as I say, the development of the air services.

While welcoming the news that progress is to be made in the telegraphic and telephone services to business firms and farmers—and this is very welcome news—I should like the Postmaster-General to give some indication of what part of the capital to be spent next year and the year afterwards will be devoted to air services.

The hon. Gentleman who made the opening contribution from the Front Opposition Bench began his speech by saying that it was a gloomy thought that the telephone waiting lists were likely to become longer. Indeed, it is a gloomy thought, but I think the hon. Gentleman and hon. Members sitting behind him, if they will listen to the argument which I desire to put before the House, ought to recognise that they have some responsibility in this matter. I speak with a rather long knowledge of Post Office work and conditions.

The essence of the problem of telephone subscribers at the moment is buildings. In fact, it is the main problem as regards all traffic services in the Post Office, and the hon. Gentleman opposite ought not to slip into the error, into which so many members of the public slip, of thinking that we only require a telephone instrument and a line and everything will be all right. It is not so. In the Post Office, buildings were neglected before the war, when men were unemployed and labour was available. The organisation with which I have been associated for a number of years constantly pressed hon. Members opposite to see that these buildings were erected. Today we are paying the penalty. If this is a gloomy thought, then it is due, to a large extent, to the inaction of previous Governments.

The Bill provides for the authorisation of an issue of £75 million—£71 million for telephones and for postal traffic, and £4 million for telegraphic traffic. I think it is also associated with the development programme set out in Command Paper 7268. There we find that the major part of the money is to be used for the development of telephones and telephone buildings. I am entirely in agreement with my right hon. Friend in this. The only mild criticism that I would make is that I think it ought to have been done before. There should have been the development of four walls and a roof in which to put the equipment during the two and a half years which have gone by.

As my right hon. Friend has already mentioned, the carrying out of this work must reduce the duct work for local subscribers. It means that we must restrict the possibility of connecting up local subscribers, and that there will be longer waiting lists. My right hon. Friend said this morning that there are now 450,000 people on the waiting lists. I am confident that, as a result of the programme which is to be developed, there will be still longer waiting lists. I am not unhappy about that, because I believe that the long-term programme adumbrated in this Bill will in the end give us a speedier reduction of those waiting lists.

I also welcome this Bill because it links up with the export programme, in that equipment which might have gone into our exchanges will be exported abroad, and will, therefore, make its contribution to the export drive. It will also assist in seeing that materials are utilised in the right way, and will enable the Post Office to concentrate on efficiency. There has been a good deal of criticism in this House of the efficiency of the telephone service. Very often that lack of efficiency was due to pressure—apart from that to reduce the waiting lists—and not putting the workmen on the maintenance of our telephone system. Had there not been this pressure, we should not have had the number of complaints which we have had, and would have had a far more effective planned maintenance which would have prepared the way for accommodating the new subscribers. So far, we have not been able to do this.

I also welcome what is in the Bill with regard to capital investment, although I feel that its blessings are not unmixed. Here I come to what I regard as the real problem which has existed in the Post Office, and which has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserved. All the time we have had this battle of the waiting lists and the dissatisfied subscriber who had to be pacified. But very little thought has been given to the staff working at the exchange, who have had to put up with the criticism and impatience of the subscriber. Very often, it was a quite understandable impatience, but it was the staff who had to put up with it, and who had to remain silent when often they would like to have said something about the facts of which they were well aware.

The automatic equipment is very sensitive indeed. The bombing in London upset a good deal of it, and it required a good deal of skilful engineering work on the maintenance side to put it right. The staff knew what was wrong, and would like to have told the irritated subscriber the reason why he could not get his number. The pressure has been in the direction of more and more lines, and more and more new connections, which has not improved the service. It is regrettable that, immediately after the war, we did not pause for a while to enable the telephone service to recover. The result is that the service has deteriorated, and is the subject of much criticism.

I believe that the Post Office strive to do too much; in fact, they strive to do the impossible. There has been this attempt to extend the service, but in these two and a half years it has not been possible to do so. If a real extension is to be undertaken, it necessitates having the necessary equipment, buildings and staff. Those things ought to come first, and I regret that they did not. Instead, we had the battle of the waiting lists. Had attention been paid to plant, buildings and staff, I am satisfied that we should have had a better service today. I hope that the lesson has been learned, and that something will be done very quickly with regard to buildings. The staff have a very real grievance in this, connection.

I have some knowledge of the matter and have visited a few exchanges. The equipment is worn out and years out of date, and there are over-crowded conditions. During the Recess, I went to the Whitehaven office. I hope my right hon. Friend will make a note of this office because it is one that requires attention. Every member of the staff is cramped for space, and cannot work properly because of these conditions. Another example is the Wantage tele- phone exchange, where the switch room was originally designed, 21 years ago, for one operator and Gone switchboard. The exchange has now grown to three positions with a staff of five day and three night telephonists. During the day, four female officers are constantly on duty and, at night, there are two male operators. The size of the room is 12 ft. by 9 ft. by 8 ft. That is evidence of the need for dealing with the situation so far as it is set out in this Bill.

Therefore, I ask my right hon. Friend to get on with the job as speedily as he can. We shall still get criticism because of the waiting lists, but, in the end, I believe we shall produce a service which is much better than this country has ever known. It will grow out of all recognition. In the ultimate, the seat of the trouble is buildings, staff and equipment. I hope that this Bill, which I welcome, will help us to achieve the things we want.

The hon. Member for Clitheroe (Mr. Randall) speaks with a good deal of knowledge of the matter, and I listened to him with great interest. I am sure we all join with him in paying tribute to the work of the telephone staffs under very difficult conditions. I hope, however, that what the hon. Gentleman has said is not the "party line," because it is extremely cold comfort to hear that there may be still longer waiting lists. I agree with the hon. and gallant Gentleman the junior Member for Antrim (Major Haughton) that it is a very serious proposal to reduce the capital grant of the right hon. Gentleman's Department.

I should have thought the telephone service would be used very much more in the future than it has been in the past. There are all kinds of difficulties with which one has to contend in business. One hon. Member has referred to the export trade. I imagine there will be serious industrial and commercial difficulties on the sales side in the battle to bridge the gap between our exports and imports, and there will be an increasing tendency on the part of business men and sales men to use the telephone instead of making long journeys by train or motor car. I have no doubt that the right hon. Gentleman has his difficulties, but I hope he will rally his forces behind him and fight again, because he should not accept this reduction in capital. I appreciate that there are all kinds of difficulties involved in taking over the equipment to which reference is made in the Bill, but the right hon. Gentleman must aim at a brave new world and ask for more. If he puts his case to the people who have to handle these matters, I believe they will give him all the co-operation he needs.

I have had complaints from my own constituency in East Suffolk. There have been complaints of the shortage of equipment, such as poles, crossbars, copper wire and so on. I do not pretend to understand the complicated system of supply to the right hon. Gentleman's Department, and I do not know whether it is a matter for public or private contractors; but, despite all this war equipment which he will receive, I am told there are serious bottlenecks in the supply of certain important equipment. What can be done about that? Doubtless, the right hon. Gentleman has given a great deal of time and thought to the problem, but I suggest that if contractors are unable to supply specific items of equipment because there are too many orders, the problem should be tackled as an emergency measure. There must be a system of grouping and sub-contracting. Firms with the capacity, the floor space and the productive equipment must be brought into a grouping system with the main contractors to overcome bottlenecks. Possibly there are many manufacturers who are producing all they can; their manpower and floor space are fully occupied, and yet there is a bottleneck which is delaying a particular type of development. This is a Labour Government; surely this Government will not accept all the deficiencies of the past and say, "It has never been done before."

I hope, therefore, that we shall get some new proposals. We must have a grouping system, as we did when we had a bottleneck in aircraft production during the war. Surely, the Minister will not say, "We cannot do this because the industry cannot supply the equipment." It does not matter whether the industry is State owned or privately owned. The question is whether we have the maximum efficient system which will give the optimum production. Are we using new ideas? Are there people in the Department who are showing some sort of initiative and trying to solve the problems, or is the Department taking it lying down and saying that nothing more can be done? The right hon. Gentleman has the confidence of both sides of the House; we all agree that he is trying to do a good job. Let him make a bold proposal and bring it to the House for our support.

There have been considerable experiments in the United States of America with the use of helicopter services betwen the airport and the post office. I believe the right hon. Gentleman has already met representatives from America who have been engaged in these experiments. Perhaps the Assistant Postmaster-General will tell us what experiments have been made. It is one thing to get a passenger or a piece of paper or an envelope across the Atlantic or from India in 16 hours, but it is a bad thing if that piece of paper is delayed between its arrival at the airport and its delivery. It is worth while trying this experiment, and I would like to know what the Post Office propose to do. If the right hon. Gentleman is able to say that efforts are being made to overcome any bottleneck which may exist—particularly in East Suffolk, so far as I am concerned—I do not think anyone in this House will oppose the Bill. I hope also that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to say that the air mail service will be accelerated, because if we are to have an export drive there will be a tremendous demand on the air mail service.

My right hon. Friend has already had more encomiums than are really good for him, but I am bound to join in the general praise and say that in my experience the telephone and postal services have improved enormously over the last few months.

No one in this Debate has mentioned the village postmistress. Many years ago I used to assist in working one of these local exchanges—an experience which had many forms of interest. The conditions under which the village postmistress has to work—and I know this is one of my right hon. Friend's nightmares from one point of view—are deplorable. Their salaries have been disgraceful, and although I know my right hon. Friend has made some improvements there is still room for improving the conditions of these people who are employed in distant and remote telephone exchanges and who are liable to be fetched out of bed at any hour of the day or night to listen to a conversation in which someone says, "Good night dear; I hope you got home safely," at three o'clock in the morning.

Reference has been made to the question of the party line; I am using that term in the technical Post Office sense and not in the political sense. Although this party line system may be necessary, it Obviously raises problems. For one thing, there should not be the same charge. I do not know how one would apportion the charge for a line which was used collectively by the local consulting physician and the local reporter. There might be some case for saying that the local reporter should pay a higher share of the charge for the news value of the service than the physician should pay for having consultations with his patients.

The Assistant Postmaster-General knows that I have a small personal grievance about the allocation of new telephones. I wish to raise a question not merely affecting the matter about which I wrote to him recently, but also affecting my constituents. I have had very courteous service from the Department and, generally speaking, my constituents' needs have been met within a reasonable period, but as this demand for telephone services grows there arises a problem because of the prosperity of the country. The large waiting list is due to the prosperity of the country—many more people can now afford the telephone service—but as the demand grows, there will be a problem of deciding how to allocate this service. In "The Times" every day houses are advertised for sale with vacant possession, and one of the inducements offered is a telephone. One can go to the auction and buy the house, but two days later men arrive from the Post Office, disconnect the telephone and remove it, saying that it is going to somebody else. I make no complaint, but I suggest it would be a proper step for the Government to write to the various auctioneers' institutes and call their attention to the fact that to advertise a house with a telephone is, in the circumstances, slightly dishonest. They should be told that they should not advertise houses in this way, because the telephone is not saleable property and it is liable to be removed in accordance with the present policy of the Government.

The second thing is this. As I understand it, the Post Office have a scheme in this matter of "First come, first served," so that the man who ordered the telephone in 1944 gets it before the man who ordered it in 1945; and there is rough justice in that. Obviously, however, there must be exceptions. For instance, a doctor who has now to move his practice—say, because of the health of his wife—from the North to the South Coast, may need a telephone much more than a local bookmaker opening a new branch of his business, even though the latter contemplated doing so 12 months before.

There is another aspect of the matter. If the priority rule is given and rigidly adhered to, then the men who were in prison camps in Germany, and the men who were serving abroad, and who are now embarking upon their careers, are completely deprived of the right to facilities for developing their careers by fulfilling their urgent need of having telephones in their houses.

I suggest that there must be some reconsideration of the priorities in this matter, that there must be some method of assessing and assisting the real need of the individual, and that there must be some method of giving to the people who were serving abroad while these orders were accummulating the right to have some priority, assessed in accordance with the length of their service and the urgency of their needs and their demands. Subject to that, I desire to join in the general congratulations to the right hon. Gentleman on the very great improvements generally in the service in the last few months. I hope they will continue.

I agree with a great deal of what the hon. Member for Oldham (Mr. Hale) has said, and I think that some account should be taken of specific cases of applications for telephones which come before the Department. However, that is rather secondary to the main consideration, which is getting the telephones to the people who require them as quickly as possible. I understood from what the Postmaster-General said that that depends mainly upon the question of money. I should like to draw his attention to the fact of the £21 million being paid for Government stock. I am not now talking about the materials themselves, but the prices the Post Office are paying. I should like the Assistant Postmaster-General, in his reply to the Debate, to say whether there is any extravagance in the cost of the materials, because in so far as the £21 million can be reduced, by that amount will there be more money available for capital expenditure on telephones.

Therefore, we ought to have an assurance that this increased figure of £21 million does not represent money being paid over by the Post Office to Service Departments—which, in point of fact, is taking that available money away from the development of telegraphic services in this country. We want an assurance that this costing has been gone through extremely carefully. My experience of Government surplus stock of this kind is that much of it is not really suitable for civil needs, and that a lot of money has to be spent on adapting it. I am not satisfied that the Post Office should accept this charge of £21 million on its books at the expense of the person waiting for his telephone.

It seems that in the past the money which has been spent on maintenance and on the putting in of telephones has run at about something over £34 million a year. Of the £71 million we are now voting, if we divide it by three to cover three years, that brings it down to about £25 million a year. We are reducing the sum from something over £30 million to something about £25 million. That is the picture on the one hand. On the other hand, we have been told—and it is a creditable performance—that 1,300,000 telephones have been installed in two years. That is at the rate of about 650,000 telephones a year. If 650,000 telephones could be provided at a proportional cost of something over £30 million, one would have thought it would have been possible proportionately to provide something like 500,000, or 450,000, in the coming year with the money which is available.

I understood the Postmaster-General to say that the number of telephones required and outstanding is 450,000. I appreciate that where telephones are being put back on lines which have been disused, not much money will require to be spent; but I understood the Postmaster-General to say that out of three telephones one is an entirely new installation. Therefore, he has not been referring merely to putting back telephones on lines which have been discontinued in houses where they were before.

I am satisfied that, with the money which Parliament is now granting, if the materials which the Postmaster-General said were available, there is a possibility of doing away with this waiting list within a year, and I should like an assurance at least on that and secondly on what is the target—and we hear a lot about targets nowadays—of the Post Office in this matter. I am myself not satisfied that party lines are really what we require in the Sheffield area. I asked a specific question on this matter, and if I cannot be given an answer today, I should be obliged if I can be given one later—whether the position in the Sheffield area with regard to the waiting list for telephones is better or worse than most.

While welcoming the general intent behind the Bill to get on with the job, I am not satisfied that sufficient attention is being paid to all the possibilities of getting rid of this waiting list. I do not think this House should be satisfied with any service which is not the best. We ought to expect the best service which we can get.

I do not propose to follow the hon. Member for Ecclesall (Mr. P. Roberts) in his maze of arithmetical calculations, because there is a relatively small matter I wish to raise. My right hon. Friend gave us a great deal of interesting and valuable information, and I certainly should like to join with other hon. Members on all sides of the House who have congratulated the Department on the way it has carried out its very difficult task during the last two and a half years since the war. We all agree it is very disappointing that the limitations in our physical resources do not make it possible to allow that expansion in the development of the use of the telephone which the demand shows to be desirable.

The Post Office itself, some years before the war, carried out a very good educational campaign to encourage the use of the telephone, and I think that the increasing telephone consciousness on the part of the public is partly due to that. It is probably also due, not only to the advertising carried out by the Post Office a few years ago, but to the increasing standard of living and the increasing prosperity of the people. A great many more people are able to afford to be on the telephone, who could not afford it before. However, there are still a great many who cannot afford to have a telephone, even if one were available, but who would like to have that facility very much indeed.

I want to make a plea on behalf of those people, and to refer to the question of telephone kiosks. The hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Grimston) rightly said that the inability to fulfil the demand at the present moment, coupled with the number of people who cannot afford to have the telephone installed, makes the telephone kiosk very much more important. My right hon. Friend spoke of his aims in regard to the installation of telephones in rural areas; and I was very glad to hear him say there was a possibility of meeting all the demands from the farmers by the end of the year. That is very good. But what about the farm workers living in the villages?

The Post Office have a method of determining whether a village which needs a telephone kiosk should be put on a priority list and given that kiosk as soon as the equipment is available. What happens is that the rural district council generally passes the responsibility on to the parish council, and there is a demand from the Post Office that they shall be willing to pay a sum of £4 per year for five years. I should like the Postmaster-General to reconsider that. It is paltry and petty that parish councils, when they are convinced of an urgent need for a kiosk, to be shared by the residents in a small village community, should be required to undertake such a payment. It is very important that this facility should be available in these rather remote rural areas, where there are emergency demands for the district nurse, or a doctor in cases of sudden illness. This facility is required for those who cannot have a telephone, either because there is such a long installation waiting list, or because they cannot afford a private telephone in their house, and it should be put at their disposal as quickly as possible.

If, because of the shortage of resources, my right hon. Friend has to work a system of priorities for the time being, he ought to devise some other means of determining the relative urgency and need in various rural areas, rather than demand that payment from the local authorities, even though, as he said in reply to a Question on 12th November, it is not an onerous one. I urge upon my right hon. Friend to give more attention than he has indicated in the development programme, which he mentioned this morning, to the needs of rural communities and the provision of kiosks or public telephones which they can share; and I certainly ask him to abolish this system of demanding payment from local authorities.

I have some sympathy with the last remarks of the hon. Member for St. Albans (Mr. Dumpleton). I have never been able to understand this Post Office insistence on a form of guarantee in regard to telephone kiosks and services in rural areas, because I consider it an essential requirement of rural areas to have reasonable telephone facilities. As a matter of fact, I have a selfish motive here, too, because nearly two years ago I raised the question of the installation of a telephone kiosk in the village in which I was brought up. I know that the inhabitants have to suffer the disability for 12 months of the year but when I go there on my holidays every year it necessitates a walk of a mile or a mile and a half every time I want to telephone. So, from a purely selfish point of view, I sincerely hope my right hon. Friend will have some regard to this problem, and even should he be unable to satisfy the country as a whole, if he could provide a telephone for that village in North Wales it would well satisfy me.

First, I wish to express my approval of the Bill itself, and my appreciation of the very able manner in which my right hon. Friend has presented it. After the work he had with the Bill last year, he seems to be becoming very competent, and I think we can guarantee his increment very shortly if he carries on in that way. I also wish to express my personal appreciation of the tremendous amount of work that has been going on behind the scenes in the Post Office since we last discussed this some time in 1946. I thought I knew a good deal about the developments there, but it simply staggered me to know that there were 1,322,000 new installations, at a time when we have so many difficulties in connection with manpower, maintenance and raw materials, to say nothing of money. I could not follow the hon. Member for Ecclesall (Mr. P. Roberts) in his mathematics, and I will not attempt to deal with that aspect especially on a Friday. It is more abstruse than I could possibly hope to understand.

I am very appreciative, too, of the work done, not only on the postal and telephone sides, but also on the international telephone side in connection with the development and restoration of international telephone services, the experiments that have taken place, and the helicopter. I sincerely hope hon. Members will not think that if even half-a-dozen helicopters are put in the air a substantial improvement will be effected in the postal services, for that would be to misunderstand the facts, and might lead us to make ridiculous suggestions from time to time. However, I am pleased with the development that has taken place, which I hope will continue.

Tribute must also be paid to the Post Office administration. It has been second to none in its vision of the future, the potentialities of scientific developments, and the way it adapts itself to trying to face developments in the scientific field. Our research department in the Post Office is a department par excellence, and if given more money and more staff, tremendous improvements will be achieved in the fields we have been discussing today.

I am rather surprised that a Socialist Government should want to reduce by one-third its commitments for telecommunications, which is such an essential public service. I agree entirely with the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Grimston) that such a cut is tremendous in these days. For many years I have held the view that whatever export drive or industrial output we attempt to achieve, if a bottleneck is created in the telecommunications services, a great deal of waste will accrue. An analogy would be asking the miners to produce a certain quantity of coal while our transport system was not equal to the consequent demands made upon it. I hope my right hon. Friend will go to the Cabinet and tell them the view of hon. Members on both sides of this House, that if the Cabinet want the service which is essential to national recovery and prosperity in industry and the export trade, then the telecommunications services must have as much of the available resources of the country as is possible. I know that raw materials, and so on, are very limited, and that we must try to maintain a sense of proportion in these matters; but I aver that in peace, as in war, telecommunications services are an essential feature of our national requirements.

Having regard to the disabilities and difficulties which we may experience during the next year or two, I sincerely hope that my right hon. Friend will not try to carry a load which is too big for him. If there is to be a limitation of manpower, equipment, and plant, too big a load must not be carried lest, as in the case of the proverbial camel, the little extra makes the load too heavy. It is always wrong to overload a service, because the chaos and inefficiency that result are always worse than the disappointment which may arise from the limited nature of that service. It is no use putting in new installations to private renters and subscribers unless the exchange conditions are such that the installations will be reasonably efficient from an administrative and staff point of view.

Being a little selfish, I would like my right hon. Friend to look in the direction of Heston and Isleworth, a constituency which is important in the big drive now going on for exports. According to the number of letters which I have received, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction in my constituency about telephone installations, and I think there is considerable merit in the suggestion that much discretion and common sense will be required in the allocation of telephones during the next 12 months. I have had plenty of complaints from people who have bought houses on the assumption that a telephone would be there, and I, too, believe that the Postmaster-General should make the position plain.

There is another point about publicity. The Postmaster-General, realising the difficulties he is up against, would be well advised to tell the people of the country exactly what can be done and what cannot be done, not only in his interests, but in their interests as well. Let him give them some idea of the difficulties and possibilities—

On a point of Order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. Does expenditure on publicity come under the heading of capital investment?

I am not clear that that point arises at the moment.

If the hon. and gallant Member had been listening he would have realised the association between the point I am making now, and some of the difficulties and inconveniences from which people are suffering. I am sure that no Ruling from the Chair was necessary. On the question of the interesting developments which are taking place in the telegraph service—and the hon. Member for Westbury referred to the manual through-switch, which, I am glad to say, has been so successful—a great deal of the success of this system has been due to the close co-operation between the administrative and working staffs. Without that it would have been impossible to have developed the rudiments of a system which, in its automatic form, will eventually revolutionise the telegraph service as we have known it, and will, I hope, expedite the transmission and delivery of telegrams.

Finally, I would like to point out that for many years many Post Office buildings have not been suitable or adequate. I wish Members could see some of the offices in which Post Office employees have to work; they would be astonished that such a state of affairs could have been allowed to continue, at a time when this country was in a much more prosperous condition than it is in today. I know my right hon. Friend cannot deal with all the cases that are brought to his notice, but I hope he will give his attention to one case I have particularly in mind—in Glasgow—where it has been necessary to have a medical opinion about the state of the building. In the interests of administration, and of my right hon. Friend himself, he should see whether it is adequate and suitable from the point of view of health and working conditions. I hope the Post Office and its staff will, in the years ahead, continue to co-operate with the same friendliness as hitherto, so that as a result of some of the developments foreshadowed in this Bill the Post Office will not only live up to its present high standard of efficiency, but will continue to do even better.

With reference to the point raised a few minutes ago by the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for Antrim (Major Haughton), it would appear that the Bill is restricted to capital expenditure, so that detailed reference to current expenditure, including, I imagine, publicity, would be out of Order. I am obliged to the hon. and gallant Member.

The fact that in this Debate some Members have contemplated continued development of Post Office services is, to me, a rather terrifying prospect. For instance, it is almost impossible nowadays to work in an office in peace. The telephone bell is ringing nearly all the time. We and the public generally should, therefore, give some thought to where development of these ingenious contrivances of the Post Office will eventually lead. We must deliberately consider whether we should not put a limit to development, which is taking up a great deal of building, engineering equipment, and staff.

As I say, it is almost impossible to settle down to work in an office without somebody ringing to say something which, in nine cases out of 10, could have been just as well said by letter, or which is of no consequence whatever. It is obvious that there will be great deficiencies in the telephone service for a long time. Many people want a telephone; equipment and labour are short, and although no one is blaming the Post Office, great frustrations and difficulties are being experienced. The Post Office, by its propaganda, should impress upon the public that the telephone service should be regarded, at present, as an emergency service; people should be persuaded that brief telephone conversations are essential. I know of people who have installed themselves in telephone kiosks for conversations of five, to, 15, 20, or even 30 minutes. I have known people deliberately take sandwiches and a book into a kiosk, get their number, and hang on to the 'phone. If that continues, no improvements in the service will make it efficient. Would it be possible to institute a limitation of time—say a two minutes' call—so that people would know that they have to limit their conversation to two minutes, after which there would be an automatic cut-off? I am certain that if that could be made a practical proposition, the present equipment could be used to greater efficiency for the whole community. There are great difficulties and frustrations at the present time, but the blame, if any, is not on the service but on the general public. It is the duty of the Post Office to let the general public know the limitations of the service under present conditions, and to try to persuade them to use it for emergency purposes only, and not for general conversations—inquiring after someone's health and what they think of the Government.

I think that it will be generally agreed that we have had a very interesting Debate. It is apparent from the tone and moderation of the speeches of hon. Members that the Bill has been well received. I assure hon. Members that suggestions which they have made will be examined, but I do not think that any speaker has proved that, allowing for the cuts which arise through the limitation of capital investment, we could have done any better under current difficulties.

The hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Grimston) mentioned that the list of people waiting for telephones was growing larger. I think that my right hon. Friend, in the figures which he gave, proved that the Post Office has done a splendid job in installing many new telephones. One reason why the list is continuing to grow is that people have become more telephone-conscious. There is no doubt that many who have returned from the Services desire the telephone, and, consequently, the demand is far greater than it was before the war.

A question has been raised about the shortage of telephones for business purposes. I do not think that criticism is fully justified. The Post Office are giving priority to business people, as was made clear by my right hon. Friend in his speech this morning and by the statement which he gave to the House some weeks ago. Business houses will be helped by the fact that a considerable amount of this expenditure will be for the purpose of developing trunk services, which will aid manufacturers to communicate with their branches. As to maintenance, we agree that there is a considerable back-log of maintenance work because many Post Office engineers went into the Forces, and because of the tremendous amount of latent bomb damage which, from time to time, reveals itself. The engineering side are fully conscious of the importance of concentrating on maintenance.

It has been suggested that lack of buildings was the principal cause of the shortage of telephones, and that we have not availed ourselves of temporary buildings. That is not the whole case. The main reason for the shortage of telephones is the lack of equipment and of cables. I have also been asked about the £21 million of war service goods and stores absorbed into the Post Office system. The sum is now a little more than £21 million, and it represents the prime cost of plant, less accrued depreciation up to 1st April, 1946, provided by the Post Office for war purposes, which could be absorbed into the system for the development of the service.

I take it that it has been found possible to absorb a lot more plant than was thought possible a few years ago.

That is so, after a most careful examination of the plant. There is no question of the Post Office taking plant which is of no value to it. I can give the hon. Gentleman the assurance that that matter has been carefully examined. I was also asked about submarine repeaters, and whether we were utilising that invention. At the moment, we have two submarine repeaters actually in position, one on the cable to Northern Ireland, and one on the cable to Germany. We are fully aware of the need for developing the use of submarine repeaters, and the research station at Dolls Hill is carrying on work to see whether it can get valves for submarine repeaters which will last for a long time.

Reference has been made to the increased cost of the parcel post. I gather, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that that was not entirely in Order, but perhaps, as the matter has been raised, I may be allowed to answer. The increase in the parcel post rates was solely due to the increased railway charges. The Post Office increase has not been commensurate with the increase in railway rates. Railway rates have increased 55 per cent, but the Post Office parcel rate has increased by only 47 per cent. We cannot consider a situation in which the parcel post would be subsidised by another section of the Post Office revenue; otherwise we should not be in the healthy position financially that we are in at the moment.

It has been argued that we should have diverted some of the traffic to the road, but we would be up against a shortage of vehicles, of accommodation and of manpower. I have also been asked what we are doing with regard to the helicopter. We are continually watching experiments made with helicopters. It has one great disadvantage and that is its slowness. Nevertheless, we are seeing how it may help the efficiency of the service. At present we are experimenting with dummy mails in the West of England.

Can the hon. Gentleman give some indication of the weight that helicopters can carry?

The lifting power of the helicopter is very small, but I could not give the exact figures without notice. I was talking about the general principle, and the fact that it is very much in the experimental stage.

I now come to the more thorny question of shared service. I was rather surprised that the hon. Member for Westbury' stressed the need for reducing the cost, because that was already being done during the time that he was at the Post Office. The position is that there is a rebate on the basic rental of 10s. a year, which with the war time surcharge, brings the rebate to 11s. 6d. a year. It is absolutely essential to expand the service by this means because the cut in our capital expenditure has precluded new lines in residential areas. Many exchanges are full. Indeed out of 5,800, 1,500 are already full.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Willesden (Mr. Viant) again raised the question of the secrecy of the service. We do not claim the service is secret, but no indication is given that the other person is telephoning. Another disadvantage is that at the moment the account for calls obtained by dialling at automatic exchanges has to be rendered to one of the subscribers. That in some circumstances can give rise to complication. We are hopeful that we shall be able to devise ways and means whereby completely separate accounts can be rendered for those sharing a party line.

Is it possible for the Post Office to find out the method used in America for rendering separate accounts, because there, it is a recognised feature of the telephone service and each individual subscriber, even on a party line, is treated as we treat exclusive subscribers here and receives his bills in the ordinary way.

We shall probably get that information, but in America there are up to 36 people on one single shared service and we are not suggesting anything of the sort here.

The hon. and gallant Member for Antrim (Major Haughton) raised the issue of the Northern Ireland air service. We should like to institute a night service to Northern Ireland, but there are one or two factors which at the moment preclude our doing so. First it would use 200,000 gallons of petrol a year, and further, the regularity of the service could not be fully ensured because night navigational aids are not available at some of the aerodromes. The matter is continuously before us. Indeed, the hon. Member for Londonderry (Sir R. Ross) is a Member of the Post Office Advisory Council and he is always raising this matter—and quite rightly so—in order to ensure that that part of the United Kingdom is not overlooked. We shall do what we can to expedite a solution to this problem when things are more normal.

I want now to turn to the point with regard to kiosks raised by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Dumpleton). He complained about the onerous charge of £4 a year for five years which the local councils have to pay for the provision, of telephone kiosks. One might assume from the hon. Gentleman's remarks that there were no telephone kiosks other than those provided by the local authority or the parish council. In point of fact, in all our villages where there are Post Offices, except possibly a few of the remote ones, there are telephone call offices available, and at the present moment we are engaged in seeing that the call office is taken from within the Post Office and placed in an outside kiosk in order to make it available throughout the whole of the 24 hours. Why do we do this? It is because it has proved to be one of the ways and means by which we can meet the demand. Otherwise, we leave it to local authorities to apply for kiosks in the villages. The fact that there is a nominal charge, however, encourages them to exercise due care in the selection of where a kiosk will be placed. As far as the charge of £20 is concerned, it costs more than this to maintain the kiosk during any given year. In all the circumstances, I do not think the rural areas are doing badly.

Are we to understand from the statement that where there is not a village Post Office there, we shall not have a kiosk?

No, that does not follow at all. The fact is that this system will be maintained in order to ensure that these kiosks are really placed where there is a demand, and one way of ensuring that there is a real demand is by asking for the small payment of £20 spread over five years. One hon. Member raised the question of remote districts. Where there is an exceptional case it always receives the most sympathetic consideration of the Department. The hon. Member for Heston and Isleworth (Mr. W. R. Williams) also mentioned this point. I did not think Heston and Isleworth was a particularly rural area, but I rather gathered that he was referring to his native village. If it comes into the category of being remote it will receive the consideration that it deserves.

The hon. Member for Ecclesall (Mr. P. Roberts) raised the question of the £21 million. I have already explained in answer to the hon. Member for Westbury what are the circumstances. We have not bought a pig in a poke. One point on which I could not follow the hon. Member was when he started by a process of mathematical calculation to assume that we should be able to clear up all the arrears on outstanding telephones in one year.

This calculation was based upon the assumption of a progressive proportion in the capital amount of expenditure on the one side or on the other. If there is any difference in the proportions of our expenditure, it would be interesting to know.

My position is I could not follow the algebraical equation and I gather the unknown factor x was the number of applications for new telephones continually being made by the general public. However, I hope the explanation I have already given is of a satisfactory nature. I now turn to the question raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Clitheroe (Mr. Randall) who has an intimate knowledge of staff conditions. He was concerned with the accommodation at telephone exchanges. We agree that it is not always perfect, but there are many new buildings where the conditions are exceedingly good. Let me assure him that those exchanges of which he has told us will be subject to a most careful examination. He must appreciate that as a result of the cut in capital expenditure we are precluded from carrying out the modernisation and rebuilding which we all desire. In order to make the work of the telephonists less onerous we are experimenting with new methods to ensure more flexibility and to bring less fatigue.

Questions of welfare are continually being considered by the Department. I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Heston and Isleworth that I will take note of the instance he gave of the post office upon which he commented so unfavourably. We are anxious to improve the conditions of the staff. My hon. Friend has given ample examples of that fact. We shall continue to do our best in the circumstances in which we are placed. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham (Mr. Hale) seemed to take umbrage because persons who take over a house with an existing telephone, find that they are not allowed to retain the installation. We think it would be unfair to allow the telephone to remain for the incoming tenant if there were earlier applicants waiting for a telephone.

I said I thought it was, on the whole, reasonable, but I suggested that notice should be given, to people who take houses upon the guarantee of a telephone that the telephone would be removed.

We are considering with our legal department the question of people advertising the sale of property with use of telephone. As that is a legal question, we must await the legal answer.

On the question of priorities, the broad principle was indicated in the reply of my right hon. Friend to a question by the hon. Member for Westbury some time ago. The priorities are to business people, public utilities, doctors, midwives and farmers. For residential people priority is according to the length of time since the application was made. We also give priority to disabled ex-Service people and to ex-Service men who are entering into business. In the circumstances, I think that that arrangement is equitable.

I believe I have covered the main points put to us. I hasten to assure the House that we shall continue to give the best service we can, having regard to the amount of capital available. The Post Office seeks to give Britain the best services it can. Undoubtedly, we should have made further considerable improvements had it not been for the situation in which the country is placed.

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

This is a minor Bill and I hope that it is non-controversial. It brings up to date the Water Act, 1945, and deals with certain difficulties which have been found to prevent the full use of that Act by water undertakers seeking new powers and persons wishing to form new water undertakings. The Bill was introduced in another place. The text of the original draft was amended as a result of the consideration given to it and I think those Amendments have improved and clarified the drafting without in any way interfering with the original intentions.

I am glad to be able to say that local authorities and other water undertakers are already making very good use of the procedure of the Act which is working very well, on the whole. The Minister has already made 90 orders, while 53 orders are being considered by the Department at the present time. The Department has knowledge of proposals for 44 other schemes which water undertakers have in various stages of preparation. The House will agree that those are fruitful results after just over two years' experience of the working of the Act. There is every reason to think that there will be an increasing use of the procedure as water undertakers become more familiar with it. The full effect will then be seen of the planning of the past two years.

Shortages of labour and materials have prevented the full operation of the Act in rural areas and the full extension of the service to urban areas, which must be achieved before the scheme reaches its maximum efficiency. There has been a good deal of work in the planning of new schemes and in the redistribution of areas of supply not only by local authority water undertakers themselves, but in many detailed surveys already carried out, or being carried out, by the engineering inspectors of the Ministry. Those surveys cover wide areas and deal with many problems of supply and distribution. Their recommendations include suggestions for new works and for the re-organisation of existing undertakings. The effects of this planning are already being reflected in applications to the Minister for new powers.

It must also be anticipated and it has already been demonstrated that the Government policy for the development of new towns will bring demands for new supplies and for the formation of new undertakings which will, of necessity, be sited in areas of limited resources and with services designed for areas of smaller population than will be provided by the new developments.

It is, therefore, very desirable on all counts that there should be no flaws to prevent the full use of the powers of the Act for these purposes. Although the Bill is a small Measure, it is somewhat intricate, as no doubt hon. Members will already have seen. It will, therefore, be necessary, I fear, to go rather more closely into details than is usual in a Second Reading speech.

The main purpose of the Bill is to overcome difficulties that hinder the formation of new undertakings and the combination of existing undertakings into joint boards. These matters are covered by Clauses 1–3. At present Statutory Water Undertakers for the purpose of the Act are companies, local authorities and other bodies and persons supplying water under the Act, a function which cannot be performed unless land can be acquired and, in some instances, a supply of water can be made available either in bulk from other undertakings or from rivers and streams. The Act already empowers the Minister to authorise Statutory Water Undertakers to give and take bulk supplies and to acquire land and water rights. No difficulty arises where the undertakings are already affording supplies, but as, by virtue of this definition as I have given it now, the powers are not exercisable until the undertakers are in fact supplying water, the Gilbertian situation may be reached that new undertakers cannot become Statutory Water Undertakers until they are supplying water and cannot obtain the powers that are necessary to enable them to supply water until they are Statutory Water Undertakers. That is obviously an impossible situation.

There are also difficulties in regard to the formation of joint boards or the amalgamation of undertakings. Section 9 of the Act empowers the Minister, with or without the agreement of the undertakers, to amalgamate existing undertakings and to form joint boards. It will often be the case that the new undertakings thus formed will need additional powers for the taking of a bulk supply, the construction of new works or the compulsory acquisition of land for water rights at the time they are formed. As the Act stands, they cannot apply for or be vested with powers for this purpose until they are in fact functioning, and the powers must, therefore, be obtained in two stages. This means duplication of the very comprehensive procedure of the Act in regard to advertisements, service of notice, objections and local inquiries, and possibly separate consideration of each stage by special Parliamentary procedure.

It is proposed to meet the first difficulty by providing that new undertakers shall be statutory Water Undertakers when they are authorised to supply water instead of when they are actually supplying water. This is done in Clause 1. As for the other difficulties, Clause 2 provides that orders authorising the formation of new undertakings, the constitution of joint boards or the amalgamation of undertakings, may also make provision for the giving and taking of bulk supplies, the construction of works or the acquisition of water rights. Clause 3 provides that persons applying for powers to form new undertakings or existing undertakers applying for orders amalgamating undertakings or constituting joint boards may make, and submit to the Minister for confirmation, orders for the compulsory purchase of land at any time before the orders authorising the formation of new undertakings or the combination of existing undertakings are made. As hon. Members will appreciate, this will be a much simpler and speedier method than the one we have to employ at present. The Act lays down in the First and Second Schedules the procedure which undertakers and the Minister must follow in regard to the service of notice, advertisements, objections and inquiries and as to the consideration by special Parliamentary procedure of certain kinds of orders if objections are pressed. It is intended that the appropriate procedure shall apply to orders made under the Sections as amended by these Clauses, and provision for that is therefore made in the Bill.

Those are the main objects of the Bill, but the opportunity has been taken to make some other desirable amendments. Clause 4 deals with supplies of water in bulk. Doubts have been expressed whether water undertakers can take supplies of water from bulk from persons who are not specifically authorised to furnish such supplies and also whether the Minister has powers to establish an undertaking solely for the purpose of supplying water in bulk. If, for example, it was desired to form an undertaking to construct head works and a reservoir and to sell the water to local authorities for distribution in their districts. This Clause will remove any doubts.

Clause 5 will smooth the path of persons who apply for licences to construct works for the abstraction of water in areas where abstraction is controlled by orders made by the Minister under Section 14 of the Act. It has sometimes been found when an application has been investigated that the works could have been sited with less risk of interference with other supplies in an area other than that selected by the Act. Under the existing provisions the applicant must go through all the procedure of making a further application, including advertising and service of notice, before he can be assured that the alternative site will produce the supply. The Clause will enable him, with the Minister's consent, to carry out an experimental pumping for this purpose before application for the further licence is made. If the alternative site proves to be satisfactory, the applicant will have to comply with the procedure of the Act, including providing an opportunity for interested persons to object, before the Minister decides whether a licence shall be given permitting him to use the water. The Clause also makes it clear that persons who wish to install or modify machinery for the purpose of extracting additional quantities of water in controlled areas must first obtain a licence. This is a necessary provision since the intentions of the Section may well be defeated if large additional quantities of water are abstracted, for example, by the installation of modern pumping machinery.

Clause 6 contains a new power for water undertakers which is, however, very similar to the powers which have already been conferred on planning authorities by Section 103 (9) of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947. The Clause will enable water undertakers who propose to acquire land for their undertaking, to survey the land before steps are taken to acquire it, so that they may be satisfied that it is suitable for the purpose for which it is wanted. Water undertakers can often obtain permission from the owners to enter into provisional agreements for purchase, but there have been cases where compulsory powers have been necessary and the Clause is intended to deal with that. A compulsory purchase order involves considerable trouble, delay and expense, all of which is completely wasted if the site proves to be unsuitable. Moreover the siting and planning of ancillary work, such as treatment plant, service reservoirs or pumping stations, may depend on the suitability of the site selected for the head works. The Government consider that it is in the public interest that water undertakers should be able to assure themselves that land for public water supplies is suitable before they are obliged to acquire it. It will, however be noticed that the powers are exercisable only with the Minister's consent and after he has heard any representations from the owners and occupiers and, further, that compensation for damage or disturbance will have to be paid to persons with legal interest in any land affected by the provisions. The Clause will not, of course, absolve undertakers from the necessity of obtaining powers for the use of land under the full procedure of the Act if subsequently they wish to acquire it.

Clause 7 contains a minor but necessary improvement consequent upon the power of water undertakers and local authorities to lay mains in land not forming part of a street. These are desirable powers, especially in rural areas, where mechanised plant cannot always be used effectively in narrow lanes. There is less interference with traffic, and the cost of maintenance of the streets and mains is reduced considerably. As the law stands, however, the undertakers can obtain power to lay the mains but, if the owner refuses consent, cannot obtain power to lay the pipes between the mains and the premises to be served if those pipes will pass through land not forming part of a street. This Clause will put the communication pipe in the same category in this respect as the mains. In both cases the owner's consent has to be obtained. If consent is withheld, the Minister can determine whether or not the refusal is unreasonable.

Clause 8 provides that supplies under the Public Health Act to houses used partly for a profession shall be on the same footing as if they were given under the Water Act. Clause 9 extends the provision of the Acquisition of Land (Authorisation Procedure) Act of 1946 to the development corporations of the new towns if they become water undertakers. They will thus be in the same position as local authorities who are water undertakers except that the special and temporary powers for the speedy acquisition of land have been excluded, as it is considered unlikely that they will be required for the purposes of water supply to the new towns.

I do not think I need make further reference to any other provisions in the Bill. The Bill as a whole will simplify some of the procedure of the Act. It will remove certain flaws which were not evident when the original Bill was in draft, but have since come to light as a result of the experience gained by the Minister in the administration of the Act. It is, I am convinced, a useful Measure which will be reflected in improved administration and, together with the 1945 Act, will I hope eventually mean better supplies. I commend it to the House.

The Minister opened his remarks by claiming that this was a non-controversial matter, and I agree with him entirely in that statement. As he said, the Bill is designed to amend certain blemishes or omissions or difficulties that have been discovered in the 1945 Act. The hon. Gentleman gave the House certain information as to the manner in which that Act was working and the progress being made. The House is grateful for that information and, further, for the very full manner in which he dealt with this Measure which, although it is a minor one, is nevertheless of considerable importance.

I would ask the hon. Gentleman to stress to his right hon. Friend the great importance of water in the rural areas, and I am certain that he and his right hon. Friend will press that as much, as possible in the circumstances of the present day. He also referred to the Amendments made in another place, and there again we have a right to express our thanks for the clarification obtained there which has made the Bill a much better Bill, although it is not altered in principle by the Amendments.

The principal purpose of the Bill is to give powers, which under the principal Act can be conferred on existing statutory undertakers, to new statutory undertakers simultaneously with their creation. That purpose will commend itself to the House. I was amused at the absurdity to which the hon. Gentleman referred, that under the existing law new undertakers cannot become statutory undertakers and cannot obtain a supply of water in bulk, or land or water rights, unless they are actually engaged in the supply of water and are thereby qualified to become statutory undertakers. That is remedied by Clause 1, and Clause 2 gets rid of a similar absurdity in regard to joint boards and amalgamations. As the hon. Gentleman said, the opportunity has been taken to make certain other alterations in the law, and with these we are in accord. However, it may be that at some later stage we shall ask for certain Amendments in regard to small matters such as in Clause 6, where we do not think the time allowed to make representations by the owner to the Minister is sufficient.

There is one point on which the Bill is silent, and it should be remedied. There is a great and increasing demand for water in these days, and water authorities are, no doubt, seeking to find water wherever it may be found by deep borings and otherwise. Existing supplies may well be affected by new borings and that is serious, particularly in the rural areas, and especially in connection with agriculture. Where a statutory water undertaking takes water from existing wells that have been in operation for long years, it should be incumbent on that authority to supply the people with water; they should be compensated by the authority for the water taken away from them. I ask the hon. Gentleman to consider that matter, which was raised in another place. I think the Government undertook there to do so, but nothing further happened. I hope the hon. Gentleman will consider whether it would not be possible to introduce a Clause into the Bill to make that necessary safeguard.

On the whole I think the House will agree with the Minister that this is a reasonable Bill. As I have said, we may bring forward Amendments later but, that apart, I feel with the Minister that the principles of the Bill should be accepted, and that the House today should give it a Second Reading.

I think we are all in agreement that the Bill is a necessary improvement on the 1945 Act, not that one wishes to throw stones at that Act, which, in itself, was a considerable improvement on what had gone before. Indeed, for the last hundred years, since the passing of the Waterworks Clauses Act, 1847, which was the foundation of all modern waterworks enterprise, there has been a steady but slow evolution of waterworks legislation. If I wanted a parable on the subject of water, I would say that the attendance in the House today is indicative of the way in which Government Departments and local authorities consider the subject of water. They consider it lightly until they are threatened with losing it. We had an example of that during the war. I hope my friends in the Treasury will not mind what I am about to say, but one of the regrets of my life is that, when a German bomb broke the watermain in Whitehall, the water was shut off too quickly for it to overflow into the Treasury vaults. If it had done so, it would have called attention to the need of labour for repairing it. During the war, water was held in such light esteem that there was no priority for the repair of water mains, although more than 6,000 were broken in London.

Some of us have had to struggle very hard to get water put on the same footing as gas and electricity for supplies of fuel. As water is one of the elementary necessities of life, for rural areas and for the towns, it should not be so difficult to maintain a good supply. I regard this Bill as a further step in the evolution towards what should be a nation-wide supply of water. Because of that, I wel- come the Bill. From my own experience I can endorse what my hon. Friend has said in introducing it.

The 1945 Act has been operated in various ways. For instance, the Central Advisory Water Committee has been set up, and has been working pretty hard. I hope that before long there will be outward and visible evidence of some of the work it has been doing. One result of that evidence, I hope, will be to correct something which went rather badly astray about 12 months ago, not through the fault of my hon. Friend nor his right hon. Friend. Reference has been made to new towns, and some of us know that the propositions in regard to water for one new town would have resulted in robbing an English river of a considerable amount of water which they proposed to put back above the intakes of the authority in the shape of sewage. That is not planning, but the negation of planning. I hope there will be very careful planning in connection with the finding of water. After all, the game of robbing Peter to pay Paul may be a good thing for Paul up to a point, but it does not make common sense. The water supply of the country should be regarded as a comprehensive whole, rather than as little fragments entirely unconnected with one another, as has been the case in the past.

The 1945 Act gives an opportunity for organising the water supplies of the country. Some of us have had uncomplimentary things to say about the rainfall in the North West. Although people up there have spoken about London as "The Great Smoke," I have heard people compare the North West to another place, not quite so salubrious as "The Great Smoke." It gives us a shock to find that great towns in that area have had difficulty in connection with their water supply recently. I agree that there has been a tremendous hold-up of water undertakings, due first to the war, and secondly to the postwar situation. I know the Parliamentary Secretary and the Minister are straining at the leash to see that handicaps are overcome. I yield to no one in my desire to see water supplies extended to the rural areas, but all that will mean new mains, plant, and the acquisition of land. This Bill makes the acquisition of land easier than under the 1945 Act, and I hope that before long the Minister and the Parliamentary Secre- tary will be able to take a big jump forward in that direction.

The situation in regard to water pollution is serious. There was a time when the London river so teemed with salmon that London employers were forbidden to feed their apprentices with Thames salmon more than twice a week. That was the time when we had a pure stream, but now London's river, and other rivers, are not pure. I know that if London's supremacy is to be maintained it must maintain its industrial character, but I am afraid that authorities, large and small, have been great sinners in the way in which they have polluted the streams, I know that London's water is not taken from the tidal portion of the river, but in many rivers there has been a steady deterioration of the sewage effluent. The Minister of Health and his advisers are keen to see it made nearer the high standard attained by the West Middlesex scheme at Mogden. If every sewage works in this country had the same high standard, the rivers of our country would be in a much better state. I only wish some other towns were working on those lines.

I hope that when the Bill becomes an Act, the Minister will turn his attention to the real organisation of the water supplies of the country. In the past there has been too much fighting by one authority against another, instead of combining to provide a proper supply of water. I know that in this I am probably speaking against the interests of Parliamentary counsel, because they have flourished as a result of that strife, but their interests are far less important than the water supplies of this country. I hope that by means of regional advisory councils throughout the country there may be regional co-ordination, instead of the fight which has gone on as recently as last Session in this House between more than two water authorities.

While I wish the Bill well, I agree with the Parliamentary Secretary that it is a minor Measure, though a very necessary and important one. I hope it will be the prelude to administrative action on the part of the Government towards putting the water supplies of the country into such a state that we shall not have the spectacle of water flooding, and then water scarcity, such as there has been in recent years. The advice given by Joseph Ben Jacob many centuries ago to take the products of the rich ripe years, and store them for the time of scarcity, is advice which might very well be taken into account in connection with water supplies. Quite a number of years ago a scheme was put forward for two very large impounding reservoirs up the Thames, where the water could be impounded in times of surplus, and let down in times of drought. Unfortunately, due to procrastination, one of those sites is no longer obtainable.

What can be said in regard to the Thames can be said of other districts. As we are likely to be presented again with the spectacle of floods followed by droughts, the commonsense thing to do would be to take the products of those floods and store them, and then let them out in time of drought. After all, this country, in many respects, is a wet country, and I am not saying that from the temperance point of view. From that point of view, I am increasingly hopeful that it will become a dry country. There is plenty of water in this country, and it flows in unchecked every winter. If that water could be stored, and if it is not beyond the wit of British water engineers to devise means for storing it—indeed, there are a number of schemes which cannot be proceeded with now owing to the present situation—if it can be stored, for manufacturing purposes and for hydro-electric purposes, we shall no longer have the farcial situation of 12 months ago.

I should like to mention to the Minister that there are certain directions in which I think the Bill may be improved when the Committee Stage is reached, but it would not be proper to mention them now. I hope that, when the suggestions are made to the Minister he will recognise that they are pat forward with the sole aim of improving the Bill and helping the administration of the water supplies in our country.

My hon. Friend, who has just made an able and informative speech, is a recognised authority on the question we are now considering, though he was speaking mainly from the point of view of the London area, where some forward planning has been done in anticipation of the needs of the population and of industry. I was glad to hear him contrast that with our position in the North of England, and especially in North Staffordshire, the North-Western areas and adjacent areas.

This Bill is a disappointment to me, for, relatively, it means the maintenance of the status quo based upon evolution that comes from legislation passed 100 years ago. Today, we have this Bill; next week or the week after, it may be the Rivers Bill; and, in the following week or the week after that, some other Bill. Expediency, expediency, expediency. What we were entitled to expect from a Labour Government was a comprehensive policy, and a Bill based upon that comprehensive policy, like the Bill which has been published today dealing with Parliamentary representation. We have floods and ample water in the winter, droughts and a shortage of water in the summer, and that even applies to Manchester. For several summers, the water supply of Stoke-on-Trent has been in danger. In North Staffordshire, we suffer from the serious effects of mining subsidence, which seriously endangers our water supplies. In that area, we must have steel pipes to carry water, and one of the difficulties over which the local authorities have no control is that they are only offered cast-iron pipes when it is absolutely necessary that they should have steel. I contrast this dangerous position in North Staffordshire and the North-West, and also in other industrial areas, with what I have seen for the last 20 years.

For 20 years, I have been travelling between Manchester and Euston, and, every year, I have seen floods in the Trent Valley and in other parts: yet, we now have 10th century technology at our disposal—bulldozers, mechanical navvies, trench diggers and reinforced concrete for the banks of rivers and canals. In these circumstances, the Minister responsible should tell the scientists and engineers of this country, who are the authorities in these matters, what is required of them because they can deal with almost anything. Instead of that, we still allow floods in winter and a water shortage in summer, and all this after a war of science such as we have just passed through.

This Bill is the product of a Victorian mind, or of an office where men and women live in a world of their own. This Bill is not worthy of Labour Ministers; it is the product of backwoodsmen. We should have introduced an all-inclusive and comprehensive Bill, prepared with vision by men with a big outlook and an understanding of what can be done with 10th century technology to meet the needs of the country. The country is in a serious economic position. By their own efforts, the people will save themselves, if they are allowed to do so. Industry and the people are achieving miracles. Give them the tools and the plans and they will deliver the goods. This Bill can be compared to using a spade instead of a modern bulldozer.

This country must have ample supplies of coal and power. What an opportunity we have, and what great potentialities we have in our country in our ample supplies of coal and water power. We should have laid out a national plan for the scientific utilisation of our ample supplies of water. We should have adopted, in accordance with Labour's policy, a national water policy for the use and conservation of water. Leading members of the Government in the past have all had a great deal to say about planning. Never did a Government in peacetime have greater powers than this Government, and they should have gone in for the planning of our natural resources, of which water is one, so as to build up, conserve and utilise them in a 10th century way. Let all remember the fuel crisis of 1947, when some of us for weeks spent much of our time in prophesying what was going to take place. Now, I give the same warning in regard to water. My hon. Friends may not, however, be prepared to accept this from me. Let them, then, listen to the Secretary of the Royal Meteorological Society, who some time ago gave a grave warning. This is what he said:

"With water reserves in their present state, a drought comparable with that of 1740–43 would be a national disaster of the first magnitude."

He implied that we are little better prepared to meet the emergency than were our ancestors 200 years ago. I was not as pessimistic as this, for I contented myself with saying 100 years ago. He goes on:

"So imperfect are arrangements for conserving water in some of our more populous centres that, after three months of dry weather, following the great floods, supplies ran dangerously low."

Compared with that serious warning, this Bill is only tinkering with the problem. Those of us who represent areas where the water supply of the people has been in such danger many times before would be lacking in our duty if we did not protest on their behalf against this tinkering with the problem, for that is all this Bill means. Compared with that, we have had long newspaper reports of the terrible suffering that arises from flooding in places like the Severn Valley, the Wye Valley, and the Lugg Valley. In Shrewsbury, for example, 500 houses were flooded. In the North Staffordshire area, floods endangered poor people's houses. It is always the poor people's houses that are flooded, and their furniture which floats on the water.

Salford have issued a booklet stating that, in the event of the Irwell again overflowing, the local authorities have made provision for rest shelters, for medical men to attend the people, and to blow the sirens if the water gets above a certain height. One would think this was 1748, not 1948. As I have said, 500 houses in Shrewsbury were flooded recently, the main roads were blocked, ferry services had to be organised to take people to and from their employment, to take food to them, and a large number of cattle was lost. There is grave danger of subsidence as the result of the water getting under the surface of the roads. Yet we still prefer floods in the winter and shortage of water in the summer.

We have suffered from flooding for generations. It was excusable in the past when we worked with small tools, like picks and shovels, but, now that we are in the 10th century, there is no excuse for floods in the winter and shortage of water in the summer. The time has arrived when this should be regarded as a national responsibility. The Government ought to have introduced a comprehensive Measure—not three or four Bills, but one Bill—dealing with the whole problem of water supplies for the people and industry, and its utilisation in other ways. Large concerns like Metropolitan Vickers, the English Electric, Mowlem's, Wimpeys, and Lindsay Parkinson's, are among the firms who build reservoirs all over the world which guarantee water supplies to the people of other countries, but they are not building in the same way at home. I suggest that the Government should reconsider their approach to the problem. This is the old way of approach. My hon. Friend said that our water supplies in the North-West and other areas are in danger. I contrast that with the position in the London area, where they planned for the people's needs. Therefore, I hope that a more comprehensive Measure will be introduced as quickly as possible.

I was probably anti-Nazi long before a lot of other people in this country, but it can be said to the credit of the Germans that they organised their inland waterways and their water supplies. There is no excuse for us not doing the same. When I suggest what ought to be done, people sometimes point out our serious economic problems. I am the first to admit that we are in a very serious position, but what I am saying is that, instead of tinkering with the problem as we are doing today, we ought to have introduced a Bill that would have enabled us to approach the problem in a 10th century way. What our contractors can do all over the world, what the Germans did in Germany, and what is being done in many other countries, we can do, if we adopt a similar policy.

I remember, when a similar Bill was introduced some years ago, I made an appeal to the then Minister of Health, who was looked upon by some of us as being relatively progressive compared with many of his right hon. and hon. Friends. He was Sir Kingsley Wood. It must be to or 15 years ago since he gave a promise that this matter would be dealt with, and that pollution would be done away with. My hon. Friend, who understands the needs of the London area probably better than anyone else, said that the authorities in London had anticipated the needs of the people, and had made plans for dealing with them. But, in many other parts, the position is no better today than it was years ago. The health of our people is endangered, our water supply is wasted, and fish cannot live in many of our rivers.

In my view, my right hon. Friend the Minister of Works was correct when he said, in June, 1946, that there was a source of weakness in the multiplicity of undertakings, many of which needed to be eliminated. This Bill perpetuates this multiplicity. We should have had a Bill based upon a national authority with regional organisation, when, in my view, we would have been able to deal with the whole problem. We need a comprehensive Measure based upon a national plan for the co-ordination of all our water interests and supplies, and for the conservation of our water resources and the scientific harnessing of water for the supply of power.

I am bound to say that I have a great deal of sympathy with the eloquent appeal that has just been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke (Mr. Ellis Smith) for what may be called a "new deal" in the organisation of the water supplies of the country. I am not sure, however, that I would have expressed some of the points in his speech with quite the same vigour as he did, because I know that, in addressing his remarks to my and his hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary, he was pushing at an open door. I believe that the Ministry of Health are very conscious of the fact that they are—and, perhaps of necessity—dealing with the country's water supplies on the basis of an ad hoc patching up of the existing structure, rather than working out a completely new structure. I have no doubt that they are conscious of that, and are filled with a desire to build a new structure and to start a new scheme, whenever that is possible.

I think the House will recognise that, what with one thing and another—the new health scheme, and the re-orientation of the relationships between the Government and the local authorities and of the relationships between the local authorities themselves—the Ministry of Health have got quite a lot on their hands at the moment. Anyhow, as even my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke suggested, this is not, perhaps, the best time for entering into large-scale arrangements which would, of necessity, involve considerable expenditure in capital equipment. But sometimes it is necessary to keep pushing at a door even when one knows it is open, because if one does not give a little push once in a while, it has a tendency to shut.

Would my hon. Friend explain how it is possible to push at an open door?

If my hon. Friend will carry out a small experiment on an open door, he will find that even he will have no difficulty in carrying out this operation. What I meant was this There is a danger in tackling a large scale problem by legislation through expediency, and in tacking new patches on a leaky structure. The habit grows, and one goes from expediency to expediency.

I do not wish to detain any hon. Members who may be listening to me, under false pretences. I propose to ride a well known hobby-horse of mine. Some hon. Members know that on many occasions I have argued in this House with respect to manufacturing industries that enormous gains are to be achieved in productivity, output, the raising of our standard of living and the contribution towards the solution of our economic problems by rationalisation and standardisation. Recently I have been doing some study to see whether those principles have equal application to the provision of a public utility service as they have to the manufacturing of goods. I thought I could find no better example on which to test this possibility than the example of the extremely unco-ordinated industry of supplying water to the population as a whole. I approach this subject as a layman, purely as a manufacturing man, and it seems to me that on the basis of the layman's approach and on the basis of what one knows in other spheres about the gains to be achieved by rationalisation and standardisation, the potential gain of this new deal in the water industry is enormous.

There are no less than seven applications, with each one of which I shall deal briefly, in relation to the rationalisation and standardisation of the water industry. The first thing one should try to standardise is the end product. Although the law imposes upon water undertakings the obligation to give what is called an adequate supply of wholesome water, in no Act can I find any definition of the words "adequate" or "wholesome" in this context. Consequently, varying purveyors of water can purvey varying commodities all of which fall within this extremely loose definition of what they are required to purvey. Secondly, it is quite clear that standardisation will eliminate the very wide variations which exist in efficiency of operation between varying water undertakings throughout the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke has referred already to the multiplicity of water undertakings—not only their multiplicity in numbers but also their multiplicity in types.

I am bound to say that, coming to this problem as an outsider and with a fresh mind, I was amazed and, indeed, appalled to see how disparate was the operation over the country of this industry of supplying water. So far as I can make out, there are more than 550 water undertakings in Great Britain and Northern Ireland which are members of the British Water Works Association. Some of them are owned municipally, but there is also a surprisingly high number of private companies; there are 149 statutory companies, 89 non-statutory companies, and over 1,000 private purveyors of water, and these purveyors are of all sorts, shapes and sizes. Because they are of all sorts, shapes and sizes, they are at all sorts of different levels of efficiency. The larger waterworks, so far as the layman can judge, appear to be run very efficiently indeed, on the whole. But obviously some of the smaller undertakings have not the capital resources, the regular revenue or the resources in staff to provide anything like a good service. That is why, with all this multiplicity of undertakings, with all these guns shooting at the same target, from big howitzers down to little popguns, all shooting in a unco-ordinated way at the same time, there is still a considerable part of the country where, as the hon. and gallant Member for Pollok (Commander Galbraith) pointed out, there are no piped supplies of water at all.

It is this question of differences in size of undertaking and in size of operation which accounts, to a considerable extent, for these wide margins of efficiency. In providing water, just as in manufacturing escalators, silk stockings or pills, there is always an optimum size for an organisation, taking all the factors into account. An organisation above or below its optimum size can, by definition, not be as efficient as one at the optimum size. Here we have giant organisations like the Metropolitan Water Board which I should think is, if anything, larger than the optimum size for efficiency, and at the other end of the scale there are many units which have not the staff or the plant required, and I believe there is a small number of units which have no full-time staff at all and clearly are very vulnerable in this connection.

There is a great deal to be done by standardisation of equipment. Even the electrical engineering industry, which has completely failed to tackle its duty of getting some degree of standardisation in design of equipment, appears to me to be no worse, and perhaps even better, than the water undertakings. We are losing a great deal of productive power owing to lack of standardisation in water fittings. One authority insists on a particular size of lavatory cistern. Another authority will not have that size. It is a quarter of an inch too big, or, in one case, an eighth of an inch too big. One, therefore, has to tool up to manufacture another lavatory cistern in order to get a cistern one-eighth of an inch different in size. Some authorities want their cisterns with their sides at right angles to the base. Other authorities will not have that; the sides must be at an oblique angle to the base. Different authorities even go so far as to disagree on what that angle ought to be, as though there would occur any tremendous disaster to the welfare and health of the nation if we used lavatory cisterns whose sides were at an angle of 105 degrees to the base instead of at an angle of 104 degrees 30 minutes to the base. All this is the result of the lack of co-ordination of which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke was speaking. There is also little co-ordination in research, though obviously a great deal of research needs to be done, as I am sure the Parliamentary Secretary would be the first to admit. How is it possible effectively to get any co-ordination of research when there is such a large number of authorities of different types?

I come to another point of which the domestic consumer, and certainly every hon. Member in this House, will be aware. We are wasting a tremendous amount of clerical labour in particular, and administrative labour in general, through the complete failure to apply any sort of standardisation to the methods of charge. There is a large number of different methods of charging for domestic water supplies, and it seems to me that the only respect in which the 1945 Act does not represent a considerable improvement on the 1936 Act is that it is extremely doubtful whether the facilitation of some uniform practice in the 1945 Act, so far as charging is concerned, is going to have any real effect at all.

In some places dwelling-houses are charged on the gross annual value; in some places on the annual value; in some on the annual rack rent. Sometimes the charges vary, not only as between houses in a city and those just outside it, but as between different parts of the same city; sometimes charges vary according to whether the properties are considered to be above or below the datum level. Sometimes a small house is charged at a higher percentage than a large one. Sometimes there is a flat rate. In some places one pays extra if one has a bath or a water closet, and so on. Even that chaotic situation so far as charges for domestic use are concerned is not nearly as chaotic as the method of charging for industrial use; though here it must be said that the 1945 Act does appear to effect a quite considerable improvement.

What is the result of all this? It is that in many water undertakings the clerical staff engaged on the assessment of charges and the collection of the money is greater than the total remaining staff, technical and operative, of the organisation as a whole. That is to say, more than half the staff is engaged, not in providing water, but in working out how much to charge for the water and then in collecting the charges which, in these various and devious ways, they have worked out. It is an overhead cost that it is grossly unfair to expect the industry of supplying water to bear. There seems to be not only an overwhelming case for some sort of standardisation, even with a few amendments here and there, in the method of charging for domestic water supplies, but a quite strong case also for making that charge nil and for dealing with water in exactly the same way as we deal domestically with sewage disposal. In that case we do not have elaborate calculations in algebraic formulae for deciding how much ought to be charged for collecting it at various types of houses. We simplify the thing by making it a charge on the rates, without all this nonsense. There seems to be a case for this, too, in respect of water.

Then there is the question of the standardisation of sources and resources re- ferred to by my hon. Friend the Member for West Woolwich (Mr. Berry), who is an undoubted authority on this question. There is still too much allocation of sources and resources by what may be called political considerations—the boundaries of authorities, of county boundaries, and so on—rather than by geographical and geological considerations. All sorts of undertakings take water from the Pennines. The pipe lines criss-cross one another, or, at least, go very near one another, without any facilities at all for interchange; and one authority will refuse to give another authority the great deal of help and easement it could by providing facilities for interchange. What they do is to add further to their overheads, and reduce the amount of money they could have available for construction and technical development, by promoting legislation in Parliament, a good deal of which is designed to defeat the objects of legislation by other undertakings. A good deal of time and money is spent on legislation which otherwise could go into providing more and better water supplies.

In this respect the authorities are in a very much worse position than the private landlord. Do people realise—I am quite sure I did not realise until I had this quite recent look into the habits of this industry—that the landlord is much better off than any water authority in this connection? There is no power to prevent the landlord or even the renter of land, the occupier, sinking a bore; but a water authority cannot sink a bore until this House gives it authority to do so. There is, as a result, competition for water not only as between authority and authority, which is bad enough, but between authorities and private owners There have been, for example, in recent years large-scale borings by private borers in South Lincolnshire, who between them waste 10,000,000 gallons a day whilst providing water to grow watercress. In the same area water undertakings are unable to supply adequate water to their consumers

I apologise to the House for the time that I, an amateur, am taking on the matter, but I come now to the seventh and last point at which it appears to me some rationalisation is possible, and that is at the level of Government administration of water supplies. Although it is quite clear that the ideal situation would be that in which there would be a single Government Department dealing with water matters, it does seem to be rather an ideal than a practicable proposition; but it does appear to me that we have a degree of duplication and multiplication which is on the whole unjustified.

So far as I can find out, the Ministry of Health deals with piped water supplies and the prevention of pollution. The Ministry of Transport also has a hand in the prevention of pollution, as well as, of course, looking after inland navigation. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries is concerned with drainage, and the fisheries, and the water supplies in agricultural areas, and, like the other two Ministries, with the prevention of pollution. Water power is the responsibility of the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Water for fire fighting is the responsibility of the Home Office. Industrial water supplies are the responsibility of the Board of Trade. There are other matters which are shared amongst a number of different agencies. The general responsibility for the administration of reservoirs is shared between the Home Office and the Ministry of Health.

It does seem, unless I am greatly mistaken—and I repeat that I come to this matter as an amateur, new to the study of this industry—that there is a great deal of substance in the plea made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke that we stop, as he said, "tinkering about" with this thing, that we start trying to amend the thing as a whole, rather than in an ad hoc manner. When my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health and my right hon. Friend are a bit less busy with the doctors and local authorities and other problems with which they have to deal, they might gather together a team of people to sit down quietly for six months with a clean sheet of paper and work this out from scratch. I hope we shall have some evidence in the near future that that, at least, is the intention, even though it may not be practicable immediately.

This is an amending Bill, making some very necessary, though not very large, improvements in the main Water Act, 1945, and as such I welcome it. I sit for a constituency in one of the driest parts of England, in which quite a large proportion of the tubes and pipes required for water supplies are made; also, I live in one of the wettest parts of the United Kingdom. Therefore, I am interested in water.

Through the Parliamentary Secretary I urge upon the Ministry one or two points in the administration of the additional powers being taken under this Bill. One of those powers relates to bringing the water from the mains through what are usually called communication pipes, actually up to the houses. I am sure the Parliamentary Secretary will have well in mind that in many villages—I was about to say most villages, but perhaps that would be an exaggeration—there is said to be a water supply; but the water supply ends at a pump or tap, to which people have to go over long distances, from many cottages, and in weather of all sorts. I hope these powers will be used, and that my hon. Friend will see they are so used, to supply water not merely to the village, but to the houses in the village.

My second point, on the amendments in this Bill, is that there are a very large number of non-statutory water undertakings of all kinds and sizes, throughout the country. There are some exceedingly odd ones. In one village of my constituency half the village, but not the whole, is supplied by a body called the "copy-holder." Copyholding was abolished in this country some time ago: but the system under which water is supplied to half, and only half, the village still obtains in rural Northamptonshire. I urge that these new powers be exercised by my hon. Friend, so far as they are his, and that he sees they are exercised by local authorities—for they are principally concerned—to remove some of these small and very unsatisfactory non-statutory undertakers. They are unsatisfactory by the mere limitation of their size and their inability to go any further than they have already gone. I am glad to see that the enlarged powers under Clause 2 of this amending Bill are directed to points like supplies in bulk, which ought to be of material assistance.

We have been some time on this amending Bill, and I do not want to detain the House; but I should not like to resume my seat without adding a few words to what has been said by my hon. Friends the Member for Stoke (Mr. Ellis Smith) and the Member for Reading (Mr. Mikardo) on the scope of this Bill. I fully recognise, as we all must do, that there are practical difficulties in introducing a large-scale Measure at present. The Water Act, 1945, is not so very old, and was indeed a great improvement on the state of affairs which existed before. However, one has only to consider the question of water supplies in a very dry county, such as Northamptonshire—necessarily dry because of the character of the subsoil—to realise that even the best arrangements which could be made locally are a poor substitute for a national scheme; and a national scheme should, I believe, be on the lines of the supply of electricity, that is to say, the wholesale distribution of water should and must be a national matter, for the kind of reason given by the hon. Member for Stoke. On the other hand, there are great obstacles to removing the local retail distribution of water completely away from some form of local administration. How far local authorities may be suitable for that purpose seems to me a very moot question.

We have had, and have now, under consideration county schemes for the supply of water in Northamptonshire. The difficulty is not only a lack of water, but the extreme multiplicity of the local authorities concerned, and the innumerable difficulties which arise between them, some of which are substantial and some of which seem to represent local pride and prejudice rather than a realisation of collective responsibility to the community. If we are to tackle the problem of water supply on national grounds we must remember that it cannot possibly be tackled unless the questions of sewage disposal and allied sanitation are considered at the same time. They are equally urgent, but slightly less obvious, and tend to be neglected all too often. The supply of water for domestic purposes is the start of the story, but at the other end is the provision of proper sewerage arrangements.

I welcome this Bill, as I am sure the House welcomes it, so far as it goes. It can be no substitute in the long run for a proper national scheme for the provision of water, particularly in dry areas, a scheme which will take account, not only of water supply, but of the allied questions of sewerage and sanitation.

I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Reading (Mr. Mikardo) apologised for being an amateur in this matter, but I must congratulate him on a most informative speech which indicated to me, at any rate, he had made a considerable amount of research into the problem of water supplies. I am sure that his concluding observations about the need for uniformity and efficiency of water undertakings will commend themselves to Members in all parts of the House.

I was more concerned, however, with the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke (Mr. Ellis Smith), who made an appeal for a more adequate and efficient water supply for the North Staffordshire area, with which I, too, am associated. Britain has been blessed with a great supply of natural water, but there ought not to be the floods which we have seen from time to time. There are two things in this world which ought to be cheap, particularly in Britain—a purified air supply and a plentiful and adequate water supply. There can, of course, he too much water just as there can be too little. Coleridge pointed out, in his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," that there was:

"Water, water, everywhere.

Nor any drop to drink,"

and that anomalous position can, to some extent, be translated to the situation in some parts of this country. Here, we have a country with a superabundance of water where it is not wanted, in the shape of floods, and a dearth where it is required, in remote hamlets and villages. That dearth of water may be due to the quantity which industries in the area have to take, or to an inadequate pipeline for the supply to the isolated districts. It is astonishing to me that the Lord Mayor of London, who instituted a fund for the victims of the floods last year, has been left with the better part of £1 million, which has not been utilised to deal with cases of distress. That is an anomaly which arises out of a situation which ought to be bettered.

It would take many years of research and study to know all about water supplies, but I am interested in certain aspects of the matter which have come to my attention. I am interested, for instance, in mining subsidence. That involves boring in different parts of the county of North Staffordshire. I understand that authorities responsible for water undertakings in their districts, if they want to bore, and have to acquire land to do so, will have to approach the Ministry for permission. Suppose a recalcitrant land-owner, knowing that the authority requires land for that purpose, raises his price or becomes refractory in some other way. Would the Minister take steps to help that authority?

What is the position with regard to big cities, such as Liverpool. I have been a member of the Liverpool authority for 18 years. On one occasion during my callow stages of that membership, I was taken to Lake Vyrnwy in Wales, which is the source of their water supply. It is a magnificent undertaking, and the water is conserved with great care by a very competent authority. Similarly, in the case of Manchester. I understand that they get their water from Thirlmere and Haweswater. That authority had to make provision for a supply of water in order to ensure the life of a million people in that great city and of two million in the immediate environs. Most people in towns of that size have a good supply of water. What is going to happen if the Ministry is not prepared in the near future to consider the question of bringing together all the multifarious undertakings who cannot undertake to provide an adequate supply of water? I hope that we may devise a means of bringing these undertakings under national control for the supply of water. That should not be a politically controversial subject, and I can imagine hon. Members opposite being prepared to support it in the national interests. I hope that anomalies which now exist may in the future be rectified by a more competent Bill, so that every householder may have an adequate supply of pure water.

During this Debate singularly little has been said about the Bill itself. The hon. and gallant Member for Pollok (Commander Galbraith) referred to the question of compensation. The Minister is able and willing where he thinks it necessary to attach conditions when he authorises work. We can consider that when we reach the Committee stage of the Bill. There are very great difficulties in making that apply to all existing undertakings. I want now to look at a point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Mack). One of the points of this Measure is that water undertakers will be able to prospect further without actually having to acquire the land. If they find water then they have powers of compulsory acquisition in the ordinary way.

The brunt of the discussion has not been on the Bill but on the complete organisation of our national water supplies. I am going to resist the temptation to be drawn into that field but it is a matter to which I am not indifferent. Indeed, I have been as interested in it as most Members present this afternoon, possibly with a few distinguished exceptions. We are here dealing with a few small changes to the main Act of 1945, under which we have been working since it was passed a little over two years ago. I think it was a little unfortunate that my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke (Mr. Ellis Smith) let loose his broadside on this little inoffensive Bill—as inoffensive as I am. I think he should have reserved his grand attack for another occasion when we are talking about the economic state of affairs.

The hon. Member represents Stoke and I happen to represent Blackburn. We have got our flooding problems just as much as Stoke has got them. There are similar problems in other cities and towns of the North, where they have flooding. That, however, is not what we are dealing with this afternoon. Some parts of the Debate will be very relevant in a week or two when we come to the Second Reading of the River Boards Bill, when this whole matter can be ventilated. It is all very well to talk about allocations of steel instead of iron and so on. The hon. Member for Stoke, with his Departmental experience, will know the position we are in with regard to the very modest allocations of iron and steel with which we have to work, and he will also know that there are a large number of jobs which ought to be done. All we can do is to take them in the order of their urgency and help as best we can.

I want to make it plain that over the last two years we have been doing our best to secure the material on which we can plan. I am leaving on one side, for the moment, the new powers that may be given, and I am thinking of the powers we have under the 1945 Act as they may be modified under this Bill. We have done a large amount of work, and no Government, even as good as this one is, would be likely to correct, in a relatively short space of time, all the things that are wrong in the water system which has grown higgledy-piggledy and almost haphazardly in the country. Some of the things referred to by the hon. Member for Reading (Mr. Mikardo) are matters which have received our attention and on which we have been working along with the National Advisory Council on Water.

One of the things we certainly had to do was to acquire the information, and in a number of different ways we carried out surveys or encouraged the carrying of them out in different parts of the country. We have drawn up plans for new resources and condensations of undertakings, and we have moved in the direction of the standardisation which my hon. Friend the Member for Reading so very much wanted. In the case of London alone, everyone knows the situation is not wholly satisfactory in the Greater London area. We have a departmental committee under the chairmanship of Mr. Moelwyn Hughes. When we have received its report, which is sure to be comprehensive, we shall, I hope, be able to take action under our present powers within the 1945 Act, and begin to see results.

Included in that action we shall not overlook, when we have the facts in front of us, the acquisition of public and private non local authority undertakings. We must look at the whole of the facts. I ask hon. Gentlemen on both sides of the House to consider that we have to proceed under the Act of 1945 and that there is an inevitable period in which we are gathering our material and conducting the surveys. Then will come the use of powers under the Act to combine undertakings, to set up advisory committees, and to do all the other things which we hope in due course will give a better service throughout the country. I do not think I need say any more at this stage. One or two other points which have been raised I shall be happy to consider when we come to the Committee stage. The Bill may not create a new heaven and a new earth, but it will make the 1945 Act a little more workable.

Before the Minister sits down will he say a word on the subject of bringing water into the new houses?

All I can say is that we want provision of water in the houses but that the physical difficulties of materials may place very great limitations upon what can be done.

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

This is a very short Bill and I hope it is an uncontroversial one which may not give occasion for any very lengthy oratory. Certainly it will not give rise to any very great oratory on my part. The object of the Bill is to remedy an admitted defect in our criminal law. The House may be aware that the maximum penalty at common law for the full offence of rape is penal servitude for life, and that the maximum penalty for attempted rape, which is a misdemeanour at common law, is imprisonment for two years or a fine. His Majesty's judges have complained for a long period, as very serious cases of attempted rape have come before them, of the inadequacy of this maximum penalty for the attempt to commit rape. They have pointed out that the attempt to commit the full offence may cause to the victim all the indignity and all the terror of the full offence and yet because the resistance to it, at a very late stage perhaps, is effective, the maximum penalty, instead of being penal servitude for life, is only two years' imprisonment.

The purpose of the Bill is to raise the maximum penalty. Of course, we deal only with the maximum penalty, as is always the case in our law. We propose to raise it to seven years' penal servitude. Unfortunately, I am not able to give to the House, as I had hoped to do, separate statistics showing how many convictions there have been in recent years for attempted rape, because the criminal statistics, in the form in which they are compiled, do not distinguish between convictions for rape and convictions for attempted rape. The figures I can give are those for the two offences put together.

I am afraid that, as in the case of so many offences of violence against the person, the figures have risen since the year before the war. In the year 1938 the number of convictions was 40. After remaining steady or slightly lower during most of the war, the figure rose steeply to its maximum point in 1945, when there were 100 convictions, and in 1946, the latest year for which I have the figures, the number was 65. These are figures of convictions; there were a good many more cases known to the police in which they were not able to bring the offence home to an individual and to secure a conviction, although it was established that the offence had been committed.

Bearing in mind that an attempt to commit the offence may be in some cases, and often is, as brutal as other offences with violence which carry much heavier penalties, the House will find no difficulty in agreeing that a maximum penalty of seven years cannot be unduly high for the worse type of offence and that a maximum of two years is certainly unduly low. I have referred to other offences with violence which carry heavier penalties, and I would like to give an example. In case of an assault with intent to rob under the Larceny Act, 1916, although that is, in effect, merely an attempt, that is, an assault with intent to rob and not the full offence to rob, the maximum penalty is five years. If it is committed with aggravation or arms, the maximum penalty for the attempt, that is to say, the assault with intent, is penal servitude for life; that is, if one assaults someone with intent to rob and uses aggravated violence, one may get penal servitude for life, but if one commits a similar assault which is as aggravated but with intent to rape, the maximum is two years.

In Scotland the limitation does not exist. Under Scottish law the courts can give imprisonment for an indefinite period, and in nearly half the cases which arose in the years 1935 to 1944 of assault with intent to ravish, which is the way the Scottish law describes it, penalties were imposed which were heavier than the maximum which could be imposed in England.

It may be said that there are other anomalies rather similar to this in our criminal law, and it may be asked why this has been singled out. It is unfortunately true that there are a number of anomalies relating to particular offences, but the House will agree that a complete review of such anomalies would be a very heavy task. We are already in a very large measure, the Criminal Justice Bill, tackling one whole side of criminal justice law but are not tackling the question of penalties for individual offences. If we were to attempt a similarly comprehensive Measure catering for that side of the subject we should certainly require long study and consultation with many bodies and persons concerned with the administration of the law, and we should be involved in long debates and in some cases in controversy. In the case we are dealing with there is a very solid consensus of judicial opinion. His Majesty's judges have brought this to the notice of the Home Secretary over quite a period of years. The crime is more frequent than some of the other crimes in respect of which the penalties are somewhat anomalous, and a further factor which makes it reasonable to deal with this item now is that there can scarcely be room for dispute that insofar as it goes it is reasonable. The Government therefore feel justified in bringing it forward as a special case, and I hope the House will be prepared to give the Bill a speedy Second Reading.

The hon. Gentleman opened his remarks by pointing out that this was a non-controversial Measure, and I am certain the House will agree. This is really a most brutal form of crime and one which should be punished drastically. In my opinion, even the extension of the punishment to a maximum of seven years is too lenient. I would rather have seen the Scottish system adopted which places no limit on the length of punishment that can be given. However, I sincerely hope that this Measure will be given a Second Reading without any opposition.

It is most unfortunate, in the view of those authorities who are entitled to express an opinion on this matter that it should be found necessary to introduce this Bill this afternoon. The trend of modern ideas on the subject of criminal punishment has been rather in the direction of reducing than increasing the penalties, and the figures given by my hon. Friend were not as conclusive as perhaps they ought to be. He said the statistics showed that in 1938 there were 40 convictions for rape, in 1945 they had gone up to 100, and in 1946 the number of convictions had fallen to 65. There seems to me to be no evidence that the number of convictions for sexual offences is increasing. When the Home Office figures relating to these offences are examined, it will be found that in 1913, 1,004 were convicted. That figure dropped in 1938 to 729. In 1945, the last year for which I have any figures, the number was 850, so that in the year 1945 the number of convictions for sexual offences, which includes a number of other things besides rape, had fallen compared with 1913. Further, when the figures for 1945 are analysed, it will be ound that of the 586 prisoners received in various prisons in this country for rape, in not more than 60 cases did the judges consider it necessary to send the criminals to penal servitude.

Those figures put a different complexion upon the matter from that which might appear at first sight. In saying this, I do not question that the maximum penalty of two years, in what we all hope is a small number of cases, is inadequate. As a general rule, however, it is always undesirable to legislate from a comparatively few instances. That may be a danger on which we are embarking in agreeing to the Second Reading of this Measure. Only the other day, on another question, my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General pointed out that it was very difficult to legislate in a certain type of case, which could best be dealt with on its individual merits. With those few provisos, I welcome the Bill cordially, and I hope it will have the effect which is in the minds of those people who have sponsored the proposals embodied in it.

I can well appreciate the feelings of the hon. and gallant Member for Brixton (Lieut.-Colonel Lipton) on the fact that at this time, when the tendency perhaps for 100 years has been towards lighter punishments, we should be going to the trouble of singling out one offence for very much heavier punishment. I feel, however, that this is necessary, and therefore welcome the Bill.

The Bill is necessary for two reasons. Although the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861, which is a codification of offences against the person, has stood the test of time remarkably well, there is, nevertheless, this single anomaly which requires attention. The second reason is one which the hon. and gallant Member dealt with by implication when he referred to the fact that it was only in a small proportion of a large number of cases of rape and attempted rape in 1945 that heavy sentences were imposed. That may well be so, but, as the Under-Secretary of State pointed out, it is most desirable that judges should have power to deal with those few cases where a heavier punishment is deserved. I welcome the fact that the Under-Secretary has today called in aid of his proposals the views of His Majesty's judges. I hope that in future he will always respect those views, and not call them in aid merely when he wants to call them in aid, but give them the attention they deserve on all occasions.

I must express a regret concerning the Bill. When we are thinking of crime we should think closely of the effect of crime upon the victims. There is no doubt that these cases of rape, and even attempted rape, have the most deplorable effects. There comes to my mind the case of a fairly young woman, an officer in one of the Women's Services, who was travelling on board a troopship during the war, and a rape was attempted against her. It had a very serious nervous effect on her, and she was unable to do any proper work for about a year, although she was not physically mutilated at all. The person who committed the offence was earning exceedingly good pay, and could quite well—had the courts cared to use any power that had been given them—have been made to compensate that girl for her loss of earnings, or some of her loss of earnings, during the time in which she suffered. I mention that because I sincerely hope that before many months are past, the House will consider, more than we have in the past, this question of compensating the victims of crime. It might be out of Order to go into that in any more detail at this moment, but I think it should be mentioned in passing.

I mentioned this anomaly on the Second Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill, and I am very glad that the Government have acted so promptly on my suggestion.

Our business today has covered a variety of subjects, including the Royal Marines, telephones and water. Now I want to raise a point in connection with milk supplies, and to make a strong appeal to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food on behalf of elderly people, many of whom are not getting enough milk. The medical advisers and scientific gentlemen at the Ministry of Food have apparently sat round a table and considered who are the people who should be added to or included in the priority classes for milk supplies, and they have decided—and one cannot quarrel with them—that they should be invalids, expectant and nursing mothers and growing children. They have not been able to say that old people should be included in the priority classes.

The point has been raised from time to time, and it is evident that this is not a matter which is restricted to my experience. It has been raised from time to time in Questions in the House by quite a number of hon. Members, which shows that there is general evidence of this need to do something that will make it possible for elderly people to obtain more milk. It falls particularly hard upon those old people who are living alone, where the total milk supply coming into the family is not such that it can be shared out so that they benefit from the larger number of people living in the house. Where old people are living alone, and especially when they live in country districts, where they have not the ready facilities for going to restaurants and catering establishments, it is particularly hard, and I have had some very heart-rending letters from people in such a condition, showing that they have at some times not only been restricted to their half-pint a day, but have, on occasions, had to do without any supply at all.

I know very well that the Parliamentary Secretary will say, in reply, that it would be possible to increase supplies to elderly people only by drawing away supplies, in the existing state of shortage, from the other priority classes, but I say that there might be a case even for doing that. Readily as I recognise the importance, on nutritional grounds, of an adequate milk supply being available to expectant and nursing mothers, for invalids—where supported by a doctor's opinion—and for growing children, I think there is a case even for giving priority to the old people over, say, milk for children in schools. One of my correspondents has written to me saying—

"I feel that we who are old and have borne the brunt of life need milk much more than boys and girls of 16."

Whatever case may be made out on scientific and nutritional grounds for adolescents, I have some sympathy with that point of view. I was very glad the other day to hear the Minister of Food say that his Department was making a special investigation and inquiry into the difficulties that old people were experiencing with food supplies at the present time, and I suggest to him that he should go to those local organisations—I have one in my constituency, and there are others in other parts of the country—which are carrying out special work in connection with the welfare of old people. My local old people's welfare committee is running a mobile meals canteen, and they tell me from their experience that they are finding that old people are having very great difficulty because they cannot always digest the foods available to them nowadays. That, I think, is an added reason why special consideration should be given to making it possible for them to obtain greater supplies of milk.

I know that it may also be said that there will be great administrative difficulties, with such questions as "How are we to determine who are old people? What line are we to draw about age? Is it going to be confined to people who can produce an Old Age Pension Book?" I would say "No." There are elderly people who may not be old age pensioners, but who are equally in need of an adequate milk supply. I suggest that administrative means could be found by which they could go to the food office and get a certificate which would enable them to have the right to draw priority supplies. I hope my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary will be able to tell us that the Ministry will give attention to this problem, which is a really human problem, in regard to these old people, and that means will be found for ensuring that they can have a little extra milk.

I think that the hon. Member for St. Albans (Mr. Dumpleton) has done a great service to a large section of the community by raising this matter this afternoon. As he said, this is a matter upon which there has been a great deal of discussion in the country. The Parliamentary Secretary may be aware that, not three weeks ago, I forwarded to her right hon. Friend a memorandum on this subject, which had been submitted to the food committee of the borough of Malden and Coombe. Therefore, it is a matter on which it is desirable that there should be discussion, and that the point of view, both of the old people and of the Ministry of Food, should be made quite clear.

I would not go quite so far as the hon. Member for St. Albans and urge that this very real need be met by any cut in the milk actually consumed by the adolescent. I believe that the mid-teen group is, at the moment, the age group which is suffering, perhaps more than any other, from present stringencies, and I would not urge upon the Parliamentary Secretary that the milk very urgently required by the old people should be found from that source. I think that the old people's claim is so strong—because, as the hon. Member pointed out, in many cases they cannot properly digest certain available foodstuffs—that it can only be rebutted at all if the Ministry of Food can establish beyond any doubt that the necessary milk could only be found by a direct cut in the milk supplied to other equally important groups. That reasoning, I think, demands that the Ministry should make it quite clear, and beyond all dispute, that there is no wastage occurring in the supply to the other groups.

In that connection, I should be very grateful if the Parliamentary Secretary would deal with a possible source of wastage which I have never heard fully explained, and that is the question of what happens to the school milk during the school holidays. I know that there is the scheme under which children can collect, at certain centres, the milk which they would be consuming were they in school; but, I think the hon. Lady will agree, that only covers a comparatively small percentage of the milk consumed during the school term. There is a substantial amount, which, for some reason, is not collected. One of the reasons undoubtedly is that the arrangements for its distribution are far from satisfactory at the moment. I do not think the hon. Lady would seriously dispute that those arrangements could be improved.

What happens to the difference between the ordinary milk consumed during the school term and the amount consumed during the holidays as the result of that collection? There is a substantial amount involved, and I have never been able to follow what happens to it. Quite obviously, the cows are not aware of the precise end of the school term, and do not synchronise their output in accordance with the requirements of the Ministry of Education. Therefore, there must he a certain amount of milk available for distribution. What happens to that milk? The hon. Lady may be able to tell us, but it seems to me that if that milk has not all been traced, there is, at any rate during the school holidays, a quantity of milk which is not going to the other priority persons, and which, if it is at all possible, I would suggest to the hon. Lady might be used, at any rate during the holidays, to meet the needs of the old people.

I am sure the hon. Lady will appreciate that that suggestion is put forward with the intention to be helpful and with the recognition that there may well be technical difficulties, but I think she will equally agree that where there is, as there undoubtedly is, this very great need for every drop of milk that can be produced, and where there are many clamant mouths demanding it, it is incumbent upon those responsible for its distribution to see that every drop goes in the right direction and that there are no losses due to wastage. I am sure all hon. Members hear accounts of wastage. Very often when one analyses them they tend to be the result of exaggeration or prejudice, but there is, no doubt, a certain substratum of truth behind these rumours. The hon. Lady would be doing a good service to the House and to the country if she were to explain what steps are taken to prevent any wastage of this very precious liquid, either in the particular connection which I have mentioned, for school milk during the holidays, or in any other connection. I hope the hon. Lady will be able to reassure the House and our constituents on what is being done in the matter.

I am glad this matter has been raised, because it is very serious in the country areas. In my own constituency there is a great outcry about the inadequacy of the rations of old age pensioners and other old people, particularly those living alone who have no means of cooking their meals and are unable to go to the village shops and obtain foodstuffs and other commodities. It is apparent to those who live in the country that the milk ration is inadequate. The old people could easily make small dishes which would help them along if the milk ration were increased. The Parliamentary Secretary may suggest that if the milk ration of the old people were increased, other consumers would suffer a reduction in their ration. My view is that if the farming industry received a call from the Minister of Food and the Minister of Agriculture, they could easily supply the extra milk which is required by the old people.

In reply to a Question in the House recently, we were told that there were about 6½ million old age pensioners. All of those 6½ million would not require extra milk. I have produced some figures on the basis of four million old people receiving an extra pint of milk per week; that is, au additional half-pint on Saturdays and an additional half-pint on Wednesdays. The administration of such a scheme would be very simple, and the milk would be delivered in the ordinary way by the local milk distributor. I am sure that if the agricultural industry were called upon to produce this extra milk, they would be able and willing to do so. An extra pint for 4,000,000 old people would mean very little extra effort. It would mean simply an extra gallon of milk per cow per month from the cows at present in the dairy herds of this country. If the cows could not produce that extra amount of milk at the present time, we should have only to introduce one additional cow for every nine on the farms of the country to obtain it. That, surely, is not beyond the means of the agricultural industry? This extra allowance, however, would make a great deal of difference to these old people. I do, therefore, ask the Minister of Agriculture, in consultation with the Minister of Food, to deal with this question.

The agricultural industry might rightly ask for additional feedingstuffs. No doubt, there would be ways and means of obtaining the additional feedingstuffs. It is an important matter. It is a matter which requires action, and I think it requires immediate action. There is a considerable amount of dissatisfaction about this issue throughout the countryside—that old men and women should be called upon to help in milk production on the farms, where they see the extra milk produced, and yet are not able to obtain it.

There is another and most important point. If this additional milk is produced and is to be obtained by the old people, it is up to the Government—I put this suggestion quite seriously—to provide some sort of subsidy to ensure that the milk can be obtained at a cheaper rate. At present milk can be obtained on a medical certificate, but the cost of the milk is the same whether bought on a medical certificate or not. With the rising cost of living, these small incidental expenses mount up month by month. It may be that some of the old people with fixed incomes would not be able to afford additional milk even if they were allowed to obtain it. It is up to the Government to find ways and means of making it possible for those old people to obtain the additional supplies. I commend the suggestion to the Parliamentary Secretary. I hope the Government will take action immediately.

I am particularly interested in what the hon. and gallant Member for King's Lynn (Major Wise) has just said, because I raised that particular matter of the old age pensioners in a Question earlier this week. In answering the Question the hon. Lady told me that there were 6,500,000 people entitled to the old age pension, and that, therefore, there would not be enough milk available. As has been suggested, there may not be as many as that who actually draw their old age pension. Will the hon. Lady consider that? Perhaps, she will tell us how many old age pensioners over 70 draw the extra tea ration. Perhaps, the extra milk which is asked for them could be allotted to them on a similar basis. When I asked a supplementary question on Wednesday, I suggested that some of the existing allowances might be manipulated—not necessarily cut—to provide this extra milk for the old people. One of the reasons I had in mind has already been mentioned—that milk that is at present allowed to children or adolescents between 15 and 18 is not fully—

While I fully agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) said, that it is most important for these allowances to go on till the 'teen ages, I wonder whether those between the ages of 15 and 18 who are allowed the milk actually receive it. The school-leaving age is now 15; most children go out to work soon after reaching that age, and are then able to feed in canteens and places outside the home, and the extra milk they are allowed may go into their own family pool. Perhaps that point could be considered. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston-upon-Thames also referred to the wastage of school milk. I am sure the Parliamentary Secretary has examined that very carefully My third and last point is that of priority for extra milk. I am sure the scales and the administration which enable people to obtain extra milk are right, but I hope the hon. Lady will make quite certain that the administration of these priorities is all it should be.

I desire to support this human plea for an increased milk supply to elderly people. If, as has been said, there are six and a half million old age pensioners who cannot afford to buy extra milk, then it is high time that their pensions were in creased. Today, I approach this question from the point of view of food values. The present amount of rationed food for a household of two people is totally inadequate. With three or four people it is easier, for they are able to share it out; but when it comes to two people—no matter what the Minister of Food or anybody else may say—looked at from the food value aspect, there is not sufficient to keep them in a healthy state.

I come from the Fen area, where for miles and miles one meets with only an occasional house, and farms dotted here and there. One can imagine the difficulty old people there have in getting to the villages to obtain their supply of rationed foods. Milk is a perfect food, and if old people are unable to get sufficient of other foods, milk will contribute very largely to their health. It must be borne in mind that we are here speaking of people of mature age, of 50 and 60, and over. They have delicate stomachs, and must be dealt with accordingly. That is another reason to see that elderly people get an increased supply of milk.

We are now nearing the time of year when we can obtain an increased supply of milk, and steps should be taken to see that that increase is used to give an extra allowance to elderly people. I know it will be argued that to give more milk to elderly people will mean taking it from somebody else. I cannot accept that argument, because it is our duty to see that old people get whatever is necessary from the milk supply in the country. I am sure the farmers would do all they possibly could to help in this direction. If these old people cannot afford extra milk, then some means must be found, perhaps by way of subsidy, to ensure that the extra milk they need is supplied to them. I hope to hear from the Par- liamentary Secretary that a serious attempt will be made by the Government to meet this great need.

I intervene in this Debate because of the remarks made by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for King's Lynn (Major Wise), who thought it was a comparatively simple matter to get an increased milk supply from our present herds. I want to correct that impression, because I do not think it would be fair if that statement were allowed to go unchallenged. I have a little experience of this matter, through a municipality which is running large farms, on which are large herds of cattle, and I know from experience that the only way in which we can ensure our present supply of milk is by the careful rationing of the limited quantity of feedingstuffs that we can import or produce at home. To obtain an increased milk supply from our herds would mean that we must have extra feedingstuffs, and there are only two ways of doing that—by importing more concentrates, or increasing the number of herds and the acreage of grassland. There is great difficulty in obtaining more feedingstuffs at the moment, and there cannot be an increase in herds and the amount of grazing land without food supplies suffering in another direction. If more cattle use more grazing land, that land cannot grow other kinds of food. I have great sympathy with the plea which has been put forward today, but the remedy is not so simple as my hon. and gallant Friend would have us believe.

I welcome the opportunity which the House has given me once more to explain, to Members who have spoken on this subject, what determines our milk policy. I can assure my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Dumpleton) that if emotion solely dictated our policy, his request would have been acceded to a long time ago, but unfortunately, we have to face the stern realities of the supply situation. We have to allocate our milk according to available supplies. As my hon. Friend said, we have decided on certain priorities which I group, as a doctor, in to physiological and pathological groups. The physiological group contains the expectant and nursing mothers, children, babies, and adolescents, and the pathological group includes those who are suffering from certain diseases, the symptoms of which are alleviated by an extra allocation of milk.

After we have made our allocations of milk to priority and non-priority groups, we are left with a marginal allowance of 800,000 gallons. If we were to give 6½ million old age pensioners one pint of milk a day, as we would like to do, it would mean that we should have to find 5,687,500 gallons. For the first time, a Member in this House has specified which of the priority groups he would exclude and replace by old age pensioners.

Not exclude.

Hon. Members must be specific on this subject. Every hon. Member, except the hon. Member for St. Albans, has been very vague. They have appealed to us. I was very surprised that the hon. Member for King's Lynn (Major Wise), who is a farmer, should ask us to persuade the cow to produce another gallon of milk, when he has heard in this House, time after time, my right hon. Friend and myself at this Despatch Box tell the House how we are trying to get feedingstuffs from many countries in the world. He has known our difficulty, yet he vaguely comes to the House and says, "Just get the feedingstuffs and give it to the cows; they will produce the extra gallons, and the old age pensioners can have the milk." He must be more specific. I invite him to give a detailed scheme of how this is to be done. If he could find means of producing these extra gallons, we would regard his case very sympathetically.

It is not a question of my Department being hard-hearted. We have looked at this matter from every angle, and have tried to discover some means of satisfying hon. Members who have spoken on this subject. We do not decide these priorities in an arbitrary fashion. We have been advised by nutritional and scientific advisers; not only of my Department, but of the Ministry of Health, and by the Special Diets Advisory Committee composed of some of the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in the country. They say that our scheme of priorities is the right one. I think that it is clear from the Debate that most hon. Members accept the fact that people suffering from some pathological condition should be given extra milk. It is quite clear that they do not agree that all children should enjoy the allocation that they are having today. The hon. Member for St. Albans' who raised the matter, had the courage to come into the open and say that we should divert the milk from the children to the old people.

Some of it.

The hon. Member must remember that the schoolchild is only having one-third of a pint.

That is additional to what is received in the home.

Certainly. It would not be a priority allowance if it was not additional. I am sure that the House will forgive me if I approach this matter from a scientific angle. I must impress on hon. Members that the nutritional value of milk lies in its high biological value, because it contains very important elements of diet, animal protein, mineral salts, calcium and vitamins A and D. It is for those reasons that milk is said to be a food of such importance that our available supply should be allocated in such a way that those individuals who depend upon this food for its body building properties, should be given priority. The animal protein of milk is an element in the diet which is indispensable to children.

I now come to the main point I want hon. Members to appreciate it. The most important mineral salt in milk is calcium, and milk is responsible for approximately one-half of the calcium in the diet. The reason we give priority allocations to prospective mothers, nursing mothers and children is because, without a sufficiency of calcium, a child's bones are imperfectly formed. That is the whole basis of it. Without this milk a child would risk one of the deficiency diseases which were quite common in the last century. Normal adults, including old people, have sufficient calcium stored in their bones to prevent them taking any deficiency disease.

I know the hon. Member for Cambridgeshire (Mr. Stubbs) has a tong memory. He knows of the days when it was far too commonplace to see a child in the streets of our industrial towns with knock knees and bandy legs, the result of deficiency diseases. We can see the results of bad feeding in our cotton areas today, for mothers had to go out early in the morning and leave their babies to be minded and children were denied fresh milk. We also see unmistakable signs of milk deficiency, because milk contains the calcium which is essential for perfect bone formation. Milk contains vitamins A and B both of which promote growth. That is why we regard milk as the complete food for a baby. When a child begins to walk it is necessary to make certain additions to its diet. It is essential if that child is going to attain maximum physical proportions that it should have a priority allocation of milk.

The hon. Member for St. Albans comes along and says he has got a good idea. It is to take that calcium from the children and give it to the old people. Of course, we would like to give the old people milk. I can assure him that the officials in the Ministry of Food have old fathers and mothers who would like the little extra milk, as indeed would the parents and old friends of hon. Members here. I understand that the hon. and gallant Member for King's Lynn (Major Wise) has a parent of 85. We should like to see all our old friends having this little attention.

Recently, I spoke to a meeting in the Central Hall which was attended by old age pensioners. It was a very moving meeting. I thought when I went there that these old people would probably tear me to pieces. Speaking to a meeting of people who have all lived a long time is a most interesting experience, because one can put a case to them and they can soon tell in the light of their experience of life whether they are being told the truth or not. I told them about the calcium content of milk, of the bad old days when the children were denied these things as a result of which they were malformed with crooked bones. Instead of these old people rising up and saying, "Take the milk from the children and give it to us," they applauded me. They had come from the industrial towns in the north and had seen these things for themselves. They had seen these children warped in body and their big hearts allowed them in their old age to say, "That is right." Instead of selfishly demanding, as they might well have done in that big audience, that they should he given the milk, they understood.

In case the House might think I am only expressing my own views on this subject I should like to quote from the report of the Advisory Committee on Nutrition in 1936. Many Members will remember how this Committee recommendations were eagerly scanned by those who were interested in the social services and kindred subjects. The Advisory Committee on Nutrition in 1936 said:

"Within recent years much experimental evidence has been brought forward which has shown that cows' milk is the most valuable food known for the promotion of growth and health in children"

That is still the opinion of the authorities. It is difficult for all those old people to understand what may seem to them to be newfangled ideas and the coddling of the modern child. Hon. Members must realise that we have a new conception of diet from what it was in the old days, when the criterion of an adequate diet was whether it satisfied hunger. Today, we are concerned with the quality of the diet and with those nutrients about which I have told the House. We know that they are essential for the building of a structurally sound body. That is what determines our milk policy.

I have been asked certain questions. The hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Thames (Mr. Boyd-Carpenter) quite rightly asked whether we were satisfied that there was no wastage. The hon. and gallant Member for Chelsea (Commander Noble) asked what happened to milk in the school holidays. I assure him that we have our eye on that, too. That milk is used for manufacturing milk products such as baby food. It is integrated with on, other food policy. We have to ensure that babies get dried milk. Therefore, that pool is used for that purpose. My hon. Friend the Member for King's Lynn made a suggestion to which I have already referred. I will repeat that we should be only too pleased to have his scheme forwarded to us.

Other hon. Members have asked me about wastage in schools. I am surprised that they have not raised a point which has struck me before, which is, What happens to milk which is delivered at the schools when the children to whom it is allocated do not turn up? Obviously, one cannot stop the supply for that morning, made careful inquiries about this matter, and I am sure the House will be glad to know that the teachers have been told to give that milk in the afternoon to necessitous children. The necessitous children, therefore, if there is any surplus, get one-third of a pint in the morning and one-third of a pint in the afternoon.

Another hon. Member suggested that we might choose old people. He pointed out that there were 6,500,000 people eligible for old age pensions, and that all those would not require milk. On what basis are we to choose? Are we to choose them on the basis of age groups? I can assure the House that if we did that—unless we considered giving compassionate consideration to the highest age groups—we should be faced with an administrative difficulty. It is possible to have somebody quite physically strong and healthy at 75 while the neighbour at 69, also eligible for the old age pension, is rather a frail creature and might be glad of a little extra milk. Asking us to choose the age group would confront us with a problem which would be difficult to solve.

I want the House to realise that we do not ignore this problem. Haling debated it in the House today and having looked at it from its different aspects, does not encourage me or anyone else in my Department to put the whole question into a pigeon hole and to say; "Next time the House brings it up we shall bring it out again and tell them these reasons." Every time we feel that there might be a small pool of milk surplus to our requirements, we look again at the old age pensioners question. We wonder whether we could allocate it in some way. People in the Ministry are very concerned with the problem. As I have already said, they have old relations, too, and are not removed from the problem, and I have invited them on many occasions to consider it and to produce a scheme which they think would be workable. I therefore want to assure hon. Members who have spoken that this will remain very much in our minds, and when the time comes when we can consider revising our policy, I can assure the House that we shall do it immediately.

Would the hon. Lady deal with one point which arises out of the reply which she gave to a Question a couple of days ago? She indicated that the Ministry were discussing with the Committee on Milk Distribution the possibility of unscrambling, as it is called, the present rationalisation scheme. Is she bearing in mind, in connection with the matter we have just been debating, that the effect would be to increase processing and distribution wastage, and that while there would be a bigger quantity available, it would put off a little further her hopes of finding a little extra for the old age pensioners and would so increase the retail price of milk that many old age pensioners would not be able to afford their present ration, let alone an increased one?

We should not think of introducing a scheme which would bring about the things the hon. Member anticipates. What the House has been rather anxious about is that the housewife should be given another choice. We have not yet decided just what form our announcement will take and whether we shall accept the recommendations, but I can assure hon. Members that the matter will shortly be dealt with.