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

The Bill has two main purposes. The first is to raise the maximum value of the shares which an individual member may hold in a society registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, 1893. The second is to enable agricultural and horticultural co-operative societies to make advances of money to their members without security. I must make it clear that the consumers' co-operative movement does not seek power for its own societies to lend money without security; although it welcomes an increase in the maximum shareholding.

Clause 2 is intended to facilitate the work of agricultural and horticultural co-operative societies. I shall deal with it later.

Clause 1 is permissive. No co-operative society will be required to change its present practice, unless it wishes to do so; nor will any agricultural society. Clause 1 (3) gives power to the committee of a registered society to pass a resolution recorded in writing that members be permitted to hold such greater amount of share capital up to £1,000 as may be specified in the resolution. Upon the passing of such a resolution, the rules of the society will have effect accordingly. Such a resolution, however, will not hold good for all time, because Clause 1 (5) lays down that if any amendment to the rules of a society is made after the Bill has come into force the power of the committee passing a resolution such as the one to which I have just referred under subsection (3) will come to an end.

In other words, a simple resolution of a committee of management can give effect to the provision of the Bill relating to share capital, but when the rules of the society are next amended in any respect whatsoever the new share limit must at that time be the subject of an appropriate amendment to the rules. This, as hon. Members on both sides will realise, would be a great convenience to societies which may, for good and sufficient reasons, not wish to take the trouble of amending their rules to cover this point alone.

Clause 2 (1) does not enable the committee of an agricultural society to make advances of money to members without security, unless the rules of the society are appropriately amended. The reason for the difference in treatment of the two amendments is not difficult to understand. In the first case, a decision to raise the shareholding limit is not one which can be open to abuse. No one can be obliged to subscribe more to the share capital than he wishes. In the second case, decisions about lending the funds of the society to members without security are of direct concern to all members. They have a right to be consulted before such power is given to the committee.

Clause 1 (1) raises the limit of the amount of shares which any one member may hold in a society from £500 to £1,000 by amending the principal Act. It has already been pointed out that societies do not need to adopt the higher figure unless they choose. The figure of £500 was laid down in the Act of 1952. Before that, the maximum figure was £200 which had existed since 1862. In the original Industrial and Provident Societies Act which was passed in 1852, the limit was £100. In this respect as in so many others, co-operative societies differ from the joint stock companies in that the maximum share holding of any individual member is laid down by Statute. Although the rules of a society may fix a lesser amount than that permitted by law, they may not provide for a greater amount.

It is extremely important, therefore, in the interests of societies and their members, that the maximum shareholding should keep pace with changes not only in the value of money, but in economic and social conditions. If we take the value of money in 1914 as 100, it has now, in 1960, fallen to about 20. On this basis, it may be claimed that the present shareholding limit should be at least £1,000 to maintain the same relative position as we had before the First World War. In 1952, that aspect of our case was admitted by the Government of the day.

Looking at the matter, however, from another point of view, there has been a vast development of co-operative trade during this century. In 1914, the total retail trade of the consumers' co-operative movement was £88 million. Last year, it had risen to £1,022 million. It is true that some of this increase can be accounted for by the rise in prices, but it must be noted that during this period membership has risen from over 3 million to nearly 13 million. Such large increases of trade require the employment of corresponding increases in capital. In fact, in recent years, the growth of share capital has slowed down. Indeed, between 1952 and 1959, co-operative retail trade increased by 42 per cent., but share capital increased by only 11 per cent.

It would be misleading to claim that the reason for the slowing down in the rate of capital accumulation in the co-operative movement can be attributed to the present limitation upon the individual shareholding. Many other factors are involved. Some of these are the direct responsibility of the Government, but naturally, as this is Friday, that is an aspect which I shall not pursue. I simply mention the fact. I do not, however, propose to develop it; nor shall I dilate upon the discriminations practised against co-operative investments in the matter of Income Tax concessions, for I hope that some of my hon. Friends, who have greater freedom than I, may say a word on this aspect of our case for speeding up capital accumulation.

It would, however, be agreed on both sides that co-operative societies have fared badly in comparison with the treatment offered to National Savings Certificates, Defence Bond holdings and Post Office savings. I submit, therefore, that the upper limit of £1,000 for share- holders in co-operative societies is a reasonable claim in all the circumstances of today.

I turn now to Clause 2. The agricultural co-operative societies have a particular interest in this part of the Bill, although their case must receive a different emphasis from that of the consumers' co-operative movement. Like the retail side, however, their need of more capital is just as pressing. The necessary increase in my view must come from additions to share capital and reserves.

I want briefly, and, I hope, without intruding too far on the patience of the House, to direct attention to some of the recent statistics which illustrate the work of the agricultural societies better than mere words. To deal, first, with increase in England. The turnover of agricultural societies for the year ended 31st March, 1959, was more than £135 million. In 1953, it was just over £92 million. In 1946, it was £46 million. I relate this to the gross agricultural output which in 1953–54 was £1,253 million and in 1958–59 it was £1,450 million. A simple calculation shows that in 1953 the agricultural co-operative societies enjoyed 7·4 per cent. of the gross agricultural output. Last year, they had 9·4 per cent. This is a notable and welcome increase.

It is worth while observing the detailed figures. Of the total turnover of agricultural societies of £135 million for the year ended 31st March, 1959, the requirement societies absorbed £85 million. The marketing societies £43 million and those societies which provide for services and a number of miscellaneous matters absorbed £7 million. Every one of these separate aspects of the general work of the agricultural societies is showing expansion. It is only fair to them to say that the Government have given quite good support in practical ways to this movement, and I hope that this morning they will indicate their desire to continue that work by supporting the Bill.

When we look at the total share capital in England, and find that it is only £10 million, we see that it is obviously too small a capital accumulation in relation to this turnover. A recent survey has shown that if societies maintain their present rate of growth they will need new capital at the rate of £2½ million per year. In Northern Ireland, the traditional home of the movement, last year the output was almost £7 million, which represented an increase over 1958 of £540,000. In Wales, where the movement is very extensive and is called the Agricultural Organisation Society, for the titular aspect varies a little from country to country, they had a total trade in 1958 of nearly £15 million, which represented an increase of £750,000 over 1957, and, there again, success marks the progress of the Co-operatives.

I come to my own country, Scotland, and there the story is not quite so happy, I am sorry to say. Development has been largely confined to the west Highlands, and there the trouble is chiefly lack of capital—which is our song and plea this morning—and transport costs. Nevertheless, the system is practised, admittedly on a smaller scale than it was before the First World War, but possibly greater help with loans would assist to strengthen it and enable it to expand.

Ideally of course share capital should be proportionate to the amount of trade put by the member through his society. A rough method of ascertaining this is to relate existing capital employed to turnover, in which case it will be found that the average requirement society stands in need of £250 of capital for each £1,000 of annual output. That is quite a remarkable figure, and, in fact, a society extensively occupied in manufacturing may use even more than that. On this basis, therefore, a farmer putting £2,000 per annum through his society should subscribe the maximum shares.

Recently, estimates were made of the expenditure of an average dairy farm of 1,000 acres on feedingstuffs, seeds, fertilisers, fuel and machinery. The amount was £1,750 per annum. I think that this illustration shows that the present limit—

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the figure of £1,750 for a farm of 1,000 acres. Would it not be more like 100 acres?

I apologise, Mr. Speaker, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for his interruption. I thought I said 100, but if I did not, I correct the figure and say that the dairy farm was 100 acres.

I think that the illustration which I have given shows that the present limit of £500 is far from being over generous, even if the £ retains its present value. If there should be any further inflation this situation could become much more serious. It is broadly true, I think, that the present limit is mainly a handicap to the societies having the larger farmers in membership.

The extent of this disadvantage is rather difficult to ascertain, though it has been calculated by the Agricultural Central Co-operative Association, in a survey of English societies, in 1957, that approximately £70,000 of additional capital was lost to them because the present investment limit of £500 would have been exceeded. This loss may be compared with a total addition to share (capital in the same year of £755,000. To take an example, one society which obtained £61,000 of share capital in that year had to turn away an additional £9,500. It is generally accepted, I think, that if the 1960 figures were available they would show a still larger loss of capital. As the percentage of the farmers' trade put through the societies becomes greater the limitation will become increasingly more important, with the result that societies will have to ask the smaller farmers to invest more than their fair share to make good this deficiency.

There are, of course, ways of getting round the £500. Shares might be taken out in the names of wives or other non-trading members of the society, but I am sure it will be agreed that that is not a desirable practice.

In pressing, therefore, for a relaxation of the limit at the upper end of the scale, societies are not oblivious of the need to bring about a generally higher level of investment on the part of their other members. Such a policy has, indeed, been actively pursued for many years. A number of devices, such as, for example, retention of bonus for conversion into share capital, are in general use. It will be appreciated on both sides, I am sure, that this must be a slow process, and that it would not be practical policy for a society to insist that every new member bringing in much-needed trade should immediately contribute an appropriate investment of capital. Such a result, we hope, would be eventually obtained, but not as a rule till he had traded for some years with the society and had got some confidence in it.

I think, therefore, that there is no doubt that the £500 limit is a definite handicap to marketing societies in particular, because they must spend a lot on grading and on cold storage equipment, and particularly where their outlay in capital is large and membership rather small.

Clause 2 of the Bill could remove an out-dated restriction in the original Act of 1893, which was designed to protect the early leaders of co-operative societies, who were assumed to lack experience in financial matters. I know that on this question of lending without security doubts exist about that part of the Clause, and I want to assure the Joint Parliamentary Secretary and his right hon. Friend the Minister that we shall co-operate with them in securing such amendment, if necessary, as will be fair to all legitimate interests.

Apart from the consideration that I have just mentioned, I think that the Bill is simple and non-controversial. It certainly covers an astonishingly wide field of human endeavour which is worthy of the utmost help. Its principles, I believe, are acceptable to the Government, and to the co-operative movement its proposals are necessary for future expansion.

I should like to confine myself to dealing wholly with agricultural co-operatives. I very much welcome the Bill. It attempts to deal with the most important movement in British agriculture today, the co-operative movement. We heard a great deal earlier this year, during the debate on the Agricultural Price Review, about the blows that were suffered by agriculture when agricultural subsidies went down, as they seem to do year by year. We have heard a great deal recently about the effect, if we join it, that the Common Market would have on our agriculture. But I think that the most detrimental effect that anything could have on agriculture in this country is that of the failure of our farmers to agree to plan and co-operate together.

It is this lack of co-operation and reluctance on the part of many farmers to band together to solve their problems which will prove a great hindrance to their security in future. In agricultural co-operation we are years behind the United States, the Scandinavian countries and, indeed, many European countries, and we must do something to make up that lack. Although this is a private Member's day, I must say that I should like to see the Government give more assistance towards helping farmers to set up co-operatives and particularly to give them more help in the form of guidance on how to form these co-operatives and organise their financial affairs.

We spend £250 million a year on agricultural support. It is surprising that a percentage of that does not go towards encouraging marketing for farmers. I know that we do a great deal for horticulture and have done something recently, but more should be done for the farmers. There should be more co-operation in the purchase of fertilisers and seeds and the supply of services like grain-drying and storage. Most important of all, there should be assistance in marketing. These forms of co-operation are absolutely vital. Any Bill that helps this movement deserves our support.

The Bill serves two basic purposes. Clause 1 gives agricultural co-operatives the chance to raise more money to finance their operations. There is no lower limit to the amount brought in. This is largely a matter for the co-operatives concerned, but the Bill raises the maximum from £500 to £1,000, which is a step in the right direction. I do not think that it is realised by many people how much money is required by the average farmer for his annual purposes. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) quoted £1,750 for the average farm per year. Perhaps he was thinking of a dairy farm. It may be true of many farms of that sort, but if it is a high production farm of the kind that existed until recently at the Royal Agricultural College the figure is considerably more than that each year. In many cases it is twice as much.

This applies not only to dairy farms but to cash root farms where there is a great deal of investment, and also to sizeable pig or poultry enterprises. There is a considerable difference between these enterprises in speed of turnover, but basically many of them require a great deal of money every year. If the farmer does the bulk of his trading through an agricultural co-operative association he should be in a position to contribute something like a quarter of his annual expenditure in the form of share capital. I think that that is one of the reasons behind the Bill. This is particularly true of the farmer who farms a large number of acres.

At the moment a sum of £500 is clearly inadequate and it certainly restricts co-operatives that have in mind very ambitious plans. The Bill would enable co-operatives to expand and be of much more use to their members. The increase is needed not only at the top of the scale for farmers who are doing most business, but also at the bottom of the scale. As the activities of the co-operatives expand, I am sure that this will give confidence to small investors and to farmers to expand their businesses. Clause 1 is to be welcomed because it allows this expansion of activities.

Clause 2 helps to deal with the great necessity in farming today for the expansion of credit to the credit-worthy. I am thinking particularly of the younger farmer farming for the first time and also of the many cases of the older farmer who has worked himself up from being a farm worker and wishes to buy a farm. The price of land at the moment is at a very high level, and I think that it will go further. Ten years ago the £100 an acre farm was an expensive farm, but it is now largely a thing of the past, and it will be for many years.

Therefore, unless he is very rich, the new farmer has to raise a considerable amount of money on mortgage to buy the farm and he is faced after that with buying implements, running costs, and the cost of stocking. He has to raise as much as possible on mortgage to buy the farm in the first instance and then finds it difficult to raise the extra money. I should like to pay tribute to the help given by the banks and the credit organisations, but any further help is welcome.

Clause 2, therefore, enables agricultural co-operatives to lend money unsecured. The great merit of this is that money will be lent by organisations better fitted than any others to lend it, because they are able to judge better whether the applicant is credit-worthy, whether he is the sort of man who, by background, training and ability, is likely to succeed as a farmer. This is very important. I know myself how careful a farmer has to be for many years when he is building up his farm and how long it takes to get an adequate return on the money.

If the right sort of person wishes to obtain credit from an agricultural association, he deserves all the help he can get. Agricultural co-operatives are not only enabled by Clause 2 to lend money unsecured but they are bodies that can help the farmer in many other ways to start up, particularly with equipment and advice, and I think that they are more likely to do this to the man who is a debtor. The position of the tenant-farmer in his need for help and advice is just as important as that of the man who buys his own farm, even though he is not likely to want a mortgage.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Govan on his choice for a Private Member's Bill of this unstartling subject and such an unnewsworthy subject. The Bill is probably all the more worthy for that. It seeks to secure co-operation between existing farmers and to help the man who is just starting, to enable him to climb that most difficult and most satisfying of all things—the farming ladder.

I join with the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Mr. Coulson) in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) not only on having the good fortune to have his name come out of the hat, but on his usual good sense in introducing such a Measure as this. It is a rather unique characteristic of unity, and it draws together not only Members on both sides of the House but also, I hope, town and country. What is put forward in Clause 1 is of considerable interest to some 12 million members of the consumer co-operative movement—most of them industrial workers—and Clause 2 turns to the countryside and gives a very considerable encouragement to the growing movement of co-operation in the farming community.

I listened with interest to the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, North. One of the most important points he raised was that in a development of this kind in agriculture the Government should be available to give advice on "know-how." In no sector of the economy are we anxious that the Government should have a lot of bureaucrats or forms, or should interfere with the ordinary working of industry or of agriculture, but increasingly, as technology advances, there is need far "know-how" to be available in easy terms for people in their own sector. I hope that one of the by-products of this Bill will be that such a department might emerge from the Ministry, perhaps to increase facilities already available.

I also welcome the hon. Member's criticism—which was drawn lightly—of the position of this country compared with Scandinavia and the United States. We do well to watch advances in these countries to see whether there is anything we can gain by following their example. By banding together for any purpose, and so encouraging some of the greatest individualists of all, the farmers—they are not as individualist as the doctors, but very nearly—to join together in their mutual interest.

This is a very narrow Bill, but I want to approach it from a wide angle. Clause 1 deals with the raising of the limit on share capital. It has been very well explained, and most of the points have been put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Govan. The principle behind it is that of encouragement to a number of people to get together, performing things mutually for themselves. It is also an encourgement to the spread of democracy at a time when there is a tendency for things to become increasingly centralised. It gives greater opportunity to them to contribute some measure of their own resources to do a job mutually which perhaps could not be done individually, and it enables the amount which they contribute to be enlarged.

We have seen elsewhere this increasing tendency towards having one expert at the centre. In commerce, we have seen take-over bids, with huge sectors of the economy passing into one man's hands. Bat the tendency to get together, encouraged in this Bill, which arises throughout the co-operative movement, Whether applied to consumers, agriculturists or housing, is one which the Government and all people of good will can only support. The inherent thing in a co-operative society is that the members participate, and that participation will be heightened if they have a little larger stake than they are allowed to have by existing law.

I do not expect that people will dash to increase the amount of money they put into co-operative societies in order to get a return of 3 per cent. fixed interest, with no possibility at any time of capital appreciation. Nevertheless, from the point of view of small savings this Clause of the Bill is very important. The tendency in a co-operative society is that an amount of capital accumulates because not only are the profits of the society turned back into the society, but the bulk go to members in the form of dividend on what they purchase—and in many cases they do not draw the dividend but allow it to accumulate until such time as they need something which costs a considerable amount. Thus, it is an encouragement towards thrift amongst small savers.

I do not want to go into that aspect, however, because we do debate it from time to time, but pending the passing of this Bill, a shareholder, when his accumulation reaches over £500, knows that he must draw some out. Often, however, he will also lake the opportunity to spend more. Thus he draws out not only the few pounds in excess of £500 but tends to draw out more. That may lead to an inflationary trend in the country's economy.

The proposals in Clause 2 bring in a principle that is not new. This has existed in the past. The British Government took great pains more than fifty years ago, when they were responsible for the Government of India, to pass two special Acts in 1908 and 1911 precisely in order to give agriculturists in India the opportunity of borrowing money without security. The background, of course, is different. There is a different situation in this country from what it was in India fifty years ago. We were then dealing with peasants who were not creditworthy. They were in the hands of moneylenders and the British Government had to pass legislation in order to get them out of those hands.

These Acts brought results that began in India but spread throughout the whole of Asia, until now there are hundreds of thousands of co-operative societies for credit and thrift. The emergent countries foster this movement as part of their economic planning.

Many safeguards were inserted in these Acts in order to ensure that credit was safeguarded. One safeguard was mentioned by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, North—that the people who were agreeing and giving authority for a loan were themselves members of the society. As far as I can see, the same provision would apply in this Bill. It will be the agricultural co-operative societies which will have the final say about whether or not a loan is to be granted when there is no backing of collateral security. That is what happened in Asia, but they were dealing with less credit-worthy people and the safeguards were more stringent. They all had collective liability and, if a member defaulted, they had to pay his debts. In order that the entire society need not be caught, the borrower had to find two sureties to guarantee the money. In this country co-operative societies have limited liability.

What provisions will be made to safeguard money lent without collateral security under this Bill? We would welcome any suggestions in Committee which would help clarify this problem. The basic principle is that we are dealing with adult people who know agriculture and who should have a measure of freedom to decide whether or not it is possible, under the prevailing circumstances, to provide credit for their members in order to do a specific job. After all, what is being judged is not the amount of resources and land behind the man so much as his ability as a farmer. He has land and property, but what is being judged is the extent to which his ability is capable of making the land yield more to enable him to pay back any unsecured loan obtained through this Bill.

I welcome very much the fact that in the Schedule the Bill takes notice of what is probably one of the most important developments in the 'sixties—the very belated but very necessary growth of co-operative societies to deal with the housing needs in this very tight little island. The House will know from housing debates that the Minister of Housing and Local Government has welcomed this approach where people are unable to own their own house and, in the terms of hon. Gentlemen opposite, individually become part of a property-owning democracy. There is much to be said for such people joining together in a housing association to own a block of flats or their own houses collectively. The Minister of Housing and Local Government has given his blessing to the efforts that many of us have been making in this direction, particularly in my constituency where we have two such societies and people who would have been evicted as a result of the Rent Act have been saved by joining together in a co-operative fashion.

So in a period when there is a tendency for people to get apart, in a period of intense personal ambition and competition, when it seems as though the motto "I'm all right, Jack. Haul up the ladder." has been part of the philosophy running through the country in recent years, it is very nice that my hon. Friend has had the opportunity of bringing forward this Bill which goes in the opposite direction and enables people to contribute of their own resources and ability and join together for common purposes. To help others, I hope the whole House will join with my hon. Friend and ensure that the Bill obtains a Second Reading and is eventually placed on the Statute Book.

First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) upon his luck in the Ballot and also upon his judgment in selecting this piece of legislation. It is a logical piece of legislation to come before the House in view of certain Measures which have preceded it over the last decade or so. We have had a good deal of legislation which has dealt directly or indirectly with agricultural co-operative societies, such as the 1952 Act, which was introduced by my right hon. Friend the present Minister of Pensions and National Insurance, and the recent Measure concerned with horticultural improvements, which bears directly on the present Bill.

At present, we are experiencing a revolution in agriculture and horticulture and particularly in marketing. I welcome the Bill because it helps the co-operatives to contribute a little more fully to the revolution. An indication of the Government's support for the revolution is the specific mention in the Horticultural Improvements Act of the fact that grants can be made to horticultural co-operatives. These grants will be more and more important in connection with the purchasing and marketing of produce when we get smaller units working together on certain matters without losing their own direct independence in controlling their own holding and what they are producing on it.

When one has regard to the amount of capital on which co-operative societies operate, it is remarkable that they operate as efficiently as they do. The hon. Member made a very good point when he drew attention to the fact that for every £1,000 worth of purchases that a member may make from a co-operative, the co-operative needs some £250 of capital to finance what is done. The hon. Member drew from that a conclusion which, I think, is very important, that the person who has a limit to the amount of capital which he can hold in a co-operative society and who has a big purchasing programme from the society is benefiting out of proportion to the amount which he has invested in the society.

In other words, that person is having the benefit of what he is getting from the society being financed by the other shareholders, who, in turn, may be on a smaller scale. Whether the limit which is being introduced in the Bill will be sufficiently high, I do not know, but I think it is wise that a figure of £1,000 has been chosen as a logical step following the previous limit of £500.

The hon. Member for Govan pointed out the way in which the figure had been held remarkably low until the 1952 Act. The hon. Member knows the history much better than I do. My researches have gone back only to the 1893 Act, when the limit of £200 was set. As the hon. Member correctly pointed out, the value of money between 1893 and 1952 had altered more than in the proportion of the two limits concerned. I hope that people will not think that because we approve of the Bill now we believe that the purchasing power of money has halved since 1952. However, I think that, on balance, the limit proposed in the Bill of £1,000 is probably about right.

It will, of course, be possible to raise the limit at a later date if it is found to be too low. Meanwhile, it gives the societies an opportunity to show that they can exploit that limit to the full. It will need some hard work on the part of the societies to obtain capital up to this limit. However, it is something which accumulates, because very often people leave in their account not only the capital but also the interest, so one gets a compound interest factor operating and the capital of the society building up in that way.

I have been assured of support for the Bill from a number of other Essex Members who, unfortunately, are unable to be present today. These include my hon. Friends the Members for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) and Harwich (Mr. Ridsdale). The manner in which the societies can obtain their capital has been very fully explained by the hon. Member for Govan. All right hon. and hon. Members will agree that it is much better that the societies should to a large extent be self-financing rather than that they should have to depend on bank loans, and so on. Therefore, I most wholeheartedly support the first part of the Bill, raising the limit to the number of shares that can be held.

While, in general, I support Clause 2, I am glad that the hon. Gentleman said that he would be open to receive suggestions for modifying the rather wide drafting of the Clause about unsecured loans. It is extremely important that we should realise that co-operatives are in a very responsible position, in the same way as are building societies. In both cases, there are many small members in the society, and, therefore, it is necessary for the House to make doubly sure that the interests of those members are fully protected.

I realise full well the difference between a peasant co-operative and one in a semi-sophisticated society like our own. [Laughter.] There seems to be some doubt about that, but I still think, particularly in view of the experience we have had quite recently with building societies which have fallen into the wrong hands and have been used for objections completely different from those for which they were designed—in financing take-over bids on a very unsound basis—that it is very necessary for there to be some precautions in the operations of co-operative societies. That is why I am a little doubtful about Clause 2 being quite as sweeping as it is.

Generally, I welcome the Bill, and I am very glad to have been able to be one of its sponsors, because I think that it will help to establish co-operatives still wider in the horticultural and agricultural field, and to make them more effective in the very important work which they must undertake if we are to have a thriving horticultural and agricultural industry in the future.

I intervene very briefly in the debate in support of the Bill which my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) has introduced, and I should like to add my congratulations to him on having used his place in the Ballot to bring in such a much-needed reform. I hope that the Bill will proceed from its Second Reading to reach the Statute Book, and be very useful not only to co-operative societies, but to their members.

I take part in this debate primarily as a co-operative housewife. I do not think that figures are available, but, if they were, I think that they would show that a large part of the share capital of retail societies is supplied by housewives who do their shopping in co-operative stores. It is a common practice for housewives to leave their dividends to accumulate in the form of share capital, and they add to it from time to time in various ways, very often by the purchase of savings stamps, which again add to the accumulation of share capital. In passing, it is interesting to note that in my own society the denomination of savings stamps for some time past has been increased from 6d. to 1s., which indicates the change in the value of money—one of the main reasons for the introduction of this Bill.

The savings of co-operative housewives in these societies are simply made because they can use their shop as their bank, and, therefore, it is a great advantage to be able to save in this way. When, as so many housewives do today, they go out to work, I do not think that it is sufficiently appreciated how many of the families which are now becoming owner-occupiers, either from choice or necessity because of the housing shortage, depend on the housewife working outside the home to supply the money which will help to put down the deposit on the house. While she is working and saving in this way, she very frequently uses the co-operative society to invest the savings until she has accumulated enough to produce the necessary deposit and the other fees necessary for house purchase.

These are very common arrangements among many families. Many women go out to work solely for the purpose of enabling the family to become the owner-occupiers of a house. It is quite obvious that for many families the limit of £500 at present is inadequate, because if they are saving for house purchase or something else of that kind, that limit must be raised for their convenience, quite apart from the benefits to the co-operative society.

Therefore, I think that there is no argument at all, quite apart from the fact that we all know how the value of money has changed, against raising the amount of the holding which co-operative society members may have in a society from £500 to £1,000. While the savings are being made, they are of great benefit to the societies themselves, enabling them to expand and develop. When there are so many thousands of people who use co-operative societies because they believe them to be socially desirable, and who save through co-operative societies for the same reason—in spite of disadvantages which have been imposed in some ways—it is quite wrong to limit them, as at present. If they want to save through co-operative societies, they should be able to save to a maximum of at least £1,000, which is the purpose of the Bill.

That is from the paint of view of the consumers' societies. So far as agricultural societies are concerned, in my own constituency at Wood Green, this is not a burning issue, because we have long since lost all the farms that we ever had there. Again, from the housewife's point of view as well as that of agriculture, this is a service which the community very much needs and which ought to be developed and increased considerably. Looking through the British Farmer, which I occasionally read. I saw one paragraph, referring to farming co-operatives, which used these words:

"In any event, co-operation as such needs a lot more publicity, alike on what societies are doing and what they could do when members and managers are alive to their opportunities."

It is because I agree with that and with the fact that sufficient publicity is not given to the benefits of co-operation both inside the House and outside that I hope that the Bill will receive a Second Reading and, ultimately, reach the Statute Book. I warmly welcome its introduction.

I hope that the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler) will forgive me if I do not follow her observations about the Bill from the housewives' point of view. I agree with her and all hon. Members who have spoken in warmly welcoming the Bill and in congratulating the hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) on bringing it forward.

I should like to support what the hon. Lady said about agricultural co-operatives as a service to the community. I wish that their importance were more widely appreciated by housewives and the public generally. If the debate has done nothing else, it has drawn attention to the agricultural side of the co-operative movement, and that will be valuable.

It is important that we should not give the impression, in the House or in the country, that businesses which operate under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act are in some way second-class types of business. There is possibly the feeling that when a company is registered under the Companies Act there is something more respectable or more professional about it. That is completely untrue. Not only does the co-operative movement now have great resources of skill and experience, but it does many things which cannot be and are not done by ordinary companies. If the Bill does nothing else, it should emphasise that the House regards the movement as a worthy part of our business effort.

The hon. Member for Govan spoke of the increasing rôle of consumer co-operation except in his own country. I will not follow him by giving illustrations, but the more one is involved with agriculture—

When I regretted slow development in Scotland I was referring to the agricultural side of co-operation.

I am grateful to the hon. Member. That was a slip of the tongue. I intended to refer to producer co-operatives. I believe that the producer co-operatives will make most use of these facilities if the Bill is passed.

I have some doubt about the wisdom of periodic Bills to increase the limit of permissible investment. I wonder whether it would not be wiser to take a more radical view of the matter. Presumably, the purpose of a limit is to prevent any one person, or a few people, from dominating any society. One could legislate to prevent that by providing that no person should own more than a certain proportion of the society's shares, one-seventh or one-tenth, say. That might have great advantages and it is a matter which we might consider in Committee. Is it better to make a rule which would stand for ever, even with changing values, or a rule which needs the luck of an hon. Member like the hon. Member for Govan to be amended?

This is a period of remarkable and even revolutionary development in agricultural production and techniques. Those of us who went to Smithfield, at the beginning of the week, probably saw, as I did, a piggery in which the whole process, including feeding, watering, and even mucking out, was automatic. That sort of agriculture is being carried on on holdings which are the result of long historical processes, but where the type of agriculture is often out of date.

In my constituency, which is primarily industrial, the agricultural holdings are extremely small. Because of their smallness, they find the difficulties of competing in modern conditions becoming ever greater. I am convinced that that size of holdings is the greatest bar to agriculture taking advantage of the tremendous opportunities and the new techniques and the thrilling ideas which are now being developed.

I believe that there must be amalgamation of holdings if agriculture is to be efficient, but amalgamation of holdings is, and clearly should be, a slow process. It is easy to be sweeping and ruthless about these things, but the people on these holdings are earning their livings in the only way which they know, and amalgamation must be a slow process. But I would like to see the Government concentrate more on bringing that process about.

However, short of amalgamation of holdings, the best way to get over the disadvantages of smallness is co-operation. On the Continent, co-operation is very much more advanced in countries where the holdings are in every case smaller than they are in this country. Our holdings are small enough, but in a country like Denmark, which is held up as a model of agricultural production, holdings are very much smaller still.

In The Times Agricultural Supplement, published on the occasion of the Smithfield Show this year, there was an illuminating table, which I shall not trouble the House by quoting, but which showed the extent to which Continental farming is undertaken in units smaller than British units. With intelligent use of co-operation in agriculture the results can be remarkable.

In passing, I must say that the debate has illustrated that producer co-operation is a non-party matter. I listened with great interest to the hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt), who speaks with great authority on matters of co-operation, and I very much agreed with him when he said that this was a narrow Bill, but that its implications were very wide.

During the autumn, several hon. Members on this side of the House had the good fortune to be the guests of the Agricultural Central Co-operative Association on a trip round my own county, Yorkshire. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Mr. Gresham Cooke) was on that trip and that he will confirm my view that the trip was an eye-opener even to those of us who had been closely involved in this movement for many years. I understand that similar trips have been arranged for hon. Members opposite.

As someone who is not an agriculturist, but an industrialist, my opinion of the agricultural executives in Yorkshire was that they were most efficient, managed in a very businesslike way, were providing an excellent service to the public and that they should be encouraged in every way.

As a Yorkshireman, I very much appreciate that.

One of the main impressions, I am sure, was the astonishing variety of things which could be done with the co-operative method. We saw large and small co-operatives in a fairly limited area to the south and east of the City of York. We saw the Yorkshire Egg Producers' Association, which is a large concern, we saw the Yorkshire and Northern Wool Growers' Co-operative, which is a medium-sized association, and we saw the Yorkshire Farmers' Bacon Factory, which is not a large concern.

One of the most interesting—and I do not know whether I should declare an interest, but this was the only one of which I am not a member—was a small machinery co-operative at Holmeupon-Spalding-Moor, which serves about 3,000 acres and where farmers co-operate to dry their grain, which many of them also store on the same premises. It was impressive because, as has been said during the debate, the agriculturist is not noted, or has not been noted in the past, for being a particularly co-operative person. It is largely due to the activities of the Agricultural Central Co-operative Association Ltd. that this long tradition is being broken down.

I am sure that the Bill will greatly encourage the development of co-operation. I hope that it will bring the idea of co-operation into the minds of the Government so that it will be studied from the point of view of availability of grants, rating, and the rest of it to make sure that if a group of farmers get together to carry out some enterprise co-operatively, which, because of the size of their holdings, they cannot do individually, they do not suffer in treatment from the Government in such matters. Although this is not within the Bill, there is a great deal of room for consideration of these important matters.

In producer co-operatives there is great variety not only in size, but in capital needs. Some of the societies to which I belong, and which we visited on this trip, had taken from their members a nominal share of 5s. and raised capital in other ways. Others borrow the money from the bank and attempt to recoup over a short period. In yet others the question of the shortage of capital is the dominant consideration at almost every meeting of these societies, and the Bill will be a great help to them.

For one thing, it will allow greater investment, but, perhaps as important, it will, as the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green said, bring publicity on this subject. This question is a little like the attitude of too many people to the church collection. Before the war people used to give 3d. to the church collection. The number of threepenny bits in church collections is still very large.

Not everybody appreciates that if one is to have something, as times change one must increase the payments towards it, and I think that this is very true of producer co-operatives. I hope that the publicity of today's debate will encourage people to ask themselves, "Am I really fairly supporting my local co-operative? Do I perhaps realise that because I am not putting in as many shares as I could readily afford the co-operative has to go to the bank and get money on worse terms?".

I would like to say a word about one aspect of producer co-operatives which has not so far been mentioned. It is the forestry co-operative. Every word that has been said about agricultural co-operatives applies probably more strongly to forestry co-operatives. If it is difficult with the size of the modern farm to take full advantage of modern conditions and techniques, in the ordinary size of woodland unit it is immensely more so, because in this country woodland is owned in extremely small units, and to bring to bear the skill of management and the marketing knowledge in these small plots is an immense problem.

If we are to use our resources as we should in this country, it is vital that these small packets of woodlands should be cultivated with skill and knowledge. If that were done it would increase the amenities of the country and would bring a little extra income to many people. It is important to mention that forestry co-operatives will also benefit from workings of the Bill if, as I hope, it is passed into law

I had the privilege of sitting on the board of, I think, one of the largest forestry co-operatives in this country. Northern Forestry Products Ltd. I know the difficulties we repeatedly had over the question of the amount of capital available when this and other co-operatives were expanding. There have been a certain number of new co-operatives set up during the last year or two, and there is a general feeling of "going ahead" and of expansion, and I have no doubt that this provision will be of great help to these forestry co-operatives.

Horticulture and agriculture are specifically mentioned in Clause 2 of the Bill and I wonder why forestry has not been mentioned. Perhaps this is something which might be considered in Committee. Forestry is never quite sure of what it comes under. People concerned in forestry sometimes wish there was another "F" in the title of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. It would be good to know that the Bill covered and dealt with forestry co-operatives in the same way as other producer co-operatives.

indicated assent.

I am glad to see that the hon. Member agrees with me.

The Bill is not only a useful step forward in producer co-operation. It is a great achievement by the hon. Member for Govan, who brought it forward, and I hope that this debate, which has been very useful and enlightening, will cause a great deal of interest in the country and will stimulate this important movement.

I rise to speak briefly because of the comments made by the hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Worsley). I am delighted with what I regard as a most warmhearted speech from an hon. Gentleman about the principle of co-operation. I hope this example will be followed by many other Conservatives.

I have no wish to disturb the harmony of the House by bringing in partisan matters. I recognise that the Bill embraces not only consumer co-operatives but producer co-operatives. Perhaps for that reason it has been taker out of the party arena by hon. Gentlemen opposite and we are therefore able to get agreement on a matter which, in another context, we would not.

I have been in the House for five years, and I have witnessed a number of occasions on which the co-operative movement as a whole has been rebuffed, always I thought unfairly, at the hands of Treasury and other Ministers. I hope that this will not be the case today and that the excellent example of the producer and consumer societies to which reference has been made will be acknowledged and that their rightful place in the community accepted.

The hon. Gentleman made a point which I thought was in a sense rather strange when he more or less, I will not say chided, but suggested that perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) in promoting this excellent Bill had not gone far enough; he perhaps had not been radical enough. It was a peculiar charge to make against my hon. Friend. The charge, if it is a charge, is that perhaps £1,000 as the shareholding limit is somewhat modest, and that this idea of leap-frogging after a score of years from one position to another was hardly the most satisfactory way of going about this matter. This is a rather strange note of criticism considering that we on this side of the House have struggled for a long time and, indeed, are rather surprised that we managed apparently to get this accepted by the Government as the present limit. It only places us in the same position, if the Bill is passed, as the co-operative movement was in 1914, but I do not regard it as a reasonable argument that where we were in 1914 is where we ought to be in 1960, or where we should be in 1980. That seems to me a bad argument. I therefore welcome the hon. Gentleman's comments in this regard. I think he feels the same as I do, and as I know my hon. Friend the Member for Govan does, that we ought to have gone further than this. In the circumstances, however, this modest advance is probably as much as we can get while maintaining the present harmony in the House.

If we are in this excellent frame of mind on both sides of the House, however, in which we recognise the virtues of co-operative societies, whether producer or consumer—and I hope that we do—then, if the Bill becomes law, as I hope it will, perhaps the Government will examine the whole of the legislation governing industrial and provident societies. If the Bill is placed on the Statute Book it will be the sixth Act on the subject. The legislation is becoming a little more complex as the years go on. This might, therefore, be the time for the Government, in welcoming the Bill, as I hope they will, to say that they are considering a review of existing legislation on industrial and provident societies in order to bring it more into tune with our times.

Irrespective of any argument about capitalism, Socialism or any other "ism," I firmly believe that in our modern democracy in Britain today the co-operative societies ought to have a proper place in the development of the country. They deserve it. They are a form of social ownership which is very close to many proposals which we hear from all political parties. We have spent Friday afternoons discussing proposals for co-ownership from the Liberal Party, co-partnership from the Conservative Party and many other similar proposals from this side of the House on how we can spread ownership in this country. Surely the co-operative societies are a good example of social ownership.

I think that often, in their desire not to concede anything to the radical party in this country, hon. Members opposite blind themselves to the great usefulness and social purpose which the co-operative movement represents. I hope that hon. Members will divest themselves of their prejudices about the co-operatives, which the hon. Member for Keighley mentioned, which lead them to regard the co-operatives by their very nature as a second-class business. It is quite true that the co-operative movement as a whole does not pay its executives as highly as other organisations. Perhaps that is a mistake in this modern economy, but it has been a tradition of the movement that this should not be the case and that men should be willing to serve rather than to be paid as fulsomely as in other posts.

It is also the tradition of certain right-wing newspapers in this country constantly to attack the movement and to put it in the second class which they think it deserves. This attitude is shameful and wrong, and I am sure that the hon. Member for Keighley meant to convey that view too This is a kind of organisation in industry and agriculture which ought to have its deserved front rank place.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Govan on his good fortune in being first in the Ballot and also on choosing this much-needed Bill, and I am delighted that we have had such harmony on both sides of the House today.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin), as other hon. Members have done, on introducing the Bill, and, if necessary, I shall be prepared to support it if there is a Division. This does not necessarily mean, however, that I agree with everything which has been said by every previous speaker. There are two or three points which I want to raise before I sit down, as I shall in a few minutes.

The Bill has been described as a message going from the House, and the hon. Lady the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler) talked about the socially desirable nature of the co-operative societies. I do not agree with her. This is a free country, and if people want to shop in one place rather than in another, they are fully entitled to do so. If people like to subscribe to a particular party, they are fully entitled to do so. All political parties depend on their support.

We know where the support of the co-operative societies goes. Even though it goes there, I should never think of opposing anything of this kind for political reasons, but there is nothing socially desirable in shopping at a co-operative society. People do it from choice. I think that it is an unwise choice, because I am certain—and I want this message to go clearly from the House, and no one has yet said it clearly—that they will get better service, better attention, better credit and better goods from private traders.

That is why I do not care two straws whether the co-operative societies have this Bill; they are welcome to it, and good luck to them in that sense. It will do no good in increasing their trade, because they cannot give the service which private enterprise can give. That is the message which I want to go clearly from the House. But I shall not allow political prejudices to interfere with my support of the Bill. If they want extra money subscribed, why not? Private industry can get it, and probably much easier.

The hon. Member for Govan gave us figures about capital expenditure, but no one has told us whether there is any demand by the co-operative societies for this advance. Probably there is, but it has not been mentioned. No doubt the hon. Member who winds up the debate will tell us.

I can assure the hon. and gallant Member—

Hon. and learned.

I am sorry that gallantry should be divorced from learning. I can assure the hon. and learned Member that there is a demand in the retail societies.

I am obliged to the hon. Member.

I am glad that this a permissive Bill. If it had been compulsory, obliging societies to do this, I should have objected to it on the ground that they should be allowed to run their own affairs in their own way.

While I cannot wish the societies especial good luck, I wish the hon. Member luck in getting his Bill through. The Bill is well drafted, which is more than one can say for many Bills, both Government and private; it is clear, and it says exactly what it means.

I have spoken about consumer co-operatives, and I come to the second aspect—the agricultural co-operatives. They are desirable, but when we talk about credit for farmers, and particularly small farmers, what better body is there for deciding credit than the banks? They have more experience of rating credit values and the local managers have more knowledge of the local farmer and whether he is likely to farm well or badly.

I am not suggesting for a moment that anybody should have a monopoly in granting credit, and I do not suppose for a moment that the banks will worry about the credit which the agricultural co-operatives can give, but it is wrong for hon. Members to compare the position of agricultural co-operatives here with that in other countries. Their position is entirely different. We have a much more specialised agriculture in this country than they have; for example, in New Zealand farmers may produce butter and lambs exclusively, with one market for those commodities. In an agricultural industry of that kind it is wise to co-operate in order to market in the best way.

Here, with their huge export trade in cattle, for example, our farmers are faced with a different problem. While we want them to discuss their mutual interests together, it does not necessarily mean that the co-operative is ipso facto a good thing. We know of the very powerful influences which are wielded by the National Farmers' Union, and it is wrong to say that farmers, both large and small, do not have a voice in the governing of their affairs.

The hon. Member for Govan said that he would be accommodating on the question of advancing money without security. To be frank, I should have objected to such an advance, because they are dealing with other people's money and it would be wrong to advance such money without security merely because they like a particular member. When dealing with other people's money, there ought to be some form of restraint.

It is their own money.

Surely the banks are also dealing with other people's money.

All joint stock banks are limited liability companies.

As the hon. Member for Govan said that he was prepared to assist in setting up some form of security, I will not press the matter any further. I should have done so had he not been as accommodating on this occasion as I am sure he always is on others. I hope that the Bill will receive a Second Reading and will eventually pass through all its stages.

I am glad that in his opening remarks the hon. and learned Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty) indicated that if there were a Division he would support the Bill, because I felt that the nature of his speech indicated rather lukewarm support and one might have had some doubt. I did not really follow the hon. and learned Gentleman's opening point when he queried whether my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Butler), was right in saying that co-operative societies are socially desirable institutions, because, as he said, everyone has a choice as to where he will shop. That does not seem to me to counter the claim that a co-operative shop is a socially desirable institution.

Many congratulations have been offered to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) both on his good fortune in the Ballot and on his choice of subject. If I may, I should like to offer him my congratulations on the clarity and cogency of his speech when he introduced the Bill to the House. My hon. Friend is doing a service by the Bill to the retail co-operative movement and to the agricultural co-operative movement.

We on this side of the House, of course, are more closely associated with the retail co-operative movement, but we are more than friendly towards the development of agricultural co-operation. We know that many hon. Members opposite are closely associated with the agricultural co-operative movement, and we sometimes feel, as my hon. Friend the Member for Greenock (Dr. Dickson Mabon) indicated, that some of them might be more friendly towards the development of the retail co-operative movement.

I would stress that although there are differences of emphasis, differences in the nature of the support which the two sister movements have in this country, fundamentally they are based on the same principles. They are set up, of course, on the basis of the same law. The essential principles which that law ensures are that the members of a co-operative should exercise democratic control over its management, that distributions of interest on capital should normally be fixed and deliberately kept at a modest level, and that the major distribution of surplus should be in relation and in proportion to the amount of loyalty, support and use which the members makes of the services of the co-operative.

I wish to deal with one detail in Clause 1 (3), which I particularly welcome. It is the fact that a resolution of a committee is all that is necessary, in the first instance, to raise the capital holding of members from £500 to £1,000. I think I am right in saying that the same procedure was adopted in the Bill which Mr. W. T. Williams, at that time the Member for Barons Court, introduced in 1952. As a member of a management committee, as I was then and am now, I know that that procedure is of considerable administrative convenience to co-operative societies, and I welcome the fact that it is included in this Bill.

The retail consumers' movement, of course, welcomes the uplift to £1,000. Although we are not directly concerned with the second part of the Bill, we certainly have no objection to the possibility of agricultural co-operative societies lending to their members without security. Several hon. Members have pointed out that the raising of the limit on shareholding to £1,000 is really only catching up with the passage of time and with the diminution in the value of money.

In this connection, when I was browsing through the century-old HANSARD of the time when the £200 limit was fixed, I came across a quotation which rather startlingly illustrated the great change that had taken place both in the value of money and in the scale of co-operative enterprise. The hon. Gentleman who introduced the Bill nearly 100 years ago said, in referring to the membership, capital and trade of the then young movement, that it was doing £1½ million worth of trade and that he regarded that as an extraordinary and almost incredible amount of trade.

If it was considered suitable to make the limit of £200 at a time when £1½ million was considered to be extraordinary and almost incredible, surely it is perfectly reasonable to raise the limit to £1,000 when, in terms of retail trade, the amount is not £1½ million but more than £1,000 million. The £500 limit which was introduced in 1952 was, in my view, over-cautious at that time. I think it would have been better to raise the limit to £1,000 at that point. However, it was not done, and my hon. Friend the Member for Govan is now seeking to do that.

I think it has been obvious from the debate that the Bill is, perhaps, rather more in the interests of the agricultural co-operatives than of the consumer movement, although we in the consumer movement will find it very useful. We have a lot to do in the way of development—shops, vehicles, factories—and we have our problems from time to time of shortage of capital. In order to accomplish what we wish to do, therefore, the raising of the limit to £1,000 will be useful to us in our work.

There are not very many statistics which show us the number of members of co-operatives who have capital holdings approaching the present figure of £500. What is certain, however, is that there is a vast number of members who have nowhere near that amount. Indeed, we know that the average amount held is only something like £20. The fact that the average holding is only £20 might prompt the question, What is the significance of allowing some people, at any rate, to have up to £1,000? The significance, I think, lies in the fact that a relatively small number of members is responsible for a considerable proportion of the share capital of the movement. Though it is not a big proportion of the 12 million members, the capital which that small proportion introduces into the societies is important, and it may well be that the raising of the limit to £1,000 would produce an influx of capital which would be very welcome. If that is true of the consumer movement with a small number of members who are particular providers of capital, I think it must be all the more true in the case of agricultural co-operatives; I do not know, but I fancy that must be so. Therefore, this lifting of the figure to £1,000 must be particularly useful to the agricultural co-operatives.

It is the experience of the consumer movement that the capital of members, though still vital and important, has in recent years been a declining proportion of the total capital used by co-operative societies in the conduct of their business. This Bill may help to increase the amount of members' capital. But I stress that there is a need for capital to be raised by other means, by the building up of reserves and by the collective accumulation of capital in other ways. My hon. Friend the Member for Greenock referred to the fact that the co-operative movement has not received the greatest help at times from the Treasury when it has claimed—as it has claimed—that it is not getting fair treatment in respect of taxation, and so on. The collective provision of capital is handicapped in the co-operative society by the incidence of the Profits Tax as at present constructed.

Another piece of taxation which hampers the collection of co-operative capital is the differentiation between Post Office small savings and co-operative small savings. The fact that the first £15 of interest received on Post Office savings is tax free, whereas the first £15 of interest received on co-operative savings is not is a form of differentiation which we believe to be unfair. I put to hon. Members opposite, who have shown a commendable keenness over the development of co-operative societies in the agricultural sphere, and who welcome the possibility of members of co-operative societies depositing more funds with the society, that their agricultural societies also would receive considerable benefits if these unfair tax burdens were put right.

Order. I think that the hon. Gentleman at that point is going beyond what is permitted to him in this debate. I am sure that it is all right to argue that an increase in the permitted holding in the co-operative society is needed because of the difficulty of accumulating capital, but he ought not to argue in this debate for a change in the taxation system as applied to the society.

I bow to your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, and I will not pursue that point. But the one form of capital is so closely related to the other, the need for individual members' share capital is so closely related to the collective provision of capital, that I wished to point out these other factors in the matter.

I urge hon. Members who have shown this keenness about agricultural co-operation to show in the future more keenness about our side of the movement, the retail co-operative movement. We shall look forward to receiving their support, not only in connection with this Bill but with the development of co-operation in all spheres of life. It is our firm belief that the co-operative principle is one of tremendous assistance to small people be they farmers, consumers or tenants. In all forms of life co-operation is an extremely important principle. We do our best to make sure that that principle is applied in every sphere of trade, housing and so on, and we should welcome the support of hon. Members opposite.

I think it may help if at this point I intervene to tell the House that the Government are glad to welcome this Bill which the hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) has presented, and which is supported by a number of hon. Friends and by my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr. B. Harrison). Nearly every hon. Member who has spoken has mentioned that he speaks either from the producers' angle or the consumers' angle. I think I can claim properly that I speak for both, since our interests extend from agrciulture right across the water to food. Perhaps that is a form of co-operation which we should not overlook even though it has not been mentioned as yet.

It is true that this Bill has a particular reference to certain forms of agricultural co-operation, and here I do not think it out of place for me to express a word of credit to the Agricultural Central Co-operative Society which for a long time has done a great deal of work in this sphere, and has been working towards something of the kind envisaged in this Bill. My Department has many contacts with that society and our aims are in common.

The hon. Member for Govan has explained that the first purpose of his Bill is to raise the permissible share holding in co-operative societies. Here, following the tradition of the House, I think I ought to declare my interest. For a long time I have been a member of an agricultural co-operative society; in fact, I am a member of two. One of them I particularly wish to mention has expanded greatly and has gone so far as to carry out a successful invasion of south Scotland from the English side of the Border. But as the hon. Member for Govan has mentioned that he would like this Friday to be a special day of truce, I will not pursue that matter further.

The suggestion is that the figure of £500 which is now the law of the land should be raised to £1,000, and I think most hon. Members would agree that that is certainly in keeping. It may well be that without this provision the development of some of the societies might be impeded, for example, certain of the agricultural co-operatives, particularly those specialising in marketing. We think that it ought to be made possible for members' shareholdings to be made more commensurate with the business put through the societies. The House may have in mind particularly those where expenses are high, such as fruit packing, and where a high rate of investment per ton of throughput is needed, if they are to operate really effectively.

The second main purpose of the Bill provides for agricultural societies to lend money without security. Of course, the creation of credit is nothing new in the movement, either here or abroad. But, so far, agricultural co-operatives have not previously been allowed to lend without security, and societies wishing to do so have to register under the Companies Acts. There is no reason why the growth of such societies should be impeded in this way and, subject to certain safeguards which the hon. Member for Govan has mentioned—I think his words were that he would like to secure Amendments fair to all legitimate interests during the Committee stage, and I think that was very fairly put—we would agree that some such change might well he made.

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will recollect that I inserted the two words, "if necessary." While I and I am sure everyone is anxious to co-operate, the hon. Gentleman will recognise that I must preserve my status at the moment with regard to the Bill.

I am not trying to put any pressure on the hon. Member. In order to be fair to him, I wrote down his words as accurately and quickly as I could. If I made an error by leaving out those two words, I certainly did not do so on purpose. I think he agrees that some such safeguard would be an advantage in this Bill. We should say that this change might well be confined to societies whose main function is the creation of credit; for example, we might say those which are providing finance for machinery syndicates. It might well lead to difficulties if societies whose main function were some other form of co-operation were too light-heartedly to take on the business of lending—which is no easy technique to master—as a sort of sideline.

Credit without security is not an unmixed blessing, either to the lender or the borrower. All the same, I hope the House will approve such changes as I think the hon. Member and other hon. Members who have spoken have in mind for debate in Committee. With these reservations, I hope the House will help this Bill on its way.

I think the House will agree that the assurance which has been given by the Joint Parliamentary Secretary that the Government will help this Bill along to the Statute Book will be very welcome. I do not think there will be any quarrel from this side of the House or in any part of the House about the need, if need is shown, to amend Clause 2 so that, if safeguards are necessary in giving of credit without security as now stated in the Bill, they may be written into it by amendments.

I join with other hon. Members on both sides of the House in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) on using his good luck in the Ballot to bring forward this very useful Measure and also for the clear exposition of what in effect is a technical Bill. I am sure that his great forbearance in avoiding partisan political issues during his exposition is also to be commended. One hon. Member said that it was a non-startling Bill, but it has produced a remarkably good and interesting debate. The only comment I make is that, if I remember rightly, it was in the early years of this century when I believe Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman said, "We are all Socialists now."

Harcourt.

It was Sir William George Grenville Venables Vernon Harcourt, to give him his full name.

At any rate it was a leader of the Liberal Party. Unfortunately, it was a sadly premature statement, but the support given this Bill today by both sides of the House indicates that we are all co-operaters now. That is a step in the right direction.

Apart from the hon. and learned Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty), who apparently did not know what the Bill was about and does not seem to know what the co-operative movement is about, I think it true to say that this Bill has the unanimous support of the House. We are very glad indeed that the Government are supporting it, probably with a slight amendment, and I hope it will soon be on the Statute Book.

Now that this Bill obviously has the blessing of my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Darling), winding up for the Opposition, it is unnecessary for me to pursue the subject at any great length. However, I should like to say a few words, as a practical farmer, about the importance of the Bill to agriculture. I also add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) on his luck in the Ballot and on choosing this most important Bill.

As many hon. Members have already said, this country does not compare with America or Scandinavian countries, or indeed other countries of Europe, in its agricultural co-operatives, but I understand that there are now 300 farm co-operatives in Britain. Most of them are registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, which does not permit their members to hold more than £500 capital. There is no doubt a very real need to increase that amount to £1,000, not only because of the change in the value of money, but very much because farm co-operatives are expanding rapidly and there is great need for more expansion in future. Therefore, I unreservedly support Clause 1.

On Clause 2 I have some reservations, as obviously other hon. Members have, about advances being given without any security whatever. There is, however, certainly a need to make it much easier for co-operatives to lend money, thereby placing them on the same footing as organisations registered under the Companies Acts. In my view, this Bill is absolutely essential if we are to increase agricultural co-operation. Such an increase is absolutely necessary in the light of present conditions and trends for the future.

In this year's Annual Review and Determination of Guarantees it was stated that:

"The net income of the industry depends on many factors apart from the level of the guarantees, not least the industry's ability to adapt itself to changing circumstances."

Changing conditions today call for reduced costs and increased efficiency. The small farmer with very limited capital will find it most difficult, and certainly uneconomic, even if possible, to invest large sums in small units in order to keep up with future trends in the industry. In my opinion, the only answer for him is more co-operation, for otherwise there is the certainty of being swallowed by a larger unit.

In my constituency there is a land settlement association, which, I understand, is not the same as a co-operative association, as these associations were set up under statute after the First World War, but the principle is exactly the same, that of co-operation in purchasing seeds, fertilisers, machinery and, even more important, co-operation in marketing. Advantages of such holdings over independent smallholdings is only too obvious. The main difficulty about agricultural co-operation is a social one. It goes against the grain of the independent farmer to co-operate. This I quite understand as a farmer myself, but these barriers must be broken down in the interests of the industry itself.

There is a feeling that compulsory co-operation is intended, but I am sure that no hon. Member would want that to happen and for the situation to be like that in Communist countries. This year I witnessed an interrogation in West Berlin of a farmer who was fleeing from East Germany simply because he was forced to join a co-operative farm. I saw the misery that that can cause. At the same time, there is need for more co-operation among small farmers in this country. By increasing the amount of share capital and making it easier for co-operatives to make advances to members, the Bill will be of real help to this most important of our industries.

Far be it from me to delay the discussion of the following Bill, but I want to make a few general observations on the importance of the Measure that we are now discussing. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) is a man of many and varied interests. I am sure that he had to resist many temptations before deciding to submit a simple but important Bill of this nature. I am certain that he would have liked to put forward a Bill relating to Holy Loch, or other matters which engage his attention in this House from time to time. But he has chosen this simple Bill which deals with the improvement of one of our greatest social organisations, namely, the co-operative movement.

It is clear from the discussion that we have had so far that there will be no opposition to this simple but important Bill. It is well that from time to time the House should have an opportunity of discussing our great social movements. The co-operativemovement started in Britain and spread throughout the whole world. In the tropical zone of Africa there are many vital co-operatives, and in the frigid zone of the North Pole co-operative organisations exist among the Eskimos. It all started here in Britain. It is the greatest existing movement for training people in the practice of democracy in our universe. This movement will expand throughout Africa, Asia and the Antarctic. The movement in the Metropolis is strong and progressive, and anything that the House can do to remove obstacles preventing its expansion is a very healthy occupation.

Hon. Members on both sides of the House have discussed the relative merits of consumer co-operatives and agricultural co-operatives. What is not clearly understood is the fact that the co-operative retail societies, numbering about 1,000, are among the largest farmers in Britain. For example, the London Co-operative Society is one of the six largest farmers in the south of England. Even on the retail side, therefore, there is a very powerful agricultural organisation which makes a large contribution to the economy of the country. One of the largest and most thriving orchards in this country and, indeed, in Europe or the world is I he co-operative orchard at Bedford, which has over I million apple trees. It is efficiently run, and it makes a very important contribution to the co-operative retail trade and co-operative agriculture.

It is pleasing to note that the House accepts the necessity for expanding and assisting as much as possible the development of co-operation on the consumer side, the production side and the agricultural side. I therefore have great pleasure in supporting the Bill, and I hope that it will get a unanimous Second Reading.

I want to give a word of welcome to this Measure from the agricultural point of view, and also to congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) on introducing it. As with most other industries, one of the basic problems facing agriculture is that of reducing the costs of production. The Government are all to apt to preach to farmers by telling them that this can be done purely by producing the same quantity of produce at lower cost. That is obviously a very limited argument in farming.

In many cases it is possible to increase efficiency—that is, to lower costs—only by actually increasing production. On large farms, employing perhaps half a dozen men, it may be possible to hold the present rate of production while reducing the number of employees to five, but the vast majority of our farmers employ either members of their own families or one man at the most, and the Government have not yet made any very helpful suggestions as to how such a farm can be run profitably on a basis of employing less than one man. That must mean that increased efficiency can come only from increased production.

I have held for a long time that agricultural co-operatives can play a big part in helping in these matters. They can help to improve production directly by giving smaller farmers the advantage of bulk purchase facilities and, in certain circumstances, the advantages of producer processing. But they can also help enormously—and this is a sphere which we are only just beginning to exploit—in the whole problem of marketing. They can help to improve quantity and also to standardise, and they can help even more to increase demand by placing on the market a product which is really tuned in to what the housewife demands, and to produce a consistent quality. This is much more difficult for a series of small farmers working on their own.

It is doubtful whether, in areas consisting largely of small farms, many individuals will be likely to find even as much as £1,000. Nevertheless, as I think the hon. Member for East Ham, South (Mr. Oram) mentioned, one of the snags of the present limit is that many of these farmers, even if their initial contribution was a relatively small one, have been prepared to allow their bonuses, and so on, to accumulate for the benefit of the co-operatives in order to increase the available reserves.

The limit of £500, however, has meant in many cases that the funds which farmers were prepared to leave in the co-operatives had to be paid out to them because they exceeded this limit. I do not know whether there is any special merit in the figure of £1,000, as opposed to a figure of £2,000 or an even higher sum, but I certainly welcome this as an advance, and again congratulate the hon. Member for introducing a Measure which is not only valuable in itself but shows that the House is anxious to encourage farmers to use the mechanism of co-operation.

Hon. Members on this side have been chided for the somewhat different degree of enthusiasm they show towards the ordinary traditional retail co-operative as compared with the agricultural co-operative. In my opinion, the explanation of that different feeling lies to a large extent in the hands of the co-operators, as we generally understand them. I imagine that it was entirely of their own wish that they allied themselves to the political philosophy of public ownership.

Does the hon. Member realise that the co-operative movement was forced into politics only by the attacks of Governments supported by the hon. Member's party?

We should be getting beyond the terms of the Bill if we were to proceed further with that argument.

Agriculturists regard this as a system of individual ownership, albeit through the mechanism of co-operation. That seems to us to be quite different from the public ownership which the party opposite espouses. With that digression, I congratulate the hon. Member for Govan again, and hope that we shall be able to consider, in the reasonably near future, other aspects of co-operative marketing, especially in relation to agriculture.

As a Scottish Member has been fortunate in the Ballot and has chosen a United Kingdom Bill, he has saved us from the need of further deliberation in the Scottish Standing Committee, but it may be appropriate for me to say a few words about the Scottish reaction to this general Measure.

Clause 1, which has been generally welcomed, is thoroughly endorsed by the Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society. I believe that the Society is most enthusiastic about the provision which extends the sum which can be advanced from £500 to £1,000.

The caveats which have been generally voiced on Clause 2 are felt even more strongly in Scotland than they are south of the Border. This is because, as the hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Rankin) will recognise, there are a considerable number of extremely small societies in the Highlands and in the North and they lack the necessary expertise and resources to take in their stride these difficult and dangerous lending operations without security.

I understand that the Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society, which has the most expert view in these matters, feels strongly about those reservations. It also feels—this is a technical point which can best be dealt with in Committee—that organisations which are co-operative in character should be registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, 1893. Those are the sort of matters which are proper for Committee deliberation.

The general point is that the Scottish view is that Clause 1 is as welcome, if not even more welcome, in Scotland than it is south of the Border. The possible difficulties inherent in Clause 2, which we hope can be satisfactorily cleared up in Committee, are even more apparent to small societies in the North than may be the case with larger societies in the prosperous agricultural areas of the South.

I thought it right to state those brief reflections on the Scottish point of view and also to join in welcoming the Bill and congratulating the hon. Member for Govan, who has so ably introduced it.

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

This is a limited Measure, but I hope that it will commend itself to the House as a useful and necessary one. The law in regard to printer's imprint is at present in disrepute. There is great uncertainty about when an imprint is required and when it is not. The ancient regulations on the Statute Book do not meet the needs of the modern printing industry. They take no account of new printing processes, nor of the varied products of the printing industry today. More important, the law as it stands in its present vague and archaic form on occasions produces, as I shall show, serious injustice.

I hope the House will bear with me for a few minutes if I attempt to set the Measure in its historical perspective. The imprint is as old as printing itself. Printers have always wished to use this form of advertisement for their existence and their work. The false imprint came very much into vogue in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In particular, there are delightful fanciful imprints from Puritan authors and printers who were campaigning against the Church. They were in considerable danger themselves and, therefore, took any measures they could to conceal the origin of their work. "An Epistle to the Terrible Priests" in 1588 is one example, where the imprint is, "Printed oversea in Europe within two furlongs of a bouncing priest."

Before the eighteenth century there was no legal obligation for a printer to put an imprint upon his work. It was customary after the Engravings Act, 1734, for engravings to bear the name of the man who had produced them in order for him to be afforded some protection of copyright.

The present law dates from the Unlawful Societies Act, 1799. There was then an insurrection in Ireland and there were dangers of revolutionary ideas spreading from the continent. In March of that year a Committee of Secrecy reported to the House on the whole problem. It was as a result of that report that the present law was introduced. The Report spoke of

"the propagation of these destructive principles which originally produced the French Revolution."

The Committee reported that

"The most effectual engine employed for this purpose has been the institution of political societies of a nature and description before unknown in any country and inconsistent with public tranquillity and with the existence of regular government."

It was to meet this threat that the Act of 1799 was introduced. It was a wide and very severe Measure. Some thought that it was too severe. According to Woodfall's Parliamentary Reports:

"General Walpole rose and said he thought it was his duty to oppose the measure as tending to take away from the general security of our liberties. He ridiculed with much humour several passages of the Report of the Secret Committee."

Despite that, the Act was passed, imposing swingeing restrictions on Press and political freedom. Most of these restrictions have by now been repealed, but the regulations governing the printer's imprint remain almost intact. With certain narrow business exemptions, an imprint is required by that Act upon every printed matter. There is a penalty provided for of £5 per copy for every violation. The intention was to hamper political societies and to prevent the French from using British presses. There have been only minor amendments in subsequent Acts, and nearly all the regulations in the 1799 Act were re-enacted in 1869.

These restrictions today impose a serious handicap upon the industry, because there are many articles upon which it is impossible or undesirable for the printer to put his imprint. Examples are, visiting cards, letter headings, wrappers, cartons and 101 other articles which are produced today but which were never envisaged when the 1799 Act was passed.

Yet, if the printer leaves his imprint off these articles, he breaks the law. Admittedly, the Director of Public Prosecutions has not in recent years taken action against any printer for a purely technical offence, but by the provisions of the Act of 1799 the printer cannot claim payment upon any article if there is a technical infringement of the law.

In recent years there have been a number of instances where customers have defaulted on their obligations because of just such a technical infringement. Very often customers ask a printer to leave his imprint off. As a rule, the printer is only too anxious to have his name printed, because it is a good advertisement. But with many articles, the customer says that he does not want the imprint. There have been a number of cases where, despite the fact that the customer has specifically asked the printer to leave the imprint off, when it has come to paying the bill, the printer has found that he has been unable to enforce payment because he has technically infringed the law. That in itself is a justification for the measures which I propose.

Clause 1 (1) exempts all articles upon which there is no possible reason for an imprint to be required. Anything which carries a message will still need an imprint. Any publications which could conceivably be seditious, obscene, pornographic or libellous will still require an imprint. Thus, Clause 1 (1, a) provides that

"words grouped together in a manner calculated to convey a message"

will require to have the printer's imprint upon them, unless they are

"words calculated to convey only a greeting"—

such as a Christmas card, or a greeting card—

"an invitation"—

such as an invitation card—

"or other message in a conventional form".

Then one can think of forms, order books, catalogues, and so on.

Equally, by subsection (1, b), pictures, photographs and cartoons will still require to have an imprint upon them but trade-marks and purely formal designs will not. Thus, the intention of this main Clause of the Bill is to release from the obligation of an imprint certain articles for which one cannot think of any reason for them carrying an imprint.

Subsection (2) of the Clause makes two effective changes. It releases the printer from the need to keep a copy of all these articles. Under the 1799 Act, he is required to keep for at least six months a copy of every article upon which there needs to be an imprint and there is a penalty of up to £20 for not doing this. Evidently, it is a burden to the printer nowadays to have to keep a copy of every label and every greetings card that he prints.

The second effect of subsection (2) is that it frees the publisher from any serious consequences resulting from his distributing any of these articles and it frees the printer from the obligation of restraining the publisher from distributing cartons, and so on. The publisher of an illegal document is today quite often the housewife, because the 1799 Act makes it illegal to expose to the public view any printed paper not having the name and place of abode of any person printed thereon." If one sees anybody carrying such an article, it is at present lawful, in the words of the 1799 Act,

"to seize and detain the person and deliver him or her to some constable or police officer."

Housewives carrying a printed paper shopping bag in the High Street can hardly realise the terrible peril in which they walk. Subsection (2) will safeguard them for the future.

Subsection (3) extends the exemptions of the 1799 Act for letterpress to all the modern processes of the industry, like photogravure, lithography, and so on. The 1799 Act exempts certain business articles connected with the selling of goods. There was a case in Bournemouth four years ago of a printer who had supplied some travel brochures to a customer. They were of substantial value; the bill was something like £800. The customer refused to pay on the ground that the imprint had been left off, although, admittedly, at his request.

The printer took advice, hoping that travel brochures would be covered by the exemptions of the Act, but found, on the advice of two eminent counsel, that the Act extended only to certain documents involved in the selling of goods, not in the selling of services. Therefore, subsection (3) extends those exemptions to services. Subsection (4) is self-explanatory.

This Measure will be of substantial help to printers. It will, as, I hope I have demonstrated, release them from a number of difficulties under which they now labour. Also, by making the law clearer, it will help to ensure that the imprint is not omitted from those documents on which it should be placed. If the law is clear, as I hope it will be if this Measure is passed, the printer will be able to insist upon putting his imprint upon an article if it is required, even when he is asked not to do so by his customer.

Whatever views hon. Members may have of the French Revolution or of any French revolution, I hope that it will not be held that this is a Bill in the words of the 1799 Secret Committee, "inconsistent with public tranquillity." It will be of real value in the printing industry and it will serve to simplify the task of the printer.

It is rather a coincidence—it may be a unique one—that our great printing industry has come under discussion in this House twice within six sitting days. In my experience, that is unusual. I never remember anything like it before.

I am not here today to offer serious objections to the Bill, the Second Reading of which has been moved by the hon. Member for Lewisham, North (Mr. Chataway). The House will, however, agree that when dual interests are involved in any Measure that comes before it, close attention should be given to the effect of those interests upon either of the parties who may be concerned.

To those of us who are members of the trade unions connected with the Printing and Kindred Trades Federation, this is an important matter and we have given close attention to the phraseology of the Bill. In particular, so great were our doubts about its phraseology that we thought it wise to take counsel's opinion on it.

It is interesting that when one has an opportunity of talking to colleagues about the Bill, my general impression has been that the doubts expressed to us in the printing trade unions by our counsel are confirmed by the views of Members interested in the promotion of the Bill in this House, the advice given to us being that it was rather unfortunate that the terms of the Bill were negative rather than positive. I refer to Clause 1. Subsection (1) begins with the word "Nothing" and in line 9 uses the word "neither". There are other negatives in paragraphs (a) and (b).

I ought to acquaint the House that being desirous of coming to a satisfactory arrangement by the Bill—in other words, not desiring to oppose it, but desiring to make it workable in the interests of both the master printers and of our trade unions concerned—we have already endeavoured to make representations to the promoter of the Bill with a view to finding a form of words that might satisfy both our interests.

At this point, because, while we are sitting as a House, it will not be possible for me to make a second speech, I hope that at least I may leave the thought with the hon. Member for Lewisham, North that he might think in terms of agreeing that the breathing space between Second Reading and Committee might be put to profitable use if our two organisations—the Master Printers Federation and the Printing and Kindred Trades Federation—again collaborate to consider the wording of the Bill. If they cannot find a satisfactory form of words, it might be that their counsel, on both sides, might be able to advise them as to something that would meet the case and satisfy both our interests.

It is true, as the sponsor of the Bill said, that Parliament—and this is interesting—has ever since 1799, I think it was, required that imprints should be placed upon most printed items. This was long before the trade unions had any interest in print whatsoever as a means of employment. Parliament in its wisdom, a century and a half ago, thought that this was a necessary procedure. We know, of course, the reason. There was a lot of seditious literature published in the early days of printing. By trying to enforce a legal requirement that the name of the printer should be imprinted on his work, offenders could be traced.

It is no less important today that it should be possible, wherever we can enforce the law, to trace documents which are issued for public circulation. I ought not to be provocative in this debate, but I have a little document in my pocket which I was very tempted to produce here, and which was issued in the 1955 General Election, which emanated from the north of England and which we in the Labour Party regarded as being a scurrilous document. Fortunately, this man put his imprint on it—he was both publisher and printer—and we knew the source of it.

Hon. Members will know from their own experience, and you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, will probably have experienced this, that there are people still around today who will drop a document on a café table, or leave it on a bus seat, or leave it lying around in a train, and we have no means of identifying them unless we enforce the use of the printer's imprint.

There are one or two things about this matter that I am not too clear about and which, I would say, I scarcely understand. Here let me say, first, to those Members in the House who are connected with the Master Printers' Federation that I appreciate their document setting out the reasons why they want this Bill and their courtesy in sending it to me, and it has been exceedingly helpful. However, I should like to make a comment on the document headed "The Printer's Imprint" and the criticism which the Federation has of the existing law and where it says

"It is not as clear as it might be what items are covered by the exemptions from the imprint requirements."

In other words, what is asked for is more specific determination of the exemptions. Of course, it readily comes to my mind that perhaps a Schedule to the Bill would be the answer. Here again, we have quite a degree of sympathy with the master printers about this. We think that there would probably be some good in having a Schedule, but we also think that it might create a fair amount of difficulty, for if a Schedule were to be published, then immediately—there can be no doubt about it—everybody would come rushing in saying, "This ought to be left out," or "This ought to be put in," and so on. We do appreciate the difficulties involved. So I would suggest to the sponsor of the Bill and his hon. Friends that, as this is a Measure which could be an advantage to both sides of the industry, there might helpfully be consultations.

I would point out that we in the trade unions always like to see the use of an imprint, because it helps us considerably in our own business. In the printing industry—and I think that my friends who are on the masters' side of the industry would agree with me about this—we do suffer from the little one-man show which sets up in a back room and uses an Adana press and produces chemists' labels for bottles, and so on. I think that it is true that the majority of the printing houses in this country, particularly those houses which are responsible for the really high class printing which is turned out—and some of the finest printing in the world is produced in this country—are indebted to the law in that it requires them to put their imprint on their work. It is, of course, a very good advertisement for them and they are not ashamed to have it there.

I do not know whether any subsequent speaker from the other side of the House is prepared to give us any assurances. As I say, we do not want in any way to try to stop this Bill provided it can be so phrased as to meet what I am sure are the objectives of both sides. I have no doubt myself that both sides are after the same thing and will welcome its achievement, if we can find a form of words which will conciliate our viewpoints.

I think that we have a right to be concerned about the intention of the Bill because, after all, the Title of Clause 1 is:

"Relaxation of requirements as to printer's imprint, etc."

and that very word "relaxation", of course, makes one open one's eyes and start wondering what are those relaxations and where will they end if Parliament permits them to take effect. It is reasonable, I think, that we should be concerned about that, but I cannot imagine that there could be any serious difficulty in coming to agreement on it. I cannot imagine so.

So I hope that there will be consultation before the Bill goes to Committee. One of the disadvantages we have suffered from today is that the Bill was available to us only on Monday and the intervening period has not been too great to permit of adequate consultations taking place. I think that we have probably all suffered as a result of that. Perhaps the Bill could have gone through almost on the nod if only all the parties concerned had had the opportunity of discussing the matter together beforehand.

I regret that I am not able to say that I can give a complete and absolute blessing to the Bill. I only hope that we can find some point at which we can reconcile any differences we may have, and that in Committee the sponsor of the Bill will not completely shut his mind to the possibilities of amending it if by being so amended it can become a wholly agreed Measure.

We all ought to congratulate both North and South on coming together in this way—my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North (Mr. Chataway) upon introducing the Bill and upon the very clear way in which he has dealt with it, and the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Wilkins) for the welcome which he gave to it; because, if I may say so, I think that it was not so much that he was damning it with faint praise as praising it with faint damns—but not very serious damns, just reservations of the position which come from dealing with an extremely comprehensible Bill.

That is the word—"reservations".

I am sure that I am speaking on behalf of both sides of the printing industry. For once I may be allowed to speak as someone interested in a printing concern. We have here a situation in which from both the craftsmen's point of view and the master craftsmen's point of view everybody is anxious to be proud of their work and to put their imprint upon it.

The extent to which imprints are put in notwithstanding that they are clearly exempt under the present Act is significant. For instance, all papers to do with the proceedings of this House are exempt, but when we pick up our HANSARD we find that Her Majesty's Stationery Office is proud to put on the front that it is responsible for that astonishing achievement which gives us a record of last night's proceedings on our breakfast table this morning. Likewise, has any hon. Member ever signed a share transfer form which has never had an imprint at the bottom stating that further copies can be obtained from such and such an address, although it is exempt from the requirement to have an imprint?

In other words, we are discussing the Bill in a context in which every printer and worker in the place wishes to be proud of his work and to put his seal upon it. There are certain forms of printing in which it is not practicable to do this without completely damaging the value of the craft as a masterpiece, and the purpose of the Bill is, indeed, one of relaxation in that respect.

The hon. Member for Bristol, South raised the question of the joint interest of the Master Printers' Federation and the Printing and Kindred Trades Federation. I think that I speak on behalf of everybody in the House when I say that the House always welcomes assistance from relevant bodies outside who really "know their stuff" and whose joint approval of anything that comes to us means that it comes with a far greater certainty of our being right when we give it the strength of Law. I am sure that I speak for all hon. Members when I say that we would strongly welcome it, if it happens outside—we cannot do it here—that these two bodies should get together and tell us whether there are Amendments which should come to Committee which would enable the Bill, when found acceptable to the House, to be as acceptable as possible to both parties in the industry.

I think that one of the difficulties which made the hon. Member for Bristol, South reserve his position and that of others in the printing and kindred trades is, as he rightly said, the extraordinary number of negatives in the Bill. The substantive Acts are all negative, and there is a great deal not only of double but of treble negatives in the Bill.

I should like to pay tribute to the staff of the Public Bill Office. When I read the Bill I thought that after serving fifteen years in the House I was becoming a complete dunce, because I did not know where I was. Thanks to skilled advice upstairs, I now understand that the effect of Clause 1 really is that any message, any sentence, must carry an imprint, with the one exception that if it contains only a greeting, like "Happy Christmas", or an invitation to tea, or a phrase like "Request the honour of your company at luncheon", or a message in conven- tional form, like "Keep your pecker up", it does not have to carry an imprint. But if the message says "Pitman: keep your pecker up" it should carry an imprint, because it would remove it from the class of the general and conventional to the particular and detailed.

I do not think that anybody in the House would feel that, provided we have left in the restriction that every message must carry an imprint unless it is of this very limited character, we are opening the doors in any way more than they ought generally to be opened, having regard to the fact that a printer always wants to put his imprint on, anyhow. The hon. Member for Bristol, South mentioned the possibility of people leaving leaflets on the seats of buses, in trains and on café tables, and so on. Let us face the fact that nothing we can do in the House will stop illegal actions. What we are out to do is to deal with the law-abiding printer and distributor and make his task easier. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North has already pointed out, the printer is already in a position of very great difficulty and sometimes even of danger.

The staff of the Public Bill Office tell me that the only relaxation that Clause 1 (1, b) gives is that all drawings, illustrations and pictures will have to have an imprint on them but that those which represent only a geometrical, floral or other design or a registered trade mark or any combination thereof will not in themselves require the printer's imprint. If there is a fleur-de-lys at the top of a menu card, that does not mean that when one later comes to write the menu on it one must put the printer's imprint on it. One can do it if one wishes, but one is allowed to leave it off. It seems to me that the relaxation given in subsection (1, b will prove not to present the difficulties to which the hon. Member for Bristol, South referred.

I should like to emphasise to the House, as has already been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North, that there is a real need for the Bill because the continuation of the existing law puts the law-abiding printer at the mercy of a shark. This is one of those situations in which law and practice have got so far divorced from one another that it is really impossible for the most law-abiding and honourable printer to carry out the law. Speaking not as a printer, but as a Member of Parliament, I would say that it is highly desirable that from time to time we should close the gap where it evolves in this way, and make it possible for the well-intending to be law-abiding printer to carry out the law, and cease to put him in a position in which it is quite impossible for him to do so.

I recommend the Bill, therefore, very strongly to the House. Having now drawn attention to so much of this matter in raising it, we are in a worse position if the Bill does not go through. Therefore, if the House has sympathy with its general principles, I hope that it will give the Bill a Second Reading.

I should like to add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Lewisham, North (Mr. Chataway) on his success in the Ballot and on his selecting this day for a Second Reading debate on the Bill when his prescience must have indicated no doubt that there would be a great measure of unanimity in the Chamber.

If the Director of Public Prosecutions carried out logically the Unlawful Societies Act, 1799, I am not quite sure where any of us would be. If I had a business card which bore the words "Paper merchant" that would be within the law although there was no imprint on it. If an hon. Member opposite had a business or professional card that said, "Insurance consultant" no doubt it would be illegal for him if it had no imprint.

Fortunately, in a great majority of cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions is a sensible and sane man and does not carry out the law to its logical consequences, and only interposes in conditions of extreme illegality when the subject matter of the message or the book is obviously contrary to the public interest.

The position of the printer is only, therefore, made difficult if the customer is unscrupulous—cases where, having slipped up, even at the customer's request, owing to the great uncertainty of the law, he is refused his proper payment for the goods. These cases are, fortunately, rare. It therefore gives me great pleasure to support the Bill in principle.

I hope that better wording can be found for the main Clause. I agree with the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Pitman) that the multiple negatives led one to read it many times before one was quite satisfied about its significance—and even then one was a little uncertain. I am pleased that we have had two adequate explanations from the benches opposite today about the significance of Clause 1, but I hope that in Committee it will be further studied in order to try to make it clearer, so that we shall not have to make legal interpretations, and the printers, both masters and men, will be able to carry on their business in greater happiness through feeling that the law is simplified and in accordance with modern requirements.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North (Mr. Chataway) on introducing the Bill. I am also most grateful, as are other hon. Members, to my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr. Pitman) for explaining Clause 1, because I was inclined to agree with the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Wilkins) that it was fraught with double negatives. Its intention was by no means clear.

I welcome the minor relaxation of the law on printers' imprints which the Bill introduces. Nevertheless, there is a strong argument in favour of making it obligatory to put the publishers' imprints on printed matter as well as the printers', particularly nowadays when so much undesirable literature is produced.

Clause 1 (3) is intended to meet the revolutionary changes in reproduction in printing processes Which have occurred since 1869, such as in photogravure and lithography, but only in so far as it covers the printing of books by lithographic and photographic processes. We should, however, examine in Committee the definition of the word "engravings". If I understand it correctly, impressions of engravings were exempt under the provisions of the original Act. If that is so, then Clause 1 (1, b), when mentioning

"a drawing, illustration or other picture …"

which must now bear an imprint, should cover every possible form of reproduction by whatever process it is reproduced.

Nowadays the quality of reproductions is so high that there is considerable risk of some reproductions, unless they bear a printer's imprint of one sort or another, being indistinguishable from the original.

Would not my hon. Friend agree that paragraphs (a) and (b) in subsection (1) of Clause 1 deal with what is reproduced and that it is Clause 1 (3) which deals with how it is reproduced? Would not he also agree that the only effect of Clause 1 (3) is to bring all printing processes into the position where there is no longer doubt as to whether the offset is an impression or by letterpress?

I appreciate that point. I was trying to emphasise, on Clause 1 (1, b), where it says that

"a drawing, illustration or other picture …"

must hear an imprint, that great care must be taken to see that all forms of reproduction bear an imprint. I do not say, however, that each illustration in each book should bear an imprint.

I welcome the Bill and hope that it will receive a Second Reading.

Most hon. Members who have spoken in this debate have a direct interest in the printing trade. It is perhaps right that a little bit of fresh air from outside should be introduced in criticism not of the principle of the Bill but of the wording. The wording is very bad. It jumps backwards and forwards between neithers, nors and nots, until one does not know what one is talking about.

Might we not have begun simply by saying, "Notwithstanding anything contained in the Act, the following matters shall not require a printer's imprint"—and then follow with a list? In that way one is aware of the subjects and the whole thing is clear and simple. If it is thought and hoped to bring clarity to the lives of printers by this Bill, I am afraid they will have to spend a lot of time finding out what it means and will be in greater darkness afterwards than they were before.

We will have a field-day with this Bill in Committee.

I hope that we shall, and it can start in the House. I am giving my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North (Mr. Chataway) the benefit of some free legal advice by redrafting his Bill. Given more time and patience, I hope I will do a little better than I have done so far in making suggestions straight out of my head. It will take many hours of head-scratching and book-searching to find out what this Bill means.

I know what is in my hon. Friend's mind, but he has not expressed it very clearly or happily. It is not until the end of paragraphs (a) and (b) of Clause 1 (1) that one realises that he has made a definition. But he has arrived there in a most vague manner. I know the object he has in mind, namely, why there should be an imprint on a wedding invitation card printed by Messrs. Jones, Smith and Brown when all people want to know is the time, place and date of the wedding and who is getting married.

There is another factor. Printers and publishers are liable for libel. If somebody outside this House chooses to print a serious libel on a Member of this House he will be mulcted in heavy damages and perhaps an injunction will be issued to restrain him from doing it again. That is one of the advantages of having an imprint, unless someone has forged it. It may be said that this does not matter because all we are concerned with are such things as Christmas cards and wedding invitations. But what greater libel could there be to an already happily married man if wedding invitations were sent out announcing his wedding to somebody he had never met.

When printers get orders for wedding invitations, they check whether the partners are anxious, ready and willing to get married. If my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr. Pitman), who I know is, a happily married man, received an invitation to attend his own wedding to somebody he had never met, he could take no steps in the matter if this Bill were law. I ask him to bear that in mind very much indeed.

A greeting card may be a courteous one, which no doubt is what my hon. Friend had in mind, one that talks about "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" with a picture of a couple of robins playing in the snow, although it is nearly always foggy at Christmas. Yet a greeting could be a most discourteous one. Far from its being "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year", it could be "A painful Christmas and a horrible New Year", and if that were the case we should like to know the name of the printer who had published anything so unpleasant.

Perhaps at some stage of the discussions we may be told what a

"message in the conventional form"

is. Some messages in conventional forms can be most discourteous. We might wish to send to those whom we do not like messages in a conventional form of a most discourteous kind, and what is conventional in Wapping may not be conventional in Westminster. The phrase in the Bill is of absolutely no meaning at all. We may know what my hon. Friend had in mind when the Bill was drafted, but his purpose is not expressed in the words contained in the Bill.

I do not want to interrupt my hon. and learned Friend's field-day too much, but surely any message which is in a conventional form is, by definition, unlikely to cause any offence to anybody or to break the law. Anyway, if society had broken down to such an extent that it was conventional to pass messages which broke the law, there would be very little that we could do about it. I suggest that we are not likely to get to that point.

A conventional form of message between two people who do not like each other and whose language is customarily, to put it mildly, rough, could easily, if printed and sent through the post, cause a breach of the peace. I am sure that my hon. Friend does not wish that to happen in connection with the very excellent ideas that he had in mind about Christmas cards, wedding invitations and so on.

We are living in days of political cartoons which are probably not nearly as good as those of the eighteenth century—

One yesterday was.

I have more in mind a most unfair one about the Minister of Health two or three years ago which I thought was rather stupid and unfair. But those of the eighteenth century were very good. The skill of the artist in drawing those and in drawing the present ones is very great, and I would question whether it is beyond them to draw political cartoons by means of:

"a geometrical, floral or other design."

I have seen in nineteenth century issues of Punch, as I am sure other hon. Members have, flowers out of which have been growing the faces of well-known politicians of the time. Those could be said to be floral designs, and it was very likely that they could be said to be libellous of the politicians concerned. We know that fair criticism of a politician inside or outside the House is perfectly all right, but it could be libellous in the circumstances which I have been talking about, and I question whether it would be right for the printer to be protected by means of the Bill.

It is only to a floral design.

How nice to argue on a lawyers' field-day "It is only a floral design." There might be a picture of the top of a flower out of which was growing the face of my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, Home Department, or the hon. Member for Bristol, South, but if the wording underneath was of a libellous character, they would both rightly object and no doubt rightly wish to take proceedings against the printer for printing such a libel. If there was no imprint, they would not know for whom they should go, because his name would not be on the cartoon or pamphlet.

If it were a sentence which was not of a conventional kind in general, it would come under paragraph (a) as well as under paragraph (b).

I have dealt with paragraph (a) and the difficulties in that respect. Now I have gone on to paragraph (b) and am dealing with the geometrical or floral designs.

My hon. and learned Friend referred to the caption underneath the design.

Let us leave the caption and stick to the faces. What I am thinking of is faces of flowers representing public figures, with the stalks of the flowers underneath.

Cartoonists are very ingenious. The Bill speaks of geometrical designs. We might have square pegs going into round holes or round pegs going into square holes. I have the ideas, but unfortunately, I am quite incapable of drawing such things and so hon. Members need not worry on that score. In connection with the geometrical design, I can think of a square peg going into a round hole and there being somewhere on the picture a face or something else to indicate who is being referred to, and that might be highly libellous.

I am drawing attention to these facts in order to show how badly the Bill is drafted and how, through the desire of my hon. Friend to protect those in the industry, the general public, whether they be politicians or not, are perhaps being placed in danger by the taking away from them of the information that they require if they want to protect themselves from libellous and scurrilous attacks and matters of that sort, because they will not know who the printer is.

Having said that, I am certain that my hon. Friends who have the interests of the printers so much at heart will take the Bill away and clarify it or put it more accurately in Parliamentary form. I hope that they will redraft the Bill, deleting Clause 1 and inserting something entirely new and quite different, which will protect members of the public from the possibilities which are foreseen. It is no answer to me to say that respectable printers would not do what has been suggested. We must take it that printing is no better and no worse than other occupations and trades, and the public must be protected from those who are, if not exactly rascals, at any rate not quite so particular. I am sure that my hon. Friend will bear that in mind when reconsidering the drafting.

I would ask my hon. Friends to ponder over my words later on when they read them in the OFFICIAL REPORT. They should not look upon this as a lawyers' field-day; they should regard what I have said as a breath of fresh air inserted between the general public and those who are directly interested and concerned in printing, and say "What he said was right, but he gave his blessing to the idea behind the Bill. We must see that our idea is put into proper legal language which can be understood. Let us not endanger members of the public who are libelled or otherwise affected. We will do something better than this". If they did that, I am sure that the whole House would give the Bill its blessing. Otherwise, the Bill may have a rather rough passage when it returns to the House.

If my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North (Mr. Chataway) reads the speech of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Mr. Doughty) in the OFFICIAL REPORT, he will find that at the beginning of his speech my hon. and learned Friend offered to redraft Clause 1 (1). In my ten years in the House I have always admired the skill which members of the legal profession employ in tearing to pieces the wording of all Bills—Government or private—but seldom are they incautious enough to offer to improve upon them themselves. The week-end lies before my hon. and learned Friend and my hon. Friend, and I shall watch with great interest their attempts to improve the Bill.

I have in my files some attempts by members of my hon. and learned Friend's profession to produce a formula to do just what we all desire to do in this Bill. I would in all seriousness advise my hon. Friend that if any improvements can be made upon the present wording of the Bill—I shall return to this point—he should examine them most carefully.

We are, as my hon. Friend said, reverting for a brief moment to the Napoleonic Wars when these restrictions were introduced in the interests of dealing with treasonable and seditious practices.

Is the Minister going to leave that point without saying anything about the alteration of the wording?

I intend to return to it.

After the most lucid explanation of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, North, whom, incidentally, I congratulate on his success in the Ballot, I do not think the House will require a long speech from me. I should also like to congratulate my hon. Friend on making what could be a rather dull subject a very interesting one. What the House will want to know from me is the attitude of the Government towards this Bill, and therefore I should like to say at the outset that the Government give it their full support. The Home Office have known for some years that the Federation of Master Printers has been anxious to amend the printer's imprint requirements preserved in the Act of 1869. My hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr. Pitman), who also intervened in this debate, approached my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary on numerous occasions, and my right hon. Friend in fact promised his co-operation. This Bill fulfils that expectation.

There is nothing that I personally at this stage would want to say by way of Amendment, but there are two or three points, including the point raised by the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Wilkins), which I should like to emphasise. In the first place, we should be quite clear that the Act of 1869, which this Bill proposes to amend, was in itself a liberalising Statute, but the provisions already existing relating to the printer's imprint were preserved in the Schedule to that Act. As my hon. Friend said, subject to a few specified exceptions which are mentioned in that Act, a person who prints any paper or book is required, first, to print on it his name and address, and, secondly, if the paper is printed for reward, to keep for six months a copy of every such paper or book marked with the name of the person for whom it was printed.

It follows from that, and I am here repeating for the record what has been said already, it is an offence to print, publish or distribute any paper or book which does not bear the imprint, and it is also an offence if a printer fails to keep the required copy. I do not exactly know the arguments for the retention of this provision in the 1869 Act, but, presumably, it was considered useful to protect the public from publications whose anonymity would breed irresponsibility, and also, as the hon. Member for Bristol, South said, to provide means of tracing those responsible for seditious, libellous or other objectionable matter.

When the Federation of Master Printers suggested that it would like the relaxation of this restriction, it was anticipated that there might be a case for complete removal of the imprint altogether. The hon. Member for Bristol, South dealt with this, and I would agree with him that it is undesirable to abolish completely the printer's imprint. I know that there have been at least five prosecutions since 1954, according to our records, and one of them was in respect of spurious Cup Final programmes.

The existing Act provides a safeguard, and this is why the law is seen in some disrepute, against unreasonable enforcement of the imprint requirement, because it is necessary to obtain the consent of a Law Officer to a prosecution, a point to which the hon. Member for Bethnal Green (Mr. Holman) drew attention. Obviously, this is not a very satisfactory position, and the Government therefore prefer my hon. Friend's solution, which is that of an extension of the existing restrictions. Since the imprint requirements were first imposed, the uses of printing have greatly extended, and it now seems quite impracticable and unsuitable to require an imprint on such things as paper bags and Christmas cards. At this season of the year, hon. Members might care to examine their own Christmas cards to see if the law has been strictly complied with. Although I have not had the chance to examine those printed by the House of Commons, I cannot believe that my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General would consent to a prosecution in this case.

Nevertheless, it seems to me good sense to bring the law up to date and to make it enforceable. As both my hon. Friend the Members for Lewisham, North and Bath have said, the printers themselves are much concerned about the effect of failure to comply with the imprint law upon the enforcement of payment for a contract. They have been advised in the light of a decided case that failure to comply would render a contract for printing unenforceable. Thus, a defaulting customer could, and has been known to, be able to avoid payment by pleading the illegality of the omission. One of the benefits of extending or widening the exemptions in this Bill would be to limit this kind of plea. It could be argued that it would be preferable in a Bill of this nature to print the exemptions contemplated in a Schedule. The hon. Member for Bristol, South has put forward that suggestion, though I think that he himself later rejected it. I have evidence that that was considered. The difficulty, as the hon. Gentleman made quite clear, is that any Schedule would be almost certainly incomplete and would almost certainly need revision from year to year.

Consideration was then given to the question of printing the exemptions required in a Schedule, and also giving power to my right hon. Friend to amend it by Statutory Instrument from occasion to occasion. That was thought to be unacceptable to the House, and so opinion crystallised in favour of inserting in the Bill the provision of the formula to which my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East has taken exception. This formula, in fact, provides the cover the exemptions required by the Federation of Master Printers, and I am advised that that body considers that this is the best formula that can be devised.

Like the hon. Member for Bristol, South, I dislike the double negative, but I think that he will find that it stems in the first place from the original Statute and secondly, from the Long Title. I am advised that at this stage it would not be possible to amend the Long Title in order to remove the double negative from this Clause.

That is a rather astonishing statement. Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that the Government want the Bill in its present form, and that although a private Member sponsored it, he must not agree to any alteration in the phraseology of the Bill if an amicable arrangement can be made between the interested people? Is that what the Minister is now saying? Is he adamant on the question of alteration, because I am quite sure that we were hoping to be able to talk about this. If we could find a formula which was more satisfactory to both sides of the industry, and would bring amity between them, will the Minister close his mind to that?

The hon. Gentleman must not get too alarmed; I shall come to that point. I was saying to my hon. Friend that in view of the Long Title and the principal Statute, he will have much difficulty in avoiding a double negative. I was going on to say that my hon. Friend has had counsel's opinion about this formula. If he can find a better solution, if he will see my hon. Friend and consult with him and perhaps with me, we will examine whether there is a better solution. All I am saying now is that many of my hon. and learned Friends have looked at this matter and think that this is the best formula that can be found.

Does my right hon. Friend see any objection to the formula which I myself announced to the House, to this effect:

"Notwithstanding anything contained in any previous Act, the following matters shall not require a printer's imprint;"

and then follow with (a), (b), (c), (d) and so on?

I am not a lawyer and would not like to give an off-the-cuff answer to that, but I should think that there would be many objections. I am awaiting my hon. and learned Friend's amplification of his suggested amendment, and I sincerely hope that the hon. Member for Bristol, South will consult with him or with me, or all together, so that we can see whether this formula can be improved.

I have already consulted the hon. Member for Lewisham, North, but up to the moment the hon. Member thought that we have not reached any sort of agreement about it.

I think the position that we have reached is this. The House generally is in support of the principle of this Bill, which is that the relaxations should not extend beyond those provided in the Clauses of the Bill, but some of my hon. Friends, and the hon. Member opposite feel that the formula in subsection (1) could be improved upon. If that is possible, the Government would be pleased to give their co-operation and on any other point, such as that raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, South (Mr. Batsford) on subsection (3). Apart from that, I commend the Bill to the House.

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

When I decided, a few weeks ago, to make this my Bill, I received a letter which said:

"The Times is against you; the Minister of Education is against you; the Library Association is against you; you are certain to win."

Most hon. Members will probably realise that that letter came from A. P. Herbert. I take this opportunity of saying that he has been most helpful, on behalf of the Society of Authors, as have the representatives of the Publishers' Association, in giving me advice and information.

I do not think that it is entirely true that all those people are against me, because only today hon Members will have seen in the OFFICIAL REPORT that, in answer to a Question about what the promoters of the Bill should do, the Minister of Education said that he had advised them to discuss their proposals with the local authority associations and with other library interests; and he has asked those bodies to take part in discussions.

One of my reasons for introducing the Bill is the intransigent attitude of the Library Association, which has told the Society of Authors that it sees no reason why it should practically waste its time by discussing the matter with the Society.

Things have greatly changed over recent years, especially the position of authors and public libraries. When public libraries were first started, in the middle of the last century, it was openly and definitely to help artisans and poor people to get a chance of reading. Today, everyone will admit that a large percentage of the people who use public libraries could well afford to buy books for themselves if they wanted to. I have had several letters from people who have said that their conscience has sometimes been stricken by the number of books borrowed from libraries by their family and for which they would be prepared to pay if need be.

It must be remembered that the use of public libraries and the development of the buildings and the amount of money spent on them have risen colossally in recent years. In 1924, 76 million public library books were read, and by last year that figure had risen to 400 million, and there are now about 560 public libraries all over the country. Authors have not received one penny other than their royalties on the purchase of single copies of their books. On an ordinary, hard-backed book, an author may get up to 2s., but on a soft-backed book, a Penguin, say, he gets only about 1½d.

Public libraries are making soft-backed books into hard-backed books so that they can go round more often, and we therefore find that the books go out 60 to 100 times and that, although as many as 100 people may read one Penguin, the author still gets 1½d. in royalties. I think that the public as a whole feels that that is unfair.

These days, everybody else is getting a little more for whatever he does, especially in connection with the Welfare State, and it is becoming part of the Welfare State that public libraries should undertake this tremendous free lending of books. Doctors and other people working for the Welfare State have something done for them, but nothing is done for the authors. Some of the libraries are not as good as they could be, and if the Government act on the Roberts Report with a Bill which is soon to be brought in, they will have much to do to improve conditions in public libraries all over the country. But there are also several which are very well equipped, having even swimming pools and all sorts of side attractions.

About £16 million is spent on public libraries through the rates in different parts of the country, but of that £16 million only £4 million goes to the actual buying of books. Most of the rest goes to the staff in pay and pensions, but authors get no pay or pensions. They get only 1s. or 2s. in royalties from each book, or 1½d. on a Penguin.

That is unfair. We want to help the libraries as much as we can and Clause 7 suggests how that can be done—payment for admission to lectures or meetings, charges for notification that a book or other material is available, and a charge for the retention of a book beyond a prescribed period, not exceeding 2s. 6d. for eight weeks. Those are all things which could be done to help libraries.

I am told that the Holborn Library reserves books—indeed, I believe that all of them do and most charge about 4d. for so doing, but the author does not get one penny of that amount. Last year, Holborn Library reserved 252 copies of one book for which it received four guineas, but not a "bean" went to the authors. Westminster Library has a system of fines and catalogues of its books and in 1957–58 it got no less than £8,991 from fines and the sale of catalogues, but not a brass farthing went to authors.

Now the libraries, especially the Library Association, are looking with horror on the suggestion that authors should get a little more. This is a little like Oliver Twist asking for another plate of porridge. The libraries say, "What! You want another 1½d., when we are making £8,991 on fines and catalogues for your books? You want another 1½d? Disgraceful!" The Daily Telegraph today says that the libraries are almost in a panic about this suggestion. I can quote a number of hard cases which have been sent to me by authors, but I will not quote them because it would not be fair to the authors themselves. Some authors are of course best-sellers, but many are living on a margin. Although I could quote many letters, I do not want to publicise the circumstances of individual authors.

The Society of Authors made a survey last year and in confidence asked 600 authors, who were a cross-section of the Society's members, what they were earning. As the Society has a pension scheme for authors, it was only right that it should try to find out the position. The answer was that about 73 per cent. of all the authors got less than £1,000 a year. Some of those with books in the libraries are getting no more now than £3 to £4 a year in royalties for books that came out two or three years ago.

Education is making more people read. It is certainly making them use the libraries more. To a certain extent it is making them buy books, but only to a very small extent compared with the number that go to the public libraries. The commercial libraries' circulations are going steadily down, as, indeed, are those of the book clubs, because more people are going to the public libraries, which are cheaper. Is it fair that authors should be left in this unhealthy state, despite the advance in the use of their work?

The Library Association has sent out a document on which I will only comment by trying to answer some of the points which it makes. It talks about the principle. The Association seems to be not so much worried about whether authors should live better and get a bit more. It is thinking of the principle of it, and what it will lead to in regard to other things. It says that the position is the same as when one buys motor cars, washing machines, or top hats and lends them out.

My answer is that an author is not in the same position. He comes much more under the cultural side. If the public libraries were to buy 100 motor cars and lend them out free, as these books are lent free, to the people in the district, I am sure that the motor trade would be very quickly down on them; and so would the taxi drivers and everybody else. It would be regarded as absurd. An author can stop the public reading of his book. He can stop one quoting from it and ask one to pay, but in the public library it is being used as an exploitation and not just an ordinary borrowing, and in that sense it seems to me grossly unfair.

The libraries say that it will not be possible to do what I have suggested in the Bill. There is nothing to stop them and us getting together and working this out. If the Bill gets a Second Reading today, we can wait in Committee for some months during which time we could discuss these matters with the Library Association and the municipal organisations. I do not see why that should not be done.

The libraries also say that it would be impossible to check on all the people whose books are taken out. That is for them and for us to get together on. That is what the Minister asked the municipal libraries to do some time ago, and what I understand they will probably be doing in the near future. But not the Library Association. It will not touch the Authors Society. We must get the Association to work with us on this.

I have received the opinions of several libraries on this subject. I have received the opinion of libraries in Manchester, Birmingham and many other places. One suggestion which was made, Which I think is a good one, was that instead of asking for a 1d, per copy, as we do in the Bill, we should come to an arrangement whereby the libraries would pay a lump sum. That is a possibility which could easily be worked out. That is roughly what is done in Scandinavia, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. There is no reason why something like that should not be done here.

Will the hon. Gentleman tell us how this lump sum would be apportioned? He has spoken about the survey of authors' remuneration and income. Would he tell us a little about the publishing houses, which will also benefit, but we do not know by how much?

We are only at the beginning of this, and one would think that the authors would get 60 per cent., if not 70 per cent., and the publishers no more than 30 per cent. There is no reason in the world why that should not be dealt with as suggested in the Bill, by a committee of four persons appointed by the Minister, two appointed by the authors and two by the publishers. They could decide how this sum should be allocated.

Another suggestion is that we should have, as on the Obscene Publications Bill, a Select Committee instead of going to a Committee upstairs. If that were done we would get much more detailed figures and facts from publishers, from libraries, and from other groups of people compulsorily. That might be a satisfactory solution. I would like to hear what hon. Members feel about this proposal.

There is no doubt that the education side has to be watched. We are told by some of the corporations that if we insist on the 1d. system it will mean so much extra work for them in the libraries that they will have to take on extra staff which will pretty well cover the same amount of money. The lump sum proposal would get rid of that difficulty. It is not essential that it should cost them so much because they could think out methods which would be cheaper. We complain that they have not been willing to meet us on this subject.

Another thing they say is that it will mean that the funds given by the corporations will be cut to meet this cost, and that, therefore, fewer books will be read. It is very interesting these days to see what books are read in public libraries. Until a year or two ago we were given lists showing the proportion of different types of books that were read. One noticed that the percentage of thrillers and the more shocking books gradually increased until the last time the list was published when over 60 per cent. of the books read and purchased were of that type. Those figures are no longer published, but we know that there are some public libraries which more or less concentrate on those types of books, on the thrillers, the wild west series, and so on, and not on what was the original idea of the public libraries, that of helping on the cultural side.

If libraries found that they had to cut down, it would not be a bad idea to cut down on thrillers. They could well do that. It is I often think because so many thrillers are read in public libraries that we are experiencing the present increase in crime, because it is young people as much as anybody who use public libraries. Be that as it may, if they were to cut down on those types of books and provide more educational books I do not think that anybody would object.

The libraries are suggesting that the publishers should be asked to pay 6d. more on every book. They suggest that that would provide the same amount of money. When one considers that over 37 million people read books and only 4 million do so from the public libraries, it means that we are asking over 30 million people to spend an extra 6d. to keep these public libraries free for everybody to go to. I am not sure that that is a fair proposition.

I would like to point out one thing in the Schedule which is not exactly a mistake but it has been misunderstood. The second paragraph states that in the case of a lending library where the issues exceed 2,000 a year, the charge is to be:

"one penny far each issue recorded under subsection (2) of section four of this Act; where the issues do not exceed two thousand, nothing."

This means that we are not trying to make a charge on those little tobacconist-shop libraries, travelling libraries and small libraries which do not lend in the year more than 2,000 books—not of any one author but 2,000 books altogether. We are aiming only at the bigger libraries.

I therefore ask the House to give the Bill a Second Reading and then, in Committee, to work out, as far as we possibly can with the libraries and with the different cities and boroughs, the best possible arrangement. As the Daily Telegraph wrote today, it is not quite fair that the authors should be left in a position in which they get nothing. Although we may not insist on collecting 1d. for each book, at least a gesture should be made.

Can the hon. Member give an assurance that if the Bill is given a Second Reading and sent to Committee he will be in a position to substitute a lump sum payment for the 1d. levy?

Of course I will. It is my Bill.

In supporting the Bill, I ought to declare an interest in a double sense. First, I am this year the chairman of the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, which is keenly interested in the Bill, and I therefore have an interest in it in that way. Secondly, in a much more direct and personal sense I have an interest in it as an author for, as it so happens, I am just the kind of author for whom this is a burning issue; I write the kind of rather heavy and, I am afraid, rather dull book the author of which is rather lucky if it secures a sale in this country of 5,000 copies, although a very high proportion of those copies go to public libraries and a very high proportion is read, not I am afraid by the million but certainly to a much greater extent than the 5,000 sales indicate.

I think that I speak here for my kind of author when I say that we feel that the arrangement which has grown up under the Public Libraries Act—no one intended it—and the development of public libraries throughout the country.

which in itself is a splendid development, has quite unwittingly begun to do some injustice to one type of author. Some people would say that this kind of book, not perhaps my own, but at any rate those written by other people, on sociology, economics, political science, or any other similar serious book, is an important kind of book to foster and that we ought to enable people to write such works.

I can tell the House that my books usually take me about three years to write, and that if I make £1,000 from a book I am lucky. That is a little over £300 a year, and I do not think that that is an exorbitant rate of remuneration for this sort of work. It strikes me that if that is the only sort of reward for which one can hope, there must be many people who have contributions, probably much more valuable than mine, to make who simply cannot afford to make them because there is no hope of a living wage for them.

That is the grievance which has made the Society of Authors take up this matter. Let me describe the situation as it has developed. I cannot draw it more vividly to the attention of the House than by quoting words in the document which the Library Association has circulated to us in opposition to the Bill. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Teeling) has already referred to those words. The Association draws an analogy between the lending of books in free libraries and the hiring-out of motor cars and adds:

"If the public must compensate the producer when they hire books, why not also when they hire motor cars?"

We ought to take that analogy a little further. The true analogy, surely, would be if local authorities up and down the country established garages, which purchased motor cars and then hired them out to the public; although "hired them out" is a misnomer, because one should say lent them out to the public free of charge.

Why not?

It would be a splendid thing for the public but not for the safety of road traffic. I think the House would ring with the complaints of motor manufacturers.

Why?

Many fewer motor cars would be built.

But it would not be dangerous to the public.

I think that the person who hired the car out on the next day might well be a danger to the public.

Is there not a close analogy with the records library?

I am coming to the analogy of music, which is very important and very pertinent to the Bill. The lending free of am article of commerce, be it a book or a motor car or anything else, by public authorities, supported by public funds, must raise a quite different issue from the commercial hiring-out of a motor car. We are therefore grateful to the Library Association for having raised this point.

Secondly, it is important for the House to think of the scale on which this development has taken place. It was perfectly right and proper in the middle of the last century, when the Public Libraries Act was passed, with the distribution of income as it was at that day, for the free library system to be established. The authors and publishers of that day were right to regard it to some extent as a contribution which they were making to general public education and public enlightenment. But in the seventh decade of the twentieth century the situation has become very different. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion gave the figures, which are remarkable, of the immense growth of the free lending of books, for which neither the publisher nor the author receives any remuneration Whatever.

The Bill seeks to establish what can only be called a public lending right analogous precisely with the performing rights in music. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) shakes his head, but there is an analogy with the publication of a piece of music which is then performed here and there, and reproduced on the air, for it is clearly established by law—and the system works—that the musician and the publisher shall be remunerated. It is a very small amount for each per- formance, but they are remunerated. That is provided for by a performing right. The person who has done the initial work in producing a work of art—in this case a work of music—has a continuing interest in it and a continuing right, when his creation is enjoyed by the public at large, to some small remuneration for it.

What we are seeking to do today is precisely to establish an analogous right for authors of books. It is not an easy thing to do. It is a difficult matter, of course, and it is complicated. I am not by any means convinced that the Bill before us today is exactly the right way of doing it.

Would not the honest way be to place the matter on a purely businesslike basis and to charge an economic price for the book in the first place?

The difficulty of that is that the book has two classes of purchaser. It has the individual who buys it and it has the library which buys it. They both buy it for different purposes. The individual buys it to read and to lend, very likely to his family, or to a friend. Nobody is questioning that for a moment. The library buys it to lend it publicly to hundreds of customers. This is really a very different thing, and just to put up the price of books seems to me to be a very clumsy remedy.

Is it not also true that the extent to which the libraries provide these books free really prevents the rise in the price of the books themselves? If, in fact, there were no libraries which were lending books free it would be possible for publishers to charge more money for the books. The very fact that there is this very vast amount of free lending automatically depresses the price which the book could obtain.

The hon. Gentleman has raised a point about which I am not sure. He must ask a publisher.

Of course, on an analogous point, the libraries in their memorandum say:

"We are the best customers for books. You would not sell nearly so many books if it were not for the free library."

That is a very arguable matter.

No one can question the fact that lending libraries are very valuable and important institutions, but it is very arguable from the publishers' point of view whether an individual book would have a higher sale if there were no libraries. If there were no other way of obtaining novels at all, it is very arguable whether they would have a higher sale than their very modest sale today.

Why should people buy books when they can get them for nothing? That is the question. It seems to us that this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. I put it to the House—especially, perhaps, to my hon. Friends on this side—is it really in the interests of the general public, and of the poorer members of the general public who cannot afford to buy books, that we should have this strange system which has grown up in which they can obtain books free—which is very nice indeed—but which means that the author's remuneration under the system drops to zero?

I should not have thought that, in the long run, it was in the interests of the reading public, because, sooner or later, there would be fewer and fewer books to read. I should have thought—exactly on the analogy of what is happening in the world of music—that some right analogous to the performing right, which we call the "public lending right", should be established in this country. How exactly it is to be done is a matter of great difficulty and complexity, and one which requires very careful consideration by a Committee of the House.

It seems to me that sooner or later the House will have to find some way of remunerating the producers of books, as, otherwise, the supply may dry up. Some such way should be found now that this wonderful system of great public libraries up and down the country accounts for immensely the greater part of the reading which is done. In some way or another people must pay for their reading. Someone has to pay for the production of books or else they will not be produced.

Surely my right hon. Friend appreciates that the public lending libraries are supported by the ratepayers?

Yes, of course the ratepayers pay in some way. But libraries buy at the present purchase price, which is the same price charged to an individual purchaser who buys only for himself. Libraries buy books which may be read by hundreds and thousands of people. To we authors that seems an injustice and something which in the end will not be in the interests of the readers, as well as being very much against the interests of authors and publishers. Therefore I ask the House, though I realise at first sight that it seems a retrograde step—

Hear, hear.

If my hon. Friend will think it out, he will be forced to the conclusion that it is far from a retrograde step to make some arrangement by which the only possible source of these books, which now are circulated—it is a glorious thing—by the hundreds and millions, can remunerate the people who produce the books. Of course, the ratepayers can do it out of the rates and as individual readers. There are many different ways of doing it, but in some way the public lending right of the author and the publisher should be recognised, and that, it seems to us, is something which in the long run this House will have to face.

Will the right hon. Gentleman make clear whether it is the ratepayers who are to pay the extra or the person who borrows the book?

That is something which must be examined during the Committee stage. The Bill leaves it open, one might say. In my opinion, it is not impossible for the borrower to do it.

It is quite impossible for the borrower to do it because it is against the law.

Without a change in the law it is impossible, and that is why we are trying to bring in the Bill.

Would my right hon. Friend be happy at the abrogation of the principle of a free lending library?

I do not believe, with the present distribution of incomes, that there is anything sacred about the principle. On the other hand, if necessary, this could be done without abrogating the principle. It is not true that libraries never collect any money. To take my own case again, my family use the Chelsea Public Library. Frequently we keep books longer than the prescribed period and we have to pay a fine for keeping them. In that way a library collects money from the borrowers and it happens on a considerable scale. There is nothing impossible, preposterous or wicked about the idea. It can be done through public funds or local funds or—

It is certainly retrograde and anti-social.

If more and more the real mass of reading in this country is done not by the purchase of books but by the reading of books purchased by libraries which lend them free, the production of books will tend to dry up; that must be so. I think the House, and my side of the House, should face that issue and find a way in which something analogous to the performing right in music—which the House does not question any longer—can be used. With that end in view, we suggest that the House should give this Bill a Second Reading today.

The speech to which we have just listened was a very persuasive speech and with every word of it I agreed, as I did with the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Teeling), who moved the Second Reading.

There seem to be two main lines of argument advanced by local authorities against the Bill. The first is that the producers of books are already adequately remunerated, or, if they are not, that there are other methods of increasing their remuneration which would be preferable to the method suggested by my hon. Friend in the Bill. The second argument against the Bill is that it would cost the public library administration so much extra burden of work and so much money that either the charge on the rates would be exorbitant, or the number of books purchased by the libraries would have to be reduced.

On the first objection to the Bill, the principle of fair remuneration, I do not think that it is for the libraries to offer a comment. Authors do not question the salaries or pensions of librarians and I do not think that it is particularly appropriate for librarians to question the earnings of authors. I have no axe to grind in these matters. I have never written a book and I do not suppose that I ever shall. My hon. Friend gave some figures, and it is probably admitted by both sides of the House and both sides of this argument that the average author's earnings are somewhat inadequate. My hon. Friend said that a sample survey revealed that 70 per cent. or more of authors earned £1,000 a year or less, 50 per cent. earned £500 a year or less and about 40 per cent. actually earned £250 a year or less. The average earnings work out at about £500 a year, which is not very much money nowadays. I suppose that it is less than the earnings of a manual worker in industry.

I suppose that a great many of those would be only part-time authors. They would have some other job, as a teacher or something else, by which they would be earning rewards.

That may well be. They might be members of the House of Commons in their spare time.

This was a sample survey and I have no details of exactly which authors were questioned and whether they were part-time authors or not. Even if they were, I do not think that their remuneration can be considered very great for the effort, experience and brainpower involved. Of course, some popular authors, as my hon. Friend said, earn very large sums of money, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Authors may receive adequate rewards on a royalty basis for books sold, but they certainly receive very meagre rewards for books read through the libraries. My local authority, normally a very fair-minded and logically minded local authority, wrote to me and suggested that if publishers needed a larger income in order adequately to remunerate their authors, they should increase the price of books—and hon. Members have suggested this in interventions—by 6d. a copy. But should the buying public, which pays quite heavily for its books already, subsidise the free-of-charge borrowing public? I do not understand the equity of that argument.

The second argument advanced by the libraries deals more with the method than the principle. It is that the cost of the administration of this sort of proposal would be considerable. Surely most of that cost would fall upon the publishers. They themselves would eliminate the non-copyright books, and simply send the libraries, each year, a list of books upon which lending fees are claimed. All that libraries would have to do then would be to mark the number of issues against each book on the lists.

Most of that work would be quite capable of being done by the borrower. He would only have to note on an issue sheet the name of the book and its publisher and hand it to the library assistant. All that the librarian would then have to do would be to collate the issue sheets and send them in at the end of the year or every fifteen months.

Is the hon. Member suggesting that it is practicable for libraries to issue with each book a sheet which the reader will mark and return? He must remember that 20 million issues are made each year.

No. I had in mind that in the public library the borrower would find available forms similar to telegraph forms. All that he would have to do when taking out a book would be to write upon the form the name of the book and the publisher. That would not be a great burden for him. It would certainly not be a difficult task for the library to provide issue sheets of that sort. In fact, they could be provided by the Publishers' Association. Alternatively, issue slips could be sent to the Association for collation. That method would involve the libraries in practically no work at all.

Then there is the lump sum method, which my hon. Friend suggested. Last year the libraries spent £4¼ million in buying books, but the readership of those books amounted to the staggering total of 431 million. That is very good—the more the better—but it is not very fair to the authors. As the Daily Telegraph leader pointed out this morning, library circulation may well add to the prestige of an author but it adds absolutely nothing to his income. It actually reduces his sales, by increasing readership without increasing the proceeds from that readership.

I have one other suggestion, which really takes the form of a question to my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion. The matter was touched on by the right hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey), and it will no doubt be much objected to by certain other hon. Members. If the libraries think that this Bill would make too great a charge on the rates, why should not the charge be laid upon the borrower? What is so sacred about this right of everybody to read anything and everything for nothing? Would it really be so unreasonable to charge a borrower 1d. for reading one of the books written, for instance, by the right hon. Member for Dundee, West?

Does the hon. Member appreciate that after many years of struggle and difficulties we now have free education? Does he realise that reading is part of that education? The borrowing of books on the part of students and others is part of our educational process. Does the hon. Member intend to initiate a movement that encroaches upon the basic principle of our democracy, namely, free education?

It is all very well to talk about the basic principle of democracy, but that is very high-flown stuff. I am talking about 1d. a book.

I must perforce declare my interest as being one of a group of what a publisher described to me recently as those despised people who take photographs. Will my hon. Friend tell me where photographers who have photographs published in hooks come in?

That is a very interesting point, but it is a Committee one. My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion will deal with the point in Committee.

In this day and age there must be very few people who genuinely cannot afford 1d. to read books written by the right hon. Member for Dundee, West and other distinguished authors. That sum is only about one half the cost of smoking one cigarette. It is much better value for money, because it lasts a great deal longer than one cigarette.

The only people who genuinely could not afford it might be those in receipt of National Assistance. For those who cannot afford it, it would be perfectly easy and correct to make an exception in the Bill.

On the question of the 1d. levy, is the library expected to sort out before it charges the 1d. all those books in respect of Which copyright has not yet expired?

No. Under the Bill that will be done by the publishers. They claim lending rights only for books for which they have coypright. That is clear from the Bill.

Hon. Members may dislike the suggestion of making any charge to the borrowing public. It may conflict with their idea of State help for everyone. I can quite understand that point. It would mean, as was mentioned by the hon. Member for Islington, South-West (Mr. A. Evans), the supply of free literature as part of the Welfare State. I have no objection to that point of view.

It is not a question of the Welfare State. It is more fundamental than that. We must provide people with the means to read, write and learn.

What the hon. Gentleman said in his earlier intervention was that it was retrograde, because education was now free in this country and the reading of books, which is part of education, should also be free.

Whether it be called the Welfare State or anything else, I accept that education is now free and that this could be regarded in the same light. In that case, let the State pay. Let the Exchequer find the money, as it does for every other service in the Welfare State. But let us try to get away from the idea that the author and the publisher should subsidise the reading public through the provision of a free, or very nearly free, literature service.

I hope that we shall give this Bill a Second Reading today and try, in Committee, to devise the best compromise solution which may be available through which we can give authors—

And photographers.

And photographers. I shall not argue with my hon. Friend, who is a very skilled photographer. But I hope that a solution can be found by which we can give authors fair financial compensation for their books, which are read by thousands, but which are paid for only once.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Teeling), my right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey), and the hon. Member for Surbiton (Mr. Fisher) have supported the Bill. It is certain that they have produced all possible arguments in favour of its principle and all possible apologies for the fact that they know that it is not practicable. I was a little surprised that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion did not explain, until I asked him a question, that publishers as well as authors were involved

Let us face the fact that this is a Bill to give more money to publishers as well as to authors. This may be a good thing to do. It may be right that local authorities should be employed for this purpose. If so, we must surely say that the local authorities should look at the books of the publishers to see how poor or how rich they are. If they wish to make a case for money for themselves as publishers, let them put a case. This they have not done. The local authorities quite rightly say that this is not a Bill but a conspiracy. Under the guise of wishing to help authors and of some of the facts given about authors, we have a hidden motive behind this. It would be most improper if a Bill of this type were to be given a Second Reading.

The principle of the Bill is bad, and it would not work properly. The hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. G. R. Howard), who is a photographer, raised a point that embarrassed his hon. Friend. It was a very good point. If we are to have reading rights as well as performing rights, why not have viewing rights? Why should not the painter who sells to an art gallery come forward to the community and say to the local authority, "I want a penny a look"? In many cases he deserves it a great deal more than the writers of some of the trash which is stocked in all forms of libraries. This applies also to the sculptor as well as to the painter.

Consider, for example, the Tate, which shows contemporary works and where one has to be a formidable artist to be accepted. There is no evidence that modern contemporary painters as yet get a tremendous amount of money for their work. There are paintings in the Tate by Sutherland that were bought by the Tate for as little as £4. If Sutherland had had a penny a look since those £4 paintings went up he would have had an income commensurate with his value as an artist. [An HON. MEMBER: "Bring him within the Libraries Bill."] I should like to do so, and then, perhaps, we would do justice to the authors as well, but let us keep it away from the publishers, because it is not good enough to have this sort of Bill produced in this sort of way.

I said that the principle was wrong. Concerning practice, the local authority in the area which I represent has written to me to say that the Bill is entirely unacceptable. It states that it could not operate the Bill and make any money to give to authors. We have no objection to authors having a higher income. I have heard the figures; they are desperate if they are true. According to a large sample, 73 per cent. of the authors earn less than £1,000 a year. I remember that in 1947 there were 700 painters and sculptors earning no more than £10 a week. Therefore, it is high time that we had an artists' Bill to see that justice is done to them all. But it should not be done in this way.

Objection has been taken to the proposed method. My right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West said, "I write books that go into libraries and which people do not buy for their own homes. They borrow them from the libraries. When I spend three years writing, I am lucky if I get £1,000." That is not a strong argument to offer in favour of the Bill. What he was really telling us was that if there were no free lending system he would not get anything at all. That is true. The House must accept it, that by the free system of public libraries, by their buying serious works like those of my right hon. Friend, we subsidise authors at once in this way, because otherwise there would be losses on those books and the publishers would not publish my right hon. Friend's works at all.

Haw can my hon. Friend tell whether my books or any other books would sell less or more if there were no free lending library system? They might still be bought. It might well be, from the purely selfish point of view of the authors, they would sell more. That is not the only desirable thing. We want our books to be read as well as bought, of course; but we do want some remuneration when they are being read by very large numbers of persons.

I was basing my argument upon what I have heard my right hon. Friend say himself, and although I cannot know in full, I think I have a right to know in part as well as he. Let me tell my right hon. Friend that I always bought his books and read them before I came to this House, but since I became a Member of this honourable House I borrow them from here whenever passible; but before I came here I had a very large income and I appreciated his works so much that I got them and read them, and I have still got them. If he wants more money for his labours, then this is not the right way to go about it.

Does my hon. Friend not realise that before public libraries were thought of a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago books were much more expensive and authors much richer?

One thing I am certain of is that in those days books were fewer, even if they were more expensive, and there were fewer authors and few people who could afford to read them.

There are more who are richer today.

In the situation today, we are asked, as we have heard this last hour, "Why should people get their books free?" They do not get them free. We discussed a Bill earlier about co-operation which met with the approval of the whole of the House. Is it not simple co-operation when people band themselves together and say, "Here there are 5,000 people in the town. We cannot afford more than perhaps 50 books if we individually buy them, but we can afford one hook each if we band ourselves together, and can have 5,000 books, and gradually we shall all be able to read them all." Of course we are paying. There is nothing free about it, and that is why I say that if hon. Members want to assist authors, let them not attempt to do it this way.

My right hon. Friend, if he had his own way, would really kill the goose which lays the golden egg.

How?

Because he would find he would have very few books sold. Not just £1,000 would he get for three years' labour and thoughtful work, but probably less than £100, and there would hardly be any publisher who would come forward to publish them.

If there is a guaranteed market because of the public library system—

Is my hon. Friend now suggesting that this Bill is a Bill to close down public libraries and to stop the public libraries from lending? Of course, it is not. It is nothing of the sort. We would not dream of doing such a thing. My hon. Friend is really making the most gross misrepresentation of the Bill, if I may say so.

This is very unfair. I am making no gross misrepresentation of this Bill. I am simply highlighting the nonsense which I have heard while I have been sitting here, and the nonsense spoken by my own right hon. Friend. Because of his own clarity of mind I would never have believed that he would have lent himself to such loose thinking. It is quite unlike him.

rose—

I must continue. Other people wish to speak, and I want to sit down in a couple of minutes. The House is interested in this Bill, and rightly so, and other people want to intervene in the debate, too. The first three speakers have supported the Bill and no doubt there will be others who may try to do so.

We have been told by those who sponsored the Bill that there is no other way of getting the money. They exclaim, "What! Charge 6d. extra on every book to get an extra million pounds? That is impossible, you would break the book-publishing industry". How can we accept that unless evidence is brought before us? None has been brought. Books are dearer now. I remember before the war hawking books, including some written by my right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West, for 2d. each, and I and some of my friends sold 20,000. One cannot do that now.

Does my hon. Friend want to make them still dearer, then?

I do not want authors and publishers paid from the rates and this impost put upon the ratepayers. It is a bad way. It is not practicable, it is not just and no case has been made out for it. A sum of £1¼ mililon is expected, but the total already spent by local authorities on books is £4 million. I have brought evidence that an extra 6d. on the price of new books would bring in £1 million. Why do not the publishers consider that move? Why should we not have a Bill to do that and the sum total of £1 million given to the authors?

We have heard that the publishers would take only 20 per cent., or 30 per cent. or perhaps 40 per cent. of the £1¼ million. They have not made out a case for taking a farthing. Where is the evidence that they need more money, quite apart from money paid to authors? It is wrong that in this House we should face demands of this kind. My local authority in Stoke-on-Trent, and I am pretty sure every other local authority, will not wear it for a moment.

It is time that a voice was raised from this side of the House against the Bill. It is a curious thing, and, to me, it has always been an anomaly, that although it is for the Government to propose charges on the taxpayer—a privilege which, I might say to my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education, who is on the Front Bench, is grossly over-exercised—we as back bench Members are apparently entitled to do anything we like with the unfortunate ratepayer.

I have never regarded that as a sound principle, and I still do not. This, of course, is entirely a charge upon the rates. It cannot be anything else. There is no practical possibility of charging borrowers of books 1d. a book when they take the book out. It is, to start with, a violation of the entire principle of the public libraries. This is something that we have been building up slowly. Westminster started its first public library about 1872 and from that time the service has been provided free, whatever the service might be. Even those libraries which issue gramophone records, which are much more expensive than books, cannot charge for the issue. Those libraries that lend pictures cannot charge for the lending. It must be done free and, in my view, it should rightly be done free.

The suggestion put forward from both sides of the House that the Exchequer should pay is impracticable, because the moment that is suggested the whole darned Bill is out of order. There is no possibility of including an Exchequer charge in a Private Member's Bill. Therefore, it does not seem possible to carry out the object of the Bill without putting an extra charge on the rates. The effect of that might be quite considerable. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Ms. Teeling) has said, 60 per cent. of the books published are thrillers or novels of various kinds.

I did not say 60 per cent. of the books published. I mentioned 60 per cent. of books bought by libraries.

I will accept that. In that case, books of that kind are probably about 98 per cent. of the number of books actually produced, because libraries presumably do not take into account the sort of paper-covered garbage which one sees very largely, I regret to say, in the bookshops of my hon. Friend's constituency.

Let us assume that 60 per cent. of these books are thrillers borrowed from the public libraries. It has been argued on many occasions by many reputable local authorities that libraries should not provide a service of fiction, with the exception of the classics, and there is a great deal to be said for that point of view.

The public library is, as one hon. Member opposite said in an interjection, part of our system of education. I am not sure how far the modern English novel or, indeed, the last generation's English novel, is a part of our system of public education. The most famous of the last generation's has only succeeded in publicising a word which we all knew before, and I do not think that it has added very much to the educative pool of knowledge in this country.

These libraries, if they are faced with this charge, may very well, and rightly, cut down on their fiction. There are several thousand libraries throughout the country and where will the author or the publisher be if this basic market is arbitrarily cut away?

I have a little experience of publishing—very little—and it was highly selective. It mostly consisted of extremely expensive books on various forms of art, which we published before the war. As a firm then, we relied entirely on the libraries before we would touch a book at all. I am not surprised. If one produces a work on Chinese art costing ten guineas, one does not expect it to be bought by anybody but a library. The high grade stuff has always been dependent upon the libraries for its basic market.

I was not really touched by the financial predicaments of authors. It may be that only a modest percentage of them are earning £1,000 a year and that some are earning only £250 a year. But after all, there is no direction of labour into the trade and alternative occupations are available to them if they are not earning enough. They can get a lot more than that in a factory if they wish.

Or in the House of Commons.

If an author decides that that is the way in which he can earn his living because he can do it in an armchair with a pad on his knee, he must either write extremely good books, when he will be extremely well remunerated—

I did not write like that.

I regret to say that it is a long time since I read one of the right hon. Gentleman's books, and, as far as I remember, it would be one of those which be would be glad to forget.

A number of my books I would be glad to forget.

This is not a compulsory profession and those who do write do not, in my view, do too badly. Whether one should encourage a man who writes badly I do not know. I should say not. Whether one should, indeed, even encourage authors at all—for they seem to need little encouragement—is another question. One cannot stop them, if they once have the itch to write. It is in the Book of Jab that the man says

"Oh … that mine adversary had written a book."

It rather indicates that a friendly soul would discourage a man from adopting this rather hazardous profession.

I cannot see that there is any case for this proposal. Local authorities are not irresponsible bodies and are quite unanimous about it, from the richest to the comparatively poor. My own local authority is a small one, a borough council, and it has a library. A council on which I used to sit has a library which lends 2 million books a year. It is equally against the Measure. It is not a question of its meaning very much more than perhaps a 1d. on the rates, I agree, but every 1d. counts, and we are putting quite enough burden on local authorities now. Local authorities are very hard put to it to perform the services which they are required to do without vastly increasing their rates.

Does not the hon. Gentleman also appreciate that it is not the actual cost to the rates but the increase in administration which would be entailed if local authorities had to keep records of all the individual lendings?

I entirely agree. I should have made reference to that had I not wanted to keep my speech brief. It is true that the cost of administration would amount to a fair figure. Indeed, if we managed to violate the whole principle of public libraries and started imposing an individual charge on books, the cost of administration would, of course, be more than it is now.

I do not think that my point about the difficulty of sorting out the books on which one would have to make a charge has been met. The Bill contains provision for a list to be sent to the library by the publishers of the books on which the pennies should be collected. The library would still be responsible for scrutinising the books which it lent to see whether it had or had not to charge 1d., which means scrutinising all the books it lent. After all, copyright lasts a long time. This would add greatly to the cost of administration.

I suggest that Committee points are not enough. I believe that it would be impossible to improve the Bill in Committee. I made this remark on another Bill not so very long ago, but the House disagreed with me and the Bill went to a Standing Committee. It came back so emasculated that it could not even have got a job in a Turkish harem. I suggest that it would be merciful not to subject this Bill to the same fate and, therefore, to ensure that it does not go to a Standing Committee.

I wish to follow the hon. Member for Rugby (Mr. Wise), not in his last figure of speech, but certainly in his opposition to the Bill. I wish that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Teeling) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey) had been a little more generous in their attitude to our libraries. I think that both sides of the House regard the public libraries as a great national institution, rejoice in what they have achieved and rejoice in the kind of figures which have been almost urged against them this afternoon—that they spend £4 million on books and then get many millions of people to read them, which I should have thought that authors particularly would have welcomed.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion said that one of the causes of juvenile delinquency was reading crime books in public libraries, as though part of the sin was to read a crime book which could be obtained from a public library and as though a crime book would not have this effect whether obtained from a public library or not.

As for my right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West, I was brought up on his Left books in the Left Book Club days. I find it very difficult to equate his, almost, attack on the libraries when I remember his municipal socialism, to which I should have thought he would still have stuck. To speak about books being free when they are paid for by the ratepayers, roughly on the principle of from each according to his ability to pay and to each according to his need, struck me as surprising.

I believe that there can rarely have been a time in which the writer, if I may coin a phrase, has had it so good as in our time. Political writers today get far more money for attacking their party, from either the Right or the Left, than Mr. Robert Blatchford did for helping to create it, or Swift or Addison got for supporting it. The successful dramatist makes far more out of his plays than Shakespeare ever did. The novelist today does better than Scott, the historian better than Gibbons, the economist better than Adam Smith. I believe that Bertrand Russell has got far more out of his writings on philosophy than most of his predecessors in philosophy.

With the ever-widening reading public, caused partly by education and partly by the public libraries themselves, the market for a good book, the market for a fairly good book, even for a mediocre book, and certainly for a rubbishy book, increases every year. While it is true that the greatest rewards go to the most ephemeral and least worthy writers, the genius is usually recognised in his own generation, certainly more in this period than before, unless he is a poet.

The poet has a rough time today, unless he has some other source of income, and I think that the success of John Betjeman is the exception which proves the rule. It is possible that an outstanding genius will still have to starve in the garret, or earn his living in other ways while writing his masterpiece, but I think that it is extremely unlikely. In this affluent society of ours the genius stands more chance of being discovered, even if we discover a lot of non-geniuses in the same process.

I believe that the House is not concerned with the arrangements between the publisher and the author. It may be that we are all getting our books too cheaply, and, that being so, the publishers should charge more for their hooks. It may be, on the other hand, that the publisher is taking far more out of the profits of a book than the author, in which case the author ought to address his grievance to the publisher.

What seems to me to be utterly wrong is that the public libraries should be called upon the right any wrong which the author feels is done to him, or which the publisher feels he has to endure. I suggest that this is a case of the author biting the hand that feeds him. The public library, in many ways, is the author's best customer, if the figures given by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion are correct—that 60 per cent. of the cheap fiction goes to the libraries—and would benefit under the Bill and would take the major share of the royalties or the new tax to be levied under the Bill.

Both for fiction and non-fiction, the libraries provide for the author what we have at least provided for agriculture—a guaranteed market and guaranteed prices with some stability.

Surely the hon. Gentleman is not saying that 60 per cent. of the output of publishers goes to the public libraries.

If the hon. Gentleman had heard his hon. Friend, he would have known that he said 60 per cent. of the cheap fiction.

What I said was that the public libraries take 60 per cent. of the cheap literature.

The hon. Gentleman means 60 per cent. of the contents of the library is cheap fiction, which would benefit from the Bill.

I have watched in my own county the growth of the county library service over many years. It now covers almost every village in Hampshire. We are taking, by mobile libraries, books to corners of the county in which people had never before had an opportunity of reading books of the variety and range that we are taking, and these books would never have reached these villages if they had not been taken by us.

Our county library expenditure has increased its expenditure on books year by year, and must be spending at the moment ten times what it spent ten years ago and fifty times what it spent fifty years ago, and on each of the books which the Hampshire County Library buys the author gets the royalties which he would have got if the book had been sold to anybody else.

The most serious works, the great biographies, the great histories and the great scientific text books could not be published at all if publishers were not certain that they could count on the learned libraries not only providing a definite demand for most of the first edition, but as the years went on and as the libraries built up their reference libraries, a regular demand for books for which there is no commercial market. Much of the ephemeral literature might not reach print. Public libraries often give the new writer his first opportunity. I understand that libraries often take as much as 50 per cent. of the publication of a first new novel, and it is because of that that the publisher is able to encourage young novelists whom he would not otherwise think of encouraging, so that the ratepayer, through the public library, is acting as a patron of the arts just as effectively as the rich patrons did in the days long past.

The Bill introduces a new idea into English law and into book reading. It is that one should pay twice for a book—once when buying it and again when reading it. While I can do as I like with my books—and I buy my own books, not using libraries very much—and can read them and read them and read them again, and lend them to my friends—and hope to get them back—without any charge, as a ratepayer through the public library I must become liable to a further charge of a penny any time I as a ratepayer use one of those books.

A parallel has been drawn between the levy made by the Performing Right Society on musical performances, but if a library lends a musical score or a gramophone record, no royalty is demanded by the Performing Right Society. The Performing Right Society rightly insists on royalties being paid for performances. It is literally true that even if a composer could insist on every member of the orchestra having a complete score for which he has to pay, the composer of music could not get by merely on the sale of the sheets of his music.

If the dramatist has his play performed, he will have his performing rights and if my right hon. Friend can get anyone to give a public performance of any of his books, he will be entitled to performing rights.

Books are written to be read. They are bought to be read and to ask for an extra sum for the reading of a book is utterly fantastic. The Bill could create a position in which the efficient public library committee, in an endeavour to keep rates down, would lock up the books it had bought in an effort to prevent them being used, or if it had to choose books, would be likely to choose them on the basis that nobody would be likely to read them.

rose in his place, and claimed to move, That the Question be now put; but Mr. SPEAKER withheld his assent and declined then to put that Question.

Why should the Bill be applied only to libraries? Why should local education authorities not be charged a penny a book for every book used by children in classrooms, if that book is copyright? Why confine it to copyright books? Why not make Shakespeare pay something towards the profits of the publishing houses?

The Bill is almost unworkable. The machinery for levying the £½ million or £1 million which it proposes for public libraries would cost nearly as much as that to set up. I ask the House to note what the Bill asks local authorities to do—every library will be supplied by every publisher with a list of copyright books; every library will have to make sure which of those copyright books it has; it will have to be sure that it keeps a complete record, as distinct from its issues of books, of each of its, books, sub-divided into non-copyright books and copyright books.

Supposing that a student goes into the reading room of a library and reads a book for half an hour; would that be included for the levy?

The hon. Member will not expect me to answer for the promoters of the Bill, but if they are logical they would have to insist on a check being kept of the reference library and other references in the library so that—