I beg to move, in page 2, line 32, to leave out "to which this section applies," and to insert "within the ironstone district."

I should like to say at the start, to reassure hon. Members who may have noticed that there are a large number of Amendments on the Order Paper, that most of them, including this one, are designed to carry out agreements reached in Standing Committee upstairs. This Amendment is designed to enable us to permit the ironstone district as defined in this Bill later to be amended or extended by appropriate action.

I beg to move, in page 20, line 24, at the end, to insert:

(5) Regulations made by virtue of this section may apply to any minerals belonging to His Majesty in right of the Duchy of Lancaster, or to the Duchy of Cornwall, in respect of which arrangements under subsection (2) of section eighty-eight of the principal Act are in force; and references in this section to development charge shall be construed as including references to sums payable in pursuance of such arrangements in substitution for development charge.

This Amendment is to enable certain minerals belonging to the Duchy of Lancaster or to the Duchy of Cornwall to be covered by the near-ripe set-off arrangement. Similarly, the Amendment to be considered later, in page 21, line 20, will enable the Lands Tribunal, with the consent of the Duchies concerned, to modify rights in respect of certain of the minerals.

There is one question which I should like to ask about this matter. While seeing the desirability of amending Section 88 of the principal Act in the way which is to be enacted by this Bill, I am not quite clear of its necessity unless the Duchies do themselves develop minerals. We are here bringing them within the scope of Clause 26, which applies to minerals owned by developers or land offered for development on the appointed day, and it would appear to me, although perhaps quite wrongly, that this would only have effect if the Duchies themselves develop or are likely to develop minerals.

They own minerals, in any case, and may be mineral developers.

I beg to move, in page 23, line 2, at the end, to insert:

"and for the reconstruction and maintenance of the original highway;

and any provision included in the order in accordance with subsection (4) of the said section forty-nine requiring payment to be made in respect of any cost or expenditure under the order may provide for the payment of a capital sum in respect of the estimated amount of that cost or expenditure."

This Amendment is designed to deal with the special problems which may arise when a highway or footpath has been temporarily stopped up or diverted in the course of mineral workings, and the first part of the Amendment enables an order made under the Clause to provide for the construction and maintenance of the restored highway. Where the cost of maintaining the restored highway exceeds the cost of maintaining it in its original state, it is only reasonable that the persons in whose interest the stopping up or diversion is carried out should contribute to the increased cost. It may be desirable to commute their contributions to a single capital payment, and the second part of the Amendment enables that to be done.

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

This Clause applies to what I said about the ironstone district. Provision is made in order that the area of the ironstone district, as defined in the terms of the Bill, may later on be exceeded if desired. It gives power to the Minister by order, subject to affirmative Resolution in both Houses, to extend the area of the ironstone district, and also enables him to vary a number of dates in the Bill which would be inappropriate if, at a later stage, an extension were made.

This is a new Clause which the Government are proposing in accordance with the undertaking which they kindly gave as the result of an Amendment moved by myself on behalf of the Opposition in the Standing Committee, and I should like to express our appreciation of the course which the Government have taken. We feel that it will import a certain amount of flexibility into the Bill, enabling it to be modified. Cases may arise in future that may make it necessary for the extension of the beneficial effects of this Bill to other parts of the country.

I should be the last person to desire to delay the proceedings, but those hon. Members who did not have the privilege of serving on the Standing Committee find these private arrangements a little mysterious, and I should like to ask the Minister if he could be a little more informative. I take it that the answer is that, if there are new sources of iron ore discovered in this country, this provision is made with the intention of covering those at present unknown sources?

indicated assent.

I beg to move. "That the Clause be read a Second time."

There was a considerable discussion in Committee on whether and how enforceable options upon mineral-bearing land should be brought within the scope of Clause 26. Nevertheless, the problem is one of such importance that I feel that it needs no apology for suggesting that there should be a further discussion on this occasion, not least, perhaps, for the benefit of my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, East (Sir H. Williams), who, unhappily, was absent from those discussions—

Not absent; not authorised to be present.

—of whose presence in those discussions we did not have the advantage.

I am going to assume, without the necessity of proof, that there are substantial advantages for a mineral operator in being included within the scope of Clause 26. I think I may assume that, because otherwise we should not have had that Clause before us at all—at the request, primarily, of mineral operators. It must therefore be a benefit and an advantage to existing mineral operators to be covered by this provision, and a disadvantage to those who have been excluded. We must, therefore, assume that those types of mineral extractor—particularly, those engaged in quarrying lime, sand and gravel—who so often work under the principle of enforceable options, would have their operations facilitated if they could be brought within the scope of Clause 26, as this new Clause seeks to do by an alteration which it produces in the principal Act.

The Government have so far found difficulty in acceding to the request of the Opposition that this extension of Clause 26 should be made, and they have found difficulty on three grounds, with each of which I should like to deal. The first objection raised is that, by making an enforceable option an interest for the purposes of the principal Act, a new class of claim upon the £300 million compensation fund will be created. The second reason is that, if one seeks to have enforceable options brought within the principal Act, it is very difficult to draw the line between that class and other classes, and thus the floodgates are thrown open. The third objection is that in any case, the owner of an enforceable option can get his way by the compulsory powers existing under the Mines (Working Facilities and Support) Act and Section 42 of the principal Act.

May I deal briefly with each of these objections? First, it is alleged that, by adding this new Clause to the Bill, we should create a new set of claimants for compensation. As a matter of fact, I believe that to be wrong. It is perfectly true that the owners of the enforceable option could not make a claim for the development value of their option, because that option is not an interest for the purposes of the principal Act, but the owners of the land have presumably made a claim for the development value in those minerals, so that there are already claims before the Central Land Board in respect of the minerals to which the enforceable option applies. It is true that these claims were made by the landowners, and not by the owners of the option. Nevertheless, there is a corner or a niche within the compensation scheme already for that class of development value, so that we are not making any addition to the existing scheme of the compensation fund.

The only difficulty is that we are seeking to apply the machinery of Clause 26 to a case where the interest in respect of which a claim was made belonged at the appointed day, not to the operator, but to the landowner. I do not, therefore, think that there is any unsurmountable difficulty about that. The Minister has already envisaged in the regulations which he has so helpfully presented to the House cases in which the development rights are owned at the appointed day by a different set of persons from the prospective operators.

The explanatory note on Regulation 3 states that minerals are admitted in cases where they were not owned or leased by a mineral undertaker on the appointed day, and it gives us instances of cases where operations had been temporarily suspended—of course, that is not comparable—and also cases where the owner was associated with the mineral undertaker. Therefore, we already have in the Regulations provision for a very similar type of case to the enforceable option type where the owner, not himself an extractor or prospective extractor, owned the mineral on the appointed day and made a claim in respect of it. I submit, therefore, that there will be no administrative or technical difficulty in bringing the enforcable option within the machinery of Clause 26.

I pass now from that first Government objection—which I believe to be groundless—to the second, namely, that we should be opening the doors to all sorts of enforceable options which could claim to be brought within the scope of the principal Act. That really is a very difficult argument to take seriously, because the whole purpose of this Bill is to isolate a particular class of claims and to give them special treatment. We are isolating the owners and lessees of mineral-bearing land from all other types of owners and lessees by this very Bill. No one objected to the Bill on the ground that if we gave this treatment to mineral owners we should have other sorts of owners coming along for comparable Bills. It is equally difficult to argue that if we extend it to cover enforceable options in minerals, we shall have claims put forward by other sorts of enforceable options. It is easy to isolate the one case from the other, and we are doing it in other circumstances in this Bill. Therefore, I cannot believe that the Government attach much weight to this difficulty of keeping the floodgates shut.

Finally, we were assured that the owners of options would find no difficulty eventually in being able to carry on their operations on land to which the options apply, because they could get compulsory powers of purchase or lease and could have the terms of their agreements compulsorily modified by the existing machinery. I accept that that is so, but I would ask the House whether it is desirable to provide for a set of contingencies by means of the compulsory machinery of the Lands Tribunal and the High Court under the 1923 Act as amended, instead of doing it by the machinery of this Bill. With what sort of firms are we dealing? They are mostly smallish firms operating in rural areas who, for the most part, have these agreements and options with the local farmers and small landowners. I want, if I may, to read to the Committee one paragraph from a letter I have received from a typical developer of this type, which shows how he thinks the use of these compulsory powers would react in the neighbourhood in which he operates. It says:

"We are a rural industry and have a 'country outlook.' We make arrangements with our neighbours that the business tycoon would describe as naive. In a small community, often only a village, there would be uproar and everyone would take sides if we used the processes of law to acquire another's land at less than we had agreed to pay for it. In most cases we would refuse to do it, being reluctant to 'pull a fast one' on a man we have known and liked, and probably worked and played with all our life. Ergo, the price of our products will rise."

Let us assume that these compulsory powers, if used, are adequate to secure for the owners of these options all the benefits which they would receive under Clause 26 were they within its scope. Is that really the right procedure for us to force upon the operator? After all, the same argument applies exactly to the owners and leaseholders already covered by Clause 26. Why do not we say to them, "It is all right. You need not worry about Clause 26 and these arrangements which have been so carefully negotiated. You could get just the same advantages by going to the High Court or to the Lands Tribunal under the 1923 and 1947 Acts."

The reason we have this Bill is that we know perfectly well that it would be fantastically inconvenient to use the compulsory machinery in order to achieve the same effects as we are getting here by the set-off process. I urge the Government to consider once again whether they cannot extend the machinery of Clause 26 to cover enforceable options.

As Members of the Standing Committee will remember, we had a considerable discussion of this point in Committee, and I am afraid that, although this Clause is in a little different form from that moved in Committee, I still find it impossible to accept it, and I very much hope that the hon. Gentleman will not press it. The arguments against it are several. Perhaps the most important is that if this Clause were accepted, it would create a new class of preferred participants under the £300 million fund.

We have already been told from time to time that that sum is too little—I do not accept that—for the total claims. We have also been told by some of our critics that within the £300 million fund there are already too many preferred classes, and that therefore the ordinary claimant is going to get too little. In so far as these arguments have force, it is clearly undesirable and inequitable to include yet one more class of preferred claimants, and that is what this Clause would do. That is the first argument against it.

In the second place, although the new Clause no longer requires it to be necessary for the holders of mineral options to submit claims, as did the proposal put forward in Committee, yet it is still true that there would be a new block of claims coming forward. That would further trouble the time-table which, as I explained at an earlier stage, we are very anxious to maintain so that the payments may be completed by mid-1953, the end of the five-year period laid down.

But surely claims have been made in time already in respect of these minerals by the owners and not by the prospective operators?

I appreciate that in this one respect there is some saving in the pressure on the time-table, but it is still true that a great quantity of these claims will be coming forward. That will mean still further delay, and a still further likelihood of our not being able to complete the operation by the due date. That argument has been diminished, but not entirely done away with by the new form of the Clause. There are further arguments against it which the hon. Member will have heard, but which I will re-state as the matter is now before a Committee of the whole House. There are many kinds of options, and I do not think it equitable to pick out mineral options for special treatment. There are also options in regard to building land. These are not brought into this and I do not think we can equitably distinguish here.

11.30 a.

Finally, the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) accepted, I was glad to hear, the proposition I made that a person affected would be able to take a series of alternative actions to safeguard his interests. He could negotiate through the terms of his lease in view of his liability for development charge. He could apply for compulsory purchase by the Central Land Board or by the local authority, or he could apply for a grant of compulsory rights. These are the three courses open to him. I think I informed the Standing Committee, and I now inform this Committee, that in fact the Central Land Board have assured me they would be prepared to consider their powers of compulsory purchase under Section 43 of the principal Act in a case of this kind. Therefore I think the principal interests of the option holders concerned are protected, and I hope that this new Clause will not be pressed.

I want to reply to one point. I fully understand the difficulties of the situation. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), who has been so very helpful to us in the Standing Committee and has paid so much attention to the matter, has put a strong case which I think in equity it is very difficult to overturn.

The Minister answered it, in effect, by saying that his own Act made it difficult for him to do justice to these people. He said that if we add to the number of prior claims, we shall damage the interests of the deferred stock holders, as it were, in this £300 million. On the other hand, we on this side of the Committee are not responsible for setting a limit of £300 million and, whatever is the fair sum of compensation, it ought to be paid. One cannot say in advance that one is not going to pay more than £300 million, because one does not know whether it is the right sum. While I appreciate the Minister's case, I suggest that the difficulty arises perhaps not so much from his own action as from that of Lord Silkin, who is no longer with us.

I want to refer to what the Minister has said with regard to the point put from this side of the Committee on the question of the undesirability of extending preferred claims. That, of course, has been the argument from this side of the Committee dating back to debates on what is now the Town and Country Planning Act, during the Session of 1947. If the advice which was tendered from this side of the Committee had been taken, the difficulty would not have arisen.

What was said was that where there were these cases for exemption they should be treated as cases for exemption and excluded from liability to development charge instead of being taken care of by being given a preferred claim on the fund. If that course had been taken by the Chancellor—[HON. MEMBERS: "Not Chancellor."] I beg pardon. I must not say that evil associations corrupt the memory. If that course had been taken, it would not now be open to the Minister to make this point.

The other point is that of the alternative courses mentioned by the Minister as being open to the option holders. I think they would be unwise to count too highly at any rate on some of those courses. It may well be that on application to the High Court under the 1923 Act there would be some comfort. But they certainly would be unwise to build much on the activities of the Central Land Board under Section 43, because happily to date the Central Land Board have limited their activities under what many people in this country think to be powers that should never have been conferred upon them at all. Therefore, I do not think that is really more than a token right; at least, I hope it is not.

If the Minister were really anxious to meet the position on the point we have thought it again necessary to raise, I think he would find a solution to it by a study of draft Regulation No. 3, which he himself drafted and laid before the House for information. The effect of that Regulation is to give very wide discretion to the Central Land Board to enable them to have regard to the actual circumstances of the case. They are empowered to treat as the owner or lessee of the land persons other than those who are the actual quarriers.

It is possible, for example, for a director of a company to hold the land himself, and if he can satisfy the Central Land Board that he holds the land to enable the quarry or mining company with which he is concerned to have it as a reserve, it can be treated at the discretion of the Central Land Board as land which falls within the beneficent effect of Clause 26. Even in the case of a parallel agreement, that can be taken into account; and that shows how far the Government have thought it necessary or wise to trust to the discretion of the Central Land Board.

If the Minister will consider this matter between now and the time when the Bill goes to another place, he will find that within the general structure of the Regulation he has submitted to us there might be a way of dealing with the hard cases which I think undoubtedly exist. In asking that these cases shall be considered, we are not in the least desirous of opening the door to cases which are not reasonable.

I never want to refuse to look at a thing again, even if I have looked at it several times already, as I have sought to do in this case. I gather that the hon. Member for The High Peak (Mr. Molson) now thinks there might be some amendment of the Regulations; that is, he thinks that if this new Clause is not pressed I might be able to find some way of so modifying Regulation No. 3 as to give, if not all, at any rate part of what is sought in the argument for the new Clause. If that is the proposal, I undertake to do so, without any commitment, but I see difficulties with the particular proposition in the new Clause.

I am inclined to think that, speaking on the spur of the moment, it would be necessary for the Act to be slightly widened to give the Minister power to include enforceable options in his Regulations. But the operative clause would be the Regulation which would give discretion to the Central Land Board to treat as being included within the beneficent effect of Clause 26 cases which they were satisfied it would be fair and equitable to include

That is a new one on me. I can only undertake to look at it, and that I will do.

The difficulty about this idea is that an enforceable option is, of course, not an interest in land, because no one need exercise an option. I have yet to hear from those interested in this new Clause and in similar Amendments moved in the Standing Committee what the position would be when the option was not enforced and yet the man had taken rights under Clause 26 of this Bill while it was still an option.

I think the exchange which has just taken place between the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for The High Peak (Mr. Molson) may well have taken us a good step further forward. I am inclined to agree with my hon. Friend that the possibility exists that something of what we have in mind could be achieved without amendment of the principal Act. I think that is supported by the fact that undoubtedly claims, by whomsoever made, for the development value of these minerals should have been made already under the principal Act, albeit by the owner on the appointed day. It may, therefore, be possible for the Minister to find some method of extending Regulation 3 to meet the arguments advanced from this side of the Committee, the force of which may perhaps have partially presented itself to his own mind. In view of the remarks which he has made, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

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

This Clause is designed to enable a new town development corporation to be treated as a local authority for the purpose of Clause 14. Under the Bill as it stands the restoration of any work on ironstone land within the designated area of any new town can be carried out by the local authority as owners or by means of arrangements entered into by the local authority under Clause 14.

This Clause will have application only to one new town, namely, Corby new town. I think it is felt by all, including the local authority, that it would be more convenient to let the new town corporation exercise these powers within the area. As I understand, the relations between the Corby New Town Corporation and the local authority are very friendly, and I do not think there would be any difficulty there. This is one of the worst examples of derelict ironstone areas that I have ever seen.

I fully understand what is in the mind of the Minister and why he is seeking to do this, but I do not like the principle that an autocratically appointed body should have the powers of a democratically elected council. I am a firm believer in the rights of the individual, and if we allow Corby to do this we may later have another Bill in which the powers of a local authority are conferred upon another new town corporation, and this present case will be quoted as a precedent. The precautionary words of the Minister this morning may not be remembered, because when one is considering Bills one does not always look at HANSARD. I wish to put on record my protest against a Clause which I think is dangerous in principle.

I think the hon. Member for Croydon, East (Sir H. Williams) is really objecting to the whole of the New Towns Act, and that he happens to have taken one particular instance of the growth of the powers of a development corporation as a peg upon which to hang a more sweeping form of difficulty.

I am very glad indeed that this new Clause is before us. As the Minister rightly said, the ground all around Corby and within the area of the new town has been largely worked for iron ore, and the spectacle is at present both striking and rather disgusting. The risk is that Corby will be imprisoned within a ring of these workings unless the provisions of this Bill are fully used, as I hope and expect they will be, by way of restoration.

It is not merely a question of the ground around the town. The iron ore workings come right up alongside the streets and it is exceedingly urgent that they should be dealt with. Moreover, I entirely agree that the development corporation ought to have the powers to do this, for it is their business to plan the new town of Corby, to put their own plans into operation, and for that purpose they will clearly need the powers given to a local authority under Clause 14.

I was very glad to hear the Minister say—and I entirely agree with him—that there is in this case likely to be little or no difficulty because the relations between the development corporation and the local authority are exceedingly good. Perhaps my right hon. Friend will allow me to say that he can take a little credit for that himself because of the very wise and sensible appointments that were made to the development corporation where regard was had to the need for local government experience, and regard also was had to the very useful and extensive work already done in a somewhat similar respect by the urban district council itself.

I beg to move, in page 3, line 44, at the end, to insert:

(3) For the purposes of this section and of the said Second Schedule, no account shall be taken of development value attributable to the prospect of developing land by winning and working ironstone which immediately before the fifteenth day of February, nineteen hundred and fifty-one, was subject to a full restoring lease.

This is the first of a group of Amendments consequential on a discussion we had in Committee when an Amendment was made to the Third Schedule. I will put the matter as simply as I can for the benefit of anyone who was not present during the Committee discussions.

The general form of the lease which we have found in this area contains the provision for a payment in lieu of restoration. Messrs. Stewarts and Lloyds—I am speaking objectively and I am not criticising anyone—have a standard form in which a payment in lieu may be offered in place of restoration, and in many cases it is found that the payments in lieu have not been at all sufficient to restore the land. That is not always so, but it has been so in many cases. That has been one of the weaknesses of these arrangements from the point of view of the public interest.

It has been represented to me that there are quite a number of small land owners who have insisted upon full restoration covenants without any payment in lieu as an alternative, and it has also been represented to me that they will get a lesser royalty than they would have got had that covenant not been inserted. There are comparatively few of them. I was asked to consider their case sympathetically. I have done so, and since they are few I think there is a case to exempt them from contributions where a full restoration covenant without an alternative payment in lieu is provided for. The object of this group of Amendments is so to exempt them.

We on this side of the House welcome this small concession made by the Minister. I am not sure that I fully agreed with the facts as he put them forward. In the past this provision covered a fairly wide number of landowners. It was, of course, the general practice in the past that there should be full restoration, although in many of the leases there was a clause to the effect that money payments could be made in lieu of full restoration. I think it would put the matter in a more correct focus if we accept the fact that that was the standard practice.

I personally think it was to be deplored that the alternative practice crept in. I am by no means happy about the fact that advantage was taken of that clause in the lease, but I understand the circumstances. In the first place, it was mostly done during the bad times of farming, and mostly by what were called owner-occupiers. It was no reflection on them that they needed the money at that time to carry on their livelihood. Nevertheless, it brought about an unsatisfactory state of affairs.

The Minister has mentioned that a body of landowners insisted on full restoration and took a lower royalty as a result of that clause in their lease, and in their case I feel that some measure of justice is being done here. I support the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 4, line 7, at the end, to insert:

"and subsection (2) of section sixty-five of that Act (which prescribes the date on which stock is to be issued in respect of such payments) shall have effect as if the reference therein to the amount of any payment required by that section to be satisfied by the issue of stock included a reference to the amount of any contribution to be made under this section out of such a payment."

This Amendment is linked with some others later on the Order Paper and the effect is that a payment from the £300 million need not be made until the slice to be taken off the Ironstone Restoration Fund has been obtained. The reason is that unless we can make a provision of this sort it might be necessary to make a payment from the fund without any deduction and then to take steps to recover the slice. By this means, through the Amendment, we simplify the procedure.

I beg to move, in page 4, line 32, to leave out subsection (1), and to insert:

(1) This section applies to ironstone to which regulations made by virtue of section twenty-six of this Act apply, not being ironstone which immediately before the fifteenth day of February, nineteen hundred and fifty-one, was subject to a full restoring lease.

This Amendment is consequential on the Amendment concerning the exemption of certain royalty owners.

I beg to move, in page 6, line 19, to leave out "or," and to insert "and."

This Amendment is somewhat more than a mere verbal drafting Amendment. I believe it has some point of substance although, upon further study, I am inclined to think that for its completeness it would be necessary to leave out the word "for" in line 20. Perhaps I may put the point as I see it to the Minister for consideration in case it is found necessary to make an alteration at a later stage.

Subsection (1) of the Clause entitles an operator who does certain work to receive certain payments. Subsection (2) explains that the payments are the difference between the cost of the work and the average rate. Subsection (3) defines the average rate. The work referred to in subsection (1) is described disjunctively as either work for levelling or work for respreading. For the moment I will ignore the further words about restoring surface fertility.

The payment in subsection (2) is admittedly made in respect of work which is carried out, and no other, so that if the work carried out was merely levelling presumably the payment would be made only in respect of the cost of levelling. But when we come to subsection (3), there are not two average rates—one for the average cost of levelling and the other for the average cost of respreading the surface soil—but a single composite average rate for both operations considered as one operation.

It is impossible, therefore, to have "and" in line 38, which results in a single average rate and the word "or" in line 19 which results in two alternative and separate operations. If I am correct in that contention it would be necessary to leave out the word "for" in line 20 so that "otherwise restoring fertility" becomes an alternative to "re-spreading of surface soil" and not, as it stands at present, an alternative to either of the two previously-mentioned operations. I hope what I have said will be sufficient to make the point clear, right or wrong, so that it can be considered at a later stage.

I beg to second the Amendment.

As at present advised, I do not see the necessity for this Amendment. The effect of it would be to limit payments out of the fund to cases where the planning permission required both levelling and top-soiling or some other treatment for ensuring fertility. But there will be cases in which we shall not need these matters of technical handling. I do not want to seek, out of my amateur and second-hand knowledge, to give a long address about draglines, shovels, excavators, and so on. The point is that there will be some cases where we shall do top soiling and there will be some cases where we shall not. The effect of this Amendment would be to limit payments to where we required both levelling and top soiling or some other treatment, but there may be cases in which we require only one of those operations. I should have thought that we ought therefore to leave the Clause in its present form, otherwise there will be excluded cases which I should have thought we would wish to see included.

I do not wish to detain the House over this, although I think that there is a point which perhaps the Minister has not apprehended, namely, that he has only one average rate, and that average rate is for two operations to be considered as one. He will find that if levelling only is carried out, he has no average rate for levelling only with which he can compare the cost incurred by the actual operator in the levelling. Having said that, and wishing to leave it for later consideration, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 6, line 39, at the end to insert:

"or otherwise restoring fertility thereto."

At an earlier stage the Government accepted an Amendment to insert in line 20 the alternative "otherwise restoring fertility" to the process of re-spreading surface soil. This Amendment appears to be consequential, so that the same alternative is added at the end of subsection (3).

I beg to second the Amendment.

We did discuss this in Committee, when I accepted similar words to this in subsection (1), as the hon. Gentleman has reminded us. However, I do not myself see why it is necessary to do the same in subsection (3). I think the words are appropriate in the place where I have accepted them, namely, in subsection (1), because there the cost is estimated by reference to the work which is required to be done with permission. In subsection (3) that is not so. There, a rate has to be fixed by reference to notional circumstances, and the Minister can only do that if the facts on which he has to estimate the average rate are quite clear.

The hon. Gentleman is generally a great pursuer of ambiguities, but here I think that he introduces an ambiguity, because one can readily estimate the cost of re-spreading surface soil; that is a clear-cut job. But to estimate "otherwise restoring fertility" is a much more general conception. We have had some discussion about methods, but it is very difficult indeed to estimate that with precision in advance. It must evidently vary from case to case. I should have thought that on this occasion the hon. Gentleman's Amendment did not, as his Amendments are generally designed to do, clarify the position but did the reverse.

I am obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for his explanation, and I therefore beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I am obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for proposing this Amendment, which arises out of something said in Committee. It avoids a possible ambiguity, that variations under Clause 9 might be excluded from treatment under Clause 8.

Mr. Dalton.

There is an Amendment on the Order Paper, Sir, in the name of the right hon. Member for Blackburn, West (Mr. Assheton), to leave out Clause 12.

I have not selected that.

I gathered that you have not selected my Amendment, Sir, which I had considered the most important of the day.

I am sorry about that, but a similar Amendment was negatived in Committee. After all, its point can be raised on Third Reading.

At that stage it is rather late to appraise the House of the difficulties. We can raise it then, of course, although we shall be unable to have the matter altered.

A decision was taken on this in Committee, and on the Report stage we very rarely take Amendments to leave out a whole Clause.

Can we have a little guidance upon that, Mr. Speaker? I thought the idea of the Report stage was so that matters of great importance could be reconsidered by the House when the Bill came back to it from being considered in Committee upstairs. Clause 12 is an extremely important Clause, dealing with the whole basis of the assessment of development charges. Here, in this small Bill, a fundamental change is made in the principles of the assessment of development charges laid down in the principal Act of 1947.

I am sorry about that, but I can assure the hon. Gentleman that when I had my conference this decision was not taken without very careful consideration, and I decided not to call the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 11, line 16, to leave out from "levelling," to "any," in line 17.

This is substantially a drafting Amendment, but perhaps I should just add a word or two about it. In Committee the fear was expressed that the subsection as drafted might exclude work carried out for the purpose of rendering land suitable for a use not similar to agriculture or afforestation. For example, it might be possible for a building to be put up This Amendment makes it clear that the provisions of the subsection include work for preparing worked ironstone land for any use whatsoever.

As the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Michison) has left the Chamber, it falls to me to thank the Minister for making this change, as it was an incidental observation of mine which drew the hon. and learned Gentleman's attention to the fact that as the Bill stands the words "other use" interpreted not as ejusdem generis might be unduly restrictive.

I beg to move, in page 11, line 41, after "out," to insert:

"or make arrangements for the carrying out of."

This cures a small drafting defect in subsection (5). The Clause already prohibits a local authority from carrying out works outside its area unless the local authority for the other area consents. The same limitation is obviously needed before an authority can make arrangements for another person, whether it be a landowner or anybody else, to work outside the area of the authority. This Amendment inserts such a limitation.

I beg to move, in page 13, line 3, at the beginning, to insert:

"Where an operator carries out on or in relation to worked ironstone land any such works as are authorised by the said section four- teen to be carried out by a local authority (not being such work as is mentioned in subsection (1) of section seven of this Act), then."

There are consequential drafting Amendments following this Amendment. The intention here is to enable the Minister to pay out of the Ironstone Restoration Fund for work carried out by an operator beyond the main work of levelling and top soiling. For example, a screen of trees may be planted, or other work of that kind, or any of the things a local authority could do under Clause 14. In my view, there is no reason why payment should not be made from the Fund for such work.

I beg to move, in page 14, line 13, to leave out from "district," to "it," in line 14.

This is an exploratory Amendment. We cannot quite see the purpose of including the words which we propose to leave out, and perhaps the Minister will give us a short explanation.

I beg to second the Amendment.

If this Amendment were inserted the effect would be that the Minister of Agriculture would no longer have to consider whether worked ironstone land was capable of being brought into productive agricultural use before operating the provisions of the Clause. I am not clear what is the intention of the Amendment. Agricultural land is defined in the Agricultural Act, 1947, and includes land which, in the opinion of the Minister, ought to be brought into use for agriculture. I would have thought that it was desirable to leave the Minister's powers in that respect unimpaired so far as this Bill is concerned.

I am the Minister primarily responsible for the operation of the Act, but it was said in Committee, and I agree, that where matters require expert agricultural knowledge, it ought to be the Minister of Agriculture who takes the decision in consultation with me. I think that this Amendment will tend to diminish his duties in that respect.

I am relieved to hear the explanation which the Minister has given. There was a fear in the minds of some of us that this Clause might be used for other extravagant operations on potential agricultural land, but it now appears from the Minister's explanation that the effect of the words which have been moved to be left out is, in fact, restrictive and that it would require a prima facie case to be made that the land is potentially agricultural land before special steps could be taken.

In view of the Minister's explanation, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I beg to move in page 15, line 40, after "Fisheries," to insert:

"after consultation with any advisory committee designated by him for the purpose."

After what the Minister has said in reply to the last Amendment, I am satisfied that he intends to be careful in the administration of this Bill, and to ensure that while all suitable land is restored to agriculture, there shall not be any extravagant expenditure upon land which would not be worth restoring to that purpose. It is for that reason that we thought it desirable that the Minister of Agriculture should consult "any advisory committee designated by him for that purpose."

We have intentionally drafted the Amendment in a general way because it occurred to us that the Minister might find it convenient to consult the agricultural executive committee of the local county council in the matter. It was because a good deal of the land which has been used for ironstone working was not agricultural land before it was worked —in some cases it was under trees and in some cases more or less derelict—that we thought it would be wise for the Minister of Agriculture to consult some local people with an intimate knowledge of the agricultural problems of the area.

I beg to second the Amendment. This gives the Minister an opportunity to carry out an undertaking which he gave in Standing Committee. At that time he said:

"I think that we could get a panel which contained people with knowledge of this technical matter which could be brought to bear upon the particular point at issue and, of course, the National Farmers' Union would be represented on it. If an advisory panel on those lines, including persons representing the interests of farmers generally were acceptable, I would undertake, if the Amendment were withdrawn, to put down something accordingly on Report Stage."—[OFFictAL REPORT, Standing Committee A, 6th June, 1951; c. 156.]

It was in view of those words of the Minister that the Amendment was drawn in such wide and permissive terms which are already used elsewhere in the Bill.

I hope that the hon. Members who moved and seconded this Amendment may think that the Government Amendment which I shall move in a moment, in page 16, line 33, may meet their point.

I think that one of the difficulties of the form in which the Amendment has been put down is that, although my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture is very anxious in this matter to take advantage of appropriate advice, it is going rather far to require him to consult with an advisory committee in all cases covered here. I do not think that he should be required to do something, but I can give an assurance that, quite apart from any Amendment that may be moved to the Bill, he is most anxious in any doubtful cases that may arise to avail himself of competent advice. Would the mover of the Amendment be willing to withdraw it in order that we may consider the matter again on the. Amendment that I shall move?

I think that the general assurance of the Minister will prove satisfactory, particularly as there is a further Amendment to be moved on this point. We were concerned with this aspect of the general problem. As was said in Committee, there is a tendency to take the view that all restoration should take the form of providing these devastated areas with lush green fields, notwithstanding the fact that, in many cases, it will not be appropriate to do anything of the sort.

I understand that the general requirements of the Forestry Commission in Great Britain are such that considerable acreages will be required for afforestation, and in many ways it will be very much more to the purpose if this restored land is used in the first instance for afforestation rather than other agricultural land shall be taken over by the Forestry Commission for this purpose. It was because we were slightly concerned that there was an attitude of mind that all restoration should take the form of restoring to high productivity agricultural land that we moved this Amendment that there should be consultation with the Minister of Agriculture and with other authorities in regard to this question; but the Minister has given a general assurance on this matter, and no doubt we can explore the position further in regard to the succeeding Amendment.

With the permission of the House, may I say one or two words in reply to the Minister? I was puzzled to find that I had apparently overlooked the subsequent Government Amendment on this point. On looking at it again, I find the Amendment to which the right hon. Gentleman referred has reference to Clause 20 of the Bill which deals with the termination of tenancies, and I do not think it has a bearing upon the point which would have been covered by the present Amendment had it been accepted.

I am entirely satisfied with the verbal assurance that the right hon. Gentleman has given about the way in which the provisions of the Bill will be administered, and I think that he is probably right that the Minister of Agriculture should not be under an obligation to consult any advisory committee, since he will, in fact, inform himself of the best local opinion on the subject. That being so, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 16, line 33, at the end, to insert:

(6) Where the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries proposes to issue a certificate under subsection (1) of this section in the case of a tenant, he shall, in accordance with regulations made by that Minister under this section, afford to the tenant—

(a) an opportunity of making representations in writing against the proposal to that Minister;

(b) if the tenant so requires, an opportunity of being heard by a person or persons appointed for the purpose by that Minister, and consider any representations made by the tenant in accordance with the regulations, and any recommendations made by a person or persons appointed as aforesaid for the purpose of hearing the tenant.

I propose to say a word or two about this Amendment although the subject has been mentioned on the previous Amendment. This Amendment fulfils the undertaking which I gave during the Committee stage. What I offered in Committee to consider was what could be done to meet the criticism that the Bill gave the tenant no right of appeal against the decision of the Minister of Agriculture. It was then suggested, as has been recalled this morning, that something in the nature of an advisory panel might be appropriate, bearing in mind that the restoration of ironstone land was a rather cumbersome undertaking and was a special study understood by rather few people. It was for that reason that we rejected the idea that the Lands Tribunal would be a suitable body.

I have had consultations with my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, and he was very sympathetic to the object which hon. Members had in mind in Committee. He will offer a tenant an opportunity to make written representations against the termination of the tenancy, or if the tenant prefers being heard by a body of persons appointed by my right hon. Friend for that particular purpose, he would be quite prepared to consider what such a body had to say, but he could not be bound by it. In the last resort he must exercise his own discretion.

With regard to the arrangements for such persons to hear the representations which the tenant may wish to make, my right hon. Friend is prepared to consult appropriate agricultural organisations like the National Farmers' Union to endeavour to secure that the selected persons include some who have expert knowledge of this particular restoration problem in the area. I would hope that this explanation, together with the terms of the Amendment, remove any fear that hon. Members may have that the tenant will not get a proper hearing in any case of that sort.

On the whole, and speaking entirely for myself, I prefer the procedure suggested by the right hon. Gentleman to that under the preceding Amendment, because administratively speaking it is difficult, I imagine, to the point of impossibility for advisory committees which are constituted by the appointment of part-time persons to give detailed attention to individual cases. I am not very well convinced that the reference to advisory committees is entirely helpful in these matters.

I am very glad that the Minister is incorporating the provision he now proposes to incorporate to give the right of representation and of hearing. As the House will appreciate, this procedure also gives rise to difficulties in practice, and raises some rather fundamental problems on what is known as administrative law, the difficulty being, of course, that to some extent the Minister must be the judge in his own case. I agree with what the right hon. Gentleman has said that since, in effect, these decisions are quasi-judicial and retain their administrative aspect, it is probably impossible by legislation to ensure that the Minister is bound by the report of the tribunal, body, inspector, commissioners, or persons to whom such representations are made and before whom they are heard and argued.

Nevertheless, under the procedure as contemplated and as it will be formulated in the Regulations, if the Minister pursues the ordinary traditional path in these matters, there will be a hearing, evidence, argument and cross-examination. I trust that the Minister will ensure that there is no effort at these hearings to exclude cross-examination, which is very valuable in these matters. However, there will not, of course, as far as the aggrieved person is concerned, be anything to link up the decision or report of the tribunal hearing the matter with the ultimate decision of the Minister of Agriculture.

Having conceded that it is impossible to legislate that the Minister shall be bound by the decision, could we not at least agree on a half-way stage? Could the Minister not consider inserting in the Regulations a provision that there should be access to the report or decision of the people who hear the actual representations? If the thing follows its customary form, what happens is that there will be a reserved judgment at the actual hearing, and a written report will be presented to the Minister or whoever undertakes the functions on his behalf within the Ministry. Then the decision will be made, and the aggrieved person will not know what relation that decision bears to the impression formed and the conclusions come to by the person or persons who hear the evidence, see the witnesses and hear the arguments.

This, in my view, is a defect in the whole process of administrative law running through all these Acts, and, as this is a new provision, I ask the Minister whether sympathetic consideration cannot be given to going that far at least to provide for the availability to the interested parties of the report of the person or persons who actually hear the proceedings. I do not think it is an unreasonable request. I do not suggest that the Minister must be bound by the report, but I submit that it would remove the feeling in such cases that the decision may not have followed the report, and that it may have deviated from it for reasons which are not known to the parties. I should be very glad if the Minister could give an assurance that consideration is given to that point in the framing of the Regulations, for I consider it to be a very important aspect of administrative law.

I am not going to take up much time except to warn my right hon. Friend—I doubt if he really needs a warning—that what we have just heard was an attractive but an insidious and exceedingly far-reaching suggestion. The hon. Member for Hertford (Mr. Walker-Smith) knows perfectly well that there are many cases in our legislation of public inquiries of various sorts and kinds the lines of which, for good or ill, are pretty well established by now. What is here proposed is to apply those lines to this case. I have always felt that the difficulty is that in the last resort the Minister has the responsibility for the decision. It is an administrative or political one. He makes his decision, and the kind of plea that is put forward by the hon. Member is really subject to the fallacy that the Minister is making some form of judicial decision.

I expressly refrained from making that point. I said that even at the highest he could only be acting in a quasi-judicial capacity, and for that reason I could not suggest that the Minister should be bound by the decision of the Tribunal. I think that in all fairness the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) should remember that.

I did not for a minute suggest that the hon. Member used that language. Let me put it this way: he skirted all round the fallacy without lifting up the skirts. He made matters worse by describing this person or these persons as a tribunal. That was going a bit too far, and I think that this point is perfectly well known to everyone. I only hope that in a matter with which I am personally as a Member very much concerned, we shall not take this opportunity of adopting the rather remarkable and, I think, very doubtful step which has been suggested.

I cannot undertake that we could accept the proposal in this case, which is, after all, a very small case, whereas the principle to which the hon. Member objects covers a very wide field, including all the inquiries under the 1947 Act. I do not think that on this light peg we could with advantage hang so heavy a garment.

In Committee I moved an Amendment asking for the Agricultural Lands Tribunal to be the body to deal with these cases, and I recognise that the right hon. Gentleman has offered something here as a sort of halfway house. My hon. Friend has, of course, drawn attention to the weakness of the tenants' position in these cases. That really was the point with which we were concerned in Committee: the giving of a reasonable assurance.

We have to recognise that this is a very special form of tenancy. The farmer who accepts a tenancy in these circumstances knows that it is a very special form of tenancy, in which he is bound to be under the supervision of the Minister, because he is taking part in the process of restoration. Interested as we are, on the one hand, in seeing that the land is adequately restored and, on the other hand, that the tenant has a reasonably fair deal, we have to keep the right balance between the two interests. Quite clearly, the tenant cannot have the same full rights as a tenant would have in the ordinary way. I recognise that, and I am not, therefore, prepared to go quite as far as my hon. Friend in asking for the assurances that have been asked of the Minister.

I was glad to hear that m setting up this body, which would be used to advise the Minister and to hear the tenant, the Minister proposed to consult farming interests. That would help to give confidence. The practical point is that unless there is machinery which gives a reasonable assurance to the tenant, there is obviously a danger that farmers will not be prepared to accept the tenancy of these lands; so much will depend on the operation of the arrangement in practice. In the circumstances, the Minister has made a reasonable offer. Its effectiveness will, of course, depend on the sympathy with which it is operated in practice, and I trust that when it is operated it will be done in the right spirit.

I beg to move, in page 17, line 27, to leave out paragraph (c).

The paragraph which it is proposed to leave out substitutes, in the case of worked ironstone land, the acquisition procedure of the War Damaged Sites Act, 1949, for the generally applicable authorisation procedure of the Acquisition of Land (Authorisation Procedure) Act, 1946. In Committee, the objections which were raised to this more summary and expeditious procedure were to a very slight extent met by the Minister in that he gave what amounted almost to an undertaking that, in practice, his right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture would allow an extra 14 days' grace. Nevertheless, upon further consideration it seems that the House is making a mistake in leaving this provision in the Bill at all.

The grounds which have been given for substituting the 1949 procedure for the 1946 procedure are that in certain cases the 1946 procedure has been found to involve undue delay. There is, perhaps, an additional reason that in the case of worked ironstone land the ascertainment of present ownership may not always be as easy as in the case of other land coming up for acquisition.

My contention is that if those reasons are valid in this case, where there really cannot be any extraordinary degree of urgency, however much we may wish to get on with the job, they are going to be valid in almost any other case for compulsory acquisition that can possibly be imagined; and that by inserting this obscure paragraph in a comparatively obscure Bill, we are creating a precedent which will be invoked in every successive future case where compulsory acquisition powers are given in a Bill. Therefore, it behoves us very carefully to consider the justification of what we are doing before we retain this paragraph in the Bill.

The Acquisition of Land (Authorisation Procedure) Act, 1946, which was intended to be a new code for the procedure of authorisation where there was to be compulsory acquisition, was a Bill which went through all the normal stages in both Houses and was considered in great detail and with great care. If it is now the Government's opinion that that procedure is unsatisfactory and insufficiently expeditious, they ought to justify it to Parliament and to the country by producing an amendment of the principal Act of 1946.

The Government ought not to insert the thin end of the wedge in the Mineral Workings Bill, where no one will notice it, by saying, "In this case we will use the war damaged sites procedure." We know perfectly well what will happen. This paragraph will be turned to in future. We shall be told that there was no objection to it in the case of worked ironstone land. The Government will say, "A precedent exists, therefore we are going to do the same in the next case, and the next and the next."

The War Damaged Sites Act was really in a special category, and not the type of case which ought to afford a precedent either for the acquisition now in question or for any other kind of compulsory acquisition. It was to deal with bomb damaged sites, particularly in regard to the imminence of the Festival of Britain. That is to say, it was designed to deal ex hypothesi with sites of which the ownership was likely to be difficult to ascertain, which had in many cases been abandoned by their owners for almost a decade and where special difficulties in the acquisition procedure were to be apprehended. In the second place, it dealt ex hypothesi with an acquisition which had to be completed within a definite and relatively short period of time.

There is no justification in those conditions for repeating the same procedure in the present Bill. We have a general code for the acquisition of land. It applies even where we make it for such urgent purposes as housing, for highways, and for any of the many more urgent purposes than are envisaged in the Bill. We ought to adhere to that procedure whenever there is to be compulsory acquisition, and if the Government do not like the procedure in general they ought to tell the House so and present an amending Bill.

I beg to second the Amendment.

The Amendment and the paragraph which it seeks to delete are concerned with the correct procedure in respect of compulsory hiring of land. Perhaps it would be right to remind the House as a background to this question, that compulsory hiring of land, as against compulsory acquisition, does not have very deep roots in the constitutional customs of the country.

I do not, of course, refer to powers of requisitioning in war-time, which have very ancient roots. Apart from that, until comparatively recently the only provisions for the compulsory hiring of land were contained in the Defence Acts in respect of emergencies or apprehended emergencies. The only occasions on which compulsory hiring could take place were emergency and short-term occasions, there was no elaborate procedure for objections, representations and the like.

With the coming of the Agriculture Act, 1947, which is referred to in this Clause, the position became rather different because that Act empowers compulsory hiring up to 35 years. Because that is so, and because that is long-term and non-emergency hiring, the Agriculture Act very properly assimilated the procedure of the Acquisition of Land (Authorisation Procedure) Act, 1946, to which my hon. Friend has just referred, which is contained in Section 93 (1, a and b) of the Agriculture Act.

The Clause to which this Amendment relates seeks to deviate from that procedure and to follow instead the procedure of the War Damaged Sites Act, 1949. The difference, briefly, between these two procedures is that whereas under the First Schedule of the 1946 Act—which I hasten to say is far from perfect; a few moments ago, in the discussion on another Amendment I gave some of the reasons why it is not—there is at least provision for written representations and objections, right of hearing and presentation of arguments, etc., there is none of that in the War Damaged Sites Act procedure. It gives rise merely to the right of written representations but to no right of hearing.

When the War Damaged Sites Act was debated in this House in the last Parliament I ventured to point out, temperately and objectively, I hope, the difficulty that if that procedure were put in that Measure it would be prayed in aid before very long on quite unsuitable occasions. I regret to say that those temperate observations drew most explosive and eruptive rejoinders from the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan), who was then in charge of that Measure. Now that the right hon. Gentleman has deviated I suppose that the Government do not feel bound by the decisions to which he came in that case. But in any event the circumstances are different.

As my hon. Friend has pointed out, the defence for putting this curtailed procedure, with its denial of the right of hearing of the subject, into the War Damaged Sites Act was that the whole thing was to be over in a very short time, that speed was the essence, that it was virtually an emergency Measure and was not to last for very long. None of those considerations apply in this case. I am not sure, with respect to my hon. Friend, that he is not putting the case a little high when he says that this procedure will be followed in cases of compulsory acquisition. I do not think that there is any reasonable danger in that respect because there is a separate code in the case of acquisition.

But there is the very material danger that if long-term hiring has a procedure which is administratively more simple and, therefore, more tempting to the Government, there may be a tendency to insert in future Bills provisions for longterm compulsory hiring with the minimum rights to the owner and the subject instead of provisions which attract the more elaborate but fairer procedure of the 1946 Act. In those circumstances, I submit that this procedure is quite misconceived in this Clause, and that it would be proper to follow the procedure of the 1946 Act for what is non-emergency long-term hiring.

The hon. Member for Hertford (Mr. Walker-Smith) always makes a very attractive case, and he has done so on this occasion apart from the fact that the 1946 Act does not deal with the hiring of land, or at least my impression is that it does not. If that is so, and the 1946 Act does not deal with the question of the hiring of land, then according to my understanding of the hon. Member the major portion of the case he has made in seconding the Amendment really falls to the ground.

May I make the position clear? It is true, as the Parliamentary Secretary has just said, that the 1946 Act does not deal with the provision of a procedure for hiring. Where it is relevant is that in Section 93 (1, b) of the Agriculture Act, 1947, the procedure of the 1946 Act is assimilated for longterm agricultural compulsory hiring. That is how it becomes relevant, because the Clause with which we are now dealing, proposes to do away with that part of Agriculture Act for these purposes.

It ill becomes me, as a layman, to argue with such a distinguished lawyer as the hon. Member, particularly when he is dealing with legislation by cross-reference.

To deal with the position on a general basis, I would ask, first, what sort of land is it with which we are dealing? If there is any land that is analogous to war damaged sites, blitzed sites and even a battlefield, it is land that has been taken for mineral workings. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), quite rightly made reference to the case he made during the Committee stage, and he has made reference to war damaged sites being dealt with in the way they were because of the difficulty of finding owners who have moved away and that kind of situation.

That is quite corect, but only an hour or so ago his hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Fylde, South (Colonel Lancaster), who is very knowledgeable on these matters, pointed out that a great deal of the damage and trouble that has arisen in the case of ironstone workings has been due to the period when agriculture was in a very bad way, and when the landowner, the small landowner in particular, was up against it, being pressed by the banks, and when any offer of a little ready money was snatched with both hands. Many of those owners whom we criticise—and I have criticised them as violently as anyone else—were, as the hon. and gallant Member for Fylde, South said, small owners who took this extra money because they were in a very bad way, and the site was left in the way in which it has been.

The owners have very likely gone, there being no attraction to stay, and the site has been derelict for years. We are not dealing, under this blitzed sites arrangement, with the compulsory acquisition of land which is in use, on which someone is earning a living. We are dealing with land which has been left derelict for the past 30, 40 or perhaps 50 years. So it is necessary, perhaps even in the case of small plots of land required for gaining access to do work, or even to complete the job, to deal with it under this Bill.

It is true, as the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West, said, that during the Committee stage my right hon. Friend did say that there is some case in respect of the person who might be away on holiday and who, being given 14 days' notice, would not be back from holiday before that time had expired. My right hon. Friend promised to discuss the matter with the Minister of Agriculture. Those discussions have taken place, and, as the hon. Member knows, the regulations have to be made. It is the intention of the Minister of Agriculture to provide, in those regulations, 28 days for the submission of written evidence and 14 days' notice for the request for a personal hearing.

A personal hearing would be taken by one of the inspectors of the Ministry of Agriculture. When there is a request for a personal hearing the inspectors are not just waiting for the hearing to give them a job, but have to programme their work over a long time. It takes a week or two to get the information and make a decision. So the shorter period is given in the case where there is to be a personal hearing.

These regulations have not yet been made. They have to be made by the Minister of Agriculture who, as is the case with every other Minister dealing with regulations, is prepared to discuss with the interested parties the points arising. I suggest that the hon. Member should withdraw his Amendment. If the landowners have really important matters to raise the Minister of Agriculture will discuss them.

I wish to add my word to what has been said from this side of the House. It really is fantastic to use procedure of this kind for a purpose for which it was never designed. There cannot be that degree of urgency which necessitates operating 14 days' notice, which is what it amounts to, to acquire land which has been waiting for years to have anything done to it. It really is fantastic to ask the House to use procedure designed for something completely different. As I said in Committee, I have the strongest objection to the abuse of a power given for a certain purpose when it is applied in a case like this. I hope that from the point of view of intrinsic interest in the matter and of the credit of the Government the hon. Gentleman will think again before refusing to give way to us on this.

The Parliamentary Secretary made a proposal with regard to the regulations which the Minister of Agriculture is to make. I think he hoped that that would meet the points raised from this side of the House, but. I do not think I should feel quite satisfied with that.

I am very puzzled to know why the Government have introduced this procedure, and I should like to be enlightened on the matter. The whole object of the War Damaged Sites Act was to enable something to be done speedily. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford (Mr. Walker-Smith) said, it was considered desirable, in connection with the Festival of Britain, that there should be power to clear up things quickly, but we have been told that this is to tidy up something which has been left derelict for 30 or 40 years. It is preposterous to bull-doze something which has been left for 30 or 40 years.

This matter was argued very fully, when the 1946 Act was under consideration, by both Houses of Parliament. Here, in a Bill connected with mineral workings we are asked to insert a paragraph of a most dangerous kind. We are setting a most dangerous precedent, among other things, because we shall find this sort of thing creeping into other Measures and going through without the careful consideration we have been able to give to this Measure.

I ask the Parliamentary Secretary to go a little further and to undertake to consider this matter very seriously in the light of this discussion before the Bill goes to another place. I have a suspicion that there might be considerable criticism of this subsection in another place and certainly nothing said on the Government side of the House has justified in any way whatever the suggestion that there is so much urgency about the matter.

I do not know why it is suggested that there should be 14 days' notice when a person is given the opportunity of a personal hearing and 28 days' notice when he makes representation in writing. I do not appreciate the difference between the 14 and the 28 days and the reasons for that, but in any case neither 14 nor 28 days is adequate in my opinion. I would therefore ask the Parliamentary Secretary to look at the matter again and to ask himself whether the analogy he puts forward holds water. The fact that both the war damaged sites and the ironstone areas look derelict is not a logical argument for what he put forward.

I speak again with the leave of the House in response to the right hon. Gentleman. I think we are getting this a little out of proportion. It is not a question of bull-dozing people's rights with 14 days' notice. Here we are dealing with derelict land which is to be brought back to agricultural use, or to be used for industrial purposes. Many of these ironstone fields are made up of a number of pieces of land which were in personal ownership. Much of it was worked many years ago and there would be difficulty in tracing many of the owners.

As the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), said, the procedure under the 1946 Act can be very protracted, particularly when there is difficulty in tracing ownership of the land to be dealt with. Searching for the owner of one small piece of land may hold up the whole scheme and it would not be "bull-dozing" to give 14 days' notice.

I put it to the hon. Member for Guildford (Mr. Nugent), who generally is very mild in his statements but referred to this as an abuse of power, that it is an abuse if delay in finding the owner of a small piece of land can hold up the development or re-development of 50 acres of land to be brought into agricultural use. As the hon. Member knows, the land would have to be treated in order to be brought back into agricultural use and would have to be re-hired or re-sold to the farmer who is to deal with it. Therefore, we require such powers as are given in the Act dealing with blitzed sites. If the land is needed for industrial purposes that is even more important.

I am, of course, always willing to discuss anything at any time, as my right hon. Friend said earlier. But we have discussed this with the Ministry of Agriculture and in the main the land is required to enable the Ministry of Agriculture to give a long-term holding or hiring of a tenancy to a farmer and to re-sell to a farmer, or to an adjacent farm, in order that they can go on with re-development or rehabilitation of the land. I am quite willing to have further discussions, but I should have thought that better than my having discussions with the Ministry of Agriculture the landowners concerned should do so.

This is not an instrument to deal with existing landowners and those with whom we are in close consultation and working on the re-development of land. This is a provision to deal with the special cases of those whom it is difficult to trace, or those who are proving difficult to handle in connection with a re-development scheme. I suggest that perhaps it would be more effective if the landowners themselves had discussions through the usual channels with the Minister of Agriculture in connection with the regulations which are to be made.

On the question of the 14 days, if a person has asked for an appeal to be heard, then arrangements have to be made for the visit of the inspector. That takes time, and it may be 28 days, or even more, before the visit can take place, consultations held and the report sent to the Minister. In view of what I have said, I hope that the Amendment will be withdrawn.

We have had some indication that the mind of the Government is not entirely closed on this point. As the question is to be looked at again, I venture to mention two points which have emerged during the discussion. The hon. Gentleman has just dealt with the first, but I do not think that he appreciated the difficulty of my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn, West (Mr. Assheton) about the relationship between the 14 and the 28-day period. I realise that, where there is to be an oral hearing, more time will be required for the preparation of the case by the appellant than where there is to be a written argument put in by a given day.

On the other hand, the difference in length of time does not meet the case where the owner might be absent or not able to deal with the matter immediately. His difficulties in those circumstances would be the same whether he intended eventually to make an oral or a written application. Perhaps that point might be considered.

Great stress has been laid on the difficulty of tracing an owner. That point was not overlooked in 1946. In the First Schedule to the 1946 Act there is provision that the confirming authority, where he is satisfied that it is necessary, can substitute service on the owner, who presumably cannot be found, by the affixing of the relevant notice to objects on the land. We ought not to be under the impression that the 1946 procedure makes no provision for the type of case that may well be met with in connection with devastated ironstone land. I hope that these points, and the others made during the debate, will be borne in mind by the Government, and that an Amendment will be considered before the Bill goes through its stages in another place. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 18, line 44, at the end, to insert:

(2) If the Minister is satisfied in the case of any land not belonging to a local authority—

(a) that a person having a sufficient interest in the land is willing to make arrangements with the local authority under subsection (2) of section fourteen of this Act for the carrying out of any such works as are authorised by that section, being works which in the opinion of the Minister ought to be carried out; and

(b) that all persons interested in the land consent to the carrying out of the works, but the local authority have refused to make such arrangements, or to make such arrangements upon reasonable terms,

the Minister may make those arrangements on behalf of the local authority; and for the purposes of this Act those arrangements shall be deemed to have been made by the local authority with the approval of the Minister under the said section fourteen.

There are in the Bill default powers to enable a local authority to step in and do work on land in someone else's ownership, if the landowner defaults and fails to do the work. Perhaps it may be said that we on this side of the Committee are very unkind in our remarks about landlords; but it is true that there might be a landowner who wishes to do the work, who wishes to get finances to do it, and who finds that the local authority are apathetic in the matter. We think that the default powers ought to apply to the local authority as well as to the landowner, and that is why we move this Amendment.

I beg to move, in page 19, line 13, to leave out from "in," to "the," in line 14, and to insert:

"the case of such minerals as may be prescribed or determined by or under the regulations (being minerals an interest in which belonged on the appointed day to a person engaged in the development of minerals or treated for the purposes of the regulations as so engaged)."

This Amendment fulfills an undertaking given by my right hon. Friend to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) on a point which he made in Committee, and which my right hon. Friend undertook to consider. Having agreed with the substance of what the hon. Gentleman said, we have faithfully put down this Amendment.

I am obliged to the Minister for having seen his way to make this Amendment, which is an important one. As the Bill stood, it would have been possible for the Minister, within the limits of the Statute, to make this set-off arrangement not merely in regard to the type of case that we all have in mind, where there was ownership or a lease on the appointed day, but in regard to other cases as well. In fact, it gave him statutorily an unlimited right of off-set. I am glad that the wording now limits the powers of the Minister to the type of case which we all have in mind.

Might I suggest that in the last line of this Amendment a slight drafting correction is necessary? I think it will be found that the word "so" is requisite between the word "not" and the word "determined." I think that, on examination, that will be found to be the case.

I am advised that the wording of the Amendment is correct but, if necessary, I will have the matter put right in another place.

I beg to move, in page 19, line 35, at the end, to insert:

"and for regulating the devolution of the right to receive any such payment"

This is really a legal point in connection with the ownership of land and the passing from one person to another of rights in the £300 million fund.

I beg to move, in page 20, line 29, to leave out from "by," to "in," and to insert "the lessee."

This is an Amendment which should be considered along with the exactly similar Amendment to page 21, line 2, While they are to a degree consequential, their purpose is to enable the Lands Tribunal to vary any sums payable under a mining lease and not simply those payable by way of royalty or rent.

I beg to move, in page 20, line 31, to leave out "are equal to," and insert "do not exceed."

The effect of this Amendment is that the Lands Tribunal has now power to increase the sums payable under a mining lease.

I beg to move, in page 22, line 26, to leave out "will," and to insert "can."

The effect of the Amendment is to provide that the Minister of Transport has to be satisfied, before he can make an order to stop up or divert a highway, that the highway can be restored. This is one of those legal points, and I am advised that my right hon. Friend would have to go into the realms of prophecy in order to say whether a road could be restored, but if it is right that it should be restored, his requirement is to see that it can be done.

I beg to move, in page 24, line 23, to leave out subsection (4), and to insert:

(4) Where an offence under this section which has been committed by a body corporate is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of any director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate, he as well as the body corporate shall be deemed to be guilty of that offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.

This Amendment fulfils an undertaking which my right hon. Friend gave in Committee after a very lengthy discussion. It is a question of the transfer of the onus of proof, and of the relationship of this Amendment to an Amendment made in another place to the Sea Fish Industry Bill. This Amendment keeps this Bill in line with the general intentions of Parliament, as well as fulfilling the promise which my right hon. Friend made.

I feel that the Opposition should express gratitude to the Government for this Amendment. This is one of those cases where recently there has been a tendency for administrative convenience rather than the rights of the subject to be considered in legislation, and it is a matter on which some of us thought an important issue was at stake. In this legislation, the onus of proof would have been upon an accused person to prove that he was innocent, instead of the obligation being placed upon the prosecutor to prove that he was guilty. It is for that reason that we attach very great importance to the Amendment, which seems to represent a certain change of heart on the part of this Government, in that they are prepared to reconsider a matter of this kind. I want to express the gratitude of the Opposition for their having done so.

I beg to move, in page 26, line 28, after "Act," insert "(other than regulations made by virtue of section twenty-six of this Act)."

This is an Amendment to make clear that the regulations governing the near ripe scheme under Clause 26 require the affirmative Resolution of the House.

I beg to move, in page 27, line 22, after "Act," to insert:

"or in the payment of remuneration or allowances to any person or persons appointed by that Minister for the purposes of subsection (6) of section twenty of this Act."

This is to give authority for payments out of the Restoration Fund for the ex- penses of persons on the panel appointed by the Minister of Agriculture to hear representations made against the termination of tenancies.

I beg to move, in page 28, line 2, at the end, to insert:

"'full restoring lease' means a mining lease imposing on the lessee an obligation to restore to a condition suitable for the purposes of agriculture all land excavated under the lease in the course of winning and working ironstone by opencast operations and containing no provision for the payment of sums in lieu of compliance with that obligation in respect of any of the land or by way of liquidated damages for failure to comply with it."

This deals with the question of full restoration, which we have already discussed.

I beg to move, in page 29, line 33, to leave out subsection (3).

The reason for this Amendment is that we have been slightly delayed in the progress of this Bill, and we now feel that we cannot bring it into law by 1st July. We do not propose an alternative date, and we think it should be operative from the date of the Royal Assent.

There is a technical matter about which I should like to ask the Minister a question. This Bill will give statutory authority to an arrangement which has, in fact, been operative during the last few years. The moratorium comes to an end on 1st July, and there has been some criticism by the Select Committee on Estimates or the Public Accounts Committee that this near ripe arrangement has, in fact, been put into operation without any statutory authority to do so. There have been discussions between the right hon. Gentleman and some of us on this side of the Committee about the time-table of this Bill, and we were anxious that it should reach the Statute Book in good time.

I had thought that, owing to the difficulties that have arisen and owing to this Bill being delayed, it would have had some retrospective operation. The Central Land Board is under an obligation at present to enforce all the provisions of the principal Act of 1947, and I had not expected to find that this matter would be dealt with merely by leaving out subsection (3) of Clause 38. I am anxious that we should keep to the constitutional proprieties, and that things should not be done by administrative action when there is no statutory authority for them, even though it was actually informally agreed that there would be no substantial opposition to this amendment of the law being carried out.

I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for The High Peak (Mr. Molson) is quite right in pointing out the undesirability of the sort of arrangement which is adumbrated in Clause 38, where arrangements are operating without statutory authority. Of course, we are here reaching at a gnat when we have already swallowed two or three camels in regard to the near ripe scheme, which has been operating for two or three years without any stautory authority whatever. I take it that there will be no practical effect from the omission of this subsection, since the Central Land Board will not, in fact, levy any development charge until the Bill begins to operate, and nor will there be any question of any payment being made.

The hon. Gentleman is quite correct. The Land Board have decided to postpone the collection of the development charge. With regard to the other matters mentioned, it is understood that notice has been given to all persons concerned that they have no statutory basis, but it is the intention of the Government to give them that basis at a relatively early date.

I beg to move, in page 31, line 11, to leave out from "ironstone," to "is," in line 19, and to insert "which."

The provision which we leave out here is superseded and made redundant by the Amendments already accepted.

I beg to move, in page 31, line 46, to leave out "becoming due," and to insert:

"rent or other payment becoming due under the lease."

This Amendment, together with the next Amendment in page 32, line 2, enables an ironstone operator to recover contributions from any payments becoming due under the lease. I think that will clarify the position.

I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read the Third time."—[King's Consent, on behalf of the Duchy of Lancaster and of the Duchy of Cornwall, signified.]

I do not think that at this stage it is necessary for me to say much. It is the general view of all parts of the House, as it was of the Committee upstairs, that this is a very valuable Bill, that it will do much for the restoration of a part of our country which has been sorely devastated in the past and not yet fully restored, and that it will make provisions to avoid any repetition of such evil incidents in the future.

The Bill has been considered in a nonparty spirit, both upstairs and in the House today. It has been much improved as compared with its original shape by Amendments which have been moved and accepted, or accepted in a modified form, at all stages. I do not think that at this time of the day it is necessary for me to do more than commend this Bill to the good wishes of the House.

I do not want to take up very much of the time of the House, but I think it appropriate to make one or two observations at this stage. It is evident to everybody here today that the problem is now being tackled in a much more restrained and rational manner than might have been visualised from the way in which it was discussed on Second Reading. 1 think that anybody listening to the debate on that occasion would have gained the impression that generations of rapacious iron-masters had devastated great areas of our country, and, having exploited the countryside, had, in the words of the Minister, "gone off with the swag." Of course, that is very far from the truth.

Until recent years full restoration was the general practice. Indeed, up to quite recently, over 90 per cent. of the iron workings had been fully restored, and, as we have seen in the process of this Bill, two factors then began to operate. Some of the less valuable iron ores in eastern Northamptonshire were mined, and it was not found possible in the economic circumstances of the time to mine and restore the land satisfactorily. There was also, as we have seen again this morning, a certain clause in leases which enabled the operator to dispense with the full restoration by payment of a lump sum to the owner of the land. In certain cases, that clause operated, and in most cases, I think, the small owner-occupiers were so placed at that time owing to the condition of agriculture generally in the country that they found themselves forced to accept payment, and the land remained derelict.

It is in regard to those two aspects of the matter that this Bill has really come into being. I wish to say straightaway that we on this side of the House are fully in sympathy with the purposes of the Bill and are hopeful that it will fulfil the expectations of the Minister. We have, of course, certain misgivings. Throughout Part I of the Bill, we find a lack of that sense of incentive and competition without which we have felt all along that restoration, or, at least, the methods employed in mining ore, so that restoration should afterwards take place, are not likely to be of the most economic nature.

It has been shown, I think, that various methods have been adopted in the past regarding restoration, and there has been a fairly wide gap between the most effective means and those which have been, if not so effective, at any rate more expensive. We have heard a good deal during the Committee stage of variations between the main figure of about 3d. a ton of output and that of 1s. a ton. The hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) made some play with the fact that we were approaching this problem from rather different aspects, and that there was this wide variation. The variation was not as peculiar as it may have sounded. As I say, it has been a difference in cost between those companies who were most expert in the general process of restoration and those companies who, perhaps, had not the experience or technical ability to do it in that manner.

We had hoped that this Bill would have placed emphasis on the necessity of both mining and restoring by the most efficacious means. But the Minister has very rightly, in our opinion, placed considerable emphasis on the advantage he will obtain from the advisory committee which will lend him its help in advocating the best means of carrying out this restoration and bringing the land back to some form of fertility. We look on that as an important matter.

Restoration is, in a sense, a technological problem. It is not just a question of levelling the land and leaving it. What really is involved in the whole process is extraction in the first instance and replacement of the various over-burdens extracted in the second. It has to have regard to the whole system of drainage which may operate on a piece of land being mined, and, when the levelling processes have been completed, it has to have regard, of course, to what purposes the land can then be put: that is, whether agriculture in the sense of green fields or ploughed land should be restored or whether—as we have advocated in a great many cases—possibly the best and most efficacious means of bringing it back to fertility is, for a generation or so, a system of afforestation. We say that that should be done particularly where it is intended to attempt to restore old workings.

In those cases it is a certainty that the surface soil will have disappeared and although it will be practicable to level out those old workings there will be an almost insoluble problem of turning that land into a productive condition. Particularly in those cases, we advocate most strongly that afforestation should be the order of the day. As this problem is in great measure connected with Northamptonshire, it is worth recording once again that a great proportion of these areas which have been left derelict formed originally part of Rockingham Forest and Gedling Chase. They were two well-known afforested areas. Although some part of these areas have been devoted to agriculture from time to time, I think it is fair to say that a great proportion of that land was originally, and up to recent years, an afforested area.

The hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison), quite properly, has taken a keen interest in this Bill. He is concerned with the interests of his constituents who live in a large mining area and are thereby affected. But I think in his efforts to appear to be a champion of the countryside he has gone rather too far in suggesting that Corby, in particular, and other parts of his constituency should be now surrounded by belts of green fields when, in fact, that is not necessary in the best interests of the countryside and where, indeed, that could not be carried out without disproportionate expense.

However desirable it may be to have green fields round Corby and elsewhere, if it can be shown—as I think it can be shown that the more sensible approach is by afforestation I hope the practical approach to the problem will hold sway over any matter of sentiment. I speak with some personal feeling, and I think this will appeal to the closed shop of old Etonians who have been responsible for handling this Bill at various stages. I have shot and hunted, and in more serious moments studied afforestation, in these areas for many years. On the other hand, the hon. and learned Member for Kettering has, I hope politically, had a transitory interest in this matter. I feel, and so do my hon. Friends strongly as I do, that if restoration should occur it should occur within reasonable limits.

I should like to refer to one other small matter. We are glad that the Minister saw his way to making a small concession to that body of landowners—a larger body than I think he possibly recognises—who all along have been anxious to see full restoration and have insisted on it. I think I should say once again in fairness that the iron-masters who have mined the iron ore, whether in Northamptonshire or in other countries in the Schedule, have carried out restoration in the overwhelming proportion of cases. I have already mentioned the particular cases where that has not occurred, but we should not be doing justice to what has occurred in the past if we did not allude once again to the very public-spirited attitude which has been adopted by a great proportion of iron foundry companies who, in great measure, were the original extractors of iron ore up and down the country.

There are certain defects in the Bill. particularly in Clause 12 to which I know one of my hon. Friend's will refer in a moment or two. There are defects also in Clause 26 to which some reference has been made already. But, in general, we are in complete sympathy with the attitude of the Government in this matter. We are hopeful that as a result of this Bill both restoration of old iron workings and current restoration will be carried on efficiently and intelligently. We wish the Minister well in the task that lies ahead of him and we support the purpose and intention with which the Bill has been presented to the House.

Like my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Fylde, South (Colonel Lancaster), I feel that as a result of the educational effect of the Standing Committee the Minister has moved the Third Reading of this Bill in a more conciliatory manner than he moved the Second Reading. I am also inclined to think that he is now better informed on the past record of those who have been concerned with the exploitation of iron ore in the Schedule area.

I want to confine myself only to three main points. In Committee my hon. Friends offered certain figures of the cost of restoration which were substantially different from those upon which the Government have been acting. I believe the explanation of that is that different companies have used very different methods. It is most important that in the restoration which is to be financed by the fund set up under this Bill the newest and best and most economical practice shall be followed by all those concerned.

I have an uneasy feeling that the wide variation in the figures that have been given, and which have been used in perfectly good faith both by the Government and by the Opposition, is due to the fact that some of those concerned have been carrying out restoration at their own expense. They have been doing it with a keen desire to make the land good behind them, but naturally they have done it as economically as possible. It may also be that there are others concerned in this area who a long time ago made up their minds they did not want to carry out restoration. If that were the case, it would not be surprising if the figures which they quoted as showing the cost of restoration should be extremely high, because the higher the cost of restoration the more excusable would be the fact that they were not carrying out that restoration.

After I had given some figures during the Committee stage I looked at them again and I was a little troubled to find that there did not seem to be that great difference which I should have expected between the cost of restoration if it takes place as a single part of the operation of getting the ore, and the entirely different problem of restoring land which has been worked in the past and abandoned for 10 or 20 years and where I should have expected the cost to be immensely greater. It would mean, of course, obtaining the heavy equipment needed and sending out that equipment and the men on to land that had been abandoned, which had become hardened under the rains and frosts and sun of 10, 15 or 20 years, and which had in fact become caked and solidified.

I have been at some pains to check the figures. From the source from which I have obtained my information, and who are actually engaged in this restoration, I am advised that in many cases it actually costs no more with modern equipment to restore the land as the working is taking place than to leave it in the form of hill and dale. The difference in cost is really negligible. In the case of old workings—these figures relate to the last few weeks—I am advised that a figure of £50 per acre is a fair and practical figure of what has been achieved in bad limestone areas. If it is necessary for the topsoil to be removed and then replaced, it is likely to cost something in the neighbourhood of £70 to £80 per acre, or in particular cases a maximum of £120 per acre.

Therefore, we arrive at these figures: £50 per acre for levelling, £70 as a minimum up to £120 as a maximum per acre for soil covering, and then £10 per acre for fertilising which may also be necessary. Therefore, in the case of these old workings we arrive at a figure of £130 as a minimum or £180 as a maximum as the cost of restoration. It is further pointed out that in some cases it is not necessary for the topsoil to be replaced, but if it is not, then there would have to be discing and heavy fertilising in order to make up in the matter of the topsoil, and that might amount to £25 or £50 a ton. There again, with this alternative measure we arrive at a figure of £100 per acre.

I referred to that particular subject because I think there is complete agreement that we are anxious that this legislation shall result in the most efficient and economical restoration of these lands; and it is, therefore, vitally important that those interests which have quoted very high figures shall know what is being done by some of their competitors with perhaps longer experience and perhaps a greater measure of good will, who say that is what, in fact, it is costing to restore at the present time.

Now that a fund is being raised and everybody concerned is being compelled to contribute towards it, this ceases to be a matter that can be left to private individuals to be economical or extravagant, but if they are going to be subsidised then all those who are benefiting under this Bill must be required to bring their practice up to the most efficient standard possible. It is for that reason that my hon. Friends have attached so much importance to the Advisory Committee which is being set up, and we are most anxious that it shall consist not only of administrators but of technicians who have practical experience of restoration by methods which have been found to be effective and economical in order that the same may apply in all cases where subsidy is being paid under this Bill.

I pass to my second point. I am sorry that the Parliamentary Secretary is not here, although I know that he has been on the bench for a long time, and I make no complaint of that. He misunderstood a point which I made on the Second Reading and which was emphasised by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) during the Committee stage. It is a point of considerable importance which I think ought to be repeated now. Under the 1947 Act, development charge is determined by the Central Land Board. There is no right of appeal, and therefore what is paid in development charge is a matter for negotiation between the Central Land Board and the developer.

It has never been denied by the Government that as a result of the negotiations that take place the development charge ultimately charged is frequently only a fraction of the development charge that has been first asked for. I happen to be a member of the executive committee of a certain non-profit making concern which has been having an argument with the Central Land Board about development charge for a residential house which it is now using as offices, and it is just on the point of agreeing to a development charge of £12,500 in comparison with an original proposal by the Central Land Board of £30,000. I still think that is inclined to be on the high side, but as a result of many months of negotiations it has been brought down to substantially less than one-half of the development charge that was first asked for.

Under Clause 26 mineral development in the case of near-ripe land is being exempted from the payment of development charge and whatever is the development charge agreed upon is going to be set off against the £300 million of compensation set up under the 1947 Act. I need not emphasise to the right hon. Gentleman that this means, in fact, that yet another class of persons are going to receive 100 per cent. of payment out of this £300 million, because he advanced that as a reason against an Amendment which I moved earlier today.

These mineral undertakers who come within the benefit of Clause 26 are going to have the whole of the development charge set off against the £300 million fund. They therefore have no incentive whatsoever to try to beat down the development charge for which, in the first place, the Central Land Board will ask. Why should they carry on long negotiations, as I and my colleagues have been doing for many months, with the Central Land Board in order to get the development charge reduced, as we have had it reduced by more than 50 per cent.?

But the people who will suffer through the development charge being too high are not the mineral undertakers under Clause 26 but all the other landowners in the country whose compensation under the Act of 1947 is limited to £300 million. I say, therefore, that this provision for a 100 per cent. priority slice being taken by all the mineral enterprisers with near ripe land will mean that the Central Land Board will get away too easily with the initial assessments which they make, and that that set-off will be made at the expense of all the other landowners in the country. That I regard as being a very great injustice likely to result from the Bill.

I come now to Clause 12. It had been our intention to deal with this matter at some length on the Report stage but, as our Amendment was not selected, it is necessary to deal with it on the Third Reading. I am glad to see that the Parliamentary Secretary has returned to his place. He has a way of making speeches in the country, which no doubt commend themselves to his supporters amongst the electorate but to which, as they are made out-of-doors, there is neither time nor opportunity for Members on this side of the House to reply. Speaking on 14th April about the Opposition's attitude towards this Bill, he said:

"They fought us on behalf of the landlords and royalty owners to avoid their having to make a contribution towards the land from their future profits."

In all the discussions which we have had, mostly I think of a quite amicable kind, we have made a helpful contribution towards improving the Bill, as the Minister has been good enough to recognise. I do not know whether, after all these discussions, the Parliamentary Secretary is still of the same opinion and whether he is disposed to repeat a charge of that kind when next he is speaking out-of-doors. But in our attitude to Clause 12 we have sought to relieve the nationalised steel industry from a burden which will be imposed upon it under the Bill and which we consider to be quite unfair and quite unreasonable.

Under the old land tenure of this country, the owner of the land was the owner of the development rights to the minerals; he received his royalty and the operator received his profit. It was rational enough that the broad conception of the Bill should be that in order that the land should be restored, the royalty owner should make a contribution of 1⅛d. out of his royalty, the operator should make a similar contribution out of his profits, and the Exchequer should make a contribution of ¾d., in respect of each ton of ore produced. This is, in fact, the system which applies to near ripe land under Clauses 2 and 5.

When we come to dormant minerals the situation is different because of the principal Act which was passed by the present Government. Under the 1947 Act the State has bought from the landowner the development rights in his land. Surely it would be only equitable that when the State is acquiring the benefits it should also accept the liabilities of the ownership of the development rights. The benefit which the State has acquired is the right to impose a development charge which, at 100 per cent., will be approximately the same as a full royalty which might have been charged by the private owner in the past. The liability which the State should accept is the obligation under this Bill to pay 1⅛d. per ton, which normally would have been paid and which is being paid out of the royalties received by the private individuals who are owners of land which is near ripe.

When the State has bought the development rights in the land, I submit that the State should also accept the obligation to pay the contribution which previously the royalty owner was paying. By Clause 12, which the Opposition wish to omit from the Bill, the State seeks to put the whole of that liability on to the operator. He is being asked to pay twice. In the first place, he pays his own contribution of 1⅛d., and he is also being required to pay again because no account is taken in assessing the development charge of the fact that in future he is to be under an obligation to make this payment.

How much better off were the operators under the old system when they paid royalties to private individuals! Then the royalty owner was obliged to pay his contribution out of the royalty which he received. That is what still happens under the near ripe scheme, but in the case of the dormant minerals, the minerals which are to be developed in this country in the future, the operator will have to pay 2¼d. per ton instead of 1⅛d. because, when it takes over the development rights from the private owner, the State refuses to take over at the same time the obligation to make a contribution towards the restoration of the land.

I want to address two arguments to the Parliamentary Secretary. He dealt with this matter in the Standing Committee. He suggested that if the Clause were omitted it would be the State which would be required to pay twice. If the hon. Gentleman wants to arrive at a fair conclusion he ought not to confuse the Central Land Board with the Exchequer, in spite of the fact that any surplus remaining in the hands of the Central Land Board will ultimately be paid over to the Exchequer.

Under the scheme contained in the Bill there were to be three parties: the landowner, the operator and the State. All three were to make a contribution to this fund—and so they do, in so far as the land is near ripe. But what has happened is that the Central Land Board has stepped into the position of the private owner of land, and it must surely be unreasonable for the Parliamentary Secretary to say that because the Exchequer has undertaken to pay a grant is a reason why, when it is receiving development charge in lieu of the royalties that were previously being paid to the private owners of land, the Central Land Board should not pay a contribution similar to that which was previously being paid by the royalty owners.

The second point I wish to address to the hon. Gentleman is this. As I have mentioned before, he has accused hon. Members on this side of the House of being concerned only with the interests of the landowner. This particular point does not affect the landowner at all. In this case it is the nationalised steel industry which is having thrust upon it a two-fold burden. It might quite well be able to pay out of its profits the same contribution which it would pay under the near ripe scheme, as provided for in Clause 26, but it seems to us to be most unreasonable that this additional burden should be thrust upon the nationalised steel industry. The only effect of it must be to reduce the competitive powers of the British steel industry.

On its general principles we are supporting this Bill. We believe that its intention is benevolent. We hope that it will be administered in such a way as to restore to agriculture or forestry land which is at present devastated or is likely to be devastated in the future. We do, however, consider that there are these fundamental defects of the Measure, and we wish that the right hon. Gentleman, who has kept his mind open and accepted so many Amendments proposed from this side of the House, had rectified the various defects in the Bill, to which I have sought to draw attention

I intend to address my remarks entirely to Clause 12. I do so fortified by the assurance of your predecessor in the Chair, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that this would be the appropriate opportunity for doing so, and undeterred, despite the remarks which fell from my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Fylde, South (Colonel Lancaster), by the fact that I did not have the advantage of an education at Eton College—a misfortune which I believe I share with the Parliamentary Secretary.

The strength of the arguments against this Clause are such that I shall find it necessary to traverse hardly any of the ground which has just been covered by my hon. Friend the Member for The High Peak (Mr. Molson). Although we cannot at this stage make any alteration in the Bill, it seems important that the very weighty arguments against this Clause should be put upon record for its later stages elsewhere, because this Clause makes innovations of principle in the principle of the 1947 Act, of practice in the procedure of the Central Land Board, and of precedent for the future.

I should like to begin by correcting a misapprehension which, I am sure unintentionally, was created during the Committee stage by the Parliamentary Secretary. In answering my arguments and those of my hon. Friend the Member for The High Peak, the hon. Gentleman said that the authorities concerned had had nothing to say against Clause 12. His actual words were:

"it is fair to say there have been discussions over a long period of time, and during those very detailed discussions no objection has ever been raised by them on the basis of this proposal. They made many other objections, and had they objections to this it is fair to assume that they would have raised them. Whilst there has been no actual agreement, I think that by silence they have indicated agreement and consent."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee A: 5th June, 1951; c. 134.]

I am sure that on that ocasion the Parliamentary Secretary was merely drawing bow at a venture, and that it had escaped his recollection that representations, and strong representations, had been made, and have since been repeated, by the negotiating bodies on the matter of this Clause. I have in my hand a letter dated 21st March from the Federation of British Industries addressed to his Department, which contains a number of observations on the Bill, including a strong criticism of Clause 12. Therefore, the argument ex silentio which the Parliamentary Secretary sought to draw from the progress of the negotiations on the Bill can be set aside.

Now I come to the actual merit and content of the Clause itself. The Clause enacts very simply that, in the assessment of development charge it shall be assumed that the developer does not have to bear a burden which he has to bear. That is the effect of Clause 12. What repercussion will that have upon the assessment of development charge? Development charge purports to be the collection by the State of the development rights which it has previously bought, and which are being released by virtue of a permitted development. It purports to be merely the collection or reaping of an increase in value due to the permission of certain development, of development values arising out of permission to carry out a particular development. In other words, it purports to be tied to a matter of fact—to the actual amount of development value created or released by a particular operation.

The development value arising out of any particular operation is, of course, partly dependent upon the burdens which the developer will have to bear. Every extra burden which he has to bear auto- matically diminishes pro tanto the development value created or released by that operation. Consequently, the obligation to pay 1⅛d. per ton placed upon an operator automatically diminishes to that extent the development value released by his permission to extract the mineral.

It must follow that, as a consequence, the development charge to be collected by the Central Land Board is that much less. On the face of it, Clause 12 enacts that an assumption shall be made which is not only untrue but which conflicts logically with the underlying principle of development charge.

By this Clause the State is attempting to have its cake and eat it. It is attempting to reap in full a development value which it has reduced by an enactment. It is reducing development values in that it places burdens upon development and diminishes the profitability of a given development; and, at the same time, it is asserting that the development values remain intact and unreduced.

Very different is its behaviour when the development value, or the claim to compensation in lieu of it, is in the hands of private persons. There, the State behaves in exactly the opposite way. Under Clause 4 it reduces the compensation for loss of development rights which has to be paid to the individual, by assuming that a legal obligation existed in 1948 which was not created until 1951—exactly the opposite way round. So the State is trying to have it both ways.

We were told by the Parliamentary Secretary that it was untrue to say that as a result of Clause 12 the operator would be paying twice over. He argued, on the contrary, that unless Clause 12 were enacted and this burden were ignored in the assessment of development charge the operator would escape altogether from that burden.

indicated assent.

I am fortified that I am not misquoting him.

Yet this is a ludicrous misrepresentation. Let me illustrate that by taking the analogy, with which we are more familiar, of Income Tax. Income Tax is assessed upon the profits which are earned by a business. Let us suppose that Parliament enacts a statute which imposes some obligation to make a payment upon the firms engaged in a business. Their profits will be reduced in consequence, although I do not say to what extent. Are we then to argue, "Oh, but that is to be ignored for purposes of Income Tax; when you assert that as your profits have been reduced you should pay less Income Tax you are trying to escape from the obligations that Parliament intends to place upon you."

If we pass an Act which has the effect of reducing profits we accept the inevitable consequence that there are less profits to be taxed. Here we are making an enactment which reduces the value of development rights and at the same time pretending that they retain undiminished their pristine amount. The developer no more escapes from the burden of this l⅛d. per ton by its being taken into account along with all his other burdens in the assessment of development charge, than he escapes from the fulfilment of an obligation which reduces his profits. He bears them both, even though we only tax him upon his actual income and levy development charge on development values as they are.

This Clause is of a type with which we have been very familiar in the last four or five years and which has been described before as a "Canute Clause"—an attempt by the Government to escape from the economic consequences of their own legislation.

Was he the king who did not know how wet he was being?

He was the much maligned monarch whose name is taken to stand for an argument exactly the opposite to the one which he was really putting to his courtiers.

The effect of this Clause is to insist that the real economic consequences of this Bill, which are to reduce development values arising out of the extraction of minerals, shall be ignored. Like Horace's "Nature," economic consequences may be expelled with a fork but they will still return; and the economic consequences of this Bill will be felt in spite of Clause 22.

It is worth remembering for a moment who is to feel them. The extractor is to pay the equivalent of l⅛d. per ton twice over. He is to pay it in development charge and he is to pay it in levy. He will seek inevitably to transfer part of that burden in two directions. In the first place, he will—and this is the only point upon which I take issue with my hon. Friend the Member for The High Peak—try to transfer part of it to the landowner; and he will no doubt successfully transfer part of it to the consumer. The landowner, of course, in the assumed circumstances is only the owner of the land without benefit of permission to develop. He can only receive for it theoretically a rent or royalty representing its value for its existing use.

But the operator who has to pay a development charge more than the development value which he actually reaps will try to beat down the landowner on the price or the rent to a figure lower than will make it worth the landowner's while to enter into the transaction. Thus we shall be involved in the familiar consequences of litigation and use of compulsory powers. On the other hand, part of this burden is inevitably going to be transferred to the consumer. We are imposing on the process of extraction a double burden which will be passed on through the iron and steel monopoly to the consumer, direct or indirect, of everything that involves the use of iron and steel.

Serious as these consequences are in themselves, I believe that the most serious aspect of this Clause is that it is a breach in the principles of the 1947 Act. It is a precedent for the future which can be immensely harmful. If, whenever a new obligation is imposed upon development, Parliament is, at the same time, to enact that for the purposes of development charge the existence of this new obligation shall be ignored, then we shall get into a cycle of events in which development charge will be a potent factor in the raising of costs all round. This Clause, unless it is taken out of the Bill, will be a cause of harm to the iron-ore extracting industry itself and will have very harmful repercussions far beyond.

I did not intend to say anything on the Third Reading. I intend only to speak about Clause 12, and I am doing so now because Mr. Speaker indicated, when he did not select the Amendment dealing with that Clause, that hon. Members could have their say on Third Reading.

We have had some interesting and full speeches about this, and I intend to confine my observations at the outside to about four minutes. I do so the more easily because I think that the real case in connection with this Clause is a short and comparatively simple one. What the Clause does is. in effect, to prevent the Central Land Board, in computing what is called the consent value, taking from it the amount of contribution made under this Bill to the Ironstone Restoration Fund. In my view this constitutes a rather serious deviation from the main statutory principles of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.

There, as the House knows, the principle of a development charge is fixed as being, roughly speaking, the increased value of the land due to the benefit of planning permission; and, thereafter, it is really a matter of valuation to determine what the respective values are. There is the consent value—that is, the value with planning permission—and the refusal value, which is the value without it; the difference between them represents the amount of the development value.

In regard to minerals, the Minister's own Memorandum in paragraph 210 says:

"Its effect in relation to mineral working is, very broadly, that the development charge for working the mineral will be equal to the value of the unworked mineral covered by the permission."

I think that in applying the normal processes of valuation to this problem any valuer will take the view that if the benefit, which can be got from the planning permission is necessarily limited by the burden of a contribution imposed by statute, the amount of the contribution must automatically fall to be deducted from the consent value.

Quite clearly, that would be so if it were not for Clause 12. The effect of Clause 12, therefore, is to impose a statutory contradiction to the important and fundamental principle of the 1947 Act. In effect, it imposes a tax upon a tax, and that, in my submission, must be wrong. The right way to look at this is suggested by the last sentence of the Ministry's own Memorandum, paragraph 210, which says:

"Any particular permission may, however, and often will, be qualified by conditions which will reduce the additional value of the land due to the permission, and account will be taken of this fact in assessing the development charge."

The liability to contribute to the Ironstone Restoration Fund may properly be viewed in the light of a general condition, universally attached to this particular form of planning permission. It should, therefore, be treated in exactly the same way as any individual provision, and the amount of the contribution should be deducted in aiming at consent value.

I am certain that the House will be glad that we have got to the last lap of this Bill. It has not been a flat race, but a steeplechase, particularly in Committee upstairs when we met a great many obstacles, some of which we never succeeded in getting over. Several hon. Members on this side of the House assisted the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary in getting over some of the obstacles, and they made very helpful suggestions.

Only one hon. Member on the other side of the House, who is here even to the end of the race, contributed to our discussions on the Bill. I should like to thank the right hon. Gentleman and the Parliamentary Secretary for the cooperative way in which they have examined the proposals and suggestions we put before them from time to time. I know that the Minister feels that they have been of assistance to him in the course of the Committee and Report stages.

There were two objects of the Bill. The first was to form a fund to deal with the restoration of ironstone working; and the second was to make statutory provision for this near ripe mineral scheme. What we have to ask ourselves is whether they have been satisfactorily effected. There are a great many criticisms that one could make, and we all listened with great interest to the several criticisms of Clause 12.

I do not propose to add to those criticisms, but I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to give particular attention to the speeches made on the subject by my hon. Friend the Member for The High Peak (Mr. Molson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), because owing to the Ruling of Mr. Speaker it was not possible to move my Amendment on the Report stage, which would have omitted this Clause. Thus the House has not had an opportunity of deciding whether it ought to be in the Bill, and we can only comment on it as it stands. The Minister is in the fortunate position, however, of being able to reconsider the matter, because the Bill will go to another place and he will have an opportunity of deciding whether he should recommend any alteration in that place.

The part of the Bill which will need the most attention from the Minister from an administrative point of view is that which deals with the restoration of the worked ironstone land. Owners of land will be anxious to know, having contributed to its restoration, whether that restoration is satisfactorily done. They will want to know if the Fund will be made readily available for achieving that end, and that the best expert advice will be given to ensure that the levelling and replacement of the soil on top and all that sort of thing will be carried out, so that the Owner will be able to put the land into a state of cultivation and fertility once again. That applies particularly to the better quality land and to shallow worked land.

The House is aware that in the case of opencast coal mining quite an amount of successful restoration has been achieved, largely as a result of the constant watch being kept upon it by the agricultural executive committees' restoration officers. We do not want to find that an operator hands the land back after extraction, allegedly levelled and resurfaced, but, in fact, in a wholly unusable state for ordinary farm purposes. We do not want to find land in such a state that every plough that goes into it is broken because boulders have not been removed.

I wonder if the Parliamentary Secretary would explain what supervision there will be, and what exactly will be the powers to supervise such work. What would be the position, for instance, if there is a conflict of view between the operator and the supervisor, for example, as to whether certain action is to be taken or is not to be taken. I suppose if such a situation does arise, an operator would not be given his certificate to enable him to receive payment for the work he has done. That, in itself, is a penalty on the operator, but it does not achieve the aim of the Bill, namely, to restore the land for agriculture or for forestry.

This matter was discussed in the Committee and the last words uttered by the Parliamentary Secretary on Clause 10 were these:

"But we agree that agricultural executive committees ought to be closely associated with this and I will look at the matter."

But before that he said:

"We rely on the supervision which we are assured we shall obtain from the county council planning committees in conjunction with the planning authorities, who will work closely with the advisory committee and the agricultural executive committee for the area. …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee A; 5th June, 1951, c. 126–127.]

If such an array of persons is to act in concert it seems rather excessive, and it might well result in no one really being the person to accept responsibility for the proper and orderly return of the land to its former state as far as that is possible. I hope that the Minister will give the most careful consideration to that practical point. I am sure that he will, because he really has this matter at heart.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Fylde, South (Colonel Lancaster) made some very useful observations about the doubtful wisdom of putting to agricultural use, and at great expense land, which, perhaps, was not fit for it, some of it was land which at one time had been forest. That is a very strong point, and I sometimes thought during the passage of the Bill that the interests of forestry had not been so firmly presented to the House as the interests of agriculture. I know that the Minister is aware that the Forestry Commissioners are planning to take away a great deal of agricultural land. Here is an opportunity to satisfy that extremely rapacious demand for land without so great a sacrifice as might be the case in other circumstances. I am rather sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland (Mr. Vane) is not able to be here today. He was with us during the Committee stage, and this is a point on which he would have made a valuable contribution.

Clearly, there must be some ceiling to the cost which this very hard pressed generation can afford to reach on behalf of future generations. With that limit in mind—and it must be a very real limit—we on this side consider that every effort ought to be made to restore the land to the best possible condition, either for agriculture or for forestry, whichever is most suitable. We want the cost to be as low as possible, so that as many acres of land as possible can be restored.

I do not propose to say anything more about Clause 12. I hope that the Minister will read the discussion that took place during his brief absence from the House this morning on Clause 21, about the question of the length of notice in the compulsory acquisition of land. We had an interesting discussion, and the Parliamentary Secretary said he was willing to look at the matter again before it got to another place. I hope that the Minister will be good enough to consider it carefully.

All that we have been talking about so far relates to the ironstone areas of the country, but Part II of the Bill, in which are Clauses 26 to 29, is of more general application. There is not very much that I need add in this direction. I made it quite clear on Second Reading that we on this side had never approved of minerals being brought within the financial provisions of the Town and Country Planning Act, an Act which was designed primarily to deal with the development of property for building and so on. We are, however, very glad that the Government have recognised what we told them in 1947: that that Act would not work as far as minerals were concerned.

They have, in effect, by a most ingenious and complicated device, now taken near-ripe minerals out of the scheme. If the right hon. Gentleman had not done so, mineral development would have been held up and the price of all minerals would have been raised. That, no doubt, was a very powerful consideration when he reached his decision on the matter, and I am sure that it was not absent from his mind.

I fear that owing to the ingenuity and complication of this scheme, it may provide still further scope for those highly skilled gentlemen of the law who have already reaped such a very rich harvest from devoting their attention to the Town and Country Planning Act, and without whose assistance none of us would be able to make any sense whatever of these very complicated laws. I hope that the Bill, which is a very complicated one, will be studied in another place, where, perhaps, there are even more Members than here who are familiar with the problems with which the Bill is so particularly concerned.

We on this side have been as helpful as possible. We have tried to improve the Bill, and have been glad to work closely with the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary in trying to do so. The fact that we do not think the Bill is wholly satisfactory now is not our fault, because one cannot amend so imperfect a Bill and make it perfect. We have, however, been able to deal with some of the problems which have been raised, though there are still many opportunities for improving the Bill in another place. We shall certainly not oppose its Third Reading.

I wish to draw attention to the necessity for securing continued financial assistance from the central Exchequer to compensate blitzed towns for the great loss of rateable value which they have suffered as a result of enemy action during the late war, a loss which subsequent building and reconstruction has by no means restored. I shall take most of my examples from the town of Southampton because that is the town I know best, but I am sure that the argument I shall adduce in the case of Southampton will also mutates mutandis apply to most of the other heavily blitzed towns in the country.

Southampton was one of the most heavily bombed towns in Great Britain. We not only had concentrated night raids on a number of occasions, lasting for several hours and necessitating the use of a large number of enemy aeroplanes, but we also had a number of daylight raids when two, three or four enemy planes came over Southampton, dropped their bombs and flew back to their bases. This very heavy bombardment was endured by the citizens of Southampton with great fortitude. The courage, especially of the women and children, was indeed remarkable. I was, during the time of the daylight bombardment of Southampton, a teacher in one of the council schools, and I remember taking my children into an air raid shelter while the bombs were falling nearby. Every time a bomb burst nearby the boys and girls merely laughed.

The citizens of Southampton expected that some reward for the sufferings they endured in the national cause would be, when the war was concluded, sufficient assistance from national resources to make up for the heavy losses they had incurred during the period of the war. The loss of life in Southampton was not actually so heavy as might have been expected from the heavy and continuous nature of the bombardment. That was because we had an excellent system of air raid precautions and also because Southampton is a rather scattered town and, for its size of population, stands upon a very large area.

Although, happily, the loss of life was not so great as might have been expected, the material losses were very heavy indeed. We lost, altogether, 6,346 houses totally destroyed or made unfit for human habitation by enemy action. We also lost nearly the whole of our big shops. The enemy deliberately destroyed our main shopping centre. High Street, above Bar Street, and East Street were bombed on one occasion in a night raid when the enemy bombed the High Street systematically, destroying every shop, one after the other. The material losses owing to enemy action in Southampton have been very great. I admit at once, and we gratefully acknowledge, that we have received financial aid from the central Exchequer. Since 1941, under the Deficiency Grant, which lasted until 1946, we received £329,362, and since 1946 under the Additional Grant we have received £395,000, making the total grant in aid, for loss of rateable value since 1942, £724,000 But, in spite of that grant from the central Exchequer, we still have not made good by any means the loss on rateable value caused by enemy action during the war.

I wish to quote from the statement made by the Borough Treasurer of Southampton to the Borough Council of Southampton on 12th March, 1951, when he was preparing estimates for the current year. The Borough Treasurer is a man of considerable ability and long experience. I do not think it likely that he would put forward any statistics unless he had prepared them carefully and checked them for any possible error. He said on that occasion:

"The rateable value of properties in the borough which were totally destroyed, or had to be demolished by reason of the bombing, was nearly £300,000. After crediting the rateable value of all properties erected on the bombed sites, the loss is still over £190,000. Even if an allowance made for the increase in rateable value owing to the use of houses as shops and offices, the loss in rateable value is still very substantial and the town, similar to other blitzed towns, is left to bear the full burden of the loss."

I think we may scale down the £190,000 stated to be the loss of rateable value in Southampton as late as March of this year to be about £150,000 if we take into account the rateable value of prefabricated offices and shops erected on the blitzed sites, but a loss of rateable value of £150,000 since the rates in Southampton are now nearly 20s. in the pound means a loss of annual revenue to the town of something like £150,000. Since a penny rate brings in £106,000, this is an equivalent to a rate of 2s. in the pound. We therefore claim that our very heavy loss of rateable value has not yet been made good and that we should qualify for continuing grants from the central Exchequer.

It is true, of course, that there has been some degree of building in Southampton since 1945, but nearly all the building has been of council houses. We lost 6,346 houses during the war and since 1945 we have built 4,912 houses. I think it is generally agreed that council houses are rather a rate burden than a rate asset on account of the subsidy that has to be paid on each house, and because in all the new council estates a new school has to be built as the child population on council estates is always very high and families with a large number of children are first allocated to houses. So the number of council houses we have built has certainly not made up for the loss in rateable value due to enemy action.

If I go to other blitzed towns, I find from statistics which have been furnished to me by the Southampton Borough Treasurer—and these statistics refer to 31st March, 1950—that the rateable value of Southampton is now only 92 per cent. of pre-war, leaving out the decimal figures—

The rateable value of Plymouth, on 31st March, 1950, was only 90 per cent. of pre-war, and figures for other towns are: Bootle, 93 per cent.; Liverpool, 94 per cent.; Portsmouth, 95 per cent.; and, worst of all, West Ham, 78 per cent. There has been some improvement since 31st March, 1950. Up-to-date figures would show an increase in the percentage of rateable value compared with March, 1950.

In almost all the blitzed towns, the rateable value today is considerably lower than it was before the war. I should like to mention figures for towns which were not blitzed. All the towns are in the neighbourhood of Southampton. The rateable value of Salisbury, which is 24 miles from Southampton, is 113 per cent. above pre-war, and other figures are: Gosport, 110 per cent.; Aldershot, 109 per cent.; Eastleigh, 108 per cent.; Reading, 127 per cent. Of all the blitzed towns, the only town now getting a grant from the central Exchequer towards making up the loss of rateable value is West Ham. The grant to all the other towns has been stopped.

None of us in any way grudges the fact that West Ham is still receiving a grant. West Ham was extremely badly damaged during the war, and there are certain local difficulties there. It is restricted in its capacity for expansion. That is not a difficulty which arises elsewhere. Its rate is very high. Personally, speaking as an old Socialist, to me there is magic in the name of West Ham. West Ham was the mecca of the London Socialist movement. It was there that the Socialist movement in London started and if, in the last 40 years or so, we have captured a majority in London, it was certainly West Ham that blazed the trail. Therefore, none of us objects at all to the grant being continued in West Ham. We hope that it will be continued for a number of years until the rateable value of that borough is totally restored.

We suggest that there is a very strong case for a continuation of the Exchequer grant to the other heavily blitzed towns. Southampton has gained no advantage at all from the rate equalisation formula. We happen to have been honest in past years and to have assessed our properties at their true value, unlike some other towns, such as Merthyr Tydvil, which assessed property at much below its true value. I know that the formula was drawn up by experienced statisticians with the utmost care and much thought. But all formulae are liable to error.

I have never known a formula which could be trusted to be true in all circumstances. The classic example of mistakes under the rate equalisation formula is shown at Portsmouth where, according to that formula, the town is supposed to be wealthier after the blitz than it was before, because the population was lower after the blitz than before the war.

I put forward these main reasons in an appeal to the Parliamentary Secretary to resume the grants to our blitzed towns in relief of their rateable value. I also wish to say that in Southampton we could do with a bigger allocation for the purpose of capital expenditure for reconstruction. It is often said that we sometimes claim that Southampton is the gateway of England. According to the point of view, one says if one is a Socialist, Southampton is the first town one sees on coming into "this happy island," and, if one is a Conservative, it is the last town one sees when one leaves "this benighted land." At any rate, we in Southampton do get a very large number of American visitors, and it gives them a rather poor impression of our country when the first sight they see is that of our ruined and desolate streets. It also gives them a lesson in the sufferings which the people of this country endured during the war.

We know, of course, that the first job of this country is to build a great many houses, and that the first priority in building labour and materials must go to housing, but we think that, in addition to building houses, we could do with a greater capital allocation for the reconstruction of the many damaged properties in the town. I would like to quote a letter which was sent to me this morning by the Town Clerk of Southampton, who is a very experienced and very cautious official. He says:

"In the House of Commons on the 20th March last, the Minister, in reply to a Question stated:

'In blitzed cities I must keep a balance between new housing and the re-building of banks, offices and shops in the central areas … I will consider any applications where it can be shown that the total allocation can be beaten by the authority concerned.'

My Council are confident that the total allocation of £250,000 can be beaten if building licences are forthcoming without in any way hampering my Council's housing programme. It is reasonable to assume that, in spite of the housing drive, there are available in Southampton 500 building trade operatives who could be engaged on central area reconstruction work, and, if one takes the figure of £1,000 per annum as the average amount of work each man can produce, that would mean £500,000 could he spent in one year. It must, however, be borne in mind that, in addition to local labour, quite 50 per cent. of the labour employed on large projects is specialised labour, and, therefore, with a local labour force of 500, £1 million could be expended in 12 months. Another very important fact to bear in mind is that, if licences could be issued on the basis suggested, I feel sure the output per man would increase and the labour drift from the building industry would be stopped."

That is the opinion of the Town Clerk of Southampton, and I pass it on to the Parliamentary Secretary. I have no doubt that the Parliamentary Secretary is a very hardworking and able Minister, and that my hon. Friend, in his reply, will advance arguments against those which I have adduced. He has, I think, taken more debates on the Motion for the Adjournment than almost any other Minister; I have listened to him replying to a good many, and have noticed that he seems to know almost all the answers. Whether he has got the answers from the civil servants of his Department, or whether he has produced them from his own dialectical ingenuity, which is considerable, I cannot say, but I hope that, on this occasion, he will not think of exercising his dialectical ingenuity, but rather of exercising his sympathy.

We in the blitzed towns are the orphans of the storm, and we feel that we are the neglected orphans of the storm. I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary, in his reply, will be able to give us an assurance which will give to the people in the blitzed towns a realisation that the sacrifices and endurances which they made and suffered are recognised by His Majesty's Government, and that they will get some financial aid towards their loss of rateable value and the reconstruction of their blitzed cities.

This is not the first occasion on which my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Morley) and I have spoken in the House on the problem of the blitzed towns, and I am sure that we both hope that this may be the last occasion on which we shall have to bring the problem of these areas to the notice of the Government.

In the few moments available to me there are some additional points to those already made so well by my hon. Friend that I should like to urge. In the first place, I would point out that it was never intended that the equalisation grants provided in the Local Government Act, 1948, should deal with this particular problem of loss of rateable value in blitzed towns. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health, replying to the Second Reading debate on that Act, said:

"Now I come to the question of the blitzed areas, on which matter so many hon. Members are concerned. I hope they will agree with me that the badly blitzed areas present a special problem, and not one suitable to be dealt with in this Measure, which I think we must regard as a permanent Measure."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th November, 1947; Vol. 444, c. 1215.]

The Government honoured that obligation. For three years from that date, in 1948–49, 1949–50, and 1950–51, the badly war-damaged towns were given grants for rate aid quite apart from any allocation that might or might not be due to them under the equalisation grants provided under that Act. It was intended, therefore, when that Act was passed, that this special problem should be dealt with by special means, and until 31st March last it has been so dealt with, but on a diminishing scale.

I would remind the Parliamentary Secretary that the amount of those grants was determined before the cuts in the capital investment programme took place, and before the re-armament programme was commenced. In consequence, the amount of recovery which it was thought would have been established by now in the blitzed towns has not been accomplished owing to the fact that there has been a very serious diminution in capital investment expenditure in those towns consequent upon the policy of the Government. We therefore feel that we have a right to ask for rather special consideration in this regard.

I shall not deal with the details of the problem of Plymouth, as I hoped I might be able to do this afternoon, along the lines upon which my hon. Friend has dealt with the problem of Southampton. I would emphasise, however, that even at this late date these war-damaged towns are in a seriously disadvantageous position. When we spend the money, whatever our resources may be by way of rate income, we are not providing for amenities; we are not providing for so many services which we should like to have but we are still having to provide for the very heavy burdens that were laid upon our cities because of the war.

In case the Parliamentary Secretary should, when replying, base his argument upon the criterion of the product of a 1d. rate, I would point out that that is not a reasonable criterion to choose in judging the problem, because even where the product of a ld. rate has recovered to its war-time level—which it has not in all cases—local authorities are being faced with additional liabilities to those faced in most towns in restoring houses, schools and other municipal buildings.

For example, housing is regarded by local government experts as a rate liability. The amount which the blitzed towns have had to spend in subsidies to housing estates and in the building of houses has been very much larger than in most towns; and they have had to do that at a time when highly rated commercial buildings in city centres have been non-existent or just beginning to be rebuilt. Therefore, while they have had to maintain those extra liabilities on account of housing. schools and other necessary buildings they had not had, and still cannot have, the rate income which would even things out and give balanced finances to these cities.

I therefore ask my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to give this matter as sympathetic consideration as he can and to do everything in his power to help all those blitzed towns, not just Plymouth and Southampton, which can prove that their rateable value on 31st March last was something more than 5 per cent. less than it was before the damage of the war fell upon them.

I am sure that all hon. Members present will agree that my two hon. Friends, the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mrs. Middleton) and Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Morley), always make a first-class case when they put anything before the House on behalf of their constituents.

As perhaps, later, I shall be what some folk may think a little unsympathetic, may I say, first, that I agree entirely with my hon. Friends that both Plymouth and Southampton among the blitzed towns of this country took a very big pounding during the war and that the population of those areas stood up to it magnificently. They showed courage, stamina and fortitude which put them in the same line as first-class troops. War was brought to their doorsteps and they stood up to it in the same way and with the same courage and endurance that British troops have always shown.

As to finance, if I may put it kindly and bluntly, what my two hon. Friends are saying is "Although we are still comparatively wealthy in Southampton and Plymouth we are not as wealthy as we would have been if there had not been the blitz." I agree with that entirely, but if we went so far as to consider the effect of war on individuals or groups or companies, and so on, taking account of the fact that they are not as well off because of the effects of war, the problems we should encounter would be quite difficult to handle.

My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton, said that average rateable values did not really amount to much; but I maintain they are vital. After all, the rate product has been the basis of local government finance ever since we have had local government, and the difficulty has always been that where, generally speaking, one had low rateable values and large populations the authorities could not afford to carry out their necessary functions.

But it must have relation to rate liabilities.

It does, because one can only have a high rateable value if one has hereditaments in the area of such rateable value as to contribute a surplus to the whole. As my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen, has said, in many of the properties the actual cost of services provided is greater than the amount of rates the properties contribute. To have a high average rateable value in the area there must be large properties contributing to it. The average rateable value for the whole country is £6.19 per head of weighted population. The rateable value per head for Southampton is £6.87 and for Plymouth £6.77.

Both Southampton and Plymouth are above the national average with respect to the rateable value per weighted head of the population. We have 83 county boroughs in this country of which only 28 are above the national average, and Plymouth and Southampton, in spite of the loss of rateable value which they suffered as a result of the war, are better off than the vast majority of county boroughs.

My hon. Friends said that these grants should have been maintained until at least the pre-war rateable value had been restored. I will not attribute those actual words to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton, but they were the words which I wrote down when my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen, was speaking. In both Plymouth and Southampton the rateable value is today higher than it was in 1938-39. According to my figures, the product of a penny rate in Southampton in 1938-39 was 5,900. The product of a penny rate in 1951–52 is £6,225, so that there has been an increase in the product of a penny rate of £325 over 1939.

When we come to Plymouth, the product of a penny rate in 1939 was £6,818.

That is not the highest year. The highest year was 1940–42, when the product of a penny rate in Plymouth was £7,657.

There may be special circumstances, but I am talking of prewar. It was said that these grants ought to be in relation to the loss of rateable value which has arisen since the war. The product of a penny rate in 1938–39 was £6,818, and the product of a penny rate today is £7,153.

No, £6,953.

No. The figure supplied to me by the Department in respect of the product of a penny rate for 1951–52, for the present financial year, in the City of Plymouth—the rate product which they themselves use—is £7,153. There again, the rate product has increased by well over £300.

Let us look at it in another way. Both Southampton and Plymouth are lowly rated towns. The average for the whole of the county boroughs is 20s. 4d. The rate levied by Southampton is 19s. 9d.—7d. below the national average. In Plymouth the rate levied is 18s. 6d.—1s. 10d. below the national average.

What about West Ham?

I have not the figures for West Ham before me, but I believe it is about 24s. 2d.

It is 25s.

When we consider that the national average is 20s. 4d., and take into account the rateable value per weighted head of the population, the product of a penny rate and the actual amount of rates levied in the area, we find that both Southampton and Plymouth are comparatively wealthy areas, in the sense that they are much more wealthy than most other county boroughs throughout the country. There are only 28 county boroughs which are in the same happy position as Southampton and Plymouth in being above the national average.

What is the purpose of making grants-in-aid? I suggest that if we are making contributions from the Exchequer to local authorities as grants in aid of their services, those grants should be given to those authorities which have the greatest difficulty or the least resources with which to provide the services which they ought to provide in their area. These grants were started in that way. They were started, first of all, for the coastal towns in 1940—towns from which, owing to the possibility of invasion, it was decided that the population should be evacuated to other parts of the country. They suffered a loss of rateable value because people had to move out of their area and there were fewer resources with which to maintain the high standard of service which had been provided for the larger population which normally would have occupied the towns. Grants were made in those cases.

Those grants were extended when the blitz took place. Unfortunately, a number of cities suffered heavy raids and lost rateable value. Again, and quite rightly, there was national and local encouragement for the inessential population of those areas to move away, which meant that there was a further loss of rateable value, and grants were introduced to assist these towns. They were made until 1948 when there was an agreement—or perhaps that is putting it a little too high—when there were discussions with the local authorities concerned who, after negotiation, were informed that these grants must come to an end and that they would taper off and end in 1951 or earlier.

All the local authorities who were affected have known that they would lose these grants and it has not been a bombshell to them. But in the 1948 Local Government Act we made provision in a better way. We said that where cities were below the national average in their rate product, whether they had been blitzed or not, we should help them to maintain their services by giving them a grant which would bring them up to a level of the national average. Since 1948, irrespective of whether the town was blitzed or not, grants have been paid to help these authorities to maintain and improve the social services of their area. These grants are on a basis of need. The need arises because they lack the resources to maintain those services.

I suggest to both my hon. Friends, with great sincerity, that the plea which was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen, in par- ticular, that there should be some compensation payment for pain and suffering is not a feasible approach to the problem. The correct approach ought to be that we should provide assistance by grants-in-aid if there is difficulty in maintaining the standard of service which the people of those areas have a right to expect. I have tried to show that on each basis in turn—rate product, the rate levied. and so on—both Southampton and Plymouth are relatively fortunate.

I conclude as I began: I most readily agree that but for the tragic circumstances of the loss of rateable value arising from enemy action they would have been much better off than they are today, but my right hon. Friend cannot agree that that is good reason for revising his decision not to continue these grants.