I beg to move,

That this House, recognising the need to protect house purchasers from jerry-building, poor materials and bad workmanship, congratulates the National House-Builders Registration Council on its efforts to obtain high standards in the building trade by voluntary agreement, but believes that legislation should now be considered to ensure that all house builders conform to accepted standards and specifications, and insure against contingencies.

I bring this subject before the House because of the petition which has been brought to me by 138 householders in the town of Ashton-under-Lyne, living on the Everest and Cranbourne estates, who have been and are faced with heavy loss due to faulty materials used in the construction of the houses which they have bought.

In personal justification, and with modesty, may I claim just a little experience in building, in that during the course of my career I have been instrumental in building over 80,000 sq. ft. of factory floor space and several houses. The current edition of Good Practice in Building, published by the Ministry of Works, has three references with illustrations to the standard of building that I have put into operation.

The houses that I am talking about were built in the period 1955 to 1959. They were built on a sloping site and filling was necessary, colliery shale being used for the purpose. The builder of these houses was warned by the borough surveyor about its use and his attention was drawn to the Building Research Station Digest, No 84, dated January, 1956, which sets out in explicit terms information about this material. For the purpose of publicity, and so that it will prevent other people from doing the same thing, I propose to draw attention to it.

This digest, dated January, 1956, states:

"Several cases of damage to concrete solid ground floors of houses have recently been brought to the notice of the Station. The damage has taken the form of cracking and heaving of the concrete floor to an extent that makes it impossible to open or close doors; in some houses lateral expansion of the concrete has caused outward movement at the base of the external walls. The cause has been traced to the use of colliery shale as a filling or hardcore under the concrete."

It goes on to explain what should be done.

As no reply to the warning was forthcoming, the borough surveyor gave two further warnings, but the materials were still used. In addition, the occupiers said that they could prove that instead of going down to the clay, as shown on the plans, the inside walls were built on a concrete raft and in consequence were affected by the buckling of the floors. After going through the preliminary stages of cutting bits off the bottoms of doors and adjusting table legs and shifting furniture to the sides of rooms, the whole thing boiled up earlier this year when the householders realised that drastic action was needed to put the matter right.

Naturally, they consulted the person who had built that property. At the time the property was built he had created chief rents to the extent of £10 per house, which he had promptly sold, and they have not been able to obtain any satisfaction from him. They next consulted the building societies. Most of the householders had bought their houses with money advanced by the building societies who sent a staff surveyor to take samples of the material. The material was analysed and I cannot do better than read an extract from a letter from a building society which illustrates the sort of attitude which the building societies took to the job at that stage. This is to Account A956 which is common to the estate. The letter says:

"In the hall, the floor surface between the front door and the kitchen has bulged to form a ridge which has caused the staircase to lift along its outer edge. In the lounge, dining room and kitchen the floor surfaces are badly bulged. Over the kitchen window and the side door settlement fractures are patent.

It has been ascertained that this bulging is due to chemical activity producing a swelling in the filling material underneath the floors. As this chemical activity is known to be increasing, you will appreciate that unless the position is corrected soon, the bulging in the floor surfaces will become more pronounced, the internal walls will move, and it will be only a question of time before these defects will affect the whole structure seriously and will have also a marked adverse effect on the value of the property."

The letter goes on to say what should be done.

The borough surveyor, the Building Research station and the society's surveyors produced a specification of work. The letter goes on:

"Three local builders are prepared to carry out the work at costs ranging from £435 to £460 assuming that the central pier envisaged in the specification will contain brickwork to a depth of 5 ft. below the suffit of the steel beam. Such work would be supervised"—

supervised at this juncture—

"of course, by the Society's Surveyors. It should be appreciated, however, that after structural work has been completed, other work may be necessary to make good disturbed fixtures, pipes, conduits and decorations."

The letter goes on to say that the building societies would advance the money.

"If necessary, such further advance could also include the Surveyors' fees for supervising the work equivalent to 9 per cent. of the builder's price, together with the Society's Solicitors' charges in connection with the Deed of Further Charge…The Further Advance would be added to the balance outstanding on your mortgage account, and the total mortgage debt would then be re-arranged over any period up to 25 years, depending on your requirements."

So the letter goes on.

In some cases the householders asked builders to do the job for them. In others, they started taking up the floors and excavating; then getting craftsmen in to do the skilled jobs. On one Saturday afternoon, I looked into a pit which a householder was digging and which was 8 ft. deep. In the sardonic way in which some Lancashire people talk, he said, "I have paid a lot of money in my time for colliery shale sent to me by the Coal Board, but this is the first time I have dug any myself, and it is going to cost me £500." It does not need much imagination to appreciate the misery, physical as well as mental, these people have endured.

When this case began, I gave the Parliamentary Secretary photographs of the situation of these poor householders. With his usual courtesy, he has looked at them and sympathised about them. They are available for anybody to see. This is a little visual training for anybody who does not know anything about the subject.

Most of these householders who took on these commitments to buy their own houses did so on very finely balanced household budgets with the expectation that after 20 years they would have an asset, a house of their own, which would be a bulwark in their retirement. But instead of 20 years they are now com- mitted for 25 years. One of them said that it would set him back ten years and that in his case he would be paying into the second year of his retirement. What a prospect for hard-working, thrifty, house-proud folk who have been subjected to the trouble through no fault of their own.

In most cases the purchase of a house by people like this is the only real business transaction which they undertake in the course of their lives. They assume that in some way they are protected and that because the building society has advanced perhaps 80 per cent. of the cost of the house and because the local authority has byelaws, they are somehow covered and will not be let down. They now know full well from bitter experience that that is not so.

I have begun my case for the consideration of legislation with an illustration of a problem with which I have now been dealing for several months, but it is not an isolated case. This sort of thing can be multiplied all over the country. Since my Motion first appeared on the Order Paper, I have had sheaves of letters from all over the country bitterly complaining about substandard workmanship, builders going bankrupt, plumbing, leaky roofs and so on. This morning my hon. Friend the Member for Merioneth (Mr. T. W. Jones) handed me a letter from one of his constituents which says:

"I am writing with the hope that you might restore the faith I hitherto had in British justice, for after my recent experiences I feel there is no justice for a person with limited means."

That is the sort of beginning to letters we all get from time to time. We discount some of the things written in letters of this type, but I assure hon. Members that if I read the whole of this letter they would see that this person was genuinely aggrieved. I shall spare the House by not reading the whole letter, but I hope hon. Members will take my word for it. From time to time in this last week I have had letters from all over the country.

I am interested in what the hon. Member is saying, but I was not quite clear, when he started citing cases of which he has photographs, whether the purchasers had had independent architects or surveyors to look at their property, or if they had relied entirely on inspection by building societies. I should be grateful if he would explain that.

They had relied on the building society's and the builder's specification in the hope that they would be covered by the surveyor's inspection and the bye-laws. I shall come later in my speech to the proportion of builders of houses who employ architects.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bilston (Mr. R. Edwards) has on two occasions brought in a Bill under the Ten Minute Rule, dealing with this subject and has quoted cases from all over the country. I have no doubt, Mr. Speaker, that if he has the opportunity to catch your eye he will lay before the House cases which he has had in his postbag. He has a vast experience of this subject and has made two first-class attempts to bring it forward. What he has done has been very good, but the method of a Ten Minute Rule Bill is not very satisfactory. It is rather like the old custom of the Chinese who used to put on the dykeside unwanted female children and leave them to die from exposure.

I have mentioned the Building Research Station. I am sure that hon. Members will not fail to connect what I am now about to say with the terms of this Motion. Despite the money which the Government have poured into research for the building trade, very little of the information which comes from the Building Research Station ever gets down to the small builder. Take the case of the history of the material I have been talking about. The possibility of using colliery shale was explored as far back as 1949. The Building Research Station issued a pamphlet on the subject at that time, saying:

"Chemical analysis is advised to check the need for special precautions."

That was a long time ago. Despite this warning, reports were received by the Building Research Station of the use of this material in St. Helens and Warwick in 1955. This provoked the station, which does first-class work, to issue a further warning in January 1956, in Digest No. 84, from which I have already quoted. The subject was referred to again in Digest No. 87 in April 1956, and yet again in Digest No. 97 of April 1957. Yet reports of trouble still pour into the Building Research Station after fourteen years.

The house building section of the building trade is a highly important section. This is not a small industry. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have agreed about the number of houses we should like to see built. We hear about 350,000, 400,000, 450,000 a year needing to be built for many years to come. That means a turnover of something like £1,000 million a year. This is no insignificant industry. Yet what the Building Research Station says is practically ignored and interest in it is very small indeed.

Instead of talking of what we intend to do in erecting houses, it is a good thing occasionally, such as on this occation, to spend a little time on what we should do about the quality of building. The Government spend £72,000 a year on the Building Research Station, but my examination of the D.S.I.R. accounts discloses no contribution from the trade. The only money the Research Station receives outside the income from the D.S.I.R. is by way of commissioned research projects from large firms, which very often are in a different class of building altogether, such as office or factory building. In the trade generally people are not research-minded.

I do not want to broaden the debate into an argument about research, but it seems high time that this trade was brought into line with other industries and that a levy was introduced to support the Building Research Station.

I know the hon. Member would wish to be completely fair. Is it not true that many of the firms which give commissions to the Research Station are manufacturers of materials? Do not the building trade employers make quite a large contribution to the funds? I have always understood that to be so.

No, my investigations into the accounts show that the only contributions the Building Research Station receives are from large firms, as the hon. Member says, and for investigations into materials or methods for which they pay. I think the hon. Member will find that there is no reference to subscriptions from any other source. If there is, I shall readily apologise, but I have gone to some trouble in this matter and I think this is so.

The country has gradually become very conscious of the need for consumer protection of all sorts. In the last few years interest in the protection of the ordinary purchaser and consumer of durable goods has quickened. There is a semi-official body, the British Standards Institution, with its Kite mark. The Consumer Council journal has come into being because of public interest in this matter, and to ensure that purchasers are not fobbed off with shoddy goods. The Board of Trade, through the Merchandise Marks Act, can prosecute those who misrepresent their goods. Motor-car manufacturers, through pressure of public opinion, have had to change a warranty to a guarantee for twelve months in many cases. According to the Inland Revenue, in my experience that constitutes a fifth of a motor-car's life.

Compare that sort of guarantee with what the house purchaser has when he buys a house. We have the Retail Trading Standards Association. Quality marks are given by Courtaulds and others. Traders are increasingly conscious of the need in this country—to their credit—to get better quality into their goods. It counts in the export markets. Even places such as Hong Kong are taking an enormous interest in the quality of the goods they produce.

But very little has been done to protect the person who buys a house except by one Council, and that on a voluntary basis. I notice the right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith) in his place. The inquiries which I have made about this Council lead me back to the work, the genius, the altruism and the foresight of his father. He should be proud, and I am glad that he is here this morning to say a word on this subject, because I should have thought that it was in his bones.

The Council has been in operation for 27 years and has had to endure the opposition and very often the indifference of the trade, which has consistently refused to put its house in order despite the injunctions of the present Minister of Housing and Local Government. At the last employers' dinner the present Minister went to town on this subject and told them that if they did not do something quickly, he would do something for them. I hope that there will be more forthright talk today from the Parliamentary Secretary. And yet we have known that this jerry building, with its terrible results, has been with us all the time.

I want to be quite fair to the National Federation of Building Trades Employers. Indeed, there is no point in trailing my coat at all this morning. The Federation has been most courteous. It has given me the information which I have wanted and has written to me in an open and straightforward fashion. On 5th December, it wrote to me as follows:

"We have been giving considerable thought recently on how to increase the number of builders registering although outside our control, and with this in view my Council agreed only last week the following resolution:

That a working party, comprising representatives of the Government, of the national House-Builders Registration Council, the National Federation of Building Trades Employers and the Federation of Registered House-Builders be set up to study ways and means of bringing about adherence by all house builders building houses for sale to the principles of the present National House-Builders Registration Council's scheme, suitably strengthened as necessary.

This working party will be meeting shortly and I can assure you that we have every intention of producing an answer to this somewhat difficult problem".

This is more than a difficult problem. It is a tragedy for 138 householders in Ashton-under-Lyne. In many cases it means the ruin of their lives. Sometimes the cold-blooded mind of the Ministry can lead to more and more frustration. What we want in this case is a little bit of urgency, a little bit of feeling for people who do not seem to be able to turn anywhere for succour. I raised this with the Ministry, hoping that there would be a public inquiry, and I received all the assistance possible from the Ministry, but they finished their letter by saying, in effect, that the only recourse which these people had was to consult a solicitor. That is being done, and I will not pursue it.

What about registration? It seems to be agreed by people on both sides of the House, by the Employers' Federation, the workers, building societies, the Government and everybody who has an interest in and is connected with the trade that there should be registration. Some people have made the proposal that registration should take place with the local authorities. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Bilston holds this view. Personally, I do not hold it, and I will explain why. Last Tuesday I led a deputation of Lancashire and Cheshire M.P.s to the Ministry to show the Minister the difficulties which 21 local authorities in Lancashire and Cheshire were experiencing in the building of houses. Five themes ran through the difficulties; for every local authority they were the same. One of the five important points was the shortage of technical assistants and staff and the inability of the local authority to acquire any. My hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) can corroborate that, I see no sense in loading the job of registration on to a local authority which is already understaffed and cannot cope with the job which it already has to do. I think that if teeth were given to the National House-Builders Registration Council some progress could be made soon.

It is interesting to see what this Council has been doing, is doing and is trying to do. I understand that since its inception it has issued 230,000 certificates. During this time 38 cases have been referred to arbitration and the sum involved in the way of liability to the Registration Council during the whole of this time has been only £900. This shows the value of registration and the responsibility which people take upon themselves when they go to the length of registering with the Registration Council. It shows how they are prepared to shoulder their obligations if faults are subsequently found in the structure of the housing.

The Council has on its register 1,700 house builders, an increase of 500—which is interesting—since my hon. Friend the Member for Bilston introduced his Ten Minute Rule Bill on 15th May 1962.

The 1,700 builders represent a proportion of the house building industry. I am not able to say what percentage it is. Some people have suggested the figure of 10,000 builders. Others say 3,000. I do not know. The Council has been instrumental in inspecting 50,000 houses in the last year, against 33,000 in the previous year. The total potential of private house building is 170,000 a year.

I come to the point now about architect-designed houses. Twenty-five per cent. of the purchasers of the 170,000 houses have their own architects to carry out examinations, inspections and quality control. This means that the Council is getting an increasing share of the remainder to supervise. This is building up but not fast enough.

I come to other services which the Council gives. Together with registration goes insurance. Insuring by the builder means that in the event of trouble—there are black sheep in every family—the insurance will take care of the liability that the house purchaser is likely to run into. I ask hon. Members to think of the difference in the mentality in my constituents if insurance had been taken out by the builder. He could have made a mistake. Anybody can make a mistake. However, in fairness to purchasers of this type of property, it is beholden on anybody who is to build houses to insure so that buyers will not be out on a limb, as my constituents are. Further, there would be as a matter of course dissemination of information down to the lowest level in the building trade. This could be brought into the general specification and the general rule which would apply in registration.

I appeal to the Joint Parliamentary Secretary to do something about this urgently. My constituents are asking themselves what on earth they are going to do. The old lady who has just lost her husband through old war wounds has taken on a job which she knows full well she will not be able to carry through. She is looking round for somebody to buy the house. She is paying out money which she has had to borrow from kith and kin to make the house good so that she can sell it. Then out she goes—God knows where to. If there were one case in the country, it would be sufficient to justify legislation. But there are thousands of cases. It is time action was taken on the lines taken in my Motion, perhaps even stronger. I have couched my Motion in this way so that the Parliamentary Secretary can accept it and devote his speech to concentrating on the need for such action, whilst at the same time bringing some encouragement to me, to those who have raised this problem before, and to the rest of the House who are interested in this great human problem.

I want to start by congratulating the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes) for the eloquence, clarity and feeling with which he has moved the Motion. I am very glad that he has taken the opportunity to raise this matter in the House, though I am naturally sorry for the constituency reasons which have, in part at any rate, motivated his action.

House purchase, as the hon. Gentleman said, is an extremely important matter in the lives of those who purchase a house. The hon. Gentleman described it as sometimes perhaps the sole business transaction in their lives. It is one of the most important transactions in their lives, yielding, however, to the still more important matter of the choice of a helpmate to share the house with. It is a very important matter. The hon. Gentleman touched both on the problem and on some of the things that are being done to try and deal with it.

I want to address myself for a few minutes to those matters. I start with a few words about the reason why there is this problem in regard to house purchase. The law, which in many respects has provided an increasing degree of protection for purchasers of goods of various categories, has never faced up to the special problem faced by purchasers of mass-produced houses. Purchasers of mass-produced houses fall into a sort of no-man's land, on the one hand lacking the protection that is obtained by the person who, wanting a house, is able to order a new house specifically to be built for him, and on the other hand lacking the statutory protection which the law, primarily through the agency of the Sale of Goods Act, has provided for the purchaser of goods and chattels. The purchaser of a mass-produced house lacks these forms of protection and is still treated by the law on the principle of caveat emptor, with the added complication that few buyers can be in a less good position to detect latent defects in the subject matter of their purchase than the average purchaser of house property.

The person who is in the happy position of being able, if wanting a house, to give instructions for one to be made to order has varied protections. He has, first, the protection of the supervision of the design and work by an architect of his own choosing and nomination. It is the architect's business to see that he gets a house free from defect, and he may be liable in an action for professional negligence if he does not carry out that duty properly. Secondly, he has the protection of the individual contract with the builder, which binds the builder to follow the specification of the architect and to do the work to the reasonable satisfaction of the architect. If the builder fails in his duty he is liable in an action for damages for breach of contract.

And, under the R.I.B.A. contract, has he not a 12 months' guarantee of the work?

I was coming to that. I was about to say that, thirdly, he has in the R.I.B.A. standard form of building contract what is called a defects liability clause, which gives him protection against defects arising during a period specified in the contract which he has signed.

Those three things taken together add up to a considerable protection, but they are, in the nature of things, a protection for the favoured few, because the house made to measure is, I suppose, not really much more common than the suit made to measure as distinct from the ready-made garment. That sort of protection, which obviously cannot be translated into the circumstances of mass-produced houses, is not available for the majority of cases or for the type of transaction with which we are dealing today.

I turn to the sort of protection which is enjoyed by the purchaser of goods and chattels. While the Sale of Goods Act does not give any general implied warranty of quality, it does something in respect of goods that is not done in respect of the sale of houses. It distinguishes between a transaction where the seller is an ordinary individual and where he is a trader.

Where the buyer of goods relies on the skill or experience of the seller, the law implies a warranty of fitness for the purposes for which the goods are required. Where the goods are bought from a dealer setting up to trade in that particular line of goods, the law implies that they will be of what is called merchantable quality. That does not apply in the sale of houses, because the law treats that as if both parties were ordinary people. If the same principle applied as in the Sale of Goods Act, both these warranties would operate for houses. They would have to be fit for the purpose of living, because the purchaser relies on the builder-vendor for his skill; and there would also be an implied warranty of the equivalent of merchantable quality because the builder sets up to deal in houses. In fact, the law gives no such safeguard. The position was well summarised in a decision of the Court of Appeal, which said:

"Quite clearly there is no implied undertaking by the Vendor as to the fitness of the house or its condition. In such circumstances, the maxim caveat emptor dearly applies to the full when the purchaser inspects the house by himself or by his surveyor and makes up his mind as to its condition and fitness for occupation."

We get the position, from the point of view of the basic law, that there is a gap in the law regarding protection for the purchaser of a mass-produced house. Where one gets a gap in the law one always gets some people, albeit generally a small minority, who are ready, anxious and able to take advantage of it.

That is what happened during the days of the house building boom in the inter-war years. The great majority of houses built in this mass-produced way at that time were not only cheap and good value but were soundly constructed. However, there was a small minority element who built what has been estimated to be about 3 per cent. of bad, jerry-built houses. Although 3 per cent. is a small proportion of the whole, it is a very significant number when translated in terms of bad houses in which people must live. That was a matter which naturally attracted attention and gave rise to a good deal of disquiet among those who had the standards and good repute of the building industry at heart and who did not want to see people badly housed when there was no need for it.

Those are really the circumstances which brought about the establishment of the National House-Builders' Registration Council, to which the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne has referred and of which he has given a description. My father was one of the pioneers of this organisation and in his ninetieth year he is still an active vice-president. I am sincerely grateful to the hon. Member for his kind references to him, which I very much appreciate.

The Council is staffed, accommodated and administered by what is known as the Housing Improvement Association, a non-profit-making company, limited by guarantee, with an Order by the Minister under Section 5 of the Building Societies Act, 1939. It operates on the basis of the registration of house builders who are prepared to accept its standards, disciplines and a system of certification whereby a house builder is entitled to a certificate if the house is built in accordance with the standards of the Council. Those standards are ensured by inspection, by the expert staff of the Council, and by a standard specification. There is an agreement whereby the builder, in the case of defects reported within two years and due to non-compliance with those standards, makes good for the purchaser. The result is that the purchaser gets at no cost to himself as good protection, in some ways better, as the purchaser of the bespoke house gets at considerable expense by employing his own architect and having an individual contract with a builder.

The progress of the Council over the years has been good, though necessarily uneven, because it reflects the uneven characteristics of the period of the lifetime of the Council. It started shortly before the war, got off to a good start, was inoperative during the war and for some years thereafter was not able to make much progress for obvious reasons. There was, first, considerable restriction on private enterprise house building and, secondly, such houses as were built were in such great demand that it was a very striking case of a sellers' market and not one in which the Council could make as much progress as one would have wished. Since 1956 there has been very rapid progress, resulting in the figures which the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne gave. Indeed, of the 230,000 certificates of which he speaks about 215,000 have been issued since 1956. Overall, there have been only about 6 complaints per 1,000 houses, mostly of a very trivial nature and immediately rectified by the builder, and of serious complaints only the 39 arbitration cases to which the hon. Member referred.

The hon. Member pointed out that these matters are rectified and that there is an insurance policy in force. He gave the phenomenally low figure of insurance liability which has arisen with regard to defects. It is perhaps worth noting that when the premium was fixed in pre-war years it was fixed at 6s. per house and now, when inflation has quadrupled the cost of a house, the premium has been cut to one-half of the original figure. This is striking evidence of the very little amount of defect amongst house-builders who accept the obligations of the registration scheme.

:Would the right hon. and learned Gentleman also make clear that the £900 was the liability of the Registration Council after the builders had had an opportunity to put right the other defects in dispute?

I am much obliged to the hon. Member. As far as the Council is concerned it is, so to speak, a residual liability after the builders have had the opportunity themselves to remedy the defects.

I submit, in summary, that these figures and this progress are a striking success story and they show the high standards of domestic building by those operating within the scheme. Where there are defects in house-building today it can therefore reasonably be assumed that they exist in the sector outside the scheme and possibly only in very small elements of the non-registered sector. But having regard to the facts and figures I should think that all trouble could be eliminated if the scheme of the National House-Builders Registration Council could become universal in its application.

The real problem now, therefore, is that, having got the scheme operating over 40 per cent. of the potential—that is 40 per cent. of houses privately built without the superintendence of an architect nominated by the purchaser— the problem is how to extend it to the other 60 per cent. Can it be done voluntarily, or will some method of compulsion be necessary? I say straight away that this has been a voluntary movement and it would be preferable if what has been begun voluntarily can be completed voluntarily. But if that should turn out not to be so and sufficient progress cannot be made, or made fast enough, there is no philosophic reason, as I see it, why a scheme such as this should not be made mandatory.

After all, compulsory standards and codes are the commonplace of professions. All professions submit to registration and to a compulsory code of standards, and though rather different considerations no doubt apply in the case of an industry from those of a profession I see basically no reason why the same principle should be rejected in the case of an industry if the requirements of the protection of the purchaser demand it.

We therefore now get to the question whether evangelisation and consumer insistence can make sufficiently rapid progress with the spread of the Council's registration scheme to absorb the remaining 60 per cent. in a reasonable space of time. I hope that they will; but I think that there is a case for the Minister to institute such inquiry as he can, as soon as he can, to see whether the answer looks to him to be that there are sufficient prospects of voluntary completion of this work or whether he should have to have regard to the possibilities of compulsory registration. Whichever way the answer lies, I very much agree with the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne that registration in the future should take this form and not be added to the already over-burdened local authorities.

There is now long experience in this field for the workings of the Registration Council, and I would submit that the future lies with it, either on a voluntary basis or on a more compulsory basis if circumstances should so require. There is no need for any new machinery, because we have here machinery which has been well tried and which has achieved a substantial success and holds out signal promise for the future.

Would my right hon. and learned Friend be kind enough to tell me whether he considers that a persistently smoking chimney in a newly-completed house would be of sufficient importance to attract the attention of the Registration Council and to require remedy by it?

:Yes, but I think that the illustration my hon. Friend takes is a matter which would also be dealt with by byelaws. There is of course machinery for byelaw approval which eliminates some defects, but it does not go far enough and it is with the latent defects in the structure that we are more particularly concerned here.

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the Motion and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes) on his good fortune in having been No. 1 out of the hat in the Ballot, on selecting such a vitally important subject, and on the excellent contribution which he made to the House today in a very human and constructive speech indeed. My hon. Friend has enabled us to debate the subject constructively, without going into all the background reasons, why something should be done quickly to halt what I consider is the rising tide of jerry-building and substandard building.

My hon. Friend, quite rightly, emphasised the view that this was not a problem for the registration of building firms by local authorities, but on this issue I must beg to differ with him and with the right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith),who spoke so eloquently on the subject. There are district surveyors in the L.C.C. area and I discovered in all my inquiries into sub-standard building that in the area covered by the L.C.C. jerry-building hardly exists because of the machinery of the district surveyors.

I also discovered that there is little sub-standard jerry-building in Scotland, because, there again, the local authorities have power through a very similar system to inspect the building of houses at every stage and have some power to condemn the material that goes into the building of the houses.

If the contention that there is very little substandard building throughout Scotland and throughout the area covered by the L.C.C. is correct, as I believe it is—perhaps the Minister will deal with this point later—then here we have a clear solution to the problem—more power to the local authorities. The whole tendency in this country unfortunately—because I am against bigness and monopoly and remote control—is to create larger local authorities. We are moving towards the creation of county boroughs, which will have increased resources and facilities for doing the additional work which is absolutely necessary if the houses of the future are to be fit for people to live in and we are to relieve so many thousands of young people who are purchasing houses today from their dreadful anxieties.

Every house-building firm should be registered with its nearest local authority. Local authorities should have the power to inspect all new house building for private purchase at every stage of construction. They should have the same powers as they now possess over their own municipal building. This seems to me to be a reasonable request. It is necessary because a builder who has consistently been responsible for substandard building would have his registration withdrawn or he would not be allowed to reregister. This, in one stroke, would compel the building industry to put its own house in order. I would bring in to this registration the National House-Builders Registration Council. I would ask for its active co-operation, and I would apply its standard as a minimum standard for the house costing under £3,000.

I would also compel every house builder to take out insurance against bankruptcy. Builders could do this through their own industry, as is done by the Law Society and the medical profession, Preferably, it could be done through the industry. Firms of repute would not be asked to do this because their standing and their record would prove that they could meet their responsibilities.

This is not a question which affects merely a few hundred people; the problem of substandard jerry-building affects thousands of young families and retired people. Young people making the biggest purchase of their lives are the main victims of jerry-building. There is also the retired person who buys a bungalow, thinking that he is protected by the local authority, the building industry or the building society, and who is often involved in heavy additional expenditure that he cannot possibly afford, because there is no proper supervision and no registration of house builders.

About 300 builders go bankrupt every year. The latest figures that I have show that 357 builders "went broke" in 1962. True, they are not all house builders; indeed, there has been no attempt to break down these figures.

In my constituency part of an estate was built over a disused mine and another part was built over a disused clay quarry. Six of the houses constructed within the last six years cracked in half and collapsed, and are now little more than heaps of rubble. Quite a number of these houses on the estate have been condemned by the local authority.

The builder went bankrupt. He was a decent chap. He wanted to do a good job. He thought that the foundations were safe and that everything had been done to safeguard the construction of the houses The local authority did its best, but the cost of preparing this disused land for this kind of estate was out of proport on to the cost of the houses which were being built, and, obviously, the people concerned cut down on the expenditure.

The occupiers of these houses are tied with mortgages for the rest of their lives, and in some cases there is no house in which to live. The local authority, using the same land, just across the road, built an estate of perfectly good houses. There are no cracks and no complaints. They will stand there for another 200 or 300 years.

My point is that the local authority had not the power to inspect the construction of the first estate to which I referred during every process of the building. Indeed, energetic and dedicated local authority surveyors make themselves very unpopular with the building industry if they persistently visit the sites. I know from letters that I have received that building surveyors from local councils have been ordered off sites because they have become a nuisance to the builder. What is required is for local councils to have authority to inspect the material, to reject unseasoned timber and bricks that are intended for interior use, but which are used for the outside of houses.

I know of an estate in Surrey where the bricks that are being used absorb dampness like a sponge. When half a brick is put into a bucket of water it swiftly sucks up the water. To deal with this diffculty the outsides of the houses, which cost £4,000 each, were painted.

How do we deal with the builder who goes bankrupt? I have with me two letters. Actually, I have scores of letters in my possession—pathetic and heartbreaking letters from old-age pensioners. One put down a deposit of £350 on a bungalow before the site was cleared. The builder "went broke" and this man has lost all his money and has no redress at all.

I have another letter here from two old-age pensioners—I mention these cases only because old people cannot start again, like a young couple can—who paid a deposit of £275 in similar circumstances. The builder went bankrupt, and they have no redress at all.

What is more, very many houses can be involved in the bankruptcies of 350 building firms. Estate after estate can be affected. I agree with the right hon. and learned Member for Hertford that there is here a real gap in the law to protect the consumer. We protect the consumer against bad food. We protect the consumer now against the hazards arising from defective household equipment. We protect the consumer in very many ways.

Almost at every level, we have become more and more consumer-conscious because modern developments have produced all kinds of new products which go into people's homes, and a greater need for protection has accordingly arisen. But we have not got down to the problem of protecting the house buyer from the builder who goes bankrupt and from sub-standard building by firms not affiliated to the National House-Builders Registration Council.

I have all manner of details here—I will not bore the House with them—of estate after estate where trouble has arisen, in parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire, the West Midlands, Greater London and Surrey and as far away as Plymouth and Poole. Some of the surveyor's reports are heart-breaking. This is characteristic: on an estate of 200 bungalows, 37 sub-standard jobs in one bungalow are noted. On another estate, over 40 substandard jobs in one house among those built are noted.

Were any of these cases covered by the National House-Builders Registration Council guarantee?

In one case, yes, but at least one of the persons who wrote to me about it was not satisfied. In the main, they are not covered by that Council.

Any house purchaser who does not buy from a builder affiliated to the National House-Builders Registration Council is very foolish indeed. House purchasers should see to it right away that the builder constructing their houses, or the builder responsible for a new estate on which they buy their homes, is a member of the Council. The Council, at least, does give fundamental protection. But it has had 30 years to organise the building industry and it has only 1,700 affiliated members. It has 50 inspectors, and I understand that they have inspected 50,000 houses.

Last year, I believe, the method of inspection involved nine visits to each house. I do not know how it is possible for 50 inspectors to inspect 50,000 houses in one year nine times during the course of construction. But these are the figures which we are given, and we must take the word of those who supply them to us. I know that this is a dedicated body, and has done very valuable work. The trouble is that it is not representative enough of the industry.

We do not know—I do not think that the Minister can tell us—how many house-building firms there are in Britain. I estimate that there are 130,000 building firms. I have spent some time trying to discover the structure of the building industry.

I think that I am right in saying that a circular goes out each year from my right hon. Friend's Department, which collects this information. It requires builders to say how many employees they have and what they are actually doing. I think that the information which the hon. Gentleman wants could be extracted from those returns.

I do not think that it is possible, without registration, for the Minister to give a report on the structure of the building industry. Any man can become a builder. Give him a ladder, a bucket of sand, a bucket of mortar and a bucket of water, and he is a builder. How does the Minister know? No one is required to register. I estimate that there are 70,000 building firms operating in this country which employ no labour at all; they are one-man firms.

Will the hon. Gentleman accept that those are the ones which do not build houses?

Yes; I am talking about the building industry. I am coming to that point.

I understand that the Minister has a register of 5,000 firms which build houses, and that that is the figure which he takes from a register which the Ministry itself compiles. But there are only 1,700 building firms affiliated to the National House-Builders Registration Council. Therefore, there must be a great many house purchasers who are completely unprotected.

This is why it is most important to have compulsory registration. The voluntary method has been tried and it has failed. I do not want to take up more time than is necessary, but I must emphasise the size of the problem. Today, thousands of young people are complaining about sub-standard building. Whole estates of as many as 200 houses are built, with every house substandard.

A builder buys a piece of land and pays a great deal for it because of the inflated price of land. Then he has to recover his money, so he cuts his building costs to bone. He puts into the bungalows or houses timber which has not been properly treated. He uses too much water and sand in his cement and too much sand in his mortar. He paints the walls before the plaster has properly dried. When the people take over the houses, they find gaps between the windows and the walls, the windows will not close, the doors will not open, the garages are quite unusable, and so on. This state of affairs calls for intervention by the Government.

We cannot deal with this problem on a voluntary basis. It is a minority in the building industry which is responsible for jerry-building and sub-standard building, but it is also a minority of the people who buy the sub-standard houses who complain. The overwhelming majority of people do not want to be involved in litigation. They are not complainers. They say, "We will put up with this", and the result is that they are involved in hundreds of pounds of extra expenditure in making their homes habitable—often expenditure which they cannot really afford.

That is why I regretfully disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne and the right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East that this is a matter which can be settled by voluntary action. I believe that legislation is required to compel all building firms to register with the local authority; that every house builder should be compelled to guarantee that the purchaser of a house is covered against sub-standard building; that every firm that wants to build houses should take out insurance in case it goes bankrupt; and that new standards of house building should be a condition of any firm operating in this industry.

Over the next 20 years, 6 million houses will be built and purchased. We must guarantee that these 6 million houses will not be the slums of the future and that the people who buy them will get value for their money and will be able to live in decent, healthy homes. This is a responsibility that the House of Commons must accept, and we would accept it if we gave these guarantees to the people we represent through legislation.

I should disclose at the outset that I am engaged in the building industry and that my firm is a registered company with the Registered House-Builders Federation. I have had a long family connection with this organisation.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes) on raising this question, because it is a very important one about which there has been a considerable amount of misinformation over the years. The hon. Member for Bilston (Mr. R. Edwards) seems to me to have had a most unfortunate, experience. He painted a very black picture. I believe that there is less jerry-building in this country today than ever before. There was a large measure of it after the First World War, but as time has gone on it has become less and less.

The hon. Member gave the impression, wrongly, I think, that the local authorities have no powers whatsoever. It has been my experience—and I was born into the industry, so consequently this has been a common place occurrence for me during practically the whole of my life—that building inspectors and surveyors employed by local authorities have very wide powers and can, and do, in fact, condemn materials and work. It is a fact that a local authority requires notices to be served when the foundations are laid and when the concrete is placed in position, when the damp-proof course is laid, and so on. Notice has to be given on the completion of the property. It is, therefore, wrong to say that the local authorities are not involved in this.

The hon. Member for Bilston referred to an estate which had been built over a mine. It seems to me reasonable to suppose that some subsequent subsidence was always a danger. I should have thought that the planning authority, in giving permission for the properties to be built in the first place, was very seriously at fault. The local authority, having been given notice that the foundations were dug and the concrete put in place and inspected by the building inspector, I think that it became involved in it in some way and that the builder, whoever he was, had, as the hon. Member said, tried to do his best.

The hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne mentioned the wretched business of colliery shale. I little thought, some years ago, that I should hear this subject debated in the House of Commons, because I have a certain amount of experience of the reactions and actions of colliery shale. It was a very popular material in building just after the war. The National Coal Board suddenly found itself with large quantities of it. In certain cases of old shale which has been burnt through completely, it has been used very successfully. It was used to a tremendous extent in local authority construction.

I can think of a large number of cases in which the material was used and there has been no detrimental effect. Nevertheless, it is true that, when the material was still of a combustible nature, burning has continued after the shale has been put in the foundations and gases formed within the walls and under the floors, causing the buckling which the hon. Member mentioned.

As I have said, I have had some experience in this matter. I do not think that it is always necessary to take out the whole of the shale. I have found by experience that, if a certain amount of air is let in and if ventilation is given to the sub-structure and the gases released, it is often possible to prevent further damage. The hon. Member mentioned that this matter had been considered by the Building Research Station and reports made. This is true. I well remember what happened when, eventually, the results of the use of shale were finally analysed and when the Building Research Station warned people against the use of it. Practically every local authority, in the Midlands anyway, forbade the use of the material under floors. Prominence was given to the digest in most of the trade publications, so that anyone using it after that date took a very grave risk.

I have always believed that the purchase of a house is the most important step a man ever takes, and one which I think should be encouraged and applauded. It is in the spirit of the day and age in which we live that people should want to exert their independence and do something for themselves. But far too often when people purchase their houses they rely on the valuation of the building society valuer and seem to presume that, because he has inspected the property and said that it is worth a certain sum, it must be in good order. On the other hand, they seem to think that because properties are statutorily inspected by the building inspector on behalf of the local authority, this is a safeguard against bad workmanship or faulty materials.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith) has spoken of the registration scheme. I believe that this is the only way in which safeguards can be given to people purchasing properties. I could not contemplate the suggestion of the hon. Member for Bilston that house builders, builders and the brush and pail brigade, as I call them—the one man with the hand cart, ladder and a bucket of sand—should all be registered with the local authority. The local authorities are not the agencies to inquire—

:I was only suggesting that house builders should be registered.

I accept that.

Nevertheless, the step from the one-man to the two-man or three-man band is only a small one, and it would involve a great deal of work to try to draw the line between the various sections of the industry. I do not think that the local authorities are equipped to register or inspect in this way. They should continue with their work from a byelaw point of view.

On the other hand, it has been demonstrated this morning that the registration scheme is increasing and its influence is extending. There have been 500 new members of it since the hon. Member introduced his Ten Minutes' Rule Bill. This seems to me to be the right sort of move. The Registration Council is a well-organised body. It comprises many representatives from various sections of the industry, including the building societies, architects, builders and operatives. It has set up the machinery to inspect properties and to see that they are built to a proper specification.

The inspectors do their work thoroughly and efficiently, as I have seen from time to time. They are extremely thorough, practical men. This is proved by the figures which have been given today of the small number of complaints which arise and the small number of instances when people have to take action against registered house builders. The scheme has had a chequered career, as my right hon. and learned Friend said, and it seems to me that the Government have never backed it to the extent to which it should have been supported. Lip-service has been paid to it by successive Governments since almost the day of its inception.

I should like to make a number of suggestions to my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary for his consideration. A good deal of public money is being advanced for house purchase through the local authorities. Why cannot it be a condition of this money being advanced by a local authority that the property should be a registered-built property? This would put teeth into the whole matter. If public money is to be advanced, let it be made a condition that it is advanced only on a guaranteed house.

This would give more strength to the Registration Council, and more builders and contractors would come within the scheme, because they would have to do so. Secondly, when properties are built in new and expanded towns—a trend which is likely to increase—why should not these properties be registered and built to the specification of the Registration Council? I believe that there are sufficient powers for this to be done.

There is a second field in which the Government can do something. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works announced a few days ago the setting up of a National Buildings Agency. This could do a tremendous amount of work, particularly in the testing and examination of new materials. Considerable good could come from this type of work. I hope that consideration is being given to the practical use of materials. Colliery shale was used in all good faith. Its use was recommended and in many cases it was successful, but there was just that last little bit of practical experience which was discovered too late. I believe that this new agency should consider the use of many new materials which are coming on to the market for use.

When the new national building code is brought into operation and the building byelaws are completely overhauled, I hope that teeth will be put into them. Building inspectors should have more authority. They should have power to take away, for instance, test cubes of concrete and have them properly tested for strength. The powers to test materials should be widened and test certificates should be given. This would be a step in the right direction.

I would point out to the hon. Member for Bilston that most bricks are porous. There are very few bricks which will not soak up water.

Some are more porous than others.

There is something in the Order about 98 per cent. of bricks manufactured being of a porous nature, and this is why we have cavity wall construction. All these materials should be tested, however, and test certificates given. If certificates were given, a good deal of the trouble in which house purchasers find themselves would be eliminated.

I hope, therefore, that when my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary replies, he will give encouragement to those who have tried over the years to bring about better standards of house building through the registration scheme, that he will use his influence to persuade local authorities, when they advance money for properties or they sell land or pass it over to private agencies for building, to ensure that the properties are built to the registration scheme standards and that when the new building code is introduced teeth will be put into the armoury of the building inspectors and we shall see positive steps taken. This would add to the safeguards of those purchasing properties.

I hope, however, that my hon. Friend will not be influenced by those who would shackle the industry to local authorities. This would be a retrograde step. It would—although I am subject to contradiction—involve the local authorities to a certain extent in legal liability. When properties had been inspected for registration purposes and the like, local authorities might be involved in legal difficulties concerning the guarantee. I hope, therefore, that the foundations which have been provided will be extended, that the registration scheme will be encouraged and that real teeth will be put into the building byelaws.

I, also, should like to congratulate the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes) on enabling us to discuss this subject today, and to express my gratitude to him, because this is a subject of great interest to my own constituency, where we already have a high proportion of home ownership and where there is a large number of houses currently under construction.

I cannot altogether sympathise with the hon. Member in his eulogies of the National House-Builders Registration Council, however. I wish to say a few words about this scheme. I agree with hon. Members who have spoken that it is better than nothing, but is it adequate? Are the inspection procedures adopted by the Council during the course of construction of houses sufficient to detect any faults before the completion of a house, and are the standards to which the Council expect the members of the scheme to conform high enough? Is it easy for the purchaser of a house under this scheme to obtain redress if defects appear after the house has been completed and he has taken occupation?

A case has recently come up in my constituency from which I think it would appear that these matters are not properly dealt with, and I hope that the House will allow me to give a little back history of this case so that it may see what I mean. It concerns constituents of mine, Mr. and Mrs. Gingell, of Starts Close, Orpington. In 1961, they bought a house from New Ideal Homesteads Limited, a company belonging to the National House-Builders Registration Council scheme. Almost from the moment they took occupation, two years ago, defects started to appear.

They took this up with the National House-Builders Association Council, which on 26th November, 1962, wrote to Mr. Gingell's representatives making, for remedying those defects, proposals which were totally inadequate, and they said so. The next thing that happened was that on 13th May this year there was a meeting between the representatives of my constituents, New Ideal Homesteads, and the National House-Builders Registration Council, when new New Ideal Homesteads replied to the criticisms which were made by Mr. Gingell's professional advisers.

I do not wish to weary the House with a recitation of all these defects, but perhaps I may mention just one as an example. The concrete for the foundations was both badly mixed and badly laid and it was poor in quality. The aggregate used in mixing the concrete contained more sand than coarse material, instead of the generally accepted proportions of about twice as much coarse material as sand.

The report of the architect who was advising Mr. Gingell on this subject said that

"in the sample of concrete taken up this excess of sand over coarse material was apparent to the eye"—

I want that particularly noted, because of what was said about the efficacy of inspection during the course of construction—

"even before analysis confirmed it. The supervisor should have noticed this excess of sand at once and had it rejected and replaced if he was attending to his job".

That is what the architect had to say, and at this meeting of New Ideal Homesteads and the professional advisers acting on behalf of Mr. Gingell the builders submitted that those foundations conformed with the British Standards Specification Code of Practice No. 111, which, I believe, provides only for certain minimum compressive strength and does not say anything about the relative proportions of materials to be used in the mix. It is true that the Registration Council's standard specification does say that there should be a certain amount of cement to so much aggregate, but it does not say the relative proportions of coarse and fine materials which should be contained in the aggregate, and this was a criticism which was made by Mr. Gingell's architect.

About this time, as they did not seem to be getting anywhere at all, I was invited to see this house, and I went round it very carefully with my constituents, and I could see that the complaints which he had made were by no means exaggerated. So, on 25th July this year, I wrote to the Chairman of the Ideal Building and Land Development Company Limited, which controls New Ideal Homesteads, and told him that I could hardly believe that work of this absymally low quality could possibly have been undertaken by a firm with a national reputation to uphold. He replied to the effect that I should investigate these complaints rather more closely before I wrote to him about them; which I think was unfair, since I had been to see the house and had discussed it with my constituents, whereas, so far as I am aware, he never did so himself.

I do not know whether it had anything to do with my visit and my subsequent letter and report to the chairman, but on 31st July New Ideal Homesteads made an offer to buy the dwelling back at its original price plus all reasonable costs. It is clear that this was totally unreasonable, and an offer which could not possibly be accepted, because during the intervening 18 months since Mr. Gingell had taken occupation the prices of houses of this nature had risen by about £1,000 in Orpington. Indeed, the price of houses being built by the same company about 200 yards away from Mr. Gingell's house is now starting from £6,400, whereas he paid £5,350 for the one of which I am speaking.

The next thing that happened was that the case of Mr. Gingell was the subject of an article by Mr. Fred Redman in the Sunday Mirror on 20th October this year. It appeared under the title

"But the lighthouse put him on the rocks"

because the lighthouse is the symbol of security and the emblem of the National House-Builders Registration Council. In view of what has been said about inspection during the course of construction I want to quote to the House a couple of sentences from Mr. Redman's article. He went to see Mr. Purvis, the Secretary of the Council, who explained to him that

"the council's certificates were issued to builders, and the actual agreement that the building standards had been conformed to was between the builder and the buyer."

The next sentence of the article is in quotes of what Mr. Purvis said to Mr. Redman during the interview:

"'Our inspections are not quantity surveyor's inspections, but the kind of inspection you can expect for a fee of five guineas. To some extent we have to rely on the builder not covering up his work.'"

It is fairly obvious that as this fee is only five guineas per house one would not expect a very thorough inspection, and although they claim to have inspected this particular dwelling nine times instead of the standard five during the course of its construction, they were obviously not very highly qualified people, otherwise they would have noticed those defects, as the architect said in his report.

I think that the hon. Member would accept the fact, though, that this registration scheme covers a large number of houses, and while one would not expect a very thorough inspection for five guineas per single house built, if the fee is paid on, say, 50 houses being built under the scheme there is a considerable sum of money involved; and the inspection which takes place on a number of occasions on a large proportion of properties does not cost quite so much, and I think that the hon. Member would find that it is a thorough inspection and thorough investigation. The whole thing must be put into proper perspective.

What I was saying was that in this case the inspection could not possibly have been thorough because the defects were so obvious, but I would give the hon. Member this, and perhaps I should have mentioned this already, that this house was one of a number put up by the company and, so far as I am aware, it is the only one of which complaint has been made, and so it is possible that more highly qualified people inspected the other ones, or, alternatively, they pointed out those defects during the course of construction anyway. The fact remains that nine visits were paid and none of these defects, which were obvious, was noticed by the inspector.

About the same time I wrote to the Minister drawing attention to the case, because we did not seem to be getting anywhere with the N.H.B.R.C. After my letter to the Minister and this article by Mr. Redman in the Sunday Mirror—I am not saying that there is necessarily any connection, but it is curious that every time someone did something an offer was made—the offer by New Ideal Homesteads was improved. This time, on 31st October, 1963, they offered to buy the house back at full market value with vacant possession.

Unfortunately, they did not make it clear in the offer whether this was to be the market value in the condition in which the house then was or whether it would be calculated in such a way as to disregard the defects which had subsequently appeared. I had to write again to the Parliamentary Secretary saying that although this offer had been made, the builders would not clarify it and my constituent had had to reject it. I heard from the Parliamentary Secretary yesterday that they had confirmed that the offer was to assume that the defects were not there and that the house was in perfect condition.

I have related this history at some length because I want to make four points from it. First, it should not have been necessary for my constituent to enlist the help of a small army of architects, quantity surveyors, analytical chemists and solicitors, together with myself as the representative of the constituency, the Minister of Housing and Local Government and Mr. Fred Redman of the Sunday Mirror. It has taken all these people two years of endless correspondence and meetings to get as far as the offer which the Parliamentary Secretary finally told me had been made yesterday.

This offer is not good enough. Why should my constituent have to move? If he bought a car, and some defects suddenly appeared in it, he would not be offered a car of a different make. If he bought a Rover and something went wrong with the clutch, he would expect Rovers to repair the clutch and not to offer him a Jaguar instead. I do not think that it is at all fair on my constituent to force him to move from the house which he bought in good faith.

It would be necessary for the builders to demolish it entirely and to rebuild it if it were to be sold to someone else. What we cannot find out is why they refused to do that for my constituent. It seems likely that they would not wish to demolish this house while in the process of building another estate 200 yards along the road, because this would no doubt be rather a bad advertisement for the firm. This is why I am at pains to emphasise that I am certain that this is an isolated case and that it has not been repeated in the other houses built by New Ideal Homesteads in that area.

The third point which I wanted to make was that the standards of the N.H.B.R.C. were much too low. I am glad the Minister appears to recognise this. The Parliamentary Secretary wrote to me saying that at the annual luncheon of the N.H.B.R.C. last June the Minister told the builders in straight terms that they must either get together to ensure their standards or accept the possibility of Government intervention. He added:

"They have since revised their standards of specification and our architects are looking at them to see whether they are satisfactory."

I am delighted to hear that, because it is a step in the right direction, but the fact is that this scheme has been in existence for 20 years and it is only now that the Minister is discovering that some of their standards are not quite high enough. In my opinion, he could quite easily dictate to the N.H.B.R.C. the improved standards which I am saying are necessary. I think that he has the powers under the Building Societies Act, 1962.

In the Fourth Schedule we read:

"Where the Minister is satisfied, with respect to a body; corporated,—

(b) that it issues certificates in respect of buildings which appear to it to conform to such standards as, in the opinion of the Minister, justify the exercise in relation to that body of the powers conferred on him by this paragraph…

the Minister may, with the consent of the Treasury, by order approve that body for the purposes of this Part of the Schedule."

The N.H.B.R.C, is a body approved by the Minister for the purposes of the Fourth Schedule of the Building Societies Act, 1962, and under that paragraph he has the power to decide what are reasonable standards to be laid down to which the N.H.B.R.C. should adhere. This is what I have been trying to get him to do, but so far without any success.

Will not the hon. Member agree that if this were done the £5 charge would have to be substantially increased, perhaps to the ordinary surveyor's fee of about £20 a house?

It is quite possible that the fee would have to be increased. I accept that. I think that it would be much better for the fee to be increased and people to feel that they had adequate safeguards than for them to run the risk of the kind of case which I have described.

The final point which emerges from this case and others like it which have been drawn to my attention is whether it is right to depend on a body which is financed and operated by the builders themselves but which purports to be for the protection of the general public. The guarantee of the N.H.B.R.C. looks very nice to a layman. It is an elaborate document with a nice picture of a lighthouse on it, and anyone reading it, particularly the sentence at the bottom, would imagine that it conferred a very powerful protection on him indeed.

That sentence states that the body is approved by the Minister of Health, now the Minister of Housing and Local Government, for the purposes of Section 5 of an Act. The average house purchaser reading this would certainly say to himself, "If the Minister has approved it, then it must adopt the very highest standards possible."

I understand the hon. Member to ask whether it is right that the scheme should be solely financed by the builder; themselves. The Registration Council is not financed merely by builders. It is organised and operated by all those associated with house building—architects, surveyors, building societies, the legal profession and the building industry. It is wrong to give the impression that it is merely the House builders Registration Council.

I am grateful for the correction, but the hon. Member will confirm that the five guineas fee is paid by the builders and that this is the main source of income for the N.H.B.R.C.

The complaints which I received were not isolated. I have similar cases which could be quoted from places as far apart as Falmouth, Stroud, in Gloucestershire, Caernarvonshire and County Durham, and the hon. Member for Bilston no doubt could fill in the gaps in any part of the country from which I cannot quote examples. I believe that the National House-Builders Registration Council, although certainly better than nothing, is by no means an adequate safeguard for purchasers of house property. If the Government impose standards in respect of foodstuffs, electrical goods and a host of other things, I do not see how they can ignore their responsibilities in a field which is very much more important than any of those.

In conclusion, I should like to quote some remarks which Mr. Fred Redman made in the article I have quoted and which summed up very well what I feel about it:

"It will take something a lot tougher than the National House-Builders Registration Council to cut out all the shoddy work and poor materials which are storing up heartbreak for home-hungry families all over Britain. What we need is a Housing Minister who can give the country national building standards enforceable by law."

The hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes) is to be congratulated on raising a most important subject. The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) raised some queries about the value of registration with the National House-Builders Registration Council. I, too, have some questions on that. First, however, I want to express two hopes arising from this debate.

The first is that the debate will not be taken as a condemnation of the house building trade as a whole. House-builders, both big and small firms, are making a tremendous effort at present to modernise the building industry and to produce houses of the number and quality the country requires. The small builder, so frequently criticised—merely for being a small builder, it seems—is a craftsman in the trade as a general rule and has served the public well.

I hope that the debate will not be taken as any criticism of the small builders or, for that matter, the big builders, as a whole. They have the confidence of the public, but, of course, as my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government said in addressing the Registration Council's annual luncheon in June,

"The public cannot tolerate an abuse of its confidence which is represented by this very small minority of builders who do not care a hang for giving value for money."

It is a very small number and the building trade has held, I am sure, public confidence on the whole.

Secondly, I hope there will not be a plea for inflexible registration standards to be laid down. There is an absolute necessity at the present time to find modern methods of building. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works has set in motion many most important things to get the building industry to adopt industrialised building. Only by this method shall we get the 50 per cent. increase in productivity in the building industry required over the next 10 years in order to produce the number of houses we need.

In the past, the old building byelaws have prevented flexibility in building methods and I fear that there is a danger that registration such as hon. Members have suggested today, and a rigid standard laid down, may obstruct progress in industrialised building. If it is decided to resort to any compulsory registration then I hope that the standards laid down will be under constant review to see that they do not obstruct modern methods of building.

Every hon. Member who has spoken has referred to the N.H.B.R.C., which, it is claimed, may be able to provide a guarantee to house purchasers that they have got a good home. I do not think that so far the constitution of the Council has been fully mentioned. As I understand, it consists of 45 members, of whom one-third are appointed by the National Federation of Building Trades Employers. The rest are appointed from a very wide range of organisations including the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Chartered Surveyors, Owner-Occupiers' and Property Owner Associations, by land, property and chartered auctioneers' associations and by local authorities. I believe that there are also appointees from both the Ministry of Public Building and Works and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government.

Thus, membership of the Council is very widely drawn. The work which it claims to be able to do—I have here a brochure which it has issued—is very extensive. It claims that a house built to standards laid down by the Council will be a house in which

"The damp-proof course is properly laid and correctly placed. The roof is adequately strutted. Windows and door frames are effectively secured. Partitions are properly bonded. Dampness, sagging roof, draughts, cracked walls and other faults due to bad construction won't develop later."

This, it is said, is ensured by the fact that the Council has a large staff of technical advisers and supervisors all over the country, and when a house is being built by a builder registered with the Council there is an inspection every three weeks, checking the vital points at each stage of construction.

Like the hon. Member for Orpington, who mentioned what the Council claims to do, I am surprised that it can do all this at the very small fee charged. I understand that for builders not in membership with the Federation of Registered House-Builders or with the National Federation of Building Trades Employers, the initial subscription is 3 guineas, with £1 for each subsequent year, and that the registration fee per house built is 5 guineas.

I am surprised that the Council can undertake the work it claims to do for a fee of 5 guineas per house, I too saw the article in the Sunday Mirror in which the Secretary of the Council is reported as having said:

"Our inspections are not quantity surveyor's inspections, but the kind of inspection you can expect for a fee of five guineas. To some extent we have to rely on the builder not covering up his work."

I do not know what the Government have in mind for the Council at the present time. I have read a report that a working party has been set up, comprising representatives of the Government and of the N.H.B.R.C the National Federation of Building Trades Employers and the Federation of Registered House-Builders:

"…to study ways and means of bringing about adherence by all house-builders building houses for sale to the principles of the present N.H.B.R.C. Scheme, suitably strengthened as necessary."

I hope that we shall be told whether Government representatives are in fact taking part in this working party, what it is intended to achieve, and whether the Government will re-consider the constitution of this working party if it is to be sponsored, as it were, by the Government. I notice that the Federation of Master Builders is not represented on the working party. It is a Federation which represents mainly the smaller builders, certainly a very great number of them.

If the working party is considering this matter then it should also consider other forms of certificates on which the public are apt to rely. Too many people rely on the local authority's assurance that a house has been built according to the bye-laws as meaning that the house is fit for the home in which they want to live. But the local authority is only concerned with bye-laws. Furthermore, too many people rely on reports by building society surveyors, but of course those surveyors are only looking at houses from the point of view of good security. They only see houses when they are built and when, perhaps, defects are covered up.

I hope that his sort of point will be given consideration, but I think, also, that we need some new thought altogether on this subject. Almost every hon. Member who has spoken in the debate has talked about registration with the Council as being a solution to the matter. But surely the best form of security is that obtained by the man who is contracting to build his own house. He has a contract and while the house is being built it is subject to the supervision of an architect. This is the best form of security, and I do not think that we need worry about further help for that type of man.

What we want to do is to give the man who buys his house after it has been completed the same sort of security as the man has who has built his own house under contract; to give purchasers of new houses—houses which have been built within,, say, one year or two years before purchase—a proper assurance from a professional man. It is surely that professional assurance which is required, and I do not think that legislation enforcing compulsory registration with the National House-Builders Registration Council will necessarily give that assurance.

I am always hesitant about legislation requiring people to join a certain body, association or society.

The Law Society?

Even in the case of the Law Society, every solicitor is not obliged to join the Law Society. There is no legislation to make him do so.

On the other hand, I see no reason why we should not legislate that upon the sale of a house completed within, say, the previous two years, the vendor should provide a certificate of home-worthiness. By that I mean a certificate by a professional man who has supervised the building. I would think that very few builders, even on speculation, are now building without architects' supervision, and therefore they should be able to provide a certificate, for use when the house is sold, that it is home-worthy and that it complies with a standard specification which would be stated by the Government, but which, I hope, would be continually under review to take into account new methods of building.

Such a certificate, which I have called a certificate of home-worthiness, might kill more than one bird with one stone. It might be accepted by local authorities as ensuring completion of the house according to the byelaws, and it might be accepted by building societies instead of charging the borrower another fee for the building society's surveyor to look at the house. It may be that builders might find that they would get a certificate of home-worthiness through joining the National House-Builders Registration Council, but I would not make that the only source of such a certificate.

I call it a certificate of home-worthiness following the lines of the certificate of air-worthiness for an aircraft or a certificate of road-worthiness for a car. I am sure that is the ultimate thing that is required, not an assurance that a builder has joined a society, council or association. We want the assurance to the purchaser that a professional man has supervised the building of a house and gives his certificate that it has been properly built.

Finally, I would entirely agree with the Minister when at the annual luncheon of the National House-Builders Registration Council in June he said:

"…no Government having regard to the public interest can tolerate the building of even a few bad houses which will rapidly degenerate into slums."

I am sure that we are all indebted to the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes) for bringing this subject before the House today. In anybody's life buying a home is possibly one of the most important transactions which takes place, and I think that, if we do nothing else, we can draw to the attention of those who are about to buy property the importance of ensuring that it is properly constructed and not likely to give trouble in the near future.

I believe that by drawing attention to this problem we must, at the same time, pay some respect to the actual magnitude of the number of jerry-built houses as against those that are properly built. It is, of course, a small minority which draw the attention. All over the country there are vast numbers of really good builders who are doing a thoroughly first-class job of work. But it is, as it has been said so frequently in this debate, those few houses to which we have to give our attention.

When the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne spoke about certain houses, I asked whether they had been independently inspected, and I think that, in this instance, one of the mistakes was that the purchasers were ignorant about the purchase of property. They relied, as has been said twice during the debate, possibly on the cursory survey made by the building society. This was probably made on the basis of the value of the property and not on its quality.

A large number of prospective purchasers believe that because a property has passed a building society test it is, in fact, fit. I hope that as a result of the debate people will realise that they are well-advised to have some form of independent survey on the property before putting out a large proportion of their capital—capital which has probably been advanced by a building society. I do not think that it is unreasonable that a building society should have some obligation to see that the properties on which they advance money are structurally sound.

Here again, if any of the mortgaged money is advanced by public authority—I hope that my hon. Friend will take note of this point—I believe that it has a statutory duty to the ratepayers and the public to ensure that no money is advanced on that property unless it is structurally sound.

The two points that we have to decide are whether we can graft on to the existing voluntary machinery for inspection or whether we have to turn towards legislation. Here, one has to appreciate one particular point: how much does the average purchaser wish to pay for the survey? The fee charged by the N.H.B.R.C. is five guineas and, as the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) said, this does not allow, in individual cases, perhaps a sufficient degree of inspection. But we must to some extent say how much is the customer prepared to pay for the services which he requires.

Earlier in the debate attention was drawn to district surveyors in London. I know that my hon. Friend will correct me if I am wrong, but I think that as a result of their services very few properties are constructed which later show major defects. Of course, in the countryside, as I understand, local bye-laws are controlled by the local authorities. The local authority, in each case, lays down its own standards.

One of the most important things to be done in the building trade today is to ensure some sort of common standards, not only in the actual building, but in plumbing and other specifications required by different boroughs. In London, for example, each individual borough has entirely different standards. A builder operating 50 yards from Westminster in Chelsea has to abide by plumbing standards entirely different from those which operate in Westminster. I know that my hon. Friend's Department is working on this matter, and I hope that we will be able to get some sort of standardisation.

The small builder has been mentioned this morning. I must make an appeal for him, because, in general, he does a useful job for the community. His overheads are low and he gives useful services. I realise that the subject of the debate does not specifically cover him, because he is not generally a house-builder, but we ought to be fair and appreciate that he does a good job with maintenance and other small jobs which it would not be in the financial interests of the large builder, with his bigger overheads, to undertake. Just because the small builder has only a handcart and a bucket, we ought not to say that he does not give good service to the community.

It is of paramount importance that we should get down to some sort of standardisation and modernisation of building methods. Many methods are being used which have not changed for a quarter, or even a half of a century. The use of steel and prefrabricated units is the sort of thing which will help with the standardisation of the building of houses and flats all over the country.

The Ministry already has a register of building trades, which it gets from the Ministry of Public Building and Works, and what I should like my hon. Friend to consider is whether it would be possible to get some agreement among the voluntary bodies, so that standards could be ensured, or whether some form of compulsion would be necessary. I dislike an element of compulsion, but if it were necessary, I believe that the House would accept it. However, before compulsion is used, I hope that my hon. Friend will consider very carefully whether we could not get some form of voluntary agreement.

No hon. Member this morning has disagreed with the view that to some extent we are obliged to protect purchasers of property. The old maxim caveat emptor does not hold water now. We have a duty towards prospective purchasers to ensure that in some way or another they get value for money, and we cannot put the entire burden on the prospective purchaser. I hope that as a result of the debate people generally will realise that when they buy a house it is up to them to spend a little more than £5—perhaps as much as £25 or £30—to make sure that their property is properly surveyed.

Perhaps my hon. Friend will also say something about a warranty of building. The ordinary purchaser who has inspected a property has no warranty from the builder. If subsequent defects show up which the architect could not see when he made the inspection, he has no redress against the builder. This seems to be a fundamental defect in the law and, if it is, perhaps my hon. Friend can think of some way to remedy it.

At least there is some continuity in the debate, because the first line of my notes is "Not caveat emptor" I intended to say that nobody had mentioned it. The hon. Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn) did so, but only to say that it was fortunate that it had not been suggested, because in this respect there is no room for that kind of approach to what is a very important social problem.

There have been the conventional expressions of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes), as there always are to those Members who move interesting Motions of this kind. My feelings are rather different. We have had a debate of great value on a matter of tremendous importance to the public and to individuals only because my hon. Friend was fortunate in the Ballot. I do not know what are the chances of being fortunate in the Ballot. I have never drawn first place, and I do not think that my hon. Friend has done so before. If he had not been lucky on this occasion, we would probably be debating something not nearly as important, and yet it is perfectly clear from what has been said, from the marshalling of information, from the quality of the speeches and from the virtual unanimity about the seriousness of the problem, that this is a matter which must be considered with great care.

The right hon. and learned Baronet the Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith) compared the purchase of houses with the purchase of goods and said that commodities were covered by the Sale of Goods Act which protected the consumer. However, is it not possible to contract out of the Sale of Goods Act? Does it not happen that consumers often do not get the protection of that Act because they have improvidently contracted out of its protection, or have been forced to do so because they could not buy what they wanted unless they did?

This problem illustrates very well the extravagance of being poor. As the right hon. and learned Gentleman said, we have something like a buyer's market with expensive owner-occupied property, certainly in the North-West, as the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne would agree, so that if the buyer is prepared to spend £3,000 or £4,000 he can have his pick. There is quite a lot of choice for the man who can afford to pay £3,000 or £4,000 for a house, and he can also afford to have a properly qualified professional man to advise him whether the house is sound.

The problem arises with houses of less than £2,000. It is in this range that the jerry builders' paradise lies. I am not suggesting that all those who tried to provide houses cheaply are jerry builders, but the temptation to cut costs at the expense of the long run life of the house must be very great at that level of cost. The most difficult of the problems of costs is that of inspection. If the inspection fees are increased at the expense of the cost of the house, it becomes very difficult to meet the problems of someone desperately anxious to buy a house at a low cost.

This is a matter in which the public as well as the individual are closely concerned. The public are concerned about the use of building resources, which are desperately short and which will be shorter still as the development of building under the Government's proposed programmes for extending public building go on, and certainly will become shorter under the programme of the Labour Government to expand public building. So far as one can see, the calls on the country's building resources are bound to increase. It is not in the interests of the public that social capital should be wasted, and jerry-building is a waste of social capital.

Another reason why the public are concerned in this matter is that this is a long-term investment. My hon. Friend quoted the case of a catastrophic crisis where, in a comparatively short time after a house has been built, there is a sudden collapse which is visible to everyone. Everyone is immediately aware of it. Probably a more common and widespread problem, but one which is just as important, is that of the potential slum, the slow deterioration of a building which will create for the local authority and all concerned with housing the problems of dealing with private slums.

I think the hon. Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Hocking) said that after the war there had been a large measure of jerry-building. That was a frank admission by someone who told us that he had been born into the building industry. It was obviously a well-qualified authoritative view. Those houses which were jerry-built after the first war are the potential slums of today. What we have to be concerned about is not only the general desire of Parliament to protect the individual consumer who has a raw deal and is cheated, but to protect the resources of the country, the social capital of the country, against waste and against the potential slum clearance problem of the future. That is something which we have to look at with great concern.

I hesitated to intervene in the doctrinal dispute which went on behind me between my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne and my hon. Friend the Member for Bilston (Mr. R. Edwards) about whether this was a matter in which the National House-Builders Registration Council should be relied upon to give its services or a matter for direct intervention by the local authority. I am in the happy-position of agreeing with both my hon. Friends because I am a dyed-in-the-wool local authority man. If this job is to be done effectively I think it should be done by the local authorities. On the other hand, what my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne said is perfectly true. Every local authority, certainly everyone in the North, is faced with a desperate lack of skilled and qualified people such as architects, surveyors, clerks-of-works and so on who can be relied upon for this kind of inspection.

:Is the hon. Member assuming that the National House-Builders Registration Council will provide qualified inspectors when the local authority is unable to do so? That is not the position.

I am not coming down on one side or the other, nor saying whether it is desirable that the National Council or the local authority should do this work. All I say is that if we suddenly put this work on to local authorities there will be a real danger of a hold-up in other types of house building. I should not like to go back to the borough of Widnes and say that we have been getting terribly romantic and excited on this Friday and have decided that it must start detailed inspection of all new houses built in the borough. I suspect that I should get a rather rough answer from the rather tough gentlemen responsible for administering the work of the housing committee.

As a general principle, I entirely agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne said about local authority responsibility. Both my hon. Friend the Member for Bilston and the hon. Member for Clapham said that in London, where there is a system of local authority inspection, we do not get so much jerry-building as in the provinces. I wonder whether there was a hidden factor there because in the L.C.C. area there is very little house building, and extremely little cheap house building. New building, such as it is, is mostly of flats. Probably the builder of gigantic blocks of flats has capital behind him which he can employ if he needs professional advance. The small builder—I do not say this in a pejorative sense—may be concerned with building a few bungalows in a very short time, but there is not so much of a problem in London.

It is a fair point to make in criticism of the work of district valuers that their work, the building code and building bye-laws are to some extent a restriction on experiment with materials and in construction. I do not see how that can be avoided. Not long ago I wanted to have some building done. The architect wanted to use a new and ingenious material which he thought would be cheap and effective. The district valuer, however, shook his head and said, "I don't refuse this out of hand, but I shall have to report back to the council and at some time it will go to the committee." What does a lay client do in that case? What did I do? I did not care two hoots because I wanted to get the thing built. I said, "I am not going to waste time on your learning; I want the thing done."

That is the effect of all controls on experiment. The danger is that unless the building code is very flexible and inspectors and those controlling the code keep up-to-date, fully alive to the need for experiment and the vital importance of reducing building costs, we shall get a slowing down of building and a lowering of experiment. If the alternative is waste through bad building that may be well worth while.

What are some of the possible ways of treating the problem? I was sorry that the right hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East was not in the Chamber when some of the harsher remarks were being made about the National House-Builders Registration Council. It was a pleasure to see him here as a shy back bencher again. It is a pleasure to me in a way to patronise him from a Front Bench, which takes me back a great many years. It was a pleasure to hear him with his great authority on these matters and particularly speaking with a name which is so very much honoured in maintaining building standards. He painted a glowing picture of the National House-Builders Registration Council. Ever since I have studied these matters I have found that to be the accepted view.

Unfortunately, after the right hon. and learned Member left the Chamber the tide of debate swung rather the other way. The hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) and the hon. Member for Crosby both treated it rather roughly, but I should have thought there was a case for saying that house builders should register with the Council. I can see no objection to that. I do not want to try to make a speech which I could not make about estate agents. In all these fields, however, there comes a time when a profession is so involved in public responsibility that it must be publicly accountable. Registration at least has the effect of providing a sanction of professional control from within the industry, which is potent. I should have thought that we recognise this not only as an instrument but as one of the effective weapons to use. Therefore, I think it wise to support compulsory registration.

It is suggested that this would involve enormous difficulties with the small man with a ladder and bucket. I should not have thought that was so because in order to get planning permission in London notice of all building going on has to be given so that houses can be inspected. One cannot build a house nowadays without anyone knowing about it. If a house is being built one can find out who is the builder. If the local authority finds who the builder is it can check on whether he is registered or not.

One or two other possible suggestions besides registration have been made. One was the possibility of providing that all people administering public funds should make it a condition that there are reasonable standards of building. I had not thought of that; it might form the basis of an Amendment during our proceedings on the Housing Bill next week. In the proceedings on that Bill we have used arguments about being certain that the conditions attached to housing societies conform to standards of good behaviour and good management. That is a perfectly good principle, and I would not quarrel with the idea that that should be done.

But I would tend to quarrel with it if it did not cover building societies as well as local authorities. I see great difficulties arising from the fact that the local authority is made to say "Because we are lending public money we must have a high standard", while the building societies are not going to have that high standard. We run into the difficulty that the little man who is in desperate need of a cheap house goes to the builder and says "I want to buy a house, but I need to borrow the money for it", and the builder or estate agent says, "Do not go to the local authority. They are a lot of fussy bureaucrats and will interfere with your freedom. If you go to the Grand Mutual Building Society, for which I happen to be the agent, it will see you through and no questions will be asked."

That is the trouble about trying to create standards by using only local authorities. It is reasonable that the local authorities should be tough in stating that there must be adequate standards, a registered builder and adequate insurance, but if we are going to do that, the building societies also, must be made to do it. I hope that the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will direct his attention to this point.

The certificate of home-worthiness which the hon. Member for Crosby suggested is not, as he said, inconsistent with registration. It could be provided by the registered body or the local authority. I do not know whether the provision of such certificates would mean a great strain on inspection resources, but it is an instrument which I should like to see developed.

There is another point which has not yet been mentioned which is a possible method of approaching this problem of maintaining standards by providing a means of dealing with the situation where standards have been shown, as in the case mentioned by my hon. Friend, to have been inadequate. I am glad that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kettering has just entered the Chamber. I was about to make a moving reference to Mitchison's Act, the famous business about putting down a deposit for new streets. There is the case where we say to the builder "if you are going to develop, in order that the owner or occupier shall not find himself faced with a bankrupt builder and a sudden charge for making up new streets, you must put down a deposit or lodge security with the local authority."

Is it not possible to have a similar arrangement with all builders so that in a case like the one in Ashton-under-Lyne, where the trouble is discovered afterwards, resources will be available, and there will be no possibility of being told that the builder has gone to America or Bangkok or wherever it is that bad builders go? I should have thought that that would be a possible arrangement.

I repeat that we, every home owner and every housing committee owe a very great debt to my hon. Friend for having used his good luck in this most public-spirited way. The Motion is a wider one than the mere grinding of the axe which he had in his own sad case. It has enabled us to look at an extremely important problem. If there is to be a continuation of home ownership and building for the owner-occupier, which everybody accepts in theory as being desirable, it must be possible to ensure that the house, which, as we all agree, is one of the most difficult things to purchase—theright hon. and learned Member for Hertfordshire, East said that it was far more difficult than obtaining a wife. I never succeeded in getting a wife, although I have a house, and so I cannot compare the two.

I said that it was more important.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has more experience of this sort of thing than I have. All I can say is that it is one of the most important and one of the most skilful decisions that the common man has to take. I trust that the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will give us an assurance that we shall be able to give the common man some genuine help and protection.

I would begin by adding my congratulations to the many a ready given to the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Rhodes). He started his speech by expressing congratulations to the National House-Builders' Registration Council and its scheme. I am glad that he did so, because, despite what the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) said, I do not think that it is true that the debate tended to swerve away from that general concept. We had one hon. Member who intervened with one case where a solution was found, albeit after rather longer than we could have hoped, but there is no doubt that there would have been no solution at all in that case had the constituent of the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Lubbock) been in the sorry plight of the constituent of the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne.

The only other element of dispute which has entered into the debate is the underlying one about whether we should hope that this would be a voluntary scheme, if necessary made compulsory at a later stage, or whether we should bring in the local authorities. I think that on balance the House has come down in favour of the existing scheme, widened as necessary and improved as necessary, and rather against the cluttering up of local authorities with even more responsibilities in a field where we all know they are already having difficulties in finding the necessary skills and staffs to carry out their byelaw obligations.

My hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) is right to emphasise—we should all do this in public and to constitutents who are involved in this—that a surveyor's certificate that the byelaws have been complied with does not imply that the building is soundly constructed throughout. Byelaws have always been directed mainly to matters of health and safety. My right hon. Friends the Minister of Public Building and Works and the Minister of Housing and Local Government are engaged in producing building regulations which will be uniform throughout the country. This meets one of the criticisms of my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn). Although it will be cold comfort to the hon. Gentleman opposite now, the draft of the regulations contains a prohibition against this particular material, and would have provided in such a case a protection.

To make abundantly clear what my right hon. Friend's attitude to the subject is I will quote what he said at the annual luncheon of the National House-Builders' Registration Council:

"The issue before us is quite straightforward. The Government has announced a major house building programme. That programme is based on the assumption that most families who can afford to provide houses for themselves will do so. They will do so, however, only if they are satisfied that they are likely to get value for money.

We know that most builders provide value for money. Many good builders stay outside the National House-Builders' Registration Council's excellent scheme, no doubt because they feel that their reputations are secure. But a tiny majority of bad builders, also operating outside the scheme, fail to give value for money. They provoke bad publicity out of all proportion to their numbers: they get the industry as a whole a bad name: they encourage sharks to think that anybody can set up as a builder and get rich quickly: and they create a demand for controlling legislation.

Well, the sharks must think again. Neither this Government—nor, I believe, any future Government—will tolerate jerry-building in its housing programme."

This makes it clear that my right hon. Friend regards the present situation as having reached the stage at which the industry has a chance to put its house in order by extending this scheme, or else the Government, whatever government it may be, will be obliged to look to some form of compulsory registration and compulsory enforcement of these standards. The hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne is right in saying that, even if there were only two or three of these cases a year, it would still be a matter of great concern. He referred to this as a tragedy. I would not for a moment question that that was too strong a word. Nevertheless, both he and other hon. Members—we were very glad to have the expert description of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Hertfordshire, East (Sir D. Walker-Smith)—emphasised that a very considerable amount of progress has been made. I know that the hon. Member for Bilston (Mr. R. Edwards) has some disagreement with me about the number of builders. We assess the number of those genuinely engaged in house building at a little over 3,000. Therefore, the 1,700 registered house builders represent about 50 per cent. of the industry. This compares with only 11 per cent. in 1957. This is very encouraging progress. The advantages of going on in this way and hoping to get the voluntary scheme more or less universally accepted are not only that it would relieve a tremendous potential burden on local authorities or some other organisations which would have to find inspectors. We all know that legislative time is always tight. It does not require too much imagination to realise that trying to lay down in an Act of Parliament every standard at every stage of building a house, or even a variety of other types of building—flats, and so on—where standards may be different—would be a very complicated process. As my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby and other hon. Members have pointed out, such regulations would endanger the flexibility which will be necessary if we are to introduce new materials and methods into the industry.

On the other hand, the industry has shown that it can carry out these inspections, although I admit that there will almost inevitably in any human organisation be the odd case that can be quoted. I have had the files of hon. Members who write to me on this subject examined. On the whole, it is surprising how very few complaints there are, and of all the complaints the number per annum that affect registered builders could be counted on the fingers of one hand. I do not think that this one instance, or even the two or three others that I know of, proves that this scheme is unsatisfactory, and it is certainly not proved that the scheme is not capable of being made even more satisfactory than it is.

As my right hon. and learned Friend said, we are faced now with the decision whether this can be extended by, as he put it, evangelical enthusiasm or whether we must legislate. We must realise that part of the answer lies in the hands of the consumer. Until a large number of potential house purchasers start asking the question, "Can I have a certificate? ", there will not be the extension, particularly in many provincial areas, which we want to see, or at any rate not at the speed which we want to see.

Here again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne, because this is a matter of publicity and this debate will give the matter some publicity. There must be many householders or prospective buyers who have never heard of this scheme, let alone of the certificate or how it protects them. That is useful. I suggest to hon. Members that it would be useful if they, wherever they go in expanding areas where houses are being built, brought this to the knowledge of people so that they, in turn, add to the demand that it should be adopted.

The main point on which the hon. Member for Bilston disagreed with the rest of the speakers was local authority versus the voluntary Builders Council. I have said something about this, but I would pick him up on the examples he gave, because I am inclined to agree with the hon. Member for Widnes that London is a very special case. Land is much too expensive in London to have jerry-builders making any sense at all. There are very few house builders. They are nearly all flats and cater for a market where this is not a problem, a market in which the professional advice and professional check right the way through is likely to be there in any case.

The London building regulations are somewhat different from the byelaws exercised throughout the country. Again, London is a very large town and a very powerful authority and more likely to be able to employ these people than smaller towns, certainly some of the smaller county districts.

Several hon. Members implied that the important thing was to get the standards adopted and that registration was secondary. My hon. Friend the Member for Crosby was rather on these lines. He wanted to ensure that there is pro- fessional inspection and said that we should not bother about whether there is a register. I suggest that registration is important, if only because it is the application for registration which gives the Council a chance to examine the financial strength of these companies. Although I have no detailed evidence to support this, I would think that much of the hardship flows from small firms biting off more than they can chew and going bankrupt half-way through. Therefore, registration on a financial strength basis is of enormous importance.

Obviously, if it is to do any real good, the application must be looked at to some extent with regard to the skills available in the applicant firm. I cannot think that this is the function of local authorities. I cannot see how a local authority would be able to judge whether a man who is starting a building firm has the expertise or will employ the right people. The building industry, difficult as this task will be, is in a better position to do it, particularly if it is, by admitting a builder to membership, giving some guarantee to the public of a builder's ability and financial strength.

My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Hocking) made several suggestions. One was that local authorities lending public money should ensure that some certificate was available. My hon. Friend made a suggestion about the National Building Agency with regard to the testing of materials and the giving of test certificates. These are clearly things which should be considered by the working party which is sitting at the moment. This is a working party set up by the industry, admittedly, but my Department and the Ministry of Public Building and Works have been invited to send members.

We have agreed to do this. Its object is to look at the scheme itself, first, with regard to the standards that are required, to see if they are right and where they ought to be improved, and, secondly, to see how we can get them more universally adopted throughout the industry. I would have thought that, if one could get about 80 per cent. acceptance throughout the industry, the tide of consumer demand would push the other 20 per cent. in or out according to their financial strength.

:Will the working party publish its recommendations, or will they be confidential to the industry?

Will my hon. Friend deal with the question of representation on the working party, because, as I have pointed out, it does not include some of the important associations of builders?

The working party has been convened by the building trade employers. Therefore, I am not entirely au fait with exactly what other bodies are being invited. I will consider whether one of our representatives should make the suggestion that other bodies should be invited. I have been very much struck by the anxiety of the convenors of the working party that it should not either appear to be or, in fact, be builder-dominated. This desire is to be welcomed.

The hon. Member for Orpington asked if the working party's recommendations would be published. Not being our working party, I cannot say. Its discussions will certainly not be in secret because our representatives will be present and my impression is that the working party is anxious to give the maximum publicity to what it is doing. I cannot commit a body which is not controlled by the Government, but I do not think that there will be any anxiety to keep its discussions or recommendations secret.

I agree that the specific case raised earlier by the hon. Member for Orpington has been a long drawn-out affair, perhaps inevitably so since before the offers were made something happened which made one wonder whether the offers would have been so good had those public actions not been taken. The hon. Member said that the first complaint had been made in the autumn of 1962. We have reached the stage now when the builder has offered to buy back at the price of the building assuming that it was entirely sound, plus incidental expenses such as laying out the gardens, legal and surveyors' fees and so on.

I can think of many other remedies at law and elsewhere which would still be going on over a period of less than a year. It is not entirely fair to condemn this scheme out of hand on that basis. Nor would I entirely agree that either the offer nor even the previous offer was, on the face of it, wholly unreasonable. The hon. Member for Orpington compared this case with that of a motor-car. It is true that if one bought a Rover, and it went wrong, one would get another Rover, but could one get another Rover if the first were repairable? And could one expect to sit in the car and have a new car built around one? That represents what the hon. Member was suggesting.

I cannot form a judgment on the right offer in this case. That is not my function. There is arbitration machinery and by accepting the certificate the purchaser, as with the builder, enters into an agreement by which it is agreed that if there are defects and if agreement cannot be reached on the extent of them or how they should be put right there is arbitration. This is the way these matters can be settled and it would not be right for me to say whether or not the offer is reasonable. It is fair to say, however, that, on the face of it, it does not appear to me to be an unreasonable offer at this stage.

The hon. Member for Orpington suggested that my right hon. Friend should withdraw his approval of this body under paragraph 11 of Part III of the Fourth Schedule of the Building Societies Act. This is largely irrelevant and is certainly taking a sledgehammer to crack a very small nut. That Schedule provides for where a building society makes an advance rather larger than it would normally make in relation to the actual security. The building society may make this exception in a number of circumstances, one of which is where the building has the certificate. It increases the advance that can be made by a marginal amount and this, I think, is valuable to building societies.

The existence of this is to some degree an encouragement to more builders to adopt this scheme because builders are interested in selling their houses and they know that 95 per cent. of them will probably be sold only if advances are made by building societies. Thus anything that makes their property more attractive to a building society is likely to help them to sell their houses. As to the withdrawal of the approval of my right hon. Friend of the Council, it would be wrong and, even if one accepted that things had gone wrong to the extent mentioned by the hon. Member today, to do so on the basis of one case would be using a very harsh penalty.

:It is true that I suggested in correspondence with the Ministry that the Minister should withdraw his approval from this body, but I made the alternative proposal this afternoon that the right hon. Gentleman should use his powers to impose higher standards on the Council.

It is not a question of imposing higher standards. The industry and the Council are showing every welcome to the idea that they should discuss whether their standards are too low. As to imposing higher standards, the precise terms of doing that could not be embarked upon easily or quickly, even if one considered that higher standards were necessary.

I hope that I have covered most of the points raised in the debate. I will see that any suggestions made in future are put to the working party through our representatives. I hope the House will agree that the Motion is entirely acceptable, except that we clearly cannot promise to legislate this week, this Session, or by any given time. I can assure the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne that my right hon. Friend is determined to see this matter put in order, preferably by the industry but, if not, by legislative action.

I have with me the Building Standards (Scotland) Regulations, 1963. They are voluminous and detailed and were laid towards the end of November. They are to come into operation— whether before or after the General Election—on 15th June, 1964. Is the working party to which the Minister referred doing the same job as has already been done by the Scots? If so, does it pro- pose to take the same standards, or will its standards be higher or lower?

I would not like to get involved in an argument on whether the Scottish standards are higher or lower. This is a totally different exercise, as the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) would be aware had he been here throughout the debate; although we are always pleased to see him in his place.

The building regulations are successors to the by-laws which are to be operated by local authorities, but universally applied throughout the country. We are working on them. They are nearly ready, although I would not like to give a date when they will be finalised. When they are they will be made the responsibility of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works and they will be the basic safety, health and structural regulations covering the whole country.

When they appear, that is.

:We have today been discussing very detailed structural requirements for houses as well as mere safety and health regulations. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne on raising the matter and I thank hon. Members for the suggestions they have made. We have had a valuable debate, if only because it will bring more publicity and a bigger demand from the public that builders should belong to this scheme.

I beg to move,

That this House notes with grave concern the continuing use of subversion by Communist countries to destroy the influence of the West in Africa, and being aware of the likely effects of this campaign upon the lives of the Africans themselves and the free world, calls upon Her Majesty's Government to take all possible steps both in the United Nations and elsewhere to counteract this threat.

A back bencher is not always fortunate enough to get a hearing on a Friday, particularly when he has drawn second place in the Ballot for Motions. I am, therefore, pleased to have this opportunity to raise a matter which needs airing now. If I had not been convinced before tabling my notice of Motion of the need to discuss this question today, my conviction would have been made complete by the sharp reaction of the Daily Worker which, the moment my Motion was tabled, published an item in which it was said, commenting on my proposition to open a discussion on Communist subversion in Africa:

"Evidently he"—

that is, I—

"considers this a diversion from the apartheid policies in South Africa".

I should like, for the benefit of the Daily Worker, to assure the House that I am not attempting to divert the attention of anybody from anything. What I propose to do is to try to attract the attention of the House and the Government and other people who might be interested to something. In that, I do not expect that I shall have much help from the Daily Worker, which, no doubt, will try to divert the attention of the public and the House by continuing to talk about apartheid in South Africa.

If we are to look at the background of Communist activity in Africa we have to go back to the days of Marx and Engels to see if there was any mention at that time of any efforts to liberate colonial territories. We find that at that time there had been no such talk in the writings of either, simply because they considered that there being no industrial countries in Asia or Africa there was no bourgeoisie with whom to battle and these conditions did not apply as in developed countries.

It was only after the First World War that Lenin began to go further a field. It was he who argued that colonies were essential to the European economy, with European industries dependent upon the sale of their surplus products to the colonies and that, therefore, to deal the European economy a mortal blow one must first liberate the colonies. We find that it was accepted that it would be difficult to create Communist parties of any strength in these territories, but that the obvious answer for one who wanted finally to bring about Communism was to support the nationalist parties in those territories. We find that Lenin accepted that there would be a long transitional period of nationalism and democratic action in favour of liberalisation before Communism could finally take over.

The Comintern resolved in 1920 that

"The revolutionary movement in the colonies is not going to be a Communist revolution in the first stages, but if from the outset the leadership is in the hands of a Communist vanguard the revolutionary masses will not be led astray, but may go ahead through the successive periods of revolutionary experience."

This attempt to infiltrate the leadership of the nationalist parties has been the principal aim of the Communists in these colonial territories. Lenin went further than this and argued that

"One should be prepared for all and every sacrifice",—

which, presumably, means sacrifice by the people in those territories—

"and even, if necessary, for all plans, strategems, illegal methods, concealment and suppression of truth."

I suggest to the House that the Communists have not been lax in acquiring these very standards in recent years.

We therefore arrived at a point where it was accepted as far back as 1920 that it was necessary for the Communist parties to support nationalist movements in colonial territories and to go further, even to the suppression of truth and action against ecclesiastics, and so on. After that, we find that a Communist paper was published in Hamburg, called The Negro Worker to appeal to negroes throughout the world. In various issues in the 1920s and 1930s one can find all the present-day slogans of African nationalist parties set out. In 1923, Mr. Kenyatta was one of the contributors and in an article in this paper one can find all the slogans which were ultimately used in the Mau Mau operations which were formulated as far back as 1933.

It was not until the late 1950s however, after Mr. Khrushchev arrived on the scene, that we find that Moscow really began to get to work in our colonial territories. It was in 1957 that the first large party of Africans visited the Soviet Union and, in return, a large number of Soviet political workers, disguised as scholars, arrived in Africa to give lectures and broadcasts.

This interchange has been carried on continually at an ever-increasing rate of students and scholars since that time, both with Russia and China and even with the European satellites. Where students go to the Communist countries the principal object, of course, is indoctrination with Communist belief. The degree of indoctrination to which they are exposed depends on the way they have arrived in the Soviet bloc countries. Those who had arrived without the sanction of their Governments, perhaps through the pipelines of various embassies throughout the world, would find themselves almost definitely exposed to greater indoctrination and more intense pressure than those who had arrived legally as Government-sponsored students.

When it is realised that three out of every four of African students who go to Communist countries are those who have got there illegally without the support of their own Governments one realises what a great threat this is to colonial territories when these students are exposed to indoctrination in this way. Though hundreds of students have come back to these territories there are still thousands behind the Iron Curtain and in China. Some people estimate the number at 5,000. I do not know how accurate this estimate is. They are trained there in the machinery of indoctrination, agitation, infiltration of political organisations, underground activities, military tactics and even violence. They are being kept there at the moment in training ready to return to their own countries at the appro- priate moment when it is felt that the time has come to strike.

These methods have been used also to produce leaders to take positions in political and non-political organisations throughout these territories. Over recent years students from Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Nyasaland, the Rhodesias, Angola and Mozambique have gone to Soviet bloc countries or to China. They have come back to infiltrate the various front organisations which are so popular with the Communists. These are often international organisations looking to all the world in outward appearance as being non-political, non-partisan and non-official, but in them full control is vested in a small group of Communists whose election is not subject to popular vote.

These front organisations have been very active in recent years in trying to infiltrate Pan-African organisations which started off purely as nationalist organisations. One finds that this is the case with youth organisations. It was the non-Communist World Assembly of Youth which first promoted the idea of a Pan-African youth organisation, but it was the Communist World Federation of Democratic Youth that moved in quickly to form a small committee to promote a conference. A conference was held in 1962 which passed resolutions condemning neo-colonialism and supporting an armed struggle for liberation.

The same applies to women's organisations, and particularly to the Council of West African Women, which was started by a very sincere Nigerian school teacher who was rapidly out-manœuvred by members of the Communist Women's International Democratic Federation. Again, once having got their feet in, it was the Communists who took over. The same also applies to the Pan-African Journalists' Union, which has a strong Communist representation from the outset. It also applies to other professions and trades in African territories.

It does not apply only to the Russians. The Chinese likewise have been trying to affiliate these organisations to their own Afro-Asian movement. At the moment, the appeal is not to Communism, but to Pan-African nationalism and this, of course, appeals to the African who wants to see his country independent.

The Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organisation is another front organisation, based in Cairo, following exactly the same lines. This is backed up by increasing pressure on the radio in both the Soviet bloc and in China. It is rather terrifying when one realises that in 1958 there were about three and a half hours' broadcasting a week from the Soviet bloc and China to Africa in English and French, whereas today it has increased to 320 hours a week in 10 languages—one hundred-fold increase in the number of hours of propaganda broadcasting. If we add to this the cash which finds its way down these pipelines to the nationalist parties in the colonial territories we realise that this is a very fearsome threat.

All this is aimed, in the first place, at depriving Europeans of political power in readiness to following this up by denying them economic power. The cry of "One man, one vote" is echoed round the world, no doubt having originated in a Communist cell somewhere. So effectively has this propaganda been spread about the world that it does not matter whether one goes to the United Nations, to the United States of America, the councils of the Commonwealth, or even in this very Chamber, that cry ricochets around.

This has been so well done that if in this House one attempts to suggest that there might be good reason to delay the granting of independence to any dependent territory, one is stamped at once as being pro-white and, therefore, anti-black and it is thought that one has no interest in the position of the Africans themselves. Of course, the position is the reverse. It is the people who are shouting "One man, one vote" the loudest who are ignoring the conditions and interests of these Africans, because if one looks around to see what the effect has been in places where "One man, one vote" has been granted, in most cases it has ended up in one election and in one-party government. This is followed by the destruction of the democratic institutions and the loss of personal freedom.

One has only to look at recent events in Ghana, where a Chief Justice has been dismissed because the Government did not approve of his action in acquitting two persons of treason. Those persons can still be kept in detention for five years, and at the end of that time without a further trial they can be kept in detention for another five years. This is the sort of thing to which Communist subversion leads in Africa.

Is there not a parallel in Africa to what is happening in South Africa, which is not a Communist country?

The hon. Gentleman may well say that, but the point is that hon. Members in this House—and the hon. Gentleman is one of them—who shout about the position in South Africa are not so quick to get to their feet and accuse Ghana of being wrong

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman's speech, but, to keep the record straight, may I say that I deplore what is happening in Ghana as much as what is happening in South Africa. Only a week or two ago, with my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Ipswich (Mr. D. Foot) and others, I went directly to the Ghana High Commissioner on these very matters to tell him what we have also said to the South African Government.

I am gratified to hear that. I accept the hon. Gentleman's statement. I only wish that in the United Nations a similar view were held.

This type of one-party government and the loss of personal freedom and of democratic rights is followed invariably by poverty, because once confidence has gone, the Europeans leave, European capital is withdrawn and this is followed by chaos.

Anybody who is not convinced of this should read a book by Richard Lawson entitled Strange Soldiering. Mr. Lawson is a young man who was decorated for his bravery whilst fighting with United Nations forces trying to prevent a civil war. He says:

"Many United Nations teams visiting bush villages have been asked the pathetic question, 'When will this independence end? When will we see the good life again?'."

Mr. Lawson goes on to say:

"I do not understand politics, but I believe that if world opinion insists that politicians of underdeveloped countries must be given the right to be wrong, then the world should know what happens to the rest of the 'free' populations."

The world does know, but either it cares not or it is too timid to protest. This is why I am so anxious to draw attention to the sort of chaos that follows this undermining of law and order in Africa as a result of Communist subversion.

How the Communist world must have crowed when the influence of President Tshombe of Katanga was finally eliminated. Here was an African who believed that the best way to work in his country was to co-operate with Europeans, much against the Communist doctrine of encouraging nationalists to get rid of the West. How they must crow, too, at the fact that the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is being dissolved.

Here we have the reverse. Here are Europeans in Africa who believe that the best way of building a fine country is by co-operating with the Africans. But how sick the Communist world must have been when it found that, having got intruders from the Congo into Angola, the Africans there rallied to the defence of the country with the Portuguese.

These are not the only examples of Communist infiltration and subversion. It is not only in the colonial territories that this battle is being fought. It is also being fought just as viciously in the newly-independent ex-colonial territories. The aim there is, having robbed the West of political power, now to rob the West of its economic power, and to stand aside as the Communist world is doing, ready to step in when the appropriate moment comes.

Ghana in 1958, which was the first newly-independent State in Africa, arranged diplomatic ties with the U.S.S.R. and this was followed by a flood of diplomats, technicians, advisers and waves of officials from Eastern European countries, until the country was flooded with an unreasonable number of Communist sympathisers busy to get on with the job of removing the economic power of the West once political power had gone.

This pattern has been followed in the newly-independent States as each one has become independent, and the concentration is now on separating these African territories from the West entirely. They preach the doctrine of neutralism. They are told to attack neo-colonialism, which is to suggest that economic ties with the ex-colonial Powers or other capitalist Powers are wrong, but that economic ties with the Communist countries are all right. In the Congo recently Soviet Embassy personnel, for the second time since 1960, were expelled for their flagrant interference in the internal affairs of the country.

In the Soviet Union and in other Soviet bloc countries training is being given today to African Freedom Fighters in techniques of violent revolution. There is no argument as to what this is for. We all know, even if we pretend not to know. Nobody does anything about it. They are being trained for activity in certain areas, namely, the territories in which the European still has some influence. They are being trained, no doubt, for activities in Southern Rhodesia. They are being trained to fight, no doubt, in South Africa, and they are being trained as well, as they have been for a long time in the Congo, for activities in Angola. In other words, wherever the propaganda has failed new preparations are being made to turn on the violence to make quite certain that the influence of the West is finally driven out of these African territories.

We find that there have been military and economic agreements giving increased opportunities for infiltration in recent weeks. In Somalia, Russia has reached a £11 million military aid agreement, which includes the training of pilots and army officers in the Soviet Union, whilst the Chinese, in the same country, have agreed to a £7 million long term credit and a £1 million budget subsidy for this year. In Algeria, we find a similar pattern—a Soviet credit of £36 million, a Chinese credit of £18 million, and a military mission negotiating supplies of Soviet and Czech arms.

All this aid is supposed to be disinterested, but, of course, it has only one aim, as I have constantly pointed out during my speech, that is, separating the African States from their traditional trading partners. Mr. Khrushchev has made no bones about it. He has said quite clearly that Africa "is no exception to the inevitable spread of Communism throughout the world". He has gone further and warned the African leaders that they must realise that, unless they choose the path of non-capitalist development—I quote his words—"after them will come other people with a better understanding of the time". In other words, he was warning the African leaders to look over their shoulders all the time and realise that, unless they go the way the Communists want them to go, someone else, who has been trained in a Communist country, will come up behind them, stab them in the back and take over.

Time is running out. We are gradually coming to the point when it will not be long before the whole of Africa is under the influence of the Communists or their "stooges", the people who have put themselves into a position where their Communist educators can step right in and take over. But there is still time for the West to wake up to the realities of the situation and, if it wants to, to prevent the completion of the Communist aim of preparing Africa for the final take-over. One gathers from the propaganda put about today that this time is thought to be not far off. The heat is being turned on constantly against the remaining territories like Rhodesia, South Africa and the Portuguese territories.

Believing that a Communist success in Africa would be a tragedy for all the Africans themselves, and for the free world, I ask my hon. Friend to give an undertaking that Her Majesty's Government will draw attention to this vile campaign not only in the councils of the United Nations, where there seems to be so much ignorance about it, but in the councils of the Commonwealth where it is being ignored. I hope that, if this is done, the tragedy of a continent lost to freedom will be averted.

Any measures designed to counter Communist propaganda in Africa or elsewhere will have my warmest support, but I feel that the hon. Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) has allowed his anti-Communist enthusiasm to run away with him a little this afternoon. The gist of his speech, as I understood it, was that all the recent troubles in Africa have been due to Communist intrigue and that the Communists have out-smarted everyone else in the way they have been able to penetrate into the countries of Africa and influence the Africans. This is not the whole picture by any means. If we concentrate on that part of it, we may deceive ourselves into ignoring some of the real trouble in what has happened and is happening in Africa.

The hon. Gentleman said, for instance, that the principle of "one man, one vote" must have originated in a Communist cell. I always thought that that principle originated in this country and that we have for a long time been trying to preach it to less civilised Africans and other peoples as something to aim at. With respect, it is nonsense to say that the principle of "one man, one vote" is wrong and must have originated in a Communist cell.

:I followed that by referring to what happened where it was pursued quite regardless of the interests of the people concerned. The principle of "one man, one vote" is wrong if it is applied in a way which is detrimental to the interests of the people.

I am grateful for that elaboration of the hon. Gentleman's statement. The note I have of what he said is that he followed that remark by another to the effect that, wherever this principle is applied in Africa, it has always been followed by chaos. This is not so. Africa is a big country. Many African territories have achieved their independence in recent years, and, if the hon. Gentleman will think for a moment, he will, I am sure, agree that chaos has not always followed. Some of them have made quite a success of democracy.

:I am sorry to intervene again, but, if the hon. Gentleman had followed my argument carefully, he would know that I said that the application of that principle had in most cases been followed by one election and one-party Government, and this, in turn, had led to the complete destruction of democratic institutions and the loss of personal freedom. When this happened, and the confidence of Europeans was lost, I said, the Africans suffered poverty and, very often, there was chaos. I did not say that it always occurred.

That is putting it a bit better than the hon. Gentleman put it in the first place.

That is what I said.

Further, the hon. Gentleman said that the Communists quickly moved in—I took that down—and he gave an example of how the Communist party had moved in quickly and had outwitted the British and other people who, equally, had been trying to influence the Africans in many of these territories. Of course, the Communists or anyone else are just as entitled as we are to try to influence others. We have been doing our best to influence some of these peoples ourselves. The hon. Gentleman complained that some of the persons introduced into Africa by the Communists were supposed to be non-political, non-partisan and non-official. This, of course, is a perfect description of the British Council. If I am not careful, I shall give the wrong impression and someone will say that I must be a Communist and I am supporting the Communists. What I am trying to say is that it is quite wrong to imagine that Communism is the whole cause of the trouble.

In fact, the Communists have not been all that successful in Africa. On the contrary, in many African States, they have been most unsuccessful. I do not wish to name any particular country, but, ranging over the ex-French colonies as well as the ex-British colonies, where is there a successful Communist party? I cannot think of any in Africa. The Africans have been too sensible. They may have accepted help from the Communists. They are very clever at that, as a lot of people are, and they have accepted help from whatever quarter it came, but this does not mean that they will fall for the propaganda at the same time.

Again—with respect, this was the sort of thing which rubbed me up the wrong way when he was speaking—the hon. Gentleman seemed to suggest that the Mau Mau trouble was really a Communist plot. This is a caricature of what happened in East Africa.

The hon. Gentleman is making a caricature of my speech all the way through. In fact, I said that the first Communist paper for Africans, the Negro Worker, published the slogans of the African nationalist movement right back in the 1920s and 1930s. I went further and said that Mr. Jomo Kenyatta had been a contributor in 1933—I can quote the extracts if the hon. Gentleman wishes—and in those early issues one can find outlined the very slogans which were used during the Mau Mau operation. I did not say that it was a Communist operation as such.

We too have circulated many documents, pamphlets, and books in these areas to try to put our point of view across. We have done this quite successfully—in fact, so successfully that I repeat that I do not know of a strong Communist party in any part of Africa.

What about Egypt?

I understood that the Communist party was illegal in Egypt.

The hon. Member will recognise one very important fact, namely, that 48 or 50 per cent. of Egypt's trade is with the U.S.S.R. and that trade in petroleum products with Russia comes to about 48 per cent. The extent of Soviet penetration has been very deep.

:We are trying to increase our trade with the Soviet Union, but that does not mean that this country is going Communist. This is my complaint. If we concentrate our minds on the idea that Communism is at the bottom of all the trouble in Africa, we shall go down the wrong road. The hon. Member knows as well as anyone how the Africans have been influenced by many other things besides Communism. There is the question of apartheid. Can the hon. Member imagine the effect in Africa of what happened at Suez? Can he imagine the effect in many parts of Africa of what is going on in Angola and Mozambique at present? Does not he remember how the Union of South Africa took over South-West Africa and refused to give it up even when told by the United Nations that legally it should do so? This sort of thing is causing far more trouble in Africa than Communism.

If there had been more education in Africa in the past, I suggest that the same difficulties might not be facing us at present. We should strengthen our propaganda. If the Communists are getting in first and out-witting us with their propaganda, surely that is a reflection on us. We should be getting in there just as quickly as the Communists and intensifying our activities.

I know that a great deal of effort is being made in that direction by the British Council and by the international trade union movement, which is spending much money and effort in trying to keep these countries out of Communist hands. If we are being beaten in this work, that is surely a challenge to us. We should be intensifying our efforts to see whether we can do better. We must search our own record and our own hearts and see whether we are doing all we can to stem any progress which the Communists are making in Africa.

However, I suggest that the best way to meet and overcome Communist propaganda is to show the Africans that there is something better than Communism and that our way of life is the thing at which they should be aiming and not the Communist way of life. Surely that should be the whole purpose of our efforts. Our political example and the way we vote in the United Nations, and so on—and I will not say very much about our votes recently in the United Nations on African affairs—have a terrific impact on the Africans and the Communists ensure that the maximum use is made of these things in putting over their propaganda to the Africans.

I suggest that we must learn the lesson of what has happened in the past and see if we can do better in future. For Heaven's sake, do not let us run away with the idea that all the trouble stems from Communist penetration.

This debate takes place in the shadow of recent events in Ghana. Tragic as those are, I hope that we will not allow them to dominate this debate because, although they have been very upsetting to all hon. Members, they are not wholly relevant to the issue which we are discussing. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) on his speech in opening the debate. He fairly set out the extent of Communist infiltration in Africa and rightly did not overstress the events which have been taking place in Ghana this week.

My hon. Friend brought out very clearly the infiltration of the front organisation and the Pan-African type movements which have been taking place since the death of Stalin. Communist activities in Africa have been gaining in impetus only very recently. In 1950, there were very few Communist agencies in Africa yet, in 1961, the number had grown to 75 Communist missions, and at the end of 1962 there were 94 Communist missions with 20 in the pipeline, as the Board of Trade would call it. This is a substantial yardstick taken side by side with the infiltration and subversive type activities of which my hon. Friend reminded us. But it would be a great mistake if we were to overstress the success which the Communist Party has yet had in Africa. Equally, however, it would be a mistake if we were to under-stress its potential activity and the potential damage which it could do to the new and developing countries of Africa.

I should like to move slightly from the ground which my hon. Friend covered and ask whether the African attitude to Communism is necessarily the same as ours in the West. If not, is this necessarily harmful? In considering this matter, the fantastic speed of change in Africa in the last 25 years should be very much in our minds. Certainly we in Western Europe have never had any period in our long history in which change has been as quick as it, has been in the new countries of Africa. I wonder whether there is any group of countries where there has been this rate of acceleration from colonial territories to self-government. This is possibly one of the most important considerations in this debate.

We should also remember that the African countries are attempting to develop a new African personality. They do not necessarily feel involved in the conflicts between East and West which seem so important to us. The problem of international Communism is probably much more of an immediate danger to a capitalist country like ours or the United States than to an independent country in Africa which has only a small proportion of private enterprise which is generally foreign owned, and where State enterprise and activity forms a large part of the economy. Inside this, one sees the strong form of central government which is developing in these countries and which is tending to concentrate on economic problems. Therefore, in this setting—wrongly in my view, but one must nevertheless accept the fact—a certain intolerance of opposition has developed.

I mentioned a moment ago the contrast with the capitalist countries. It should probably be recognised that in the African countries one will not see a form of economic development which bears any possible resemblance to the kind of development which we have in this country or which is to be found in Western Europe. Probably it is much closer to the type of development taking place in Israel where the State plays a large rôle in economic activity.

There is nothing that we particularly want from Africa. The British people have no vested interest. Our greatest interest is to see the countries develop independently and strong. We want the countries of Africa themselves to see the dangers of Communism for what they are and without blinkers. That should be the central point of our policy.

There have been substantial signs that this is happening. They are no more than signs. I would not wish to express the view that the horizon is absolutely clear, but there are signs. For example, Julius Nyerere said recently that he did not want to see a second "scramble" for Africa developing. He was obviously pointing at the Communist bloc. Also—it has been said many times before but it is basically true—it is important that the politicians and the countries which have striven for many years to gain their independence must be their own best security against losing that independence to a foreign imperialist. Communist Power.

Again, the experience of many African countries at the United Nations, while my hon. Friend would not, I am sure, be in accord with all their activities, has nevertheless been useful in letting them recognise the real dangers and threats of Russian Communism. Their support of U Thant in the Congo operation against the Communist Powers was a useful experience for them. As well as this, the main Communist pressure has been on the trade union movement. It is gratifying to see the formation of an African Trades Union Centre by the African trade unionists because of their experience of the Communist front organisations activity in this field. Again, the failure of the Communist activity in Guinea and in Mali has also been useful where the Communists very much over did their political activity and it was recognised for what it was. The experience there gained has been useful to all Africa.

We in this House may make speeches, we may endeavour in our way to expose the activities of the Communist Party in Africa, but it is essentially the countries of Africa themselves who will answer best this challenge. Africa must be its own policeman!

There is a sinister symmetry in Communist strategy against the West. Latin-America is to be the means of enveloping North America and Europe is to be rolled up from Africa. Lenin, as quoted by Manuilski in 1931, said that once Europe was severed from Africa, she would drop into the Communist lap like ripe fruit. Mr. Mikoyan, using another of these earthy Russian similes, said that Europe without Africa was a plucked chicken. In other words, like Communist thinking Paris is to be destroyed through Conakry and Algiers and London through Accra and Nairobi.

The leading Africanist in the Soviet Union is believed to be Professor Ivan Potchkin. It was he who drew up the blueprint in which great stress was laid on securing control and influence in the economic planning of the new States, and that is why I do not think that I can take quite such a happy attitude to Soviet and Chinese economic penetration of the emerging African countries as that of the hon. Member for Accrington (Mr. H. Hynd).

This aim of securing Communist control of the economic planning of African States has been relentlessly pursued in Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Somalia. It is rather interesting, in passing, to note that Professor Potchkin is rather less enthusiastic than President Nkrumah about the practicability of a United States of Africa, an all-African Federation. Soviet thinking lies rather more in the direction of zonal federation, for example, between Ghana, Guinea and Mali. After the liberation struggle, in the Marxist thinking, comes the further struggle against neo-colonialism. By neo-colonialism is meant the continuation of the economic and other links with capitalist countries and the acceptance of their aid.

The hon. Gentleman the Member for Accrington was quite right. He said that Communism had made little impact on the African masses. Indeed, the Communists have no plans, as I understand, for mass indoctrination. That, indeed, would be a very tall order. It is a bad thing to generalise about Africans, but Africans in general are very religious, and, also, they tend to be individualistic. On the other hand, Africa has been, and looks like continuing to be, authoritarian. There is something rather like the Communist principle of democratic centralism in the way Africans like to take decisions. There is free and full and almost endless discussion, but when a decision is reached it is then treason to oppose it.

But even if there is no indoctrination of the African masses this does not mean there is no great danger of Communist subversion. After all, only, I suppose, in Yugoslavia and Cuba—if Cuba is a Communist State—has Communism triumphed anywhere except as the result of the seizure of power by brilliant, dedicated and ruthless minorities. Communism has been carried to power by chaos or Red armed force. There are only 50,000 active Communists in the Continent of Africa; that is the Soviet estimate; but they concentrate on the élite; they concentrate on the trade unions, they concentrate on the intellectuals, and they concentrate on students who, in increasing numbers as other hon. Members have pointed out, are going to the Soviet bloc and to China. As a Czechoslovak newspaper said:

"We do not invite students from colonial countries out of charity."

Of course, Communists have made many mistakes in Africa. They make mistakes in propaganda. One such mistake was to suppose that Dr. Hastings Banda might be a good leader for the Rhodesias as well as for Nyasaland. That was quite a blunder. We know, too, how Ambassador Solod in Conakry was run out of the country after the detection of a Communist conspiracy. We know, too, how Colonel Mbotu removed the Soviet Embassy in Leopoldville, and what has happened to the latest Communist conspiracy in the ex-Belgian Congo. But this does not mean that a very formidable Soviet bloc and Chinese offensive has not been launched against the West in Africa. Even if the Russians and Chinese are not marching in step, it is quite certain they are marching against the West.

The Communists have had great propaganda successes at the United Nations which have been helpful for their purposes in Africa. It is extraordinary how intelligent and fair-minded people have accepted the Communist propaganda that there is virtually nothing to choose between the South African policy of apartheid, the opposite Portuguese policy of total racial integration and the compromise policy that we have tried to pursue in the now dying Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Again, it is quite a triumph for Communist propaganda at United Nations that Mr. Khrushchev's concept of wars of liberations should be almost respectable and that his equation of European colonialism with aggression should also apparently be widely accepted among non-Communist delegations at the United Nations. Here it seems to me the Communists have had a tremendous propaganda success. It is a success which is, of course, primarily directed at Southern Africa. The reason why we hear so much about apartheid and so little about Communist Chinese genocide in Tibet and very little about Russian white settlers in Soviet Central Asia is that there is a concentrated offensive on Southern Africa because of its minerals, coastlines and ports.

It is significant that, although the hon. Member opposite pointed out that there are not many Communists and not many highly organised Communist parties in Africa, there has been a Communist party in South Africa since 1921.

That is not surprising.

That is not surprising, for a variety of reasons. The hon. Member will think of some reasons, and I am offering the House some other reasons. My hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, North (Mr. Stratton Mills) quoted from the fine speech by that remarkable African statesman, President Nyerere, at the Moshi conference. President Nyerere then spoke of "the second scramble for Africa". He spoke of the new colonialism that threatens Africa. It is a colonialism from the East and not from the West. He also gave warning to his fellow Africans not to be obsessed with what he called "the fixation of imperialism", that "imperialism" being the imperialism of Western countries which is now passing from Africa.

The Chinese are concentrating their effort on Guinea, Morocco, Cameroon and Somalia. I was one of the few hon. Members of this House who publicly expressed misgivings at the ending of Her Majesty's Protectorate in Somaliland ahead of much more advanced territories in East Africa. Independence in the former British Somaliland and the formation of the independent State of Somalia was quickly followed by the visit of the Somali Prime Minister to Moscow. I understand that as a result of that first meeting the Russians agreed to equip Somali agriculture and to construct the Port of Berbera.

As a result of the changes in the Horn of Africa and as a result of events in Yemen a new line of Communist penetration from the Caucasus through the Yemen into Somalia has been established. In passing, I should like to congratulate Her Majesty's Government on their policy in the Yemen. The British Government are often criticised for being in a minority at the United Nations and elsewhere. Her Majesty's Government have, perhaps, been in a minority over their attitude to the Yemen, but they have been proved right. The new dangers which threaten that part of Africa, which could endanger the newly established independence of Kenya and could lead to widespread Communist subversion—these facts reinforce the rightness of Her Majesty's Government's policy towards the Yemen.

The Minister of Defence of Somalia, General Daoud Abdullah, was recently in Moscow with a considerable mission, numbering 15. I understand that he agreed with Marshal Malinovsky, the Soviet Defence Minister, that the Russians would enable the Somali Army to be brought up, in terms of effective strength, from 4,500 men to 20,000, that Soviet arms and equipment would be provided, together with a new credit of £15 million, and that the Somali forces would be equipped with Soviet artillery, Mig.19s and Mig.21s. Perhaps my hon. Friend will have something to say about this.

I understand that air bases are to be established by the Russians at Berbera, Obbio and Mogadishu. However these agreements are implemented, the Soviet Union will be able to pour technicians into this vital strategic area. The Greater Somalia League, which began by being pro-Egyptian has become increasingly pro-Soviet, while China, as I have said, is also playing its part.

Dr. Shermake has also been to China. He was there last August. Although, I believe, there are only 30 Chinese Nationals in Somalia the Chinese maintain a large embassy. The rental paid is four times that paid by the British Embassy. But I would add that not all of these Chinese aid offers have been accepted. I say that because I agree with other hon. Members that the Africans are not without good sense and because the West has a great reservoir of good will in Africa.

How can we build on that foundation of good will? I suggest that one thing we could do rather better than in the past, perhaps, is to be faithful to our friends. One does not win new friends by getting rid of old ones. One merely proves oneself to be an unreliable partner. We have tended to accept the argument that once the Communists brand an African at a traitor, or as a "stooge" of the West, be becomes less acceptable to us. President Ahidjo is certainly no "stooge". At a Press conference; in Belgrade, in 1961, he said:

"Anti-co-onialism is out-dated."

I wish that we in this country could learn that lesson; I wish that it could be learnt also in the United States and in the United Nations. He added:

"Our task is now national construction."

I wish that we would carry more of the war into the enemy's camp at the United Nations. I know that there has been an improvement in this respect and I welcome it. A lead in this has been given by President Senghor, who said:

"…the colonies of the Tsar which now form part of the U.S.S.R.…the Soviet countries of Asia have been granted autonomy and have benefited from remarkable development, but have not yet been granted independence."

Even under the smiling régime of Mr. Khrushchev the Soviet empire has had its Kenyattas, Lumumbas and Kaundas. But we do not hear anything about them, for they have all disappeared.

I want to say something about propaganda. The "battle of the air" has been referred to. Has there been any improvement in co-ordination between the B.B.C. and the Voice of America broadcasts to Africa, because sometimes they contradict each other and confuse African listeners? We are up against Peking Radio, which, at the time of the Hausa-Mosli conference, devoted five times as much time to it as did Radio Moscow. The New China News Agency put out 58,000 words about the conference as against the 3,500 put out by the Russians.

There is also a war over books and periodicals. The Russians as part of their aid to Somalia, are putting up a newsprint factory at Mogadishu and on 15th February last the following announcement was broadcast over Radio Hargeisa:

"Do not forget to subscribe to Russian newspapers. Every regular buyer of Soviet books and newspapers will go on a free trip to the U.S.S.R."

We might expect, under the new leadership in Washington and in London, a more robust attitude than has been shown sometimes hitherto to Communist subversion in Africa. I hope that there may be in Washington a better understanding of Europe's problems in Africa, and, perhaps, a better understanding of Nasserism. President Nasser is not a Communist; he locks up Communists. At the same time, Red banners have been able to advance quite a long way behind the green, flag of Pan-Arabism, particularly in Zanzibar and Somalia.

One obstacle to the realization of President Nasser's plans for Africa in his book, The Philosophy of the Revolu-tion, is African memories of the slave trade and of the penetration of Egyptian imperialism, as far south as far as Uganda, in an earlier period. It was Chief Awolowo, of Western Nigeria, who said in September, 1959:

"Because of its totalitarianism and its territorial ambitions, an effective collaboration with the United Arab Republic would only be possible if the negro peoples of Africa were disposed to become satellites."

Much wisdom comes out of Nigeria. I regret that this particular prophet is a little without honour in his own country.

Not that Islam should be considered as a negative or a hostile force. It is a faith which has great appeal in Africa. Both Moslem and Christian are in the forefront of resistance to Marxist Communism. They share the leadership of great ruling political parties, such as the Tanganyika African National Union and the Sierra Leone People's Party. Christians and Moslems in Africa possess many of the secret spiritual weapons needed to defeat the Communist offensive. It was President Sékou Touré, of all people, who pointed out that there was not a man or woman in Africa, least of all in Guinea, who did not believe in God.

In the economic sphere, African States, like others, resent undue dependence on foreign loans and subsidies. Very often in this world we find dislike of benefactors. Resentment against debtor dependence turns men's minds to Communism. Technical assistance to make an economic reality of independence, trade rather than aid, is what, I believe, these new African Governments want. We can do a great deal to win the economic battle against Communism, if, somehow, we can get more stability into the main products of the African territories.

Europe and Africa are interdependent continents. One of the reasons why so many Africans have recently suffered so many things is that the European Powers have been disunited in their decolonialisation. In some cases it has been premature. In some cases it has been disorderly. Many Africans have suffered in consequence. But perhaps now, in forging new reciprocal bonds of equal partnership with the African States, the Europeans might find unity, and in so doing will do much to banish the nightmare of Communism.

The hon. Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) has given us at the end of this Friday afternoon an extremely interesting debate on a subject about which we probably do not know enough, and to which we probably do not give enough attention. At the same time, he over-simplified the situation in Africa a great deal. It is much more complicated than he made out. I very much more agree with what was said by the hon. Member for Belfast, North (Mr. Stratton Mills).

Someone said that the debate was taking place under the shadow of what is happening in Ghana. So it is, but the complicating factor of Ghana is that the very people whose detentions after acquittal we are objecting to are the people who were supposed to be pro-Communist inside the Ghana leadership. The debate is also taking place under the shadow of what is going on in Aden at the moment. The hon. Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs-Davison) mentioned events in the southern tip of Arabia, which so much affect the African Continent. Here is an instance in which we in this country play into the hands of the Communists by backing feudal leaders in that part of the world and by suspending elections. That is exactly the way to make Communist propaganda and recruit Communists. We are doing in Aden at this moment the same kind of thing which we object to Dr. Nkrumah doing in Ghana—engaging in detention without trial. Those are some of the complications.

Hon. Members have mentioned the trade union experience in Africa. The hon. Member for St. Albans suggested that this was a straightforward case of Communist infiltration and pressure, but the fact is that in Africa there have been competitive pressures in the trade union world from the West and from the East. The African reaction to that has been increasingly to concentrate on building up the African nationalist trade union centre.

The hon. Member for St. Albans tended to equate neutralism in the new countries of Africa with being pro-Communist. This is not so. In terms of overall Western strategy, the mistake of the late Mr. Dulles was precisely to believe that among the new nations those who were not with us were bound to be against us. In many ways, the wise course is that followed by the succeeding American Administration—to try to give neutralism in the new countries some sort of economic basis as well as some sort of loyalty to the West.

I do not think that the new African nations fit into any preconceived mould, either capitalist or Communist, or, for that matter, democratic Socialist in the sense that we on this side of the House understand it. They are Africans first, and it is rather difficult to foresee exactly what the general shape of African statesmanship is to be in the years immediately ahead. I suspect that the new African nations are just as likely to break Mr. Khrushchev's heart as they have broken Sir Roy Welensky's heart, and I do not think that the Westminster model is much more applicable to African political development than the Moscow model. Africa will go its own way and we have to give what help and guidance we can.

It is an exaggeration to say, as was suggested by the hon. Member for St. Albans and the hon. Member for Chigwell, that the new nations at the United Nations, under this Communist pressure, have turned largely into instruments of Communist diplomacy. The record of the new nations at the United Nations is very different from that. It is remarkable how often they have supported the West. They have often been more pro-United Nations than the West has been at times when some of the Western countries could have backed the United Nations as an international organisation much more enthusiastically than they did.

There is, of course, no doubt—and we must face the fact—that the Communist world will do all it can to win friends and to win power among the new nations of Africa. By a coincidence, I have just returned from a visit to Moscow. I was there last week taking part in a disarmament conference with hon. Members from both sides of this House. I was very interested in the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow and wanted to see it, but despite persistent efforts I was unable to do so. It may have been an unfortunate coincidence, but I suspect that that they were not too keen on someone from the West inspecting it because there is great deal of information that all does not go smoothly with their efforts to provide scholarships for people coming from Africa.

We had a good meeting with Mr. Mikoyan when we were able to engage in an exchange of questions and points of view. I pressed him to join in a Great Power agreement to try to keep the cold war out of Africa, not merely a nuclear-free zone, but an agreement that we would halt the arms traffic to Africa. I got a very dusty answer indeed. It was quite clear that the Soviet Union is not prepared to adopt that kind of attitude and that it reserves the right to engage in the arming of chosen African countries and chosen nationalist movements. We ought to face this, but it would be quite wrong to go from this to believe that the Communist threat in Africa is of the kind of magnitude which seemed to us to come out of the speech of the hon. Member for St. Albans.

The hon. Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs-Davison), who is extremely well-informed in these matters, recited some of the many mistakes the Communists have made in Africa. There was a notorious example of the snow ploughs going to Guinea. The late John Strachey told me that he had seen these himself. It was an understandable mistake, for they were sent in response to a request for tractors for agricultural purposes and something had gone wrong in the process.

I remember how in Nigeria some people were turned back at Lagos Airport because they had been provided in Moscow with visas for the Niger Republic and not for Nigeria. I also remember swimming on the beach at Accra in a very gay and varied throng and seeing two gentlemen dressed in unmistakable lounge suits of Eastern Europe and with soft hats, striding vigorously and determinedly along the beach looking neither to right not left and bathing in splendid isolation. The impression was that the Soviet technicians and other experts were maintaining a position of detachment from the local population rather greater than any British imperialist had done in the past.

As the hon. Member for Chigwell mentioned, the two great Communist countries of the world, the Soviet Union and China, are in very considerable conflict with each other in terms of their approach to Africa. I notice that China is now making very much of a racialist approach to Africa and tending to emphasise that in African eyes the Soviet Union is just another white developed country. In my opinion, these things underline that there is a much more complex state of factors operating there than one would have gathered from the speech of the hon. Member for St. Albans.

I feel that I ought to say this: I thought his speech in many ways did a disservice to the Western position in Africa because of the kind of emphasis in it. If one gains the impression that the West is allowing Africa to be at the mercy of an international Communist conspiracy and that this is in danger of being successful, that greatly underestimates the way in which Western aid to Africa compares with Soviet aid to Africa. It plays into the hands of Communist propagandists who give the impression that the Communist world is helping more generously than the Western world with its assistance. This, of course, is not remotely true.

I do not have the figures with me for the African continent but I recall the figures for Asia, which show that since 1950 Western aid to the Colombo countries of Asia ran at about £5,200 million compared with £375 million of Communist aid. We ought constantly to emphasise how the proportions operate.

That does not mean that there are not many things that the Communists do in the direction of aid from which we could learn. Literature is one good example. The flow of Soviet books into Africa is quite considerable. Some of them are well and skilfully produced and have a marked effect.

It is some years since the British Government committed themselves to trying to compete with that by producing low-priced books with Government assistance. We remember how Lord Hill introduced the scheme to the House and the welcome which it received from both sides. This House would never have welcomed that announcement, however, had we then known that these low-priced books would not be allowed into the Continent of Africa. Some of us have been fighting this for some time. We have made certain inroads into Government policy. Some parts of Africa are now allowed to receive low-priced university textbooks, but the cheap paperbacks, which are the main part of this kind of literary offensive, are not allowed into Africa, because, I think, of a dispute with the publishing interests in this country. Here is something in which the British Government could do a great deal more.

My hon. Friend the Member for Accrington (Mr. H. Hynd) emphasised the Commonwealth's record in terms of promoting political development towards independence which does not lead in the Communist direction. The remarkable thing about all the new nations of the Commonwealth is that there has not so far been one example of a Commonwealth country either going Communist or even being in much danger of doing so. Although the Westminster model will suffer big changes in the new countries, basically most of the Commonwealth countries remain, in the main, democratic. We should remember this.

It is the doctrine of white supremacy in Africa, the doctrine that the European minority in an African country should have a privileged position, that is the best recruiting ground for Communism in Africa. It is the kind of democratic things that we have tried to do in our Commonwealth policies that meet the Communist challenge in Africa in the most effective way.

The West starts with a big lead in the Continent of Africa. The astonishing thing about Africa is how slow the Communists have been in getting off the mark. It is only in comparatively recent years that they have started to establish the kind of expert institutions in Moscow that are the basis for this kind of offensive. If one compares Communist activity in Africa with Asia, there is a gap of almost two generations between them. It is important for the West to make the most of these advantages. The best way in which we can make the most of them is to give help to the new countries of Africa, because this is the right thing to do, and not simply from the negative viewpoint of anti-Communism.

It is only right to say that ten times as much aid is supplied by the Western world generally than is supplied by the Soviet bloc. Those were the figures that were current last year and I believe that the position is almost the same today. The other factor which must be remembered is that of the money promised by the U.S.S.R., only a small proportion of it is actually advanced. When one recognises this position, one realises the immense contribution made by the Western world to Africa generally.

The hon. Member for Dundee, East (Mr. G. M. Thomson) has rightly indicated that there are a number of cross-issues in Africa. There is the attempt by the Soviet bloc to put across its ideas and to persuade the people to adopt either Chinese Communism or the Soviet Communism emanating from the Kremlin. Mr. Khrushchev put it rather well when he said:

"We value trade least for economic reasons and more for political purposes."

It is right that we should bear this in mind, because this is the purpose of the Soviet Union in Africa. It works through trade in the first instance and then moves towards other ulterior purposes if it can achieve them.

I have had a certain amount of experience in Africa. When I was at Lagos last year I noticed that at the trade fail there were a number of Russian exhibits of Sputnikry, agricultural equipment, mining equipment, and so on, which was well displayed. I noticed also that there was a definition of Communism in some of the literature. Certain points as to why the local people should accept that philosophy were explained. I would have thought that, if there was to be a non-political approach at trade fairs, they would have steered clear of politics, but the Communists have no intention of keeping their politics out of trade with Africa.

I noticed at Katsina that literature was on offer by local retailers which apparently had been given to them. They could sell it at whatever prices they could get for it. I saw this also at Port Harcourt. Much of this literature is being pushed in through Soviet agencies and distributed in this way. A few years ago in Rhodesia one could turn on the Chinese radio at 4.30 p.m. and hear a simplified version of the ideology of the Chinese and Russian peoples, and the form of belief which they were ready to make available to the people of the African Continent. They believed in Horace's principle: ten times repeated and it pleases—Decies repetita place bit—and observed it intently. I believe that, if a falsehood is mentioned often enough in an area where people are just beginning to think, some of it begins to creep in and will have the most dangerous consequences.

I realise that I have only a limited time this afternoon. I believe that much more could be made of the British Council abroad. Will it appreciate that there is a danger? There are certain built-in resistances in Africa, partly from religion, partly from tribalism, and partly because of the newly acquired nationalism. Some of these features operate in favour of the West. We must not overlook the fact that the Russians have concluded trade agreements with a number of countries, which include Guinea, Libya, Morrocco, Nigeria, Tanganyika, Sudan and a number of others, and that technical arrangements have been concluded with the Cameroons, Ghana, Algeria, Mali, and a number of other territories. These all mean initial penetration by the Soviet Union. There is nothing wrong with aid or trade in itself. International trade is one way of lowering tension. However, the words of Khrushchev that this is only a beginning of political penetration shows that it is not for the good of the African but only to subvert his true interests.

The principle of one man one vote has been mentioned. It is right to say that this concept originated in this Chamber. However, in Africa it does not mean one man one vote. It means votes for the men but not necessarily for the women in many cases. Therefore, it is not democracy which is being extended. The Western world has a great deal to offer. I do not think that the African wants Communism because it means totalitarianism. I suppose that one thing can be said in defence of Nkrumah. He has been led on as though he was playing a game of chess to a checkmate. From step to step he has been falling into the traps which have been laid before him. I think that he intended to maintain a democratic State but he found that the people had not been brought up to a standard whereby democratic principles could be maintained and he has been forced further along autocratic lines.

The Africans have a right to make their own mistakes and perpetrate their own errors. The only hope is that in the end they will resort to democracy and recognise with full sympathy that what the West is endeavouring to do for them is for their own advantage.

We have had an extremely interesting debate and all hon. Members who have taken part have obviously given a good deal of time and thought to this important subject. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) for giving us this opportunity. He spoke on a number of important aspects and I shall do my best to comment on most of them.

In drawing attention to the obvious dangers of the situation my hon. Friend drew too sombre a picture in some respects. I do not think that we are faced with anything like a complete Communist take-over in Africa. Nor do I think that time is against us. I agree with the warnings he gave of potential dangers, but I see many answers which we are able to give to them in practice in Africa.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chigwell (Mr. Biggs-Davison) asked about the B.B.C. and the Voice of America. This is a complex matter from a constitutional point of view. As my hon. Friend knows, the B.B.C. is not controlled by Her Majesty's Government, although we take every opportunity to see that it is informed of our policy. The Voice of America, on the other hand, is an organ of the United States Government. It is, I suppose, difficult for the B.B.C. to be in direct consultation with the Voice of America and I do not imagine that it is, but I dare say that the words spoken by my hon. Friend will be noted by the B.B.C.

I do not accept that complete uniformity of speeches, and so on, in the West is necessarily a good way of advancing our case. There is something appallingly monotonous in the eternally repeated Communist arguments which are always the same from whichever source they seem to come. They are very unconvincing and as long as we are agreed in principle about what we are trying to do I do not think that total uniformity is necessarily desirable in itself.

My hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, East (Mr. Skeet) and the hon. Member for Accrington (Mr. H. Hynd) referred to the British Council. The hon. Member for Accrington said that this was a good way of showing the Communists that there is something better, and I agree with him. My hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, East said that we were confronted in Africa with the situation in which people were beginning to think about political and other problems for the first time and that the British Council was important in this context.

I wish to emphasise that the British Council is in no sense a political organisation and that it is not in any way to be thought of in connection with the wagging of political warfare. It is precisely because people who go to the British Council to study or for information are dealing with an institution which is directed to the academic and practical study of particular problems that it is not in a political context. That is why it is of such great service in Africa, where there are about 80 British Council officials.

My hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, North (Mr. Stratton Mills), in a most thoughtful and balanced speech, spoke of the position of the Africans at the United Nations and I very much agreed with his remarks. I was at the United Nations when the new African states began arriving in force. I watched them in operation there for three years. It was for most of them their first experience in international affairs. While, inevitably, a good many mistakes were made by some of them at the outset—and a good many misapprehensions collected by some of them, and doubtless retained until now—it was remarkable how quickly and with what avidity they learned the lessons of politics. Their arrival at the United Nations and their participation in international affairs through the medium of that body has been of great benefit to the free world. On balance, this has been a considerable disadvantage to the Communist States.

I very much agree with the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Mr. G. M. Thomson) when he stresses the complexity of this problem. It is, of course, increasingly complex as Africa begins to develop along political as well as economic lines. I have little time now, but I should like to offer a few thoughts on the subject. First, we ought to try and cast our minds back to the end of the Second World War and wonder how the prospect in Africa looked to Stalin. Undoubtedly, he judged it in terms of Marxist-Leninist theory, of which he was an extremely careful student and great exponent.

This, of course, predicated a lot of developments which have not taken place. It predicated the decline and collapse of the Western Powers. It predicated a great out-pouring of plenty in the Marxist-Leninist State. It predicated that there would be one continuing authentic source and citadel of the doctrine of Marxist-Leninism. It certainly looked to a state of affairs where, whereas Lenin himself had pointed out, that the intermediate stage of capitalism in Africa would be missed out, in spite of many difficulties it might be expected that the former colonies would become ready recruits to the Communist bloc.

All these things have proved to be erroneous predictions, and it seems to have become apparent to the Russians during the years since the war that they knew extremely little about Africa and its problems as indeed might be seen by studying their actions in practice. Therefore, they went to great trouble to embark upon a systematic series of Africa studies in the Soviet Union. Seminars set to work and an immense amount of information was collected, and instead of expecting an immediate and rapid development they clearly began to make basic preparation for the long-term development of Communism in Africa by equipping themselves with information and preparing themselves to take advantage of such opportunity as might occur.

I believe that there was one serious miscalculation on the part of the Russians which I have not mentioned and to which I now turn, and that is about the impact on the situation in Africa of British policy. No doubt they expected that the liberation of the colonial peoples would take place in an atmosphere of violent conflict between the colonial Powers and their former colonies. It must have been a great surprise and extremely disconcerting for their political planning to find India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and then all the nations of Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and so forth, achieve their independence with generous aid from this country and in close collaboration with the Colonial Office itself or the other equivalent Departments in London throughout the process. After the liberation, relations with us remained on the whole extremely close and friendly.

In other words, I think that, throughout, the Communists, in their planning in Africa, were misled by the theories of Marxist-Leninism and that this is what has caused them to undertake the extensive operation in Africa to which my hon. Friends have drawn attention as a kind of substitute for the situation which never came about. Their activities, as my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans has described them, fell roughly into military and economic agreements, which involve the importation of technicians who very often are not technicians, and the training of personnel in the Soviet Union. We look with very great misgivings on some of these agreements, such as the one recently concluded by Somalia.

There is the attempt then to make use of the Pan-African organisations. This is standard Marxist-Leninist technique. One penetrates the bourgeois institutions and then turns them to one's own purposes. Here, I think, Africans are already beginning to see that as these organisations become penetrated, instead of serving African purposes which they were intended to do, they begin to serve Communist purposes which they were not intended to do, and I think that Africans are quite intelligent and observant enough to see this process as it goes on.

In this connection, one also has to bear in mind the appearance of the Chinese upon the scene in massive strength, and, as I have very little time this evening, I commend the House to an admirable article in The Times today, in case some hon. Members may not have had an opportunity yet to see it, which gives an interesting and, I think, accurate description of what is going on there.

I must say that although, obviously, the dangers of a massive Chinese assault on Africa are apparent, nevertheless the fact that the Chinese and the Russians are operating there in intense rivalry lends an element of flexibility to the political situation in Africa which has a certain merit. The more that we can get away from the monolithic confrontation of East and West the more likely I think it is that a healthy political life will grow up in Africa as elsewhere.

I wish to say just a word about students. Myhon. Friends have described the dangers which beset them on their journeys to the Soviet Union and other countries. Two things have to be observed here. One is that very many students who go to Communist countries are not at all impressed by what they see and I have met a number in Russia and outside it who can testify to this fact.

The other point is that we must bear in mind the scale of operations here. For every one student from Africa in the Communist countries, there are more than ten in the West, and when they come to the West I think they are, by and large, very satisfied with their treatment. They get the education that they came for, and not a lot of indoctrination in subversive practices and so forth, and I think they go back feeling that their objective has been achieved.

In spite of the organised attack upon the situation, there is a good deal of opportunism in the Russian attitude as well. The very large Russian staffs in countries where there are no resident Russian colonies and negligible amounts of Russian trade speak for themselves. They are ready for use if the situation should permit, as it has twice done in the Congo in recent years.

Then, as my hon. Friends and hon. Members opposite have pointed out, there are points of friction, of which the situation in South Africa is the most serious. This is the situation which Lenin would have prescribed, where there is a violent conflict between the white successors of the colonial Power and the indigenous inhabitants. I am sure that an ill-service is done by trying to paint all who oppose apartheid, as being Communists, as there is a tendency in South Africa to do. This action is exactly the Communist objective, as the article in the Daily Worker about my hon. Friend makes clear. The Daily Worker is seeking to identify as closely as possible the Communist Party with opposition to apartheid. We know that the Communist Party is opposed to apartheid, and so are a great many people throughout the world who are not Communists.

What are the ways in which we can influence the situation? They are by trade, aid and political actions. Our trade is massive. Our aid is far in excess of anything that the Communist Powers can show, and we are taking steps throughout all the international organisations and in other ways to reduce the barriers to it. Politically, I do not doubt that the Africans are well able to detect the essential differences between the politics of the free world and the Communist bloc, and to make their own choice.

I take the opportunity of this Adjournment debate to draw attention to circumstances arising out of the death in British Guiana last July of a young man who was a constituent of mine, Alan Land, a 19-year-old Rifleman in the Green Jackets Battalion, and I wish to draw to the attention of the Under-secretary of State for War and the House certain lessons which seem to me to derive from the handling by the War Office of the events following his death.

Alan Land died in Georgetown on the night of 12th July. I do not wish to go into the details of what happened, partly because there would be no point in so doing and partly because some of the details are still obscure. One of the most extraordinary aspects of this case is that the inquest into his death dragged on for a very long time in Georgetown and was not completed until 7th October. The coroner's depositions in the inquest have still not arrived in this country. I understand that the War Office still has no copy of them, and I know that the family has no copy. Therefore, many aspects of the case still remain obscure.

All I need say is that, on this particular evening, Alan Land was off duty. He was in the town, first, in the early part of the evening, with friends from his battalion, and later with some Royal Marines. Later the same evening, he was involved in a fight with two local policemen, as a result of which he died in hospital at about 11 p.m. What we do know from its verdict is that the coroner's jury found that the two policemen in question had used excessive force and were criminally responsible for his death.

I wish to discuss the policy of the War Office in regard to this tragic event, partly on behalf of the parents, who are constituents of mine, and partly because there are lessons here to be learned which have a bearing on other cases. I emphasise two aspects of these events. First, I remind the House that this is one more case—several of us have previous examples—of the distress caused to the family of a Serviceman, following a tragedy of this kind, as a result of War Office policy regarding the burial of Servicemen who die overseas. I speak of the War Office, but this applies also to Admiralty and Air Ministry policy.

After parents have had the shock of learning that their son has died in such circumstances—or, of course, it may be a wife who learns of her husband's death—there comes the shock of learning that he has already been buried and that they have not been consulted in any way about the arrangements. They have not had a chance to decide whether they would like the body brought home. There is no offer made of help from public funds to bring the body home. There is no offer to take them out to the place in question if they would like to attend the burial there, and there is no consultation about the kind of burial, the kind of service and so on.

I have been looking up the references in this matter, and I find that on 14th March last Mr. Profumo, who was then Secretary of State for War, announced on behalf of the Government a new policy regarding Service men dying in North-West Europe under which there would be an offer made to the family either to bring the body home at public expense for burial in this country or to fly out to Germany, or wherever it might be, at public expense, two members of the family to attend the burial service there. But he was not able to commit the Government to do this in other parts of the world.

I urge very strongly that this matter should be reconsidered. I appreciate that there are complications in some areas of the world. Sometimes a burial must take place quickly because of local health regulations and sometimes there would be real difficulty in transporting people from this country to the place in question. However, I feel that, wherever possible, something should be done at public expense—other countries, such as the United States, I believe, do help in these matters—either to bring the body home or to take relatives out to the place in question.

There are several possibilities. There may be cases in which the family would not want a cremation to take place overseas and the ashes to be brought home. Within a day or so of a tragedy of this kind, I should like a welfare officer from the War Office, or whatever Service Department is concerned, to call on the family and to offer whatever help is practicable. In such cases, the expense involved should not be a bar to doing what is considered reasonable and just. I know that in this particular case it would have brought a great deal of comfort to the parents, and I am sure that cases like this could be multiplied many times.

I wish now to discuss matters applying to this case which would not necessarily apply to other cases. As I have said, the inquest took a very long time. It finished only on 7th October, and neither the family, nor, apparently, the War Office has the detailed results of it.

In the first few days after Alan Land was killed, his parents received the usual telegram from the War Office. They then received two letters from the Commanding Officer expressing condolences and paying tribute to the boy. The second letter contained photographs of the burial service. They also had from me a copy of the letter which I had received from the then Secretary of State, who is now the Minister of Labour, giving the few facts which he had at the time. After that they received no information for a very long time.

This is a very unsatisfactory slate of affairs. The inquest was incredibly slow. I do not think that we yet know fully why this was so. In a letter to me of 14th November, the Parliamentary Secretary said:

"The reasons for the many hearings an adjournments are, particularly in the absence of a copy of the evidence, not yet altogether clear, although I gather that these were partly, at any rate, caused by delays on the part of the civil police in finalising their arrangements and by the fact that their Legal Adviser was not always available owing to his other legal commitments."

Certainly it was a very slow process, and the family is entitled to an explanation of it as soon as one can be obtained.

During this period, no one from the War Office or from the civil authorities of this country in Georgetown communicated with the parents. The only news which they were getting was such reports as appeared in the local Press in the area which, because this was a local case, was receiving news from the wire services and reporting certain aspects of the inquest proceedings. This was the only news which the family was getting of what was going on.

I understand that there was no representative of the Army at the early sittings of the inquest, although I gather—and I have been in touch with the War Office on this point—that a military officer attended the sitting of 2nd October and that a legal adviser attended the final one on 7th October when the verdict was given.

During that time, the only information which Mr. Land, the father of the deceased soldier, was getting was what I was able to obtain from the Secretary of State, and this was, in the nature of things, not very much. The only letter which he received directly from the Secretary of State was one dated 14th October which repeated what the Secretary of State had told me in an earlier letter of 10th September. I protested at that stage that nothing was going direct to the father. This letter was merely a reharsh of one that had been sent to me earlier and which I had sent to the father.

I put it strongly to the Under-Secretary of State that this is not good enough. In such cases, the War Office has a special duty to the family of a young soldier who has been killed overseas, or, in other cases, it might be, to the soldier's widow. I quote again from the Under-Secretary's letter on 14th November, when, in relation to the inquest, he said:

"We do not necessarily arrange representation when a death arises in the course of purely private activities, as seems to have happened in Rifleman Land's case".

I should have thought that that was just the sort of circumstances in which the War Office should arrange representation.

If a young man still in his teens were killed in this country, his family would clearly want to, know how it had happened. The parents would attend the inquest and would probably arrange to have a legal adviser with them if this were thought appropriate. When it happens on the other side of the world, most people cannot afford to go or to employ legal representatives to represent them, and yet for their own satisfaction they want to know what happens, as any of us would do if it were to happen to one of our own family.

The parents want to know what has happened, whether somebody was responsible and, if so, what is being done, perhaps, in either a criminal or a civil action appropriate to the case. The War Office should want to know what is happening. The Department has responsibility for a battalion being overseas in a difficult situation and, I should have thought, would want to be represented at an inquest of this kind and to get the fullest possible information.

I submit, therefore, first, that there should have been a representative of the Army or of the civil authorities, or both, at all stages of the inquest. Secondly, this representative should have regarded himself as being indirectly the representative of the family. The War Office owes this duty to the family. Thirdly, the parents should have been kept informed at every stage. In other words, after every day's sitting of the inquest, a letter should have been sent to the parents describing in detail what was happening Fourthly, the local representative should have been looking into all the consequential stages—and should be looking into them now—such as whether there is to be a prosecution in the case of the two policemen, what other steps need to be taken to satisfy the interests of the family, and so on. Finally, in this and in any similar case, a welfare officer from the War Office should call on the family and explain the developments point by point.

I suggest very strongly to the Under-secretary that there has been a lack of the human touch in this case. Nothing that is done by the War Office or by anyone else can replace the family's loss in these tragic circumstances. Everything should be done to avoid the feeling that somehow or other the family has been left in the lurch and that after the official notification, the War Office has washed its hands of the matter. That may not be fair to the War Office, but it is the feeling that was conveyed by the fact that over a number of weeks the family had no information and nobody has written, except on routine matters such as this disposal of their son's effects. The impression is conveyed that nobody cares very much what happens.

I suggest that this matter has not been handled properly and that lessons should be learned for possible future occasions. Apart from the humane considerations, the matter is important to the reputation and the image of the Army. Such matters indirectly affect recruitment, because the reputation of the Army among people is affected by incidents of this kind which people talk about with their neighbours and relatives. It is important that these things should be handled humanely and intelligently. In some respects, the War Office has failed.

I will welcome the Under-Secretary's comments and any information which he can give about how the case will be handled from now on and how he sees any lessons from this case which can be applied in future.

:As the hon. Gentleman the Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) has said, this has been a case of peculiar difficulty for the War Office, and, indeed, for the hon. Gentleman himself, and I should like to start what I have to say by expressing publicly what I have already expressed to the hon. Gentleman, and what the Department has expressed to the parents of Rifleman Land, our very deep sympathy with them in the loss they have sustained on this occasion.

As I understand it, the hon. Gentleman is raising two particular points. The first one is a fairly general one, that is, the general policy of the Government over the repatriation of the bodies of Service men who die overseas; and the second one is the particular case of the way in which Rifleman's Land's death was handled by the War Office and by the Army authorities on the spot in British Guiana, and the general application of the arrangements, and I should like to say a word or two about that.

Perhaps I may deal first with the general point which the hon. Gentleman has raised, that is, the repatriation of dead bodies of Service men overseas. This, as the hon. Gentleman knows, is a matter which has given us the very greatest concern for a very long time. It is an appallingly difficult and deli- cate subject. Apart from North-West Europe, where the situation is generally the same regardless of which country one is in, there are immense difficulties which arise not only of the question of cost—in fact, the question of cost is one of the smaller difficulties involved—but also of local health regulations, climatic conditions and so on, which make it extremely difficult for any general rule to be laid down.

As a result, the only general rule which exists applies to North-West Europe, where conditions are fairly pari passu—very much the same. This general rule to which the hon. Gentleman referred was announced in this House by the then Secretary of State during our last debate on the Army Estimates on 14th March this year. The then Secretary of State said that the new arrangements for the next-of-kin of soldiers who die in North-Western Europe would be to give the next-of-kin the choice of having the body brought home at public expense or allowing two relatives to be flown out to attend the military funeral. We have looked most thoroughly into the possibility of extending this scheme to other parts of the world, but in general we have found it impossible, because of difficulties like climatic conditions, and local laws which demand burial in less than 48 hours. Indeed, even today there could be the difficulty of availability of transport, and of having a plane available in the area. In fact in this case, in British Guiana this was a difficulty, that the body of a deceased person must be buried within 36 hours of decease. That difficulty has occurred in this case, as the hon. Gentleman knows, and it might well have been impossible to find transport available to have brought the body home.

There would certainly be occasions on which we would be able to bring home a body or fly out relatives to the funeral anywhere in the world, but because of the difficulties which I have just mentioned we could not guarantee to do this in any place except North-West Europe. The wishes of the next-of-kin might be received too late to prevent burial, or the relatives might not get there in time, and, in fact, the first indication we had about the wishes of the next-of-kin in this particular case arrived after Rifleman Land had been buried. Failures of this kind—and they would undoubtedly be frequent—would naturally cause intense disappointment and sorrow and, we believe, even bitterness. Therefore we did decide very reluctantly that we could not extend a general arrangement outside North-West Europe to other areas.

If we find some way of doing it I am sure we would be only too glad to do so, but I can assure the hon. Gentleman that the main consideration is not that of cost. There are practical difficulties in finding a way in which we could ensure that no relative on any such occasion would be, as it were, deprived of what he might regard as a right.

:Could not the authorities, all three Service Departments, consider the possibility of doing it wherever it is practicable, and, where it is not, having someone call at the address of the family to explain why? On balance, that would cause less distress than the present arrangements, which people do resent anyway, and which cause bitterness at the moment.

:We will certainly look into that. I assure the hon. Member that we wish to find a way which will minimise distress to everybody. But there are occasions—in this case particularly there was the time difference between British Guiana and this country—which created difficulties. The time at which Rifleman Land died was eleven o'clock at night in British Guiana, which is about six o'clock in the morning in this country. There are difficulties about time lag, and so on, which sometimes make it absolutely impossible for us to make the arrangements we should like to make.

We have found up to now that it is better to make a general rule which everybody knows, that in the case of North-West Europe we can make these arrangements, which appear to work as satisfactorily as any arrangements can in these circumstances, but for other parts of the world we cannot lay down any general rule. If we laid down a practice which we should have to breach from time to time through no fault of our own, it might cause even more distress than the present arrangements do.

Coming to the case in question and the steps which the War Office took following the death of Rifleman Land in Georgetown Hospital on 12th July, it is the practice of the British Army when a death occurs from other than natural causes to hold a domestic inquiry—that is, an inquiry inside the Army itself—into the causes of the death. It is usual that this inquiry is not held until after any civil inquiry which may be held under the laws of the country concerned. But if it appears that the civil inquiry will be unduly delayed, the military inquiry is stepped up so that we in the Army can be satisfied about the circumstances which arose.

In this case, Rifleman Land died at 11.5 p.m. on 12th July, and the domestic military inquiry took place on 15th July, a little over two days later. At the inquiry a full investigation was held into the circumstances of his death. The findings were communicated to the War Office and received by it on 30th July, about a fortnight later.

We normally wait for the outcome of the civil inquiry before we inform the parents of the total circumstances. We had no reason to suppose on 30th July that there would be any delay in the civil inquiry. There was, therefore, this misunderstanding. We had assumed that the inquest would proceed fairly quickly and that as a result we should be able to have the results of both the civil inquiry and the military inquiry together and be able to communicate them both to Rifleman Land's parents.

However, as the hon. Gentleman has said, this did not happen. The inquest did not open until 7th August. Hearings were held on 5th, 9th, 10th, 14th and 17th September and 2nd October and there was a final hearing on 7th October, at which the coroner summed up and the jury brought in its verdict. It was only when the commanding officer and the War Office realised that the proceedings were being unduly delayed that it was decided to send a representative of the Army. He attended the last two hearings on 2nd and 7th October.

I should add a word about the powers of the coroner in British Guiana. Under the laws of British Guiana the coroner is empowered to adjourn any inquest or inquiry if he sees fit from place to place and from time to time until the whole of the evidence touching and concerning the death and the cause thereof has been obtained. So far as I can see, no one has any powers to stop him.

The same is true with regard to depositions. Under the same law, everyone committed to prison or held to bail under or by virtue of any verdict of a coroner's jury or any finding of a coroner may require and be entitled to receive copies of the depositions and of the statement of the accused person. But there is nothing in the Act which enables any other person to obtain a copy of the depositions as of right; and the Army, like anybody else, is in the hands of the coroner as to whether one can have the depositions or not. As the hon. Member knows, we have not as yet got them.

:In these circumstances was it not all the more important for the Army to be represented at every sitting of the inquest?

Yes, but I must point out that, until the proceedings began to drag out, we had no idea that the inquest would take all this time. We applied for depositions on the day the inquest adjourned on 7th October, wrote again on 22nd October, made six telephone calls between the 22nd October and 6th November, wrote on 6th November, made two telephone calls between 6th November and 22nd November, wrote again on 27th November and made a further telephone call on 9th December, when we were told that copies were about to be despatched and that the delay was due to the copies not having been typed.

I have looked once again at the question of representation at inquests. The decision as to whether the War Office should be represented at an inquest on a man who has died overseas is normally left to the commander on the spot, who is in the best position to judge requirements in the light of local circumstances. In this case, the local commander decided not to send a representative at first, largely because the Army had already held its own domestic inquiry into the circumstances of the death of Rifleman Land, although it was decided to send a representative later when it became apparent that the proceedings were being strung out in a way that made it difficult to communicate information home.

With hindsight, and in the light of what has happened, I am not sure that the commanding officer's decision was right, but I would not censure him because he was in a very difficult situation. But it might have been better if he had sent a representative from the beginning. I am looking into the practicability of having revised instructions issued requiring automatic War Office representation at such inquests.

But, having said that, it is by no means certain that much, or anything, would have been gained by the War Office being represented at this inquest in view of the fact that we had made our own inquiries. Although the Army, in these cases, has a very real responsibility for the welfare of the troops under its command, it is rather difficult to say that it should be, as it were, representing the parents or next-of-kin on these occasions. In the case of Rifleman Land, of course, it would have been all right, but I can conceive of cases when the interests of the next-of-kin and the interests of the Army might conflict and a rather difficult responsibility would rest upon the commanding officer himself.

I am not saying that I am absolutely satisfied with everything done in this case, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman, the House, and Rifleman Land's parents, will realise that a very difficult position was forced upon the commanding officer. He had no means of knowing that the inquest would go on so long. He communicated to the War Office at regular intervals what was going on. The War Office also had a difficult decision to decide whether to send partially digested information or the complete story of what happened about Rifleman Land's death.

Perhaps, as I have said, it would have been better if the War Office had been represented from the start and we are looking into the whole question of inquest representation. But I am not prepared this afternoon to place any odium on the commanding officer, who had a very difficult decision to take, more than to say that I think that, in the light of what happened, it might have been better if we had been there from the start.

I have tried to give the House such information as I have. We still have not got the depositions from British Guiana. I inquired just before this debate and was informed that they have not yet arrived. As soon as they do they will be made available to the War Office and we shall then have to consider the situation as it is then.