House Of Commons
Monday, 2nd March, 1953
The House met at Half past Two o'Clock
Prayers
[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]
Oral Answers To Questions
Electricity Publication
2.
asked the Attorney-General whether he has considered an illustrated publication entitled, "The place of Electricity in the Nation's Fuel and Power policy," a copy of which has been sent to him and which purports to represent the views of the British Electricity Authority, but carries no imprint of the name of the body or persons issuing the document, and no imprint of the name of the publishers or printers and thus constitutes an offence; what steps he has taken to establish if this document was published with or without the authority of the British Electricity Authority, or by it; and, in view of the requirements of the statutes bearing on this matter, what steps he is taking to establish the identity of the issuers, printers and publishers of the document and to secure compliance with the law.
I am having inquiries made.
Legal Aid Scheme
3.
asked the Attorney-General whether sufficient experience has now been gained of the working of the Legal Aid Scheme to enable him to make a statement thereon; if he is aware that an unassisted person is at a disadvantage when engaged in litigation with an assisted person; and what measures he proposes to redress this disequilibrium.
The Report of the Legal Aid Advisory Committee, which has recently been laid before Parliament, gives, on the whole, a favourable judgment of the Scheme. My noble friend the Lord Chancellor agrees with their view, but he thinks there is room for improvement. He has the Report under consideration at present. Section 2 (2, e) of the Legal Aid and Advice Act, which limits an assisted person's liability for costs to what he can reasonably pay in all the circumstances, is based on a recommendation of the Rushcliffe Committee on Legal Aid and Legal Advice. It was fully discussed when the Act passed through Parliament, and no amendment of that particular provision is at present contemplated.
Since an unassisted person has to pay his own costs even if he is successful in his litigation and an assisted person gets his costs paid for him even if he loses, does not my hon. and learned Friend think that this is a rather dangerous situation—one in which it is almost impossible to induce an assisted person to settle, even though he should settle, because there is no inducement for him to settle? Does he not think that this conflicts with the basic principle of equality before the law?
I will see that my hon. Friend's view is put before the Lord Chancellor.
Would the hon. and learned Gentleman not agree that a great many of the present anomalies would be removed if the Government would bring into operation the Sections of the Act in regard to giving advice, and would he say what the intentions of the Government are in that respect?
I am afraid I cannot make any statement in regard to intentions of that kind, but that also will be considered.
Has my hon. and learned Friend's attention been drawn to a case about a dog, which was recently before Mr. Justice Lynskey, in which both sides had all their costs paid, so that, whichever won, either side could not have paid damages?
I do not think anybody could have helped having had that called to his attention.
Civil Liability (Damage By Animals)
4.
asked the Attorney-General what action he proposes to take to implement the recommendations in the Report of the Committee on the Law of Civil Liability for Damage done by Animals.
These recommendations are now under consideration.
Have the Government any proposals in mind in view of the fact that there are farmers still suffering through damage done to sheep by dogs and there is a provision in the recommendations that might do something to meet that complaint?
There is a number of different recommendations, and they do require quite a lot of consideration.
Royal Commission On Marriage And Divorce
5.
asked the Attorney-General when the report of the Royal Commission on the marriage laws will be issued.
I am not in a position to say when the Royal Commission is likely to report, but I understand that it is quite impossible for the report to be available in the near future in view of the large body of evidence which has been tendered to the Commission.
But, so far as he can do it, will the Attorney-General do his best to facilitate the publication of this report, to which many people look forward in the hope that it will lead to much-need reforms?
I will certainly facilitate publication of the report, but it first has to be made.
Statute Law Committee
6.
asked the Attorney-General whether he will make a statement about the work of the Statute Law Committee since his statement of last year.
Yes, Sir. With the permission of my hon. Friend, I propose to have a statement circulated in the OFFICIAL REPORT, since it must run to some length.
May I ask my hon. and learned Friend whether the statement shows any progress is being made in consolidating Acts of Parliament?
I feel some hesitation in expressing any view about it, but I should think that it will be found that quite a satisfactory result is disclosed.
Following is the statement:
The Committee's functions concern consolidation and statutory publications. Work on consolidation has proceeded satisfactorily in general, but some of the work has suffered delay in consequence of need to await the passing of amending legislation. Five consolidation Bills have been passed, relating respectively to Customs and Excise, Magistrates Courts, Costs in Criminal Cases, Prisons (England and Wales), and Prisons (Scotland). Two Bills are now before one or other House, relating respectively to the Post Office, and Births and Deaths Registration. Bills to consolidate the enactments relating to the Auxiliary Forces and to the Registration Service are likely to be introduced very shortly. Work is in hand on Bills, which it is hope to introduce during the current Session, to consolidate the enactments relating to Licensing for the sale of Intoxicating Liquors, the Medical Acts, the Solicitors Acts, and the Summary Jurisdiction (Scotland) Acts.
Work is also in hand on other measures which may be completed in time for introduction of Bills during the current Session, but of which I would prefer not to speak with greater certainty in this statement. In the case of one important project, to consolidate the Electricity Supply Acts, a suspension of work has become necessary after much had been done, in view of the need referred to above to await the passing of amending legislation; and the position is similar as to a consolidation of the Supreme Court of Judicature Acts, having regard to prospective large scale amendment of the Rules of the Supreme Court.
The work of the Statutory Publications Office has proceeded for the most part in a normal manner not calling for particular comment, but it has been of somewhat exceptional volume in consequence of the numerous alterations entailed by the extensive range of the consolidations mentioned at the beginning of this statement. Some success has attended the efforts continuously made to secure earlier issue of periodical publications. With a view to testing demand for annual publication of the "Guide to Government Orders," experimental publication both in 1952 and in the present year has been arranged. A sub-committee of the Statute Law Committee will review this experiment. and other matters relating to the issue and sale of the Guide and of other publications for which the Committee is responsible.
Coronation Amnesty (Deserters)
7.
asked the Attorney-General whether Her Majesty's Government will introduce legislation to authorise the amnesty for deserters.
No legislation is required for the amnesty of the military offence of desertion. As regards civil offences, the method of dealing with the matter is still under consideration.
Should not a Motion be put down to give effect to the amnesty? Does not the Bill of Rights, which is still on the Statute Book, say, and I quote the words:
"The pretended power of suspending laws or the execution of laws without the consent of Parliament is illegal"?
I can assure my hon. Friend that, so far as the military offence of desertion is concerned, there is no possibility of contravening the Bill of Rights. As for civil offences, that is another matter. Obviously it is desirable to avoid the necessity of legislation if possible, but it may not be possible.
Were the Law Officers consulted about the wording and the content of the Prime Minister's amnesty statement before it was made, because it was not as clear as it might have been, hence the disappointing result so far.
The Law Officers are not consulted on the wording of statements. The Law Officers are consulted on matters of principle. I believe that the answer I have given is correct.
45.
asked the Prime Minister if he will recommend extending the amnesty granted to deserters to all men who deserted in the reign of King George VI.
No, Sir. Desertion is a most serious crime in peace or war. However, to mark this Coronation year the Government thought it reasonable that an amnesty be granted to those who deserted during the war and have been living as fugitives for many years since hostilities ended. There would not in my view be any justification for extending this act of Royal clemency, in the manner proposed.
Is the Prime Minister aware that the deserter who deserted in time of war is getting more favourable consideration than the man who deserted in time of peace?
He may conceivably have been under more stress.
If the Prime Minister will not extend the amnesty, for reasons which we can well understand, will he at least take an early opportunity of clearing up some of the obscurities in his original amnesty statement which has, judged by the results so far, in one way failed of its purpose?
Its purpose was to relieve a considerable number of people from anxiety about their position in the country. It is quite true that it may take some time for them to adjust their affairs in accordance with the new clemency extended to them, and that is a point on which the House may from time to time seek further information.
Referring to the supplementary question of my hon. and gallant Friend, could the Prime Minister say whether the advice of the Law Officers was received by him as to the terms or the principle of the statement which he made with regard to this matter?
My right hon. and learned Friend answered a Question earlier today on that subject.
I know, but it was not a specific answer on that specific point, and the Prime Minister will, of course, know the answer. I am asking him whether the advice of the Law Officers was given or asked for as to the wording and the principle of the statement he made with regard to this amnesty.
I am not sure. It may well have been that it was not asked specifically on that point.
Furnishing Firms (Trading Activities)
8.
asked the Attorney-General whether he has completed his inquiries into the allegations against certain furnishing stores; and whether he has found any grounds for taking proceedings.
I have received a very full report on this matter from the Director of Public Prosecutions. It discloses no evidence of any criminal offence.
Would my hon. and learned Friend make it clear, as I think he almost has, that there is no reflection whatever upon the honesty and integrity of Phillips' Furnishing Stores, Wynn's Furnishing Stores and, in Wales, A. Bevan and Co. who were named in this House on the last occasion the matter was mentioned?
Obviously, there can be no reflection upon anyone in respect of whom a careful investigation of this kind has been made.
Does not the hon. and learned Gentleman agree that one of the results of this inquiry has been to interfere with the possibility of ordinary salesmen, working-class chaps, who work for these firms, receiving the increased commission which automatically they would have received through the winter sales? Is he not aware that such winter sales were not conducted by the firms because of the length of the inquiries which have been made?
I am afraid all I can say is that some allegations were made against certain people and that they have been proved to be unfounded.
May I have your guidance, Mr. Speaker? On 24th November, no fewer than 10 hon. Members put down Questions on this subject, making allegations of illegal trading methods and unlawful practices, when a number of firms were mentioned in a supplementary question. Some of the hon. Members were closely associated with a rival trading organisation. Before these Questions were put down at all, according to my information, all goods had been delivered or deposits refunded to unsatisfied customers. As these very damaging allegations have been shown by my hon. and learned Friend's reply to have no foundation in fact, would it not be appropriate for those responsible for putting down the Questions—and I see one in his place—to apologise?
That is not a point of order for me. I have to take Questions on the basis that hon. Members who ask them or who put them on the Paper make themselves responsible for the facts which the Questions disclose.
As an allegation has been made by the hon. Member for Dumfries (Mr. N. Macpherson) against one or more hon. Members on this side of the House whom, he alleged, represented rival organisations, may I submit that that is a gross breach of Parliamentary custom?
I did not follow that part of the hon. Gentleman's question.
The words used by the hon. Gentleman were that the hon. Members on this side of the House who raised the matter were closely associated with a rival trading organisation. The clear imputation of that is that the motive which induced hon. Members on this side of the House to raise the question was a personal interest which they had in a rival trading association. In view of the fact that that remark was made at a time when the hon. Member was purporting to raise the matter in the name of the order of the House, it seems to me that his remark was quite uncalled for and ought to be withdrawn.
I am obliged to the hon. Member for that explanation. It must be clearly understood that all imputations against hon. Members of any undisclosed or unavowed motive are quite out of order and should not be made in the House.
Further to that point of order. I was not making any imputation against the bona fides of hon. Members. All I said was that it is a fact that they are closely associated with a rival trading organisation, and, that being the case, while no imputation is made in any way against their bona fides, no doubt they would wish to apologise.
Hon. Members must act as they are advised about making apologies.
Pensions Appeal Tribunals (Medical Witnesses)
9.
asked the Attorney-General whether he is aware of the great difficulty experienced by applicants for disablement pension who are unable, through poverty, to secure the attendance of medical witnesses on their behalf at the tribunal; and whether he will arrange for a procedure by which an applicant can submit a written application to the tribunal in advance of the hearing for certification of the costs of his medical witnesses.
I am not aware of the difficulty to which the hon. Member refers and I have been informed that the pensions appeal tribunals know of no case in which an appellant has been unable, through poverty, to secure the attendance of a medical witness. But if the hon. Member can give me particulars of any such case, I shall be very glad to look into it.
I am obliged to the hon. and learned Gentleman and greatly appreciate his reply. Unfortunately, this sort of thing does not come to the pensions tribunal. This is the case of the chap who feels that he has a right to be there and who goes to his panel doctor, who says, "Who is going to pay? A reasonable sum will do." The thing stops there. There are such cases, and I should be grateful if the hon. and learned Gentleman would have a word with me about them.
I shall certainly be very glad to have a word with the hon. Gentleman about it, if I may.
Is the hon. and learned Gentleman aware that I have particulars of some such cases and that the only result in most cases is the defeat of justice? If those cases are brought to his notice, will he take steps to obviate this difficulty, which certainly exists?
I shall be glad to take advantage of any assistance which the hon. and learned Gentleman can give me.
British Secret Service (Allegations)
10, 11 and 16.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1) whether he has considered the letter from the hon. Member for West Ham, North, enclosing the communication from Colonel Dr. J. M. Somer, former Commanding Officer of the Dutch Bureau Inlichtingen, containing evidence of continuing neglect on the part of British Secret Service agents during the war; and whether he will make a statement in answer to the points contained in the colonel's letter;
(2) why 3,000 Sten guns, 300 Bren guns, 2,000 hand grenades, 75 radio transmitters and secret radar equipment was parachuted into German hands in Holland during the last war by British Secret Service agents, after the Service had been informed of this danger. (3) why, and on what basis the British Secret Service made the necessary arrangements for van der Waals, a German Secret Service agent employed by the Gestapo, to be introduced to Mr. Vorrink, the leader of the Dutch Underground Movement, as an allied friend and British agent; and if he will explain the procedure that was adopted to inform Mr. Vorrink that van der Waals was a tried and trusted friend of Great Britain.As the hon. Member has been repeatedly informed, these matters were the subject of full investigation both during and after the war. As he was also told on 18th February, it is contrary to the public interest and established practice to publish details of the affairs of secret organisations.
The Foreign Office statement of the 14th December, 1949, annexed to the Netherlands Parliamentary Commission's report, admitted that mistakes were made. It made it clear, however, that the inquiries had not revealed the slightest grounds for believing that there was treachery either on the British or on the Netherlands side. That statement was endorsed by the Netherlands Parliamentary Commission. The letter from Colonel Somer, though dated 10th February, was not received in my Department till 26th February and there has not been time for detailed examination of its contents. It does not appear, however, to contain anything new or which would justify further discussion with Dr. Somer.Germany
Herr Krupp
12.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs why, in view of the fact that in the Occupation Statute for Germany powers are specifically reserved to the Allied Control Authority with regard to de-cartelisation and deconcentration of German industry, no progress has yet been made with proposals for preventing Herr Krupp from buying his way back into the coal and steel industry.
15.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs what arrangements have been made with Herr Krupp.
I hope to be in a position to make a statement on Wednesday.
Refugees
28.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs the latest figures for refugees from Eastern Germany; and what further steps are being taken to deal with the problems created by this influx.
Since my hon. Friend's reply to the hon. Gentleman on 4th February, it is estimated that between 35,000 and 40,000 refugees have arrived in West Berlin in February. The present rate of evacuation to Western Germany is about 750 a day. It is planned to increase this rate to 30,000 a month as soon as reception facilities in the Federal Republic permit. Her Majesty's Government have been in touch with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and we have asked the German Federal Government to suggest what useful assistance we could render.
While thanking the Minister for that answer and welcoming the effort by Her Majesty's Government, may I ask whether he does not think the time has come to reconstitute through the United Nations some agency for taking care of these refugees, removing them out of Berlin and, if necessary, resettling them?
That is another question.
Is it not of great importance that there should be an international agency dealing with this matter and, if necessary, that international funds should be raised, with Her Majesty's Government contributing, in order to deal with a problem which may be of tragic importance to German democracy?
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been taking a very great interest in this matter and working out a scheme in consultation with the German authorities to deal with certain aspects of the matter.
But has he any funds to help?
He certainly has funds, to which Her Majesty's Government have made a contribution.
Does the assistance which Her Majesty's Government propose to offer to the German authorities include an invitation to take a proportion of these refugees into this country?
I believe that it does not.
Hungary (Mr Sanders)
13.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether Mr. Sanders, a British subject imprisoned in Hungary, has yet been visited by Her Majesty's representative in Budapest; and what was the date of his last representations on behalf of Her Majesty's Government and the nature of the reply received from the Hungarian Government.
I would ask the hon. Member to await the statement which the Prime Minister proposes to make at the end of Questions.
British Troops (Suez Canal Zone)
14.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if, in view of the fact that the Egyptian area is one of the most important places in the world in respect to the defence of the free world, and not merely because it is the site of the Suez Canal, he will make representations to the Egyptian Government on the necessity of stationing there powerful land, sea and air forces equipped with all modern weapons in the interests of Egypt and of the free world.
26.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether his attention has been drawn to the demand, put forward officially, by the Egyptian Prime Minister for the unconditional evacuation of the Canal Zone by all British Forces; and whether he will make it clear that this is not an acceptable basis for negotiations.
I am aware that there have been a number of public statements by responsible Egyptians, demanding unconditional withdrawal of British Forces from the Canal Zone. No formal demand has however been made. As my right hon. Friend told the House on 23rd February, it is Her Majesty's Government's policy to arrive at a general settlement of the whole question of defence by negotiation with the Egyptian Government.
I am sure the House would not expect me at this stage to make any disclosure of the nature of the representations which we hope to make shortly to the Egyptian Government. I can, however, assure both hon. Members that the important issues they raise will be borne in mind.As General Neguib is an experienced soldier, does the right hon. and learned Gentleman think it could be suggested to him that it is absolutely necessary, for the protection of this vital zone, that Egypt should share the duties of protecting the zone with her allies?
I certainly think that is a factor which has to be borne in mind by both sides.
Mr. Wyatt.
On a point of order. May I have an answer to my Question No. 26?
The hon. Member's Question was answered with Question No. 14.
That is quite a different Question.
The Minister purported to answer both Questions together and I thought that the answer covered both points.
Are we to understand, Mr. Speaker, that if a Minister answers, for example, Question No. 3 and purports to answer at the same time Question No. 46, although the Member asking Question No. 46 is not here, the hon. Member is thereby debarred from asking his Question?
Theoretically hon. Members should be in constant attendance in the House.
Is it not the practice for Ministers, in those circumstances, through their Parliamentary Private Secretaries, to inform Members concerned that they proposed to answer their Questions together?
No.
The practice varies. What Ministers choose to do has nothing to do with me.
Anglo-Iranian Oil Dispute
17.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he will make a statement on the recent proposals made to the Persian Government through the United States Ambassador in Teheran for a settlement of the Anglo-Persian oil dispute.
21.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he will make a statement on the recent British offer to Persia to settle the oil dispute.
I am not yet in a position to add anything to the reply given by my right hon. Friend to the hon. Member for Aston (Mr. Wyatt) on 28th January.
Icelandic Fisheries Dispute
18.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if he has yet studied the reply which he received on 18th February to his proposals to the Icelandic Government about the fisheries dispute; if he is aware that the fishing industry and consumers of fish are anxiously awaiting his forthcoming statement on the subject; and if he will expedite that statement.
At present I have nothing to add to the reply which my right hon. Friend gave to the hon. and learned Member on 23rd February. A statement will be made to the House at the earliest possible moment.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman does not appear to be in an informative mood today. Is he further aware that I raised this matter with the Foreign Secretary only last week and that he then said he was studying the reply? Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman not agree that this is a very important matter affecting the food supplies of the country, that the Government appear to be abrogating the functions of Government and allowing them to be usurped by private interests, and will the Government study the matter and have it attended to immediately?
I certainly agree with the hon. and learned Gentleman that this is an important matter affecting many people. The reply of the Icelandic Government is being carefully studied, and I should like the hon. and learned Gentleman to realise that it is not our fault that this dispute has dragged on. We have made several proposals for a settlement, but none of them was acceptable to the Icelandic Government.
Would the hon. and learned Gentleman be good enough to advise the Icelandic Government to be careful before they come to any arrangement with Mr. George Dawson?
British Shipping, Far East (Interference)
19.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs what payments have now been made by the Chinese National Government as compensation for damage and interference with British shipping.
Only two claims for compensation for damage to, or interference with, British shipping by Chinese Nationalist forces have been submitted by Her Majesty's Consul at Tamsui. One of these arose out of a machine-gun attack by aircraft on the motor vessel "Glenearn" in July, 1950, in which the First Officer was injured and the ship damaged. The Nationalist authorities have admitted responsibility and, last September, agreed to pay the claim, amounting to £11,600, in full, although payment has not yet been received. The other case was that of the s.s. "Rosita," which was dealt with in my right hon. Friend's answer to the right hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. A. Henderson) on 23rd February.
In view of the necessity to maintain British prestige in the Far East, is it not about time that this claim, which was admitted last September, was paid, and will Her Majesty's Government really impress upon the Formosan Government that they wish this to be paid at the earliest possible opportunity and that they do not propose to wait for it?
There has been a delay in the paying of this claim, but it does not appear to be a wilful delay. It is due to some technicalities over payment being made through certain accounts which are in the United Kingdom. We are still seeking to negotiate a method of payment.
Two British lives were lost in connection with incidents of this character, and can the Minister of State tell the House whether that was taken into account in the two claims to which he has referred, or are they considered as separate incidents?
From recollection, I do not think a life was involved in the first case of the "Glenearn," but so far as the "Rosita" was concerned there was a life lost and that matter is being borne in account.
World Peace (Mr Eisenhower's Statement)
20.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on how many occasions since the present Government took office he has raised with the Government of the United States the question of the desirability of a meeting of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister with Premier Stalin.
I would ask the hon. Member to await the replies which the Prime Minister will give to Questions Nos. 46 and 47.
Is the Minister aware that this Question has nothing to do with the Question put to the Prime Minister which was on the Order Paper a week ago, and can he give us an assurance that the Prime Minister is not going to take over the duties of Foreign Secretary?
If the hon. Gentleman will await the reply of the Prime Minister, he will realise that that reply will cover his Question.
46.
asked the Prime Minister if, in view of the official declaration by President Eisenhower of his willingness to go halfway to meet Marshal Stalin, he will make a statement on his attitude to this new development; and what contribution he is prepared to make in an effort to lessen the tension in international affairs.
47.
asked the Prime Minister if he will now reconsider his decision and make a prompt statement, in view of President Eisenhower's recent acceptance in principle of a meeting with Premier Stalin, to the effect that he now favours such a Three Power meeting.
I will, with permission, answer this Question and Question No. 47 together with No. 20.
I understand that President Eisenhower has publicly declared himself willing to meet Mr. Stalin provided, among other things, that he can see a hope of results that would help world peace. That has always been Her Majesty's Government's attitude. It may be well to repeat the actual terms in which President Eisenhower is reported to have spoken on 25th of February:that shows it is geographical—"I would meet anybody anywhere if I thought there was the slightest chance of doing any good, as long as it was in keeping with what the American people expected of their Chief Executive. In other words I would not want just to say I would go anywhere. I would go to any suitable spot, let's say halfway between,"—
Also on 26th February Mr. Dulles is reported to have said:"and talk with anybody and with the full knowledge of our allies and friends as to the kind of thing I was talking about. Because this business of defending freedom is a big job and not just one nation's business."
In reply to Question No. 20, I would say that such consultations as Her Majesty's Government have had with the United States Government concerning relations with the Soviet Union have been confidential. They will no doubt be continued by the Foreign Secretary who is due to arrive in the United States on Wednesday. On the general issue, speaking for myself and Her Majesty's Government, I should, of course, be quite ready at any time to meet President Eisenhower and Marshal Stalin on the basis outlined by the President if suitable arrangements could be made. Of course the matter does not rest only with me."Nothing whatever is in prospect for such a meeting."
While I thank the Prime Minister for that answer, does he not appreciate that the people overwhelmingly desire that he should meet Marshal Stalin as soon as possible? If Stalin is bluffing, is it not right that the bluff should be called, but if he is sincere might not some good be done? May I beg the Prime Minister before it is too late to take this step, because if war should come and it has not been done, many millions of people would feel that all has not been done to keep the peace?
What exact step is the hon. Member asking me to take?
I am asking the right hon. Gentleman whether he would meet Stalin; and if he is bluffing to call his bluff, and whether some good could not be done.
I really do not think that matters of this great gravity ought to be dealt with on the basis of calling somebody's bluff.
Does the Prime Minister think that President Eisenhower came to this conclusion after reading a very large number of eloquent speeches that the Prime Minister delivered previous to this? Will the Prime Minister tell us quite specifically that he welcomes this new overture and will do his utmost to carry it out in the spirit in which he delivered the election speeches?
I certainly would say that I welcome every effort to arrive at a good understanding between the great Powers.
In view of the fact that throughout history the meetings of heads of State have almost invariably been followed by quite disastrous consequences, would the right hon. Gentleman in future see that our relations are conducted through Foreign Offices, which seem to bring about much more satisfactory results?
I might suggest that the hon. and learned Member should carry out active proselytising work on his own side. [Interruption.] I quite see that the hon. and learned Member is carrying out my suggestion.
Korea
Germ Warfare Allegations
22.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs when he was informed by the United States Government of their directive to introduce in Korea widespread germ warfare.
The United States Government have not communicated to Her Majesty's Government any directive about the introduction of germ warfare in Korea. Germ warfare has never been used by the United Nations forces in Korea; and I believe that the allegation that any such directive has been issued is complete nonsense.
Has the right hon. and learned Gentleman been made aware of the report that was recently published by two high-ranking American officers who have served for a considerable time in Korea, and are still in Korea, about the use of germ warfare there, where amongst other things an effort was made to lay a cholera belt across North Korea? Surely the right hon. and learned Gentleman ought to make inquiries into these facts when they are known to the public although deliberately denied by this Government?
The hon. Gentleman refers to reports and facts. The lapse of time between the capture of these officers and the publication of this story was, I should have thought, in itself enough to throw doubt on the truth and spontaneity of the so-called confessions.
On a point of order. Is it not a rule in this House that an hon. Member makes himself responsible for the allegations made in his Question? Is it not wholly undesirable that insinuations of this sort should be made if there is no truth in them?
Further to that point of order——
May I have an answer?
Hon. Members, as I have frequently said, must make themselves responsible for any statement of fact included in their Questions. In order to preserve the utmost possible freedom of speech I think that rule ought to be adhered to, uncomfortable though it sometimes is in its consequences. On the other hand, it does impose, in my judgment, a sense of responsibility on hon. Members as to Questions which they should put on the Order Paper. If that sense of responsibility animates the exercise of that freedom, we shall get the benefits of freedom without its abuses.
Am I to understand that you, Mr. Speaker, impute that by putting down this Question I was not supported by facts, and that I was not fully justified by facts in placing it on the Order Paper?
No.
I am not imputing anything against the hon. Member. I merely showed, as I wish to do, for the guidance of the House, the general principle which should govern the putting of Questions on the Order Paper, I have not the slightest doubt that the hon. Member fully believes he was justified in doing what he did, and I have made no allegations to the contrary.
Further to the point of order. The Question asks whether my right hon. Friend was informed by the United States Government of their directive, and that implies that in the hon. Member's mind such a directive was issued. No one has yet even claimed that, and surely it calls for a very severe rebuke.
The Question undoubtedly implies that the hon. Member who asked it knows or believes that such a directive was issued, but that is as far as it goes.
Further to that point of order. We are told that this is a United Nations war in Korea, and I contend as a Member of Parliament that the Government ought to have been told before additional horrors were perpetrated in Korea. I still adhere to my facts.
Is it not a fact that a Chinese lady Communist in Bulgaria announced that germ warfare would be used in Korea six months before the Chinese Government said that it had been used, thereby showing it was a carefully prepared propaganda stunt?
What the right hon. Gentleman has just said is quite correct. It is remarkable that these new charges were produced by the Peking Radio on 22nd February, the exact anniversary of the launching in 1952 of the germ warfare legend. It is also significant that the season for normal epidemics in Korea usually begins at the end of February.
As this matter now stands, the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydvil (Mr. S. 0. Davies) stands by what he alleges in that Question.
Absolutely.
My right hon. and learned Friend has emphatically denied it, and is it not right, therefore, that the hon. Member should withdraw this Question?
I stand by it. I am trying to get the truth from the Government side of the House.
Matters of that sort must be left to the judgment of the House. The hon. and gallant Gentleman must take his own course with regard to that, and the House must form its own opinion.
Later—
On a point of Order. May I, Mr. Speaker, ask your guidance still further on Question No. 22, which reads:
It raises an important question of principle, because it is well known that there never was any directive. As a result, I want to ask how that Question passed the Table and why the hon. Member was not asked to put in the word "alleged" before "directive." May I ask how this House can express its abhorrence of such irresponsible spreading of charges without foundation?"To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs when he was informed by the United States Government of their directive to introduce in Korea widespread germ warfare."
The answer to the first part of the hon. Member's question is that if the Question had been submitted with the word "alleged" in it, it would not have been in order. Questions must proceed upon a basis of fact for which the hon. Member makes himself responsible and, therefore, the Question was strictly in order. As to the view the House takes of the matter, that is not a question of order.
Further to that point of order. If the hon. Member cannot be induced to withdraw his disgraceful allegation, can it be made clear that he is in a minority of one?
Can you advise me, Mr. Speaker, as an hon. Member of this House, what steps I can take to break the conspiracy which exists in this Government against facts being made known regarding Korea to the people of this country?
That is not a question for me. As far as I am concerned, I have been careful, whatever I may think, to give the hon. Member absolute freedom for his own opinions.
Whilst not agreeing with the point of view of my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydvil (Mr. S. O. Davies), it surely is the case, is it not, that if an hon. Member wishes to bring up an important case of this kind by way of Question he must allege it and take responsibility for the allegation? I understand that is the rule as to Parliamentary Questions. Secondly, would it not be wrong, as has been put to you, to argue that, because the Government deny the alleged facts, the hon. Member is thereby necessarily proved wrong? May I submit that on both points the point of order falls down? As I say, I take a different view from my hon. Friend, but I think that we have to accept the point that if Ministers deny the truth of what an hon. Member has put down and he has then to withdraw his Question, that would endanger the liberties of the House.
I think the right hon. Gentleman has stated the position perfectly accurately and in accordance with what I said when the matter was previously raised. Whatever we may think, we must be careful to preserve to hon. Members their freedom of speech which, as I said before, carries with it a great deal of responsibility.
Is there not a difference to be drawn between allegations of actions of Her Majesty's Government and allegations of actions of friendly Powers?
Surely it is in the recollection of everyone in this House that the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary all through the Spanish Civil War denied that there were German or Italian troops in Spain at all?
That raises a very much larger question.
When the allegation the hon. Member has made is so damaging, surely it is up to him to produce the evidence and, when he has not done so, should he not withdraw?
That is a matter for the hon. Member to decide and for the House.
According to your Ruling, Sir, there can be no limit to the fantastic and untruthful nature of any allegation any hon. Member tries to embody in a Question, because there is apparently to be no limit to charges that are entirely without foundation to which currency can be given by means of Parliamentary Questions? Is not the House entitled to protection?
There are certain limits but, on the other hand, it is very important in this House to maintain the rights of hon. Members.
Surely the rights of hon. Members do not extend to making allegations against friendly Powers for which they cannot bring evidence?
If the right hon. Gentleman——
The right hon. Gentleman will see the difficulty in what he proposes. It is that if the hon. Member is challenged he would produce what he considers to be evidence. We have had this matter raised on an Adjournment debate already by the hon. Member, in which he submitted, as evidence, evidence we have already read in the public Press. That is the difficulty with which the House are confronted.
Wireless Sets
23.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he will make immediate representations to the South Korean customs authorities to release 40 wireless sets consigned to the 1st Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry, from the United States of America.
Her Majesty's Minister in Korea has raised this matter with the Korean authorities. I am hopeful that a satisfactory settlement will shortly be reached. I should like to add that the fault does not appear to lie with the South Korean authorities, who are being helpful in this matter.
While thanking the Minister for that reply, may I ask him to bear in mind that these sets were subscribed for by the people of Durham many months ago and were purchased in the United States, and that they have been held up ever since? Will he do everything in his power to expedite delivery?
We certainly will. We realise the hardship involved in the delay, and we shall do all we can to get the matter settled.
Nato (Documentary Films)
24.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether, in view of the need to develop mutual understanding among the peoples of the Atlantic community, he will suggest to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation that it should produce a series of documentary films on the theme, "Know your Partners," with sound tracks in the different languages of the alliance, for the information both of the Armed Forces and of the civil populations.
The information section of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation secretariat are considering this proposal with the information services of member Governments of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. I am informed that no final arrangements have yet been made.
European Defence Community
25.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether, in view of the recent discussions in Rome over the protocols of the French Government in the European Defence Community respecting the conditions of French military participation in European defence, he will now state what measures are to be adopted for closer co-operation between the United Kingdom and the European Defence Community.
No, Sir. I have nothing to add to the answer which my right hon. Friend gave to the hon. Member for Aston (Mr. Wyatt) on 23rd February or to his answer to the supplementary question of the hon. Member for Gloucestershire, West (Mr. Philips Price) on 16th February.
Seeing that the French protocols seem to indicate an approach towards our point of view, is it not an opportunity to press this matter to a solution?
I do not disagree at all with what the hon. Member has said, but these relationships are matters for discussion by the six E.D.C. Governments, and not only by the French Government. Our proposals on this matter have already been circulated to the E.D.C. Governments and are now being considered by the Interim Commission.
Have the Government replied to the very reasonable proposals made in the questionnaire when the French Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were in London? Why cannot we be told what the French proposals were in detail and what our reply has been? This is a vital matter which, in 10 days, will be decided one way or the other.
These are matters for negotiation among the Governments concerned. The French Government did make suggestions, and our reply has been given to the French Government. The date of publication of the reply surely is a matter for the French Government.
We fully realise that not everything can be published, but will the Minister of State consider that the people of this country may have to make a very important decision in this matter and that the sooner they can know what our Government propose the easier it will be for them to make up their minds?
I do not quarrel with the supplementary question of the right hon. Gentleman.
Argentina (British Utility Companies)
27.
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he is now in a position to make a further statement with regard to the Joint Anglo-Argentina Committee of Inquiry into the compensation for the cases of the Anglo-Argentina Tramways and the Primitiva Gas Company; and whether this Committee of Inquiry has yet been set up under the provision of the protocol recently signed with the Argentine.
I regret that I have as yet nothing to add to the reply given to my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Teeling) on 23rd February.
Is my right hon. Friend aware that it was a condition of the protocol which was signed at the end of last year that this Committee of Inquiry should be set up by 31st January, and therefore this is a breach of that protocol? As the Argentine Government are in breach of their protocol, will not my right hon. Friend consider tightening up certain other trade arrangements which are harmful to British trade to see whether we cannot get better conditions out of the Argentine Government?
Technically, this undertaking was unilaterally given by the Argentine Government, and it was not part of the trade protocol. I can assure my hon. Friend that we are pressing the Argentine Government very strongly to live up to this undertaking.
Does he think that the Argentine Government are sincerely trying to live up to it?
Ministry Of Food
Milk (Consumption)
29.
asked the Minister of Food details of the average weekly consumption of milk by the different income groups for the fourth quarter of 1952; and how this compares with the same period in 1951.
The information relating to the third quarter of 1952, which my right hon. and gallant Friend gave in reply to a Question by the hon. Member on 15th December, is the latest at present available.
Flour (Content)
32.
asked the Minister of Food which chemicals will be extracted from flour in order to make the new white loaf; and which chemicals will be added to it.
I would refer the hon. Member to the reply given by my right hon. and gallant Friend to my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Beresford Craddock) on 23rd February.
Does the Minister recall how he himself advised the public against this white flour, saying that it was just as dangerous to allow chemists to take out certain elements and to add others by artificial means as it would be to allow a milkman to skim the milk or the butcher to paint his meat with chemicals to make it look better?
I recall that many times, in comparing pre-war white flour with higher extraction flour during and since the war, I emphasied that the higher extraction flour was a much healthier flour. What is now proposed is that there should be at the subsidised price a high extraction flour and also, if the public choose to buy it, a 70 per cent. extraction flour to which have been added three important nutrients to bring its nutritional condition up to that of the high extraction flour.
Will the Minister arrange for an appreciation by the Medical Research Council of the effects of different flours on the health of the people?
I will give consideration to the right hon. Gentleman's suggestion.
Does the Parliamentary Secretary recall that he went further, and said that he challenged the statement that it was possible for chemists to bring the nutritional value of white flour up to that of the other, and that he said that it would be an invitation to ill-health?
In my view, the national bread at the high extraction rate is still healthier than the flour to which additions have been made but, by those additions, the margin of difference has been greatly narrowed. The public are offered the choice between the two.
What steps is the Parliamentary Secretary taking to inform the public of the dangers that they run when they buy the 70 per cent. extraction flour and the bread made from it?
There are no substantial dangers attached to the 70 per cent. extraction flour to which the three nutrients have been added so as to bring it up to the level of the 80 per cent. flour.
33.
asked the Minister of Food the chemical composition of flour now in use, as compared with the white flour which will soon be available for bread.
As the reply contains a number of figures, I will, with permission, circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
| CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF REPRESENTATIVE FLOURS | ||||
| Nutrients per 100 g. | Extraction Rate | |||
| 80 per cent. National (including added calcium carbonate) | 70–72 per cent. (unrestored) | 70–72 per cent. (restored) (including added calcium carbonate) | ||
| Energy value (calories) | … | 341·0 | 343·0 | 343·0 |
| Carbohydrate (g.) | … | 70·2 | 72·0 | 72·0 |
| Protein (g.) | … | 11·7 | 11·3 | 11·3 |
| Fat (g.) | … | 1·4 | 1·1 | 1·1 |
| Calcium (mg.) | … | 143·0 | 16·0 | 142·0 |
| Iron (mg.) | … | 1·65 | 1·25 | 1·65 |
| Vitamin B1 (mg.) | … | 0·24 | 0·08 | 0·24 |
| Nicotinic Acid (mg.) | … | 1·6 | 0·8 | 1·6 |
| Riboflavin (mg.) | … | 0·06 | 0·05 | 0·05 |
49.
asked the Minister of Food how much iron will be available in one pound of the proposed white loaf; and how much is present in one pound of National bread.
As recipes for bread-making vary, it is not possible to quote exact figures for the iron contents of different white breads, but any whiter flour produced after decontrol will have to contain the same quantity of iron as the present National flour, namely 7.5 milligrams per Ib. of flour.
Is the Parliamentary Secretary aware that that amount of iron will be less than the amount in National bread? Will attempts be made to add iron, as has been done in many parts of America, and in any event will the Minister advertise to the public the desirability of avoiding this substitute bread as compared with the bread which we still can enjoy?
If the hon. Member studies the figures given in the OFFICIAL REPORT in reply to Question No. 33, he will find
Does the Minister realise how difficult it is for the public to decide whether they should be advised in this matter by the Parliamentary Secretary in his previous capacity as "Radio Doctor" or by the "Radio Doctor" in his temporary capacity as Parliamentary Secretary?
When the hon. Gentleman studies the table he will find there is no inconsistency between the two.
Following is the information:
that the level of iron to be achieved in the new white flour is exactly the same as that contained in the National loaf.
Enforcement Officers
35.
asked the Minister of Food how many enforcement officers are employed by his Department at the latest available date; and when he proposes to dispense with their services.
Five hundred and thirty-two on 1st February, 1953, a reduction of 45 since October last. Further reductions will be made as more controls are removed, including those made possible by decontrol of sweets, eggs and feedingstuffs.
Will the Minister bear in mind that we fought and beat the Kaiser and Hitler and that we are now re-arming against another form of dictatorship? How much longer will he try to do what Hitler and the Kaiser failed to accomplish? If he is not careful, I shall have to come round and see him with my cosh.
Cold Storage
36.
asked the Minister of Food if he will make a statement regarding the results of his experiments in cold storing meat in 1952; and whether he will extend this experiment this year.
Last year about 2,000 tons of pork and 20 tons of home-killed beef were frozen. This meat has now been issued and its condition was satisfactory. Experiments are continuing, and special facilities for them are being provided at the new Government slaughterhouse at Fareham.
Would my hon. Friend agree that the cold storage of home killed meat was surprisingly satisfactory, and is he experimenting with chilling meat as well as with freezing it?
No, Sir. I would add that the freezing down of home-killed meat would add to its cost and lower its value, and it is right that there should be technical investigation before we commit ourselves to the policy.
Cereals And Feedingstuffs
37.
asked the Minister of Food if, in view of the fact that in the last four years his Department has lost some £78 million on importing and selling feedingstuffs and bread grains, he will now bring to an end this form of governmental trading and allow experienced merchants a free hand to carry on this trade.
The figure quoted is the total of the subsidy on imported animal feedingstuffs for the last four years. As regards the future, I would refer my hon. Friend to the White Paper presented on 21st January last announcing the Government's decision to bring cereals and feedingstuffs control to an end at the next harvest.
But will the Minister bear in mind the loss incurred in groundnuts, Gambia eggs and sorghum from Queensland, and will he stop at once this waste of public money in national and governmental trading?
Sugar (Sweets)
38.
asked the Minister of Food when he hopes to be able to announce details of the allocation of sugar and other scarce materials to new entrants into the chocolate and sweet manufacturing business.
The arrangements are being prepared, and an announcement will be made within a week or so.
39.
asked the Minister of Food to what extent it is proving necessary to increase the allocations of sugar to chocolate and sweet manufacturers following the derationing of sweets.
Not at all, apart from the initial help mentioned in reply to the hon. Member for Blackburn, East (Mrs. Castle) on 18th February.
Meat Supplies
44.
asked the Minister of Food the estimated total tonnage of carcase meat required during the year 1953 from home, Dominion and foreign sources, to maintain rations and allocations for manufacturing and auxiliary purposes at the various proposed levels; what is the tonnage that is estimated to be an aggregate of meat required for the year to enable meat to be derationed; what is the net estimated shortage of meat to be met to facilitate derationing; what is the cost to his Department of maintaining meat rationing including all salaries and overheads; and whether he will now make a statement on meat supply prospects for the year 1953.
On present estimates we expect to receive during 1953 about 1,850,000 tons of carcase meat and offal, which falls short by some 250,000 tons of pre-war supplies for a smaller population. How much more may be required to satisfy free public demand can only become known as we gain experience of rising supplies of meat and other foods. Meat control, including rationing but excluding general Ministry overheads, costs about £1,350,000 a year in salaries and wages. As regards the last part of the Question if estimates are fulfilled we should receive rather more meat in 1953 than in any year since the war.
Does my hon. Friend realise that the note of optimism for the derationing of meat will be well noted in the country, and that every one is looking forward to the early part of next year when the figures that he has given show reasonable opportunity for the derationing of meat and making further progress towards getting rid of his Ministry?
Domestic Pig Keeping
34.
asked the Minister of Food how many backyard pigs were slaughtered in 1952; what is the anticipated increase that will take place in 1953 resulting from the freedom to rear and other relaxations announced on 23rd February, 1953; and what further encouragement and stimulus he now proposes to give the backyard pig population.
In 1952, 347,000 pigs were slaughtered for home consumption. I cannot forecast the effects of recent relaxations, but no doubt they will help.
But is my hon. Friend aware that the whiff of freedom for backyard pigs which he announced last Wednesday may well result in another half a million pigs in the next 12 months, and that if he will get rid of the regulations altogether we may well add another million pigs?
I would point out to my hon. Friend that what remains is the notification to slaughter, and while pig producers in general are compelled to sell all their pigs to the Ministry of Food, to permit uncontrolled slaughter would be an invitation to black marketing.
40.
asked the Minister of Food whether he is aware that a person selling two half pigs to the Government, retaining two half pigs for himself, is not required to surrender any bacon coupons, whereas a person who sells one whole pig to the Government, retaining a whole one for himself, has to surrender 52 bacon coupons; and what is the reason for this regulation, in view of the fact that the only action required to avoid surrendering coupons is to cut the pigs in half.
In future domestic pigkeepers may, without giving up any bacon coupons, retain one whole pig on the sale of a whole pig to the Ministry.
Government Departments (Amalgamation)
48.
asked the Prime Minister whether he can now estimate the saving to be made by the proposed amalgamation of the Ministries of Pensions and National Insurance, and Transport and Civil Aviation.
I must ask the right hon. Member to await the White Paper which I have already promised to the House, and which we hope will be ready at the end of April. Meanwhile I may say that the immediate saving in staff and administration will not be large but the amalgamations will enable growing economies to be secured while fully maintaining—as we are determined to do —the standard of service.
Are we, then, to assume that the Cabinet took this important decision without having any definite figures of savings before them?
The matter was considered from every angle.
If the right hon. Gentleman has the figures, is there any reason why he should not give them to the House?
Estimates are necessarily made on almost all matters, but the point at which those estimates are translatable into facts which can be laid with all responsibility before Parliament is one which must be left to the judgment of the Ministers of the day.
Is my right hon. Friend aware how greatly the country has welcomed this measure of economy and administrative simplicity? Would he regard it as a precursor for further such measures and the elimination of the Ministries of Materials and Food?
Whilst I am not raising any point about the question of policy that is involved, surely it is elementary that when the Government consider these matters they have the figure of the immediate economies before them? I have handled some of these things, and that is always known. If the Prime Minister holds out the prospect of growing economies, is it based upon changes of policy? Can he not tell us what the immediate economy is on a figure that must have been before Ministers? The right hon. Gentleman is getting worse and worse in refusing to give the House reasonable information in answering Questions.
The right hon. Gentleman said that he had considerable experience of these kinds of things, but he means considerable experience of these kinds of things the other way round: namely, that he would rapidly multiply and expand Departments in all directions and cast away our scanty store, in the hopes of successful electioneering. Very little experience has yet come his way along the more stony track of trying to repair evil that has been done and to save money that has been wasted.
Whilst that is amusing, as the right hon. Gentleman can be, is not that reply, again, utterly irrelevant? Any Parliamentary Secretary could answer the question which I put to the right hon. Gentleman. Surely the Prime Minister could answer it. Is not his humour about "the other way round" rather out of place in view of the fact that he has created Ministers in Scotland and Wales much greater in number than ever before?
Is there any significance in the fact that this economy was carried out in the absence of the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lonsdale (Sir I. Fraser)?
Can the Prime Minister at least tell us this: Were the savings which he expects from this step included in the Civil Estimates for these Departments which were laid before Parliament a fortnight ago?
I think I said that the matter will not approach a definite and final form until the summer. Therefore, I cannot suppose that the savings have been forecast in the present Estimates. Of course, one hopes that they will come about gradually, because not multiplying Departments at a time when the actual process itself is being reduced by natural causes is a way which brings about slowly and gradually a return to more normal limits of expenditure.
Hungary (Mr Sanders)
I will, with permission, make a statement on Question No. 13 about the case of Mr. Sanders and other matters.
The Hungarian Government have repeatedly refused permission for Her Majesty's Consul at Budapest to visit Mr. Sanders. The last occasion on which representations on the subject were made to the Hungarian Government was 6th December, 1952. The Hungarian Government replied that permission would not be given because Mr. Sanders had been convicted of espionage. Her Majesty's Government have made repeated efforts, as did their predecessors, to secure Mr. Sanders' release. As the House will recall, in December, 1949, they broke off negotiations for a trade and financial agreement with Hungary because of the Hungarian Government's refusal to allow the British Consul to visit Mr. Sanders in prison. Negotiations were never resumed and Hungarian imports into the United Kingdom have, as a result, been virtually excluded. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Government has proposed that Mr. Sanders should be exchanged for Lee Meng, a Chinese woman bandit, whose death sentence is still under review in Malaya. There can be no question of bartering a human life or deflecting the course of justice or mercy in Malaya for the sake of securing the release of a British subject unjustly imprisoned in Hungary. Every effort will continue to be made by Her Majesty's Government to induce the Hungarian Communist Government to release Mr. Sanders, with whose family and friends we express our deepest sympathy.Whilst appreciating the reasons why the offer could not be accepted, could the Prime Minister state how long ago this offer was made, because I understand it was made some weeks ago? Could not unnecessary distress to the family have been avoided had a decision been more quickly reached?
I am afraid I cannot give all the dates on the spur of the moment. I gave a great deal of consideration to the answer I have just given. It does not, of course, exclude further consideration of the matter once the question of the capital sentence has been resolved by the authorities responsible. But I do not wish to say anything more than that at the present time.
Is the Minister laying down a principle in his answer about bartering one life against another? Does he not recollect that in the case of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart an exchange was made and, therefore, although the House may understand what the Prime Minister has said, surely he should not depart from a method merely because the individual at stake may not be so important?
That is matter upon which every hon. Member can judge upon his conscience, and no doubt he can also refer to precedents. With regard to the question asked by the hon. Gentleman, it was in January that leave to appeal to the Privy Council was sought in respect of the sentence. It is only a few days ago that leave to appeal to the Privy Council was refused by the Privy Council. Therefore, there has been no needless delay in dealing with this serious and painful subject.
Surely, if the principle that there should be no bartering of human lives governs the decision which has been made, whether an appeal from Malaya to the Privy Council was made or not would not be relevant to this matter? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that because of the delay in reaching a decision the Sanders family learned of the offer through the Press, which naturally must have caused them far more distress than if they had learned of it after a decision had been reached
rose——
Order. We must get on.
Austin Works Dispute (Unemployment Benefit)
(by Private Notice) asked the Minister of National Insurance whether he is aware that Austin workers who cannot work because of the strike in the vehicle building section of the Austin works, but who are themselves not on strike, have been refused unemployment benefit at the Dudley and Stourbridge employment exchanges, and what steps he proposes to take.
Whether a person who has lost his employment as the result of a trade dispute should be allowed unemployment benefit is a matter for the independent statutory authorities to decide, and I have no power to interfere with their decision. I understand that benefit has been disallowed in some cases in connection with the dispute to which the hon. and gallant Gentleman refers and that a number of appeals are now pending.
Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that a considerable number of applicants for unemployment benefit, themselves victims of this strike, have been put to great hardship as a result of having been refused benefit last Friday? Will the Minister assure the House that he is taking all possible steps to speed up the payment of benefit when he is satisfied that it is due?
In my reply I explained that the machinery for settling claims has been long established and is well understood. Allowance or disallowance of benefit depends on and rests with the independent statutory authorities over whom I have no control.
Is not it a fact that under the National Insurance Act it is a matter for the Minister in the first place to say that he does not feel that the person claiming benefit should receive it; and that it is when a man has been refused benefit that he can appeal to the tribunal? In other words, it is a matter for the Minister's local officer who has in this case refused benefit. Is it not the case that the people concerned are not the people instituting the strike and therefore, under the Act, they should be allowed their benefit?
No, Sir. The insurance officer is one of the independent statutory authorities, and in no way acts on my behalf in these cases.
Would the Minister say under what circumstances those who are victims of strikes, that is to say, who belong to unions directly involved, may be entitled to National Assistance? Will he recall the precedent of a strike a few months ago in Coventry?
National Assistance is quite a different thing from insurance benefit. The administration of it is perfectly well understood. Anyone who is in need, and has resources below a certain level can at any time procure unemployment assistance from the Board.
May I ask the right hon. Gentleman to think again about his answer regarding the insurance officer? Whatever legal fiction the right hon. Gentleman pretends to, the officer is in fact one of his own officers. May I ask whether it is true that there is now a long list of case law established on appeal to the statutory authorities, courts of referees and the umpires? Should not he now give instructions to his local insurance officers so that they do not go on disallowing benefit in contradiction to the case law?
I must reaffirm that it is not my business to give instructions to the insurance officers who are part of the independent system of adjudication in these cases. An appeal from their decision can be made to the local appeal tribunal, and in cases of this character the tribunal would sit at the earliest possible moment, or as soon as the applicant's trade union was ready to bring a test case.
Is not it a fact that the local insurance officer is a salaried officer of the local employment exchange and therefore directly an official of the right hon. Gentleman's Department?
Will the right hon. Gentleman try to meet us, not on the legal niceties of this business, but on the commonsense grounds of trying to remove some of the harsh effects of this dispute? Is the Minister aware that thousands of men, through no fault of their own, are unemployed? A person sitting in an employment exchange knows broadly which men are entitled to benefit and which are not. There are a few people who are border-line cases, and who, I agree, must be referred to the insurance officer. I ask the right hon. Gentleman to do everything in his power to speed up the payment of unemployment insurance where his officials are satisfied it is due.
I must make it clear that the law relating to the payment of unemployment benefit in the case of trade disputes has been well settled for a long time. It was last re-enacted in the National Insurance Act, 1946, by a Socialist Government. The hon. and gallant Member will find the conditions laid down in Section 13 of the Act. I have no say whatever in the way these cases are decided. That falls to the independent statutory authorities who are prepared to consider and to hear appeals with the utmost possible despatch.
Royal Prerogative (Disallowed Motion)
May I ask your guidance, Mr. Speaker, on a matter of which I have given you notice? It is the Motion which my hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) sought to put down on the Order Paper on 26th January and the Ruling which you gave in this House on 27th January about the Motion being removed from the Order Paper.
I should have raised this matter before, but for the fact that I thought some of my right hon. Friends were considering this matter. I do not wish to give the impression of clashing with the Ruling you gave. I am seeking clarification. In Erskine May, on page 437 of the 15th Edition, it is stated that matters which are pending judicial decision cannot be brought forward for debate in the House. It goes on:On page 384 of the same edition, dealing with Motions placed upon the Order Paper, it says:"A capital sentence cannot be raised in debate while the sentence is pending."
and these are the operative words—"A notice wholly out of order, as, for instance, containing a reflection on the vote of the House, may be withheld from publication on the notice paper or,"—
I think some misapprehension has grown up about the Ruling you gave. There is a feeling that you established a new precedent at that time, and I wish to ask for an assurance about two things: first, that you established no new precedent in the Ruling you gave; second, you established no new limitation on the medium of free speech, either by notice on the Order Paper or by the spoken word, which has been handed down to us in this House."if the irregularity be not extreme, the notice is printed. and reserved for future consideration."
I can give the hon. Member both the assurances for which he asks, for the reasons I stated at some length on the occasion to which he has drawn attention. No new precedent has been established and no new limitation on the rights of hon. Members has been enforced.
Bill Presented
Epsom And Walton Downs Regulation (Amendment) Bill
"to amend the Epsom and Walton Downs Regulation Act, 1936, as to the charges to be made by the Epsom Grand Stand Association Limited to bookmakers and their assistants for admission to a prescribed part of Epsom Downs and Walton Downs," presented by Mr. McCorquodale; supported by Mr. Ede, Mr. Grimond and Sir Herbert Williams; read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Friday, 13th March, and to be printed. [Bill 51.]
Orders Of The Day
Supply
[6TH ALLOTTED DAY]
Civil Estimates And Estimates For Revenue Departments And For The Ministry Of Defence, 1953–54 (Vote On Account)
Resolution [25 th February] reported,
That a sum, not exceeding £898,676,000, be granted to Her Majesty, on account, for or towards defraying the charges for the following Civil and Revenue Departments and for the Ministry of Defence for the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1954.
[ For details of Vote on Account see OFFICIAL REPORT, 25 th February, 1953; Vol. 511, c. 2109–13.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."
Blitzed Towns
3.51 p.m.
Hon. Members on both sides of the House who represent blitzed areas will be glad of this opportunity to discuss this important topic for several hours. During the past few years we have had an opportunity to discuss the plight of the blitzed towns and cities only in Adjournment debates, when only one or two speakers could join the debate. But today, if Front Bench speakers restrain themselves and do not make their usual speeches of 40 minutes' duration and if back benchers try to speak briefly, as I hope to do, we may be able to hear the views of a number of hon. Members from the various blitzed areas. Thus we shall be able to get a complete picture of what is happening and of what the people in these areas think about this matter.
Of course, citizens of every city in this country suffered during the six years of Hitler's war. It would be reasonable, however, to say that those who lived in the blitzed towns and cities suffered more than others. They suffered the same casualties, the same losses of fathers, brothers, and sons in the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, as did people in other towns. In Southampton we suffered considerable losses among those who served in the Mercantile Marine. One of the most respected aldermen in the borough of Southampton lost all his four sons in the Royal Air Force during the war. But in addition to these losses which were shared with the people of the nonblitzed towns, the citizens of the blitzed towns suffered considerable civilian casualties from air raids and extensive damage to their property. Those sufferings and losses were borne with fortitude —a fortitude which earned the admiration of the whole of the Allied world and especially that of the United States of America. The people of the blitzed areas thought that immediately the war was over they would be given reasonable priority in men and materials for the reconstruction of their damaged premises. They were buoyed up in that hope by a statement made by the present Prime Minister in March, 1945. He said:I cite the example of Southampton not because I take any parochial view, but because I know the facts and figures connected with that town best. Other hon. Gentlemen will be able to give the facts and figures relating to their areas. In Southampton, 5,000 houses were completely destroyed through enemy action and we also lost the major portion of our shops and offices and our business centre. A long street runs down the centre of Southampton—Above Bar Street, High Street and Below Bar Street. During two prolonged and concentrated night raids enemy aircraft systematically destroyed almost every shop, office, business establishment and every church in that long street and the streets which run at right angles to it. By taking advantage of the admirable housing policy of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) which has been continued, with modifications, by the present Minister of Housing and Local Government, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bromley (Mr. H. Macmillan), we have been able to provide the people of Southampton with 7,000 new dwelling houses since 1945. This accommodation includes prefabricated houses, permanent houses, cost-ofworks houses, houses erected by private builders and flats. But though we have now more houses than we had before the war, there is still a large waiting list at the office of the local authority. Very few of the shops, offices and business premises have been reconstucted. If one goes down the main street and into the side streets one sees a number of one-storey prefabricated shops where before there were handsome buildings; but one also sees a large number of bare and desolate patches of ground which are covered with a kindly mantle by the willow-herb and other wild flowers in their season. Southampton is the major passenger port of Western Europe and we get a large number of visitors from the United States. They must have a very poor idea of our post-war efforts at reconstruction when they view the barren and desolate areas where once shops, buildings and offices stood. The people of Southampton, with those of other blitzed areas, awaited with great interest the announcement by the Minister of the value of the licences which would be allocated this year for reconstruction in the blitzed towns. The announcement was made a few months ago when it was stated that this year £4½ million would be allocated, of which £2½ million would be a carry-over from last year, leaving new construction to the value of £2 million. This £4½ million is not, as some people think, a financial grant to the blitzed areas from the Ministry and the Treasury. This merely gives the people permission to spend their own money. The sum to be allocated for all 18 blitzed towns is £4½ million. I am informed that the total expenditure of the country today runs at the rate of £2,000 million per annum."Victory lies before us. certain and perhaps near. Of course, we must first concentrate on those parts of our cities and towns which have suffered most."
I think that by a mistake of language the hon. Gentleman got the figure wrong. There was a carry-over of £2 million and £2½ million was new.
I had the figures the other way round. Before the right hon. Gentleman corrected my mis-statement I was saying that our capital investment runs at the rate of £2,000 million a year. Actually, £4½ million is only 0.2 per cent. of the £2,000 million. Is that the regard which we have for the blitzed cities of this country—a 0.2 per cent. regard? The first question I want to ask the Minister is why this comparatively meagre sum for the reconstruction of the blitzed cities has been fixed. Surely it cannot be said today that there is any shortage of steel, when last year, under public ownership, we had a record output of steel in this country, amounting to over 16 million tons? Then, of course, there are the one million tons which the Prime Minister secured from the United States, and which I assume have now arrived here, so that the excuse of a shortage of steel for new construction cannot be a valid reason for the disappointingly small global sum that is to be allocated for reconstruction during the coming year.
I should not think that the sum is not larger because the Ministry or the Treasury fear that, if the sum were increased, there might be an inflationary tendency as a result. Even if the 0.2 per cent. of the capital investment of the country was increased to 0.4 per cent. of the total investment, it would not have more than an infinitesimal effect so far as inflation is concerned. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister, in the Adjournment debate of 4th December, said that, after all, even if the amount were only £4½ million, it was twice as much as was allocated for the reconstruction of the blitzed cities by the previous Labour Government, but the figures which were supplied by the Minister of Works on 30th October to my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. King) do not bear out the contention which was then made by the Parliamentary Secretary. According to those figures, in 1950, under the Labour Government, the allocation was £4,345,300, and, in 1951, also under the Labour Government, it was £4,811,000. Both in 1950 and in 1951, the allocation under the Labour Government was about the same as the allocation will be this year under the Conservative Government. The Minister must be aware that the announcement of this figure of £4½ million was greeted with a chorus of disappointment and disapproval from the leading figures in a number of the borough councils of the towns affected. For instance, on 26th November, the "Hull Daily Mail" had this to say:I should imagine that, if the hon. and gallant Member for Hull, Central (Captain Hewitson) has done much stamping on the Minister's doorstep, there cannot be much doorstep left. The quotation goes on:"Hull's allocation of only £400,000 for the continuation of blitz construction is a bitter disappointment to planners and traders, who were hoping for a much bigger share of the £4½ million which is to be divided among 18 cities. Councillor R. W. Buckle, DeputyChairman of the Town Planning Committee, told the 'Hull Daily Mail' yesterday: 'We feel that Hull's allocation is very disappointing and hopelessly inadequate. We feel bitter that we have not been given a fair chance when we have the labour and the materials. We shall expect our Members of Parliament to stamp on Mr. Macmillan's doorstep.'"
Sir Clifford Tozer, a leading Conservative on the Plymouth City Council and Chairman of the Reconstruction Committee, said:"'We shall stamp ourselves, if he will let us. May be, we shall stamp if he does not let us.'"
The Mayor of Southampton said:"It would be foolish to pretend that I am satisfied with the allocation. I hope we shall have some more."
That was in December, and he has recently repeated his strong dissatisfaction with the allocation to Southampton. Alderman John Lane, the alderman who lost four sons in the Royal Air Force during the war, and to whom I have referred, who is now chairman of the Planning Committee of Southampton, said:"I am by no means fully satisfied."
So there was general dissatisfaction throughout the blitzed towns of this country both with the global amount of £4½ million and with the way in which that global amount was allocated to the respective cities. I wish now to come back to the case of Southampton. The allocation to Southampton this year is £350,000, of which, £88,000 is a carry-over from last year. The leading members of the Southampton Borough Council state that, during the last four years, they could easily have spent a yearly average of £350,000 upon the reconstruction of the central blitzed part of their city. In fact, the allocations given during those four years amounted on the average to only £262,000 per year. That was the amount which they were allowed to spend. To bring that average back to £350,000, it would be necessary for Southampton this year to have an allocation of £705,000 instead of the £350,000. But the leaders of the borough council in Southampton, like the two Members of Parliament for the borough, are reasonable and moderate men, and they are asking, not for £705,000, but for £528,000. With £528,000, the council could get on with 13 projects which, at present, are very urgently required in Southampton. As it is, with the amount allocated this year, they can get on with only six of those projects. They claim that they have the men and the materials with which to get on with these 13 projects, instead of the six which are allowed under the allocation. If they have the men and the materials, why should they not be allowed a sufficient allocation to complete these 13 projects? Then there is the question of the rateable value of the blitzed towns. Very few of the blitzed towns have yet recovered the rateable value which they possessed in the pre-blitz period, and, because they have not recovered that rateable value, the fact is that, with the ever-increasing costs to local authorities and the ever-increasing services which they are bound to provide, their rates are higher than they would have been had the blitz not occurred; indeed, their rates are higher than they would have been if the local authorities had been allowed to proceed more quickly with the reconstruction of their shopping and business premises. It is true that a number of houses have been built which have added to the rateable value, but, at the same time, the building of council houses also involves a fairly large expenditure on social services which tends to outweigh the additional rateable value they provide. With council houses, there are quite a lot of children, which means considerable additional expenditure on education. Shops, offices and business premises, on the other hand, generally have a fairly high rateable value and do not attract as much expenditure on social services. Perhaps I may give some figures of the rateable value of blitzed towns compared with their rateable value in preblitz years. The rateable value of Southampton is now 94.7 per cent. of the figure in 1940, when the first heavy raids took place. The rateable value of Portsmouth is 96,07 per cent. of that of the pre-blitz years. The rateable value of Liverpool is 96,58 per cent. and of Plymouth 95.12 per cent. For West Ham, where in many ways there was more destruction than in other cities, taking size into account, the rateable value today is only 78.62 per cent. of pre-blitz years. The first Labour Government of 1945–50 gave grants to the blitzed towns for their loss of rateable value. In Southampton I think we had something like £750,000 as a grant from the Exchequer as compensation for loss of rateable value. These grants have now been stopped, except in the case of West Ham, which still continues to receive some Exchequer grant."Every one of the badly blitzed cities is going to express disappointment and dissatisfaction. I am starting the chorus of protest."
We hope it will continue, but we have been informed that it will end with this current financial year. We hope that the Minister will be generous again in the forthcoming year.
I hope the Minister will give that assurance.
Let us compare this loss of rateable value in the blitzed towns with figures for the non-blitzed towns. We find that in many non-blitzed towns the rateable value has considerably increased over that of the pre-war years. In Reading, for example, the rateable value is 129.53 per cent. of the figure in 1938; in Wolverhampton, it is 112.69 per cent., and, in Salisbury, it is 117 per cent. of the 1938 figure. We feel that there is a case for large allocations to the blitzed areas in order that they may more speedily reconstruct their cities. I do not regard this as a party matter at all and I am not trying to make a party issue out of it. I hope that if the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke) is fortunate enough to catch your eye, Mr. Speaker, he will abate his partisan zeal in the contribution which he makes and will behave with that moderation and discretion which is becoming to a gentleman who is both honourable and gallant. My hon. Friends and I frequently criticised our own Government from 1945–51 for not doing, as we thought, sufficient for the reconstruction of the blitzed cities. I made a number of speeches on the subject from time to time. Mrs. Lucy Middleton, who then represented one of the divisions of Plymouth, also made a number of speeches on the subject, with much more cogency and pith than I can command. My hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Southampton, Test made a plea for greater assistance for the blitzed areas the main subject of his successful maiden speech. My hon. Friend the Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot), whose glittering eloquence and powers of invective have made him the idol of the television fans of the country, made a series of brilliant speeches against some of our own Ministers for not giving sufficiently to the aid of the blitzed towns. This is not a party matter at all. It is a national matter; it is a matter for the national honour to see that the blitzed towns are properly treated. The blitzed towns and cities of this country are the orphans of the storm. They are in need of care and protection. Both the major parties of the State should vie with one another in their efforts to see that they get that care and protection.4.16 p.m.
I had not intended to intervene in the debate, but the admirable speech of the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Morley) made me feel that I ought to say something about one-half, at least, of my constituency. I do not propose to attempt any comparison between the claims of the City of London and those of any other blitzed city in the country. Quite naturally, hon. Members who represent cities which have suffered severe damage and grave loss of life, property and rateable value in the blitz will put their cases from the point of view of their own cities and their own fellow citizens. I want to put the case of the City of London solely from the national point of view.
It is beyond argument, I think, that the City of London and the activities which are carried on within its boundaries have always been of enormous importance to this country and today are vital to our survival as a great power. The invisible exports provided by the services of banking, shipping, insurance and of merchanting within the City of London have always provided the balancing factor which has enabled our economy to stand up to international strains and has made us the great commercial and industrial nation we have always been. Not only does the City house the institutions concerned with these activities but it is also the seat of the head offices of administration of great industrial and commercial organisations with international reputations, of international importance and of the greatest possible significance to our national economy. Yet today, eight years after the end of the war, of that square mile of the City of London, the most valuable square mile of land in the world—not only financially valuable, but vital to the country—over a quarter, well over 1,200 to 1,300 acres, is still completely derelict, occupied by nothing but heaps of weed-grown rubble, car parks and things of that sort. Inside the City the people on whom the recovery and development of our trade and industry depend are sitting almost on one another's laps, working in conditions which make it quite impossible for them to attain proper efficiency. The workers who flock into the City in hundreds of thousands a day are queueing for anything up to half an hour or even an hour at a time to get a mid-day meal, and more often than not they miss the meal altogether. We have great national organisations with their administrative offices scattered in four, six and in some cases ten or a dozen buildings in the City of London and the boroughs which immediately surround it. Surely, in those conditions, it almost becomes nonsense to appeal to the industries of this country to develop and increase our export trade and save us in the time of acute financial crisis through which we are now passing. What an advertisement this is for British enterprise. The hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen, referred to American visitors who come to Southampton. What about the visitors from all parts of the world who come, not as they do to Southampton to see its beauties as well as its tragedies, but to London to do business and who frankly are amazed that a nation, facing economic trials such as it has never faced before, should be so slow to restore to its businesses and industries the conditions in which alone they can make their proper contribution to our recovery? It is true that something has been done in the City already. Something like £12 million worth of work has been done on substantial new buildings in addition to quite a considerable amount spent on restoring smaller buildings. I do not want to make this a political debate and I will not say why this is so, but the fact is that practically the whole of that space is occupied by civil servants who are living and working in conditions far better than those in which any of the commercial companies are working, and far better than those in which, in past and most properous times, commercial companies ever did work. Government offices have traditionally occupied twice as much space per man, and often more, than have ordinary commercial concerns. Not only do they occupy the new buildings in the City, but they occupy still under requisition large numbers of vast and fine old office blocks in the City and in the area immediately surrounding it. I make no appeal on behalf of the citizens of London, but I appeal on behalf of the country that something substanial should be and must be done at once to give back to the City the opportunities which it needs if it is to render its proper and continuing service to this country and our Empire. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Works announced a few days ago his intention to grant £10 million worth of licences for the re-building of central London. I confess that I do not find it easy, within the bounds of Parliamentary etiquette and Parliamentary language, to express an adequate opinion on the utter inadequacy of any such suggestion. I welcome it, of course, as a gesture. I think that at least it gives the opportunity for a beginning, but I would remind my right hon. Friend, through his Parliamentary Secretary, who is present today, that already the City Corporation have granted consents under planning powers and approval of projects which amount to well over £60 million outstanding at present. So the £10 million, even if the whole of it came into the City of London, which apparently it will not, would be a mere beginning and a pretty poor beginning at that. But it is not even true that the share which is coming into the City of London is intended to meet the real needs of that great city, because it is common knowledge that a big part of whatever is coming is ear-marked for the Bank of England. The Bank of England—and I pay them a tribute—have undertaken a substantial scheme of redevelopment within the City. They are to take over responsibility for a substantial redevelopment area, but a very big part of the accommodation which they are to provide will be, of course, for their own use. In these days it is very difficult to find out anything about these Government and semi-Government organisations, but from personal knowledge I can say that the Bank of England already occupy a large building within 100 yards of Oxford Street. It is a large and modern office building of some six or seven floors. As that building faces the well of the staircase of my own office I am able every day to look into every floor. I can assure the House that for many months past not more than two of those floors have had any occupants at all. I would estimate the population of that building as being well under 100 and possibly not more than 50. I am told that that building is held as a reserve to meet any special urgent need of the Bank of England. Surely it would be possible to meet urgent needs somewhere other than in the heart of London in one of the most expensive and one of the finest buildings that exist. I do not want to carry that point further. I merely mention it because I am convinced that it would be quite improper to allow additional expenditure by the Bank of England unless the Government are amply satisfied that they are using properly what they have already. I know the reason which is always given for the Government's refusing to give more than a limited number of rebuilding licences. The hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen said that it was wrong any longer to give the shortage of steel as a reason for withholding licences for building of this kind. I agree entirely with him. I believe that in the matter of the supplies of structural steel, Government Departments, as is inevitably the case with all planning Departments and has been for five or six years now, are several months behind the facts. At present, there is a fairly substantial supply of structural steel available for building of this kind. There is plenty of stone and plenty of concrete and there is labour available for this building without entrenching on the field of domestic house building. I should be the last to suggest anything in competition with the housing programme on which, if I may be allowed, I should like to offer my very sincere congratulations to the Minister of Housing and Local Government. But I would beg him to show in this matter the same imagination, the same courage and the same energy as he has shown in the housing programme. I would remind the House that until some 12 or 18 months ago we were assured time and time again that 200,000 houses a year were all that the building industry and the building materials industry could possibly produce. My right hon. Friend refused to accept that. He set himself a target 50 per cent. higher, and he is today reaching it. He has shown that it is not impossible and that if the demand is there and it is a real and active demand the labour and materials will be forthcoming. Even with this increased rate of house building I have not heard of any serious hold up for the lack of either materials or labour. I am convinced that if the Minister will make a like appeal in regard to the materials and labour required for a proper rebuilding of these blitzed areas—and, in the national interest, primarily those great and vital areas within the boundary of the City of London—he will meet with a like response. It must be done; the condition of the country demands it. I beg my right hon. Friend to adopt the same policy that he adopted with such great success in connection with housebuilding, and say to the local authorities not, "Thus far and no farther" but, "Here is your allocation and your quota of licences to start off with. The quicker you get through them the more you shall have." In that way he would produce the answer to the problem of labour and materials.4.31 p.m.
Hon. Members on this side of the House will most readily echo the call of the hon. Member for the Cities of London and Westminster (Sir H. Webbe) for a dynamic approach to the problem of the blitzed areas. The areas that we speak for were blitzed because they were the most important targets for the enemy. In the case of the community of West Ham, for instance, which my hon. Friend and I have the honour to represent, it was blitzed because it was a vital part of the industrial heart of Britain.
This area, with its dockland, its many factories, its extensive acreage of sugar refineries and flour mills, was a tremendous target for the enemy. It is a community the morale of which was vitally important last time and will be vitally important again if danger arises. There have been moments during the last seven years when many of us on both sides of the House have felt that that morale was not being sufficiently boosted and thought about. It is right that we should approach this debate in a non-partisan way. I, too, hope to follow the exhortation for brevity which was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Morley), so that as many Members as possible can speak. I feel I need make no apology in this debate for turning immediately to the major specific problem of my own constituency. It is first and foremost a question of cash—pounds, shillings and pence. The financial difficulties of West Ham are well known to the Minister and I am sure he is well aware of the exceptional conditions that prevail there owing to the depletion of its population and rateable value as a result of the devastation caused by the war. My hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen, in introducing the debate, has already given the graphic figures. Until this year the Government have recognised that in the case of West Ham there are special problems which need special treatment, and until now special financial assistance has been given. I earnestly hope that at the end of the debate the Minister will say that once again, this year, that special assistance will be continued. He has already before him the memorandum from the West Ham Council on revision of the equalisation grant formula and I hope that it will receive the careful and sympathetic consideration of the Government. This matter of the revision of the grant formula concerns the permanent fabric of financial aid which the Government can give; we are also, however, deeply concerned with the immediate financial help which is necessary this year, because that help is desperately needed. This year the rates are going up by a shilling, to 27s., so that the people themselves are playing their part. They are not coming to the Government as a community which has not tried and is not trying; they deserve this assistance. It is a matter for satisfaction that the expansion of house building in West Ham continues, and a matter for rejoicing to me, as one who, like many other Members, has received such painful, pathetic and very often tragic letters from constituents about their housing problems. But in a financial sense that expansion provides its own special difficulties. I am informed that the burden on the rate arising from housing will be 50 per cent. more in 1953–54 than it was two years ago. The financial problem has been accentuated by the undoubtedly socially beneficial development of the housing programme. Therefore, without apology, I come, like Oliver, again to ask for more. There is a certain feeling of impatience in West Ham about the fact that we have to come annually cap in hand in this way. I quite readily do so today; but we hope that very soon a more satisfactory arrangement will be made than these uncertain annual acts of assistance, indispensable as they have been in the past and essential as they are in the immediate future. The other matter to which I wish to refer is a very small one, which I think will receive a sympathetic hearing from the Minister but which requires action on the part of his colleague, the President of the Board of Trade. I ask for a more liberal attitude from the Board of Trade towards the issue of industrial development certificates. The Minister will probably agree that factory development in blitzed areas requires as much help and consideration as in even the new towns. I am informed that there has been very substantial delay in dealing with some applications for industrial development certificates which has held up important factory development in my constituency. I feel sure that the Minister will want to inquire from his colleagues whether any of that delay is avoidable. If he finds that it is, I ask for urgent action to be taken to deal with it. At the moment, the materials problem is not so acute. We may be running into manpower problems fairly shortly, but this matter of a hold-up in the procedure with regard to applications is causing a little trouble and I should be most grateful if the Minister would look into it.4.39 p.m.
The hon. Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) thinks that the problem of the blitzed cities is primarily one of cash; but he is not entirely accurate about that. I should have thought it was a question not only of cash but also of what can be exchanged for cash, in other words, labour and materials. Many hon. Members have some difficulty in understanding the difference between allocations and work actually done.
This is a very important point. My hon. Friend, when speaking of the question of cash, was referring specifically to the problem of one blitzed area. He would agree with the general line of argument which the hon. Gentleman is developing.
I beg the hon. Gentleman's pardon. I rather thought he was carrying on the point raised by the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen who, I felt, confused the allocation with the work done. In referring to the Adjournment debate on 4th December, he quoted the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. I do not want to make a party point of this; it was the hon. Member who raised it. The Parliamentary Secretary said that the amount allocated for 1953 was twice what had been allocated on a previous occasion. The hon. Gentleman, in quoting the Parliamentary Secretary, gave certain figures which it seemed to me he quoted as figures of allocation. What the Parliamentary Secretary said was:
Thus, provided £4½ million worth of work is done in 1953—I agree that at the moment it is only an allocation—it will then be a fair thing to say that the allocation and the work done have increased very considerably. That should be a source of some relative satisfaction to everyone in the House, but I suggest that relative satisfaction and absolute satisfaction are two entirely different things. I believe that hon. Members on both sides of the House are dissatisfied absolutely with the allocation of £4½ million for 1953. In the Adjournment debate on 4th December, the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen, indicated that, at the present rate of progress, it would be the year 2088 before Southampton was restored to its pristine beauty. I do not quarrel in any way with the hon. Member's mathematics. I feel as strongly about the matter as he does. I feel very strongly about Portsmouth, not merely because I happen to represent a part of it, but also because Portsmouth is the greatest naval seaport in the Empire. [An HON. MEMBER: "No."] I believe that the hon. Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot) questions that, but I do not think there is any doubt about it. It seems to me that on those grounds Portsmouth should be a show-place of the Empire whereas at present its centre is something of a shambles. The hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen, suggested that, for rather a similar reason, that it is the gateway of the Empire, Southampton should also have a very strong and urgent claim. The claim of all the blitzed cities is still a strong one, after eight years of peace, including—as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke) might have said had it not been for the exhortation of the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen—six years of Socialist mis-rule. As the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen said, not the least serious aspect of the matter is the loss of rateable value and, thus, of rates. It has a double effect. First, it forces up rates on existing property, and we cannot force up the rates beyond a certain point because, if we do, they become high relative to other parts of the country and people begin to leave the area, and then we have an absolute loss of revenue as well. Another matter which applies with force to a seaside resort—I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, South (Sir J. Lucas) will say something about it—is that when the centre of a city is as dreary as is the centre of Portsmouth today, visitors coming for the first time are frightened away, and in those circumstances a seaside resort which ought to have a great trade and revenue as a result of its visitors is very heavily penalised. It has been said that, to the blitzed cities, shops and offices are very nearly as important as houses. Civic dignity is also a very important and healthy influence in our communal life, and my heart bleeds for Portsmouth City Council as I look at the shell of the Guildhall and see the cramped quarters in which it has to try to carry out its duties at present. At the count in the 1950 General Election my result was the last of the Portsmouth results to be announced—at 7.30 a.m.— for the simple reason that there was not room for all the checkers required in the flats on the front at Southsea used as council offices. It is true that for the last General Election better arrangements were made, and the count then took place on the South Parade Pier at Southsea, but it seems a little incongruous for such an important civic event to take place in an atmosphere of penny-in-the-slot machines and "What the butler saw at Brighton." I hope that in the very near future it will be possible not only to provide the houses, shops and offices which are required, but also to restore important civic buildings. Everything I have heard so far today has been temperate, but it has been of a nature which would make one feel a little pessimistic were it not for three things. First, if the allocation of £4½ million worth of work is actually completed in 1953 it will be a substantial advance on anything which has happened since the war. That may not be progress as rapid as we should like, but at any rate it is progress. Secondly, I believe that it is the policy of my right hon. Friend that, where a local authority in one of the blitzed cities can show that it has already, as it were, used up its portion of the allocation for 1953 and has labour and materials available, he will consider an application from it for an addition to its share of the £4½ million allocation, whatever that may be. Lastly, I believe that the policy of the present Government is more likely than that of some of its predecessors—I am trying to keep this on non-party lines as much as I can—to guarantee that more labour and materials and capital investment will be available in the future. I am not at all certain that the allocation of £4½ million is not the maximum that most, if not all, of the blitzed cities will be able to cope with in 1953, but I hope and believe that 1954 will see Portsmouth, Southampton and the other blitzed cities taking a much bigger stride on their way to the restoration of the beauty and dignity to which their position in our civic life entitles them."… because the work done in 1949 and 1950 was £2,300,000, in 1951 it was £3½ million. …"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 4th December, 1952; Vol. 508, c. 1913.]
4.47 p.m.
It would be wrong, in a debate of this sort, if a word were not said on behalf of the City of Liverpool, of which I am one of the representatives here. I am disappointed that someone who is perhaps better informed than I am is not able to speak for it. However, I wish to make a few observations following what has already been said. I approach the problem like other hon. Members, anxious for the rehabilitation of the places they represent or live in, and we can all say that we are disappointed that so little has been done over the years.
I live in Bootle, one of the worst blitzed places, and Liverpool and Merseyside generally suffered nearly as badly as did Portsmouth and Southampton. Like other hon. Members, I am concerned because insufficient has been done and, so far as I can judge, sufficient is not likely to be done for a long time. If I were to criticise what has been done in the City of Liverpool, I should say that a lot of attention has been given to business premises, perhaps more than to the housing aspect of the problem. I recollect that in the last four or five years Lewis's were allowed to spend £1,250,000 on rebuilding, while small businesses were hardly able to get a licence at all. That is not right. I know that the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board have done a reasonably good job. They have done all that they can. But there was a time—about three years ago—when housing was held up, and I hope that the Minister will try to avoid a recurrence of that position. So far as I can ascertain, that was largely due to the fact that a very large number of large houses were being built or rebuilt, which caused a problem with regard to normal house building. I want to criticise, in that respect, not merely the Government but perhaps the city council responsible in the area which I represent—the built-up working-class area in Kirkdale, where we have thousands of blitzed shops in respect of which nothing had been done, other than to put in sheets of galvanised tin, most of which are now falling down. In Liverpool, as apparently in many other places, large sites were appropriated and small businesses were demolished. I think that there has been insufficient work done to repair these small premises by every Government since that time. I remember approaching, during the war, the then Minister of Health—I think that it was Mr. Brown—who was visiting us in Bootle on the question of what could be done to rebuild the area in the town in which I live, and for which I had then some responsibility on the emergency committee. I remember pointing out to him and those who were with him that on a considerable portion of land a few dozen very large houses had been blitzed, and the difficulty was, as it apparently still is, to acquire the property and use it in a better way than was contemplated. There seems to have been no royal road towards making use of that property for rehabilitation, and on that particular site there are now a large number of "prefabs." There are in Liverpool very many places of probably a few acres each where there has been a very bad blitz of property, and it seems to me that there is no desire to do other than just clear it up. Liverpool will have to extend in order to deal with its housing problem, but surely it is not beyond the wit of man and of Government to do something to make it easy for the local authorities to acquire that land so that it can be used within the town. Most of the people today in the big centres are being rehoused on the outskirts of the town. In places like Liverpool, there are sites which, if rebuilt within the city, would give satisfaction to many people who do not want to go into the garden city. They want to live somewhere near their work. That may not be desirable from some points of view, but I think that we have to recognise that position. I hope that the Minister, during the period he is in office—and I hope that it will not be too long—will look at this problem to see whether something more cannot be done to make it possible for the authorities to do more than they have done, and have been able to do, for very good reasons. We have only been fiddling with this problem since the end of the war. Insufficient has been done. I have never been satisfied that enough has been done in Liverpool. Fears have been expressed this afternoon about what might happen if, for instance, too great attention were given to houses to the exclusion of business premises, or the other way about. Figures were given by the Minister, not more than a month ago, to show that building trade labour had increased from 25 per cent. to 28 per cent. for the building of houses. There would not appear to be any shortage of labour if we are using only 28 per cent. of the building trade labour for houses. I ask the Minister whether he is serious about the blitz problem. I hope he will see that not only will a great measure of financial assistance be rendered, but that there is no hold-up on the score of either labour or materials. If the figures I have quoted are correct, then it is not building trade labour for housing purposes which is preventing the hold-up. I am not so worried about the City of London, as a show-place; I am worried about the other places where people have not the houses to live in. Liverpool is not replacing the number of houses lost during the blitz, which demonstrates very clearly to me how much more must be done. What we have heard on the question of rates has to be taken note of. The figures for Southampton and West Ham show a very serious position, and Liverpool and other places are something like 5 per cent. down on the rateable value as compared with the pre-war period. That requires some attention. I urge the Minister to give this problem more attention than has been given. There is need for it and we have to face the position. Eight years after the end of the war some awful sites still remain in the blitzed areas. If we are to have good residential properties, much more has to be done. I think that the Minister flatters himself, perhaps with some justification. on what he has done, but if he could do more to restore the blitzed cities he would earn the gratitude of a great number of people who have been very worried about the lack of attention which the Government have given to this problem.
4.59 p.m.
I am most grateful to have caught your eye, Mr. Speaker. The City of Plymouth, in which my constituency lies, was one of the most savagely devastated during the war. I will make my remarks brief, in view of the number of hon. Members on both sides of the House who wish to take part in the debate.
I should like to associate myself with hon. Members on both sides who have made the point that the rebuilding of our blitzed cities is not a party problem. It is a national problem. The blitzed cities were blitzed only because they were of great national importance, and if they were a national asset in 1943 they are a national asset in 1953. Their national importance is sometimes forgotten. I do not intend to try to impress upon hon. Members from Portsmouth or Southampton that Plymouth is more important than Portsmouth or Southampton, but I do ask the Minister to consider which city has helped itself most, to remember the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, and to bear in mind which city has done most about its plan for reconstruction and which city has done most by its own effort. I do not think anyone would disagree that the progress Plymouth has made since the war is second to none in England. I ask the Minister to consider two points about Plymouth, the first being the necessity for continuity. It is impossible for a local authority to plan unless there is continuity in the flow of materials and licences. Plymouth is peculiar in that it is the only large city in the area of Cornwall and South Devon, and unless there is continuity the labour force working on reconstruction will be stood down, will leave the area, and it will be impossible to reassemble it. That problem affects Plymouth more than any of the other blitzed cities. I believe the Minister has said that, where possible, when there is unemployment in the building industry in blitzed cities, he will grant more licences to absorb that unemployment. Despite the rearmament programme, which means that the dockyard is fully employed—and the dockyard in Plymouth is the main source of employment—the average unemployment in Plymouth is double the national average of 2.2 per cent., and the unemployment in Plymouth is largely in the building industry. If the Minister is to fulfil his wish to absorb unemployment in the building industry in devastated areas, Plymouth is a place where he can do so. In conclusion, I will say only this. I know that the Minister is aware of the problems of Plymouth because he has been there; he is aware of the efficiency of the local authority because he has seen it. I ask him to bear in mind the opportunity for diminishing unemployment now in Plymouth by granting additional licences, and to bear in mind the necessity to maintain our special labour force—and the labour force on reconstruction is not the same, in every respect, as that for housing—because if Plymouth loses that labour force, once it leaves Plymouth it will leave the area, and it will be difficult to reassemble it.5.3 p.m.
There is a word, which I would describe as a very ugly word, growing up in the English language. I have found it in other countries when I have gone abroad. In speaking of the damage which has been done to a blitzed city, the verb "to Coventrate" is used. That is a word which, I know, we all hope will not gain much standing in the language, but I think it conveys to a good many people, not only in this country, what the blitzing of a city means.
In common with hon. Members on both sides who have spoken so far, I am not anxious to try to show that the city I represent has suffered worse than any other city, but I know that the Committee will forgive enthusiasm on the part of any hon. Member who feels that his city suffered particularly and has made the very strongest effort to recover. This is a non-party debate; it is the type of debate we have raised from both sides, whoever has been in power, and I say here and now that we in Coventry feel that the present Government are not unsympathetic to our problems in Coventry. The Parliamentary Secretary has been to see us there; the Minister has received a deputation in the House; and I hope that this debate today will enable us to reach further conclusions. Everyone will agree that all of the cities we represent should be included in this debate on blitzed towns, but we in Coventry have a new point that we wish to put to the Minister, which we believe is a valid one. We believe that Coventry should no longer be approached solely —I would say even mainly—from the viewpoint of a blitzed town. We believe that we have an additional, or alternative, claim to the consideration of the Government, which is that Coventry should be considered from the viewpoint of a new town. I shall hope to show in the course of a few brief remarks why we in Coventry feel that. In this city of ours we have the problems of a new town, as well as those of a blitzed city. We think we are right in assuming that it is the policy of this Government, as of the previous one, to foster the new towns. Well, we in Coventry are collecting a new population. We have been collecting a new population ever since 1900, and also since the end of the war. In 1942, the population of Coventry was 200,000. The population in 1951 was 258,211—an increase of 58,000 in 10 years. We contend that such an increase, quite apart from being a great drain on a blitzed city, is the problem of a new town. If we in this city are to play a part in the defence and export programme of our country, we believe that there should be a decisive effort on the part of the Government as well as on the part of Coventry itself to give us the means of having a decent civilised community. It is no use building factories and attracting workers if simple human needs are disregarded, and in this city, as in the cities of other hon. Members who have spoken, we have problems of houses, schools, hospitals, shops and other amenities. The point I wish to stress, even unduly, is that the expansion of Coventry has been so great since the end of the war that it has been quite impossible for the building of houses and schools to keep pace with the expansion of industry. In one part of my constituency there is a very big housing unit, which I hope the Minister will be able to come and see some time. I recently spent some days there and encountered very natural grumbles which we have all met from housewives, that, while it is very nice being so far out from the city, the problems of shopping, bus fares and of the children are almost insuperable, and they were not entirely convinced that it was better to be so far out when the shops were so far away. We are aware of that, as is every other city council. We know that the ideal is to have the houses, shops, churches and schools near one another. During the last two years we in Coventry have had schools made of aluminium, which have attracted attention from all over the country. I must also express my admiration of the work done in the Coventry hospitals. I simply do not know how it is managed. Our accommodation is a disgrace to any city, never mind a city the size of ours. Talking of matrons and the recruitment of staff, and the difficulties of space and accommodation, I should like the Minister to realise that it really is impossible to treat people as they should be treated when there is that lack of accommodation. A wonderful job is being done. Now, coming on to other amenities— and I do so because I want to keep my speech brief—I should like to take one in which I am very interested, and that is swimming. Concerning the question of bathing in Coventry, I have a notice here which tells me that the earliest reference to a public bath in Coventry was in 1742. That is going back a very long time. I know that the Parliamentary Secretary, although he may not be keen on swimming, at least is keen, as I am, on athletics, and I understand that now he is also keen on swimming. In 1742, an advertisement appeared in the "Coventry Mercury" of 14th June, which said:If we go forward about 100 years from that date and come to 1851 we find that the first municipally-owned baths in Coventry were commenced in Hales Street for a cost of £4,500. They were opened on 8th July, 1852, and 2,000 persons were admitted between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. that day. My purpose in going back 200 years is to tell the Minister that today, as a result of war, we are in Coventry as we were 100 years ago as far as the provision of swimming baths is concerned. We have one; and that is an illustration of the lack of amenities, which is very important from the health point of view. In 1938 and 1939 we had five swimming baths, and the attendance of swimmers in the city was over 300,000. In 1951, just for one swimming bath, the attendance was 216,167, which proves the demand. Club attendance and attendance from schools has gone up. This growth in demand has led to a two-way grumble from the people in the city. The swimmers complain of the restrictions on their enjoyment because attendants at the one bath have to limit them to one hour—while, on the other hand, the people outside are complaining because they are being kept waiting. I have not time to say more than these few brief words on this subject, but that is one amenity which I hope the Minister will bear in mind. In my constituency, Coventry, South, practically the whole of the commercial centre of Coventry was destroyed. The Parliamentary Secretary will know because he has been there. In the centre of the city we are making a real effort to overcome the dreary appearance which is so disfiguring our blitzed cities and great credit must be given to local initiative. Pre-war development and war-time development brought large shadow factories to Coventry. It brought them to the exclusion of social, cultural and civic amenities. The point I wish to stress today is that in a city of the size of Coventry, growing, as it is, we have a serious lack of social, cultural and civic amenities of every description. Side by side with that, I think I ought to inform the Minister, if indeed he does not know, industry in my city is three times more heavily committed to defence work today than industry in Great Britain as a whole. Side by side with that, as everybody knows, we are almost equally heavily committed to the export drive. I am hoping that when the Minister replies to the debate he will tell us what responsibility the Government feel they have for a blitzed city and four new towns combined. I would say that Coventry should be treated as a new town. For one thing, it has increased its population by 200,000 since 1900, and I think that that is the population figure for four new towns. During the last 20 years alone, 90,000 people have come to the city. The corporation, employers and workers are doing everything possible, but we want to know what the Government are prepared to do as well. In Coventry, we are very short of market accommodation for selling fruit and vegetables. We have acquired a site for a new wholesale market at Barras Heath, and we should like the Government to help us get on with that project very quickly. I was very glad to see that last week the Minister of Works, in Birmingham—I hope he was correctly reported in the Press—said that there is no anxiety over the supply of bricks for Coventry. At one time it had been felt that this would prevent carrying on as fast as we should have liked. The Minister did stress the point that the opening of hostels for the building labour force had been successful. There is now a balanced building labour force in the Coventry area. So, in conclusion, I ask the Minister whether, in addition to considering Coventry as a blitzed city, he will bear in mind that we have the problems of a new town, and that we feel that it is to that particular aspect of our problems that special consideration should be given."Francis Blick has just opened an excellent cold bath at the bottom of Palmer Lane, Coventry, where people may privately bathe for 10s. a year or 6s. the summer season. N.B.: Proper attendance will be given."
5.16 p.m.
Many points have been raised by my colleagues on both sides of the House who represent blitzed cities. I myself should like to raise the point of equalisation grants, which became possible under statute in 1948, under the Socialist Government. Doubtless the scheme was made with the very best of intentions, but certain weaknesses have developed, and Portsmouth, in particular, is one of those places that have suffered from them.
First of all, let me say that the heavy bombing destroyed whole areas of our city, and our population has been very much reduced. Revaluation has taken place, and honest revaluation at the highest figure raised the rates per head, so that we get no grant. Our rateable value per capita is too high. Secondly, because we are doing as we were asked to do—making a new town outside the city at Leigh Park—the overspill into that new town has reduced our population without any benefit to our rateable value. Hence we get no grant. I should have liked to have said a word about sawn-off buildings, but I under- stand that my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke) hopes to deal with that, and I shall leave it to him—except to say that I have raised this matter before in the House, that it is one which bears very hardly on us, and that in the cases of sawn-off houses, where the house next door is pulled down, we cannot get anybody to say who is to pay for the party wall to be put right. We are continually having to fight for permits to rebuild blitzed or burned factories, garages and the like, and have been refused permission because of lack of steel. In several instances I have been lucky in getting a revised opinion on a permit refusal, because it has been possible to put forward new plans using less steel; then we have got some sort of licence granted. I have a case now of a tyre factory, damaged by fire, where, for several years, the men have been working in the open because there is no roof. I only hope that now the supply of steel is supposed to be easier we shall get more help in these matters. Portsmouth has suffered severely. Southsea is a resort which attracts great numbers of people. It is very severely handicapped by having bombed areas in the middle of the shopping district. I do hope that my right hon. Friend will pay special attention to Portsmouth as a bombed city and one of the most important ones of the whole country.5.20 p.m.
I wish to begin by joining with the hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Sir J. Lucas) in the plea he has made about sawn-off houses and by making a positive proposal to the Government on this subject. They are houses where the immediately adjoining property has been knocked down, leaving the party wall standing, where the War Damage Commission repairs the wall but where, within a few months of repairing the wall the damp comes in again.
I, like the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke), who raised this matter some months ago, have several cases in my constituency where the War Damage Commission has repaired the same wall two or three times but where the damp is still coming through. Eventually, the War Damage Commission loses patience and says that it cannot do any more about it. That leaves the poor householder in a situation where the War Damage Commission, although it has made considerable efforts to repair the house, has not carried out its obligation to restore the house to its pre-war condition. It is very expensive for the local authority to build on the site where the adjoining house has been knocked down, and in such cases one cannot blame them for not wanting to build on such sites. It is also very difficult for the householder to discover who is responsible for building on the site. In these circumstances, I suggest that the Government should see whether it is possible, either under their present powers or by the introduction of a small amending Bill, to introduce a system of special grants to local authorities to enable them to build on these sites. If something of that sort is not done, the householders concerned will continue living in perpetually damp houses without any redress from the War Damage Commission or anybody else. Such a scheme would not involve a great amount of money because there cannot be a great number of cases of this nature in the country. Therefore, I hope the Minister will look into the point put to him on a number of occasions by the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West and myself and see whether he cannot devise some remedy for a very real grievance under which a number of householders are labouring.Some of the houses are still propped up.
Yes, and I know of cases where the War Damage Commission has said, "We quite realise that the householder suffers a grievance but, as we have already twice paid for the wall to be put right, we do not think we can pay again," even though the architects consulted at the start may have stated that the only way to tackle the problem was by rebuilding the house next door. But, as I have said, that house will not be rebuilt in present circumstances because it would be more expensive than building a house elsewhere. If the Minister can find a remedy for this problem, I am sure we shall all be very grateful to him.
On the general question, I think it would be wrong for those from blitzed cities to give the impression to the country that we in those cities are on our knees begging for help, because I do not agree with those who deny that a great deal of work has not already been done in those cities since the war. In my own city a great deal has been achieved since the end of the war. I am glad to follow the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mr. J. J. Astor), whose father played such a big part in enabling that city to go ahead in preparing its plans during the war. I believe that after the war the city council also played a great part in the matter of reconstruction. It is wrong to suggest that much has not been done in the blitzed cities since the end of the war, not only in reconstruction work but in the number of houses built. Very soon we shall be able to say that Plymouth has built more new houses in the years since 1945 than were built between 1918 and 1939. In addition, factories have been built and huge and expensive roadworks started in order to make this development possible. The blitzed cities are not asking for charity, but only for their rights and that the Government should really examine the problem and make sure that no obstacles are put in the way. It would he possible in this debate to have a discussion on what I consider to be the misdemeanours of the Minister during the past year so far as the blitzed cities are concerned. But I will not spend much time on that because in some respects the right hon. Gentleman has shown signs of repentance, and I am much more eager to encourage those signs than I am to encourage the right hon. Gentleman to confess his misdemeanours. On the question of the figure for capital investment allowed in blitzed cities, the Minister on one occasion made the curious statement that he would not know the figure until the end of the year. I am glad he has been persuaded that it is advisable to give the figure so that we may have this debate, not on the basis of estimates known only to the Minister, but on estimates known to all of us.indicated assent.
I am glad to see the Minister nodding his head because that is a proposal which he turned down on least five occasions when I put it forward in the past When some of us from the blitzed cities showed considerable concern because the value of allocations for particular projects was being reduced, the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary suggested that we should not add up the value of the licences issued for particular projects because that gave a false impression, but that we should look at the allocations for work actually done in particular years, which gave a much better impression. One hon. Member referred in the debate to that point. I understand that the argument used by the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary in the earlier debate was that we should not consider the value of the licences for particular projects because the work would be going on in subsequent years and did not give a real impression of the amount being allocated.
It was suggested that we should take the 1952 figure of actual work done and compare it with the 1951 and 1950 figures, when it would show an improvement over those years. In the same way, if we took the figure for 1953 it would show an improvement on the figure for 1952, and that, therefore, there was nothing to worry about. I wish to comment on that, because it is the main defence of the Government. It is not sufficient for the Government to say that the amount to be spent on actual work done in 1953 will be greater than the figure for 1952 and that the figure for 1952 is greater than that for 1951, because there must be a much bigger expansion than that each year if the blitzed cities are ever to be rebuilt. We must have an expanding figure of the amount allowed, and that was always the policy of my hon. Friends in the Labour Government who carried out the process of expanding the amount. It is necessary that the amount of capital investment permitted in the reconstruction of blitzed cities should be sufficient to allow the work to go ahead at a reasonable pace. The second comment I wish to make is on the Government's chief defence of their reconstruction programme. I say that the figure of £4,500,000 to be allocated for work actually to be done in 1953 is not sufficient because it involves penalising those cities that have gone ahead fastest. If the Government enforce this total of £4,500,000 for work actually to be done in 1953, it will mean that the City of Plymouth, which has gone further ahead than most of the other blitzed cities in its plans for reconstruction, will be seriously penalised. If the Government operate this figure in a rigid way, those cities which went ahead in the first two or three years will be held back because they were adventurous. I am sure that that is not a principle which the Minister would like to defend in public, whatever he thinks in private. May I give the Minister the full facts about Plymouth, which have been reasons why we have put down so many critical Questions during the last year, and which prove that what was said by the representatives of the City of Plymouth was more correct than what was stated from the Treasury Bench? Let me give the figures for the value of licences for new projects during the years beginning 1949. In 1949 the total value of those new licences was £741,389; in 1950, £583,941; in 1951, £772,250; in 1952, £80,000—that was the first year of the right hon. Gentleman's tenure of office—and in 1953 under the present proposals of £4½ million the new allocation would be £186,000 as compared with an average of £500,000 or £600,000 in the last three years of the Labour Government. From the point of view of Plymouth this was very alarming, and before the Minister had ever announced the figure for 1953 we were already alarmed about it. We, of course, foresaw that many new licences would be required if we were to maintain our reconstruction programme, but the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary said on many occasions "You know you need not be alarmed." That was the purport of the Parliamentary Secretary's remarks on 25th February, 1952, when he said, in reply to myself and to the hon. Member for Sutton:The force referred to is the force which we had working on reconstruction in Plymouth. That was what the Ministry said in February, 1952, was to happen, when we were asking the Minister to pursue a policy which would result in the retention of the workers engaged on reconstruction in Plymouth. What has happened? When the Labour Government went out of office 1,000 people were employed on the reconstruction of Plymouth's centre, but by last Christmas the figure had fallen to just about 400. There were 600 people fewer working on the reconstruction of Plymouth's centre. The Minister nods his head, and I do not know what that means other than that he accepts the figure. It certainly confirms what we prophesied last February, that the Minister was not issuing sufficient licences to enable us to maintain our reconstruction effort. We were proved right and the Minister and his Parliamentary Secretary were proved wrong. In Plymouth not only has the number employed on reconstruction of the centre fallen from 1,000 to about 400, but the total number of building workers unemployed is round about 300. For six years under the previous Administration we never had any building workers unemployed, and we have now about 300 out of work. Over and above that, a considerable number have left the city for other forms of employment. One of the matters that we are concerned about is that we may have some difficulty in attracting them back to our reconstruction programme if we are to attain the momentum which we had before. Unfortunately, the Minister and his Department seem to have been very illinformed on this subject because, although the figures are as I have stated and as has been stated by the hon. Member for Sutton, and although the average in Plymouth is twice the national average, on 4th December, speaking in this House, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry said:"But I can assure him that we in the Ministry will try to see that all the building work is kept on a level to retain the force."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th February, 1952; Vol. 496, c. 901.]
That may have applied generally to the blitzed cities, but it did not apply to Plymouth. Therefore, before making any such statement and before basing his policy on that kind of allegation, the Parliamentary Secretary ought to have discovered the facts of the unemployment situation in Plymouth. If the Minister is to carry out a policy of reconstruction in Plymouth which will enable the whole of our building force to be built up to the figure which prevailed at the end of 1951, then instead of allowing Plymouth new licences to the total of £186,000 he will have to raise the figure to about £1,200,000. That is the evidence which I have from the Town Clerk of Plymouth, and perhaps I will be permitted to read the whole passage. He said:"There is no evidence of unemployment … it is wrong to say that there is unemployment in the building industry."
Instead of the value of the actual work to be done in Plymouth being £400,000 under the Ministry's plan, it should be treble that amount if the building force that is available in Plymouth is to be employed on reconstruction work. That is what we are asking for. We do not expect to get the full amount, but we hope the Minister will reconsider the matter in that light. There are two other propositions which will assist us in dealing with our problem. First, I should like to call attention to what was said by the Parliamentary Secretary on 4th December, 1952. As I have already pointed out, he was saying quite mistakenly that there was no evidence of unemployment. He went on to say:"The strength of our case for more licences lies in the fact that we can, without affecting defence or housing programmes, find employment for our building trades employees which would meet an expenditure at the rate of £1,200,000 per annum instead of the inadequate sum of £400,000 of which only £186,000 represents new work next year."
As I have said, the information on which the hon. Gentleman based his remarks was incorrect, but that does not alter the point that he was suggesting how unemployment could be dealt with. I will only say this to the Minister. As far as the further allocation of houses to deal with this problem is concerned, that would not be a solution for Plymouth, as I think he will readily admit from the discussions which he had when he came to the city. Already Plymouth has more housing allocations than have been taken up, and it would not be a solution to the problem. I think he admitted in his statement that an extra allocation of houses would not be sufficient to deal with the building workers who are unemployed."If there should be unemployment, the Minister of Works has a scheme whereby when any district can prove to him that it has unemployed resources of men and materials it need only apply to the Regional Office for more houses and it will get the go-ahead straight away and the materials. Therefore it is wrong to say that there is unemployment in the building industry."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 4th December, 1952; Vol. 508, c. 1915.]
Of the 200 or 300 unemployed, 100 are painters, and painters cannot be immediately taken up in work on new houses or new steel fabric shops.
That is where the Minister should try to reduce a little of his arrogance. It is no use the Minister trying to tell the House that these are not the right kind of workers. We had 1,000 workers engaged on Plymouth's reconstruction when he came into office. Today, there are only some 400 engaged on reconstruction.
The hon. Member is now doing his usual side-walk from one point to another. He said that when I went to Plymouth I admitted that it was not possible to take up the unemployment by the immediate allocation of more houses. My reason for saying that was a very good one—100 of the men unemployed, out of the total of 300, were painters. It is just as impossible to put them immediately to work by giving some long-term allocation for the building of office or shop projects. This is a problem of the utilisation of a balanced labour force, as hon. Members realise. The hon. Member is now on a quite different point. I have replied to his challenge about what I said at Plymouth.
But the right hon. Gentleman was trying to suggest that it was not possible to re-employ these people on Plymouth's reconstruction because of the different types of workers included in the 300 unemployed.
All that I am saying in reply—and I am perfectly entitled to say it—is that during the Minister's term of office the number of people employed on reconstruction in Plymouth has fallen by some 600. Obviously, these people could be employed on the same kind of work as that which they were doing before. That is the point with which the Minister must deal, and which he has refused to admit in the House. On 4th December, the right hon. Gentleman sent his Parliamentary Secretary to give incorrect information to the House. I am glad to see that the right hon. Gentleman has now discovered that there is heavy unemployment in the building industry in Plymouth. although on 4th December his Ministry were apparently unaware of the fact. There is a further suggestion which I should like to put to the Minister. Not only do we hope that he will reconsider the proposals for giving extra licences for building shops in the city centre, but we also hope that he will use his influence with the Ministry of Works and other bodies which may be concerned to try to get them to go ahead with building projects which will assist in the solution of our problem. For instance, in the case of the Gas Board, a licence to build was withdrawn several months ago. I hope that it will now be restored and that work will start. In the same way, the station project in Plymouth could be started. We hope that the right hon. Gentleman will use his influence with the Railway Executive or anybody else concerned in the allocation of the licence to enable them to go ahead with that work. We hope that he will review the other projects which might be undertaken in the city. We hope that, following the debate, the right hon. Gentleman will be prepared to reconsider the figures of the allocations which he has announced and to study the facts which I have given him, and of which he was apparently unaware when these allocations were made; and we hope that he will do his best as quickly as possible at least to try to restore the level of reconstruction and the numbers employed on that reconstruction to that prevailing in Plymouth some 12 to 14 months ago.5.43 p.m.
We are all agreed that the subject which we are discussing this afternoon is not of a party nature. I hope that I shall be able to keep at any rate within the bounds laid down by the hon. Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot), that I shall be no more partisan than he and that I shall be able to imitate his humility, if nothing else.
As well as being non-party, this is the kind of debate in which one may properly put forward the case of one's own constituency. I do so all the more readily since what Hull endured during the war was not generally recognised at the time. I do not remember the exact figure, but I think that, after the blitz on London had ceased, Hull endured something like 100 consecutive nights of bombardment from the air. Hull endured them with great patience and fortitude but nobody outside the city knew that it had had anything to bear at all, because, for security reasons, it was not permissible to mention the name of Hull. It is not my intention to weary the House with statistics. I do not say that Hull suffered more than any other city in the country, but certainly it suffered as much. The houses which were destroyed have very largely been either rebuilt or repaired. In the main, the factories and the industrial premises have been replaced. There is, however, one great gap in Hull. A similar gap exists in other cities, as was pointed out by the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Morley). I refer to the shopping centre and business centre, which was almost completely destroyed and which Hull has scarcely begun to replace. This has been a great inconvenience to the people of Hull; it has represented a considerable loss of trade to the city; more important perhaps than anything else, it has represented a great loss of rateable value, because the area in the centre of Hull, which was completely wiped out, was probably the richest area in rateable value in the city. It is difficult to make exact calculations but, as a result of the virtual obliteration of the shopping centre of Hull, I believe that an additional charge of about £200,000 per annum falls on the rates. Already the rates have reached the fantastic figure of 25s. in the £ and the forecast is that they will be raised almost immediately to 27s. in the £. This very high figure is largely due to the effects of the war and to the fact that the shopping centre has not been rebuilt. That is clearly not the fault of my right hon. Friend. It is eight years since the bombardment of Hull ceased and, of those eight years, he has borne responsibility for only 18 months. Nor do I wish to make party capital out of this. I do not think in this case that it is the fault of the last Government. Indeed, the last Government were helpless in this problem of the business centre. It was not the last Government which prevented the rebuilding of the centre of the city. It was the policy pursued by the Hull City Council, a Socialist-controlled council, which made progress impossible. The hon. Member for Devonport referred to the great progress which has been made in Plymouth. I suppose that, outside London, the two places which I know best and which I visit most frequently are the cities of Hull and of Plymouth, and the contrast between the two is staggering. If we drive through Plymouth we see a magnificent new shopping centre, as modern and convenient as any in the world. The hon. Member for Devonport said very fairly that that is due to a great extent to the devotion and energy of one man—the late Lord Astor. It is also due, however, to the fact that those responsible for the administration of Plymouth knew what they wanted and made up their minds; and, because they made up their minds, they were able to get what they wanted. How different is that from the sorry story of the City Council of Hull.The right hon. Gentleman, I am sure, wants to be fair. My right hon. Friend gave me the task of preparing a report for him in order that he could adjudicate. It is only fair to say that certain sections of the business community of Hull were not as co-operative as they might have been. There was a clash between the two, and whenever there is a clash, all the faults are not on one side.
Certainly the business community of Hull were not as co-operative as the City Council would have liked them to be, and I will tell the hon. Gentleman briefly why that was. The City Council of Hull, which has been in power since 1945, had all the hallmarks of Socialist administration everywhere. It was determined that fact should be made to conform to theory.
The fact was that the shopping centre was in a certain part of the city and it was determined that the shopping centre should be moved before anything was done. The council lost that battle. The Socialist City Council also determined that freeholds were objectionable and that leaseholds from the corporation were desirable. Therefore, it spent four or five valuable years in trying to bully and blackmail the freeholders into abandoning their freeholds. It did not succeed. If the City Council had concentrated on the simple fact that this was the most convenient centre for the shops, that it was where the people of Hull had been accustomed to do their shopping and where they wanted to go on doing it, and that it did not matter from the point of view of the citizens whether the shopkeepers were freeholders or leaseholders; if it had concentrated on the simple fact that it was its first duty to rebuild the blitzed area, that area would have been rebuilt even under the late Labour Government. Now at last the Council has come to realise that it is no good kicking against the pricks in this way and that it is time it was getting on with the job. Unfortunately, things are nothing like as easy today as they were four or five years ago. There is the re-armament programme. Money is not so free. There are fewer songs in fewer hearts——The rate of interest has gone up.
It is all much more difficult than it was. I am glad to say that the people of Hull now know who it is they should blame for the fact that the business centre still does not exist in the main. They do not blame my right hon. Friend. I am glad to be able to say they do not blame the late Labour Government. They blame, and quite rightly, the Socialist administration of the City Council. The people of Hull also know who to blame for the fact that the rates are going up from 25s. to 27s. They do not blame the late Government. They do not blame the present Government. They blame, and rightly, the present Socialist Council.
Although it is not the fault of my right hon. Friend, I beg him to do everything he can to relieve the position of my constituents, who have suffered so patiently and for so long. I join with other hon. Members on both sides of the House in asking my right hon. Friend to realise that this is a real problem for parts of the country which suffered so greatly in the war only because they were nationally of the greatest importance. I do not ask him to cast all discretion aside but to stretch his discretion to the fullest possible limit and give what help he can, certainly greater help than he is giving at present, to the blitzed areas.
5.54 p.m.
In view of the time factor, I shall not recite to the House details of the damage done in Swansea by enemy action. The Minister has full details in his possession. I recognise that reconstruction cannot be divorced from industrial, commercial, housing and educational development. It is a vital part of such aims and must obviously be included in the Minister's conception of a balanced programme.
None can deny that the blitzed areas are severely handicapped through no fault of their own, and we are engaged in an unequal struggle with towns and cities that were fortunate enough to escape some of the worst penalties of the last war. We suggest that we are entitled to priority in respect of capital expenditure and a greater supply of steel. The devastation of our towns was a national calamity, and if it is not accepted as a national responsibility we should at least be given every facility to expedite the work of reconstruction. The right hon. Gentleman visited Swansea recently and observed the wide open spaces in the centre of the town which formerly accommodated our principal shops and stores in addition to the largest and finest covered market throughout the country. The potentialities of the town are fully recognised. We have a queue of applicants waiting and willing to invest their money and other resources in order to restore the facilities that were formerly available. The allocation for 1953 is only £300,000. We have eight buildings for which plans have been approved, involving an expenditure of £616,000. Those plans are held up until 1954 at the earliest. Sites and terms have been agreed in respect of 14 other building projects but if we cannot get an increased allocation the prospective developers will be unable to proceed with their schemes until 1956. The Minister is able to appreciate better than most people what that means in loss of ground rents and rateable value to the local authority. Listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Miss Burton), I was surprised to find the number of features that Coventry and Swansea have in common. The hon. Lady referred to the desperate need of improved hospital accommodation. When we were discussing Welsh affairs recently I gave details in respect of our claim. Then she mentioned the lack of such amenities as swimming baths. We have been waiting for years for the authority and material to provide that necessary amenity for an industrial town like Swansea. In April, 1952, we sought the approval of the Minister for a further stage of road and building development. We emphasised to him the need of such a scheme to cater for a number of small, wellestablished businesses. People who have spent a lifetime in Swansea and have given the community good service are now waiting to return to their old sites. There have been protracted negotiations and a mass of detailed information has been submitted to the Department, but we are still without approval. The delay and uncertainty is detrimental to the commercial interests of the town, and there is a tendency for prospective developers to drift away. Meanwhile it is increasingly difficult for the local authority to resist applications for the temporary repair of damaged premises, although the life of those premises is necessarily limited and expenditure on them represents a waste of labour and material. Swansea caters for a much wider area than its own boundaries. Shopping and commercial facilities are urgently needed. The local authority is in need of the rent and additional rateable value. In fact, the prospect is that the rates will go up this year by about 4s. in the £. If the authorities are given proper encouragement, they will complete the task that they commenced the day after the blitz. I mean that in a literal sense. There was no moaning, whining, or waste of time. We resolved immediately on "No surrender," and we started to build a new and better Swansea from the ashes. The local authority have ample initiative and enterprise, but unfortunately they are held up for want of the Minister's approval to go ahead with the business and commercial premises and the development of road communications. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South said that Coventry was trying to create a new town. On the initiative and inspiration of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton), we are giving the town of Swansea an entirely new shape. But this means new roads and all the other ancillary features. Another aspect concerns the steel that has been withheld for the completion of the new Neath River Bridge, which is to give improved access, not only to Swansea, but to the whole of West Wales. Unless the additional steel is forthcoming, the tremendous amount of money that has already been expended will have been spent in vain and progress will be stultified. Although there is a very good approach from the bridge itself, the approach to Swansea is a bottleneck, and unless we are able to complete the work all the labour of the past two or three years will have been in vain. The Minister knows the area very well and I understand that he has accepted an invitation to visit us next month. I hope that by the time he comes he will have resolved to increase the allocation. Hon. Members have said that they are not making undue claims in respect of their constituencies, and I do not intend to do so. I only wish to reinforce the argument that this is a national problem and should be so accepted on a much wider and more generous basis than hitherto. With these very brief comments on behalf of the principal town in Wales that has suffered extensive damage, I commend our appeal to the Minister and hope that he will respond on a non-party basis. We shall give the Government full credit for any help which they may give us.6.2 p.m.
I want to enlarge on the question regarding sawn-off houses which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, South (Sir J. Lucas) and by the hon. Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot). These sawn-off houses, as they are called locally, have been a big problem for a long time, a problem to which no end seems to be in sight. I hope that when my right hon. Friend replies tonight he will be able to tell us what is being done for the people affected.
Like all houses, these buildings were insured against war damage, but unlike other people's houses, the people to whom these belong have received no compensation whatever. There are, in fact, two kinds of sawn-off house. There is the house where the bomb landed on and completely demolished the house next door, leaving an exposed party wall. In that case, I understand, the War Damage Commission have paid in some cases, some sort of compensation and have allowed the wall to be rendered against the weather, although often, as it happens, unsatisfactorily. But there is also the case of the house which was not completely demolished but which was pulled down for some other reason: because, for instance, planning consent could not be given to replace the house or the council wanted to run a road through the site. In that case the house has not been replaced. The War Damage Commission say that they have paid for it to be replaced and that they have no further responsibility in the matter. The council, on the other hand, say, "We have no responsibility. It is a matter for the War Damage Commission." I got a number of these people together in my constituency, and we obtained legal advice. Unfortunately, both the War Damage Commission and the council have had legal advice also, and I understand that although we have no case which we can fight, the legal opinion say that we have a very good moral case for getting some money. These people have suffered damage, and it is quite useless to put up a small amount of waterproofing material and to tell them that their house is as it was before the war. In fact, it has lost a considerable amount of its support. It has lost the front and back walls of the next door house that acted as a support, and it has lost the next door roof which kept the water off. In the case of terrace houses, many of the walls are made of what are called mild clamp bricks, which, I am told, cannot be rendered waterproof by any known means other than by building another skin four and a half inches thick on the outside. This the War Damage Commission refuse to do. In some cases, they have attempted to hang slates or tiles on the side of the damaged houses, but this has proved thoroughly unsatisfactory because small boys can throw bricks at them and once more the house is rendered liable to rain and the ravages of the weather. I should like to draw the Minister's attention to this matter. Portsmouth suffered appalling war damage, more than 7,000 houses being destroyed and a great many more damaged. Recently we have witnessed the tragedy of the floods on the East Coast, and everybody has responded to the appeal for money to help those who have suffered loss. We all understand the position and feel very sorry for those on the East Coast, but I remind my right hon. Friend that we are not asking for charity. We are asking merely for our rights in having the War Damage Commission pay for the damage that occurred during the war and which was insured against. I understand that the total number of these houses in the country is something like 500, of which about 150 are in my constituency. The cost of building a skin on the outside to render these houses safe for ordinary weather purposes would cost about £150 a house, and I hope that when my right hon. Friend replies to the debate he will say that a more generous attitude is being taken over this matter than was taken in the past. I should like to touch upon the general aspect of the war-damaged city of Portsmouth. We have welcomed the number of houses that have been put up since a Conservative Government came back to power. We were unable to put up houses in the past because of red tape and obstruction from the Socialist Government, but recently we have almost doubled the number of houses that were going up and I hope we will double the number once more in the coming year. The centre of the city still remains blitzed, but we put houses before town halls and other public buildings. I should like to point out to the Minister, however, that now, after seven years, six years of which were under Socialism, we should begin to see our way to build up these blitzed cities. We are grateful to my right hon. Friend for having given us more money this year than we have had in the past, but we ask him to double the sum and to give us still more in the future.6.9 p.m.
It is rather difficult to intervene in this debate on behalf of the burgh of Clydebank, a very heavily blitzed burgh in Scotland—by ratio of its prewar property, probably the heaviest blitzed burgh in the country. When the list of capital allocations for the blitzed cities of the United Kingdom was published, however, Clydebank was not included. I put down a Question on the matter and was told that the allocation of capital to Clydebank was nil.
I have had hundreds of protests about this from the citizens of Clydebank. I am not deprecating what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot) or by other Members who represent Portsmouth and other cities, who are justly proud of their achievements, but to maintain the tradition of my predecessor I must mention that the beautiful ships that adorn the country's docks were built on Clydebank. On that alone Clydebank merits considerable consideration. We have built more than 4,000 houses since 1945. We require another 6,000, but we have been compelled to go three or four miles outside the centre of the burgh and to build houses in country lanes. We cannot get an allocation to build roads to service those houses. We cannot even get schools and there are individual cases of parents paying for taxis to take their children three miles to school from burgh houses. As the Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland knows, there is the whole of the Mountblow area. There there is a lane over a bridge which carries only three tons and we cannot get necessary permits to widen that road or rebuild that bridge. Who is responsible? The Minister of Housing and Local Government is not responsible. Presumably the Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland is responsible, but he cannot get the money. The Minister of Housing and Local Government can get £4,500,000 from the Treasury, but the hon. Gentleman cannot get a penny. This is making it very difficult for all Scottish hon. Members. When Scottish people see these things happening and see that there is no capital for Clydebank they want Scottish hon. Members to move to Edinburgh and have financial matters under their own control because then they might be able to get some money. That is the attitude of the rank and file who point out that the Minister of Housing and Local Government gets £4,500,000 for England and Wales while the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland cannot get a penny. We have been successful in building houses, but cannot get an allocation for development. Because that capital development does not necessarily cover business premises it does not mean that the people of Clydebank do not need capital expenditure—they do. They need a road to Mountblow and they need to have several halls rebuilt. We are in the alarming position, on the Faifley Estate, of not having a hall which can be used as a polling station for the municipal elections. There is not a hall near the place, because it is three miles from the town. We had a workers' hostel in Clydebank. Now we are short of skilled labourers in the shipyards as there is no accommodation for workers. We want 6,000 houses, but cannot get capital allocation to rebuild the workers' hostel to which workers would come from other parts if it were rebuilt. I ask the Joint Under-Secretary to see whether he cannot be as successful as his right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government is in England. That Minister has £4,500,000 for the blitzed towns of England and Wales. I do not think it is enough for them but I think the Under-Secretary should try to get a considerable sum for the burgh of Clydebank. We are bearing a burden which is far beyond our capacity as a burgh. If we could get more capital allocated we could recoup some of the necessary expenditure.6.15 p.m.
I am glad of the opportunity to raise the question of the blitzed City of Sheffield, which suffered very badly during the war. In its centre whole shopping areas were destroyed and in one shopping centre, known as "The Moor," there was a complete flattening of the whole area. I have had interviews with the town clerk of Sheffield and the councillors and aldermen with a view to getting the blitzed areas restored and rebuilt. At the present rate of allocation of licences it will be a very long time before the area is developed.
I have been in correspondence with the Minister by letter about this area but that, unfortunately, does not help the city to get on with the small amount of allocation of licences they have. This is having a very serious effect on the people of Sheffield who have to bear an increase in their rates owing to the loss of rateable value from the value of land on which the shopping centres formerly stood. I feel that a global figure of £4,500,000 for the whole country is too small. I say this not from the point of view of party politics. We must bear in mind that it will take a great many years to restore some of our blitzed cities. The allocation does not allow local authorities to plan their city centres as they wish. That is one of the complaints I heard in the City Hall in Sheffield—that they were unable to plan the city on the right lines or to hasten the planning of the city owing to slow development and the small amount of money involved in the number of licences allocated to Sheffield. There is a feeling of anxiety and frustration in Sheffield about the restoring of blitzed cities. People believe that they have not had a fair allocation of the global sum in view of the damage which has been done. After all, Sheffield was employed in a full war effort when the blitz took place and it is still carrying out very valuable work for re-armament. More sympathetic consideration is due to Sheffield in the assistance given for rehabilitation of blitzed shopping centres. The "Sheffield Telegraph" says, in a leading article today:I agree. The article goes on:"This Government is certainly doing more than its predecessors. Last year it allocated for such areas £1,000,000 more than was allocated in 1951 and £2,000,000 more than the amount for 1950. But even at this accelerated pace it will be a long time before Sheffield's rateable value is restored. Something more must be done. Delay is dangerous."
"It is dangerous because the loss of rateable value means that Sheffield people are having to pay unnecessarily high rates. Considerably less than a 3s. 6d. increase would have been possible if the city's shopping areas had been rebuilt.
I appeal to the Minister. We cannot build up a shopping centre one store at a time over 12 months. Whole areas have been wiped out and the problem must be looked at on a far wider scale with a more sympathetic mind. I plead with the Minister to give this matter more sympathetic consideration from the point of view of the global sum. I ask him to adopt a wider outlook and to consider increasing the figure of £4½ million. The number of licences issued to the blitzed cities might also be increased gradually so that they may secure the assistance they badly need.It is dangerous because people may have formed new shopping habits. Not only have people in the region around who made Sheffield their shopping centre had temptations to go elsewhere; within the city itself shoppers have been diverted from areas no longer able to serve them."
6.20 p.m.
I am grateful for the opportunity of taking part in this debate as, strangely enough, there has been but one hon. Member on this side of the House representing a London constituency who has had that opportunity.
When my hon. Friend says that only one hon. Member from London has spoken from this side, may I point out that no hon. Members representing Sheffield have spoken and that Sheffield is a more important city than London?
Sheffield may appear more important in the eyes of my hon. Friend, but without doubt London and Greater London suffered more damage than any other area, including Sheffield.
With my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones), I represent a county borough in the East End of London. Although enormous damage was inflicted upon it, West Ham is only one of many boroughs in a similar position, including Poplar and Stepney. In West Ham over 56,700 dwellings were damaged, and of those 14,000 were destroyed beyond repair. In addition, other buildings such as public houses and shops with living accommodation, and factories, also were damaged, and West Ham, in common with other boroughs, has an enormous housing problem. Thanks to the wonderful work of the London County Council a magnificent job of housing has been carried out for the people in the London County Council area. But the people outside that area are not included. Both during the war and immediately afterwards West Ham continued with the job of re-building. But even though 1,400 temporary hutments were allocated the housing problem remains, because these hutments are now obsolete and should have been pulled down a long time ago. Some 60 per cent. of the existing houses in West Ham were built before 1895, and many have been condemned as dangerous because of the effect of bomb blast on the foundations. This has aggravated the housing problem as people are being moved out of houses which normally would have been used to re-house the population. The same difficulties which confront the West Ham council confront other councils and may be quoted by other hon. Members. In West Ham we have built over 1,600 new permanent houses and we have a further 2,600 under construction. The difficulty is that as West Ham and similar councils overcome their housing difficulties they are creating for themselves a financial problem. With an urgent priority housing list of 14,000 in addition to the general waiting list, it will be apparent that in West Ham there exists a financial problem as well as the problem of repairing and replacing houses. I agree with the hon. Member for Hallam (Mr. Jennings) and the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke) that it is unfair to expect councils to meet out of their rates expenses which are directly the result of war. West Ham now has only 78 per cent. of its pre-war rateable income, and even with a rate of 27s. in the £ the council cannot overcome their problems. I ask the Minister not only to continue the generous grant of £50,000 which he made last year, but to increase it. The costs of the council are increasing, through no fault of their own, and if £50,000 was thought to be needed 12 months ago, I think the Minister will agree—with the depreciation of the £ and the higher cost of living—that figure will not compensate for the loss of rateable value which the borough has suffered. I suggest that something be done about the blitzed sites which are so apparent. As this is Coronation year, I ask the Minister to give some financial assistance towards clearing up these bomb sites, and perhaps making them into Coronation gardens. I understand that a committee is now meeting to discuss the question of the equalisation grants. I ask the Minister to urge that committee to expedite their report. Many of the blitzed cities will benefit if a fair and equal distribution is made, and it will be generally agreed that help and assistance should first be given to the blitzed areas. The Minister should ensure that when the Budget proposals are framed his Ministry is not neglected, so that financial assistance may be given towards the replanning and rebuilding of our blitzed cities.6.30 p.m.
I want to refer to the aspect of the rebuilding of blitzed cities which concerns the constituency I have the honour to represent. One of the great problems in this rebuilding is to allocate the money and the effort correctly between the demand for houses and the calls of commerce and industry. I am sure that hon. Members would not like to interfere with the output of houses. The overwhelming majority of our people are filled with admiration for the efforts made by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government and the success which is being achieved.
I am certain, however, that the provision of adequate facilities for industry, especially for manufacturing industry, is all important. There is no point in building houses or rebuilding our cities unless we provide places where people can do useful work. In a city like Exeter the problem is exceptional. There is a certain amount of manufacturing in the city, but it is not undustrialised like towns in the Midlands or like certain parts of the Metropolis. Its function is concerned mainly with the distribution of goods for a large area. The large agricultural community which comprises the major portion of Devonshire treats Exeter as the centre to which the people must go to buy most of the necessities of life. Unless a special effort is made to rebuild the shopping and commercial centre of Exeter we may find ourselves in difficulties. Younger people cannot enter the trades followed in the city in the past, because many of those trades are not now carried on. The damage done by air bombardment was confined mainly to the shopping centre. I make a special plea to the Minister to consider the demands of the city council that they should be allowed to proceed at an accelerated tempo with the reconstruction of that area. This is not only a question of more shops: there is a grave shortage of office accommodation. Businesses are spread all over the city and various parts of one organisation may have a number of addresses. The same applies to the municipal offices. We have not many of the facilities normally to be expected in a large distributing centre like the capital of Devonshire. We have not got a satisfactory civic hall, and so on. All this leads to extreme inefficiency in the performance of the city's function as the centre of a large agricultural community, and I suggest that special consideration should be given to the problem.6.34 p.m.
We have had a most interesting debate in which hon. Members from many parts of the country have successively made the case for their own constituencies. That, on an occasion like this, is most proper. It is a most valuable function in the work of the House. Members from the blitzed cities, in whatever part of the House they may sit, form a special kind of pressure group; but it is a most legitimate pressure group—a moral pressure group. It is right that they should, jointly and severally, come together and put their case to the present Minister of Housing and Local Government.
It will not be challenged when I say, not naming too many names in the comparison I propose to make, that the success which has attended the work of rebuilding the blitzed cities has depended on the efficiency of the local authorities —and such efficiency has varied greatly from one authority to another—and also upon the assiduity of the Members for the constituencies in accosting the appropriate Ministers on all possible occasions. In the years from 1945 onwards I would certainly say that none was better served in this respect, both by the efficiency and imaginative sweep of mind of the local authority and by the assiduity of their Members in this House, than Drake's City of Plymouth, on the one hand, and Lady Godiva's City of Coventry on the other.Clydebank?
I will deal with Scotland later. Both authorities got off at high speed. Plymouth, even during the harsh ordeals to which it was subjected in the war, was all the time planning for the victorious future which Plymouth knew would come. It is surely symbolic that in this famous city associated with so many great names and great adventures in the past, standing forth first of which is Francis Drake, they were, through their elected representatives, preparing the way even under the bombs for the new Plymouth which would arise from the ashes. I pay my tribute to the splendid speed with which that authority got off the mark when victory came. Indeed, they were well served at that time by my hon. Friend the Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot) and by Mrs. Lucy Middleton who admirably represented the Sutton Division of Plymouth through that crucial Parliament of 1945 when first decisions were taken and the framework was laid down for the handling of this problem.
Coventry was not far behind. Coventry, as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Miss Burton) has said, has a special feature in that it is an expanding city as well as a blitzed city. It was a little rash of her to call it a new town. If that phrase were followed through in its full statutory significance, we should put in charge of the affairs of Coventry, not the elected representatives of the ratepayers, but a corporation of wise and able persons appointed by the Minister. That, I am sure, was not part of her dream for the near future. But she can put herself right in statutory terms by speaking of it as an expanded town, because that is provided for under a recently passed statute where the rights of the ratepayers remain unimpaired. Coventry also went ahead with great imagination and great energy. And no one can say that the Members for Coventry are seldom either heard or seen in this House or in wider public circles. I must not go on making invidious comparisons one with another, but perhaps I may say a few words about Swansea, because Swansea presents a very special case. Relatively to the size of the town, Swansea suffered most severely. The only consolation that comes to me, as one who knows that part of the world very well, is that although it suffered so severely, its most beautiful civic buildings, by some miracle, just escaped. For that I was deeply thankful. Indeed, it has been necessary in Swansea, before the actual rebuilding of the offices and shops and the centre of the town could be begun, to reshape the pattern of the whole town, and, in fact, as my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. P. Morris) said, give it a new shape. I well know about that, because sometimes I used to prod the local authority, when I was the Minister responsible, to get on with the building, but they always made the answer that, until they had made the roads, they could not begin the buildings that were to stand along the roads. I understand that the new roads have now been substantially completed, and I hope the Minister will pay heed to what my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West said and will give that authority an increase in their allocation. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Law) has now left the Chamber, so I am not concerned to say anything on behalf of the Hull City Council, which he attacked, although the right hon. Gentleman is a representative of the city in this House, beyond saying that, as far as I know, and contrary to what the right hon. Gentleman alleged, the rate payers of Hull have retained their confidence in the present majority on the Hull City Council. I leave the matter there for the moment, but, were the right hon. Gentleman present, I would have pursued with him in detail the question of the lack of co-operation between the business community and the city council to which he referred. As to Scotland, I do not think the present Minister of Housing and Local Government would either wish or dare to plunge northwards on official business. In that Department we only cross the Border when we have something other than "shop" to transact. So much for some of those who have put a case today. The hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Dudley Williams) was also quite right in saying that Exeter had a very special problem, and that there is a danger that, unless they can quickly rebuild their city centre, they will lose much of the present status of Exeter, which they should not lose. The only other point that I wish to make where I shall give the name of a particular authority concerns West Ham, and I hope that the Minister will pay heed to what was said by my two hon. Friends who spoke as representatives of West Ham here, and will be able to tell the House, I hope tonight, that he will be continuing the special grant which, on all the facts, I am sure is still justified in the case of West Ham, which suffered quite exceptionally, not only in the destruction of property and all the death and misery which went with it, but also in the destruction of its rateable value, which, in the case of West Ham, was quite disproportionately large. This, indeed, is a point which we must always bear in mind in discussing this question. It is not only that these blitzed towns and cities stand forth above all others in the degree of damage which they suffered during the war, but they have also been heavily smitten in the post-war period in their rateable value, and, therefore, they are less able to meet the requirements of their citizens for public services on a proper level. As the years pass, and almost eight have now passed since the end of the fighting, it certainly does become more and more sore that we should see these wounds still gaping in the centres of these cities. Whatever our political views may be, and from whatever part of the country we may come, we must all feel that these wounds gape more and more cruelly as the years pass. It is quite true that, as the years have passed, those of us who have had to deal with this problem in any Ministerial capacity, have hoped that we should be able gradually to get an expanding programme of reconstruction in these cities, so that these deep wounds might soon be closed and healed. I am sure, though I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to reaffirm it, that the present Minister shares that hope with the rest of the House, and no doubt will be able to tell us, so far as next year is concerned, that this will be a period of a gradually expanding scale in this work of reconstruction. If I may be permitted one comment on current affairs here, I would say that this odious proposal or suggestion that German airmen should be trained in this country to drop bombs once more surely must bring our thoughts back with a sharp pang of pity for all those communities which were so badly knocked about by the Luftwaffe in the last war. Today, we are not debating whether German airmen should drop bombs over here again, but we are discussing the destruction that was actually caused by German airmen only 10 years ago. With regard to the procedure in handling this problem, it has been said, and I think very truly, that the steel shortage, which has been a hampering and limiting factor in the past, is at any rate alleviated now. The steel shortage, if it has not actually passed, is becoming less severe. While I was responsible for these affairs, it always was such a factor. But I do not think the supply is now so short that we are not able to grant more licences for buildings which must contain a great deal of steel. I therefore hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be able to say that the easing of the steel shortage will enable him to make larger total provision for the rebuilding of the blitzed cities than was possible at an earlier stage. Indeed, I hope that this figure of £4½ million is not final, but that the right hon. Gentleman may find that more will be available. Apart from the question of the steel shortage, one of the aims which we have always held before us in the past was the need to have a properly balanced labour force engaged upon this blitz reconstruction, and the need for it to be held at a pretty steady level city by city, the need to see that it is suitably composed of different types of craftsmen and skilled workers, and the simultaneous need for a sufficient civil engineering labour force for the laying of the foundations and so on. It would indeed be a setback to any proper programme of reconstruction of the blitzed cities if this labour force, at one stage balanced, was to become unbalanced and dispersed, because the rate of progress would be necessarily slowed down in the future. With regard to the granting of licences, when I was the Minister responsible I always tried, though I did not always succeed in what I was seeking to do, to arrange with the local authorities that they knew well ahead what licences, how many and for what amounts, they were going to get. I have had lately a rather uncomfortable feeling—and perhaps the Minister can allay it—that this period has been shortened and that local authorities have been kept waiting until a rather later date than used to be the case before they knew how rapidly they might go ahead. I hope the Minister is aiming at giving them adequate notice so that they are not suddenly taken by surprise by the number of licences to be granted being either larger or smaller than they had been hoping for. I noticed that the right hon. Gentleman only this weekend made a speech which was rather apposite to what we are discussing. He said that there was a danger that the centres of many great cities would rot away; that is true, and it opens up wider questions than those upon which we are engaged today. But here we have the centres of a number of cities and towns not merely rotting away slowly, but completely blotted out as a result of warlike action. Although a certain amount of rebuilding has been done in the last seven and a half years—and do not let us under-estimate it—yet here we already have the problem starkly posed of how to reconstitute worthy centres for those cities to fit in with the ever growing activities of these great communities. It is not enough—and I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will agree—to build houses on the circumference, where the centre is either blown away or for some other reason is unworthy of the city as a whole. It is not even enough to build blocks of flats somewhere in between the circumference and the centre. The centre must be rebuilt and properly planned, and it may mean, as in Swansea, the reshaping of the whole road pattern, or as in Plymouth the breaking through, among new features, of a great new public way right to the famous Plymouth Hoe. But the centre must be thought of as the most important part of all for without a well planned, beautiful and healthy development of the centre, even a beautiful circumference will not make a city. Therefore, the problem that confronts us is how most quickly we can proceed with planned developments which will at no too distant date ahead give us back something better than that which Hitler and his airmen destroyed. It has indeed been said—and it is true—that in some places we should be very grateful to the late Hitler for what he destroyed. There are some places—I am not sure that some of the constituents of hon. Members on this side of the House who have spoken today are not among them—where slum clearance was long overdue. If only we could have had a clearance of the populations before the bombs fell, nothing but good could have resulted. But these were not the only parts damaged. Damage was also done to essential public buildings, shops, warehouses and the like, and it is that property which has to be rebuilt now. There has been one or two excursions into party politics, some from the other side, but all that may be regarded as secondary. The primary purpose of this debate is to draw from the Government a statement that they propose to press forward, I hope on a greater scale and at a more rapid pace, than they have hitherto been able to announce with regard to this most important part of the rebuilding of Britain. I repeat that houses on the circumference are not enough if the city has not a centre worthy of the whole, and the theme of this debate has been the need for re-creating such worthy centres. I invite the Minister to tell us what the Government are able to announce in this respect today.6.54 p.m.
This has been a most valuable and interesting debate. I have had the good fortune to listen to every speech with two exceptions, that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Law) and that of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. P. Morris), to whom I tender my apologies.
I am very grateful to the Opposition for choosing this subject for debate today for, except for the rather disconnected discussion which is inseparable from a debate upon the Address in reply to the Gracious Speech and from rather short Adjournment debates, we have really not had the opportunity of a comprehensive discussion whether upon a party or a non-party basis. Non-party lines are all very well, but the right hon. Gentleman opposite and I have long experience of how they easily develop into a general coalition against the Government of the day. At any rate, in this historical review, he has been as much a target as I have been. I do not propose to be partisan, but neither do I propose to stand in a white sheet, even under the pressure of the grand inquisitor below the Gangway. In any event, we must agree that the loss suffered by the blitzed cities and by their populations and the hardships caused to their citizens must never be forgotten. We are grateful to hon. Members on both sides who have very properly reminded us of those losses today. We in the House of Commons as representatives of the people owe a corporate duty to them, and, indeed, to ourselves not to forget, and this duty, I hope and think, the country will feel has been admirably discharged today. There are many different problems and each city has its own peculiar problems. I think that was admirably put by the hon. Lady the Member for Coventry, South (Miss Burton), when she pointed out that by a strange paradox the position in Coventry was that it was both destroyed and increased at the same time. It had all the problems of an expanding town while it lost so much of its amenities and necessities which would not have been sufficient even had they remained undestroyed. That is the rather special problem of Coventry, and we will try to help that city all we can. There is one way in which, perhaps, the hon. Lady will help us. In the new towns, under the beneficent autocracy set up by the right hon. Gentleman before me, we arranged to allocate houses to bricklayers and others of the building force. That arrangement works well, but after all the efforts of my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to get something like that in Coventry we did not succeed. If we could get 30, 40 or 50 bricklayers housed in Coventry it would make a great difference to the speed with which we could get on with the work. Again, there is the special problem of West Ham. It was mentioned quite rightly by the representative of the constituents of West Ham in this House and by the right hon. Gentleman opposite. It has not really to do with the allocation of expenditure for rebuilding, but rather with the special question of grant. I will study most carefully what has been said with a view to whatever proposals the Government will be able to make this year. I thought it might interest the right hon. and hon. Members if on this occasion I told them—I do not know whether it is usual, but I shall be quite frank to the House even to the point of indiscretion—that when I took office 15 months ago I was introduced to an institution known as the capital investment programme. This somewhat mysterious conception has puzzled many acute minds who have tried to understand it from the outside, and even when one is admitted to the esoteric mysteries of Government it still has its obscurities. As I understand, the capital investment programme was instituted immediately after the war, but it did not reach its full fruition, its peak period of beauty, until the functions of the Minister of State for Economic Affairs were combined with those of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. From that date there were brought together in the Treasury two organisations, the old Treasury financial experts and the new economic planners. It was indeed an amazing marriage. It was a fusion of those who, like the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Lewis), think that only cash matters and those who, like the planners, think that only things matter; and as we can well imagine, proceeding from the first dawn of that new era of progress which only began in the world in 1945, it pressed on rapidly. This combination of two Ministries coalesced; and it was soon apparent that there was a rigidity and austerity more suitable to religious dogma, where any kind of backsliding might endanger not merely the economic stablity of the country but the immortal soul of the weaker vessel. I am the last person in the world to wish to throw any doubt upon the value of planning in economic affairs. [An HON. MEMBER: "The Government said it was all 'boloney'."] As Professor Joad would say, whether it is "boloney" or not all depends upon what one means by planning. Properly used as a servant and not as a master, as a general guide to economic trends and possibilities, and not as a kind of Bradshaw or A.B.C. which one looks up to get what one reasonably hopes is an accurate result, economic planning is a vital need of our present structure of society, divided, as it is, into two sectors, one publicly controlled and financed, and, therefore, only capable of being controlled by direct planning, and the other privately controlled and financed and capable of control by other, possibly more old-fashioned processes. When the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Morley) gave a percentage of particular allocations of the spending programme to the blitzed cities he referred to the whole of the investment programme and not to the building element. I think that he would have been fairer if he had made it a percentage of the building side of the investment programme. The investment programme in the case of the building industry deals with the total availability of building resources, labour and materials and does not, of course, deal with the manner in which these resources are to be financed. In other words that is quite another question. It comprises all the work which has been done on public account, on local authority account or on private account. That is right because if one is considering this by the physical test of the labour and materials available the question of how they are paid for is quite irrelevant. Most of what we have talked about today is not a matter of public expenditure, as the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen said. We are not asking the taxpayer to do anything, but allowing private individuals to spend their own money in building shops, offices and the like. The hon. Member for Dunbartonshire, East (Mr. Bence) fell into this confusion when he said that the Minister had £4,500,000 and asked what grants the Secretary of State for Scotland had obtained. It is not a question of grants. It is a question of permission and of licences which, of course, operate in the same way in Scotland as in England. The reason why not so many licences have been given in Clydebank is that the main loss there was a housing loss and not so much shops, services, and the like; and that main loss is met in the ordinary way by the central subsidy, by local authority subsidy and by the specially generous assistance given by the Scottish Housing Association, from which the local authority finds great relief. I have been informed that licences have been given to cover most of the damaged shops and, I am happy to say, most of the church buildings. On the other hand, over the whole range of the investment programme the greater part of what we have to consider, as the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton) will remember, is work financed in whole or in part by local government or the central Government. That is to say, most of it falls under the categories of housing, schools or defence work. Factories are sometimes privately financed and sometimes fall to be done with Government help. Since the war, all other building, ordinarily speaking, has been prevented altogether. The general idea of those who prepare the investment programme so far as building is concerned is to try to create a picture of the total amount of building effort which will be available, measured in terms of money. For money is still, even in these days, the most convenient mathematical formula for describing effort; and they have to make a general division as to how it is to be used. There are certain questions which, I frankly admit, arise from this procedure. First, how is the total amount of effort calculated? How is this estimate made? It is quite clear that there can never be an absolutely accurate figure. For, first of all, it deals with the global amount available throughout the island as a whole and, of course, we all know that labour is the least mobile of all these assets. Even some physical assets can be carried great distances, but sometimes it is expensive to do so. In the second place, the total estimated productivity of the building industry in any one year is the result of a series of calculations which, again, can only give a general guide. The total returns under the census of production are added together for the whole industry and this is said to be the productive capacity of the industry. During the period when repairs were running at certain levels without licence, it was necessary to make a certain estimate of them. The only way that that could be done was to add together all the licensed building, then deduct that from the total as shown by the census of production and assume that the difference amounted to the amount of unlicensed repair work. That was the basis of the whole calculation. I quite realise—and perhaps I realise it more than it has been realised until recently—that there must be a considerable margin of error in such a method of calculation. Nevertheless with all its faults, this is the only practicable way in a period during which demands exceed supply of getting a broad general guide on which any Government of whatever complexion, can act. But now, in the case of the blitzed cities, comes another complication. The total building productivity available is divided among the various Ministries which either finance undertakings themselves or act as sponsors to people who are prepared to finance these undertakings. The priorities, under previous Governments and under this Government, have been rightly given to houses, schools, factories for export, and defence —over the whole country. These are the overriding needs for, after all, security from foreign aggression, homes, food, and work are still the most important things to give to our people, beyond all else. It often happens, however, that a considerable amount of building in a blitzed city can take place and has taken place not under what we are now discussing, but under the schemes sponsored by one of the Ministries concerned—the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Works, and the Ministry of Supply. It may be, for instance, an insurance company, a bank, an oil refinery or a similar project is brought into being in the blitzed city, or its immediate vicinity under one of these methods. For the first few years after the war these priorities were faithfully observed and no exceptions were made at all. The hon. Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot) talked of expanding, but this did not start until 1949 or 1950. The total amount of such work since the war—quite apart from the special allocations of offices and shops in the central parts of the blitzed cities—has been very considerable. I calculate that what they have got under the sponsorship of other Ministries is probably far more than the total amount sponsored under the particular system which we are now discussing. Immediately after the war the blitzed cities obtained their share only to the extent that they could contribute to the prior needs of defence, schools, exports and the like. During those first years office buildings, shops, cinemas and the rest were either wholly banned or allowed here and there only on new housing estates, on rather a small scale, when new shopping centres were brought into being. But by 1949 it had become apparent that something more had to be done for the blitzed cities, otherwise the town centres would never recover and the lives of the people would become intolerable. Even the Treasury has an interest in this matter, because the Exchequer was and is paying considerable amounts in loan interest in land in these cities. It was therefore decided by our predecessors that a special allocation should be made for this purpose, and the task of sponsoring this programme and deciding the major priorities was allotted to the then Ministry of Town and Country Planning. That was the point at which I took over the investment programme in November, 1951. I claim that it is open to argument whether this allocation has been reasonable in the past. That is not my affair. I am responsible with regard to whether it is now running at a reasonable rate and whether we are managing it as fairly and as reasonably as we can. It is worth remembering that, except in the new housing estates of the new towns, where some provision has been made on a modest scale, nothing has been allocated for shops, theatres or similar amenities. In respect of the City of London this ban has now been partially withdrawn and some considerable orders are to be placed. I think £10 million worth of orders was mentioned for the next three years. As my hon. Friend the Member for the Cities of London and Westminster (Sir H. Webbe) pointed out, this is being done because of the importance—especially the dollar-earning importance—of the great trading and finance companies operating in the City of London; but, even here, so great are the divergent pressures that while my hon. Friend the Member for the Cities of London and Westminster thought that this provision was too little, the hon. Member for Kirkdale (Mr. Keenan) thought that it was too much.Hear, hear.
That shows how different are the pressures which are put upon the Government. Questions have been put down suggesting that this money would be better spent on houses.
At this stage, I should like to point out that the allocation of money is one thing and the spending of it is another. The making of a scheme is the first process, but carrying it out is the part that matters. In all building, as in all other forms of production, it is vital to get the flow of orders running at a rate which is neither too high nor too low for what can be carried into effect. That is why I am much more interested in figures of work done than in figures of money allocated in any particular year to any particular authority. It was that difference to which the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen referred when he said that he did not altogether accept the figures given to him by the Parliamentary Secretary. That is because he was thinking of schemes planned and the Parliamentary Secretary —with his naturally practical character— was thinking of work done. There is a very great difference between the two. Let us take the years since this method came into operation. In 1950, £4½ million were licensed; but only £2,300,000 worth of work was done—just over half. In 1951, £4,800,000 were licensed but only £3,500,000 worth was done. Then came 1952. Even with the Chancellor of the Exchequer having gone to the United States, I dare not tell the House what was the sum allocated under the investment programme which was compiled at the end of the year. All I can say is that £4,600,000 worth was done, and that is twice what was done two years before. It is the work done—the houses, schools, offices and shops completed— which is the true test. Under the special arrangements the worth of work done in the years 1949 and 1950 together was £2,300,000. In 1951, it was £3,500,000 and, in 1952, £4,600,000. It may be said "But this has been carried out as a result of falling housing programmes." Not at all. Let us take the housing progress in these blitzed cities. In 1949, the number of houses built was 14,500; in 1950, it was 17,500; in 1951, it was 20,200 and, in 1952, it was 24,500. So there has also been a growth there. That is the story up to date. Here it is perhaps not indecent to lift a little further the veil of mystery that surrounds the capital investment programme for 1952–53 as it affects the blitzed cities. I have always held that these programmes are a general guide and that we should not allow them to dominate. By local and national effort we can get a few more schools; by getting people to work a little harder we can increase the productivity rate a little more. That is what we do in time of war; now we have to do it in peace. We must try to get a little more than a pint from a pint pot. I take a little pride in the fact that we managed £4,600,000 worth of completed work in 1952, which was certainly higher than a meticulous application of the investment programme by my Department might have suggested. One of the beauties of these things is that no one can add up the figures until the end of the year—as the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland knows. At the same time, we have built more houses in these cities and the rest of the country than either we or anybody else thought possible, except the right hon. Member for Ipswich (Mr. Stokes). Coming to the plan for 1953, I want to think of it in a practical way. First, we have to start with the fact that there is £2 million worth of work going on, and we have to consider how much should be fed in to achieve a good result. We want to make sure of £4½ million as a start, and I have suggested that we should feed in about £2½ million worth of new allocations. But when that has been allocated we have to take the position of each city and town. It may be easier to put a little more into one than into another. There cannot be absolute fairness, because one has to think of all the other things which are needed. It may be that at one place we need a great refinery which is of vital importance from the economic point of view, and that town will have to do with a little less than another town which has no such rival claim. One cannot have priorities. One must take the total of what is fair and reasonable and try to feed it into each place at a rate which will achieve the best results. At the same time, one cannot go quite crazy about it and lift the lid altogether. If we did that we should be running to the other extreme. We must neither allow ourselves to be unduly tied and fettered by an economic planning system so operated as to take all the enterprise, spirit and elasticity out of the system, nor go back—especially when the Government are spending so great a proportion of the total national effort—to a system of complete laissez faire. One must get all one can by seeking to attain a reasonable position between the two, and that is what we are trying to do. We must keep the priorities—food, work, homes and the defence of our people against the aggressor—but we must deal honourably with the blitzed cities, giving them all we can. We must make every effort we can; we must not tie ourselves up. The £4½ million must be a programme; it is an ambition, an aim. If the completed work at the end of 1953 bears some relation to the unrevealed programme for 1952 I shall not be too unhappy.Was it part of the right hon. Gentleman's plan for 1952 that the number employed on reconstruction in the City of Plymouth should fall from 1,000 to 400? How does he propose to remedy that situation?
I am just coming to that. The hon. Gentleman, not unexpectedly, introduced the only note of real acidity, even of poison, into the debate. I do not mind; he does much more harm to his right hon. Friend than he ever does to me.
The hon. Member for Devonport pleaded with me to keep Plymouth specially under review. It is true that Plymouth has a very special situation. It is a long way off and it is not surrounded by many competing industries and, thus, there are not quite the same problems that arise in the case of Southampton or even Portsmouth. The hon. Member has a right to speak for Plymouth, although the remarkable start that Plymouth made was due, more than to anyone else, to Lord Astor, who served the city so well. It may be argued that more ought to have been started, but Plymouth made a good start. When the first allocation of £2½ million was made for the country. Plymouth got £700,000 of it. That is not bad. I congratulate the hon. Members for Plymouth, and, still more, those who made the plan, but we cannot continue to give one city a third or a quarter of the total for the country. The same thing happened that has always happened, the completions did not run to that extent, being £488,000 in 1949–50, £734,000 in the peak period 1951 and then dropping to £681,000 in 1952, even giving Plymouth all it could reasonably do. Do not forget that at the same time I am anxious—so is the Chancellor of the Exchequer—that we should get all the work done. The reason is that everybody gains if that happens. We gain politically, we gain from the feeling of having done our duty in bringing happiness to the people, we gain because local authorities will get an easement of their financial position, and, above all, we gain because a great proportion of the loans which have to be made for the purchase of the cleared land have to be supported by very large Treasury grants until the buildings are completed and so the Treasury stands to gain as much as anybody else by our getting on with the job.I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for allowing me one more question. Is it the aim of his Department in the coming year to try to restore the number of people employed on the Plymouth reconstruction as soon as possible to the figure of at least 1,000, which it was some 14 months ago?
I am not running away from that. I am just coming to the point of the local labour position which is rather peculiar to Plymouth, but I prefer to answer my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton (Mr. J. J. Astor), who spoke before the hon. Member for Devonport.
It is true that everyone wants to achieve as much as can be done, but the amount of local labour which may be temporarily available is not the only test when considering this class of building. Broadly, the class of building about which we are thinking employs, to a great extent, building firms of national reputation who operate all over the country. These firms employ a good deal of special skilled labour, and the labour is employed centrally, especially in the case of steel erection, in producing the lifts and all the rather complicated paraphernalia of this type of building operation, and a considerable number of skilled men have to travel around for the firms for the erection of this kind of building. Therefore, although I regret it when I hear that there are 99 painters, 24 other skilled men and 159 general labourers in the building trade at the moment out of employment in Plymouth, that is a normal situation at this time of the year and I do not believe that the mere drawing in of those people would provide a balanced labour force. On the other hand, it would result in a drawing upon the skilled labour and the special plant and machinery for which all the representatives of the other 18 cities have been asking. The situation is not quite as simple as the hon. Gentleman suggested. Much as I should like to see the force built up to its full capacity, it would have considerable impacts upon what could be done by the rival claimants in the other cities, even drawing upon the same kind of mobile labour force and the same kind of production capacity for the provision of the plant required. There it stands. I can assure the House that the best way to treat the temporary labour situation would be not to get the painters and a few skilled men and a certain number of general labourers into the building force but what the Minister of Works has done in raising the repair licence figure to £500 and in giving additional licences for smaller and simpler types of building, such as a room or two here and a small hall there, for that might be done without bringing in quite so much external labour. At any rate, we will keep in touch with hon. Members representing Plymouth and the other cities about what we are trying to achieve.I inquired whether the right hon. Gentleman was keeping in mind the need to give local authorities good notice of the number of licences which they might grant for major re-buildings. I am speaking now not of the small items but of major blocks of shops and offices, and so on.
I am glad the right hon. Gentleman has asked me that. He has perhaps had the same experience that I have had. It is possible to give notice earlier, but I like to keep a fight going, and I do not believe that the local authorities have lost because of a month or two's delay in the allocations which have been made. One has to keep something in hand, and I do not think that has always been possible in this rather moving battle with uncertainties as to the future.
Take steel, for instance. After all, there was no steel allocation for the last two years of the right hon. Gentleman's Administration; we had to set up steel allocation in January of last year. That did not halt us, and I felt sure the position would get easier, but it incommoded us. I will certainly do my best to give good notice and, what I think is better, consistent feeding in of anything additional which may be possible and not keep too rigidly to the annual determination. If there is any extra, we will feed it in as it appears to be convenient to do so. I did not promise anything when we started in this office 15 months ago. I remember that in the first two or three months as Minister I never came into the House or answered a Question without hearing the cry, "What is happening to the Conservative programme for 300,000 houses a year?" I observe that those interruptions have become less frequent of late. All I can say is that I am willing to do my best—I cannot promise more— for the blitzed cities and to be judged by the results.Prisons
7.30 p.m.
I am grateful for the opportunity of opening this debate tonight on the state of our prisons. I had the special privilege of presiding over the Subcommittee of the Select Committee on Estimates which had the responsibility of examining the prisons in England, Scotland and Wales.
I have here the Report which we issued to the House. By and large, the gravest danger which it discloses is the danger that the primary purpose of the training and treatment of prisoners is being very sadly undermined. The primary purpose of the training and treatment of prisoners is to establish in them the will to live a good and useful life on discharge, and to fit them to do so. In the Home Office booklet entitled "Prisons and Borstals" this is very clearly stated, on page 19:It is impossible for these high purposes, envisaged in the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, which my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) was responsible for introducing to the House, to be achieved under the existing conditions which we can see in our prisons today. We might just as well ask for the moon as to ask for these purposes to be achieved when we have approximately 25,000 to 26,000 prisoners crammed into prisons which should only accommodate half that number. I want to refer briefly to the five problems which, I think, are facing the prison administration. We can then see how difficult and dangerous are the conditions. First, there is the problem of the buildings. The present prisons, with the exception of the one which was built in 1910, are hideous monuments and relics of a bygone age when the method and manner of dealing with criminals was wrong. I do not hold the present Home Secretary responsible for the buildings today. He has inherited a good deal of difficulty. I do think, however, that the Government and the right hon. and learned Gentleman were very seriously at fault in delaying the putting in hand of a building programme which had been approved by his predecessor. That aspect is brought out in the Select Committee's Report. We are all pleased to know that the Government, in their reply to the Report of the Select Committee on Estimates, have announced that the building programme is to go forward. I should, however, like to call the attention of the Home Secretary to the Second Report of the Select Committee on Estimates. On page 10, it is mentioned that the building programme is to go forward, and we are told that:"It is therefore a primary purpose of modern methods to seek to counter the dangers of deterioration, moral mental and physical, inherent in prolonged confinement."
What does that mean—" so far as can be foreseen"? Are we to understand that there will be no doubt whatever that this vital programme will proceed? The second problem is that of overcrowding. The right hon. and learned Gentleman may not have been forewarned about the grave flood disaster, but in this Report of the Select Committee he can note a very grave warning which should be taken fully into consideration. Four thousand five hundred prisoners sleep three in a cell. That figure has been mounting fast. The Lord Chancellor recently announced that the figure had increased to 5,500. I understand that it is now even higher and is mounting towards 6,000. This is an alarming situation. Figures which are mounting in this way must be a nightmare to the prison administrator. I want to make one quotation on overcrowding from the Seventh Report of the Select Committee. I refer to the evidence which was given by Dr. Murdoch, the Principal Medical Officer of Wandsworth Gaol. I was with the Committee visiting that prison, and, expressing my personal opinion, I was completely shocked and horrified by what I saw. When at Wandsworth I asked Dr. Murdoch about overcrowding. He said, in reply to Question 809, on page 61:"Limitation on capital investment will not, so far as can now be foreseen, prevent the Commissioners from carrying out this programme, …"
Later he says:"I think it is insanitary. It can only be condemned by any doctor. These are cells built to hold one person, by space, cubic capacity and ventilation and heating; everything is arranged for one man. It is supposed to be adequate for one man, and you are putting him into conditions over which he has no control at all; he must stay there."
I notice that a prison officer who is employed at Wandsworth was quoted in the "Prison Officers' Journal" as having said, at the annual conference at Belfast, in August last:"I cannot imagine any dwelling-house with one closet to 40 people. The thing is not flushed and filled before the next man has used it. It is a disgusting thing. On the question of epidemic disease, if one man gets a disease the others will get it."
He described the atmosphere when the prison is unlocked for the first time in the morning, and said that not only was this injurious to the staff but also to the prisoners. Whatever punishment is meted out to prisoners, I believe that it is contrary to all principles of justice and humanity that in addition to sentence a prisoner should be thrown into conditions which are a grave danger to health. If this were an isolated example it would not be so serious, but the Home Secretary will note from the Report that 23 local prisons are overcrowded in this manner. I was equally disturbed when I visited Winston Green Gaol in Birmingham. I ask the Government: How long must we wait before this mounting evil can be overcome? How long must we wait before the figure of more than 5,000 prisoners sleeping three in a cell can be reduced? The third problem is that of inadequate staffing. The prisoners are not sleeping in their cells all the time, but they are compelled to remain there from 5.30 at night until 7 o'clock in the morning. They are locked in for 13½ hours. When the Home Secretary decided to "freeze" the size of the staff in October, 1951, he was, in my judgment, guilty of a grave offence, because it is impossible for the prison situation to be changed unless at least 500 additional officers are employed so that there can be satisfactory management of those prisons. The number of law-breakers cannot be "frozen," and it seemed to me to be an act, not only of injustice but of economic folly to prevent the Prison Commissioners from engaging as many officers as they could. To establish a three-shift system in the prisons requires an increase of 500 officers, and that is the only means by which overtime can be reduced. For 25 years before I came to this House I was employed by one of the most efficient firms in the land, who always said that overtime was a great evil, to management as well as to workers. Yet in 1940 my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, South (Mr. H. Morrison) had agreed, in conditions of war, to every officer working an additional hour, which was called the "Morrison hour." I am sure he never visualised that that would last for 10 years. Then there were only half the present number of prisoners. According to the Select Committee, it was expected that overtime pay alone would increase by more than £315,000. If the Government would permit the prisons to be adequately staffed they would be able to save a considerable sum of money, because they would abolish overtime, and they would get greater value for the work that was being done. That brings me to the fourth problem, that of the working week. The average working week in local prisons is 22 hours. In Parkhurst and Dartmoor prisoners work 17¾ hours per week. What a reflection it is upon us that the hardened criminals, who in the old days were sentenced to hard labour, work less than those who have committed minor offences. If there is one essential it is that the prisoner should at least do a reasonable week's work. New work is required; a new attitude is required. We must abolish for ever the making of mail bags by hand when machines that could make those bags are standing idle. We hear much about incentives. What incentive can the Home Secretary offer in present circumstances? When visiting one of the prisons I said to a prisoner who was a skilled metal worker, "How do you like the work?" He replied, "The work's all right but the rate for the job isn't very good." What is the rate for the job? A prisoner who is a skilled worker, a Grade A worker, earns an average of 3s. 4d. a week—less than the price of a packet of cigarettes. When visiting a Borstal institution near Redditch I was interested to find that the instructors were themselves offering prizes of packets of 20 cigarettes for the boys who could do the best work, or those who could lay the most bricks in a day. The Select Committee suggested that the Commissioners might give consideration to this matter. We thought it would be good to offer more incentives for better production and more efficient work in prisons. But the Commissioners are silent about that, although the evidence all went to show that when incentives are offered to prisoners in the way of a reward it produces better and more efficient results. The last problem is that of illdiscipline. Let me quote from the Commissioners' Report. They say:"The policy of housing three in a cell could only cause disaster sooner or later."
I am amazed that the Prison Commissioners could not see what we meant by "ill-discipline," which was one of the problems that caused the Select Committee to suggest that there should be an independent inquiry into the matters which were outside our terms of reference. They mentioned Parkhurst as the only evidence of ill-discipline being a major problem. Parkhurst was a very grave problem. The evidence about the very serious situation which has given rise to ill-discipline at Parkhurst is very clear. Ill-discipline in local prisons is increasing, and the evidence shows that where three prisoners are sleeping together in a cell it is constantly leading to quarrels which would never arise if the men were in single cells. Prisoners are crowded in the workshops and there is a perpetual opportunity for prisoners to make trouble among themselves. I have seen them in the prisons working elbow to elbow. If that is not dangerous from the point of view of trying to control prisoners, I do not know what is. There are far more prisoners per officer in the workshops than ever before, and the prison officers will say that at all times there is considerable difficulty in maintaining control, with the constant marching of prisoners, locking up and unlocking. What do the Prison Commissioners want? Do they want to wait until the situation develops in local prisons as it has developed in Parkhurst? Do they want to wait until the prisoners set fire to the largest workshop, as they did in Parkhurst, involving the loss of approximately £4,000, with £2,000 worth of damage to material and rebuilding costing over £1,600?"The Commissioners do not understand the Committee's reference in paragraph 40 to illdiscipline as a problem of major importance."
My hon. Friend is making charges of ill-discipline in the prisons. Is he aware that the rate of punishment, which is the best guide, was one per 1,000 of the prison population per day from 1931 to 1935 and was exactly the same in 1951, so that there has been no decrease in discipline despite the enormous overcrowding?
I say at once that I have the utmost admiration for the prison officers, who are working under considerable difficulties, but it was stated very clearly by the officers in their annual conference last August that they were able to obtain these results only by a firm discipline, and that it was difficult for them to exercise control. I do not want to be alarmist, but I think it must be obvious that, where prisons are overcrowded to this extent it is difficult to maintain discipline.
Indeed, in the prison officers' magazine, in September, 1952, these words appeared:That is the opinion of prison officers. To sum up, I feel that there is a great danger that our local prisons are becoming almost breeding grounds for criminals. They are the soil in which further evil fertilises and grows. When we look at the other prisons, the regional training prisons, the corrective training prisons and the Borstal institutions, the opposite is the case. I have admiration for the officers in all these institutions and I sometimes find it difficult to understand how they achieve their results in view of the conditions. I shall always remember seeing a prisoner in Wakefield Gaol—the regional training prison—who had entered the gaol as a youth, had been in for a few years, had been educated in classes and workshops and had become a skilled tailor. I was impressed by the work he was doing. He appeared to be cultured. I asked him, "How long have you to remain here?" and I stood aghast when he said, "For life. For Her Majesty's Pleasure." He had caused the death of a young girl, but since then he had been corrected and educated. The prison officials were proud of the results which they had achieved. He would be one of the 91 out of every 100 passing through that prison who never returned to a life of crime. We must realise that it costs more. It costs nearly £8 a week to keep a prisoner there, compared with £4 a week in Wandsworth, but when I see the 1948 Act being worked in those prisons I see justice and hope. It is only when I look at the other prisons that I am reminded of the words of Oscar Wilde in his famous poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." In Reading Gaol I particularly thought of those words as they applied to so many of the old prisons outside:"Have we to wait until something so serious occurs inside one of our prisons that the public is aroused from its indifference and clamours for something to be done? We have no wish to be alarmists. What we do emphatically assert, however, is that in the present state of the prison service, the ingredients for transforming an ordinary situation into one which contains danger to life, limb and property are disturbingly near to hand."
"This, too, I know, and wise it were
If each could know the same,
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame
And bound with bars less Christ should see
Even more significant:How men their brothers maim."
"The vilest deeds, like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in Man
I want the Government to be able to tell us that these conditions, which make those words true in some prisons today, will be removed more quickly. I pray that a firm and vigorous programme will be adopted and that the right hon. and learned Gentleman will be able to assure us that conditions will be created as a result of a new outlook and a new programme which will make us feel as proud of the buildings in which we house our prisoners as we are of our hospitals, schools and universities.That wastes and withers there."
7.58 p.m.
I am sure that the House will have listened with sympathetic interest to the hon. Member for Ladywood (Mr. Yates). He has dealt very fully with the acute and grievous problem of overcrowding in our prisons, the legacy from many past Governments and from a major world war. He has dealt well with the healing power of work, but he has touched only lightly on the condition of the prisoner when he is released. I want to take up the time of the House for a few minutes in dealing with those three points.
Is it not time that we should consider the two different types of criminal housed in our prisons? There is, first, the class of prisoner whose escape is likely to frighten the neighbourhood and there is, secondly, the class of prisoner whose escape will not cause any window or door to be bolted or any honourable and law-abiding citizen to lie awake at night. It seems to me that we ought to deal with those two types very differently. In the second class we find bigamists, homosexuals, confirmed drunkards, those who refuse to pay maintenance and those who commit fraud. There are many others. They are housed in the same building and lead roughly the same type of life in prison as those who have committed robbery, rape or many other worse offences, and they automatically increase the overcrowding of our prisons. Surely it is time that we considered the way of life of those people, how they are conditioned for their release and what happens to them on release. In prison all is found and they have no responsibility. They get physically soft. They lie for hours on their bunks without thought. Is it surprising, after only two hours out of 24 in the open air, that on release they return to society weakened physically and mentally? They are discharged with little money and they have no job to go to. Very few firms will take them on if they know them to be discharged prisoners. Often they have no home and the lodging house keepers require a week's rent in advance so they drift to some hostel or other. What they require more than anything else is to get a job, to keep it and to go straight. But to get a job, keep it and go straight requires strength of character and that is exactly what they have not got, and what largely the system of our prisons does not give them. How easy it is, as the hon. Member for Ladywood said, to find themselves once again gravitating back to their old associates and to the breeding ground of crime, and the vicious spiral of crime takes another twist downwards. It is the responsibility of our community to give a man who has served his sentence a fair chance to make good and I do not believe that at present he gets that. If, however, this responsibility is shouldered by the nation then the nation has a right to expect some return for the large taxes that are paid to keep so many people in idleness. One is appalled at the very small fraction of the prison population able to go outside the prison and do a proper day's work. Why is it? Because, it seems to me, most of our prisons are wrongly situated. If the prisoners go out, they will compete with union labour or with the labour of lawabiding citizens and one does not want that to happen. Hard work, however, is a good thing and does no one any harm. It toughens the body, it heals the mind and it can be a habit. Why do we not take that second class of criminal into wilder country, into coastal camps or Scottish castles which, through taxes or Estate Duty, have now become redundant and where there is much good work to be done and no other labour with which to compete? Afforestation, drainage and, this year, the reclamation of windfall timber or the building of extra dykes to keep out our seas, are surely works that could be undertaken and could give a prisoner pride in a job once again and get him tough. If necessary, pay him the rate for the job and deduct from that rate the cost of his clothes, of maintenance, of housing, of pocket money, banking the balance for him so that when he returns he will have something to fall back on. I believe that could well be done. The Home Secretary, during his tenure of office has shown great moral courage in making many a decision. I ask him to make this reform so that temporary evil-doers are not turned into permanent criminals, so that men can learn the joy of doing a decent day's work—indeed, there are some young chaps in prison who boast now that they have never done a day's work in their lives—so that men, on their release no longer feel that they are not wanted by society but are accepted once again and have the power to show that they are worth while. If my right hon. and learned Friend can do that, I believe that his tenure of office will be historic.8.6 p.m.
I have a great deal of sympathy with practically everything said by the hon. Member for Wavertree (Mr. Tilney). I am pleased that he raised the question of after-care because our after-care system at present is entirely obsolete and is based on the local prison in its operation. Fortunately, there is a committee sitting consisting of the Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society, the After-care Association and the Prison Commissioners, which is investigating this and will, I hope, produce a drastic recommendation in its report.
I must take up the question of discipline with my hon. Friend the Member for Ladywood (Mr. Yates). There is not a scrap of evidence of any deterioration in the discipline of our present system. The only method I know of estimating this is by taking the number of offences brought before the governors. They are lower than they were during the war and no higher than before the war. They run at about one per 1,000 per day of the average daily population, which is a very small number. My hon. Friend said that deterioration in discipline was due to its rigidity. Yet the discipline in our prisons is nothing like as rigid as it was in 1930, and when one realises that a considerable percentage of our prison officers are newly trained and inexperienced men, it redounds greatly to the credit of our prison service, from the governor down to the latest recruit, that they are able to achieve prison discipline in overcrowded conditions. I want to draw the attention of the Home Secretary to the fact that in Scotland they maintain just as good a prison discipline as we do, in spite of the fact that the average punishment imposed for a prison offence by a Scottish prison governor is about one quarter of the weight of the average punishment imposed by an English governor. There is no excuse for that difference. Governors never seem to consult each other as to policy on punishments. A comparison of the punishments of one governor with another in England shows that there is an extraordinary discrepancy in the average weight of the punishment. There is not the slightest evidence to show that the heavy punishments produce better results or better discipline. Let me give the right hon. and learned Gentleman an example. I do not mind quoting the prison—Manchester Prison, which is one of the most congested in England. It has had two very good governors following each other. One was a heavy punisher and the second was a light punisher. The governors changed over on a certain day. The weight of punishment for prison offences dropped instantaneously, and it did not make a single ripple in the percentage or numbers of prison offences, which shows that discipline can be maintained without the rather heavy punishments in which some of our prison governors quite unnecessarily indulge.The question of ill-discipline was not a matter within the terms of reference of the Select Committee on Estimates. It was because of the many instances given in the Report of officers who had great difficulty in controlling the prisoners that we considered it necessary that there should be an inquiry throughout the prison service; but we were not competent to deal with that. Many examples are given, especially in the evidence regarding Wandsworth, of the difficulty which the officers have in keeping discipline.
I am well aware of that, and particularly in Wandsworth, which is one of the most difficult prisons in the country. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating: that is, that the numbers of offences reported to the governors are no higher than in 1930, 1935 and 1936. That is evidence that discipline is being maintained.
There are two specific problems with which I want to deal: one is overcrowding, and the other is prison labour. I want to make what, I think, are practical proposals. I thought that the hon. Member for Wavertree was going to steal my thunder, but I am not quite sure that he did. The latest figures which I have are that the number of prisoners sleeping three in a cell is 5.680. A maximum security prison costs £3,000 per cell, or very nearly that figure, to build, and it takes four years to build. We cannot look to maximum security prisons to cure overcrowding—that is quite obvious. Five thousand prisoners housed in maximum security prisons means an expenditure of £15 million, and Parliament will not grant that under present circumstances. If we are to cure overcrowding—it is certainly the biggest bugbear in our prison system today— there is only one way to look, and that is to the prison camp. Hitherto, prison camps have been provided with the idea of making a more reformative régime for the prisoners who are sent there. Prisoners have been carefully selected—selected for reliability, the fact that they were possibly first offenders, selected primarily for the effect of the open prison upon themselves and also with regard to security. We have to look to prison camps for an entirely different purpose, and that is to find a home for as many as we can of the 5,000 prisoners who are sleeping three in a cell. That is an entirely different aim. There are quite a number of categories of prisoners that could be sent to camps without any danger whatever. I do not suggest that they need be open camps. I do not know whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman knows Manchester Prison——indicated assent.
—but possibly he has seen the unclimbable wire fence which has been put round part of the croft. That makes a very formidable barrier to escape. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman requires a greater security camp, that unclimbable wire fence is ideal for the purpose. If he wants double security, all that he has to do is to put in two concentric rings and electrical alarms, and he has a maximum security prison.
Just look at the categories that could be taken out of our maximum security prisons, categories which for the most part are cluttering them up, and be put into camps, possibly open, but certainly camps enclosed in the unclimbable fence. Take the old dodderers. One cannot go into a single local prison, with the exception of Eastchurch, which I cannot understand being classed as a local prison, without finding an old dodderer walking round the prison grounds, with no one looking after him, supposed to be doing a job. He may be doing a bit of gardening or brushing up, but he has probably been in that prison 30 times before, and he is occupying a maximum security cell. Why cannot all men over 60—possibly over 55, but certainly over 60—be taken out of the prisons and put into camps, made as secure as the Home Secretary wishes with the unclimbable fence? The hon. Member for Wavertree mentioned the next category, civil prisoners, who, for the most part, are in prison for a month or two months. What is the use of putting a civil prisoner in a maximum security prison? It is sheer waste of a cell, which is equal to £3,000 capital. What about the women? No woman will climb that Manchester fence. The Prison Commissioners have already put up their hands with regard to Holloway for women and have announced that they will get the women out of there as soon as possible. They will not be able to get the women from Holloway, as they had hoped before the war, into one of the cottage prisons, but they could put them into a temporary prison with hutments, and there is no reason why the women should not go there. This would give a completely additional maximum security prison in the heart of London. I have suggested three categories who are perfectly safe in prison camps, and I am going to suggest a fourth category, which may be more debatable. I would take out of our maximum security prisons all the petty habituals and put them into camps, possibly open, and possibly what one might term the medium security camp. I know that among this type, particularly the younger ones of 30 and 40 years of age, there are escapes, but does it really matter? Do hon. Members realise that every year 30,000 criminals, some of them dangerous ones, escape from our prisons? [Interruption.] Yes, 30,000, because their sentences end. At any rate, they get out of prison and nobody has a word to say about it. If my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. Turner-Samuels) had been in prison, he would regard it as an escape. Anyhow, 30,000 prisoners, including some of the most dangerous men in England, come out year by year from our prisons and nobody says a word, but if half a dozen people escape one would think that the sky was going to drop. There is no reason why one should not take a good deal more risk with certain types of prisoner than the Commissioners have even dared do before. We take that risk with Borstal, and Borstal youngsters are far more irresponsible and prone to absconding than a prisoner of 30 years of age. Nobody cares about absconding; it is not a serious matter. What is serious is when a Borstal youngster on the run breaks and enters, but otherwise absconding is a trivial matter. These youngsters bolt home, are picked up the next day, and are brought back. It is the breaking and entering which is serious. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is worried and that is one of his problems, but it is not a problem which affects the Scottish prison authorities. In Scotland they have any amount absconding but no breaking and entering. In Scotland, about 90 per cent. of the Borstal training is at Polmont and the trainees come from Glasgow and Edinburgh which are so near to Polmont that when they abscond they do not break and enter. When a lad makes a bolt he goes straight home—it is simple to get there. Next day he is picked up and brought in and everyone is happy. We have 30 local prisons in England scattered throughout the country. Prison camps have to be based on local prisons which have administrative machinery, and they have to be reasonably close together. We have local prisons throughout the whole of England and it is not a question of finding work for the prisoners because that is the same whether they are inside or outside the prison. The problem is to get them out of maximum security prisons into camps. There is a population of more than 2,000 in the three maximum security prisons of Manchester, Preston and Liverpool, which are local prisons. The bulk of the population of those prisons comes from the Lancashire area. If we had several prison camps based on those three prisons and close together, we should have no breaking and entering by those escaping as the men would go straight home. I am not talking of the man with a 10-year sentence, but the average escape is due either to an irresponsible impulse or, frequently, to the fact that the man has had bad news from home and must go to see what has happened. In one prison the staff coming on duty early in the morning were rather astonished to find one of the best behaved prisoners waiting outside the gates to be let in. A friend coming in had told him that his wife was living with another man. He broke out, rebuked them, and came back to finish his sentence. A bolt from prison may very frequently be due to disturbance at home and if a man is near to his home he bolts there and is picked up again. We really need not treat escapes as very serious. I would point out to the right hon. and learned Gentleman that there are in prison at present something like 2,000 prisoners who are serving sentences of six months and less. That means four months and less when we take remission into account. No one will bolt from a four months' sentence when he can be hauled up for breaking prison and get another 12 months. We must expand the classes of prisoners which we send to prison camps. That is the only possible solution open to us at present for dealing with this fantastic overcrowding, which seems to be growing steadily and to which there seems no end. I turn to the question of work. I am not thinking so much of work inside the prisons as work outside. It is very extraordinary that we have confined to local prisons something like 15,000 prisoners working four hours a day and many of them who could be trusted outside are debarred from doing useful national work simply by Treasury obstruction. This is a rather complicated matter. I will not say that this is dead accurate, but it is a clear enough picture. Prisoners can work for Government Departments and the Prison Commissioners are not compelled to charge the full rate for the job. They can provide labour without pay to some extent. The Forestry Commission employed quite a number of prisoners on afforestation, but, because of the Forestry Commission having had a ceiling put on the number of their staff, they have had to cut down the number of prisoners who may be engaged in forestry. That is by instruction of the Treasury. In other words, the Treasury are insisting that prisoners shall work inside, sewing mailbags for four hours a day, instead of doing useful constructive work in afforestation. [An HON. MEMBER: "Shame."] It is not only a shame, it is insane. The average prisoner sews rather less than one mailbag per day and the treadle machines which would cut down the labour to one-seventh are standing idle because the Prison Commissioners dare not run out of mailbags. It costs £217 a year to keep the prisoner. That is £4 a week and it costs £1 to sew a mailbag, apart from the cost of the canvas. Yet the Treasury, by their ridiculous obstruction, are quite willing to pay £1 for sewing a mailbag and are not prepared to allow prisoners to go outside and do useful national work. A little while ago Manchester Prison evolved a scheme whereby they could use prison labour for clearing up the pitheaps around Lancashire; a job which is well worth doing. The National Coal Board said that they quite agreed, but in present circumstances they could not possibly pay for it. The Treasury said, "No, it cannot be done, unless they pay." The result is that there are men in Manchester sitting on their backsides all day, and pit-heaps remain a public disgrace. Had those heaps been owned by a Government Department they could have been cleared by prison labour, and because they are merely national property that cannot be done. May I give another example? The development of an arterial road is held up because the Treasury will not grant the money. At one end of it is a prison. The road will carry a 100 per cent. grant. The Treasury will pay every penny. But, because the completed road will belong to a county council and not a Government Department, prison labour cannot be employed on it. The Prison Commissioners could put 100 men at work on that road tomorrow, but the Treasury would rather keep them sewing mailbags, at £l a bag. I think it is time the right hon. and learned Gentleman got tough with the Treasury. He is a tough lad, we can all see that. This silly obstructionism must be dealt with. It is costing the country money, and it is interfering greatly with the task of the right hon. and learned Gentleman. We do not know much about what causes crime, but we know practically nothing at all about why criminals stop their criminal activities. I have a feeling that if men become used to steady work that is half the battle. Employers of prison labour praise the magnificent work which the prisoners do. If they work outside the prison and put their backs into it, then we are getting many of them accustomed to honest work for the first time in their lives. I said I had a crow to pick with the right hon. and learned Gentleman about Manchester Prison. With the exception of Leeds, it is the most congested prison in England. But there are seven acres of land just outside the prison wall in the possession of the Prison Commissioners which are awaiting levelling. Some of it has been levelled and fenced off with an unclimbable fence, and a weaving shed has been built on it. But there must be at least five acres still waiting to be levelled. Why has it not been levelled by prison labour? Why is not that land being used for recreation in the summer? I recommend the right hon. and learned Gentleman to observe what happens at Barlinnie, a prison of practically equivalent size. It is the local prison for Glasgow. It takes all the Glasgow prisoners serving sentences up to three years. In other words, it takes the bulk of the young Glasgow razor slashers and gang fighters. Man for man, I think it would be difficult to find a nastier prison population than at Barlinnie. But every prisoner in Barlinnie, after he has been in prison for six weeks, goes on what is known as recreation privilege. They have 25 acres of completely unfenced land outside the prison. Housing estates are gradually creeping up round this land. Perhaps I am wrong when I say it is completely unfenced. There are the dilapidated remains of a threebarred farm fence. Four nights a week in the summer, 200 men play football on that land. They are in the charge of six prison officers. They are not selected prisoners, but 200 different prisoners each night. The whole prison population, which, as I say, is as nasty as any prison population in this country, goes out playing football or watching football or playing other games four nights a week in the summer. In the last two years there have been two prison breaks and in both prisoners were brought back within a few days. What preserves discipline is the knowledge that if a man escapes he endangers the privilege of playing football outside. When such a man is picked up he becomes public enemy No. 1. The force which keeps discipline in the compound at Parkhurst is equally operative in the unfenced playing fields outside Barlinnie. It could operate at Manchester croft just as easily. I apologise for having spoken for so long. I had not intended to take up so much time. I have tried to put before the right hon. and learned Gentleman a few practical proposals for meeting the serious problem caused by overcrowding. I beg him to get tough with the Treasury.8.35 p.m.
Everyone who heard them will agree that we have listened to three most thoughtful and interesting speeches. A number of problems have been raised. Also, a number of practical suggestions have been put forward, and I am grateful for them. I hope that it will be convenient if I take the five points discussed by the hon. Member for Ladywood (Mr. Yates) and state the position as I see it. That will enable those who speak after me to know what steps have been taken and say what improvements they can suggest.
I hope that the House will bear with me if I indicate the position in which the prison service has been for the last few years and the steps which have been taken. Everyone who has considered the matter will agree that the prison service since the war has been faced with all the problems adumbrated by the hon. Gentleman. The immediate pre-war population was 11,000. By the end of the war it was 14,000, and in 1949—and I take that year because it was the one in which the Criminal Justice Act came into force—it was approaching 20,000. The difficulties have rightly been emphasised, but it is only fair that the House should have in mind what has been done. By the end of 1949 the Prison Commissioners had regained possession of and repaired and put into use six additional prisons with cells. They had also established four additional prisons and six additional Borstals of the open type in camps or large country houses. Of course, there was still a serious problem; but that had been done by 1949. When we consider the question of staff, we must remember that there had been a cessation of recruiting during the six years of war. That cessation had occurred when this increase in the population was beginning. In 1946, the problem with which the Commissioners were faced was that to bring the staff to prewar standard they had to recruit 1,700 men and 170 women. The magnitude of that task must be apparent if one bears in mind that the pre-war figure was 120 men and a handful of women. I will come back to what has been done. I do not think that the House will feel that it is by any means negligible. Let us take the question of work, which has been rightly insisted upon. During the war, there was no difficulty, because the war-time contracts were there and they supplied the necessity for the work. After the war, there had to be a falling off in war-time contracts and that raised difficulties. In that situation—and I do not think that anyone who knows it will say that I have over-painted the picture, because I have tried to give a completely objective picture of the situation that occurred—the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) will understand exactly what is in my mind when I say that it would not have been easy to carry out the four great tasks of his Act in this field. That Act meant, first, revising the whole of the statutory rules, the prison cell cards and other documents based upon them and making changes in the system—the abolition of penal servitude and the initiating of the new systems of corrective training and preventive detention for persistent offenders. It also required the initiating of remand centres and detention centres. That is a formidable task, but all these things, except remand centres—and, of course, we have only begun the detention centres—have been done, and that must be counted for righteousness against what it is said should still be done. I do not think it right that those outside this House who do not possess an exact knowledge should view the remaining problems without some realisation of what has been done already. I want to make it clear that the new rules of 1949 provided the legal framework of a modern penal system. The whole service was recast to its present basis of local prisons, regional training prisons and central prisons, and both corrective training and preventive detention were there ready for the new sentences to be imposed under the Act of 1948 when it was brought into force in 1949. I admit, and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields will also admit, the difficulty in regard to remand centres under the capital investment programme, but we have made a beginning with detention centres, and I hope that another will follow Kidlington soon. That was the position in 1949, and, of course, the number of prisoners did not stand still. By the end of 1949, it was approaching 23,000, and, since May, 1952, it has been just under 24,000. Since 1949 there have been opened five additional open prisons and two additional open Borstal institutions, making a total addition since the war of seven prisons with cells, nine open prisons and eight Borstal institutions. That is the position, I shall come back in a moment to the question of camps, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. I should like to point out to the hon. Member for Ladywood, who talked about —I do not complain about it—the purpose of the prison system and who referred to the well-known passage in the publication which he mentioned, that the policy of training prisoners under the rules of 1949 is based on the assumption that all long-sentence prisoners, and all others who by their length of sentence, character or history seem likely to profit by constructive training, and in particular those coming in for the first time, will be removed from their local prisons to serve their sentences in prisons with facilities and régimes appropriate to their category. That is the basis of the policy, and therefore it is important that these prisons should receive attention first. At the moment there are regional training prisons for those with sentences of not less than 12 months and not more than three years who are selected as suitable for that type of training, and central prisons for those with sentences of over three years. I should like to have gone into the classes of prisoners, but I do not want to occupy too much time because I know there are other hon. Gentlemen anxious to speak. Therefore, I will not go into the details of the star class and the ordinary prisoners, but I should like to point out, because this is a point that was mentioned by the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benson), that civil prisoners and prisoners of the star class who are not eligible for either regional or central prisons are removed to special local prisons reserved for those categories and which are, as far as possible, open prisons. The open prisons, of course, include camps. I think that what the hon. Gentleman had in mind was that civil prisoners, for example, should not occupy space in secure prisons.Preston and Northallerton, both maximum security prisons.
I will check the details, but I want to assure the hon. Gentleman that the principle is to move out civil prisoners to the open prisons so that they will not occupy the space in the secure prisons. I will naturally look into any point which the hon. Gentleman likes to put to me.
Again, I should have liked to say something about the allocation system for corrective training, but I do not think I ought to weary the House with that. However, I should like the House to have in mind that the corrective training prisons may be, as hon. Gentlemen know, separate prisons, such as those at Camp Hill, Chelmsford and Nottingham, or, at the moment, separate parts of local prisons at Durham, Liverpool and Wormwood Scrubbs. I can assure the House that the institution of the threeshift system in those wings at Durham and Liverpool is one of the matters with which we are getting on as quickly as we can. In the corrective training prisons themselves the three-shift system is already in operation. There is just one other point that I think the House ought to have in mind, and that is the population of the ordinary local prisons. It includes untried prisoners, prisoners of various categories who are awaiting removal, prisoners of the ordinary class who are serving sentences of not more than four years, and a higher proportion, as the hon. Gentleman said, of those serving short sentences. Then there is another group of prisoners who are serving the first stage of preventive detention before they go to Parkhurst. I hope that the House is not too weary with that account. It is important to know the problem and I have tried to set it out as objectively as possible. I agree about the extent of overcrowding, but I remind the House that since last May—this again is a crumb of comfort —the prison population has been stable. I ask hon. Members to believe me that I only take it as a very small crumb. A prison population of about 24,000 has not been known in this country for 70 years, and I am not going to prophesy or approach that figure on the basis that it is a peak. I must deal with it as an existing fact. The curious thing is that there has been practically no rise in the number of women prisoners and no significant increase in the number of Borstal inmates. This sensational increase is confined to male prisoners, and the overcrowding to which this gives rise is concentrated in the local prisons. There we have the 5,680 men prisoners—the hon. Member for Chesterfield is quite right—sleeping three in a cell, a state of affairs that nothing but necessity can excuse. That represents a deficiency in accommodation of 4,000 cells. That is a problem which has to be dealt with and, as has been said, it cannot be solved by new permanent building. We must take other steps. I should like to deal with two points which the hon. Member for Ladywood raised, because it is right that they should be in mind. So far, there have been no epidemics and there seems to have been no effect on health and hygiene at all. Secondly, there is no estimate that there has been any deterioration of discipline traceable to this situation. There has been great difficulty in supervision and I am not under-estimating that at all. But when I have said all that, I agree that the position represents the negation of progressive penal administration. There is not only the difficulty of supervision but the difficulty of constantly moving prisoners, and the situation is something with which we ought to try to deal. I have said that the restrictions on capital expenditure are only too apparent, but I want to say a word about the longterm programme which has been mentioned in this debate. That consists of two secure training prisons which will hold about 300 men, two secure boys' Borstal institutions for 150, two small Borstals which will hold about 75 girls, and a special psychiatric establishment for mentally abnormal prisoners. As to the last, we could spend a half-day discussing that alone. I want to say only one or two words about that, and I will not be tempted to go along the by-paths. I should like to give my own views because they may interest those who are concerned about this subject. When I was a young man the new Viennese psychology, with the emphasis on the subconscious, had just broken into this country after the First World War. I, like many of my generation, thought that this revolutionary approach might be of the utmost value in changing what the poet calls "the sorry hearts of men." The difficulty of using it in prisons is that in so many cases it requires the co-operation of the person with whom the psychiatrist is dealing. I say that not only because I do not want hon. Members to feel that we are not alive to the problem, but also because I want them to realise the difficulties that face us. I must hastily pass on lest I am tempted to stray into a subject which interests me very much. That is the long-term programme, and it is obviously one which will not deal with our present problem. We have a site for one of the prisons. As the House know, we have had some difficulty, on planning grounds, about a site for the psychiatric prison, but we shall go on searching. I want to come to what we must do at the moment. I think that forts and disused camps can make the most effective contribution towards solving the problem, and the Prison Commissioners have recently secured another prison of medium security in a fort at Dover, which will hold about 300 prisoners, and a camp at Grendon, Buckinghamshire, to hold about 125 prisoners. They have also found four other sites for camps, three of which will be in the North and the Midlands. I would ask for the co-operation of the House in the matter of these camps. Whenever we select a certain situation everyone says, "It is an absolutely grand idea so long as it is not in my constituency." We all understand the first reaction to the suggestion of the establishment of a prison in one's locality; but I appeal to hon. Members not to let it swell into opposition on an ill-informed basis. Let any objectors be represented, if they want to, at the local inquiry and, above all, let them know about the second wave of feeling which has so often taken place when a prison has been established and it has been found that it is not so bad after all. In many cases great help and co-operation have been given by people outside. I have also in mind the old prison in Lancaster Castle, which will accommodate 250 prisoners. That will be taken over as soon as some other accommodation can be found for its present occupants, the Royal Observer Corps. Plans are also on foot to purchase premises near Rochdale to serve as a small Borstal institution for about 120 boys. These are the measures on hand. They will not meet the deficiency of 4,000 cells, but I want to point out—because I should not be honest if I did not—that there are limits to the number of persons who can be placed in open conditions with due regard to the general public interest, and there is also a limit to the number of camps and buildings which are suitable for adaptation. We are getting near this limit. However, I promise that I shall look into all the points which have been referred to by the hon. Member for Chesterfield. All I ask in return is the co-operation of the House, when I find a site, in trying to keep public opinion moderate, reasonable and considerate. In view of the shortage of time, there will not be a Government spokesman for Scotland, but perhaps I might assume the responsibility of saying that there is not the accommodation problem there. The old prison for women in Duke Street, Glasgow, which is mentioned in the Report of the Select Committee, will be closed next year, and accommodation for the prisoners who would have been detained there will be found in other establishments. We cannot act quite as quickly as the hon. Member for Bridgeton (Mr. Carmichael) would like, but that is what is proposed.I understand that women have already been moved from Duke Street.
I am very glad to hear it. The information I had was that it was being done.
The subject of work was also raised. I appreciate the interest of all hon. Members in this subject, but I should like to point out one or two difficulties. A prison is primarily a prison and not a factory, and priority must be given to safe custody, discipline and enforcement of rules, among other factors not necessarily conducive to industrial efficiency. Another great difficulty is that the work must be split up among 60 establishments of varying sizes. There are roughly three kinds of work: there is the work of the prison and agricultural work which goes with it; there is the manufacture of goods for Government Departments and public bodies and the provision of labour for services required by Government Departments and public bodies; and there is the manufacture of goods for the private market and the provision of labour for the services required by private bodies or persons. Hon. Gentlemen will realise that it is only in the case of work in the first class which is within the control of the Prison Commissioners that other difficulties do not arise. As soon as prison labour is used for manufacturing for other than internal consumption, it is liable to meet the traditional prejudice on the part of outside industrial interests, whether employers or trade unions, against such use of prison labour. One has to recognise that the private sector is not a great deal of help in this field. We must face that. It is only by great tact that we have avoided any trouble; it is not a subject on which one wants to make trouble. I am speaking without party feeling of any kind.In view of the very great shortage of skilled and heavy industrial workers, have any consultations about this taken place between the Home Office and the Trades Union Congress?
Have there been any consultations with the nationalised industries about this? When we nationalised certain industries some of us hoped that we should find a source of labour here. Are there not standardised products which could be machine made in prison?
In reply to the first point, the problem has been constantly before us and there have been discussions but, speaking from the prison side, we have always been very careful not to cause trouble as a result of the progress that we have made. I feel sure that those who have dealt with this matter over the years long before I had anything to do with it would say that the problem has been constantly watched, and it is also fair to say that the Prison Commissioners have gone as far as they could without doing more harm than could be tolerated. I do not think that I can go further.
On the second point, there is the difficulty, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Chesterfield that nationalised industries have been treated as outside trading bodies and not as Government Departments, and that has been a difficulty which has existed up to now.Could not that now be avoided in the case of industries that are nationalised and really part of the Government?
I will have another look into that question. I do not think that if the matter had been as easy as it appears in debate nothing would have been done about it up to now.
There is one other point which I should like hon. Members to have in mind. That is the high proportion of short-sentence prisoners. It is difficult to put them on to work that goes on continuously. But generally, at the moment, I am glad to say that there is little deficiency of work of the better class for prisoners in central, regional and corrective training prisons and for prisoners serving long terms, and technical training is very fully provided for these special types. There is a general difficulty as to the tendering which the Report mentioned, but I do not want to go into it at length. With reference to the Treasury circular which the hon. Gentleman had in mind, I want him to know that we are constantly considering that point. But when we try to find an alternative for the tendering procedure it is certainly beyond my imaginative and mental powers at the moment, and has obviously been beyond that of my predecessors, or they would have changed it. I am very glad to have any suggestions, and I promise the hon. Gentleman that it is a point we shall remember. I am sorry that I am taking so long because I had a lot to say about that aspect of the work, but may I leave it for the moment with that assurance? I want to say a word about staff because on the staff depends the threeshift system which, I think, is of tremendous importance. I am sure that everyone here knows that that system enables the prisoners to have a working week of 35 to 40 hours and also helps from the educational aspect. At present, the threeshift system is in operation in all Borstal institutions, in all regional training prisons and in all prisons devoted exclusively to corrective training. It will be in operation at the prison for young prisoners at Lewes before or shortly after the end of the year and at about the same time, as I have said, in the corrective training wings at Liverpool and Durham. I would remind the House of what I said about what had to be done to meet the shortage of staff. I am glad to say that in the six years after the war the number of staff increased by 1,684, temporarily, including 84 temporary officers, which more or less covers the 1,700 I said we needed In addition to the requirements of the three-shift system there are also the recruits to be found for the additional officers I have mentioned, and we are doing our utmost to find them. But again there is one factor which causes difficulty, and that is that the quarters to house the staff cannot be built as fast as we wish. Another factor is that recruitment to the staff varies in different parts of the country. For immediate needs it will be necessary to have about 340 more prison officers by the end of the next financial year than were in post on 1st January of this year, and of these we hope to have 150 more by the end of June. I would point out that during the six years 1947–52 the average net gain in established officers of the basic grade was 267 a year, and in addition there are these 84 temporary officers. While I take the point made about the limitation on recruitment at the beginning of 1952—I am not going into the financial difficulties at the time—I would observe that it was removed in June, 1952; since then advertising has proceeded in the national and local Press, there has been a steady flow of applications, and I am told that the Commissioners feel that they will be able to recruit the additional staff needed for the 1953–54 programme. I assure the House that they will not hesitate to take additional measures to stimulate recruitment.Do I understand that no limit whatsoever will be placed upon the Prison Commissioners in recruiting all the staff they can obtain?
Not for all the measures that I have stated. I think I have covered all the immediate needs. I never like giving an absolute blank cheque without having checked the matter. For all the measures I have referred to as aimed at in dealing with these problems, the staff will be recruited.
I felt, as I think did the hon. Member for Chesterfield, that the hon. Member for Ladywood did not give quite a fair picture on the question of discipline. With respect, I think that that part of the Report does not give a true picture of the situation. I hate arguing on statistics, but it is a striking fact that the figure given by the hon. Member for Chesterfield was that for local prisons; that is where the overcrowding is so serious. With an average daily population of 13,273 there are only 13.2 punishments, or one in 1,000—one-tenth of 1 per cent. The figures in the establishments are either comparable or better. I think that young prisoners' centres provide the only instance in which the figures are a little worse, but we are still dealing with an instance only one thousandth worse. In all the others they are better. Well, that is a remarkable record. The number of assaults, whether against warders or against fellow prisoners, is very small. In the last few years the number of cases of corporal punishment have been as follows: 1948, 14; 1949, 9; 1950, 6; 1951, 3; 1952, 1. That does not look like a decreasing discipline. Since the war there has been no award of corporal punishment for an offence of mutiny, although there was a case of inciting mutiny. I think that, too, is a remarkable record. I listened very carefully to the hon. Member for Ladywood, as did we all, and what it comes to is Parkhurst. This criticism depends upon Parkhurst. I ask the House to look at the position of Parkhurst, where there are 630 prisoners —men with the worst records in the country—serving preventive detention. That is a special régime which has been in operation for the last three and a half years. It calls for different conditions and different associations from those of a sentence of imprisonment. It took the place of the old 1908 system. There were men under the old system but they have been removed. Those are the circumstances—the introduction of a new system, with 630 of the most desperate criminals we have in the country. Speaking with the greatest restraint I can use, I think too much has been made of the arson incident and some razor slashing which took place in the earlier part of last year. Since then the situation has settled down. It may well be that there will be headlines tomorrow, because whatever happens in Parkhurst—I do not say if somebody blows his nose, but anything further than that—always attracts headlines. If we consider that and consider how the position has settled down in the last few months, I suggest that it is not a sufficient basis for a charge of indiscipline in the service. I am sorry to have taken up so much time but I wanted to cover all the points which the hon. Member for Ladywood made. Had I had more time, I should have covered them more fully, but the hon. Member will appreciate that that is impossible in a debate of this length. I do not want anyone to think that, because I have tried to put prisons and the prison service into what I consider to be a fair perspective, the Prison Commissioners or anyone connected with the service are satisfied with the conditions which exist. Of course we want to improve them. As I have said so often, we want to try to get the proper balance between the deterrent and the reformative elements in our prisons. That we shall try to do. Despite the difficulties which still exist, I think the prison service has done a good job and deserves the thanks of this House. I can assure the House that the Prison Commissioners, those in the service—indeed, everyone concerned —will do their utmost to make the improvement which we all desire. Ultimately we shall look to the new, permanent prisons but, in the meantime, we shall strain every nerve to relieve the congestion and at the same time to make the change have the effect of fighting the crime wave and also of giving the people who are put in prison the chance of a better life after their release. That is all we can say, but what we say, we shall do.9.20 p.m.
I am quite sure that the House will be grateful to the Home Secretary for the careful way in which he has gone over all the questions that have been posed to him tonight. The House as a whole will be grateful, but I must be especially grateful because at least two-thirds of his speech were taken up in defending my régime rather than his own. It is the first time I have ever been defended by one of Her Majesty's counsel learned in the law. I do not say that it is a process to which I look forward in the future, but should the right hon. and learned Gentleman, by the time I get into trouble, be relieved of his present office I will see that my solicitor is instructed to retain him.
Prior to the speech of the right hon. and learned Gentleman we had three most interesting speeches. My hon.. Friend the Member for Ladywood (Mr. Yates) spoke with the great knowledge he has acquired owing to his service as Chairman of the Estimates Sub-Committee which inquired into the expenses of the prisons. The hon. Member for Wavertree (Mr. Tilney) dealt in a way that was most constructive and enlightened with the problem as he saw it. The third was from my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benson), who, for many years has taken a great interest in this matter, has served on numerous committees connected with the prison service at the Home Office and has made many valuable, constructive suggestions, which have been embodied in the improvements that have taken place from time to time. The five problems posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Ladywood made a good foundation for this debate and I do not complain of anything he said except that I felt the Estimates Sub-Committee had been too severe on the present system with regard to the question of indiscipline. The figures given by the Home Secretary at the end of his speech on the practical elimination of flogging for assaults on officers show that the internal arrangements in the prisons have been considerably modified and humanised during the past few years. I am not over-impressed on these matters by the evidence occasionally given by some prison officers. I want to be quite frank on that point and I want to ask the right hon. and learned Gentleman, when dealing with the problem of recruitment, to bear in mind that quality in the men he can recruit is even more important than quantity. Any great reform and humanisation of the prison service must depend upon having prison officers who can use the wider opportunities that we hope will be available to them. There has been recruited into the Borstal service a number of young men of good education and wide social outlook who have gone into that service feeling that it is a vocation. I believe they have steadily improved the service, and as their influence grows they will improve it even more. If we are to get the best out of the reformative part of the 1948 Act, we shall require the same sense of vocation among prison officers. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield said that no one worried if a Borstal boy escaped. Let me assure him that Home Secretaries have to worry. The rightful indignation that the chairman of an urban council whose urban district is situated near the Borstal institution can bring to bear in an interview when he comes up to deal with the latest two or three escapes is astonishing. I hope it will not be thought that absconding can ever be regarded as something that is trivial. It puts the inhabitants of the district near the penal institution, be it prison or Borstal, into a state of serious nervous tension. That is one reason why the prisoners who go to open prisons must always be very carefully selected, so that there shall be no justifiable ground for a belief that dangerously violent people are likely to be at large in neighbourhoods where they can on occasion inflict great damage to property and less frequently, but still on occasion very devastatingly, can inflict injury on persons. I do not intend to detain the House very long, because the right hon. and learned Gentleman said a great deal that it might have been necessary for me to say about what happened between 1945 and 1951; I am quite content to take his judgment on it. On that he can be judge as well as advocate. I should, however, like to say something about the question of work, because nearly every prisoner is in prison because of the misuse of his leisure. After all, there are not many people who are now in prison because of their poverty. Anyone who sits at quarter sessions knows that instead of saying, "This man in front of you is here because he had a starving wife and six children," junior counsel now, taking a dock brief and doing the best he can for his clients, says, "He earned such high wages that they went to his head and he lost all sense of proportion." The misuse of leisure is the reason why nearly every prisoner is in prison; young men who could be in good work, and very often are, spending their evenings in petty burglaries in suburban areas. Any hon. and learned Member who is a recorder will know that such is not an infrequent type of prisoner to be in front of them; and when we get them in prison, we provide them with more tedious leisure than they even had when they were outside. That is the problem which confronts us, and I regret very much that it has not proved possible to provide useful work, hard physical work for most of this particular type, from which they can get a sense of achievement, where they can see something being done, where their muscles will be kept in good trim, and where they feel that when they go out, no matter what hard work they have done before, they will not be coming back to the place for a rest cure. [Laughter.] That is not as humorous as it may sound. It represents, to my mind, the real philosophy that we have to apply to this problem. I mentioned the other day, and venture to repeat tonight, that over vast tracts of the country we have appalling slag heaps. They are black in the North of England; in Cornwall they are white—the china clay slag heaps. Whether they are black or white they are eyesores that destroy the drainage of the country and immobilise a lot of land that ought to be used for agriculture, for recreation grounds and similar purposes. That is the kind of work that I think this type of prisoner could very well be put on. There are so many hundreds of thousands, or millions, of cubic yards of materials that cannot be conjured away. Every cubic yard has to be transported in some way or other to the site where one proposes to dispose of it, by levelling or in any other way. I would hope that it might be possible, in that kind of occupation and in similar ways, to provide a full-time working week for the type of young prisoner who needs that kind of discipline. I am very glad to know that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has been able to open one of these centres where quite young men are to get what the hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. F. P. Crowder) described the other day as something approaching a "glasshouse" form of punishment. Strict discipline, hard, continuous work, will, I am quite sure, be beneficial to them. I was disappointed, during my term of office, by the withdrawal of a great deal of interesting work from women prisoners. During the war they have been used for the assembly of radio sets and that kind of operation where a woman's deft fingers can deal with constructive work for which the type of young man of whom I have been speaking is quite unsuited. It is greatly to be desired, as far as women prisoners are concerned, that there should be an effort to give them some interesting, useful, work from which they can get some feeling of satisfaction when the job is done. I think we have to bear in mind that both men and women alike will expect to see some reasonably quick achievement from the efforts they put forward. The particular type of mind with which I have been dealing cannot wait a long time to see the achievement that results from its efforts. If for both men and women something on these lines could be done I am sure that it would be greatly to everyone's advantage. My hon. Friend the Member for Ladywood mentioned the comparative cost of Wakefield and Wandsworth—£8 a week in Wakefield, £4 a week in Wandsworth. If, from my experience, I may be allowed to tender advice to the House I would say they must not expect to get good results from the prison service on the cheap. I managed to get a girls' Borstal started in an old mansion in Kent. While the numbers were low the results were surprisingly good but if the Estimates Committee, or the Public Accounts Committee, had examined the accounts in those years I have no doubt that a scarifying report about expenditure would have been presented to the House. We must realise this is really an extension of the problem confronting us in the education service. Good results especially from younger people in this branch of the service will come from an intensive study of the character and inclinations of the individual youth or maiden with whom we are concerned. That means, comparatively high costs for staffing. I deplore the recent circular from the Ministry of Education to all local education authorities saying that the amount of money to be spent on the education services in prisons is to be restricted to the amount which had previously been spent. I suppose that in these days one should rejoice that no cut was announced. I am certain that in short-term and longterm prisons one of the most humanising pieces of work done in recent years has been the co-operation of the local education authority in providing educational classes in the evenings for people willing to participate in them. It has the advantage of bringing people outside into the prisons; in bringing in a fresh face and a fresh voice and a fresh influence. All these help to keep the prisoners in touch with the world outside. It may at the best stir up in the prisoner some interest in wider things than those in which he has previously been interested and provide him with soul-helping rather than soul-destroying ways of planning his leisure when he comes out of prison. I do not share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield that 30,000 people escape from the prison system every year. Unfortunately, a proportion, which may not be very high but is still too high, feel, when they come out, that it will not be very long before they return. Wherever possible we must try to create in the minds of men and women the determination that when they come out they are not going back.9.34 p.m.
My excuse for intervening in this debate is that for over 30 years I have lived and worked in the dock area of London and in that time many thousands of youths and men have come under my concern. Most of them were perfectly normal ordinary citizens but during that time I have known a substantial number, either before they were in trouble or during their period of trouble or, to use their own wry humour, after they are "demobbed."
I should like to offer some observations on two points of prison policy. I have rarely listened to a debate when I have found myself more in agreement with almost everything said on both sides of the House. I want, however, to say a few words on the problem of deterrents, especially as applied to penal institutions. It is very often supposed that we know a lot more than we do about it, and a good deal of rather dangerous use has been made of figures in this matter. We had an example of it in a recent debate on a Friday. At this late stage I do not propose to give a lot of figures, but I will put this point to the House. It would be easy on the sort of argument to which we listened for hours the other day to show that prison and the modern longer sentences in prison were to be condemned on the ground that they have completely failed as deterrents. Year by year, since before the war, the number of persons sent to prison has gone up. Year by year they have served longer sentences. That is the reason for the overcrowding we all deplore. Year by year the number of convictions and the number of cases known to the police for the principal crimes, especially against property, have gone up. Therefore, as a deterrent, certainly along the line of statistical argument we heard the other day, the whole prison system, especially in its modern form of avoiding very short sentences, stands condemned. I will not go into details, but I could elaborate the point. I come to the second aspect of the matter. I was really horrified by some of the arguments we have heard recently, because they would carry people much further than they would wish to go. My mind goes back to the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933. I cannot imagine that anybody who knows anything about the work of the Children's Branch of the Home Office would wish to go back on that Act, but judged by the success of modern penal methods as deterrents, that Act stands hopelessly condemned. Before it was passed, for older young lads—and this is mainly a problem of boys and men—the actual number of indictable offences was falling. For younger ones up to the age of 14 it was rising, but it never reached 10,000 a year. Immediately after the Act was passed the figures jumped by several thousand. Never at any time in the last 20 years have we succeeded in bringing the figures for indictments against young persons down to the figure at which it stood before the Act. It is now something like double. The point I am putting to the House is that it is most unwise to attempt to judge our penal methods on their success or failure as deterrents either to those who are actually concerned or to the public generally. Of course, we cannot take the matter to extremes, but I submit that on those sort of grounds to use or to attempt to use penal methods as deterrents is unlikely to succeed and may seriously hinder the proper purpose of our prisons and certainly of our Borstals, approved schools, and so on. If time had permitted I should have liked to make some observations on the great increase in offences against property, but I cannot do so. I will finish what I have to say on this subject, and I am sure that I shall carry the bulk of informed opinion with me, by stressing that the country cannot get security at home, any more than abroad, on the cheap. There is no alternative to increasing the chance of being caught, and that means more effective police action and more police. The sooner we get back to the aspect of deterrence in our prison policy the better. Part of it is, in my submission—and I am sure that this is how the ordinary young fellow looks at it— as a plain punishment by society. The rest of it must always have as its main object the reform of prisoners. To that second point I should now like to offer one or two observations. Once a man or boy is inside, any fool can make him feel sorry, but our trouble is in making him feel sorry that he was wrong, and that is not quite as easy as is sometimes supposed. The appalling selfishness of the potential criminal and the actual young criminal has to be seen to be believed. Many of us must remember the case, by no means an extreme case, of the Lord Chief Justice and the young prisoner who was writing home his first letter after being sentenced for a most savage attack on a girl, who was still unconscious and who was even then at death's door and probably never fully recovered, and in which he described his life in prison as being not so bad, without writing a single word of remorse or regret. I want to deal with this problem of prisons as reforming instruments in the real sense, and here I think I have one advantage over most hon. Members present, because I can draw on another part of my experience in that I am probably the only hon. Member present who has served many years of imprisonment. Admittedly, it was in conditions very different from those of a penal institution in England, and in which the time was enlivened by various forms of corporal punishment, but many of the psychological problems are the same. I would support everything that has been said by other speakers about the appalling problem of overcrowding and the long hours spent in cells. At this very moment, it is a terrible thing to me to realise that there is quite a number of people whom I know quite well who have already been locked up for five hours and who will remain locked up until tomorrow morning. My conscience is quite clear about any chosen and more drastic form of punishment, corporal or otherwise, inflicted after fair trial on some types of prisoners with whom we have to deal, but I confess that my conscience is very troubled —and I wish I could trouble still more the consciences of others—as to whether society has any right to imprison men in conditions where precisely, in so far as they have anything good left in them, they are first tormented, then numbed and, finally, in many cases, destroyed. Confinement in circumstances in which every nerve is jarred is a most terrible thing to inflict on anyone. I support what has been said, and I hope that it is felt strongly in the country that this is a moral issue before the country, and that all possibilities of anything that can be done will be explored quickly to limit this overcrowding, to give a chance of more work, and so on, by letting people out on licence or by any other methods. I want to take up another point on the use of prisons in their capacity for reform. It is mainly a matter of warning. I think a good deal is sometimes claimed for education in the ordinary sense which will lead us to disappointment in this matter. The statistics are very remarkable. If we take education in its most favourable form—at the youngest and most impressionable age—in full-time compulsory State education, the results are very startling. There is nothing new in this. It was reported by the Children's Branch of the Home Office in 1938, and I will only turn to the report of the Commissioner for the Metropolis in 1951. A very good case could be made for encouraging, or certainly not avoiding, the closing of schools, and for indicting the N.U.T. as a criminal conspiracy. Every year that a boy stays at school he becomes more liable to break the law. I have here the actual figures. They are laid out so beautifully that I can almost use them as visual aids. I think that is the proper term. In the Metropolitan Police district, and it is exactly the same all over the country, of the boys of the age of about nine 20 are arrested each year. After a year at school, the number goes up to nearly 200. In a couple of years more it has gone up to 400, and, finally, in the last year at school, it reaches the preposterous figure of 700. The moment a boy leaves school and gets out of the appalling influence of the educational system there is a striking fall in the number, and after two years away from school the figure has fallen to oneseventh of what it was. I do not see how anybody can doubt that these figures are a very serious challenge to our educational system when it comes to producing a sense of social responsibility. However. I am not developing that point. I am saying that the facts show—and I speak from a life-time of experience— that what turns the actual or potential young criminal into a decent lad is not the schoolmaster, but his first job. The reason I raise that now is that we have to take warning. I am not arguing against extra classes and the rest of it. Anything that can make it a little more civilised is all to the good. But the moral is that merely by having more classes and further revision of those conditions which failed when the boy was at school will not in themselves solve the problem. I suggest that just as in matters of health when, with all the advances of modern science, the doctor has ultimately to rely on the healing strength of nature, so, in this grave problem, which is a moral problem, all we can do in the prisons, Borstals and approved schools is to work for this curing power of grace. This is a religious and a moral matter. We are not really dealing here ultimately with statistics, with classes or with offences; we are dealing with souls. I could not agree more with the fine words that came from the former Home Secretary, that the crux of this matter is the quality of the men in the prison service. No improvement in mere machinery will by itself solve the problem that confronts us. Every single one of these cases is a human problem of how a human soul will react to a moral challenge in which he has hitherto failed. It is only if we treat it in that way and in that spirit that, I believe, we shall ultimately find what we all want, a system which will turn these people back from the evil road they have chosen to one on which they will not only earn a living, but will save their souls.9.55 p.m.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Oldham, East (Mr. Horobin) should have introduced into an otherwise most interesting and attractive speech a preposterous attempt to correlate crime with school attendance. I would suggest that he makes further inquiries into the question of the young people who committed offences and came before the court and find out how many of them have been in regular school attendance and how many were persistent truants. If he inquired into that he would find that there was rather more in this point than he has suggested to the House.
I have had the good fortune to be a member of the Estimates Sub-Committee of which my hon. Friend the Member for Ladywood (Mr. Yates) was chairman. In consequence, I prepared many remarks which I hoped to address to the House, all of which I have been rapidly striking out as the clock has gone round. But there are one or two points to which I should like to draw the attention of the Home Secretary. I believe and hope that our Sub-Committee produced a valuable Report. I am sure that the evidence which was presented to the Committee makes a very valuable record. Anyone who reads it will know that any suggestion, such as is sometimes made in irresponsible quarters, that prisoners today are molly-coddled or kept in luxury hotels in pure nonsense. I hope that it will go out from this debate that any attempt to preach that kind of doctrine is worse than useless to deal with crime. For prisoners in the best of prisons life is strict, arduous and hardworking, and in not the best of prisons life is gloomy, restrictive and arduous. The overwhelming majority of people who go to prison once do not go back there. Our problem is with those who go back more than once and whether they will turn into the kind of old dodderer described by my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benson). I have never seen anything more pathetic in my life than some of the elderly and middleaged men whom we on the Sub-Committee saw in our prisons, doing repetitive jobs of no use to themselves or anybody else and knowing that they will be doing it for the rest of their lives. That is one road along which a man who has gone to prison more than once will go. But the other road leads through a wellmanaged training institution back to a useful and honest life. The real problem is which of these two roads the prisoner will travel. That is determined very largely by whether there is sufficient useful work for men to do while in prison. To provide that work is not too easy. It involves problems of buildings, problems particularly of staffing, and problems of careful planning of orders for work. It is very common for the general public—and I confess that I was this way minded before I served on the Sub-Committee—when they hear of new prisons being built and new officers being recruited for service, to ask why we do not do more for people who do honest work and less for those who break the law. That is an attitude not only lacking in humanity but in common sense as well. I assure the Home Secretary that if he can persuade his colleagues in the Government to give a somewhat higher priority to the needs of prison building and prison staffs, among the many other pre-occupations of any Government today, he will be supported by anyone on this side of the House who has studied the problem and has realised that expenditure of that kind will repay the nation ten times over in the reclamation of men who might have become useless criminals and in turning them into honest citizens. There is a reference in our Report to the desirability of a special prison for the type of prisoner known as an aggressive psychopath. This was the only constructive recommendation in the section of our Report dealing with discipline, about which there has been so much criticism. I hope that a prison of that type which is to be built in 1954 will, in fact, be built, and that the Home Secretary, if he is still in office, will not allow anything to deter him from tackling that problem. Question put, and agreed to.Resolved,
That a sum, not exceeding £898,676,000 be granted to Her Majesty, on account, for or towards defraying the charges for the Civil and Revenue Departments and for the Ministry of Defence for the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1954.
Unemployment, Brighton
Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn."— [Mr. Kaberry.]
9.59 p.m.
I am pleased to have the opportunity of raising the question of unemployment in the County Borough of Brighton. I want to pay a very sincere tribute to the many persons who have helped me in giving me information for this debate. I should like to thank the Borough Surveyor of Brighton; the deputy town clerk; Mr. Till, President of the Brighton and Hove Hotels and Restaurants Association and, last but by no means least, Mr. Thorne, the manager of the Brighton Employment Exchange. He has shown great patience and has given me a great deal of assistance.
I want to make it perfectly clear that the views I am expressing are entirely my own and that I take full responsibility for them——It being Ten o'Clock, the Motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn."— [Mr. Kaberry.]
I was saying that I have had a great deal of assistance from a large number of bodies, but I comment adversely on the fact that I have had no information or assistance from the Brighton, Hove and District Trades Council. That is a matter of great regret to me, because it is that Council which has sought to make political capital out of this matter.
My objects in raising the matter tonight are twofold. First, I hope that we may get a true perspective of the issue of unemployment in Brighton, and secondly, I want to counteract a certain amount of Communist propaganda which has been disseminated in my own constituency of Kemptown in regard to unemployment. I very much regret that certain members of the Socialist Party in Brighton—who ought to and do know better—have allied themselves to this propaganda. I have always held that unemployment should transcend in importance the party political arena. The total of unemployment at the last available date I have—16th February of this year—was 3,929 persons, 2,633 being male and 1,296 female. To get some sort of picture, it is necessary to compare that total with the total on 16th February, 1951. The figure then was 3,539, so there has been an increase of 390 persons unemployed. I greatly regret the fact that there has been an increase of even 390 persons; I should like to have seen a decrease of 390. Nevertheless, this does not represent the terrible and serious problem which it is being made to represent by certain malicious and low-minded persons in Brighton. When one analyses these figures, one finds that of that total of 3,929 persons unemployed, over 1,300 are more than 50 years of age. I deeply appreciate the problem of unemployed persons who are over 50 years old; but I do not blink the fact that it is extraordinarily difficult to get employers to employ new labour in the persons of those who are of that age. I hope that the Minister, by means of propaganda, will be able, to make employers realise that very frequently persons of more mature years are better and more trusted employees than younger persons. If the Minister can do something in that direction, he will be helping to solve a very severe human problem. Of the 3,929 persons unemployed, 477 have been unemployed for over 12 months, and it must be fair to assume that some of them are probably, for various causes, almost unemployable. It may be that because some have bad characters, or for other good reasons, employers hesitate to accept them. Also, of the 3,929, 624 are registered as disabled. Here Brighton has a very serious and important problem which must be dealt with without further delay. Brighton has the highest number of registered disabled unemployed of any town in the South-Eastern region. At the request of the various Ministries, Brighton Corporation sterilised three-quarters of an acre of land at East Moulescoomb for the erection of a Remploy factory. I cannot imagine a town in the country that needs a Remploy factory without any further delay more than Brighton does. On 12th June last I asked the Minister when a Remploy factory would be built on the three-quarters of an acre designated by Brighton Corporation, and he replied that Brighton was high on the list but there were some difficulties about the Remploy organisation which made it difficult for the factory to be built at an early date. Those difficulties must be overcome. If it means starting a fresh organisation, it must be started. If it means a grant of new finance, the money must be found so that the 624 disabled persons can be employed in sheltered occupations in a Remploy factory without further delay. When we get down to the hard core of unemployment in Brighton, we find that the hotel and catering industry has 853 persons unemployed at present, building and civil engineering 706, the distributive trades 474 and manufacturing and engineering 347, making a total in those categories of 2,380. The building and civil engineering figures are interesting. Unemployed bricklayers number five, carpenters 31, painters 231—I am advised that by Easter there will be no unemployed painters whatsoever in the County Borough of Brighton and that, on the contrary, builders will be crying out for them and they will not be available— and building labourers 439. What are to be the remedies? A number have been suggested. First, the deployment of further industry in Brighton has been suggested. On this subject I have, I regret to say, a few grumbles on which I hope the Parliamentary Secretary will be able to assist me. They may not come strictly within his jurisdiction, but perhaps he can use some influence with his colleagues in other Ministries. By the early summer three new factories will have been built on the Hollingbury factory estate to employ 620 more persons. Having regard to what I have said, I hope that within a short time the three-quarters of an acre of land at East Moulescoomb will have had a Remploy factory built upon it. At East Moulescoomb there are two companies, New Wellbeck Ltd. and R. J. Adcock Ltd., who are anxious and willing to proceed with their new factory built for them on terms agreed by the Brighton Corporation, which will employ 150 persons. The only difficulty now is the frustration—I use this term advisedly—of the Ministry of Supply in giving them a building licence. I ask the Parliamentary Secretary to take up the matter of these two companies with the Minister of Supply in order to see whether something cannot be done to hasten on the building of the factory, which is going to be shared by these two companies. In connection with the third factory at Lower Bevendean, the Brighton Sheet Metal Works must move there as quickly as possible. They are in premises totally unsuitable for industrial purposes where, with the best will in the world, they are causing some nuisance and annoyance to persons living in the residential neighbourhood where the factory is at present situated. They were issued with an industrial development certificate by the Board of Trade on 30th December last. They are meeting obstacles and obstructions from the Ministry of Supply and were refused a building licence as recently as 11th February. So, again, I ask the Parliamentary Secretary to look into that case, because this is a factory which is doing valuable work in connection with supplying equipment to another company in Brighton which has a big export trade and is earning a great deal of dollars. The third factory site there is allocated to the Service Plating Company, Ltd., a company which has lost—and quite rightly, in my opinion—a town and country planning appeal because their work has caused great nuisance and annoyance to persons living in the neighbourhood of that factory. They want to go out to Lower Bevendean, and the corporation are anxious and willing to build them a factory there, but again we have the difficulty of the Minister of Supply. If the Parliamentary Secretary would deal with these three cases with the Ministry of Supply, he would be doing a great deal to solve the hard core of unemployment, so far as light industry in Brighton is concerned. In the few minutes which I have left— because I want to give the Parliamentary Secretary as much time to reply as possible—I should like to stress the fact, that the Government have, quite rightly, advocated that the Lower Bevendene factory estate shall only be used for the building of new factories from areas of Brighton which are not suitable for factories and which are to be kept residential, and do not wish to see new industries coming from other parts of Great Britain to Brighton. Therefore, I think it follows that the Minister and the Government regard Brighton—and rightly, in my opinion— as predominantly a holiday resort—I was going to say the predominant holiday resort of Great Britain. That being so, I say that it is absolutely essential—and I say this in the presence of my colleague the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Teeling)—that the Government should do a great deal to encourage the holiday industry in Brighton. As I said earlier, there are 853 persons at present unemployed in the hotel and catering industry. I suggest that there are a number of things that the Minister and his colleagues could do to help the holiday industry in Brighton. First, there could be some intelligent amendments made to the Catering Wages Regulations, particularly in connection with split time and with the spreadover of hours and wages. The holiday industry does seem to have, in the last two or three months, a better feeling of confidence in and of co-operation with the Catering Wages Board. For that I commend my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Labour, but that good work can and must continue. If Brighton is to be regarded as a holiday town, and if, therefore, hotels are to be regarded as its main industry, it would help substantially if the free limit for repairs could be extended for the hotel industry. On 9th December last I asked the Minister of Works that hotels should be included in the higher free limit of £2,000 as industrial buildings, but I regret to say that that was refused. It would help very much if hotel proprietors could get on with the job of repairing and redecorating their hotels up to the maximum of £2,000 without having to go through all the paraphernalia and red tape of licensing. One of the most important things for the hotel and catering industry is that the Chancellor's directive to the banks with regard to credit should be eased for hotel proprietors. I know, as I am certain does my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion, of hotels which have not been able to carry out repairs and redecorations during the winter months, just when there are unemployed painters in Brighton, because their bank managers have not been able to give them overdraft facilities during the winter months, as they always have done in the past, knowing full well that those overdrafts would be paid off during the summer months. That has had a very bad effect upon the unemployment figures for painters and decorators in Brighton, and something ought to be done about it at a very early date. I know of hotel proprietors who, during the winter months, have had to sack staff they would gladly have retained had their bank managers been able to extend credit facilities by way of overdrafts during the winter months, as they always have done during past years. Also, Purchase Tax should be remitted substantially for the purchase of necessary goods by hotels, boarding houses and restaurants. But the greatest thing that could be done to help Brighton as a holiday resort would be a healthy reduction in the rate of Income Tax so that more people in the middle and higher income brackets could come down and spend long week-ends in the delightful holiday resort of Brighton during the winter months, which is the time we want them so badly. Last, but not least, the Government and the people of Great Britain having decided that Brighton is the predominant holiday resort of our country, the Government ought to allow Brighton Corporation to get on with its job of making Brighton the most attractive holiday resort of modern times. To do that they must allow the Corporation to spend more money. Brighton very badly needs a large conference hall. This year a tremendously important international conference is being held in Brighton. We could have had another one at the same time, but we are continually having to refuse conferences because we have not got full and adequate accommodation to take the great international conferences which badly want to come to Brighton. Brighton also wants a winter garden. It has got the land and the site; it has got everything except permission from the Government to get on with the job of building a winter garden and building a conference hall. It is no use answering that the economic situation does not permit this, because if we were allowed to do these things we could retain many many more visitors in this country instead of them going abroad and spending there currency we can ill afford. I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary will be able to assist me with all those matters.10.19 p.m.
I want to intervene for just one minute, because to a large extent this matter also concerns my part of Brighton. I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Kemptown (Mr. H. Johnson) for bringing this matter forward, but I should like to point out that most of the unemployment, I think I am right in saying, is in his division of Kemptown and not in mine, the Pavilion division. There is a certain amount, it is true, but I would point out that we must consider not only the Kemptown division and the Pavilion division but also the town of Hove, and that the three of us work together as three large towns.
For many years, there has been a considerable amount of publicity, and rightly so, about the advantages of these two towns, and that has largely been responsible for bringing many people to Brighton, seeking employment when they cannot find it elsewhere. That is one of our main problems, which I think the Minister of Labour should study—the problem of people coming to Brighton for work. This question of people moving to places of great attraction occurs in America and other States. They come to these warm, bright and cheerful places in order to find employment. My hon. Friend thinks that the trippers should come to my part of the town, but that is another affair. Several hon. Members from Sussex have been getting together recently with the object not so much of dealing with light industries in our own district as with trying to get something for Sussex as a whole. I refer, for instance, to the question of the sugar beet industry in Sussex. There is a possibility of the development in the Chichester area in the near future of an industry which could be of considerable help to Brighton. We should think not only of what we can get locally for Brighton or for Kemptown but of what is possible in the district as a whole, or in the area, so that the train services or the other normal transport services can take people out of Brighton to work.
10.22 p.m.
Brighton is the kind of town which is not usually associated with the problem of unemployment, so that my hon. Friend the Member for Kemptown (Mr. H. Johnson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Teeling) have done a very useful service in raising the subject tonight. Brighton is a town which gives us a certain amount of anxiety about unemployment because, like many other towns where work is of a seasonal nature, the employment possibilities fluctuate enormously between June and December. One of the problems is that if we provided enough employment to keep everybody working in December, there would be many vacancies and a shortage of labour in the peak months of the summer. That makes the problem very difficult.
Perhaps it will put the matter more in perspective if I point out that among roughly 90,000 insured employees in the Brighton area—and we have to treat it as a whole from our point of view— nearly 70,000 are engaged in a services industry of one kind or another. That is, over 70 per cent. Yet the authorities in Brighton have tried very hard, and I think that it is fair to say that they have had some assistance from the Government, in trying to diversify the employment in the area. The proportion of employees in manufacturing industry is only 26 per cent. of the total number of insured employees, whereas the percentage for the whole of Great Britain is over 40 per cent. I think we are right in taking as our first cure for the problem the further development of factory estates and the further building of factories where that is possible, either in Kemptown or elsewhere in the Brighton area. I have noted the individual cases mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Kemptown. and I will look into them, always bearing in mind that the Ministry of Labour are asked to give only their advice on this occasion and do not issue the certificates and licences. The general level of unemployment in the area is very high at the moment and I thought it was a sign of my hon. Friend's very proper concern for his constituents —and we all know how energetic he is in their interests—that he asked a Question the other day on the subject. I think I can at least say that probably from now on the general level of unemployment will start to fall quite rapidly and that by the month of June the figures will be down to a very much lower level. That leaves the hard core of the problem, which in the Brighton area consists largely of people who are difficult placing prospects for our employment exchange. There is included in it the large number of disabled persons. My hon. Friend asked me what are the prospects for finding them sheltered employment in a Remploy factory. On 19th January there were just under 600 registered disabled persons who were unemployed and capable of ordinary employment and 77 capable of sheltered employment only. The difficulty is that Brighton is too attractive a place and people go there for medical reasons, probably because their doctors say that it would benefit their health. I am afraid that they do not always consider, before they go, whether there is likely to be employment when they get there. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion, said, because Brighton is so attractive there is a constant drift of people there and, once they get there, they stay. It might sometimes be as well if they took the advice of our employment exchange, which is always readily available to them, as to the prospects of continuing employment. As to Remploy factory employment, there is no prospect at the moment of having such a factory in Brighton. My hon. Friend is correct in saying that he was told the Brighton project is high on the list. However, as both my right hon. and learned Friend and myself have said in this House several times recently, until Remploy is on a more satisfactory financial and economic foundation and is trading more successfully, we have had to ban all new Remploy construction anywhere in the country. So the fact that a factory cannot be given to Brighton does not mean that it is being given to anyone else. It is an inevitable result arising from the fact that Remploy, to give some security to its existing employees, must consolidate its position before new factories are built. That does not alter the fact that the local authority can do a certain amount to meet the problem of sheltered employment, although I realise that it is not perhaps enough to meet the case. When Remploy factories can be built again, Brighton will undoubtedly maintain its high place on the list and I am sure that neither of my hon. Friends will allow my right hon. and learned Friend or myself to forget that fact. To sum up, the answer is that Brighton is one of those places, partly because it is attractive as a residential area, partly because it is essentially a seaside town with a marked seasonal business, which is bound to have at this time of year a fairly heavy level of unemployment. The only long-term answer is more light and diversified industry and that, so far as we can, Her Majesty's Government will try to assist. The special problem of the disabled people again arises from the nature of the town itself, but when the time comes when Remploy factories can be built again, the case of Brighton will be carefully considered. I must be fair and not raise hopes: that time is still a long way off. On the last point—the catering wages problem—my right hon. and learned Friend recently announced the reconstitution of the board and some special expert committees which we hope will now be able to study much more carefully the application of the Act to special sections of the catering and hotel industry. We are looking for great things from those new committees, and they will try to meet the special problems of Brighton. I am afraid that Brighton must expect a good deal more unemployment in December than it has in June, but it will be the continuing effort of Her Majesty's Government to even out those peaks and valleys as much as we can. I know that in that we shall always be urged on by both hon. Members for Brighton, who take such a great interest in their town and who are always so active in this House in furthering its interests. Question put, and agreed to. Adjourned accordingly at Twenty-nine Minutes past Ten o'Clock.